Sever Voinescu, Dilema.ro: How do we enter the new world

Very recently, a book has appeared that is a window with a panoramic view of the world we have just entered. The book is called Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump and is written by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, two journalists from The New York Times who have closely followed Donald Trump's political-biographical path over the last decade. As expected, Trump has labeled the book as false and full of inventions, and about the authors he said that "they are third-rate authors, just as their intellect is." Obviously, Trump supporters will not believe a word of this book. For them, it is known that The New York Times is a bastion of "sorosism" and a major source of anti-Trump propaganda. I refer to this book without discussing whether what the authors recount, with enough details, is true or not. It is certain that Haberman and Swan interviewed nearly a thousand people, people from Trump's entourage or who were present, as witnesses, at decision-making moments such as the initiation of the war in Iran, the deployment of the National Guard in certain American cities, or the management of the image crisis generated by the Epstein case. But, I repeat, the credibility, in details or in general, of the accounts in the book is not my subject. What is truly important, I believe, is not whether Trump really yelled at Netanyahu on the phone: "No Jew in this world can stand you anymore. Not even these two Jews who are on the line with us now can stand you anymore!" referring to Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, or whether the contemptuous, if not mocking, remarks about the billionaire sycophants Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg who changed political boats as soon as Trump won the 2024 elections are true. More important for us is that we see, feel, hear the kind of leadership, the spirit, the way those who have taken over the leadership of the world understand their power. The mentality, behavior, and style of Trump are very well described in this book and, beyond the factual, this description is validated by what we all see, almost daily, from January 2025 onwards. The world is in the hands of those who believe about themselves that they are masters and they rewrite the rules of operation according to the rules by which they operate in life. Essentially, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, along with their friend Vladimir Putin, are leading in an imperial manner a world that they are convinced belongs to them. "I am the boss," Trump told G7 leaders when he entered the meeting room. "I was joking," he will later say in an interview, but everything we learn and everything we see clearly indicates that he was not joking – he believes he is the boss of everyone.

What kind of world is it whose operating rules are permanently written and rewritten by people like these? It is not a Hobbesian world, it is not a world of war of all against all. It is not even a Machiavellian world, because the powerful do not exercise their power pragmatically and focused on certain objectives. It is a categorically bipolar world, dominated by the USA and China, in which the alliances of the two powers are rather determined by the instincts and moods of the two emperors. There are no long-term objectives, but spurts and personal preferences transformed into short-term objectives.

Who are the accepted (and thus defenders) at the court of the two emperors? There is no longer, as until 1990, an ideological criterion for admission into the "club." There is no longer, as recently, a criterion of common values for social organization. Admission or rejection and, therefore, the new lines of the planetary front are drawn apparently without a rational rigor (I refer to a political rationale). Everything is decided according to instinct, the moment's state, or the psychology of the emperor. We have truly returned to the era of imperial rule. And for it to truly be an empire, corruption is reconfigured and reevaluated. Not that it would have ever left us – corruption is a huge problem for democracies too. But in today's imperial systems, it ceases to be a problem and becomes normality.

For everyone, national security becomes the main objective. The order of the world is re-established in very selfish terms and any association, however altruistic, between states seriously shakes. National security is the kind of objective that does not admit limitations of action, neither geopolitical, nor ideological, nor economic, of any kind. It is a world in which the concept of national security becomes so broad that it swallows anything the "emperor" wants. It is a world in which there is no state interest superior to ensuring national security and states defend their interests by any means, anywhere in the world. Is this a return to barbarism in international relations? Perhaps. It is, rather, the installation of a barbarism in the agiornata version of a world with Starlink and Artificial Intelligence. Is this world cruder than the one it replaced? Without a doubt. Technology distances man from the consequences of his actions – from thousands of kilometers away, you control drones with a joystick and bombings appear to you as video games. Thus, anyone can kill anyone. We have entered a world of great carnivores who roam the jungle to mark new territories after the old world, with its territories and rules, has turned to dust. And the new territories are not marked by scents, but by trails of blood.

The cruelty of this world replaces the hypocrisy of the other. I preferred hypocrisy, of course. Hypocrisy, at least, produces politeness. The world that has died was much more polite.

Europe is not even prepared to recognize what is happening and puts its horrified hand over its eyes. Romania, led by an increasingly precarious political elite, lives imagining that national security is a clever distraction from allies, just as it has believed for 30 years that prosperity is "a sham." Now, more than ever, we must think of ourselves. Only that the general spirit of our society is on the ground.

We live a moment of self-contempt, of "self-hate," as I would say, that I have not encountered in my life. Although I lived, aware of what I was living, the years of lead, of suffocating closure, the '80s, and the wild, anomic '90s – I have never encountered such a general spirit of self-deprecation as today.

Our national consciousness now has, at least at the level of the "educated layer," the following determinations: 1. our history has been mediocre, insignificant, we have passed through history like cheap whores, everything we thought were great moments are lies, when we had a bit of vigor we rather killed people without defense, because we are some miserable racists, instead of doing something good in the world and, moreover, what is Romanian is not at all certain;

2. our present is a failure, look at the state, captured by some or others and, when it is not captured, it is failed;

3. if someone attacks us, we immediately run away, because we do not sacrifice ourselves for Nicușor Dan and Grindeanu and anyway we are not in a position to face any attack.

With these ideas in mind, we enter the world of carnivores described above.

https://www.dilema.ro/tilc-show/cum-intram-in-lumea-noua