01Three very different ways of « cause » an event

Let's start with too often trampled evidence: saying Donald Trump has « induced » A geopolitical shift can cover three completely distinct realities, and confusing them amounts to distorting all the reasoning that follows. The first is the decision directly attributable to the President: a signed decree, a negotiation conducted in person, an appointment. The US withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership in January 2017, or the presidential decree of January 2026 organizing the withdrawal of sixty-six international organizations, clearly belong to this category — The effects can be discussed, not attribution.

The second is the acceleration of a trend that already existed, often for a long time, and which the Trump Presidency did not invent but undeniably amplified. The paralysis of the World Trade Organization's Appellate Body is the clearest example of this: it dates back to May 2016, under the Obama administration, which had begun to block judges' appointments out of frustration with the body's jurisprudence. Trump stepped up this block, he didn't initiate it. The third category, the most subtle and most frequently skewed in hot comments, is the interaction with autonomous choices made by other states: when Denmark and Sweden announced military spending trajectories in 2025 above 3% of their GDP, it would be exaggerated to see it as a pure Trump effect. — the war in Ukraine and the perception of a Russian threat weigh at least as much, if not more, in this calculation.

To this typology adds a three degree certainty scale — high, medium, low — which we systematically apply in the following pages, and which deserves an important clarification: to be certain that a fact has arisen does not say anything about the certainty that it can have on its effects. One can know with a high degree of certainty that a decree was signed, and remain in the most complete uncertainty as to its real consequences for the world economy three years later. This distinction, which looks almost school-like, is actually what separates analysis from controversy.

02An unusual practice, described without being diagnosed

It must be said quite clearly: the way Donald Trump exercises presidential power breaks with the usages of his predecessors on several observable points — the centrality of direct communication on social networks, the customisation of international negotiations to the detriment of conventional diplomatic channels, the frequency of changes announced and partly applied. These are descriptive facts, which do not require any clinical interpretation. We refuse here, as the source who fed this analysis does, to any psychological diagnosis at a distance. — an exercise as tempting as it is intellectually dishonest, and which in any case would bring nothing to understanding the mechanisms involved. What we are interested in is not what these practices reveal to an individual, but what they produce in the international system: strategic uncertainty, which for the first time is also assumed as an instrument of foreign policy.

03Unpredictability diplomacy: anatomy of a mechanism

We remember the episode of April 2025: a message published on Truth Social announcing a pause in the application of tariffs already in force, followed in a few hours by a movement on the financial markets, then by a partial official confirmation. This episode alone illustrates a sequence which has been repeated many times since 2017 and which follows, almost invariably, four times: the announcement, often formulated in maximalist terms; reaction — contracts, foreign government, institution; the administrative act itself, which sometimes takes place days or weeks later; and effective implementation, which may differ significantly from the initial announcement, sometimes to a considerable extent.

A detail deserves to be placed on the file, not to psychologise but because it illuminates a well-documented mechanism of influence: a study published in the journal Nature Communications, led by researcher Sophie Lewandowsky, has shown that the most compelling messages published on social networks by political figures tend to divert media attention from potentially more embarrassing subjects for their authors. We keep saying that every presidential message consciously obeys this logic. — Individual intent escapes empirical verification —But the structural mechanism is documented and generalizable far beyond the American case alone.

04Three plausible functions, a certain cost

It can be argued, with an average degree of certainty, that this communication practice performs at least three simultaneous functions. A test function: measure a reaction before formal engagement, which allows a step back without loss of disproportionate face. A sideration function: maintain the interlocutor — Ally or opponent — in a state of permanent reactivity that limits its ability to build a long-term strategy. An internal mobilization function: simple words, designated opponents, proclaimed victories, a register that works effectively with an electorate that does not consume reports from the Congressional Research Service or from the State Department.

The cost of this method, on the other hand, is a high degree of certainty and is measured directly: the credibility of an American commitment becomes, for any foreign partner, a probabilistic calculation object rather than a stable data. An ally now negotiates less on the basis of what has been promised than the estimated probability that the promise will be kept as it is. It is a change of nature, not only in degree, in the way American diplomacy works. — and it will not necessarily end with the end of the current term, as the institutional memory of the chancelleries retains precedents well beyond a single presidency.

