Bad things can happen'

Main players prepare for the great Trump transformation

- Patrick Wintour

A revisionist state has arrived on the scene to contest the liberal international order, and it is not Russia or China, it is the United States. It is Donald Trump in the Oval Office, the beating heart of the free world. The incoming administration contests every element of the liberal international order - trade, alliances, migration, multilateralism, democratic solidarity and human rights.

"The narrative now at home and abroad is that the US is not what we thought it was. Trump was not an aberration, not a bug, but a feature of American politics and of America's story."

This stark assessment of the impact of Donald Trump's return to the White House next month, by the Princeton University professor of politics John Ikenberry, leads him to a question: "Will the new global order be determined less by the US and more by its legacy partners? Will they seek an alternative framework globally and regionally, or will they make bets to ride this out, and do the transactional politics that Trump will request?"

Already, from Ankara and Brussels to Tehran and Moscow, the whole world seems catalysed as capitals seek answers to versions of that question. Without Trump taking a single executive decision, nations are pre-positioning, responding and adjusting to the long shadow he represents.

Even Trump himself seems a little unnerved at what his return is unleashing. "The world seems to be going a little crazy now," he admitted three weeks ago in Paris.

Amid the craziness, three distinct forms of response to Trump are starting to emerge.

An "ideologically aligned" group is emboldened, including populists in Europe, Latin America and Israel who believe their often Russia-friendly brand of nationalism will benefit from being in the slipstream of "America First". The breakup of the EU, an Argentina-style chainsaw taken to regulation, a new security architecture with Russia, regime change in Tehran: all become possibilities.