President Elect Donald Trump Starting New World Order? By -Md. Hasanuzzaman

Cover Story

Donald Trump’s stunning election victory has pushed the United States – and the world – into uncharted territory. The US has never before had a president with no political or military experience, nor one who so routinely shirks the truth, embraces conspiracy theories, and contradicts himself. All of this makes it almost impossible to know how he will govern.
The certainties that underpin our current global system – the one in place since the end of the Second World War – are no longer guaranteed after the electoral earthquake in the United States. A national security adviser to the Trump team said his transition planners are aware of the potential instability that could arise in these few months. That’s one reason they are making sure he’s connecting with world leaders well before taking the oath of office on Jan. 20
The New York Times published an article titled ‘Donald Trump’s Victory Promises to Upend the International Order’ by Peter Baker which claims that Trump’s victory is “upending an international order that prevailed for decades and raising profound questions about America’s place in the world.” America is the engine of the ‘international order’ or the ‘New World Order’ (NWO) in fact; it has intervened in numerous countries by launching wars of aggression and has instigated numerous coups since the end of World War II. They have imposed international trade policies that favored U.S. corporations, advocated for open borders on an international level and maintained U.S. dollar hegemony as the world’s reserve currency.
The New York Times article claims that Trump’s “America First” policy will have repercussions worldwide:  “For the first time since before World War II, Americans chose a president who promised to reverse the internationalism practiced by predecessors of both parties and to build walls both physical and metaphorical. Mr. Trump’s win foreshadowed an America more focused on its own affairs while leaving the world to take care of itself. The outsider revolution that propelled him to power over the Washington establishment of both political parties also reflected a fundamental shift in international politics evidenced already this year by events like Britain’s referendum vote to leave the European Union. Mr. Trump’s success could fuel the populist, nativist, nationalist, closed-border movements already so evident in Europe and spreading to other parts of the world. For Europe and Asia, it could rewrite the rules of modern alliances, trade deals, and foreign aid. For the Middle East, it foreshadowed a possible alignment with Russia and fresh conflict with Iran
Trump’s presidency is most worrisome on the foreign-policy front, where many potential disasters await. We have reason to fear that miscalculations will lead to tragedies, just as Bush fumbled the response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack, failed to capture Osama bin Laden, and invaded Iraq. America’s role as a global leader will surely suffer, as will the “soft power” that it previously derived from being a model of liberal democracy for others to emulate. Meanwhile, Trump’s cluelessness will likely embolden traditional US adversaries, such as Russia, Syria, and North Korea.
The Republicans kept control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, so Trump will be able to fulfill his promises to roll back Obama’s biggest legislative achievements. Trump’s opposition to the massive Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which was championed by Obama, has essentially killed that agreement. But in a sign of how quickly Asian countries are adjusting, China is expected to use this week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Peru to push a regional trade pact in which — unlike the TPP — it will play a role but the U.S. won’t. And Abe has already said the China-dominated deal will likely become the preferred pact if Trump abandons the TPP as he’s promised.
Trump’s White House victory appears to have emboldened Russia perhaps more than any other U.S. rival, not least because Trump has consistently advocated taking a softer approach toward Moscow than even many Republicans want. Mr. Trump won with a campaign during which he praised Russian President Vladimir Putin as a strong leader, questioned whether the U.S. still needed the NATO alliance, and declared that other long-time American allies like Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia should no longer get “free” U.S. protection. Mr. Trump has also described climate change as a Chinese plot, and vowed to tear up international trade deals. The tilting of the world’s axis could be felt as soon as the election result was clear. The Interfax news service reported that Russia’s parliament burst into applause at the news of Mr. Trump’s win. Hours later, German and French leaders publicly struggled to find a way to congratulate a president-elect they clearly never expected to see in the White House, or at a G7 or NATO summit.
Mr. Putin sent a congratulatory telegram minutes after Mr. Trump gave his victory speech, and made it clear he was hoping for a new relationship between Washington and Moscow. “Russia is ready and wants to restore fully fledged relations with the U.S. It won’t be easy, but we’re prepared to do our part,” Mr. Putin said in televised remarks, adding that he was hopeful the two countries could resolve the “burning issues that are currently on the international agenda.”
Others happy to see the axis tilt were populist and far-right figures across Europe, a continent still reeling from the shock of Britain’s June vote to leave the European Union. Marine Le Pen of France’s National Front and Geert Wilders of the Netherlands’s Party for Freedom were both effusive in their praise of Mr. Trump, seeing the U.S. result as boosting their own chances ahead of elections next year in their countries. Nigel Farage, a politician who played a leading role in the U.K.’s Brexit referendum, was similarly jubilant. “I hand over the mantle to [Mr. Trump]!,” he posted on his Twitter account. He said Mr. Trump’s victory was an even bigger “political revolution” than Brexit.
