Whiplashed middle powers seek new alliances as Trump rages on world stage

While world leaders prepare for annual UN gathering, shifts in the global order continue in the face of a disruptive American president

I n the event of a midterms election battering, it is possible that a deflated Donald Trump , constrained by a Democrat-controlled Congress, will gradually have to face up to the indignity of irrelevance.

While continuing to sign off Truth Social posts with his usual, “Thank you for your attention to this matter”, no one will actually be paying much attention. His meandering press conferences will no longer be carried live by TV networks. The Republican party will move on to the question of his successor. Trump could announce he had changed the name of the Champs-Élysées to Sunset Boulevard and even Google Maps will stifle a yawn. He would become that most pitied of political animals, the lame duck.

Yet somehow this scenario does not seem to fit the Trump personality, the US media landscape or indeed the recent history of other presidential endings. Just before completing their own terms in office, George W Bush launched the Iraq war “surge”, Bill Clinton got China into the World Trade Organization and Ronald Reagan helped end the cold war.

Many observers, including the former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton and the former UK foreign secretary David Lammy, predict Trump will concentrate even more on his disruptive foreign policy after November’s midterms, seeking to go even further and faster. Potential legislative gridlock in Congress would block him off from domestic initiatives, so the thinking goes, but much less so foreign policy.

The likes of António Guterres, attending his final UN general assembly as secretary general this week, who have tried to impress on Trump that the US could achieve more in alliance with others than alone, are likely to receive short shrift.

Those hoping for a return from the orderless world to one of order, loosely built around a set of recognisable values, are likely to be disappointed. In short, there is more to come.

T hat assessment is accelerating a trend across the world of countries forming a complex web of diplomatic, military and trading alliances designed to act as protective shields from an unpredictable and predatory US president. These hedging alliances, born out of fear of entrapment or of abandonment, are springing up across the globe, changing the matrix of diplomacy, often but not always in favour of the other superpower of the age, China.

John Bew, a foreign policy adviser to four former British prime ministers, describes the process as the creation of “a sub-threshold international order”.

As Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, urged in a speech at Davos in January, the middle powers are reorganising.