The new world order and the courage of discontinuity

The asymmetry between market power and political aphasia has reached a critical point in the first eight months of the second Trump administration. His rhetoric, oscillating and opaque, recalls the Kraus of 'welcome chaos, because order didn't work'. But it is no longer just chaos: it is a new order, founded not on rules but on force.

The regression in global trade marks a break with the multilateral architecture built by the United States in the post-war period. The methodical use of unilateral measures and the hollowing out of the World Trade Organisation - a symbol of consensual globalism at its peak - have cracked the foundations of international cooperation. This is not a parenthesis: the process appears irreversible.

The categories with which we have been reading the world - liberalism, representative democracy, multilateral governance - are proving inadequate. We are not witnessing a simple change of leadership, but the metamorphosis of a paradigm. To try to understand, many resort to the automatic analogy: fascism, imperialism, patrimonialism. But what is being consolidated is something else: a slippery, opportunist, impudent political form, nourished by a logic of legal subversion of power. Not the spectacularised kind, but the kind that occupies the state, contaminates legality, dissolves the boundaries between public and private. A power founded not on law, but on its systematic manipulation.

This new 'order' rests on key elements. Violence as political language. Not extreme resource but method. Administrative, verbal, judicial, police violence. It is not concealed, it is exhibited. It serves to establish hierarchies, feed fear, impose silences. Arbitrary arrest - or its constant threat - becomes a device of sovereignty. Contempt for empathy becomes a virile virtue; brutality, a sign of efficiency.

Then there is the transformation of the state into a source of profit. Institutions bend to private interests. Business merges with diplomacy; appointments reward loyalty, not competence. This is not episodic corruption but systemic kleptocracy. The enrichment of the inner circle is not scandal, it is synonymous with success.