Paul Hosford: Trump’s America goes it alone — and the world is left to pick up the pieces

Trump’s return to power has thrown global diplomacy into chaos, as world leaders struggle to navigate his unpredictability

Just weeks into his second presidency, Donald Trump has doubled down on his refusal to acknowledge the rules of international engagement. Picture: Pool/AP 

During the 2016 Republican primaries, when Donald Trump’s candidacy still had more of an air of publicity stunt than a genuine political campaign, one thing confounded his political opponents when it came to debates — his unpredictability.

How do you debate with someone who doesn’t recognise the same rules of engagement, who calls opponents liars, and comes up with nicknames on the spot?

If you’ve only ever existed in a world of rules and norms, those who don’t recognise the same rules and norms are difficult to counteract because they’re not playing the same game as you.

Throwing away the rulebook

For some time, analysts tried to pin down what Trump was doing. Some suggested it was some kind of four-dimensional chess, that the rest of us just couldn’t see the board. But the truth is that it was just chaos.

Trump realised shortly into his 2016 campaign that if he wanted to really upset the established order, then he could not be of that order. He took their rulebook and refused to acknowledge it existed, let alone play by it.

Having had four years of relative stability coupled with inaction with Joe Biden, the 2016 primary version of Trump must look now like a dream to world leaders.

Just weeks into his second term, Trump has spoken about turning Gaza into a resort and sending millions of Palestinians to other countries, and has held peace talks in a three-year-old conflict with just the aggressor, calling the president of the invaded country “a dictator”.

Trump's unpredictability 

While world leaders have spent the last few years carefully trying to hold together the established order, Trump has returned like a drunk baby in a china shop — unpredictable, potentially ruinous, but needing to be coddled.

South African president Cyril Ramaphosa arriving for the G20 foreign ministers' meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa, on Thursday. Picture: Jerome Delay/AP

The US president’s indifference to the established order could be felt keenly this week in Johannesburg, where the first-ever meeting of the G20 on African soil took place.

Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, however, was not here, in the expo centre in the shadow of the Soccer City stadium.

Mr Rubio’s stated reason was that South Africa’s programme was “DEI and climate change”. It came after an executive order by Trump stopped foreign aid to the country over a law that the White House said amounts to discrimination against the country’s white minority.

Those are handy reasons for Trump’s administration to sell to its base, but the reality is that he himself is simply just completely indifferent to global institutions. And that is the real problem that leaders like those gathered here in Johannesburg will have to be content with for the next four years (or more, if a movement backing a third term for Mr Trump gains any traction).

Ireland's insight into the problem

It is a problem that we in Ireland can see pretty clearly.

As an island in the Atlantic, whose people and products have always left and gone elsewhere, as a nation rightly proud of its diplomatic efforts and the people who carry them out, we are the ultimate believers and beneficiaries of the multilateralism which has defined the post-Second World War decades.

During his speech at the G20 meeting on Thursday, Tánaiste Simon Harris told delegates the multilateral system was necessary.

“While the multilateral system is not perfect, international co-operation is essential if we are to address the many global challenges before us,” he said.

As a small country, we know the importance of multilateralism. It is at the heart of Ireland’s foreign policy. 

While the US was represented here in South Africa by senior diplomats, the message is becoming clearer and clearer: Donald Trump doesn’t care about how foreign policy has worked up until this point.

If he does not see an immediate (read monetary) benefit for the US, he is willing to cast aside whatever good may have come from the existing structures.

His severing of ties with the World Health Organization, it was warned last week, runs the risk of smallpox remnants being leaked into the world, adding potential for the deadly disease to return.

'Hamlet' without Denmark

The US absence at cabinet level from the meeting in Johannesburg came in the same week that Rubio had flown to Saudi Arabia to try and broker a peace deal in the Russian war on Ukraine.

Of course, the only problem there was that Ukraine was not invited. Not such 'Hamlet' without the prince, but 'Hamlet' without the state of Denmark. Trump followed that up by engaging in a war of words with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whom he dubbed “a dictator” and repeated talking points that may as well have come from a Kremlin handbook.

Tánaiste Simon Harris said at the G20: 'While the multilateral system is not perfect, international co-operation is essential if we are to address the many global challenges before us.' 

While the G20 meeting was ostensibly about trade and global development, the week’s events meant that Ukraine was high on the agenda, especially with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov in attendance.

The problem world leaders have is that unpredictability.

Mr Trump will say things and, sometimes even do things, that nobody can account for and it seems in the second Trump era, nobody will be spared his gaze. The question is how do the same world leaders react to a more isolated America?

In Europe, there is a sustained push to bring the continent closer together, make it more collaborative.

What the world might look like if more and more countries decide to go it alone is anyone’s guess, but the UK has seen its economy and world influence suffer following Brexit.

Meanwhile, that established order which has bounced from crisis to crisis to crisis has serious systemic problems to address.

Sustainable development goals

The progress on the 17 UN sustainable development goals is way off track and, in the words of Mr Harris, they “remain our best roadmap for sustainable development and transforming our world for the better”.

Reaching those 17 goals — which include ending world hunger and poverty — by 2030 in the absence of not just leadership, but any real input from the US will be impossible.

It’s possible that Trump will moderate, that he will bring America back to the table of these institutions, but it’s as likely that the US retreats further.

With US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent set to miss next week’s G20 meeting of finance ministers, there is a growing sense that Trump simply does not see the value of working with other nations, casting a shadow on the proceedings and the important discussions being had.

In Johannesburg this week, as with everywhere it seems, the absence of the Trump regime wasn’t enough to make their presence go away.