This is an excerpt from The Praeter-Colonial Mind: An Intellectual Journey Through the Back Alleys of Empire by Francisco Lobo. Download the book free of charge from E-International Relations.
The world is a strange place in 2025. A generalized sense of despondency and malaise fill the very air we breathe. Many are unhappy. Not just the poor, the disenfranchised, the oppressed. Those who are on top are also not happy. It was comedian Bill Burr who pointed out that billionaires aren’t happy with a billion dollars. But there is more. Countries endowed with a massive landmass, like Russia, are not happy with their territorial allotment. They want more. They want more land, land that does not belong to them. And, perhaps strangest of all, the first economy of the world, the country with the mightiest military forces this planet has ever seen, believes it has lost its greatness. And they want it back. They want to ‘Make America Great Again’. Enter the church of MAGA, and its prophet Donald J. Trump. In this final chapter, I will explore the impact of Trump, Trumpism, and MAGA in the rest of the world – that is, humanity or the portion of the global population that, if America is always put first, will invariably come second. This chapter should be read in tandem with Chapter Two, as it is a corollary to those initial reflections on the US as the Reluctant Empire.
As we have seen throughout this study, the praeter-colonial mind is the outlook that attempts to make sense of the many legacies of colonialism in our supposedly post-colonial world, in accordance with the varied meanings of the prefix ‘praeter’ (namely ‘past, by, beyond, above, more than, in addition to, besides’). Thus, the praeter-colonial mind sees colonialism simultaneously as past and present as it is confronted with the evidence of its many legacies. It is a mind that, ultimately, attempts to step aside to gain perspective and go above and beyond colonialism for the sake of the present and the future.
Now, if MAGA was indeed the isolationist movement many of its followers believe it to be, then the praeter-colonial mind would have very little to say about it. It would merely be a domestic phenomenon with no impact on the rest of the world. Yet, MAGA’s prophet has chosen a different path. Instead of retreating to the inner citadel of the North American landmass, to ‘Fortress America’ standing in splendid isolation, Trump has embarked on a campaign to remake the international order, seeking not only a realignment of alliances but even a redrawing of borders the likes of which we have not seen since the days of the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference or the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. How the praeter-colonial mind can make sense of what is happening to the world today is the subject of this chapter. Before that, however, a few thoughts on the domestic situation in the US are needed to lay the groundwork for further praeter-colonial reflections.
Transitional Fantasies
Thomas Matthew Crooks was born in Pennsylvania on 20 September 2003. He died in his home state on 13 July 2024, at age 20. The cause of death: a sniper bullet. It was fired at him as a direct and immediate response to his own sniper bullet aimed at one man speaking to a crowd gathered in the small town of Butler. Had Crooks succeeded in his mission that day, and regardless of his own fate after, the world would be a very different place today. It would be a world without Donald Trump.
Such a world would be a much quieter place, for sure. As Senator John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, remarked during an interview in April of 2025, ‘President Trump as we know exists loudly, and his loud existence has awakened Europe with respect to its economy, and its national defense’ (The Post Millennial 2025). Trump did survive that assassination attempt, and he went on to win the presidency that year. He remains his usual loud self. However, what is most deafening about this episode that confronted a quiet Gen-Zer with a loud Baby Boomer that summer day is, ironically, how little we talk about this young man whose actions could have changed the course of history. How quiet we are about Crooks.
Indeed, after the expected frenzy of the ensuing news cycle that week, the media went completely silent about him. No books, documentaries, or movies have been released about that fateful day in which a tragic existence ended. Not even the experts who are increasingly turning to study the phenomenon of the left-behind, angry young men to explain the political violence of our times have taken an interest in the ballad of Tom Crooks, a sad story indeed. This story is weaved into the general canvas of our dark times, days when not only those who have everything to be happy are unhappy, but also times when many quiet, ordinary people suddenly find themselves harboring dark feelings in their hearts. In the face of the unprecedented political blitzkrieg Trump unleashed in the US and the rest of the world during the first months of his second presidency, many a liberal humanist fantasized about Trump’s demise. If not left to a misguided implementation of the Second Amendment (‘the right to bear arms’), the demurely desired outcome could be delivered by something far more prosaic – say, a heart failure, or a brain aneurism. Sad times indeed if political difference cannot be handled other than by fantasizing about the death of another human being.