05An order of 1945 already cracked before 2017

Any honest analysis must begin by recognizing what would almost certainly have continued without Donald Trump. The European underinvestment in collective defence did not date from its first presidency: as early as 2014, at the Wales Summit, NATO members had committed to devoting 2% of their GDP to defence, a goal that most still did not meet eight years later. The strategic rivalry with China was theorized and engaged under the Obama administration with the « Asian pivot », then continued and hardened under Biden by measures to control the exports of semiconductors much more restrictive, in certain technological segments, than those of the first Trump presidency. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 took place under the Biden administration. — A fact that alone is enough to ban any reading that would make Trump the only craftsman of current European instability.

This is not an argument for mitigation. It simply aims to correctly situate the focal point: when asked to what extent Trump has « broken » international order, we must always add — What was the previous state, already weakened by two decades of accumulated tensions, from the 2008 financial crisis to the Afghan withdrawal of 2021?

06American Democracy: Presidentialization and Reputation

On the inside, the analysis must avoid two symmetrical excesses. The first would be to deny any evolution towards an increased Presidentialization of the Executive; the second to present this evolution as the pure and simple end of the separation of American powers. The reality is in between. The Capitol assault of 6 January 2021 remains, with a high degree of certainty, an unprecedented event in the contemporary history of the peaceful transfer of power in the United States. The Supreme Court, for its part, has issued several decisions since 2024 with considerable political significance. — Trump v. United States on presidential immunity, Trump v. CASA on the scope of federal judges' national injunctions — Without being able to speak of a collapse of judicial review: the decision Learning Resources v. Trumprendered on 20 February 2026 by a majority of six votes to three drawn up by Chief Justice John Roberts, ruled that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) did not authorize the President to unilaterally impose the disputed tariffs — a scathing judicial defeat, on one of the most emblematic instruments of the commercial policy of the administration, which in front of all arguments of a fully aligned judiciary.

However, the federal government itself has become, in a documented manner, a permanent institutional confrontation — challenged appointments, attempts to take over independent agencies, recurrent tensions with Congress over budgetary prerogatives. It would be wrong to conclude that the counter-powers had disappeared; It would be just as wrong to see nothing but agitation without consequence. The truth, here and elsewhere in this case, lies in the tension itself, not in its early resolution.

07NATO: rearmament is not the confidence found

At the Hague Summit in June 2025, the members of the Atlantic Alliance committed to increase their defence and security spending to 5% of GDP by 2035. — a decomposed objective of 3.5% devoted to the defence needs themselves and 1.5% to the protection of critical infrastructure, civil resilience and the strengthening of the industrial defence base. This is a significant shift from the 2% target set in 2014 on paper. But is it necessary to attribute it entirely to the pressure exerted by Washington under the Trump presidency? A high degree of certainty applies to the gross assessment of the advertisement; a much lower degree applies to exclusive causal attribution, both war in Ukraine — autonomous event, decided in Moscow — It also weighs, and probably even more heavily, in the decision of several European capitals.

What, on the other hand, is a solid observation that the increase in budgets is not accompanied by any measurable improvement in political confidence between allies. We can spend more while at the same time wondering whether Article 5 of the Washington Treaty will really be invoked when the day comes. Re-arming and strategic reinsurance are two variables which, contrary to what the intuition suggests, do not necessarily evolve in the same direction.

08European Union, Canada, Greenland: loyalty becomes negotiable again

The tariff framework concluded between Washington and Brussels, capping 15% of most reciprocal tariffs, was presented on both sides of the Atlantic as a reasonable compromise avoiding an open trade war. However, the method — Tariff threat first, then negotiation — has long-standing marked the European perception of American reliability as a trading partner, including among leaders who are not inclined to anti-American rhetoric. Canada, for its part, responded with counter-tariffs targeted on products of high symbolic value in some U.S. states, a calibrated retaliatory strategy that clearly illustrates the third category of our initial typology: an independent choice from Ottawa, in reaction to Washington, but not dictated by Washington.