Less enthusiastic were those who had come to rely on a predictable U.S. foreign-policy course, based on those post-Second World War alliances. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose country is in the midst of an arms race with a rising China, congratulated Mr. Trump and said he looked forward to working closely to “strengthen the bonds” of the U.S.-Japan relationship. But the official Kyodo newswire was less calm, running a headline about a possible “rift” between the incoming Trump administration and Tokyo over Mr. Trump’s suggestion that Japan needed to start paying more for its own defence. (Rival China was also unlikely to celebrate the election result, having been cast by Mr. Trump as a currency manipulator responsible for stealing American jobs.) South Korea – worried that it may be about to lose its guarantee against North Korean aggression – called a snap meeting of its National Security Council following Mr. Trump’s win.
The EU also called a special summit of the foreign ministers of its 28 member states on Sunday to discuss what a President Trump would mean for the bloc. European Commission President Donald Tusk said the U.S. election result brought “new challenges” to transatlantic relations. Among the continent’s leaders, the consternation was plain, and the congratulations to Mr. Trump sounded hollow. German Chancellor Angela Merkel was clearest in her concern, packing her message to Mr. Trump with caveats about how she hoped the U.S. president-elect would behave. French President François Hollande, who said during the U.S. campaign that Mr. Trump’s behaviour “makes you want to retch,” was more understated on Wednesday, declaring only that the Republican candidate’s victory had opened a “period of uncertainty.” Both Ms. Merkel and Mr. Hollande are members of an old international order that now seems under siege.
The escalating fighting in the Arab state suggests that “Russia may want to ‘finish up’ in Syria so as to present Trump with a fait accompli in January, and then pave the way for an improvement in U.S.-Russia relations,” said Nikolas Gvosdev, a professor of national security studies at the U.S. Naval War College. Russia also announced it was dropping its support for the International Criminal Court, a move that followed a U.N. panel’s condemnation of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea. Russia also would like Trump to drop U.S. support for American and European sanctions against Moscow over its actions in Ukraine, and the kind words exchanged between Putin and Trump so far suggest the Russians might get their wish.
What about Muslims? We have to take Trump at his word. He will attempt to build a wall to stop migrants from coming from Latin America. He will try to ban refugees from Muslim countries, if not all Muslims. He will continue to drive a wedge between whites and all others. It is who he is.
Trump rose to power with an Islamophobic campaign and Islamophobia now will become his official policy. From start to finish, the 2016 presidential election vividly revealed that Islamophobia is alive, and potent and politically resonant as ever. Scapegoating Islam and vilifying Muslims was far more than merely campaign messaging; for Donald Trump it was a winning strategy. It will bring an administration that is entirely devoid of Muslim Americans and at minimum, individuals without genuine reach into or backing from Muslim Americans. The Trump campaign lacked any bona fide Muslim American involvement, and the Trump administration will likely reflect that.
Trump’s harsh rhetoric, especially language that some deem Islamophobic and a past call to ban Muslims from entering the United States; have been welcomed by the Islamic State as a handy recruiting tool. The group, which has factions across the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, expects he’ll continue to serve that function. “This guy is a complete maniac. His utter hate towards Muslims will make our job much easier because we can recruit thousands,” Abu Omar Khorasani, one of the terror network’s commanders in Afghanistan, recently told Reuters.
According to Guardian, Mr Trump campaigned against migrants and against Muslims, insulted black and Latino Americans, launched ads that some saw as covertly antisemitic, and was cheered to victory by every white racist in the land. His voters – a Brexit echo again – will want him to deliver. Every action he takes in this area threatens to divide and inflame. After a half-century of uneven but undeniable racial progress in America, the consequences of every attempt to turn back the clock could be dire. If he is true to his campaign pledges, which were many and reckless, Mr Trump’s win will herald America’s most stunning reversal of political and economic  orthodoxy since the New Deal in the 1930s, but with the opposite intention and effect. It halts the ailing progressive narrative about modern America and the 21st-century world in its tracks. It signals a seismic rupture in the American-dominated global liberal economic and political order that had seemed to command the 21st century after communism collapsed and China’s economy soared.
In that sense, the Trump triumph has echoes of the increasingly alarming general rightward shift in the politics of other post-industrial western democracies, to which progressives have again produced inadequate responses. The result is also a generational challenge to progressive politics to find the radical and credible message that eludes them in so many countries, not just in America.
The people of the United States wanted change; more than change; something between a coup and a revolution. This election was about many things – a rebellion against Washington elites, a rebellion against the two primary parties, a rebellion against big media. But race was an undeniable factor. After all Trumps’ victory is the reflection of racial and far nationalistic character of American society.
The writer is journalist and geopolitical analyst.