Whatever the subject of the question, a clear-cut, unambiguous answer is impossible. Only arithmetic offers unambiguous answers; mathematics a little less so, physics even less so, biology and medicine, then, let us not talk about it.

Politics, and in particular international politics, stands apart from the exact sciences because it is not exact, it is the outcome of a succession of processes that intersect with each other in a disorderly fashion and of material and immaterial, sometimes even random, factors that come into play in ways and times that are impossible to foresee, let alone prearrange.

In the months leading up to the US presidential election in November, I was asked several times what would happen with a Trump presidency.

Of one thing I was sure, but that thing was embedded in a bundle of possibilities so wide that any prediction became impossible; one could only speculate, as always, but so far apart that in the end the result was the same.

The one thing I felt sure of was that Trump would sow chaos; the bundle of uncertainties concerned first of all the tightness of the US system of checks and balances - the institutional and extra-institutional counterweights that limit and control the three classical powers - and then the reactions of the markets and other international players.

Although it is obviously too early to draw conclusions, less than a month after Donald Trump's entry into the White House we can have some clues as to possible answers.

Out of control

The first is that the checks and balances are not working. It seems that no one is able or willing to get the ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) the president suffers from under control; even less to remedy it.

Anyone who had hoped for some counter-move, or at least some sign of life from the Republican majority in Congress has been disappointed: A Fox News presenter has become Minister of Defence; the president of a wrestling federation (and former wrestler herself), Minister of Education; a vaccine-sceptic, Minister of Health; a pro-Russian schemer, Head of Security Services. All approved by the Republican majority in Congress. And, in any case, Trump signed more than 60 executive orders in the first twenty-three days of his presidency, an average of 2.6 per day: at this rate, he would end up signing 3,800 in four years; for comparison, during the four years of his first term, he signed a total of 220 (Biden signed 162).

At this rate, Congress is destined to become a deaf and grey chamber, a bivouac for his followers, the same ones, moreover, who had tried on 6 January 2021 at his instigation to uphold the reality, and whom he has now got out of prison.

Quid of the other counter powers?

The Supreme Court is silent for now, but we already know where it stands. The media either spontaneously fall into line, or get kicked out of press conferences. Some of the fifty states seem to want to raise their heads; so do some local judges, scandalised by certain ‘blatantly unconstitutional’ decrees.

Apart from Wall Street, with its sudden thud after the announcement of tariffs against Mexico and Canada, and a few unions trying to protect the tens of thousands of people laid off by Elon Musk, not many seem able or even willing to put a stop to the illiberal turn that Trump had promised throughout his election campaign.

Trump against Trump

The only countervailing power to Trump is Trump himself. He can deny himself three times in one day without any of his acolytes pointing this out to him, not least because it would serve no purpose except to antagonise him.

The disease is contagious: The Fox presenter promoted Defence Minister, Pete Hegseth, said that it was unlikely that US troops would be deployed in Ukraine to guarantee an eventual armistice, except the next day he did not rule out the possibility that American troops might be deployed in Ukraine to guarantee an eventual armistice; not least because Vice-President J.D. Vance had spoken in that vein, and Hegseth was probably afraid he had missed Trump's latest mood swing.

On the other hand, Hegseth himself made it clear that he would ‘never put constraints on what the president of the United States would be willing to negotiate with the sovereign leaders of Russia and Ukraine’, thus condemning himself to reproduce the capricious fickleness of his boss.

On the fact that Trump would sow chaos, however, it was hard to have any doubt. The character has been known for some time, and moreover he has made it explicitly known that he would use the presidency to take revenge on his enemies and to promote himself, the only two objectives on which he is able to maintain any consistency.

It is well known that he is a serial liar (during his first term he lied or made inaccurate statements every 69 minutes), but much of that incessant outburst of outlandish statements is simply due to ignorance (like claiming that Spain is part of the BRICS) and the effects of ADHD; at times, however, he has a childlike candour, the same that makes children say out loud that their aunt is ugly in front of their aunt.

Paradoxical as it may seem to rationalists, and scandalous to moralists, politics is much more made of lies than truth, whether they like it or not; but lies, in politics, are useful when they are voluntary, that is, when they lend themselves to a certain strategy; they become deleterious when they burst uncontrollably from the mouth, or are used only to épater les bourgeois, to shock and scandalise the public and occupy as much media space as possible.

Crazy ideas?

