From Gaza to Ukraine, Trump’s foreign policy has reinforced a world in which power increasingly outweighs accountability.
By Patrick Wintour
“The old world is dying,” Antonio Gramsci wrote. “And the new world struggles to be born.” In such interregnums, the Italian Marxist philosopher warned, “every act, even the smallest, can acquire a decisive weight.”
Western leaders appear convinced that we are living through precisely such a transitional moment – one in which the system of international relations constructed after the second world war has ground to a halt.
During periods of transition, or interregnums, Gramsci famously observed, “a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”. Today, no symptom is more striking than the crisis of legitimacy engulfing the system of rules and laws on which the international order was built – the world the United States helped create in 1945.
No one can claim they were not warned about the wrecking ball Donald Trump was preparing to swing at that order.
Almost a year ago, during his US Senate confirmation hearing in February 2025, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, laid out with remarkable clarity Trump’s repudiation of the postwar world crafted by his predecessors. “The postwar global order is not just obsolete; it is now a weapon being used against us,” Rubio said. “All of this has brought us to a point where we face the greatest risk of geopolitical instability and generational global crisis that anyone here has lived through.”
Rubio argued that the rules-based international order had to be abandoned because it rested on a false premise: that a foreign policy grounded in national interest could be replaced by one devoted to a “liberal world order, in which all nations of the Earth would become members of a Western-led democratic community”, with humanity shedding national identity to become “one human family and citizens of the world”. “This was not just a fantasy,” he said. “We now know it was a dangerous illusion.”
That assessment was later reflected in the national security strategy released by the White House at the end of last year. The document warned of the erosion of European culture and pledged support for nationalist parties committed to “strategic stability with Russia”. The United States, it stated bluntly, can no longer “hold up the entire world order like Atlas”.
Chaotic and unpredictable
On paper, these positions appear broadly consistent with the ‘America First’ worldview. In practice, however, Trump’s foreign policy has been deeply incoherent. A formally non-interventionist ideology collides with sporadic interventions that awkwardly blend grand claims about world order with the narrower interests of Washington. There is no linear Trump doctrine – only a succession of disconnected fireworks, launched at random into the night sky.
Contempt for international law
Amid this turmoil, one element has remained constant: Trump’s disdain for the constraints of international law. He has insisted that his power is limited only by his “own morality”, rejecting the value system underpinning the legal order – above all, the principle of state sovereignty and the prohibition on using force to alter borders.
In its place, Trump champions what might be called raw coercive power, a form of diplomacy variously described as mafia-like or bully-driven, in which extortion, blackmail and transactional deal-making are the engines of change.
Faced with a choice, for example, between expelling Russia from Ukraine – something the United States could undoubtedly attempt by fully arming Kyiv – or forging a mutually profitable relationship with Vladimir Putin, in which both sides plunder Ukraine’s considerable material resources, Trump has opted for the latter. Ukraine, it seems, will pay any price, bear any burden and endure any hardship to secure the survival and success of Trump’s economic vision.
For the European Union and Nato, this is indeed a moment in which every decision may prove decisive – not only for the future of European sovereignty, but for the survival of the UN Charter itself.
The same predatory gaze has turned towards Venezuela, home to an estimated 303bn barrels of crude oil – roughly a fifth of global reserves – placing its sovereignty alongside that of Canada, Mexico and, more recently, Greenland in Trump’s sights. When warned on social media that killing Venezuelan civilians without due process – as the US had done by bombing multiple vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific – would constitute a war crime, the US vice-president, JD Vance, responded with chilling bluntness: “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”
As if to underline the point, the year opened with an armed intervention to remove Nicolás Maduro from power – another act in an interregnum where even the smallest decision can carry historic consequences.
Trade rules in freefall
Meanwhile, the rules of free trade are being blown apart as Trump weaponizes the sheer size of the US market to strong-arm allies – not only on economic terms, but to force changes in their domestic policies. A country’s value to the White House is no longer measured by rational criteria – let alone democratic ones – but by the personal relationship between its leader and Trump’s inner circle. It is a nakedly monarchical order, stripped of any pretence.
Israel’s occupation and bombardment of Gaza – actions in which European powers have often been complicit – are brutal in their own right. But they also strike at the heart of the claimed universality of international norms. The rules, it turns out, are binding only when applied to some.
As Majed Al Ansari, spokesperson for Qatar’s foreign ministry and one of the officials most closely engaged with Israel last year, put it: “We are living in an era of disgusting impunity that is pushing us back centuries. We are reduced to making concession after concession, not to stop acts of aggression, but to ask those responsible to kill fewer people, to destroy fewer neighbourhoods. We are no longer even demanding respect for international law; we are begging them to take a step back and not abandon it altogether.”
Assault on the guardians of international law
This erosion has been accompanied by an open assault on the institutions of international law that stand in the way of coercive power. In November, Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the international criminal court, gave an interview to Le Monde describing the impact of US sanctions imposed on him in August, after the court issued an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on charges of crimes against humanity.
Guillou said the sanctions had transformed every aspect of his daily life. “All my accounts with US companies – Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal and others – have been closed,” he explained. “I booked a hotel in France through Expedia and, a few hours later, the company emailed me to cancel the reservation, citing the sanctions.”
For the audacity of defending the most basic principles of international humanitarian law – and the value of Palestinian civilian lives – before a court tasked with prosecuting war crimes and genocide, Guillou said he had effectively been pushed back into the 1990s. European banks, intimidated by threats from the US Treasury, rushed to shut down his accounts. Compliance departments in European companies, acting as enforcers for Washington, refused him services.
