The new American administration continues to shock with every move it makes, both domestically and internationally. Most analysts try to justify these actions by attributing them to “Trump’s unpredictability.” However, in all these moves, one simple mathematical principle is a predictable constant: the Trump team is trying to invert all inherited order, both domestically and internationally, multiplying it by minus one, thereby turning every part of that order into its opposite.
Take, for example, the changes taking place domestically. The foundation of American democracy, from the Founding Fathers to the present day, has been a clear and precise separation of powers into legislative, executive, and judicial branches. By means of such a separation, with clearly limited powers for each of the three branches of government, the famous “balance of power” was established to construct a particular American system. Trump first removed this division and turned it into its complete opposite—a total concentration of power in only one, executive point. In his executive decisions, Trump completely bypasses Congress—the legislative branch that, under the previous order, was authorized to approve or halt most such decisions. Additionally, he ignores lawsuits, even those with issued verdicts, which largely challenge his executive decisions. Those in Congress and the judiciary who expect him to remember his obligations to them are deeply mistaken. So too are politicians and citizens who believe they can oppose Trump and his decisions through the courts. For the courts no longer have the power to impose their will on Trump, just as Congress no longer has that power. By concentrating absolute power exclusively in the executive branch, the American liberal-democratic order is turning into its immediate opposite—into an authoritarian dictatorship, with a tendency to evolve into its ultimate opposite: a totalitarian system in which the government will never again be chosen through free elections. The question even arises as to whether the state has already lost its republican character and has turned into an absolutist monarchy.
Moreover, the state itself disappears as a public administrative structure aimed at the common good and turns into its opposite—into a private property, where order is established by private individuals, such as Elon Musk, who gain their position through private financial transactions and investments. The private scene showing Musk’s child in the Oval Office is the best testimony to this conversion of state institutions into private property, where the president represents only a transmission in the process of such conversion. This is also testified by Musk’s private monopoly on the program of sending rockets and satellites into space, which was once the monopoly of the powerful state agency NASA.
The fact that many years ago NASA started handing this monopoly over to private hands demonstrates that such an inversion, from state to private, was being prepared long before Trump’s rise to power. Such long-term preparations are also mirrored in the fact that the Republicans promoted Trump as their “only possible” presidential candidate, despite his failed first mandate, subsequent election defeat, and failed coup attempt (for which, again, he was never successfully convicted). This only means that the program of turning the common good into private property was adopted by the top of this party as a permanent agenda a long time ago: instead of the “deep state”—private property for deep pockets!
On the economic front, the principle of the free market, so far considered sacred by all previous U.S. administrations, has simply been replaced by its opposite—the mercantilist principle of imposing tariffs on countries that have a positive trade balance with the United States. On the level of international law, the Trump administration arbitrarily abandons international treaties and agreements previously signed by the United States and nullifies the legal personality of all international organizations of which the United States was a member. In the military sphere, the highest-ranking officers in the Joint Chiefs of Staff are being replaced by overtly incompetent individuals who do not even possess formal qualifications for the positions Trump assigns to them. In the sphere of foreign policy, the fundamental principle on which relations between states are based—the principle of sovereignty—has been replaced by the principle of voluntary expansion, announced by Trump in the form of the United States’ absorption of Canada, Panama, Greenland, as well as Palestinian Gaza.
Also, the fundamental principle of the previous American foreign policy—the principle of Atlanticism, embodied in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—has been replaced by the principles that preceded it and represent its geopolitical opposite: the principles of the Monroe Doctrine. This means that for the Trump administration, the Atlantic Ocean is no longer a link between the U.S. and Europe. On the contrary, the Atlantic is once again becoming a dividing line between these two geopolitical entities—as it was from 1776 until World War I, when the U.S., under the influence of Great Britain, first intervened in “European affairs.” In accordance with the Monroe Doctrine, the U.S. is now turning toward the principle of control over the Western Hemisphere—that is, over both American continents. And this implies closing the most important geopolitical “gaps,” which geographically belong to this hemisphere but have not been under American control—namely Canada, the Panama Canal, and Greenland.
