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Opinion | Trump, Xi, Putin - In The Age Of Strongmen, The Peril For 'Middle Powers'

12 0
31.01.2026

In most of his speeches and social media posts, Donald Trump makes two points, directly or indirectly. First, he is the greatest President of the United States, almost a god's gift to humanity. Second, that he doesn't receive enough recognition for what he has achieved in such a short period. No Nobel Prize, even after resolving at least eight global conflicts. No praise for strengthening the US economy through his tariffs. Facts don't matter much to him; what he feels is more important.
So, Trump should no longer be committed to peace, and the US should get Greenland at any cost because Norway didn't give him the Nobel Prize. India should have extra tariffs for its exports to the US because New Delhi didn't acknowledge Trump's role in ending last May's four-day military conflict with Pakistan and failed to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize.

In the last 12 months, Trump has abandoned the rules-based global order that the US helped create after the Second World War and embraced a foreign policy based on his whims and preferences, weaponised tariffs and made the US unreliable to its partners. "I don't need international law," Trump told The New York Times earlier this month. When asked if there were limits on his global power, he said: "My own morality. My own mind,"

The raid on Venezuela and abduction of its leader, Nicolas Maduro, at the beginning of this month was done without any consultation with the US allies or even the Congress. He called it in line with what he called the Donroe Doctrine, his version of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, to secure the Western Hemisphere from Russian and Chinese influence.

Trump's Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, minced no words to defend the move. "We are back to a world," Miller declared, "that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power." What Miller meant was that the US under Trump had reverted to the pre-War era, when big powers could seize territory or foreign property by force.

In his much-applauded speech at Davos, Canada's Prime Minister, Mark Carney, declared that a rules-based global order was over and that "we are living in the midst of a rupture, not a transition". Quoting ancient Greek historian Thucydides, Carney said the world was entering a period in which "the strong can do what they can and the weak must suffer what they must". He warned, " Middle powers must act together because if we're not at the table, we're on the menu."

Trump began to weaken the rules-based........

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