For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.
We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.
So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.
The order Carney describes is over, with the hegemon replacing its rules and practices, already unfair to the Global South as they were, with the unilateral exercise of coercion and force, with no rules at all except the rule that might makes right. Perhaps the essence of the new order is best captured by the words of US Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth during the US-Israeli bombing of Teheran: “This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”
In the first three months of 2026, Trump has already succeeded in dismantling the political fictions of the old regime, among them the central principle of the United Nations that expressly prohibits “the threat of the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.” The kidnapping of Maduro and the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei were the hegemon’s announcement to the world that no country is exempt from outright, brazen intervention should Trump see it fit to do so, and there would not even be the fig leaf of constructing a “Coalition of the Willing” to prettify it, as George W. Bush did prior to his invasion of Iraq in 2003. Nor were foreign territories belonging to close allies, such as Greenland, immune from annexation should Trump decide it is in the US national interest to grab them.
Despite denunciations and votes against its aggressive initiatives at the General Assembly, through its veto power at the Security Council and its threat to withhold its financial contributions to the organization’s budget, the United States has neutered the UN.
Transforming the Multilateral Economic Regime
But before dismantling the political-military fiction of the old regime, Trump assaulted its economic fiction in 2025. More accurately, he resumed the transformation of the multilateral economic order that he began during his first presidency, from 2017 to 2021. During that earlier period, he continued the policy of his predecessor, Barack Obama, of blocking appointments and reappointments to the Appellate Court of the World Trade Organization (WTO), effectively paralyzing the body. But even more brazenly, he declared a unilateral trade war against China, undermining the system of rules and conventions of global trade that the United States led in institutionalizing in 1994, with the founding of the WTO.
In 2025, Trump expanded what he did not hesitate to call his “trade wars” to some 90 other countries. Among them were 50 African countries, some of whom received some of the highest, most punitive tariff increases in the world, like Lesotho (50%), Madagascar (47%), Mauritius (40%), Botswana (37%), and South Africa (30%). There was little rhyme or reason to the rates imposed, though in the case of South Africa, it was partly as punishment for bringing Israel to the International Court of Justice for committing genocide in Gaza.
Trump’s rhetoric is aggressive, brazen, and full of bluster, but let’s not be fooled. His is a defensive imperialism, a fighting retreat.
Foreign aid as an instrument of US policy was a pillar of the old international regime. As Thomas Sankara, one of Africa’s foremost fighters for liberation, pithily observed, “He who feeds you controls you.” To please his far-right base, which did not see foreign aid as important for the maintenance of US hegemony and viewed it as a waste of resources, Trump in one of his first acts—undertaken with Elon Musk, the world’s richest individual—abolished the Agency for International Development (USAID). This move drew divergent responses from progressives and liberals. For some, this was a tragedy since USAID programs were allegedly funding important public health and reproductive health projects in the Global South. For others, it was no loss at all since most of the funds for these initiatives went to pay the US contractors delivering or managing them.
Despite their crowing about doing away with foreign aid, Trump and Musk did not make any move to dismantle or reduce the flow of US funds to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and regional development banks through which the bulk of US money for dominating the Global South via “development assistance“ or “structural adjustment” was funneled. Most likely, the rationale was to hold these so-called multilateral organizations in reserve for the aggressive exercise of American power via Washington’s controlling interest or veto power in these institutions should this become necessary in the future.
In the meantime, these institutions continue to maintain poverty-creating structural adjustment programs, especially in Africa, promote wrong-headed “export-led industrialization” efforts even as the United States imposes massive punitive tariffs on imports from the Global South, and block all efforts to solve the massive indebtedness of developing countries to the tune of over $11.4 trillion, which threatens a rerun of the Third World debt crisis of the early 1980s.
Washington’s Sphere of Influence: Regional or Global?
Last November, the Trump administration released National Security Strategy 2025, which announced that the United States would focus its military, political, and economic initiatives to making the Western Hemisphere the primary US sphere of influence. Even before the release of the memorandum, Trump had announced US plans to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal.
Moreover, the “Trump Corollary” to the old Monroe Doctrine made it clear that this would mean aggressively putting an end or countering the activities of non-regional actors such as China in the hemisphere. Shortly after the National Security Strategy went public, the kidnapping of Maduro made it clear that Washington would not hesitate to brazenly intervene in the affairs of any sovereign state in the region, in violation of the central founding principle of the United Nations.