A Trump-free world would be undoubtedly less loud. But would it be all that different? Comedian and political commentator Jon Stewart has shown how, for over a decade, liberals in the US have been trying to make the case for a ‘fever dream’ theory whereby Trump, Trumpism and MAGA are but an anomaly, an exception in an otherwise well-ordered polity that can boast over two centuries of democratic government. Someday, the theory goes, the ‘fever will break’ and America will come back to its senses. But as Stewart remarks: ‘If someone’s been running a fever since the aughts, that’s not a fever. That is their default resting temperature’ (The Daily Show 2025, at 0:54). That is what Annie Karni, White House correspondent and author of Mad House, also pointed out in an interview in the middle of Trump’s first 100 days in office: ‘Most Democrats and voters have come around to the idea that MAGA is bigger than Trump. There is no reverting, there is really no evidence that anything is going back’ (The Bulwark 2025, at 13:40). Have we ever seen anything like this in US history?
A Century of Un-American Experiments
Even though Americans like to repeat the self-reassuring mantra that they live in the greatest country on earth, the fact is that they have been adrift for a while, even before Covid (Galloway 2022). They are struggling, and the solutions they have found for their malaise have not always been the best. In an attempt to explain what is happening in Trump’s America in 2025, some are looking back into US history to draw parallels and sound the alarm previous generations were not able to, before it is too late.
Amidst a climate of political persecution and witch-hunts, naturally, the days of McCarthyism in the 1950s are called into mind by some. In his latest book, Red Scare, Clay Risen introduces the following hypothesis in the Preface:
In his novel The Plague, Albert Camus writes that the “plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves,” ready to spring to life again. Something similar happened in the 1950s, which is to say also the 1960s and ‘70s and, I believe, on up through today. There is a lineage to the American hard right of today, and to understand it, we need to understand its roots in the Red Scare. It did not originate then, nor is Trumpism and the MAGA movement the same as McCarthyism and the John Birch Society. But there is a line linking them (Risen 2025, xiii).
Others have looked a little farther back to alert us as to all the many parallels the rise of fascism in Europe and the US has with our current times, most notably Rachel Maddow in her recent book Prequel. An American Fight Against Fascism (Maddow 2023). Maddow traces back the trajectory of a homebrewed variant of fascism in the 1930s and the 1940s, which was in part advanced by the original ‘America First Committee’ , a political organization that convened a rally at Madison Square Garden in new York on 23 May 1941 with the specific purpose of keeping the US out of World War II (Ibid, 217) – that is, until Pearl Harbor after which the Committee dissolved (Ibid, 247).
With the exception of the so-called ‘Silver Shirts’ (Ibid, 60), no major paramilitary forces or ‘praetorian guards’ were created back then in America, a usual development wherever fascism takes hold in order to ensure the loyalty of the armed forces to the leader. Yet, that does not mean that it can’t happen there too – Trump’s profligate use of the National Guard for domestic law-enforcement is a sobering reminder of this. Maddow ultimately concludes this thorough study by extending the following invitation to the reader: ‘If we’re willing to take the harder look at our American history with fascism, the truth is that our own history in this wild, uncertain twenty-first century has not an echo in the past but a prequel’ (Ibid, 309). Likewise, other intellectuals, including Yale professors Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder, and Jason Stanley, published an open letter in The New York Times decrying the arrival of fascism in Trump’s America, prompting them to leave the country and relocate to Canada (Shore, Snyder and Stanley 2025).
Now, without prejudice to the ‘Red Scare’ and the ‘fascist’ lines of criticism as useful lenses through which the events unfolding in the US today can be understood, I believe there is another notable precedent in American history that may better explain how a movement such a MAGA came to be, how long it might last and how impactful its effects may become. It is the case of a remarkable experience within the greater American experiment. Some even know it as the ‘Noble Experiment’. But most people call it simply ‘Prohibition’, the nationwide ban of alcohol between 1920 and 1933.
