Throughout Europe, U.S. President Donald Trump is seen as a chaos-monger with a reverse Midas touch: Everything he touches ends up worse than he found it. Yet despite his anachronistic views on most issues, he is the perfect embodiment of our era.
In 2021, I authored The Age of Unpeace, which argued that we need to start reimagining the rules of international relations for an era of hyperconnectivity. All the institutions and arrangements that were supposed to bring us together, I observed, were instead being weaponized. Today’s global politics is like a marriage gone wrong. In a failed marriage, shared items like a holiday home, the pet dog or children can be used by one estranged partner to harm the other; similarly, trade, the internet, energy sources, supply chains, migration flows, critical raw materials and cutting-edge technology can be used to exercise geopolitical influence and inflict pain.
In this new world, I noted, the boundaries between war and peace have been eroded. We were wrong to think that we had secured a golden age of peace at the end of the Cold War. In reality, there was violence everywhere, but it came in the form of sanctions, export controls, energy cut-offs, election interference and weaponized migration — all of which stopped short of formal war.
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