Of the torrent of words written about American foreign policy under Donald Trump, none are more revealing than the six that his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, uttered to commentator Megyn Kelly recently: “We live in a multipolar world.” They are words that would never have been uttered by any secretary of state – let alone president – in the past 80 years.

For the first half of that period, the defining feature of global politics was the division of the world into the two rival camps of the Cold War. Such wars as they fought were proxy conflicts in developing countries. The non-aligned nations mattered, particularly in global forums such as the United Nations, but when it came to grand strategy, essentially, it was a bipolar world.

Donald Trump went to his golf course in Florida on Friday as global financial markets collapsed after his tariffs announcement.Credit: Bloomberg

After America won the Cold War and the Soviet Union collapsed, the world entered a new period in which, complacently and wrongly, many Western policymakers assumed that the ascendancy of the West – with its democratic and pluralist values – was more or less a given. The collapse of communism was seen by many as a proof of concept that democratic capitalism was the optimal form of governance to which human development had naturally evolved. One renowned Harvard scholar Francis Fukuyama even published a book with the provocative title The End of History. (As Fukuyama’s thesis began to fray in light of events, subsequent editions added a question mark........

© The Sydney Morning Herald