Let us leave the lies aside, for once, and dwell briefly on the two candid truths that have come out of Trump's mouth in the last weeks. The occupant of the White House has said what many have known for some time but kept silent for reasons of political expediency and diplomatic tact (two items the aforementioned tenant ignores).

The first is that the Palestinians must be kicked out of Gaza, and the second is that a fait accompli in Ukraine must be accepted and the game with Putin must be closed directly. Those who speak of a ‘dramatic shift’ by the Americans, of ‘surprise’, of ‘shock’, are either naive or have been distracted in recent years or, in the case of the Palestinians, in recent decades.

For the Israelis, who began driving the Arabs out of Palestine in 1948, Trump's idea of deporting all the inhabitants of Gaza and seizing their land should sound anything but far-fetched, all the more so after those Hamas madmen offered them the pretext to start working in that direction on a large scale.

For many in Israel, the only way to eliminate the age-old problem of coexistence with the Arabs is to eliminate the Arabs, either physically or by forcing them to leave; that the ‘two-state solution’ is not a solution, and that neither Israelis nor Palestinians have ever believed in it are many who know it, but few who say it. Trump says it, reiterates it, and adds his own to it, seasoning it with audacious annexation intentions and fanciful tourism/real estate investment projects, as long as they are paid for by others.

The idea of reaching an agreement with Russia on Ukraine to put a wedge between Moscow and Beijing has been circulating in the United States for some time, certainly since before Trump entered the White House. An overtly exasperated Volodymyr Zelensky also had his moment of truth in Munich, confirming what analysts already knew but no political actor could say apertis verbis: that the US never wanted Ukraine in NATO, neither with Biden nor with Trump. It was known because, in politics, using the weakest pawn to checkmate the strongest pawn is a ploy that no one gives up when needed.

It's all about knowing how to do it artfully: when the US used Russia to keep Europe divided during the Cold War, they told the Europeans it was for their own good; when they used the Chinese to contain Russia, managing to limit the damage of the defeat in Vietnam, they gave Beijing the right of first refusal over Taiwan in return. The problem is that moving gracefully is not Trump's strongest quality.

Despite this, someone must have thought that, after all, the end justifies the means: the current president's belief that politics is an affair of personal friendships and testosterone, and his irrepressible infatuation with ‘strongmen’ (or at least posing as such), could have been the means to the end.

The calculation, if calculation there was, turned out to be wrong

Or rather, half wrong: the agreement with Putin could be reached, but at the same time the world could be dragged into the pit of a bottomless crisis. And this is simply because politics continues to function according to the usual laws, even if Trump does not know it.

Violating laws is not only condemned by code and morality (unless you have judges and priests in your court), it is often dangerous in real life: practically anyone who stands more than ten metres above the ground and gets the foolish idea of violating the universal gravitation law should experience it.

Action and reaction

To make a long story short, the laws of politics - like those of physics and, more generally, those of reality - must take into account the obstacles, the constraints, the conditions under which each action is performed, and its consequences.

To stay with Newton, every action corresponds to a reaction, which in politics is never the same because the forces in the field are always different, but always a reaction is there. Trump and his gang do not take into account any constraints, any conditions, even less the reactions what they are up to may cause.

When quoting William McKinley, Trump ‘forgets’ one of those many objective constraining factors: time.

He forgets that now we are not in 1898 but in 2025: The United States is no longer the young, arrogant emerging power that in ten years had managed to overtake Britain economically and was about to overtake it politically, stealing its place as a world hegemonic power; in 2025, it is a senescent power, about to lose what remains of its world hegemonic position.

McKinley's protectionism served to protect the rise of dynamic US industry from competition from Britain's more advanced industry; today protectionism only serves to protect an electoral rent that is short of breath anyway, because the only result will be to drive up the prices of goods in US, or make them disappear from the shelves - not even counting the repercussions for world industry, which North American people in general seem to care very little about.

The very concept of a great America again is messed up: the past is past forever, and it's not coming back, not even for Trump who continues to behave like a spoiled teenager.

But what matters most about the chapter is the international reaction. With the gimmick of the mass deportation of Palestinians, Trump has cornered even his closest friends in the Arab world, urging them to make common cause with each other even though, under normal conditions, they would compete to throw each other under the train. Even Saudi Arabia has rediscovered the ‘Palestinian cause’, an old tool of competition between Arab countries that Riyadh had discarded for years, if not decades.