In a famous study of this particular chapter of American history titled Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition – a book that would also inspire the documentary series by Ken Burns on the same topic – Daniel Okrent explains how such a seemingly un-American phenomenon took place in one of the most freedom-loving places on earth:
In fact, Americans had had several decades’ warning, decades during which a popular movement like none the nation had ever seen – a mighty alliance of moralists and progressives, suffragists and xenophobes – had legally seized the Constitution, bending it to a new purpose (Okrent 2010, 1).
Indeed, the political movement preceding the 1919 introduction of the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution (the amendment legally enacting the ban of alcohol at the federal level and its companion legislative instrument, the Volstead Act), can be dated back at least to the 1870s.
As Okrent further explains, it would be a remarkable combination of political forces and unlikely alliances (known as the ‘drys’ as opposed to the ‘wets’) that would bring about this unusually illiberal restriction to an otherwise quintessentially liberal document such as the US Constitution: ‘In the two decades leading up to Prohibition’s enactment, five distinct, if occasionally overlapping, components made up its unspoken coalition: racists, progressives, suffragists, populists (…) and nativists’ (Ibid, 42).
This true ‘people’s movement’ believed that ‘their cause had been sanctified by the long, long march to ratification’ (Ibid, 112). Further, the prohibitionist ethos was far from being a uniquely American phenomenon. Before the Great War, many European countries (all of them northern and non-Catholic, Okrent notes) were home to what a French economist described as ‘le delirium anti- alcoolique’ (Ibid, 75). In the UK, Lord Curzon would refer to the dry movement as ‘Puritanism run mad’ (Ibid, 172), while Winston Churchill would call it ‘an affront to the whole history of mankind’ (Ibid, 172) and ‘at once comic and pathetic’ (Ibid, 185). Aside from the obvious fact that Trump is a notorious teetotaler, I believe that many structural parallels can be drawn between today’s MAGA movement and the crusade of Prohibition. By this I mean that the parallels are not of a substantive kind, for the simple reason that MAGA is not a reaction to any kind of poison or dangerous, intoxicating substance – unless we are willing to concede Elon Musk’s outlandish theory of the so- called ‘woke mind virus’.
As Tocqueville eloquently observed, democratic centuries sometimes overdo it with their obsession over equality, even to the extent that it can turn into a form of orthodoxy among liberals. But whether metaphorical intoxication or true political commitment to a bona fides principle of the Enlightenment – égalité – the reaction to such a political force has come in the form of a violent backlash, just as militant and inflexible as Prohibition once was. Enter MAGA, ‘le delirium anti-woke’. The structural parallels I speak of can be found, first, in MAGA’s composition. Just like the Prohibition movement, MAGA in 2025 is a strange collection of political forces, almost the exact same as those who a century ago rallied behind the ‘dry’ banner. Indeed, MAGA has its own racists, nativists, and populists. If not the female suffragists of old, MAGA at least commands the loyalty of another perceived disenfranchised gendered group of our day – young male voters, or the so- called ‘bro-vote’. As for progressives, they are represented by the techno- futurist elements of the MAGA movement, led by Elon Musk (not unlike another antisemitic automobile magnate who supported the drys, Henry Ford).
On the opposite side of the aisle, the Democrats of today find themselves in a similar situation to that of the ‘wets’ of the last century: ‘Disorganized, dysfunctional, and disbelieving, the wets had watched the approach of Prohibition (…) “in a dumb stupor”’ (Ibid, 113).
