Opinion Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes: Trump is succeeding because leaders across the world want to be little Trumps
The world had become too psychologically dependent on the United States. Trump can act as a patriarch because we have put the US in that position. Much of the world, even in the face of Trump’s perfidy, is behaving like errant children, seeking their father’s good graces
US President Donald Trump. (AP Photo) There is something extraordinarily myopic and enervating about the international community’s response to Donald Trump’s transformation of world politics from an imperfect but relatively restrained set of power relations into a wager on his imperious personal judgement. One year into his presidency, the surprise is not that Trump is imperial or authoritarian. The disappointment is the absence of a serious global pushback. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has thrown down the gauntlet, describing this as a moment of rupture. Europe may finally be stirred after Trump’s threat to Greenland; Countries like India exhibit a sulky but ineffectual resistance. But by and large, capitulation has triumphed over meaningful resistance. This failure demands explanation.
The usual explanations do not hold much water. One claim is, as Carney suggested, no one is willing to defend the old liberal international order because no such order ever truly existed. Great-power exceptionalism destroyed it. The world’s acquiescence to the horrors in Gaza decisively buried any remaining moral authority it might have had. But the charge of liberal hypocrisy would be serious only if there was concerted global action to replace it with something fairer and equitable. Instead, what we are getting is greater comfort with international nihilism.
Even if one has no attachment to liberal internationalism, there are compelling realist reasons to resist Trump far more forcefully. His wrecking-ball approach has injected immense strategic instability into the global order. We might not care about norms or decaying international institutions. But Trump’s actions have significantly eroded the prospects for stable great-power relations.
The most damaging aspect of Trump’s coveting of Greenland is not merely the threat of territorial annexation or resource exploitation. One might dismiss that, cynically, as Denmark’s problem. Nor is it only the further weakening of international law. The greater danger is that Trump is placing great-power competition on an escalation ladder that will be exceedingly difficult to dismount. In both Venezuela and Greenland, the ostensible rationale is to deny China and Russia strategic space. But this is not a signal about spheres of influence; it is a signal of escalating confrontation.
Even if such moves marginally strengthen the United States’ positional advantage in specific areas in the short run, they raise escalation risks everywhere else. They communicate not merely that the United States will resist China’s rise, but that it will not even seek a modus vivendi of managed rivalry. Trump’s actions do not reduce the risks of great-power conflict; they intensify them. The annexation of Greenland would not be a territorial grab from Europe alone; it would amount to something closer to a declaration of hot war on the existing world order. For these reasons, there are strong realist grounds for a robust international pushback, even for those to whom the liberal international order holds no appeal.
Trump is redefining the rules of the international system by normalising unilateral territorial revisionism under the banner of strategic denial. The justification is the same: Preventing China or Russia from gaining influence. But this is not a classic balance-of-power manoeuvre; it is an escalation signal that lowers the threshold for confrontation everywhere. It reduces the incentives for every kind of cooperation, including arms control and the collective governance of the Arctic. Global wars rarely begin with grand designs. They begin when misunderstandings multiply, and leaders gamble that escalation can be controlled. We are in that situation now.
Perhaps we have been lulled by Trump’s own climbdowns. He does not really mean to play this game of exclusion and encirclement; after all, China forced him to retreat, and a modus vivendi may yet be possible. But this explanation does not hold water. We should remember that even if Trump retreats, the pattern of his behaviour still projects a willingness to test limits through maximalist threats. This is a recipe for volatility. Countries cannot afford to assume future climbdowns. Global stability depends on shared understandings of red lines. Trump’s episodic retreats do not reaffirm those understandings; they corrode them. They are tactical reversals compelled by resistance. That distinction explains why it is foolish to think that a modus vivendi with Trump is possible.
Perhaps there is another explanation: The lack of state capacity. Europe, as it is discovering, cannot realistically confront the United States. Building the institutions and power necessary to do so will take years. India faces a similar reality. But this only explains part of the story. It does not account for the near-total absence of efforts to forge an international coalition against Trump.
In the early months of Trump’s presidency, it was not irrational to hope that bilateral deals rather than collective action might better manage risk. Many countries assumed that the greater threat was not American overreach but abandonment. Europe feared it in Ukraine; Southeast Asia feared losing a balancer against China. But two truths are now unavoidable. First, the dangers of abandonment are eclipsed by the systemic risks the United States now poses to global peace and stability. Second, the United States can no longer be counted on as a trustworthy partner.
The world had become too psychologically dependent on the United States. Trump can act as a patriarch because we have put the US in that position. Much of the world, even in the face of Trump’s perfidy, is behaving like errant children, seeking their father’s good graces. The United Kingdom’s responses to Trump are a perfect example of this. But there might be another explanation. You look at risks of war increasing everywhere, in Africa, in West Asia now, given rising tensions between Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and between India and Pakistan. Perhaps Trump is succeeding because the world is full of leaders wanting to be little Trumps. We are not resisting him because we relish the permissions he is putting in place: The universalisation of narcissism and freedom from norms may be the newest form of American internationalism. All risks be damned.
The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express
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