[Column] Trump overturns the world order

US President Donald Trump attends a signing of a peace deal between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the US Institute for Peace on Dec. 4, 2025 (native time). (AFP/Yonhap)

By John Feffer, creator and director of International Coverage in Focus on the Institute for Coverage Research

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of well being and human companies, needed to vary his company’s dietary suggestions, he did one thing quite simple. He took the meals pyramid and turned it the wrong way up. After years of selling wholesome grains, pulses and greens, the company was now favoring meat and dairy.

It appeared like a joke. It wasn’t. 

Kennedy known as his upside-down pyramid, with meat on the prime and entire grains on the backside, “Eat Actual Meals.” A greater identify can be “Assist Cattle Farmers and Have a Coronary heart Assault.”

The Trump administration’s topsy-turvy strategy applies to each side of American coverage. 

The USA wants undocumented immigrants to keep up the financial system by filling jobs in agriculture, the development trade and the service sector. So, the Trump administration is deporting them.

The USA is the one main industrialized nation with out common well being care. So, the Trump administration is making it tougher for individuals to entry medical insurance coverage.

The USA, earlier than 2024, was the most important oil and fuel producing nation on the planet, however wanted authorities assist to make the transition to scrub vitality. So, the Trump administration eradicated these clear vitality subsidies and invested much more into increasing the fossil gasoline sector.

In different phrases, the Trump administration is doing all the things it will possibly to hurt individuals and the planet. They’re like comedian ebook villains, and so they don’t even notice it

The upside-down nature of Trump’s strategy to coverage can maybe finest be seen within the international coverage realm. 

Donald Trump has talked over and over in regards to the significance of peace. He has lobbied for the Nobel Peace Prize. When requested about his New Yr’s want this 12 months, he stated, “Peace on Earth.”

However all he has achieved not too long ago is promote battle. His administration bombed Nigeria on Christmas Day. The USA invaded Venezuela proper after the New Yr so as to kidnap the president, Nicolás Maduro, and his spouse. 

The administration is now making ready to assault Iran. Trump has insisted that america should seize Greenland, by pressure if needed. And the US president expects that the federal government in Cuba will fall as properly, and that Secretary of State Marco Rubio will someday be that nation’s chief.

The Trump administration has emphasised the essential significance of US sovereignty. It doesn’t need every other nation or any worldwide establishments interfering with US insurance policies.
 
Nonetheless, the Trump administration doesn’t care in regards to the sovereignty of every other nation. Trump believes he can intervene anyplace. Even shut allies are usually not off limits. He has urged absorbing Canada. And he appears keen to struggle a fellow NATO member, Denmark, so as to management Greenland.

Respect for sovereignty is a bedrock precept of the United Nations. All states depend on this precept to safeguard their borders and shield in opposition to the interventions of different nations. Trump’s challenges to sovereignty in Venezuela and elsewhere threaten to unravel the world order. 

This contempt for worldwide treaties and establishments led the administration early on to withdraw from the Paris settlement on local weather in addition to the UN Human Rights Council. This 12 months, he has ordered the withdrawal from 66 worldwide organizations, half of them linked to the United Nations. These embrace the UN Framework Conference on Local weather Change, the physique liable for the yearly Convention of Events (COP), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Local weather Change. 

From 2005 to 2024, carbon emissions in america dropped 20 p.c, a uncommon bit of fine information from a rustic with the second-highest fee of emissions on the planet. Final 12 months, underneath Trump, US emissions made a dramatic U-turn, rising by 2.4 p.c. 

Trump has nothing however contempt for worldwide regulation. He has achieved extra than simply denounce authorized our bodies just like the Worldwide Prison Courtroom. He has actively sought to destroy the ICC with sanctions. And he has threatened much more sanctions if the ICC doesn’t rewrite its founding doc to make sure that Trump and his cronies are by no means prosecuted for the battle crimes that they’ve most positively dedicated. 

The violations of sovereignty, the withdrawal from worldwide establishments, and the contempt for worldwide regulation: these all kind a unique sort of battle. The Trump administration has launched an offensive in opposition to the very edifice of the world order. He desires to do away with the United Nations, reverse the decolonization course of, and return the world to a time when solely energy determines the course of occasions. 

That is the world of Stephen Miller, Trump’s hard-right adviser. “We reside in a world in which you’ll speak all you need about worldwide niceties and all the things else, however we reside in a world, in the true world [. . .] that’s ruled by energy, that’s ruled by pressure, that’s ruled by energy,” Miller not too long ago informed CNN. “These are the iron legal guidelines of the world because the starting of time.”

That is, after all, nonsense. Energy, as even authoritarian leaders be taught, has its limits. Autocrats can’t change their societies by pressure alone. They’re overthrown by peaceable protests. They’re tried in court docket and despatched to jail.  

Historical past is suffering from the wreckage of empires that tried to rule by pressure alone. That’s the iron regulation because the starting of time. 

And it’s only a matter of time earlier than the Trump administration discovers that it too faces limits. The European Union is banding collectively to fend off any try on Greenland. The US courts are laying down limits on what the Trump administration can and can’t do, with even the conservative Supreme Courtroom ruling not too long ago that the administration can’t ship the Nationwide Guard to Chicago in opposition to the desires of the mayor and the governor. 

And standard protests proceed all through america, most not too long ago to protest the killing by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) brokers of a younger mom in Minneapolis. 

The Trump administration shouldn’t be stunned when the world that it’s making an attempt to show the wrong way up unites in opposition to it. An upside-down pyramid shouldn’t be secure. Ultimately, it can collapse.

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