Second, in terms of its lifespan, the MAGA movement can be said to have been five decades in the making before it got into the halls of federal power in Washington D.C., just like Prohibition found its way into the most sacred document of the land, the US Constitution, since its humble origins in the 1870s when the first bills were proposed and rejected (Ibid, 62). Similarly, the intellectual origins of the MAGA movement have been traced back to an obscure, yet momentous, memorandum published in 1971 by a conservative lawyer, Lewis F. Powell (Powell 1971). This manifesto, which ends with an ominous closing (‘the hour is late’), decries an open assault on the American economic system by socialism, communism and fascism. It further highlights the importance of reconquering universities and the media as neglected spaces by conservatives. The Powell Memo is said to have inspired the infamous ‘Project 2025’ document that the Trump administration is striving to implement (Heer 2024). A seed planted in 1971 and bearing fruit in 2025. A long fever dream indeed.
Will the MAGA lifespan equal that of the Prohibition movement, that is, more than half a century from the time the first dry amendments were proposed in the 1870s until the 21st Amendment finally repealed the 18th Amendment in 1933? It is hard to tell. Since MAGA and Trumpism are now a phenomenon that transcends the life of a sole individual, it is safe to assume that after Donald Trump leaves office the movement will stay strong and live on – probably carried forward on the shoulders of J.D. Vance. And MAGA has not even attempted to enact a constitutional amendment at the time of writing, an accomplishment that, if successful, would equal the Prohibition feat of inserting an illiberal pathogen into an otherwise liberal host.
What happens after that, and how MAGA ends, is also something difficult to predict, not least because predictions can be wrong, almost comically so as Okrent also reminds us:
In September 1930 Morris Sheppard, author of the Eighteenth Amendment, said, “There is as much chance of repealing the Eighteenth Amendment as there is for a hummingbird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail”. (…) It was one of those moments when all the experts are wrong and wisdom arises from unlikely sources (Ibid, 330).
Whether we draw our lessons from any of these un-American experiments (Prohibition, Fascism, or the Red Scare), or from all of them, and whatever ‘un-American’ means in substantive terms, methodologically there is one thing that cannot be up for debate: no one person in the US has or should have the power to designate another person as un-American in keeping with that country’s own democratic tradition. It is, ultimately, a collective decision made over generations. As the Supreme Court decided decades ago: ‘The very nature of our free government makes it completely incongruous to have a rule of law under which a group of citizens temporarily in office can deprive another group of citizens of their citizenship’ (US Supreme Court 1967).
The Anti-Antonines: ‘Malice Toward All’
Perhaps it is inaccurate and misleading to call these experiments ‘un- American’. After all, they have all been homebrewed. No alien or external force possessed Americans to ban alcohol, flirt with fascism, or hunt down suspected communists. Could it be that there is something underneath the marbled halls of neo-classic Washington DC, something lurking in the shadows behind the scenes of the great constitutional drama that has been put on display for the past 250 years?
When trying to make sense of similarly dark days in a supposedly highly civilized place, a refugee from Nazi Germany came up with an explanation as to how an otherwise sophisticated society, where there is rule of law and science and art thrive, can at the same time produce some of the most monstruous manifestations of our human nature, turbocharged by the totalitarian state. Our refugee, Hannah Arendt, postulated that after World War II: ‘The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition’ (Arendt 1962, ix). She was specifically referring to the unholy alliance between antisemitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism (Ibid), all of which converged to maximum catastrophic effect in the 1930s and 1940s.
Is there an equivalent ‘subterranean stream’ in US history? Antisemitism has its own record in the US, and its instrumentalization for political gain (for instance, by the Trump administration in its feud against Harvard University) does not belie the fact of its existence in the country. And totalitarianism, arguably the most sophisticated form of illiberalism harnessing all the tools at the disposal of the modern state, is something the US has flirted with in the past (for example, with the concentration camps where thousands of citizens of Japanese descent were forcibly interned during World War II).
However, there is another subterranean stream that runs deep beneath the tides of American history. Its roots are medieval, yet its manifestations are modern. It combines the worst of all traditions. It refers to the way politics are conducted in that country, a tradition that does not begin with Trump but arguably culminates in his rise to power. It can be characterized as the opposite of the spirit of reconciliation and magnanimity towards defeated enemies, the ‘malice toward none’ creed of President Abraham Lincoln (Maddow 2025, 297). With Trump, it becomes the exact opposite: ‘malice toward all’.
