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Trump’s ‘tariffs’ have nothing to do with tariffs. They have everything to do with power. And today, power is destroying the sole platform for international relations—trust.
Image Source: Getty
Over three trading days leading up to 7 April 2025, global markets crashed—Japan by 13 percent, Hong Kong by 11 percent, Vietnam by 8 percent, the United States (US) and China by 7 percent, Germany, and United Kingdom by 5 percent, and Sensex by 7 percent. The lack of trust and the excesses of power are the determinants of this ongoing carnage.
Over the same three days, US President Donald J. Trump released “The Empire Strikes Back”—the latest but not the last of his America First franchise, whose climax is the decimation of trust. The word Trump uses is ‘tariffs’, the translation is: however illogical it be, do what I order. Power is replacing trust.
Over the past three months, conversations between Trump and Russian Federation President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, initially hailed as a potential pathway to ending the war in Ukraine, have taken a turn. What was announced pompously by Trump in the run-up to his Presidency is now rephrased as a “sarcastic” comment. War continues, and casualties rise. Positions remain hardened. Power smashes trust.
Over the past 77 days since Trump took charge as US President on 20 January 2025, the biggest breach in trust has been felt by the EU which is still reeling under the onslaught of Trump’s security decoupling from the continent.
Over the past three years, China and India began a troops disengagement along their Himalayan border. Unlike the US which has replaced China as the international bully, this is a geography where two powerful nuclear nations, standing eye to eye, put power on the backseat even though trust remains the missing piece in the larger geopolitical jigsaw of harmonious relations.
Over the three days of the Raisina Dialogue 2025, from 17 to 19 March, one word dominated the discourse—trust. Room after room, one foreign minister at a time, the conversations centred on the need for trustworthy partners, trustworthy supply chains, and trustworthy relationships in the face of power running amok. For the first time in 10 years, Trump replaced Xi as the big bull in a China shop.
Over the past 77 days since Trump took charge as US President on 20 January 2025, the biggest breach in trust has been felt by the EU which is still reeling under the onslaught of Trump’s security decoupling from the continent. That the EU did not read the signals from the White House correctly or took for granted the past eight decades old relationship, is under introspection in Brussels, Athens, London, Berlin, Paris, and Budapest. The continent is seeking trust but faces raw power.
Power is what power does. In democracies, it is the ability to agglomerate people’s aspirations and shape nations. In authoritarian regimes, it is the ability to capture, manage and control institutions and direct national policies unquestioned. In trade, power is the covert negotiating tool. In war, it is an overt conversation written in blood and territory. In 2025, abuse of power is being normalised. China did it over the past decade, Russia since 2022, and now it’s the time for the US to join forces or so goes the great power narrative.
Much has changed in the eight decades since the 1945 rules-based international order was established. Under Xi Jinping, the rise of China has been characterised by Chinese characteristics of the breach of this order. This has happened through the weaponisation of trade, intrusion of technologies such as 5G, and aggressions around land and sea territories. Under Putin, the order was demolished with the invasion of Ukraine, which had become a proxy for the US. And now, under Trump, the order is getting its final push into the abyss of uncertainty.
Effectively, we are back to October 1945, when, following World War II a new rules-based international order was crafted through the United Nations (UN), which has failed miserably to establish peace. This is nothing new. In January 1920, another such an attempt was made through the League of Nations to create multilateral cooperation around peace, but that failed. In the post-Napoleon era, September 1814 authored a consensus among European monarchies to preserve territory through the Concert of Europe—but that failed too.
Atop this mountain of failures, now stand three of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. All three have failed to support peace. On the contrary, all three have replaced the rules-based order with a force-based disorder—Russia in Ukraine, China through wolf-warrior diplomacy and the potential invasion of Taiwan, and now the US with absurd definitions of tariffs for the world to figure out and along with territorial claims over Panama and Greenland. The other three members, UK and France, have turned themselves strategically inert.
In 2025, there is very little left to differentiate Trump from Putin or Xi. Trump’s actions to make America great again is a reactionary approach to what China and Russia have been already doing. If they can do it, so can the US, goes the underlying sentiment. This is a race that will take great powers, and the world along with them, to the bottom. And if a new order is to rise from the ashes of the old, it will be a good thing. The world needs greater equality.
Among trillion-dollar scale economies, the global drivers of growth have shifted eastward to India, China, and Indonesia. For any new rules-based order to come up, it must make space for this change.
