ONE OF the most controversial theories in geopol social media today is that the United States, under Donald Trump, is attempting to decouple from China.
Many in America and Europe do not support this, inured as they are to the old global order, but the old system along with the old sacred cows are not tenable. Russia and China, along with most of what is called the Global South, have rendered that destructive.
The world has become too unstable, and the West’s unspoken desire of imposing its moral and legal systems on the world has reached its limits.
Now, Western countries are facing demographic, economic, financial issues, not to mention geopolitical threats from Russia and China. For Trump, the solution is to tighten defenses, trim fat and reindustrialize away from the old order. All of this starts with decoupling from the dysfunctional global economic system away from those parts of the world that would threaten it. Thus, Venezuela. Thus, Iran. Thus, tariffs.
But decoupling alone would not be the end, because decoupling means the restricting of the current global system into something less universal, less moralistic than what the Rules-Based Order had promised.
I submit that decoupling means the end of the centuries-long project of the West, which sought to create a Universal Christian, and later a secular humanist, order. The first iteration of that attempt failed after the World Wars, with the retreat of the traditional European Empires.
Now, America, deindustrialized, demoralized and weakened by the Post-War Order, is retreating, not because it is being forced to but because it chooses to. Before it can do that, however, it needs to secure its trade corridors and alliance structures.
Many people believe that everything Trump has been doing was in service to this goal, and make no mistake, it’s a very risky process. If he fails, the entire global system could implode, and not just the United States.
But if he succeeds, decoupling would happen, and from there, I believe that the Western World will abandon those parts of the world it does not need. They will entrench and the world will return to something unthinkable: De-Westernization.
Third World chest thumpers will welcome this development, but I think such a world will be more shocking to the China and the Global South than most realize./PN
