Trump as a symbol of a contested order

With his provocative style, Donald Trump is not only generating confusion: he is also applying (albeit perhaps intuitively) strategies known in economic psychology. The “anchoring” described by Kahneman and Tversky—identifying an extreme starting point and then negotiating from there—appears in their initial difficult positions, which they then relax when negotiating treaties or concessions.

Trump is, in many ways, a symptom and a catalyst. Focusing on abstract personality helps understand leadership style and perhaps political strategy, but leaves us lacking answers.

From the financial crisis of 2008, through the pandemic, to the current armed conflicts – Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Hamas, Yemen, and Sudan – we are witnessing a moment of profound instability. There are many evolving cases. Trump’s “tariffs”, the latest chapter of which is Canada’s decision to pause new taxes on technology companies. The American bombing of Iranian nuclear program facilities, and the resulting risk of regional escalation. In sum, hot wars coexist with growing tensions in global trade, disputes over strategic raw materials (such as rare earth elements), energy emergencies, and environmental challenges.

Trump’s Geopolitical “Bulldozer” Geopolitics, with its three rhetorical levels, returns to the center of the debate. On the one hand it is used among experts within the academy. In addition, there is widespread production by governments and institutions such as NGOs and think tanks, especially since the second half of the twentieth century. Then there is a great use of the discourse that Gerard Toal described as “popular geopolitics”: the discourse associated with the media, films and conversations in the street. You only have to look at the search curve for the word “geopolitics” in Google Trends to notice that people’s interest in geopolitics is increasing dramatically. The search for patterns and trends in current land administration and authority has much analytical potential.

In this context, psychology is unable to understand the Trump phenomenon, but the analysis also goes beyond trade and economics. Trump is not the maker of a new foreign policy, but rather a sign of the times: he reflects an internal rift in the United States and, at the same time, stimulates the restoration of global order.

Geography and Power: Thucydides’ Legacy in a Contemporary Key. In a scenario where Pax Americana can no longer be maintained on its own terms, explanations for the new reality are sought. Political scientist Graham Allison has rescued the concept of the “Thucydides Trap” from the structural tension that occurs when an emerging power threatens to displace a dominant power, by comparing Athens and Sparta to China and the United States. Fareed Zakaria realizes that we are entering a “post-American world,” where the United States no longer dictates the rules alone, but rather the relative rise of other powers leads to the dispersion of power.

The partial withdrawal of the United States from the global scene, pushed towards a new realignment, which was more gestural than effective, opened the way for a multiplication of strategic actors. Europe faces its unstable neighborhood (Russia, the Middle East, and North Africa) as it tries to redefine its role in the areas of defence, migration, and energy. For its part, Asia is resolutely positioning itself and expanding its technological and logistical tentacles around the world, reaching into Latin America – which has traditionally been the United States’ “backyard” – as evidenced by the Port of Chancay in Peru, electric cars and batteries in Brazil, and the construction of solar parks and a Huawei data center, among other projects.

China is not just struggling for economic power; Conflict narratives. As Kishore Mahbubani puts it, while the United States has been in Asia for a century, China has been there for a millennium. Perhaps this will continue to be the case. This historical perspective not only attributes Western influence, but also challenges ways of reading global changes: not everything can be observed from Washington.

Vietnam is an example of how current industrialization processes, mediated by globalization and technology, are reshaping social classes and economic structures. Societies that absorb peasant populations into growing industrial labor, compared to other societies – such as many Western societies – where an aging and precarious middle class suffers decline as a relative loss. They are two different temporal and structural dynamics, in an asymmetric competition. This is accompanied by general development policies with different time periods.

In China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, India and Russia, long-term development strategies are beginning to bear fruit. Meanwhile, in the United States, a short-term view is causing internal sectors to emerge at different speeds. A kind of “political dumping” operates between regimes that manage to maintain an economic and political strategy, among other conditions, at the expense of lack of rotation in government and the suppression of opposition, versus democracies in which the expiration date of mandates often fails to preserve medium- or long-term goals. In Latin America we are experiencing the worst of both worlds. For 500 years, there has been asymmetric integration in the economy, generating internal social inequalities and very strong environmental impacts.

More Trump than Trump: a product of structural erosion. Returning to Trump’s character, we propose a view that goes beyond the character’s psychology or morals. Trump is not just an anomaly. In any case, it is the result of an imbalance within the crumbling economic and political system. The United States is witnessing an internal rift characterized by the weakness of the middle class, the concentration of power in the financial sectors, and the impoverishment of broad social segments for decades.

Globalization has been a real tsunami in the past three decades. It has transformed value chains, displaced centers of production and fragmented societies. And he did so unevenly. While some globalized elites gained access to new markets and resources, other elites – more nationalistic and less mobile – but not necessarily the lower classes, began to lose ground. Trump, like other figures such as Bolsonaro, Le Pen or Miley, expresses this tension.

So, it’s not about assessing whether Trump is right, but about understanding what his political success tells us. Perhaps its feature is to indicate (intentionally or not) that the global order is collapsing. The loss of US competitiveness and influence is prompting Trump to attempt unilateral measures that further aggravate the situation, from preemptive attacks on strategic enemies to trade pressure on historical partners like Canada. But it is also forcing the middle actors – Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia – to reconsider their margins of maneuver.

Latin America before the Council hurried. The key question is not whether regions or countries should support or reject the United States or China, or what logic they should play in the short term in the tariff market or in the telecommunications market, but how to position themselves in this reshaped world. With vast territories, strategic natural resources, and even an active demographic window, countries like Brazil or Argentina have opportunities that should not be wasted on reactionary or visceral readings. Geopolitics can and should help us think strategically, from where we are, from our interests, and from our capabilities.

Responding to Trump’s unilateral measures with emotional or purely mechanical retaliation – raising tariffs, for example – may be as ineffective as it is naive. What we need is a complex, interdisciplinary reading, capable of clarifying economics, sociology, history, and foreign policy. A reading that recognizes that the world is not monolithic and that charismatic leadership – whether from the right or the left – cannot replace structural analysis. A consensus that transcends political cycles is what will benefit our economies and societies in the long term.

Less short term, more realistic. The current geopolitical uncertainty is not going away any time soon. The global order becomes contested, narratives proliferate, and actors are reconfigured. Trump – whether loved or hated – is neither the beginning nor the end of the process. It is a broken mirror that reflects multiple crises: the crisis of the neoliberal model, the crisis of pluralism, and the crisis of trust in elites. Understanding it requires more than moral condemnations or ideological sympathy.

If geopolitics is back at the center of analysis, it is because we need sophisticated tools for thinking about a world that has become both interconnected and competitive. As history reminds us, there is no worse mistake than confronting a crisis with outdated frameworks. Trump is not the earthquake, he is the rift. If we don’t change the lens, we will only see the rubble, not the structures that continue to creak under our feet.

* Political scientist (UBA) and analyst at Isiae – CARI – Argentine Council for International Relations, Argentina.

*PhD in Sociology and Professor at ELISP – Latin American Institute of Economics, Society and Politics, Brazil.