The rules-based order, currently under destruction, has helped the world—great powers, emerging powers and the rest. Under its oversight, the global economy has changed. In 1960, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the US was 39.6 percent of world GDP; in 2023, it is down to 25.7 percent. In the same period, China’s share of GDP has risen from 4.4 percent to 16.8 percent; India’s from 2.7 percent to 4.0 percent; while that of the European Union (EU) has fallen marginally from 20.7 percent to 17.5 percent. Further, among trillion-dollar scale economies, the global drivers of growth have shifted eastward to India, China, and Indonesia. For any new rules-based order to come up, it must make space for this change.
Step back from these outer developments and what we see is that the Putin-Xi-Trump troika—now hyphenated by power rather than values or fairness—is turning the privilege of leading nations into their personal fiefdoms. They are fragmenting the world into smaller bits. The one-world aspiration to bind our planet together has been replaced by the interests of the national constituencies of these three powers. But extrapolating this beyond a point would be myopic. Globalisation has already unified the world in several ways.
Mcdonald's and X (formerly known as Twitter) of the US is as international as can be. So is India’s yoga and human capital, South Korea’s Samsung TV, Japan’s electronics, Taiwan’s semiconductors, Germany’s cars, Saudi Arabia’s oil, and Russia’s gas. On the other side, globalisation has also created contraries: Qatar’s funding for Islamists, Iran’s terror proxies in Hamas and Hezbollah, Pakistan’s terror exports, Mexico’s megacartels, North Korea’s nuclear threats.
Even when products carry the assemblage of one country, they cart transnational components within. The iPhone has suppliers from 43 countries, the BMW from 10 countries. Making a semiconductor chip needs expertise from the US and Israel for design and development, China for silicon, Taiwan and South Korea for manufacturing, and Malaysia and Vietnam for packaging and testing. A nuclear power reactor needs components from several countries such as South Korea, Canada, Japan, France and Germany; its raw material lies in Kazakhstan and Russia.
For Trump to huff and puff at the idea that the world could seek a financial armour and alternative to the dollar, and threaten the use of power to prevent that, is amusing. It is turning US foreign policy into a farce.
In this complex and globalised world, there is no scope for domination by any single entity. If Trump pushes too hard, new power alignments will start converging towards Xi—it is already the largest trading partner of 120 countries. If both misbehave, the rest of the world will accede for the short term (the White House says more than 50 countries have lined up to negotiate tariffs), but will be forced to create and power new groupings.
In this impossible world, lie new impossibilities. Free trade agreements between the EU, China and India will create, a combined market size of more than $40 trillion. Add Japan, Australia and ASEAN countries, and it rises to US$50 trillion. Add another US$2 trillion from Russia and US$1 trillion from Saudi Arabia and a large chunk of trade shifts eastward. That’s large enough to bring technologies, energy, people, and factories together into a cohesive trade pact. Given that the US has embraced the Chinese model of coercion, the dominance and danger of China are behind us. If the US doesn’t believe in trade any longer, trade will no longer believe in the US. How ‘devastating’ they are for the US is a discussion for another day.
Further, if the rules-based international order is no longer valid, say by ignoring the World Trade Organization (WTO) on the trade side, then all bets can be off in the world of new impossibilities. However outdated it be, the WTO provided an institutional mechanism of trust as the underlying for trade to function; the scope for power plays was limited. But first, China abused WTO and now that the US has pulled back from it, there are consequences over the horizon.
Intellectual property that China has all along been stealing on stealth can get legitimised. China First can get as accepted as America First. Where would that leave the US? And if these impossibilities are difficult to imagine, answer this: who had imagined that the US would break the order it created? Kicking Russia out of the SWIFT system was yet another nail in the coffin of a rules-based order. For Trump to huff and puff at the idea that the world could seek a financial armour and alternative to the dollar, and threaten the use of power to prevent that, is amusing. It is turning US foreign policy into a farce.
The new world order, if it is to be born, must not replicate the fault lines of the previous three. All attempts to push it down the throats of the rest of the world may create a new equilibrium in the short term, but the longer arc of history will not tolerate these crude displays of power—it never has, and it never will.
Gautam Chikermane is Vice President at the Observer Research Foundation.
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Gautam Chikermane is Vice President at Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. His areas of research are grand strategy, economics, and foreign policy. He speaks to ...
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