The message was unmistakable: those who attempt to uphold the law will be punished, while those who violate it with sufficient power behind them will be shielded. In Gramsci’s interregnum, the “morbid symptoms” are no longer abstract. They are institutional, deliberate and increasingly irreversible – and each act of submission brings the old world closer to its end, without any clear sign that a more just one is waiting to be born.
Faith without power
In a special issue of the London Review of International Law published in November, more than 40 scholars contributed essays grappling with a central question: whether this sudden surge of public faith in international law as a pathway to justice is a burden the law is actually capable of bearing. Law, they argue, cannot substitute for politics, nor can it resolve deep ideological conflicts in a polarised world. Gerry Simpson, professor of public international law at the London School of Economics, writes that he finds himself having to swallow his long-held doubts about the efficacy of international law “in the face of the enormous faith now invested in it, particularly by younger generations”.
The law’s failure to meet these heightened public expectations has produced what Thomas Skouteris, dean of the law school at the University of Khorfakkan in the United Arab Emirates, describes as a “fin-de-siècle atmosphere” surrounding international law.
In an article published in September in the Leiden Journal of International Law, Skouteris argues: “The lexicon of international law – sovereignty, genocide, aggression – has become ubiquitous, saturating the political atmosphere with juridical echoes. But this prevalence brings with it a strange paradox. The more present international law appears to be, the less decisive it is perceived to be. Norms are invoked more frequently and more intensely, even as their capacity to resolve disputes or prevent violence seems to weaken. What once promised order is increasingly read as performance.”
The contradiction reaches its most grotesque extreme when western leaders solemnly invoke UN security council resolutions or the authority of international courts, only to abase themselves moments later before Trump – yielding to his demands, addressing him as “daddy”, as Nato’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, did, and dispatching ever more lavish gifts to the new Sun King and his family.
In this interregnum, law is endlessly spoken, ritualistically performed and publicly revered – yet privately discarded the moment it collides with raw power. The old world, it seems, is not merely dying. It is being auctioned off in plain sight.
Muted resistance
Very few figures have openly resisted what the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman has described as “immorality and lack of seriousness … the two defining traits of our current leaders”.
One notable exception has been Tom Fletcher, head of the UN’s humanitarian agency, OCHA. Last May, he urged UN diplomats to pause and ask themselves what actions they would “tell future generations were taken to stop the atrocity of the 21st century that we witness daily in Gaza”. “It is a question we will hear,” he warned, “sometimes with disbelief, sometimes with fury, but always present, for the rest of our lives. Perhaps some will recall that, in a transactional world, we had other priorities. Or perhaps we will fall back on those empty words: we did all we could.”
It was a genuine cry of despair. Another came from Oman’s foreign minister, Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi. Addressing the Oslo Forum – a gathering of international mediators held in Muscat, Oman’s capital – he issued a stark warning: “We are heading towards a world in which certain forms of foreign intervention – if not the outright invasion and annexation of territory – come to be accepted as a normal part of international relations, rather than as illegal violations of our shared international order. How did we get here?”
Al Busaidi argued that the problem long predates Trump. “Restraint and respect for international law were abandoned after 9/11, with the launch, under George W Bush, of not one but two foreign interventions – in Iraq and Afghanistan – ostensibly to eliminate the terrorist threat, but in reality functioning as explicit regime-change projects,” he said.
Some voices on the left, meanwhile, have welcomed the fact that international law has moved to the centre of public debate at the very moment its credibility is collapsing. Critics echo the judgement of the Marxist historian Perry Anderson, who wrote in New Left Review: “By any realistic assessment, international law is neither truly international nor genuinely law.”
According to this view, US presidents of both parties have always rejected submitting themselves to legal constraint. The United States has never been a party to the Rome Statute of the international criminal court, nor to the UN convention on the law of the sea. Franklin D Roosevelt, it is argued, was less interested in forging a club of democracies than in constructing a legally grounded pact of stability with Russia.
Indeed, John Dugard, a member of South Africa’s legal team at the international court of justice, has argued that the Biden administration’s preference for the phrase “rules-based order” already betrayed Washington’s deep ambivalence towards international law itself.
From rules to rupture
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has long argued that the United States favours “a Western-centred rules-based order as an alternative to international law”. In May 2021, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, voiced the same criticism during a UN security council debate on multilateralism. “International rules must be based on international law and must be written by all,” he said. “They are not a patent or a privilege of a few. They must apply to all countries, with no room for exceptionalism or double standards.”
For much of the global south, such “rules” conceal long histories of violence and racial hierarchy. Others see international humanitarian law – with its language of proportionality, distinction and necessity – as a futile attempt to civilise what is, at its core, the inherent brutality of war.
It has largely fallen to older generations to insist that there remains something worth preserving. Consider the response of Christoph Heusgen, the outgoing chair of the Munich Security Conference, after a speech by the US vice-president, JD Vance, attacking European values. “We have to fear that our common value base is no longer so common,” Heusgen said. “It is clear that our rules-based international order is under pressure.” A former security and foreign policy adviser to Angela Merkel for 12 years, he added: “I firmly believe that this more multipolar world must be grounded in a single set of rules and principles – the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
“This order is easy to disrupt,” Heusgen warned. “It is easy to destroy, but far harder to rebuild. That is why we must cling to these values.”
Others are far less hopeful. Dispirited after a year of often fruitless diplomacy in the Middle East, Majed Al Ansari predicts that the world is “moving from world order to disorder”. “I don’t think we are heading towards a multipolar system,” he said. “I don’t even think we are moving towards a power-based international order. I don’t think we are moving towards any system at all. We are sliding into a situation where anyone can do whatever they want, big or small. As long as you have the capacity to wreak havoc, you can do so – because no one will hold you to account.”
Source in Spanish: elDiario.es / The Guardian