The Greenlandic episode deserves a separate treatment, as it alone condenses several strata of diplomatic trumpism: real strategic interest — mineral resources and the Arctic position of the Territory —, initial maximalist rhetoric evoking a possible pure and simple acquisition, then, in September 2026, a more modest agreement on a strengthening of the American military presence, negotiated with Copenhagen and Nuuk rather than imposed against their will. The final result is substantially down from the original announcement — a recurring reason in this file, which will be found several times in the following pages.

09War in Ukraine: Pressure as a method, ambiguity as a risk

On this file more than any other, the confusion between the three categories of causality that we put in the introduction produces misleading comments. The Russian invasion of February 2022 is a fact that predates the Trump presidency and is totally external to it. What, on the other hand, falls directly within the current administration is the method of managing the file since 2025: meetings held in Jeddah between American, Ukrainian and sometimes Russian emissaries, sequences where military aid to Kyiv was suspended and then restored according to the advance — actual or perceived — In September 2026, a new law of sanctions against Russia was adopted. Using military aid as a bargaining lever with the party receiving it, rather than with the aggressor, is an unusual reversal of the classical Western deterrence logic, and it is a point on which the available documentation allows a high degree of certainty as to the fact itself, but leaves open, with a much weaker degree of certainty, the question of its actual effectiveness in producing a lasting peace rather than a simple pause in the fighting.

Here we must keep a common shortcut in the public debate, which is to assimilate the search for negotiation and complacency towards the aggressor. Both are not synonymous, and the file documents both dynamics — pressure on Kyiv and reinforced sanctions against Moscow — without any of the two missing the other.

10Middle East: a multi-hand recomposition

The Middle East probably offers the densest illustration of our method, as the three causal categories always overlap. The US withdrawal of the Iran nuclear agreement, decided in 2018 during the first presidency, is a decision directly attributable. Abraham's agreements, normalizing relations between Israel and several Arab States, had been initiated as early as 2020 and their subsequent extension, linked in particular to the question of Western Sahara, was a direct extension. The announcement of a $600 billion Saudi investment in the United States is, however, the subject of an announced agreement whose scope of actual implementation remains, at this stage, documented with a much lower degree of certainty than the announcement itself. — The distinction between the amount declared and the amount actually invested is one of the most frequent methodological pitfalls in this type of case, to which we go further.

United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803 on Gaza, adopted in November 2025, is a multilateral process in which real American influence has been exercised in constant interaction with other regional and United Nations actors. — It cannot be presented as a mere ratification of a pre-established American plan or as totally independent of Washington's diplomatic pressure. The strikes on Iranian installations in February 2026, and the subsequent reduction of certain sanctions against Syria, complete a regional picture inextricably blended with long-term strategic continuity — the centrality of the Israeli-Saudi axis in American diplomacy does not date from 2017 — and inflections specific to the Trump method, in particular the desire to transform security relations into encrypted commercial relations.

11Africa: the end of aid, the bet of trade

It is a dossier that directly concerns readers of this blog, and deserves to be treated without the simplifications that too often circulate about it. The closure of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in July 2025 was, for many African countries, a sharp break in funding health, education and humanitarian programmes built over several decades. — a fact documented with a high degree of certainty, the concrete effects of which on the ground, on the other hand, continue to be the subject of conflicting assessments by countries and sectors. The accompanying official doctrine, summarized by the formula « trade rather than aid », translated into the renewal in February 2026 of the African Growth and Opportunities Act (AGOA) until December 2026 — a renewal of which the brevity, barely six months renewed in emergency, says a lot about the instability now associated with an instrument that the African economic operators had yet learned, since 2000, to integrate into their long-term investment plans.

The February 2025 Decree concerning the situation of South African farmers — providing priority refugee status to a minority white population, in a context of bilateral tensions with Pretoria on the South African Land Expropriation Act — Another aspect of this presidency's African policy is a selective reading of the continent's racial and land issues, which has attracted strong criticism from African governments and human rights organisations, but at this stage it is not possible to establish a cause and direct effect link with the subsequent development of diplomatic relations between the two countries, which remains dependent on many other bilateral variables.

