Trump, Vance, and the New New World Order The postwar order built on Roosevelt’s naive trust in Stalin and sustained by America’s costly global interventions now teeters on the edge of irrelevance. By Stephen Soukup
https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/01/trump-vance-and-the-new-new-world-order/
This past week, the venerable Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator for The Financial Times, used his column to declare the Trump administration and, by extension, the United States “the enemy of the West.” “Today,” Wolf wrote, “autocracies [are] increasingly confident,” and “the United States is moving to their side.” According to the subhead on the column, “Washington has decided to abandon…its postwar role in the world.” Meanwhile, Wolf cites the (in his estimation) august Franklin Roosevelt, as he complains that the United States “has decided instead to become just another great power, indifferent to anything but its short-term interests.”
The ironies here—as well as the historical ignorance—abound.
To start, one would imagine that Wolf, an educated man with two degrees from Oxford, might know that it was his countryman (and two-time Prime Minister), Henry John Temple (i.e. Lord Palmerston), who declared in a speech in the House of Commons that “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” Wolf might also be expected to know that this statement was repeated—more famously and more pithily—by Henry Kissinger, perhaps the quintessential American diplomat in the supposedly vaunted postwar order. Kissinger, like Palmerston and Trump (apparently) understood that a nation that pursues anything other than its interests is foolish, faithless, and, in time, doomed.
What bothers Wolf, it would seem, is that American interests are diverging from British and continental European interests. That is unfortunate, but it is also more than likely the case that this divergence is the result of Britain and Europe’s abandonment of the principles, values, and ambitions the allies once shared, rather than the other way around. For example, Wolf criticizes the speech given by J.D. Vance in which the vice president defended the traditional American dedication to free speech and attacked the British and European rejection of that principle. Yet again, Wolf might be expected to know that the American preoccupation with this and all other negative rights is something the nation’s Founders inherited from their British forefathers. If the two nations now differ on the importance of this fundamental right, then that’s hardly Vance’s, Trump’s, or any other American’s fault.
More ironies are found in Wolf’s praise of the now-dying postwar order and his citation of FDR as the architect of that order. While Wolf is correct that Roosevelt was one of two Americans most responsible for the creation of the postwar order, he is wrong in believing that the order was virtuous by design and that it played out precisely as Roosevelt intended. Indeed, he couldn’t be more wrong if he tried.
Almost from the moment the United States entered World War II, Roosevelt was planning how best to achieve the goal he inherited from his former boss and Progressive predecessor, Woodrow Wilson. Wilson’s goal, of course, was “global governance” under the League of Nations, a goal that the U.S. Senate, mercifully, denied him. Regrettably, Roosevelt shared Wilson’s dream. The political scientist and historian of the Cold War, Amos Perlmutter, wrote that Roosevelt’s “vision for a postwar world was neo-Wilsonian, totally at odds with reality. He would help create a new international order, presided over in an equal partnership by the two emerging superpowers, the United States and the USSR, and buttressed by the newly created world organization, the United Nations.” Like Wilson, Roosevelt sought to fix the world by bringing the whole of it under the control of a handful of its most benevolent and brilliant men—himself included, naturally.
The catch, of course, was that in order to believe that he could effectuate his plan for the postwar global order, Roosevelt also had to believe that it would be received positively by the man who turned out to be the most proficient mass murderer in the war, Josef Stalin. Remarkably, Roosevelt did, in fact, believe just that. He repeatedly told his staff and others that he was convinced that the man he affectionately called “Uncle Joe” would eagerly welcome his friendship and American entreaties to share governance of the world jointly. They would, he believed, be the closest of allies and the best of friends. In 1943, before ever even meeting Stalin, FDR told his first ambassador to the USSR, William Bullit, that “I have just a hunch that Stalin doesn’t want anything but security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world democracy and peace.”
Roosevelt approached the end of the war and Yalta in the same state of delusion. He went, hat in hand, to beg Stalin to join him in his plan to rule the world together as the benevolent co-victors and co-representatives of the triumphant political left. As history shows, Roosevelt gave Stalin everything he wanted at Yalta, in the vain hope that the two could be friends and work together. History also shows that FDR was never disabused of this fantasy and, as a result, set about trying to put it in place.
To this end, Roosevelt put his best men on the job of ensuring the creation—and the successful ratification by the Senate—of the United Nations. Among these best men were his Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and an aide on whom Roosevelt relied heavily while at Yalta, the director of the Office of Special Political Affairs, a man named Alger Hiss.
Many years of work went into creating the United Nations and planning its charter, and many prominent Americans—including Stettinius and Dulles—had tremendous input into the documents. In the end, though, it was Hiss, the Soviet spy, who ensured that the United Nations was born. Hiss was the primary author of the United Nations Charter and attended the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco as part of the official American delegation headed by Senator Arthur Vandenberg. Among other things, Hiss was tasked with ensuring Vandenberg’s support and compliance—both in endorsing the U.N. Charter at the conference in San Francisco and then shepherding it successfully through the Senate ratification process.
The United Nations was the most critical step in transforming the world at the end of the war. But it was only the first step. For the better part of a century, the leftist secular intellectuals and the Utopian pietists colluded to push the notion of “global governance” on an unwilling and uninterested globe. In 1945, however, with the Utopians victorious in the West and murderous but canny cynics victorious in the East, the Wilsonian-pietist dream at last became a reality. The entire postwar period—from Roosevelt’s attempts to court Stalin at Yalta and beyond to the establishment of the United Nations, the World Bank, and International Monetary Fund; from Truman’s speech on the Greek crisis to the formulation of the policy of containment; from the war in Korea to the Marshall Plan—is perhaps best understood as the story the American Left’s attempts to nurture and encourage world government, and to consolidate power under beneficent American leadership.
This world order—which inarguably produced the wars in Korea and Vietnam and arguably contributed to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—is the world order Trump and Vance are supposedly abandoning and which Martin Wolf wishes so desperately to preserve.
I can’t say with any degree of certainty that any new, new world order will be particularly grand, but I can say that the old, new world order was, at best, a happy accident that only nearly resulted in the nuclear destruction of the entire planet—and which might not be so lucky next time.
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