On May 8, France and Europe will commemorate the Allies' victory over Nazi Germany and the end of World War II on their soil, 80 years ago. This year's ceremonies will hardly be festive: While the post-war era marked the rise of a world shaped by American omnipotence, 2025 seems like its end.
Since his return to power, Donald Trump has been trampling the post-1945 economic order with flamboyant systematism. It's an order that rested on institutions forged under the aegis of his own country: the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO, which succeeded the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1995) and major multilateral agreements.
The Republican billionaire has launched a trade war with an uncertain outcome and violates the rules necessary for good relations – already quite relative – between countries. He does not keep his own word, adding chaos to violence. By sweeping away the gentle American hegemony in favor of aggressive nationalism, he has marked a rupture as powerful for the concert of nations as 1989 and the collapse of the communist bloc were.
General upheaval
Some still hope that, realizing the disorder caused by his spiteful protectionism, the American president and his entourage will come to their senses. Those people have not understood that Trump is merely the symptom of the ailment consuming the United States and the Western world.
This ailment has many faces, which various economic observers do not always describe in the same way: deindustrialization, ultraliberalism, growing inequalities or even resource finitude – all phenomena that fuel resentful nationalism. The proliferation of concepts attempting to grasp the nature of the system into which Washington is plunging is equally indicative of the general upheaval: techno-monarchism, techno-libertarianism, digital Caesarism, proprietarianism (a system in which freedom is defined as the power of appropriation and commodification of public space)…
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