China, Russia sway pushing Trump to alter world order

Demonstrators hold signs in support of ousted Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro outside the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse on January 5, 2026 in New York. [AFP]

Donald Trump has just reminded us again. We live in a defective diplomatic world. Powerful states moralize what they do not practice, and practice what they do not moralize. International law is for the small and weak. 

The United States’ raid on Venezuela, and the abduction, last week, of President Nicholas Maduro, must leave even the great Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) shaking his head and turning in the grave, telling the world, “I told you; I warned you, but you did not listen!”

The 28th President of the United States of America understood war and peace like no other leader has done in modern times.

Wilson understood war not like Genghis Khan (1162–1227), who used war to subdue the world;  but rather as a votary for global peace. America’s Henry Kissinger (1923–2023), easily the foremost diplomat of our times, recognized that his country missed a great opportunity to lead the world, when it failed to embrace Wilson’s “Fourteen Points for World Peace,” in 1918 –  and many more times later. Is America losing it again? 

The Princeton University historian was a political romantic idealist, who believed in the goodness of human beings. After being dragged from the lecture halls that he so much loved, into politics, Wilson reconciled himself with the political space. He cherished the opportunity political leadership gave him to bring scholarly idealism into the prism of praxis. His vision for world peace sought to persuade the “Old World” – or Europe for that matter – to abandon war as traditional diplomacy, and instead embrace peace as the new diplomacy. 

Unfortunately, today, great powers are still striving to dominate everyone else through aggression.  They are drifting ever so farther from peace. Nor do they gain control over others, even as President Trump dreams that he could put the entire global community under the American thumb.

For, the American raid on Venezuela is only a little bit about accessing the country’s vast oil resources. It is mostly about dominating the world, and especially locking the Atlantic and Pacific World from access by predatory outsiders. It especially seeks to lock out China and Russia, and other emerging great powers. Everything else is the excuse, rather than the reason. 

Repeat – America’s assault against Venezuela is pre-emptive revanchism. It is also a proxy strike on a perceived surrogate. Trump is guarding against encroachment of the American hemisphere by emerging great powers from yonder; after close to three decades of unrivalled American unipolar dominance of the global community. It is a revival of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. By this doctrine, President James Monroe (1758–1831) warned the rest of the world, and especially Europe, to keep off the Americas. Europeans were advised to stick to Europe, and the US promised not to stray into Europe either.

Today, China is rising. Russia was thought to be dead and buried after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 – 1991. Yet, it is back. India is on the rise, and other members of the BRICS countries are on the rise, too. Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russian Federation, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates, come together to constitute a major rising threat to America’s global hegemony in recent decades. They call the bluff to President Trump’s campaign mantra of “Make America great again!” Even Kenya’s President William Ruto has told Xi Jinping of China that he is ready to join China, to frame and execute a new world order. 

And so America is rattled. She does not take such remarks casually. And so she embraces aggressive diplomacy, contrary to Woodrow Wilson’s dream of a different kind of global leadership, slightly over one century ago. Wilson thought of “a new international order, based on moral principles and collective security.” Trump, and before him Obama, the two Presidents Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and John F. Kennedy, were the antitheses of the Wilson School of politics among nations. 

Wilson introduced the notion of “peace without victory.” He advocated a new moral universe, which his country instantly frowned upon, and has continued to deride. President Trump now only takes matters to an unmarbled new high. For, Wilson proposed open diplomacy and ending of secret treaties between countries – believing that these fomented wars. The United States is the king of diplo-secrecy in the world today. 

But Wilson also advocated for freedom of the seas at all times; free trade; disarmament; national self-determination; and collective security that led to the founding of the League of Nations in 1920. The League would help to address competitions and conflicts among nations diplomatically, rather than through wars. today, President Trump is rolling this back. He is pulling the United States out of the UN, which took over from Wilson’s League of Nations in 1946. 

If America lost the chance “to tower over the international stage,” as Kissinger puts it in the volume titled Diplomacy, Trump is shattering all the vestiges of the dream through his “America Only” doctrine. If there is such a thing as the Trump Doctrine, it is not even “America First,” it is “America Only,” or “America First and Last.” Nobody else matters. And with this, does Trump seem to push the global community ever so close to Thomas Hobbes’s  atrocious war of all against all? Is life under the Trump Doctrine just about to be “nasty, brutish and short”?

America and the World betrayed Wilson in 1918. The Old World was sceptical about his Fourteen Points for World Peace. His own country pulled a snotty nose at him. Congress rejected the idea of the League of Nations, and everything about Wilson’s dreams about global peace. Might would make right. Almost as if paraphrasing Otto Von Bismarck on the eve of the Unification of Germany (1866–1871), the American Senate in March 1920 believed that the great questions of the day would be solved not through  speeches and resolutions of the majority, but by American iron and foreign blood.

That is where Trump stands with America in the world today. If the Russians and Chinese are entering the space that James Monroe secured in 1923, the resolution shall not be negotiated though global forums and discourses. It will rest on American might. Hence, Trump has invaded Venezuela not to install democracy. He has come not to grab Venezuelan oil, but to keep China and Russia out of this geosphere and hydrosphere. Interlopers must be totally locked out of this hemisphere and atmosphere, whatever it takes!

It is not about narcotics, therefore, nor is it about democratic rule. For, South America preponderates with all tribes of hard drugs; from Mexico to Colombia and beyond, it is a tale of drugs, and more drugs. The entire South Atlantic is the global headquarters of dictatorship and misrule. It is an anarchic paradise of debauched surrealistic living, enmeshed in drugs and misrule. Trump would have to institute massive regime change everywhere on the subcontinent and its islands, in order to begin giving South America a semblance of sobriety and democratic rule. 