A scholar of the Middle Ages once described the spirit of medieval times as one of ‘passionate intensity of life’ (Huizinga 1996, 1), a time when a ‘fervent pathos’ (Ibid, 9) animated people in everything they did, including politics: ‘The blind passion with which a man supported his party and his lord and, at the same time, pursued his own interests was, in part, an expression of an unmistakable, stone-hard sense of right that medieval man thought proper’ (Ibid, 20).
I believe that, in some ways, perhaps due to the lack of a war of religion like those Europe once had (the Civil War of 1861–65 in reality an example of modern warfare) the US has still not come out of this medieval frame of mind carried across the Atlantic by the pilgrims and settlers, with its distinctive blind passion and intensity – not least when it comes to the fraught politics of the culture wars (on which I said more in Chapter Six). It is a stylistic medievalism, a ‘folk-feudalism’ of sorts to go with what has been called ‘techno-feudalism’ as a system of post-capitalist exploitation (Varoufakis 2024).
Donald Trump epitomizes this folk-feudalistic blind passion. He learned from the very best. Indeed, he was mentored in the dark arts of dirty politics by that Mephistophelian figure called Roy Cohn, an extremely well-connected and corrupt New York attorney who ‘galloped through the second half of the twentieth century like a malevolent Forrest Gump’ (Bruney 2020, para. 2). Cohn, in turn, assisted Senator McCarthy in his infamous witch-hunt against alleged communists, known as the Red Scare.
Like his heirs, Cohn and Trump, McCarthy was a controversial character. Risen describes him in a way that would be completely suited for the 47th President of the United States today: “McCarthy attacked with abandon. He became part of the political landscape, a reliable source for outrageous quotes and a bellwether for the insanity of the moment. Facts, accuracy, and consistency did not matter (Risen 2025, 266).” Concerning Cohn, Risen remarks that he was a distillation of everything people loved about McCarthy: ‘his viciousness, his vindictiveness, his willingness to lie’ (Ibid, 279). Next in line in this hapless dynasty is Donald Trump, an adoptive son to a vicious political father (Cohn) and adoptive grandson to an equally venomous grandfather (McCarthy). Only time will tell whether the ‘talented Mr. Vance’ (Packer 2025) will enroll his chameleonic political persona to become next in line after he is done fulfilling his constitutional duties as Vice-President.
Thus, just as Rome had its good Antonine emperors, America got its ‘anti- Antonines’ spanning a century of national history carried by the subterranean stream of folk-feudalism and periodically emerging on the surface, ‘flooding the zone’ and mudding the waters as they pervaded everything. It was only a matter of time before these uncontainable hydrodynamic forces started overflowing into the rest of the world.
Trump’s Codicil to the Monroe Doctrine: The Reluctant Empire Revisited
Donald Trump is not a learned man. He might be clever – enough to get himself elected President of the United States twice – but he is most certainly not a knowledgeable person. He has been called ‘uneducable’ by the media, his mind described as ‘full of mush’ by a former advisor (Irwin 2025). He is an ignorant man, and proudly so. That is why he has no problem picking a fight with one of the oldest, most revered academic institutions of his country, Harvard University, as he has no respect, or need, for knowledge. Further, it is also baffling that his ignorance includes one of the areas where he is supposed to be savvier – business – as he is apparently convinced that tariffs are an entry fee that countries magically send his way for the privilege of doing business with the US instead of the sales tax on the American consumer that they actually are.
Trump’s self-assured ignorance extends, of course, to history as well. He does not understand history, and therefore he does not understand how the world works. ‘He lives from day to day’, in Goethe’s words, blithefully unaware of all the many paths the present has taken to come to be. His is not a praeter-colonial mind, not even a colonial one; his is an ‘ahistorical mind’. But what does it matter what goes on in the mind of Trump? Reflecting on his first months in office, Zoe Williams has written that: ‘One of the many indignities of the US spectacle is having to lose hours analyzing the hidden meaning and augurs of the acts of men who don’t, themselves, give one second’s thought to anything’ (Williams 2025).
