World order to disorder

How Trump sought to destroy international law

- Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor

'The old world is dying," Antonio Gramsci wrote, "and the new world struggles to be born." In such interregnums, the Italian Marxist philosopher suggested, "every act, even the smallest, may acquire decisive weight".

In 2025, western leaders appeared convinced they - and we - were now living through one such transitional period, with the world of international relations established after the second world war crashing to a halt.

During such eras, Gramsci more famously wrote, "morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass". And at present there is no more morbid phenomenon than the crisis of legitimacy for the rules and laws on which the international order was based - the world that the then US president was central to creating in 1945.

No one can say they were not warned about the wrecking ball that was about to be inflicted on the global order by Donald Trump, the current holder of that office.

The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, spelled out in his Senate confirmation hearing in February how Trump disowned the world his predecessors had made. “The postwar global order is not just obsolete, it is now a weapon being used against us,” he said, “and all this has led us to a moment in which we must now confront the single greatest risk of geopolitical instability and generational global crisis in the lifetime of anyone alive here today.”

The rules-based international order had to be jettisoned because it had been built on a false assumption that a foreign policy serving core national interests could be replaced by one that served the "liberal world order, that all the nations of earth would become members of the democratic western-led community", and mankind was now destined to abandon national identity and become "one human family and citizens of the world. This was not just a fantasy. We now know it was a dangerous delusion."