GUEST COMMENTARY - Trump 2.0 is the deliberate end of the unipolar world order

At first and even second glance, most of US President Donald Trump's actions appear erratic, almost obsessive, ill-founded, excessive, insulting, reckless, foolish, and often even self-destructive. This is making things too easy.

Although many things had been announced in the election campaign in the usual strong words, many years of experience led to expectations that they would be implemented in a much more moderate form, or rather: not at all.

Now, just over 100 days into his new presidency, it's clear: Donald Trump is about to exceed his own promises. And he doesn't seem to shy away from inflicting pain on his country. Trump calls it "bitter medicine," which is temporarily necessary if one wants to move on to bigger, higher goals.

The international financial markets, for example, were disappointed in their expectations. Until recently, a kind of "drolle de guerre" prevailed there: conspicuous composure, perhaps feigned and tortured, but perhaps even optimistic, because people believed they ultimately had a man of business in Donald Trump. He probably won't want to harm himself, or so the (fairly rational) hope goes.

The escalation of events into a trade war in early April 2025 destroyed the all-important confidence in somewhat stable conditions and led to a gigantic price discovery process. With the suspension of the most radical measures, the situation calmed down, at least temporarily, but the loss of confidence remains.

Is Donald Trump simply a "dealmaker" taking high-risk gambles? Or is he not thinking things through and ignoring the side effects of his actions? Or are we witnessing a systematic approach with well-prepared steps, executed according to a script?

Few commentators make the effort to even briefly research the sources that are readily available. The most prominent among these is the anthology "2025 – Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise," edited by Paul Dans and Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation in Washington. The 887-page book sets out the conservative program for taking power in some great detail.

For example, economics professor Peter Navarro, who has since been appointed head of the newly created National Trade Council, explains why, in his view, a profound intervention in existing trade flows is necessary in order to put the "unfair" imbalance between China (and other trading partners) and the USA on a new footing.

It's the supposedly self-destructive component of Trump's policies that is of particular interest. Why this speed and this insistence? Why a policy that we know (or could know) will cause short-term damage—by angering trading partners and imposing an uncertainty premium on all markets for an extended period?

What could one be willing to accept inflation that is difficult to control, higher interest rates, and correspondingly more expensive financing of the already high national debt? Why all this if it is expected that the world will never be the same again?

Precisely for this purpose: so that the world will never be the same again. The United States is in the process of dismantling its own world order. The US has dominated the globe as a hegemon since the 1989 revolution at the latest. That's over. They deliberately want to downgrade themselves because their existence as a hegemonic power would not be sustainable much longer. The burden is too heavy. And they are receiving little or no compensation for it.

Economically speaking, existence as a hegemon is characterized by too many negative externalities, and conversely, there are too many free riders who profit from the commons that the hegemon nurtures and cultivates. Trump and his crew want to put an end to the commons created by the United States. In their view, it has been increasingly overexploited by all sides for some time.

The obvious malaise lies, on the one hand, in the steady relative erosion of industrial economic power; and, on the other, in the enormously high US military expenditures. It costs the United States enormous sums annually to maintain security around the globe.

Pure military spending amounted to approximately $880 billion in 2023, or 3.36 percent of gross domestic product. One would probably get closer to the truth if one also included some of the costs for development cooperation, non-military intelligence services, space activities, and international organizations. This would result in a total of well over $1 trillion, or well over 5 percent of GDP.

Added to this are declining tax revenues from industrial activity, the associated increase in social spending, and rising interest costs. All this results in an unsatisfactory state of the US Treasury: excessive debt with an increasing trend.

Debt is costly. The tax authorities have to pay interest payments to creditors and refinance debts they cannot pay off, potentially at higher interest rates. During many years of near-inflation-free growth, interest payments and debt financing caused few concerns. Indeed, for a long time, it even seemed as if additional debt was no longer a problem—the New Monetary Policy, for example, argued along these lines.

A look at the US's annual interest expenditures refutes this view. Their total amount has surpassed pure military spending and is reaching levels that are increasingly restricting fiscal space.

The hegemon is in distress. But if the end of its dominance is foreseeable, how can the United States rid itself of its hegemonic status as painlessly as possible? The Americans face a unique kind of exit problem. From our perspective, there are two options: a slow, painful, uncertainty-generating decline, or a rapid, horrific end, but with the chance of successful survival.

The goal is to deprive the fiction of hegemony of its all-important foundation: confidence in its continued existence. We assume that this has been precisely the true intention of many previous actions: to destroy the trust of the reluctantly well-intentioned, thus alienating "friends," shaking fundamental beliefs through advances toward former opponents, disavowing and even betraying allies, spreading half-truths and untruths, breaking written and, above all, unwritten rules, refusing to take any losses—and so on.

If one classifies the chronology of events from the first 100 days of the Trump administration from this perspective, one comes to the conclusion: fulfilled in every respect. Trust has been permanently damaged, if not completely destroyed. A return to the previous normality is unlikely. The process of dehegemonization is underway; the rapid pace was chosen. This would never have been possible without a script, and if only one "gate" had been at work, such destructive consistency would be extremely unlikely.

The question now remains whether the process can proceed as planned, or to what extent, for whom, and under what conditions the project of dehegemonization will succeed. The transformation is challenging and risky.

Three scenarios can be distinguished for how the US's departure from hegemony could unfold in the medium term. Either the maneuver succeeds relatively painlessly for Trump and remains effective, which primarily depends on resolving the debt issue. Or, in the medium term, a kind of restoration of the past occurs, as happened after the French Revolution. Or, there will be a prolonged period of outright chaos with all possible military, economic, and social consequences.

We deliberately do not assign probabilities to the three scenarios, as this would be of no use in the event of an unlikely but disastrous development.

It would be wise to prepare for the disruptive variants, including chaos. This also means that individuals and small, powerless states will have to spend significantly more than before to survive in freedom and prosperity.

Konrad Hummler is an entrepreneur, cultural patron, and freelance author. Ivan Adamovich is an economist and CEO of Private Client Bank. In their paper "On Dealing with America," published by the Progress Foundation Zurich (2025), the authors present their arguments and the three scenarios in detail.