Trumps Augustan moment

This is the first of a two-part series.

Even the very last person has finally understood it: The world order is changing. This transformation is not random or accidental—it is deliberate, planned and it is Donald Trump’s plan, along with his allies, that is now being carried out.

Some believe they have to sit in judgment on this change, loudly bleating whether they approve of it or not. One can safely ignore them. What really counts is understanding the change, anticipating the next moves and adapting accordingly.

For me as a German politician, that translates concretely into: What opportunities does Trump open up, and what must I do to seize them for my country? First things first: Unprecedented opportunities are opening for Germany—opportunities that could usher in a golden age… provided we actually grasp them!

From legal masquerade to real politics

The previous international legal order was profoundly European, rooted in the Peace of Westphalia of 1648. It rested on two core principles: the equality of states—great and small alike had, in principle, the same rights—and state sovereignty—states acted freely in both internal and external affairs.

But both principles were always limited in practice. Naturally, small states had to defer to the interests of great powers and could never truly act as equals in foreign policy. And the human-rights argument had long since hollowed out sovereignty in domestic matters. The old, European-minted international law and its principles might still be taught at universities, but foreign-policy reality had long moved on.

This contradiction became glaringly obvious with Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine. Suddenly the West invoked those old principles, as though the issue were not power in the “heartland” but the defense of some abstract legal order.

No German media outlet could resist tacking on the label “violation of international law” every time it reported on the Ukraine conflict, and thereby systematically diverted attention from the real causes of the conflict.

Trump is now ending this masquerade. For that alone he deserves thanks. Trump is making politics honest again. He is creating an order that no longer hides behind outdated and gutted principles but is based on reality—economic, political and legal.

From universal to regional

This sense of reality brings geography back into foreign-policy thinking. Geopolitics—even the term was taboo at German universities and in political circles. Now it’s on everyone’s lips. Geopolitics is politics shaped by location.

The world is not One; it consists of various geographically and culturally defined spheres that form around a regional power. This regional power—contrary to the old international law—is not on equal footing with the other states in its space but assumes a hegemonic role. Think of India vis-à-vis Bhutan, Nepal or Sri Lanka.

The great sphere of the US is the American double continent. And that has been official since 1823, when President James Monroe proclaimed the “Monroe Doctrine,” which excluded any European influence in the Americas and thereby effectively limited the foreign-policy sovereignty of the other states on the American double continent.

Trump is reviving the Monroe Doctrine. In Venezuela he has demonstrated that the US can and will enforce its order on the American double continent at any time. The blow against Maduro goes far beyond a one-off action: it is both a signal to all states on the double continent and the beginning of the end of Cuban communism. Without Venezuelan support, the regime in Havana is no longer viable.

With an almost surgical “special military operation,” Trump has thus ordered the Latin American space. This has nothing whatsoever to do with Wild West methods.

The same logic underlies the US claim to Greenland. The US cannot allow a significant part of the North American landmass—with considerable mineral resources—to remain outside its control.

Denmark, as a non-American state, cannot justify its claim within a Grossraum order, especially since it is too weak to effectively defend or exploit Greenland. It is patently absurd that Denmark can only protect Greenland with American help, yet wants to deny the US access—citing abstract and long-obsolete principles of international law.

Liberal to post-liberal, neo-con to realist

Trump’s Augustan turn in the US, however, extends beyond the American double continent. The US is renewing and securing its role as a global power. Before Trump, this was justified with “values” declared universal—above all human rights as interpreted by left-liberal American NGOs, with Soros’s Open Society Foundations leading the way.

This method of justification triggered massive counter-movements worldwide. With the economic rise of the non-Western world comes renewed cultural self-confidence. Western models of life and coexistence appear less and less as the measure of all things—especially when extreme, “woke” versions of Western values are elevated to global standards through US-controlled multilateral institutions.

Outside the liberal bubbles of North America and Western Europe, virtually no one believes in more than two genders (let alone that they can be changed), tolerates attacks on family, tradition and faith, or wants to participate in this Western self-destruction. The very “values” used to justify US leadership have undermined it.

It was therefore logical to abolish the entire NGO industry, which happened through the outright elimination of USAID funding. Equally logical is the abandonment of multilateral structures, which are inseparably tied to these left-liberal value conceptions—and that is exactly what is happening now.

But this is not simply replacing the left-liberal, woke orientation with a supposedly conservative one, as the neo-cons’ program during the Bush II era envisaged. Power is no longer exercised in the name of “Judeo-Christian civilization” or “freedom,” nor is a universalist political program exported.

Instead, the local situation is realistically taken into account. Lessons have been learned from the Iraq disaster, where neo-con viceroy Paul Bremer destroyed the existing power structures of the Ba’ath Party and the military, plunging the country into chaos.

Accordingly, in Venezuela it is not opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado who the US installs in office, but rather the incumbent Vice President Delcy Rodriguez. It is no longer about regime change; it is about cooperation.

The same will apply in Iran: civil war is not to be expected. In a future Iran, the Shiite clergy will inevitably play a role in a country that is 90% Shiite. Existing elites thus no longer have everything to lose in the new Pax Americana, making it easier for them to accept cooperation offers.

In place of value-based justification of US leadership—whether left-liberal or neo-con—comes a realist one: the deal. This deal is no longer universal for every partner and every Grossraum but takes the specific situation into account: cultural, economic, power-arithmetical.

Russia can remain Russian, India Indian, Arabia Arab—if it aligns with the US. This makes the US attractive again to conservative elites worldwide, instead of acting as the guardian of quirky and mostly sterile minorities.

Where elites themselves are left-liberal-woke—which is only the case in Western Europe and Canada—the US now sides with the post-liberal opposition and uses its superpower resources to bring them to power.

My party, the AfD [Alternative for Germany], should recognize this. It is currently the only—and therefore without alternative —chance to defy repression by the German state and gain power.

From multilateral to bilateral

Because of the shift from liberal to post-liberal, the US is also turning away from the multilateral structures created in the liberal era. The new global order is based on bilateral treaties and agreements.

The previous multilateral structures were created and largely financed by the US. The US never joined some of the most dubious outgrowths of this already questionable multilateralism, such as the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

They are now exiting numerous organizations and slashing funding for the rest. Western Europe, as the last refuge of the old left-liberal order idea, will now try to preserve at least some multilateral structures through its own financial contributions.

This reveals the fundamental self-deception of the Western European foreign policy community. The US founded and sustained this cosmos of multilateral organizations solely to generate and exercise power through it. Now that these structures and their left-liberal agenda threaten to endanger that power, it is only logical that the US is abandoning multilateralism.

Western Europeans, by contrast, believed in multilateralism as such and never grasped its function—or above all its dependence on fulfilling that function. Unwilling to admit their error, they now cling furiously to something no amount of money can save—because only hard American power ever compelled non-Western states to participate in multilateral structures and transfer their own power and freedom to them.

The world of bilateral deals is far more attractive to them than the old multilateral one. And that is why it is finished.

What do these premises mean for the transatlantic relationship? What must Germany do to find its place under the new US foreign policy—in Trump’s golden age—and participate in the opportunities? That will be the subject of the next article.

Dr Maximilian Krah is a German jurist and member of the German Federal Parliament (Bundestag)