Enter the age of corporate-feudal warlords

As the genocidal violence unleashed on Palestinians by Israeli forces, and conflicts in places such as Yemen, Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, and Myanmar, have all been going on for many years and will continue into this year, it is not excessive to predict that the event of 2025 will be the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th President of the US at 18:00 on January 20. This will be his second coming to the tenure, and many expect it to be a second coming in the sense of the W.B. Yeats poem rather than the Christian myth.

That sense of foreboding had run through the campaign of the Democratic Party in 2024, when it had warned that a Trump victory might signify the end of American democracy. Not enough Americans were convinced, or maybe they did not care, partly due to reasons such as racism, sexism, and xenophobia, and partly also due to genuine doubts about the lack of proper democracy in the rungs of the Democratic Party itself and also genuine grievances about the rising cost of living, stagnant salaries, and perpetual wars.

However, now that Trump is back, many commentators focus on the change—for better or worse, depending on their political sympathies—that this will herald. I, however, think that the main development of 2025—or of the Trump presidency—will be the exfoliation of seeds planted by Joe Biden, the 46th President, in 2024 and further back. In that sense, Trump will not mark a change but only the culmination of extant tendencies in the US, and the most significant of these will be a further dismantling of international democratic structures and international law.

Damage done by Biden regime

The Biden regime instituted new forces to dismantle the already weak structures of international law and democracy. Actually, the tendency can be traced even further back, at least to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, orchestrated by former US President George Bush and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, with the complicity of regimes in Denmark, etc., on the basis of lies about Saddam Hussein’s “chemical weapons” and without the United Nations’ support. This was the difference between that war and the previous one when Iraq had invaded Kuwait in 1990. Regarding the 2003 invasion of Iraq by a US-led “coalition” without UN endorsement, the then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan clearly stated in 2004 that “from our point of view and the UN Charter point of view, it [the war] was illegal”.

However, the Biden administration took this American tendency much further, particularly, but not only, in its endorsement of Israeli actions in Gaza and adjoining areas. Throughout 2024, we witnessed an imperial American arm being raised in the UN Security Council to shoot down resolutions passed with an overwhelming majority by the international community. Towards the end of the year, the US was sometimes the only “Western democracy” doing this, for even its usual sidekick, the UK, had the shame to refrain on a few occasions. But the US under Biden continued with this obvious dismantling of international democracy, which was a consequence of its complicity in Israel’s total disregard for any international law in its “war” for supposed self-preservation.

US response to ICC warrants

At the end of 2024, this tendency was further heightened by the American response to decisions by the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court (ICC). On November 21, the Pre-Trial Chamber I of the ICC unanimously issued two decisions rejecting challenges by Israel and issuing warrants of arrest for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, that country’s former Defence Minister. It also issued warrants against Hamas leaders.

This was not an unusual decision. According to the ICC website, ICC judges have issued 59 arrest warrants; 21 persons have been detained in the ICC detention centre and have appeared before the court, while 30 people remain at large. The court has dropped charges against seven because of their deaths.

More memorably, on March 17, 2023, the Pre-Trial Chamber II of the ICC had issued warrants of arrest for two individuals in the context of the situation in Ukraine. One of them was Russian President Vladimir Putin. The warrant against Putin was met with loud hallelujahs in Western corridors of power, particularly in and from the US. But the US reaction to the warrant against Netanyahu was markedly different. With very few exceptions, politicians from both the Democratic and the Republican parties expressed “outrage” over the warrant, and questioned the court’s legitimacy.

White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre told newspersons: “We fundamentally reject the court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for senior Israeli officials.” The outrage was heavier on the Republican side: Senator Lindsey Graham, a crucial ally of Trump, threatened to sanction the ICC, and even US allies if they supported the warrants.

In this case, unlike the situation in the UN throughout 2024, where the opinion of the general body was repeatedly silenced by US vetoes in the elite Security Council, US politicians—both Democrats and Republicans—went further. They did not just ignore a democratic opinion at the international level and throttle it; they actually went to the extreme of dismissing the legitimacy of an international body of law and threatening to sanction it. The ball that the Biden administration has set rolling will be picked up in different ways by the Trump regime. It might be something as blatant as sanctioning the ICC, but even if it is not, it will consist of various attempts, including the most obvious one of withholding institutional fees, etc., designed to cripple the already fraught operation of law and democracy internationally.

Not many of us have forgotten that Trump in his first tenure did not come across as a great fan of the UN and other such international bodies. The dismantling of international democracy also suits the corporate interests that undergird the political world order: national democracies, no matter how flawed, are always more accountable to their voters, who mostly live within national borders, than to the logic of the global market or of free-floating capital. International democracy, or at least the possibility of it, presents similar dangers to multinational corporate interests.

‘Rough times’ ahead for UN

The IPI Global Observatory has noted that “rough times” are ahead for the UN with the return of Trump. It notes that a “confrontational stance toward the UN and multilateralism is to be expected, particularly given the nomination of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and Elise Stefanik as US Ambassador to the UN. In addition, documents such as Project 2025 and the America First Agenda already provide glimpses into what to expect over the next four years.”

Democrats will obviously blame it on the Republicans, but that will be misleading. The further dismantling of international democracy, global law, and multilateralism under Trump will only be an extension of a dominant American practice of recent decades, one followed with particular assiduity or obtuseness (depending on whether it was intentional or not) by the Biden regime. In this area again, Trump is as much the ultimate product of Democratic failures as of Republican “successes” in recent years.

Is there a silver lining? I doubt it. But some hope that where the Biden regime and the Trump regime may differ would be on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). During his first tenure, Trump had shown much scepticism about NATO, and had asked its European member-states to share a greater economic burden for their own defence.

NATO and arms spending

This time, anticipating that monetary argument, European Union nations are already reaching into their pockets. This is in keeping with the general tendency in Europe to invest more in weapons and arms, which has been one of the consequences of the Russia-Ukraine war. It is all good news for the immense arms industry, which remains the world’s and US’ biggest and most unscrutinised business.

In December 2024, Bernie Sanders, one of the few sensible politicians in the US, voted against the $895 billion defence budget. He also noted that for the seventh year in a row, the Pentagon budget had failed the national audit. What this means is that the Pentagon could not account for billions of dollars. Where had the money gone? Was anyone really looking into it and presenting an explanation to American taxpayers? Ah no, nothing like that for seven years running, according to Sanders.

Hence, it appears that the survival of NATO will depend on a greater expansion of the global arms industry, most of which, as is the case with the Pentagon’s budget, remains under-scrutinised. NATO might survive Trump, unlike what some in the Global South hope, but it will be changed even further into the policing body of the imperial and ex-colonial nations, and made even less accountable to democratic governments in the member-states.

In a world like this, led by a superpower like that, there will be many factors that will accelerate the dissolution of international law, democracy, and multilateralism in 2025. This will, then, also have regional and national consequences, which will include, as it has in recent years, the rise of autocratic national leaders, corporate-politician corruption, social inequality, conflicts, food shortages, and wars.

I think 2025 will point in that direction and it will need a real rise of political consciousness globally and nationally to present any kind of resistance to this tendency.

International democracy has never really existed substantially, but at least there have been a few institutional bodies to enable us to hope for its gradual emergence. Now, I think those bodies are going to be further weakened or dismantled. We seem to be entering a global age of corporate-feudal warlords.

Tabish Khair is an Indian novelist and academic who teaches in Denmark.