It has been a year of horrifyingly sustained genocide in Palestine. For these past several years, the relentless, sweeping military offensive on the Gaza Strip has come to be explicitly named as “genocide” by a shocked world community.
The world community has long experienced this Western power bloc as a tightly coordinated geopolitical bloc of nation – States that wield a combined political-economic collective global dominance and has done so ever since those same European powers systematically built up their colonial empires over half a millennium.
The United States of America took on the lead role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) that grouped North American power with Europe. The old colonial European states consolidated their continuing worldwide dominance by means of the giant new transnational continental state of the ‘European Union’ (EU).
At the same time, the rise of political-economic power among some large, former colonies and outlier powers such as Russia and China, as strong socialist economies (independent of Western Capitalism), resulted in a post-colonial global set-up of two rival great power blocs. The past half-century of this ‘Cold War’ between these two power blocs, the Russia and China-led Socialist Bloc and the Western Capitalist Bloc led by the US-EU, ended with the collapse of the East European section of the Socialist camp.
But NATO and EU have continued their post-Cold War geopolitics asserting their global dominance as a highly coordinated military bloc alliance, carrying out massive invasive military operations from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya causing huge human and economic loss and continued political instability.
In Asia, the US-EU combine have built up a network of politico-military alliances with Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, The Philippines and Thailand in an attempt to encircle China. But this West-leaning network is riddled by sharply growing economic ties with China.
The ASEAN group, the Global South’s most successful economic bloc has become China’s largest single trading partner and China is ASEAN’s largest export market.
The emergence of new Global South economic networks such as BRICS and the Central Asian customs union and new Asia-based security networks such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) are now permanent features of the transforming world system.
This year has seen a corresponding new geopolitics by the currently dominant world power, the US that is responding to domestic political swings that are detracting from its current interventionist role in the global system.
In foreign policy terms, this past year has been the first year of the sole global superpower’s unilateralist enforcement of political-economic dominance rather than a worldwide enforcement done in coordination with Western allies.
In his first Presidential Election bid in 2016, Donald Trump’s principal theme was ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA).Unlike Ronald Reagean’s and Bush Senior’s and Junior’s regimes, the Trumpian MAGA call was not so much about US world dominance but as a domestic social revival of ethnic White, male, dominance and a working class recovery.
Even before coming to power, Trump signalled a shift from transnational global power dominance. He shocked NATO allies with his declaration of readiness not to observe Washington’s blanket politico-military solidarity with any externally threatened NATO Member State – the famous “All for One, One for All” Article 5 clause of the Alliance’s Constitution. And after coming to power, Trump pursued exactly that geostrategy that seriously undermined the hitherto iron-clad military-political coordination within NATO.
Today, the European NATO powers are building their continental military coordination as a priority. In any case, Brussels is aware that, minus America, Europe inevitably loses its technological edge and scale-production capability in comparison with Russia and China.
European NATO has to look afresh for its ‘raison d’etre’. Ukraine is certainly not the motivational lever. Brussels, at present, is leaderless and lacking the unity needed to resist and defeat Moscow’s defiance. European powers know that even if they bestow weapons to Ukraine, that country has far too small a population to effectively deploy it.
MAGA Washington has found what it was looking for in terms of American ‘greatness’. The first Trump regime was only a precursor which enabled the Alt-Right to explore the possibilities of wielding power in the Washington ‘Swamp’.
The second Trump regime shows a more organised Alt-Right movement now controlling the Republican Party, replacing the old ‘Tea Party’ rightwing.
The Project 2025 master plan devised by the Heritage Foundation and allied think tanks for Governmental take-over by the Alt-Right exemplifies the movement’s maturing. The Alt-Right is now mainstreamed and has become the US ‘Radical Right’. This can be seen in both domestic and geopolitical dimensions.
The domestic political dimension is all about the new authoritarianism permeating the entirety of the vast American state from the Supreme Court to the State level.
If Project 2025 was the Government takeover blueprint, there are two geopolitical tracks that demonstrate the new Radical Right’s new focus. The first is the radical shift in America’s foreign trade policy from a coordination with the current capitalist world institutional framework – the WTO and the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP) – to a fully unilateralist ‘reciprocal’ and bilateral one. Within weeks of his installation as President, in early April this year, Trump signed an Executive Order that dumped all of the above ‘systems’ and unilaterally imposed “Freedom Day” trade tariffs (import duties) with all trading countries.
Given America’s continuing dominance as the world’s most voracious market, Washington has been able to dictate trade as a lever for all bilateral engagements, whether with politico-economic allies, small and poor nations or with its biggest rivals.
As President Trump said in his letter to President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, all bilateral trade terms are decided, from now on, by the overall relations between Sri Lanka and the US. The more accommodating Colombo is to Washington’s interests, the lighter will be US import duties on our products.
As Trump boasted a few months back, he only has to pick up the phone and threaten higher tariffs to get Thailand and Cambodia to halt their border dispute. Washington is now using its new bilateral trade regime as a major lever in its conduct of geopolitics overall.
Then, last month, came a second major foreign policy shift by Washington: the new US National Security Strategy (NSS) 2025. The NSS’s critical core is the firm unilateralism of America’s global geopolitical posture.
The NSS formally shifts the US from a posture of global dominance to one of hemispheric monopoly. The ‘Western Hemisphere’ is America’s backyard. No external power will be allowed in. Any extra-regional power attempting an entry (China) will be blocked by discouraging countries within the Hemisphere from hosting such ‘alien’ powers.
The NSS distances Washington from European geopolitics. China is an economic rival but not explicitly named as a military enemy. But outside the NSS discourse, the American military is well-known to be on track to match or exceed Chinese military advancement.
After nearly a year’s economic ill-treatment, America’s allies are not surprised that the NSS also belittles their geostrategic importance. Even in its West Asian ‘peace-making’ bid, Washington has gone alone with only a marginal involvement of Europe. In any case, Tel Aviv and Washington are aware of Europe’s growing distaste for such blatant misbehaviour.
Thus, 2025 can be seen as a pivotal year in world geopolitics in terms of a shift from the West’s coordinated world dominance to a dilution of that coordination. How much does this weaker bloc coordination result in a weakening of actual geopolitical dominance? Is it a sign of the increasing multipolarity that the Global South advocates? 2026 will show us.
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