Standing Up for a More Equitable and Inclusive Global Future

By Ooi Kee Beng, “Picking on the Present” column in The Edge Malaysia 21-26 July 2025

THE SHOCK AND AWE approach that President Donald Trump’s Project 2025 clearly depends on, when exercised on the international stage, has brought about a whole range of reactions from governments all over the world. At one pole, you have those whose habit is to trust the USA no matter what or whose development is seen to be dependent on the American market, such as Great Britain; on the other, you have those who consider the Trump presidency to be a manifestation of a deep shift in the self-image of the USA, most notably the People’s Repubic of China.

In between, variations depend on certain conditions, such as the discrepancy in economic and political power between the USA and the government in question, how deeply and for how long has that country been on the USA, and how historically conscious, and geopolitically informed has that country’s nation-building narrative been.

What is often lacking in analyses of the present state of international affairs is a study of the nature of contemporary global power. More specifically, 35 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, and 47 years after China initiated its profound ‘reform and opening up’ programme, ideological and historical perspectives on international relations are carefully avoided in the public sphere.

It is as if the hegemonic impulses and the ideological arrogance of Western powers have disappeared, buried by the fall of the Berlin Wall. While many European countries may continue seeing themselves as social democracies, that conviction is fading as quickly as their right-wing parties are gaining strength. Ideological discussions are now a rarity where it was the norm four decades, or even three decades ago.

It is in countries still convinced that there is no alternative to the “America as importer of last resort” model—more correctly, the critical importer of all goods, the feelings of shock and awe are most strongly as Trump executes his system of tariffs and tariff threats. The rest are more bewildered and confused than shocked and awed.

The unipolar era has clearly also been a period of streamlined and homogenous discourses in international relations. Francis Fukuyama’s pronouncement of “The End of History” from 1991 may have been mistaken when it came to global conflicts, but the fervent wish for such to be the case lived on in the geopolitical practices and the financial control of the unipolar hegemon.

This has made it difficult for any post-Cold War vision and late-globalisation ideology to be formulated, and which offers an inclusive economic path that is not driven by hegemonic ambitions.

Trumps trade war against all nations is however pushing the best brains in the world to consider the present era as a transitional one, be it manifesting the fall of an empire or the ending of a global system of trade, finance and security based on—and guaranteed by—a sole big power.

Whichever the case, it is certain that the American political system has in recent years driven itself into a cul-de-sac. And Trump and the MAGA movement, among other expressions of dissent, are grand gestures made in desperation to escape that deadend.

But deadends are called deadends for a reason. When a once-impressive model no longer works, most probably due to an unavoidable generation over time of profound internal contradictions and tensions—and I am reminded by the staggered fall closer to home of Malaysia’s once-almighty and hegemonic UMNO and Barisan Nasional—it panics. In panic, it formulates narratives and takes actions that don’t quite make sense, because it is blindly trying to give birth to, or to scream into being, a new prescriptive narrative.

Where its exercise of power was systematic and systemic in better times, it now has to insist. scream and bully. It has to shock and awe, at least until even that doesn’t quite work.

Sensing its own chaos and waning power, a falling power needs to bring chaos also into the world that it once thought it controlled. At such a point, it is actually up to the rest of the world to decide the way, and in effect to guide the flailing leviathan and coax it into a new role better suited to its diminished power.

Danger lurks in an outcome where too much of the rest of the world, mistaking the flailing as power, falls into line as if there really is a line to fall into.

One would think that formerly colonised territories and countries, such as those that are prone to class themselves as the Global South today, or who seek to join BRICS, would realise by now the inherent nature of hegemons—once they have been allowed to be come hegemons—to be experts at the exercise of global power, at manipulation through words, and at gaining obedience through threats.

But then, discarding subservience is no easy thing for nations to do. Their leaders have to realise that there are working options available, that they are not alone, before they dare to resist the coercion of the old global system.

Thycudides Trap is not necessarily about a new big power wishing to take over. It is just as likely to be about the old power not accepting new realities. Having that said, in the globalised age, international relations and geopolitical competition do not have to be hierarchic in nature, and need not be a struggle to succeed over all others. A more promising alternative to such a us-or-them culture in global relations could simply be an us-and-them-and-them-and-them model of thinking. And chances of that evolving into being increases if the world’s focus is on geo-economic integration rather than geopolitical triumphing.