Commentators advise to take Donald Trump seriously, but not literally – a phrase that has become a mantra of our hapless times. I believe, however, that although Trumpism must be taken seriously for all of the above- mentioned considerations, a mind as ignorant and impressionable as Trump’s must always be taken literally, just like the words of a child, if it is intent what we are inquiring about. Take Trump literally, and Trumpism seriously.
It is only when the world offers resistance – with all its annoying facts and laws of physics and economics and politics – that the designs of a childish mind like Trump’s are thwarted and he, expectedly, gives up or moves on to the next shiny object in sight. A mind that does not care or think about history – a mind that has no grasp of the workings of the world around it – is a mind that truly believes that the world can be carved out and remade like a lab experiment or a tragicomic pantomime of the imperial divisions of old. It is a mind that truly believes disputed biblical lands can be turned into a ‘riviera of the Middle East’; that historic bodies of water shared with other nations can be renamed at a whim; that he can snatch an entire country from the Commonwealth of Nations and turn it into his 51st state; or seize a chunk of an old northern kingdom all in the name of securing his own hemisphere – that is, his own side of the gameboard.
It is indeed an actively imaginative mind the way only children playing a game of Risk can be. Enter Trump’s Codicil to the Monroe Doctrine. President James Monroe declared in 1823 that America would be henceforth for ‘Americans’ – whether North our South, arguably, and certainly to the exclusion of European imperialism. Subsequently, at the turn of the twentieth century President Teddy Roosevelt added his famous ‘Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine, namely, his willingness to enforce such a doctrine in the hemisphere up to and including the use of force (Allison 2017, 208–209).
Today, Trump keeps a portrait of President James Monroe in the Oval Office, and although he does not truly understand why or what the Monroe Doctrine really is – he has referred to the portrait as ‘Monroe from the Monroe document’ – he has accidentally walked down the path of Monroe and Roosevelt before him by following, if not proper foreign policy principles, at least his blind, predatory impulses telling him to grab as much as he can of everything in his immediate vicinity.
This is Trump’s, and MAGA’s, own version of imperialism (Collinson 2025), admittedly a continuation of an expansionist tradition dating back to the days of ‘Manifest Destiny’ (the doctrine underpinning US expansion westward) and even Oliver Cromwell’s ‘Irish Tactics’ to subdue neighboring Ireland and ‘Western Design’ to take the Americas from Spain in the seventeenth century (Grandin 2025, 85; 106).
Thus, Trump’s neo-imperialist inclinations towards everything located in his immediate sphere of influence, the Western Hemisphere, has so far spared no one – not Panama, not Mexico, not Colombia, not Greenland, not even as close an economic and political ally as Canada. Since his ahistorical mind believes these are not real countries with real borders, and that the world around him can be redrawn at a whim, there is no need to acknowledge the basic fact of the sovereignty or territorial integrity of any of them. The same applies for other (real or perceived) powerful countries in their own ‘spheres of influence’ – a doctrinal concept that is making a comeback in international relations (Foreign Policy 2025) – namely China and Russia. That is why Trump does not really care about Ukraine, or about Taiwan for that matter.
To reiterate: Trump and his followers do not care about history or facts. That is also why he will likely continue to throw ridiculous distractions at the American public exploiting longstanding pop culture obsessions, like the Kennedy assassination or the Fort Knox gold. Conceivably, before his term is up, he will dangle more such stories at the public, for example UFOs in Roswell, New Mexico; or treating Cuba, which is dangerously close to his beloved Mar-a-Lago residence, as a place that needs to be ‘liberated’ from its own history. These things may never come to pass; but if they do, none of us will be surprised. Anything is possible.
In a way, the ahistorical mind is the opposite of the praeter-colonial mind. The former is tragically unaware of colonialism and its impact on the present, whereas the latter tries to make sense of all of colonialism’s many legacies and checkered past. Yet, that does not mean that the ahistorical mind cannot accommodate paradoxes. In fact, it is a place where contradiction thrives, where a bi-polar empire fits perfectly well within a multi-polar world.