In accordance with this doctrine, the U.S. is abandoning its role as Europe’s protector, and thus the U.S. exit from the NATO structure is becoming increasingly certain. In his recent—and already epochal—speech at the Munich Security Conference, U.S. Vice President JD Vance clearly demonstrated that the Trump administration knows well how to multiply by minus one not only the security principles of the Atlantic alliance but also its political foundations, and even reality itself: while announcing America’s geopolitical turn away from Europe, Vance surreally argued for that by Europe’s lack of freedom and tolerance for the most intolerant ultra-nationalist parties that propagate the disintegration of the EU, the introduction of authoritarian rule, the abolition of democracy, and the annulment of the principle of equal rights for all!
This geopolitical turn has caused consternation in Europe, which cannot imagine a reality without American protection, just as it cannot imagine a reality in which it does not fear Russia. Of course, this turn now opens up space for the implementation of ideas about the geopolitical unification of Europe and Asia into a single Eurasian space. These ideas are perhaps most explicitly articulated in the theory of “Eurasianism,” which emerged as part of the megalomaniac political activity of the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin. However, these ideas have been realized for decades in the most solid, reinforced concrete form, as part of China’s gigantic infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative, or the New Silk Road, which—via a transcontinental network of railways and highways—connects Asia and Europe into a single transport, trade, and economic entity.
Of course, geography says that Europe and Asia really represent a single territorial entity, and there is no particular reason why they should not also be a single trade and economic entity, regardless of the multitude of different cultures and civilizations found on their soil. It was only the doctrine of Atlanticism that insisted on the greatest possible separation of Europe from Asia and the “natural conflict” between these cultures and civilizations, in order to create the image of a “natural,” “civilizational” connection of Western Christian Europe and Western Christian America, with the Atlantic Ocean as a bridge.
Now, as the U.S. rejects Atlanticism and turns to the Monroe Doctrine, whose basic premise is “non-interference in European affairs,” Europe has two options: to turn to building a single Eurasian economic and political space or to close itself off in its Western Christian universe. Its “natural” instincts tell it to opt for the latter option, and for some time, this “civilizational” orientation will have very serious consequences for Europe’s relationship with other geopolitical entities, including its own peripheral regions, such as the Balkans and Ukraine, where the peripheral zones of other religions and civilizations are also located. But in the end, the capitalist need for profit, growth, and development will influence Europe to open up to Asia and to ignore its millennia-old fears of the Other.
In this context, a special question arises about Europe’s relationship with the existing crisis zones in the aforementioned peripheral areas. As for Ukraine, Europe has chosen to perceive Ukraine as a monolithic part of its own, Western Christian civilization, even though this country is much more complex, with Catholicism, Uniatism, and Orthodoxy on its soil. With such a rigid attitude, and with chronic hostility toward Russia, Europe can only remain excluded from the peace negotiations taking place between the U.S. and Russia. And the solution for Ukraine that Trump and Putin are negotiating can be easily glimpsed from the statements made by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth: Ukraine outside NATO, with the occupied territories in Donbas reintegrated, and Crimea annexed by Russia. Europe does not have its own answer to this, no matter how much this development of events does not fit into its ideas about Ukraine.
In the Balkans, the U.S. withdrawal from Europe has further exacerbated the issue of Serbia’s demands for the reintegration of Kosovo and the issue of the ethnic partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina. For Europe, as it remains after the U.S. withdrawal, will probably be increasingly inclined to an ethnic exchange of territories in Kosovo and increasingly inclined to giving Serbia and Croatia a mandate to partition Bosnia and Herzegovina along the lines of the current demarcation between the Bosnian entities. For the principle of ethno-religiously “clean” territories, conceived in London long time ago as a mechanism for creating perpetual crises, was accepted by the rest of Europe in the 1990s, in the belief that it was the path to lasting stability, and Europe has never distanced itself from it.
What should the forces that call themselves “pro-Bosnian” do in these conditions? They are still “aiming for Europe,” not imagining that the time for Europe has already run out, in the belief that joining the EU would “solve all the problems in BiH”!? So, what should they do? Unfortunately, the time for action has largely passed. They should not have “aimed for Europe,” but rather built their own, Bosnian nation, composed of all those who want to live in Bosnia and Herzegovina, regardless of their religion or their atheism—which are certainly categories that elsewhere belong to the private, not the public, political sphere. Then the idea of a partition between Serbia and Croatia would be both absurd and unfeasible. And those who could not see themselves as part of that nation could live with the status of ethnic minorities and the right to cultural autonomy, just like in the rest of Europe. Then Europe would approach this country as a potential business partner, not as a potential executor.