The Return and the Rupture: Trump’s Inauguration as Inflection Point
The Return and the Rupture: Trump’s Inauguration as Inflection Point
The Return and the Rupture: Trump’s Inauguration as Inflection Point
On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump took the oath of office for the second time, having won 31 states and 312 Electoral College votes with a popular vote margin of around 1.6 per cent. The Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress. The Supreme Court had already shifted to the right through his three first-term appointments. The conditions for change were in place.
His appointments signalled what would follow. Trump nominated Kash Patel, a mid-level official from his first term who had vowed to purge “the deep state,” to lead the FBI. He tapped Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democrat with sympathetic views toward Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, as director of national intelligence. Days after Trump selected Pete Hegseth, a Fox News personality, for defence secretary, Hegseth called the United Nations “a fully globalist organisation that aggressively advances an anti-American, anti-Israel, and anti-freedom agenda.” The administration would be staffed by contributors to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s policy blueprint that called for the United States to exit the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
The liberal international order—shorthand for the institutions and treaty arrangements Washington built after World War II, including the United Nations and NATO—had already been weakening. China and Russia had spent more than a decade building their own ordering projects. They contested human rights norms at the UN and offered economic and security deals, indifferent to democratic governance. The relative decline of the G-7 economies had strengthened the bargaining position of smaller states. For the first time since the Soviet collapse, such states had real alternatives to Western markets, development aid, and military backing. But Trump’s second inauguration marked something different: the formal abandonment by Washington itself of the order it had built.
American allies had to decide whether his first term had been an aberration. His re-election answered that question. Voters had watched him threaten to abandon NATO, toy with leaving the alliance, and pursue warmer relations with Russia. They chose him anyway. One European diplomat observed that the continent had to consider whether Biden’s presidency, not Trump’s, had been the deviation from the new normal.
During the campaign, Trump had promised a nationalist “America first” foreign policy. He boasted about threatening NATO allies and claimed that if European members failed to raise defence spending, he would let Russia “do whatever they want.” His incoming national security adviser, Mike Waltz, criticised the Biden administration for imposing restrictions on Israel. The incoming secretary of state, Marco Rubio, would later tell Congress that “the post-war global order is not just obsolete—it is now a weapon being used against us.”
The question was whether this represented a calculated response to shifting global power or something more reckless. The world had grown more dangerous. China had supplanted the Soviet Union as the principal rival, more formidable economically and technologically than the Soviets ever were. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea were cooperating openly in economic and military matters. Putin had announced a lower threshold for nuclear weapons use and had deployed a new hypersonic missile against Kyiv. Kim Jong Un had tested long-range missiles and sent troops to support Russia in Ukraine.
The institutional architecture that had prevented great-power war and global depression since 1945 now faced a challenge not from its adversaries but from its architect. Trump’s second term would reorient both domestic and international politics. His administration had no intention of fixing the cracks in the U.S.-led order. By the time he left office, that order would be broken beyond repair. Whoever followed would have to reckon with a multipolar world and decide what role the United States would play in it.
The inauguration was not a beginning. It was a consequence.