Editorial: Thuggery in the White House

Forty-eight hours after US President Donald Trump and his deputy JD Vance carried out what amounted to a mugging of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, it is futile to dwell on just the spectacle of it. The sheer brutality of it and the Orwellian cynicism that informed it made for compelling television, as Trump characterised it, but countries that once suffered Western colonialism have been subjected to similar treatment behind closed doors. It’s more useful to ask: What does it mean for the months and years ahead?

This thuggery by the President and his sidekick took place in front of the White House press pool with a right-wing media hack triggering the charade by asking a convenient question about Zelensky’s sartorial choice and a TASS reporter live-streaming the entire drama to Vladimir Putin. So, clearly, there was a pre-meditated purpose behind Trump’s behaviour.

Further, Zelensky’s humiliation followed a series of White House calls by world leaders, including Narendra Modi, each of whom tried to appease the US President but came away unrequited—barring Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. Taken together, this drift of events is a product of Trump using America’s superpower leverage to get what he wants. So, it makes sense to ask ‘what does he want beyond his megalomania?’

The American President imagines he is working towards a new world order. This arrangement will seemingly have ‘strongman’ nations manning their respective spheres of influence: MAGA USA, Putin’s Russia, and Xi’s China with Netanyahu’s Israel minding the Middle East for America. Europe has been cut loose from American moorings and left to rearrange itself as its capacities will allow. The choice of Riyadh as the venue for the Ukraine peace talks between the US and Russia (but not Kyiv) suggests that Mohammed bin Salman figures in Trump’s fantasy football but not any of the transatlantic allies, including France and the UK who collaborated in previous American adventures.

This vision involves not merely a reorganisation but a fundamental shift in global power dynamics. It’s a work in progress and it is by no means certain that it can be realised by Trump and his team of arm-wrestlers and Silicon Valley billionaires. For one, there is the challenge of chasing this phantasm without the willing support of the military intelligence agencies that Trump is now locked in a domestic war with.

This scenario also presents the oddity of a superpower trying to remain a superpower while changing everything else. Rather than bar-room muscularity, it reflects a deep-seated insecurity about maintaining dominance in a rapidly changing world, where emerging powers like China are challenging traditional hierarchies.

India needs to note that Trump’s fantastic new world order is a return to naked neocolonialism, which is an abiding White Christian nationalist fantasy. It is a realm in which the new oligarchs will prospect the world for resources, exploit them and leave the hindmost to the natives. The White House’s delirium about the rare earths of Greenland, Canada, and Ukraine emanates from this super somnambulism. It’s a neoimperialist fantasy.

India’s imperatives in this chaos are to diversify its alliances, strengthening ties with China, Russia and the EU, while engaging with the mercurial US. As a member of BRICS, we must continue to work closely with emerging economies to offset despite the outrageous threats from Trump.