But what would other great minds that have wrestled with politics among nations say of the emerging world order? AFK Organski has outlined the warning signs of outbreak of global war on a wide scale. Organski, in 1958, provided a balance of power perspective. World leaders will do well to familiarize themselves with Organski. President Trump especially, even as he faces the threat that he fears most – diminution of America – will do well to reflect on Organski’s Power Transition Theory. 

Organski proposed that war is most likely to break out during a transition in control of power. That is to say when an emerging power begins reaching parity with a dominant power.  The risks of war increase if the dominant power is not happy about the rise of a new power and the rising power detests the dominant power. Is that where global power balance is today? Are America’s challengers for global hegemony getting anywhere near her? Are they unhappy about America’s global hegemony? Do they, accordingly, threaten her to the extent that she would throw all caution to the winds and drag the world into an atrocious war? Is America “dissatisfied” ? 

China is the foremost emerging hegemon. In many areas of both hard and soft power, China is believed to have already overtaken the United States, at the start of 2026. From President Trump’s own recurrent lamentation about China, the Red Dragon is already monopolizing manufacturing in the world. Trump whines and whimpers all the time about jobs that have been exported to China. He speaks of the need to return them to the United States. Already, World Bank indicators showed in 2014 that China was the largest economy in the world. This is hardly surprising. A lot of American manufacturing is outsourced to China, hence Trump’s call for the jobs to return home.  

That America is worried about China’s rise has been demonstrated in Trump’s second term through recurrent, almost whimsical trade tariffs, that the American president slaps on China, every so often. Mutual attrition between the two countries has seen trade drop between them by up to 35 percent, year-over-year, at the start of this year. 

Other areas of concern include China’s military modernization, and especially expansion of her nuclear capacity. According to the Washington based Stimson Centre, whose focus is global security and shared prosperity, in a January 2026 report, China is seeking to reach 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030.  This can by no means make the United States happy. 

Then there is, of course, the combined muscle of BRICS countries which, according to World Bank sources, represent 40 percent of the global GDP. Add to this the fact that these countries are aggressively exploring formulas that will shift global trade away from the American dollar (“dedolarization” as it is being called) and the anxiety in Trump’s White House becomes easier to appreciate. So, too, the search to “make America great again.” 

But will America be made great again through American unilateralism and aggression? The rise of the BRICS is itself indicative that great nations of tomorrow are seeking greatness through the Woodrow Wilson avenue, and not aggressive JFK and Richard Nixon pathways. Nor would Trumpian running away from the rest of the world seem to be the solution. 

Last year (2025) the US National Security Strategy announced that the United States would no longer “prop” up the world order. Trump actuated this a few days ago by ordering the immediate withdrawal of America from 66 international agencies, under the aegis of the United Nations. The message is that the White House believes that the United States has enough muscle to take on the rest of the world, should raw war become the next option; that iron and blood will restore a fading America in the global arena of nations. As a curtain raiser to this aggressive isolationism, Trump shut down several UN offices in the United States last year. Is it probably only a question of time, before America withdraws from the international cooperation system altogether, and goes to armed war against the rest of the world?

There is an aura of a puerile and reckless sense of entitlement on the part of the present occupancy of the White House; a puerility that comes fully loaded with garrulous confrontation against everything and everyone, in sight and out of sight. This includes alternative voices at home. The American Chief Executive is taking war to everyone, not just abroad, but also at home. Put together with diplomatic cynicism and retreat from major international agreements, the world begins to see Trump not making America great again, but rather placing her on an isolated limp. 

In the absence of wise counsel in the White House, tantrums and emotions seem set to be the twin engines to run both domestic policies and international relations. Xenophobia –  and especially Sinophobia, Russophobia, and Afro-phobia –  is a rich ingredient in the energy that is running America today. If there are going to be more Venezuela-style raids, Africa should be on the lookout. Somalia is especially on President Trump’s lips, for all the wrong reasons. Nigeria has already had a taste of Trump’s angst. Behind the pretext of fighting narcotics and Islamists, Nigeria was bombarded a few days before the raid on Venezuela. 

Both Nigeria and Colombia appear to be test cases, however; pure inoculations against what could follow. The plot thickens with the fact that the emerging powers are not about to humour the White House by freezing their own development and growth trajectories. 

It has been said that history does not announce itself as a crisis. History is a dispute of ideas that keeps returning to haunt successive generations. It especially torments those who have not learned from its mistakes. Old thoughts return to be tested under new tensions, new pressures, and new narcissists. 

Does our own generation seem to be on the cusp of a fresh explosion? Why; there is a “fresh aggressive re-emergence” of the anachronistic notion of “spheres of influence” that had gone with the Mercantile Age (16th–18th Centuries); and the Old Colonial System (1650–1754). Great power rivalry is back, as is economic coercion, and erosion of multilateralism. 

Our world is restless and dangerous. What would Michel de Nostradamus (1503–1566) say, not as a predictor of things, but as the poet of anxiety that he was? Would he mummer alongside Wilson, Kissinger, and Organski? The French Oracle was not a theorist, like these public intellectuals. Yet, he knew how to capture the psychological atmosphere of generations on the brink of rupture.   

He spoke in terms of stuff like “the great empire broken from within, false peace proclaimed, fire in the sky and iron in the sea,” and “law betrayed by its guardians,” and the like. This 16th Century man understood the patterns of social decay. He knew that danger arises when institutions function without belief. Is this where the global community is in at the start of the second quarter of the 21stCentury, with America leading? 

Our leaders are trapped in their own myths. If push comes to shove, they would do well to watch not the stars, but themselves. The bad omen is not above them, but within themselves. Donald Trump is the captain. For the rest of the world, seek not to find (out) for whom the Donald Trump bell tolls. It tolls for you.