Adieu, rules-based international order

Even after Trump, the US as a security and economic partner will no longer be trusted in the way it earlier was.

- M.D. NALAPAT

President Donald J. Trump of the United States of America may indeed go down in history as being the cause of the collapse of the "Rules-based International Order" set up by the victors of World War II in 1945-46.

The victors were the US, KMT China, the Soviet Union, Britain and France, and the “permanent” set of rules that “responsible players” ought to strictly adhere to were designed to maintain the global supremacy of the five. With the passing of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his replacement by Vice-President Harry Truman, the US and the Soviet Union were transformed from friends to foes. Truman had a horror of Communists, and saw them everywhere he looked, a factor which led to the persecution of many (mostly wrongly) on whom the cloud of suspicion of being a “Russian agent” had settled. Truman was the opposite of Roosevelt, a genial aristocrat who had the foresight to see in Hitler the source of evil that he was. In contrast, several of his contemporaries in the leadership ranks of the US political class saw Hitler as a lesser evil than the Communists he was exterminating. Only after the US entered the war on the Allied side following the Japanese attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941, more than a year after World War II had started in Europe did such a misguided view get abandoned. Even after such an attack by an ally of Nazi Germany, the majority in the US Congress was reluctant to go to war with the Nazis.