However, with its joint assault with Israel against Iran beginning February 28, Trump appeared to be forcefully telling everyone that the United States was not departing from the old liberal containment paradigm’s perspective that the whole world was Washington’s sphere of influence, as NSS 2025 seemed to have implied. Although Trump’s volatile personality is a factor behind his shifting moves, it is becoming increasingly clear that so long as an operation does not involve sending in ground troops and relies mainly on air power or naval power, Trump is willing to use US military power anywhere in the world, as he has done not only in Iran but also in northern Nigeria, with his bombing of Islamist forces there on December 25, 2025, calculating that with few soldiers returning home in body bags, the US public could be easily pacified into accepting new foreign military engagements.
Trump and Israel
But also central in accounting for Trump’s moves is the strong influence of Israel, as evidenced not only by the joint US-Israeli assault on Iran but also his full support of Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank and his sponsorship of a US-led ethnic cleansing operation in Gaza via his deliberately misnamed “Board of Peace.”
A great majority of the people of the United States oppose the war on Iran. Even key figures in the MAGA Movement, such as Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, have complained that Trump’s recent actions in Venezuela and the Middle East represent his going back on his electoral promise never to get the United States into another “forever war.” Indeed, Carlson has denounced the Iran operation as “Israel’s war,” in which the United States has no business being involved.
Perhaps there is no better explanation for Trump’s subservience to Netanyahu than that provided by a leading figure of the American far right: Curt Mills, executive director of the American Conservative. According to Mills, Trump is
not saying no to Israel because he is fundamentally too agreeable or because he’s fundamentally corrupted. He’s agreeable. He is too close to them politically. And I think, yeah, I think he’s somewhat afraid of them. Why is he afraid of them? I think they’re an intimidating society. And I think people are afraid of Mossad. I think people are afraid of Israeli influence in foreign policy, they are afraid what it can do to people’s careers.
Whatever the cause or causes of his allowing himself to be lured into a war on Iran, it is now clear that this misadventure is a massive miscalculation that might lead to some fractures in his base.
To place things in perspective, though, Israel’s overweening influence began way before Trump. The United States forced the creation of the European settler colony by the United Nations in 1947. Since then, like Frankenstein’s monster, the creature has gradually but surely come to control its creator through the powerful Zionist lobby in Washington, to the point that subservience to its wishes has become a central characteristic of both Democratic and Republican administrations.
Trump, the Global South, and the Crisis of Capital
Whatever might be his immediate motivations, Trump’s moves are mainly directed at people and countries in the Global South—Palestine, Nigeria, Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba—the last of which he has threatened to assault next or strangle into submission. There is a logic to this strategy since it is mainly the Global South that has shifted the balance of global power and created the crisis of US hegemony. Among the landmarks in this historic process have been the rise of China to becoming the second most powerful economy in the world; the massive defeats of US arms in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan over the last 25 years; the rise of Iran as a regional power despite all the efforts of the United States and Israel to contain it; the ability of developing countries to stymie the WTO as an engine of trade liberalization; and the rise of the BRICS as a potential counterweight to the Western alliance.
Also central to the weakening of the hegemon has been the deepening crisis of the global capitalist regime of which Washington has been the global policeman, the key manifestations of which are the deindustrialization of the United State and Europe, the financialization of the leading capitalist economies where speculation rather than production has become the investment of choice, the astounding rise in global income and wealth inequality, and the sharpening contradiction between planetary survival and the ever more intensive drive for profits.
Trump’s regime of unilateralism is a savage world. But there is no going back to the old regime of US hegemony exercised through a multilateral order systematically biased against the Global South behind a façade of liberal democratic rhetoric.
Trump’s rhetoric is aggressive, brazen, and full of bluster, but let’s not be fooled. His is a defensive imperialism, a fighting retreat, a response to the overextension of American economic and political power and the comprehensive failure of capitalism to respond to the needs of humanity and the planet. The only answer to Trump’s savage moves is resistance, the kind of resistance that is rising not only throughout the Global South but also in places such as Minnesota, where people have rallied beyond race and ethnicity to form effective communities of solidarity to stop the brutal assault on migrant families.
The Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci had a saying related to the troubled 1930s that is also apt for our times: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” Trump’s regime of unilateralism is a savage world. But there is no going back to the old regime of US hegemony exercised through a multilateral order systematically biased against the Global South behind a façade of liberal democratic rhetoric. For the Global South, indeed, for all who are partisans of justice, peace, and planetary survival, there is no choice but to bravely meet the challenge of navigating the turbulent waters of this period of transition to get to the haven of a new global order that will serve the common interest of humanity and the planet, though there is no certainty regarding when or even if that arrival will come.