12China: Tariff continuity, Taiwanese ambiguity

On the Chinese file, continuity far outweighs rupture, contrary to a widespread intuition. Tariff coercion against Beijing does not start in 2025: it is rooted in the first Trump presidency, continues — in a different form, more focused on critical technologies — under the administration of Biden, before regaining a wider and more frontal look from 2025. The de-escalation negotiated in Geneva in May 2025 helped to avoid the most difficult reciprocal embargo envisaged by both parties, but did not remove a structurally conflicting balance of power: Chinese imports to the United States fell by about 29% over the recent documented period, a figure that reflects a real recomposition of global supply chains, not a mere announcement effect.

US strategic ambiguity over Taiwan remains — This is a finding of continuity and not rupture — official doctrine inherited from several decades. There is no documented evidence that this presidency has fundamentally changed it, although the multiplication of conflicting signals, sometimes firm or conciliatory towards Beijing on this specific issue, has fed into the regional partners. — Japan, South Korea, Australia — concern about the predictability of the US security commitment in the Pacific, which is structurally in line with that already observed on the European side on Article 5 of NATO.

13India: The partnership that refuses subordination

New Delhi offers a useful counter-example to any reading that would portray Washington's partners as mere implementers of the American presidential will. On Russian oil purchases, India first experienced additional tariff pressure before obtaining, at the beginning of 2026, a easing in exchange for adjustments to other commercial items. — a conventional arm sequence, resolved by negotiation rather than by unilateral submission of one of the two parties. India's membership in the BRICS group, which it continues to fully assume in parallel with its strategic partnership with Washington, illustrates a strategic autonomy that neither US tariff pressures nor diplomatic incentives have fundamentally begun. It is a useful reminder: Washington's negotiating power, however real, meets limits when its interlocutor has credible economic and diplomatic alternatives.

14Sixty-six organizations, a fragile multilateral architecture

Presidential memorandum of 7 January 2026 organizing the American withdrawal of sixty-six international organizations — Thirty-five with no connection to the United Nations system, thirty-one attached to it — is, to date, the most radical and directly attributable act of the President on multilateral disengagement. The withdrawal of the World Health Organization, effective between 22 and 24 January 2026, and the new release of the Paris Climate Agreement are part of the direct continuity of similar actions undertaken from the first presidency, but their cumulative magnitude in 2026 far exceeds this precedent.

But should we talk about a collapse of multilateralism? Caution is required. The paralysis of the WTO Appellate Body, it was said, precedes Trump by several years; and despite it, world trade continues to be largely organized according to the most favoured nation regime. — Although its share has fallen from around 80% to about 72% of world trade in the recent documented period, it still leaves the trade non-discrimination clause still largely dominant. This is a paradox that it would be dishonest to ignore: institutional withdrawal is now combined with a relative resilience of real trade flows. — two curves that do not necessarily move at the same pace, and whose gap deserves to be followed carefully in the coming years rather than cut prematurely today.

15Dollar, tariffs, fragmentation: what the figures really show

One word goes on and on in the comments on the economic policy of this presidency: « fragmentation ». The word is not false, but it deserves to be clarified rather than branded. The Federal Reserve's report on the international role of the dollar, published in July 2025, shows an American currency that represented 58% of the world's official foreign reserves declared in 2024. — almost unchanged since 2022, suggesting, contrary to a widespread assumption, that US sanctions against Russia following the invasion of Ukraine have not triggered a significant movement to disengage world reserves from the dollar. The depth and liquidity of US financial markets, the sound rule of law and the underlying property rights: these structural factors, well before the current presidency, continue to anchor a pre-eminence of the dollar that neither tariffs nor trade tensions are seriously shaken at this stage.

On the question, obsessive in the public debate, « who pays » actual tariffs, available economic literature — beyond the source file of this article — A substantial part of the cost is absorbed by US importers and then passed on, at least partially, to end consumers, and not exclusively to exporting countries, as the official rhetoric suggests. This is a point on which analytical prudence requires resisting the temptation of the shock figure and referring, as the source file does, to a nuanced assessment according to the sectors and elasticities of the demand concerned.