Proposing to deport the Palestinians and, at the same time, to revive the infamous ‘Abrahamic Agreements’ with Saudi Arabia's accession is like ‘having your cake and eating it too’, as the Anglophones say, or, as we say in Italy in a cruder way, ‘wanting to keep your bottle full and your wife drunk’. Let's be clear: if Riyadh, or Amman, or Cairo, or any other Arab capital knew how to get rid of the Palestinians without losing face internally and internationally, they would sign up immediately. But this is not the case, and neither Riyadh, nor Amman, nor Cairo, nor any other Arab capital wants to risk seeing what would happen if they did.

The EU may lose pieces

For Russia, the same applies. With due proportion, the Europeans are to Ukraine as the Arab countries are to the ‘Palestinian cause’. With Trump's promises to Putin without consulting anyone and without asking for quid pro quo, and with his threats to Canada and Denmark, via Greenland, Trump has managed to force the Europeans to reconsider their options: to recompose among themselves in self-defence mode, perhaps co-opting London and Ottawa; to consider closer relations with China; to reconnect in some way with Russia; or, finally, to be content to serve as jesters in King Donald's court.

Whatever the option - and experience tells us that European countries have enormous difficulty in agreeing on what they want - the EU edifice is at least in danger of losing pieces.

Including in the first case, because a recomposing against a Russian-American entente could lead to the defection of Hungary, perhaps Slovakia and Romania, and certainly put many others on edge.

Not to mention the risk of an acceleration of the pro-Russian electoral trend across Europe, especially if the outlandish myth that Russia had won the war with Ukraine took hold, as it already seems to be doing.

(Incidentally - and we will certainly have to come back to this - I have already written that however the war in Ukraine ends, Russia will proclaim victory, and Trump may help his Kremlin friend, perhaps receiving an invitation to the 9 May celebrations in Moscow in return. But that does not mean Russia has won. Russia lost this war in February three years ago, and no diplomatic, ideological or media stunt can overturn this fact).

The future of Taiwan

On the Indo-Pacific front, things are made more complicated by the non-existence of a common forum such as exists between the European countries, but this could also be an accelerator of all the dynamics.

If Washington abandons Ukraine to its fate - ‘Ukraine may one day be Russian’, Trump said on 10 February, immediately adding ‘or it may not’ - in Japan, India, South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand it would be noted that Washington's word is no longer worth anything, and its protection against China even less.

All would be forced to run for cover, although the palette of choices would be different for each country, with inevitable internal rifts for all. But in Tokyo and Seoul, to begin with, the adoption of a nuclear weapon would most likely rise to the top of the list of possible options. And many would find themselves forced to side with China, lest they drift away in the absence of alternatives.

But, to stay in the region, let us not forget that, during his first term in office, Trump used to show his National Security Advisor John Bolton the tip of the large marker with which he signs his decrees telling him that Taiwan's fate lay there. Trump said this out of fanatical megalomania, and he was certainly unaware that the hypothesis of a ‘G2’ between the two most powerful countries in the world, capable of bringing everyone else into line, has been circulating in the US for decades, and continues to circulate today.

In conclusion: knowing that Trump is the only one capable of disproving Trump, it would be wise to keep one's nerves in check, stop declaring oneself surprised or bewildered, and not get caught up in the rush.

If only for the banal reason that starting to imagine new architectures on the basis of statements that tomorrow could be replaced by statements to the contrary risks leading to decisions that become obsolete before they are even translated into practice.

The only thing that is certain is that nothing that seemed certain in the past is certain any more, and that those whose task was to guarantee a last remnant of order are now the prime instigators of disorder. In other words: even if Trump were forced to retract everything he has said in the past weeks, he has actually said it, and the credibility of the United States seems now to be lost forever.

Throughout modern history, ‘hegemonic stability’ has meant that period of partial and temporary international order guaranteed by a power capable of 1) writing the rules for all, 2) enforcing those rules for all, and 3) assuming a greater responsibility than all.

Today, the power that has guaranteed hegemonic stability for the past eighty years is the first to disregard the rules it has itself written and is withdrawing from all its responsibilities. This indicates to all that the international order time, albeit partial and transitional, that began in 1945 is coming to an end. And the highest price, we can be sure, will be paid by the United States itself.

See, L’età del caos

From Stefano Feltri's Substack, Appunti, 17 February 2025