Description
This paper argues that the second Trump administration functions as a “ruse of nature,” unintentionally accelerating systemic change in world politics. Drawing on Vico, Hegel, and Marx (via Gramsci’s interregnum), it treats Trump’s “America First” project not as an exogenous rupture but as a radicalization-from-within of the liberal international order (LIO), in which the dominant power revises the very rules it once authored. The analysis links three dynamics. First, U.S. contestation of multilateralism—eroding the legitimacy and problem-solving capacity of institutions such as NATO, the UN, and especially the WTO after the paralysis of its Appellate Body—undermines the LIO’s institutional core while normalizing unilateral tariffs, expansive sanctions, and local-content regimes. Second, the weaponization of finance and supply chains catalyzes countermeasures: a deepened Sino-Russian rapprochement, experimentation with non-dollar payments (e.g., CIPS, bilateral settlement in national currencies), and broader hedging by pivotal states. Third, these shifts widen the strategic aperture for the Global South, visible in the densification and enlargement of BRICS into BRICS Plus, the institutional anchoring provided by the New Development Bank and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement, and the growing use of BRICS/G20 platforms to articulate alternative governance preferences. The paper situates Trump’s return against the domestic legacy of Bidenomics—industrial policy that improved macro-indicators yet failed to consolidate consent—highlighting how U.S. hegemony’s crisis combines coercive capacity with diminished leadership. The central claim is paradoxical: attempts to restore unencumbered U.S. primacy have become the dialectical motor of pluralized global governance, consolidating BRICS Plus as a consequential—if heterogeneous—site of agenda-setting and institutional experimentation.
