With Trump’s negotiation strategies around Israel-Palestine and the Ukraine conflict, so-called transactional means, we see the return of politics to the international stage. The assertion of a national interest in distinction to international moral obligations shows that politics, as strategic negotiation defined by favourable terms to the hegemonic power (e.g. the largest funder of Ukraine), has become central to the distributional dividend of military spending and a NATO umbrella.
For too long the stage of international relations was firmly anti-political. The liberal world order’s interests weren’t just a matter of political primacy, but an obligatory function of order in the first place. The dictation of trade terms defined by Western institutionalised interests and the absorption of the East into them (China’s accession to the WTO) was a moral obligation beyond the merely transactional as it facilitated a peaceful world order where conflict could be localised to a set of bad actors, Bush’s axis of evil, who were to be treated as pariahs whose interests were fundamentally evil in intent.
Politics has little necessity in this framework as definitional ambiguities have been ironed out beforehand. What’s left to negotiate is the remaining dividend (of trade, financial and aid obligations, and debt adjustment programmes AKA privatisation of national assets and infrastructure) with the rules of the game a foregone conclusion. Disenfranchisement internationalised as both acceding countries (those looking to join the hegemonic trading relations and ideologies) and the rule-givers’ publics are closed off from the potential to question or critique these arrangements.
“A wide-ranging attempt to define democracy in a way that does not require any substantial emphasis on popular sovereignty – at the extreme, the projection of a kind of democracy without the demos at its centre”[1]. By extension, a form of politics foreclosing the defining of the friend-enemy distinction, establishing moral principles that cannot be abnegated. Where enemies exist, they are immutable, enemies of order itself.
Trump’s accession to the presidency begins to undo this, as interests overtake obligations. Where hegemonic power is used, it is used in the interests of the primary hegemon rather than abstract entities (the West, the liberal world order, the post-Cold War consensus, etc.) whose determinative narrative is fixated around the immutability of its collective existence. The “peace” brought by this order is of too high a price to believe that it can be renegotiated, particularly with tyrants like Putin. Yet interests do exist and where it concerns ballooning financial giveaways, those interests become paramount when there are other domestic and international problems that require prioritisation.
The Ukraine conflict cannot escape the arena of international politics any longer. Beyond delusions of European grandeur that they will shoulder Ukraine’s security burdens against an intransigent Russia, there are no overriding moral obligations toward a country which is a glorified money pit. Its backers are emptying their munitions stockpiles and providing huge funding guarantees just to maintain the illusion of a stalemate (which with Kursk lost appears little more than Ukrainian propaganda). Even if the European Union can meet the defense requirements[2] necessary to act as a bulwark against Russia (which is a big if for a bloc that cannot even coordinate weapons and equipment manufacture and whose military forces have adopted doctrines of limited land-based engagement that have turned them into glorified gendarmerie), there is no public consensus across the bloc for this burden[3].
America remains the financial and strategic hegemon, and unless there’s a serious turn toward militarisation of the bloc, the EU will remain a secondary power beset by internal conflicts over whose interests gain primacy. Poland, Czechia, Austria vs Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Italy vs. France vs. Germany. “Domestic difficulties are also faced by the hegemonic country itself. Under liberal imperialism its government must be careful to make its pursuit of its country’s national interests, or what it considers these to be, appear to be advancing the general progress of liberal values, from democracy to prosperity for all. In this it may require the assistance of its client countries”[4]. On that front, the EU has demonstrably failed.
Popular legitimacy remains a problem not just democratically, but ideologically. The world order is post-ideological, its innate ideology subsumed under performative displays of a post-historical moment. There are no conflicts, only differences of degree. It’s easy to establish this with an overarching military-financial hegemon guaranteeing international trade and logistics, with many countries having cosmopolitan[5] elites[6] who define themselves by the international groups they join and participate in rather than by any connection to their country of origin. A series of Blackrock or Bilderberg connected policy networks which are identity-defining.
“From the liberal internationalist perspective, America cannot be understood as a nation rooted in a distinct historical identity, cultural heritage, or particular way of life. Instead, it must be a universalist project—a totalizing ideological construct transcending all boundaries and abandoning its national interest to serve the higher cause of global justice”[7]. By invoking national interests, Trump has begun to turn his back on these moralistic ideals, pushing toward an understanding of alliances defined not by lifetime obligations but by concrete backing of American interests and explicit deal-making[8]. If only the UK or Germany has such self-interested leadership, instead being lumped with corporate cutouts who see Ukraine’s borders as more important than their porous ones.
International politics is returning and the nature of world order will become negotiable. There will no longer be ridiculous delineations between ideology and reality, as an interests-based framework refuses to make the distinction. Russia has made the calculation that it needs a securitised border against NATO with a sphere of influence in neighbouring countries (as well as accessing their infrastructural, mineral and agricultural capacities). But this is not separable from Putin’s ideological goals of pan-Russian expansion and revanchism. This is the mistake that realist analyses from Mearsheimer or Sachs make – that Russia is acting purely defensively in response to NATO. Rather, it is both proactive and defensive. Proactive in that it creates a distinct sphere of economic and cultural influence. Defensive in that it secures Russia’s wider borders within that sphere.
This sphere of influence follows China’s belt and road project of economic and infrastructural expansion which has seen them corner markets for rare earth minerals and energy transition technologies, as well as gouge US and European intellectual property in furtherance of its technological development and security aims. It’s the same as Trump’s desire for control of the Panama Canal and expanding influence within North America (integrating Canada as the 51st state and taking dominion of Greenland). For the politicians and diplomats of the 18th and 19th centuries, such aims would hardly be controversial as the USA’s expansion into the Western frontier made clear. We are the seeing the return of lebensraum[9] to the defining parameters of international order, to stockpile resources, maintain hegemony and expand the cultural, economic and military spheres of influence of world powers. Nations or blocs that can define their interests and then act upon them will then define the nature of conflict and resolution. Anyone else will remain in a state of vassalage, their sovereignty little more than curtain dressing.
The return of international politics mirrors the populist turn domestically, where the denouncing of corrupt bureaucracies and cosmopolitan elites is producing new coalitions and class-political intersections[10]. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference began to lay out the ideological fault lines – elites who have allowed and encouraged mass immigration, censorship and economic stagnation vs. a diffuse public starting to find a collective voice. Transactional relations will be more disputatious and sectorally-defined. But they represent the return of a politics that can no longer be suppressed.
[1] Peter Mair, Ruling the Void
[2] https://ecfr.eu/article/the-four-pillars-of-european-defence/
[3] https://euideas.eui.eu/2022/06/28/in-praise-of-reality-not-realism-an-answer-to-mearsheimer/
[4] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2019/03/06/long-read-the-european-union-is-a-liberal-empire-and-it-is-about-to-fall/
[5] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/npqu.12048
[6] https://unherd.com/2025/02/will-merz-sell-germany-to-blackrock/
[7] https://peacediplomacy.org/2025/03/13/donald-trump-a-george-washington-for-our-time/
[8] Bob Woodward, Fear
[9] https://collapsepatchworks.com/2023/09/22/the-re-emergence-of-lebensraum/
[10] https://unherd.com/2025/01/trump-reclaims-the-jacksonian-spirit/
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