16Soft power, universities, borders: the degraded image of a power that remains central

The Pew Research survey published in June 2025, conducted among 28,333 people in 24 countries between January and April of the same year, documents a decline in the favourable image of the United States in 19 of these 24 countries compared to the previous year. — a decline of up to 32 points in Mexico and 28 points in Sweden. The median confidence given to Donald Trump personally for « doing the right thing » world business is 34%, compared to 62% expressing little or no confidence — with considerable geographical differences, ranging from 79% confidence in Nigeria to only 8% in Mexico. These figures, robust methodologically, do not, on their own, say anything about the evolution of the real strategic and economic weight of the United States in the world: degraded image and material power do not necessarily vary in concert, and confusing the two would be another form of the same methodological trap already mentioned several times in this dossier.

On the academic front, the arm of arms engaged with several major American universities around federal research funding experienced, with Harvard, a partial outcome in early September 2025, with the administration returning to some of the cuts announced after a judicial challenge to the institution. The proclamation of June 2025 restricting the entry into the United States of nationals of several countries raised documented concerns about the attractiveness of the United States for international talent, including students and researchers. — However, it is difficult to establish with certainty when these lines are written.

17A more dangerous world? Establish responsibilities without diluting them

The military operation of 3 January 2026 in Venezuela, which led to the capture of Nicolás Maduro and the inauguration, two days later, of Delcy Rodríguez as interim president, illustrates the extent to which the boundary between assumed firmness and controversial use of force remains, under this presidency, particularly porous. One of the most disputed points in the security record of the period is that, as some commentators do, « the world has become more dangerous since 2017 » a global judgment which mixes, without distinguishing them, very heterogeneous evidence registers — statistics of armed conflict, risk perception indices, number of disarmament treaties denounced, frequency of direct military intervention. Each of these indicators deserves to be examined separately before any synthesis takes place, and the source file, on this specific point, does not, in fact, decide in a single sense, linking both the charge and the discharge elements rather than melting them into an premature verdict.

18After Trump: four trajectories, no certainty

What will remain of this period after the presidency is completed? The source dossier, with due care, refuses any electoral prognosis and merely outlines four strictly conditional scenarios, which should be presented as such. — work hypotheses, not predictions. A first scenario envisages partial redress of institutional breakdowns, through a gradual return of the United States to some abandoned organizations and a classical diplomatic reinvestment. A second scenario, probably the most likely in terms of the available literature on institutional dependence, provides for a substantial continuity of the guidelines undertaken. — mistrust of multilateralism, centrality of bilateral transactional —, but conducted with more predictable methods. A third, more pessimistic scenario anticipates an intensification of power politics, with a proliferation of bilateral power relations to the detriment of collective cadres. A fourth, finally, focuses on the emergence of coalitions with variable geometry between medium powers — European Union, India, African countries organized collectively — seeking to fill, each on its own scale, the vacuum left by American disengagement from certain multilateral issues.

19Conclusion: a graduated responsibility, not a single verdict

At the end of this journey through fifteen dossiers on three continents, a conclusion is required with sufficient clarity to be formulated without trembling: there is no single answer to the question « Did Trump break the international order? » — There is a mosaic of graduated responses, domain by domain, whose gross juxtaposition would cause more confusion than clarity. On multilateral institutional withdrawal, direct presidential responsibility is established with a high degree of certainty. On the weakening of Western alliances, it combines itself closely with previous dynamics and autonomous choices of the partners themselves. On the resilience of world trade and the status of the dollar, the facts partly contradict the story of a widespread systemic collapse. And on the internal functioning of American democracy, the coexistence of real institutional tensions and still active counter-powers — whose decision of the Supreme Court of February 2026 on tariffs offers a concrete and recent illustration — No binary verdict.

What this compilation work shows, in the end, is not so much « The man who broke the world » the meeting, at a precise moment in history, between a presidential method unprecedented in its degree of assumption and an international system whose structural fragility — European military underinvestment, WTO paralysis, China-US long-term tensions — largely existed upon his arrival. Understanding this encounter, without simplifying it in either direction, is probably the best compass available to anticipate what is coming — for Africa as for the rest of the world.