The “partisan” passions that have recently gripped that part of humanity which subscribes to “democratic” values (as derived from the Democratic Party of the United States) have led those under their influence to perceive Donald Trump as unpredictable, inconsistent, and irrational. However, the actions taken by him and his team, their declared and demonstrated priorities, as well as the ways in which they conceptualize and justify their strategy, suggest the opposite — a policy that is consistent and thought-through. This policy was clearly articulated in the U.S. President’s speech in Riyadh, where, instead of the failed “endless wars” of past Republican administrations and the equally failed “appeasements” of Democratic ones, he proposed a strategy of “peace through strength” and “peace through trade.”
Such innovation, along with the renewed tone of the U.S. President’s communication with the world, can hardly be considered entirely unexpected. After all, the previous mode of American geopolitics — “a rules-based world order” — was not fundamentally different from Trump’s “America First”: the “rules” were established by the U.S. based on its own national interests, and select countries were allowed to share in them. Thus, when Trump declared that “shared principles” were a fiction, he merely stated what everyone already knew. The novelty lies in the fact that it is now acceptable to say this out loud.
And it is precisely in this rhetorical shift and new self-positioning that lies the change which not only America’s enemies but, more importantly, its partners struggle to comprehend and accept. Why is it now permissible — and even necessary — to speak these truths aloud? Why has such an odious figure, from the perspective of his opponents, as Trump become the focal point of global politics? What on earth is going on?
There are many hypotheses — from conspiracy theories to accusations against postmodernists who deconstructed everything, all trying to reconcile the protesting “democratic” mind with the phenomenon of Trump, which doesn’t fit into its framework. However, researchers rarely pay attention to the subtle yet fundamental transformations that in one way or another affect everything in the truest sense. These are the gradual changes in the semantic universe, the logic of which different eras have attempted to articulate through various conceptual frameworks — speaking of Pleroma and aeons, Creation and Sacred History, the Absolute, the Idea, the Spirit — always in the language of metaphysics.
Political discourse, like any other, unfolds within “frameworks” defined by the meaning of cultural categories — “the good,” “truth,” “beauty,” “the meaning of life,” and so on — which are absolute for each era, serving as logical refinements of those categories within the specific domain of discourse. Political discourse remains within the bounds of cultural metaphysics, affirming the ontological content of central cultural categories. At its core lies a hard nucleus (recall Imre Lakatos), whose content and scope of central concepts are developed within metaphysical discourse. The axiomatic positions of this core determine the foundational political assumptions about human nature, the nature of the social, the subjects of political processes, their general laws and goals, and so on — as well as the strategic and tactical priorities formulated on this basis.
In the realm of politics, transformations of cultural categories have consistently shaped different political paradigms — from Plato, Augustine, Dante, Marsilius of Padua, to secular doctrines. Clearly, the collapse of Enlightenment universalism, the subjectivization and particularization of once-inviolable truths, the post-truth condition, and so forth, have had a profound impact on the political worldview. Civilization centers that until the end of the 20th century saw themselves as competing continuators of the Enlightenment paradigm began, in the 21st century, to view their national-cultural traditions as real — rather than abstract — subjects of history, with all the consequences this entails. In the geopolitical arena, this “metaphysical rethinking” has led to the fragmentation of the world-system into competing alternative global development projects (the American, Russian, Chinese, Indian, and a group of Islamic projects). These projects, inheriting a metaphysical belief in the significance of universal human meanings and ideals on the one hand, and seeking to replace the shaken universalism on the other, search for new immutable foundations in antiquity and the existential grounding of their own traditions — that is, from their own understanding of what is and what ought to be. Naturally, competition among such projects presupposes not only an ultimate level of confrontation — one of meaning — but also a corresponding level of community consolidation and mobilization.
Donald Trump is engaged in tailoring politics to this new reality: expanding U.S. boundaries to encompass the “American world,” downgrading allies from the status of friends to vassals, deepening the divide between “project-based” oecumenes into defensive trenches (which, among other things, prevent former friends from fleeing), switching from the language of persuasion to the language of coercion, translating universalist terms into a particularist vocabulary, and turning the U.S. into the sacred Zion of all the tribes of a new political community.
It should be expected that the U.S. initiative will provoke a response from those claiming their own geopolitical projects, which will inevitably lead to a radicalization of the bloc structure of the world-system, a reorganization of economic and financial logistics, and a general redefinition of geopolitical principles. But it was Trump and the United States that initiated the game — a game the rest of the world will now have to play.