Farewell to our American friends. It's over.

JD Vance's spectacle in Munich: the end of Pax Americana

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It is tempting to fall into anti-Trump vitriol, given the spectacle his new administration has been offering the world over the past three weeks since his second inauguration. However, we must remember that he was duly re-elected in a free and fair election. Although the scale of his victory is qualified as a landslide, it is grossly exaggerated as Trump won the popular vote by a mere 1.5% and did not achieve 50% of the total vote with 49.8%. For reference, Biden won the popular vote in 2020 with a 4.5% margin over Trump at 51.3%. A shift of 120,000 votes over the three states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania would have changed the election in Harris's favour.

Nonetheless, Trump won fair and square and is entitled to implement his program. The fact that he has come out of the gates all guns blazing and is aggressively pursuing what in reality is the Project 2025 plan, contrary to his numerous pre-election assertions and promises, may come as a surprise to some Americans, in particular to some of his own voters, is not in itself disqualifying either.

It seems that most Americans went into this election with their eyes wide shut and believed the constant stream of lies and untruths that they were spoon-fed on a daily basis by the candidate himself. It comes to many observers as no surprise that the second coming of Trump is no messiah-like miracle and benediction for the incredulous and adoring masses. From the day he announced his decision to run again at Mar-a-Lago in November 2023, he let there be no doubt that this election was all about revenge and retribution. "I will be your retribution" is the cornerstone of his electoral campaign, although his aides did everything they could to temper this message, fearing that it would scare some voters away.

The additional wild card of the wealthiest man in the world, Elon Trump, rediscovering his South African roots and the political philosophy of South Africa pre-Nelson Mandela, supporting wholeheartedly Trump both with quasi-unlimited financing and a fiery, albeit somewhat quirky personal presence on the trail was enough to guarantee Trump's success. George W. Bush is well known for having given up on alcohol and his previous dissolute life to become a born-again Christian. Elon Musk trod the path in reverse by becoming a born-again Afrikaner nationalist in American attire, embracing his desire for political power and influence by hitching his wagon to Trump's neo-populist train.

The new version of Trump is as expected, unleashed, uncontrolled and free of any guardrails – ready to immediately challenge the democratic status quo in the United States to see just how far he can go in what he hopes will be his second but not last term – as he has "joked" several times over the past few weeks.

As much as the chaos and pain he is inflicting on the American people and society is distressing and a parade of horribles, each day worse than the previous day, the fact remains that it is too late for the American people to change course and complain about the decision they made barely a few months ago. The country has the government it wants, and some would say the government it deserves.

Unfortunately, for the rest of the world and in particular for the people of the countries still considered to be part of the liberal democracies of the so-called "free world" we had no say in the matter. We have to contend with a reinvigorated and revenge-seeking Donald Trump ready to start where he left off, and we all know, despite Trump's best efforts to promote "the Big Lie", his final acts in 2021 were not his finest hour.

Therein lies the rub. Europe, in particular, did not vote for Trump but is now confronted with the Trumpian tsunami of a trade war based on the new President's obsession with tariffs and an American President ready to ride roughshod over international law and recent history to satisfy his vanity. Rather than having his most extreme impulses tempered by his advisors, Trump is being egged on by his appointed group of ultra-loyalists, who have sold their souls to the devil such a long time ago that they have come full-circle and worship Trump blindly as their god-like Saviour. The new Vice President JD Vance of Hilly Billy Elegy fame is a case in point and represents the future of Trumpism: the same extremist and hateful ideology dressed up as an all-American hero, albeit with a razor-sharp mind and the advantage of youth to be able to plan long-term the durable regime change he craves in America.

It is the same JD Vance who strutted out on the stage of the Munich Security Conference in the quaint, old-fashioned Bayerischer Hof Hotel, not to address the most pressing issue of the times, i.e. the ongoing war in Ukraine, but to lecture the assembled European politicians that the greatest danger to Europe was the "enemy from within". Vance's lack of self-awareness was on full display, trying to make a joke comparing Greta Thunberg to Elon Musk (spoiler alert: there are about 220 billion reasons why this makes no sense). On a much more serious note, he had the gall to come to Munich of all places, a stone's throw away from one Prinzregenten Platz where a certain Adolf Hitler lived for many years, to emphasise the risk of the "enemies from within", to stress that in the 21st-century immigrants represented the main threat to democracy and that the European countries were guilty of becoming autocratic nations by stifling free speech and "not listening to their people".

Whilst refusing to meet the current elected Chancellor of Germany, Olaf Scholz, he instead deemed it necessary to have a meeting with Alice Weidel, the leader of Alternative für Deutschland (Afd), the right-wing neo-fascist party barely two weeks before a general election. The same Alice Weidel, who is greeted by her supporters with the chant of "Alice für Deutschland", eerily similar to the 1930 SA's slogan of "Alles für Deutschland". We are far beyond the realm of symbolism here and much more in the clear territory of election interference and poorly disguised support for right-wing extremism throughout Europe.

Once again, this must come as no surprise as birds of a feather flock together, and what is termed as Trumpism in one country is called national populism in another – the common denominator between all these denominations is their common core of good old-fashioned fascism, Prinzregentenplatz-style.

This is the reality the world is faced with, where a sitting US Vice President spends 90% of his speech attacking the allies of the United States for betraying their democratic values whilst he was elected on the same ticket as an election denier and felon who would have been forbidden to run again as an insurrectionist in most other democracies, promoting free speech at the same time when the Associated Press has been barred for the White House for the third day in a row, for refusing to adopt the new Trump given name of Gulf of America, and who finally barely mentioned Ukraine as an after-thought as if it were an irritating, misbehaved child gate crashing a formal meeting, similar to Elon Musk's four-year-old running around the Oval Office during an official press conference.

February 14th 2025, will be forever a milestone in world history, where JD Vance's choice of Valentine and his fiery diatribe clearly set the stage for the New World Order, the day when the fog lifted. The day when Europe and the erstwhile allies of the United States realised that America had ridden off into the blood-red sunset to court its new-found friends of a more similar nature, abandoning not only its allies but all its democratic values, the rule of law and humanistic principles, not only at home but abroad as well.

The new Pax Americana does not include Europe or, for that matter, Ukraine and threatens to become a Bellum Americanum instead.