Otherwise, how could it be explained that America must be made great again (the implication being: that America was once great, and that this is no longer the case), and at the same time that it already is the greatest country? How to make sense of demands for equal treatment after decades of the world ‘ripping America off’ while at the same time believing it is indeed a country that deserves special treatment, special respect? Only in a paradoxical mind can greatness and equality be both true at the same time. As Zakaria notes:
The United States has always had two fundamental attitudes. One, we are too good to participate in the world. Or we are so good that we should completely transform the world. But to actually engage in the world as it exists has always been difficult for the United States because it’s an ideological nation. It believes it is exceptional and all that. And I think you see some of that in the Trump attitude (Klein and Zakaria 2025, para. 192).
Further, the ahistorical mind truly believes that America can thrive in splendid isolation and at the same time dictate what others can or cannot do, at least when it comes to its own sphere of influence, but certainly also beyond that space. However, by definition, an empire cannot remain in isolation.
Isolation is further negative for the world the US helped to build for the past eight decades, as pointed out by a Republican hawk like Condoleezza Rice during the last presidential race (Rice 2024). Such an order has, others believe, greatly benefited the country that exists at its very center, the US (Klein and Zakaria 2025). It is not that the US was not imperialistic while building and enforcing such a world order; but, as Grandin points out, it managed to navigate this contradiction without hypocrisy by way of ‘figuring the most efficient mix … of empire and law, domination and arbitration – of going alone and working together’ (Grandin 2025, 330). Trump’s bulldozer- like approach to the international negates this very legacy.
One of the main architects of the post-war order, Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, titled his memoirs Present at the Creation, complete with an epigraph by Alphonso X, the Learned of Spain: ‘Had I been present at the creation I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe’ (Acheson 1987). Present at the dismantling of the same order, it seems Donald the Builder can’t be bothered with any hints or advice to aid him in the cavalier destruction he is presiding over.
The New Athenians
At the Shangri-La Dialogue event held in Singapore between May and June of 2025, the host Defense Minister addressed the following message to his American counterpart, Pete Hegseth, playing the Melian islander to his Athenian ambassador: “If we have to choose sides, may we choose the side of principles — principles that uphold a global order where we do not descend into the law of the jungle, where the mighty do what they wish and the weak suffer what they must (Tharoor 2025, para. 15).”
In the age of Trump, however, such lofty language is probably completely lost on the likes of Hegseth, Rubio, Vance, or Trump himself. What these new Athenians have in common is not only that they are all men; it is the new brand of masculinity that they celebrate, promote and bring to the table of diplomatic affairs that is interesting, if not for its originality, at least for the perils it entails.
Indeed, we have seen this style of what Zakaria calls ‘macho realism’ (Klein and Zakaria 2025, para. 250) before in the US, in an iteration brought to us by another one of those spawns of McCarthyism, Richard Nixon. In his 1975 book The Male Machine (complete with an Introduction by the iconic feminist thinker Gloria Steinem), Marc Feigen Fasteau included a chapter titled ‘Vietnam and the Cult of Toughness in Foreign Policy’ where he summarizes this style of macho diplomacy as follows:
In short, the search for “peace with honor” in Vietnam, after Kissinger’s sophisticated intellectual gloss and skilled diplomatic tactics are stripped away, was shaped and governed by the same tired, dangerous, arbitrary, and “masculine” first principles: one must never back away once a line is drawn in the dust; every battle must be won; and, if one fails to observe the first two injunctions and by some fluke the rest of the world doesn’t care, the domestic right – the “real men” – will get you for being too soft (Fargen Fasteau 1975, 180).
This is very similar to what Acheson reports is the Soviet style of diplomacy, the same style today’s Russia seems to follow in its negotiations on the war against Ukraine. According to Acheson, the Soviets were not compelled by eloquence or reasoned arguments, but only by the ‘calculation of forces’:
Theirs is a more primitive form of political method. They cling stubbornly to a position, hoping to force an opponent to accept it. When and if action by the opponent demonstrates the Soviet position to be untenable, they hastily abandon it – after asking and having been refused an unwarranted price – and hastily take up a new position, which may or may not represent a move toward greater mutual stability (Acheson 1987, 274).
