Opinion | A New World Is Taking Shape, No Matter What Trump Does

Before the Trump administration turned its attention to Venezuela, its major act of global disruption was a suite of tariffs. Yet when they were unleashed on the world, it was shocking but not surprising. After all, President Trump and his advisers had long promoted tariffs as a silver bullet for the American economy.

The world’s reaction, however, was a surprise. Practically no one, China and Canada aside, retaliated. Instead, many countries lined up to sign deals with the United States, often putting themselves at a disadvantage. Some, such as Malaysia and Cambodia, even embraced intrusive clauses that governed their economic relations with other countries.

Global responses were also generally muted to America’s other acts of rebellion: quitting the World Health Organization, UNESCO and the Paris climate agreement, dismantling the U.S. foreign aid program and forcing deep cuts to the United Nations. Recently expanded bans on travel to America, mostly targeting Africa, have been greeted rather gently across much of the continent. A similar caution surrounds the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro.

Yet this apparent capitulation conceals a deeper development. Though the United States remains very powerful and able to bend others to its will, its days of unipolar supremacy are past. The Trump administration’s aggression is best understood as a whiplash of extreme unilateralism. Indeed, new patterns of interaction are becoming visible in the fog. As America’s global reign fades, a new world is taking shape — whether Washington likes it or not.

With its tariff blitz, America struck at the very foundations of globalization. But notwithstanding claims of a new “global template,” the rest of the world — especially countries in the Global South — is carrying on with, and even deepening, trade integration. There are exceptions, like Mexico, but in 2025 new bilateral trade pacts were signed by countries as diverse as Canada, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand and Peru.

Regional blocs were also active. China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations deepened their longstanding free trade agreement to cover digital and green sectors. The European Union began integration talks with a major trans-Pacific bloc and brought close to passage a landmark trade agreement with Mercosur, the main South American one. Globalization may now be a dirty word in America. But for most of the world, it is still very much alive.

Defying the idea of win-win trade, the United States has pushed asymmetric deals on critical minerals, constraining the autonomy of some resource-rich countries. But American coercion is far from the whole story. Taking a cue from Chile and Indonesia’s successful development of rich reserves of lithium and nickel, Vietnam and Zimbabwe have ramped up a similar effort on their minerals. Countries in the Sahel have even nationalized Western-owned mining assets.

America’s hostility toward the energy transition, too, has been met mostly with a shrug. China is now the undisputed giant of renewables and the Global South is following its lead on adopting green tech. Nepal, Singapore, Thailand, Uruguay, Vietnam and others are leaving the United States in the dust on electric vehicle sales. Africa and South Asia, for their part, are seeing surges in solar installations.

Meanwhile, the group of mostly developing countries known as BRICS continues to defend the idea of multilateralism. Last year’s accession of Indonesia to the group and the addition of Malaysia, Thailand and Nigeria, among others, as “partner countries” has enhanced its credibility and reach. Though BRICS will have to be nimble to overcome the challenge of “America first” and remains far from unified, it offers an arena for collaboration and cooperation outside America’s ambit.

Parts of Latin America, it’s true, are steadily coming under Washington’s shadow in a reactionary revival of the Monroe Doctrine — something the overthrow of Mr. Maduro makes all too clear. But the rest of the world is beginning to strike out in the opposite direction. In this, the United States’ push for allies in Europe to do more for their own defense may be a blessing in disguise. The continent is finally being forced to confront the trade-off between deterring Russia and finding a sustainable peace in Ukraine.

But it’s Asia where the most interesting developments are. Hedging between China and the United States, many Asian countries continue to welcome Beijing in regional efforts to find solutions to conflicts. Yet they are also concluding a flurry of new bilateral security pacts to counter China’s overbearing presence and are hard at work strengthening their own defense capabilities, as the more reliable way to raise costs for a would-be aggressor.

The picture, while still emerging, is of neither a resurrection of the old order nor a construction of a brand-new one. Instead, the nascent new order is a mishmash of many ingredients and flavors — rather like the Indian dish of khichdi. It may look messy, but it detoxifies the body and builds resilience. A world in this mold will be less top-down and more self-organized, driven more by pragmatism than ideology.

In such a future, the Group of 20 and BRICS could emerge as coordinating bodies for crisis management at the global level, ideally complementary to a reformed United Nations. But a lot of the action is likely to come from enterprising countries — and not just the bigger ones. Small island nations already punch above their weight on climate, for example. The formation of a new group of open-trading states, among them Morocco, Costa Rica and Norway, shows the promise of things to come.

The reconfiguration of the world beyond the United States will not be seamless, of course. There will be many twists and turns on the way, including conflict and instability. But the emergence of a new order has rarely been orderly. Why would this time be different?

Sarang Shidore (@globalsarang) is the director of the Global South program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

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