The resemblance between the Soviet (and Russian) way of negotiating and Trump’s absurd tariff wars of the present is simply uncanny. The echoes of the Nixonian ‘mad man theory’ (i.e. calculated unpredictability) in conducting international affairs can also be seen in Trump’s approach.
Further, there is more to MAGA diplomacy than just residual Cold War macho energy. There is also a critical entertainment value to it. Historian Niall Ferguson calls it ‘Reality TV Politik’ (Ferguson 2025). Trump’s background as a TV star before politics is, of course, sufficiently known, including his active involvement in the worlds of professional wrestling and mixed martial arts. Testosterone infused and male dominated, there is something of the theatrical in both. Particularly in wrestling, the concept of ‘kayfabe’ becomes crucial, that is the understanding that everything that goes on between the different ‘characters’ is taken as genuine – no matter how little or no clothes the emperor dons on the ring.
This performativity in Trump’s and MAGA political style was vociferously decried during the 2024 presidential race by journalist Craig Copetas, who even called for the serious media to stop covering then candidate Trump altogether given the artificiality of his entire campaign. Like Tom Crooks, however, Copetas was vastly ignored and his message forgotten.
Stop the Planet – We Want Off!
In 1958, a decade before the first human being set foot on the Moon, Hannah Arendt manifested her perplexity at the eagerness her fellow Earthlings displayed to leave the planet. She commented on the excitement around a human-made satellite orbiting the planet, reportedly a ‘first step toward escape from men’s imprisonment to the earth’ (Arendt 1998, 1). She did not understand why people where so eager to leave a place so essential to our human condition:
Although Christians have spoken of the earth as a vale of tears and philosophers have looked upon their body as a prison of mind or soul, nobody in the history of mankind has ever conceived of the earth as a prison for men’s bodies or shown such eagerness to go literally from here to the moon. Should the emancipation and secularization of the modern age, which began with a turning-away, not necessarily from God, but from a god who was the Father of men in heaven, end with an even more fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living creatures under the sky? (Ibid, 2).
Fast forward to our present, what can the praeter-colonial mind do in light of all of these ominous developments, whereby the most powerful country in the world is dismantling the world order it helped create and ostensibly retreating to its inner citadel – not without rekindling old ideas about spheres of influence and regional imperialism?
The rest of us, that is humanity, all those who have been axiomatically made a second priority by way of ‘America First’, will just have to wait and see what happens after Trump, and Trumpism, spend out their Prohibition-like momentum. We may have to host some political and intellectual refugees as well, like the Yale professors fleeing fascism, although it is more likely that most Americans will stay put hoping they still get to, to quote comedian Dave Chappelle, ‘wear the Nikes and not make them’. Some are optimistic that, after the trade wars, more sound economic policies will return (Galloway 2025). Others are more pessimistic in light of the political polarization in the US, even referring to the different social worlds where people inhabit as ‘Earth One’ and ‘Earth Two’ (MSNBC 2023). But there is really one planet Earth, and we are stuck in it for the time being. Or are we?
There is one person who is actively working on trying to get us off this planet before we ruin it completely: Elon Musk. Just like the Prohibitionist Henry Ford started his own political experiment in the Amazon in the late 1920s, an industrial citadel called ‘Fordlandia’ (Lost in Context 2025), Musk has created a new administrative unit in the south of Texas to build his own gateway into Mars. This new ‘Cádiz’ (the main port from where hundreds of Spanish vessels departed to the Americas to build an empire) is called ‘Starbase’ (Laughland 2025). Perhaps before rushing towards a new planet that we will surely also ruin (considering human nature is a ‘firmware’ problem that we carry within us wherever we go), it might be better to reflect on how we got to this particular point in time and what it means for us by exercising the faculties of the praeter-colonial mind. As Arendt prompted us all those decades ago: ‘What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing’ (Arendt 1998, 5).
Further Reading on E-International Relations
