Coordination without Washington

Empires rarely receive a formal resignation letter from history. What they encounter instead is a subtler mutation: the moment when obedience quietly reorganises itself into coordination — without them in the room. 

The recent Munich Security Conference offered an unusually empirical glimpse into this transition, becoming an open admission that Europe can no longer count on the old guarantees. As a result, Europeans have been thrust into the throes of a tortured process of introspection, self-doubt and recrimination. 

Rarely has Europe’s confidence in itself and its place in the world been so thoroughly pulverised in a matter of a few months.

At first, it appeared to be mere diplomatic friction between Washington and its traditional allies. However, it soon became clear that it reflected an emerging disjuncture between the inherited architecture of Western-led institutions and the contemporary distribution of productive capacity. 

Observers warn it was far from another passing flare-up of transatlantic tension, which has become a hallmark of the Trump era. In an arresting phrase, Munich’s own report warned that the international system has entered “a period of wrecking-ball politics”, a world in which rules and norms were increasingly upended by great-power rivalry.

During the Cold War, and even into the post-2008 era, European elites could treat deviations in US policy as episodic anomalies (Iraq, Afghanistan, Trump I). However, a second Trump presidency transforms unilateralism from accident into pattern. 

A CNN’s description of Democrats attending Munich almost as supplicants, reassuring European leaders that America might “come back to its original form”, illustrates something profound. The postwar order functioned because US leadership was experienced as temporally stable. 

Once partners begin to think in generational timelines (“it’s going to take generations before they feel comfortable”), leadership stops being a structural fact and becomes an electoral variable.

Meanwhile, debates over Taiwan, where even rising Democratic figures appear hesitant to articulate clear red lines, reveal the growing disjunction between US global commitments and domestic political consensus. The working-class critique voiced at the conference (“those institutions… have failed to deliver”) is especially telling. It suggests that the legitimacy crisis of the post-1945 order is no longer confined to the Global South but has returned to the metropole itself.

Meanwhile, Focaldata’s analysis of voting patterns in the United Nations General Assembly brings that shift into sharper focus. At first glance, these votes are often dismissed as little more than symbolic theatre, gestures performed for diplomatic record rather than decisive consequence. However, a closer reading reveals a different logic at work.

States vote in accordance with the logistical realities of their integration into the world economy, including infrastructure dependencies, trade corridors, debt exposures, industrial upgrading strategies, technological partnerships and security arrangements. 

Therefore, when long-standing US partners such as Germany, Japan, Canada or the United Kingdom begin voting less consistently with Washington, even while remaining formally embedded within NATO, it is an adjustment to altered systemic incentives. 

Many Western observers now concede that Europe no longer sees the United States as a reliable partner, reflecting the dawning realisation that durable leadership requires more than shared history. 

For much of the post-1945 era, these two were effectively joined at the hip. The United States occupied the commanding heights of global capitalism as the primary source of capital formation, technological innovation and security guarantee. Alignment with US diplomatic positions was therefore rational because access to markets, liquidity and security flowed through American institutional architectures, including from Bretton Woods financial systems and transatlantic defence arrangements. 

‘A veto-wielding dissenter'

However, Trump’s second-term revival of “America First” is fast-tracking its withdrawal from the very multilateral institutionalism that historically translated US material dominance into procedural consensus. 

When Washington increasingly opposes resolutions on climate governance, humanitarian protection or migration, it stops functioning as the coordinator of a rules-based order and instead assumes the posture of a veto-wielding dissenter within it. 

To many across the pond, the US appears more as a disruptive “wrecking ball” within the former order. 
China, by contrast, has not sought to displace this order by an ideological “counter-hegemony”. 

Rather, over the past three decades, it has constructed parallel institutional channels that operate through infrastructural participation rather than doctrinal convergence. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) are paradigmatic as they integrate partner economies into logistical and financial circuits without demanding a creed. 

It is worth noting that the most consequential finding in the voting data is not that China’s diplomatic “bloc” has grown, but that it has held firm while the US's strong alignment has declined precipitously under Trump. A distributed network of trade and development linkages is inherently more resilient than a bloc structure predicated on unified ideological discipline or hegemonic bullying.

Scenes from Munich further revealed that the shift was being acknowledged at the core of the Atlantic alliance itself. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s acknowledgement of “confidential” nuclear deterrence talks with France signals a civilisational firewall being tested. 

Speaking anonymously to the American monthly magazine The Nation, one senior Democratic staff member described what was happening between the United States and Europe as a long divorce, “where Vance’s message last year was one partner storming out of the room, while Rubio’s return this year was a more measured message in front of the divorce court”.

At the same time, some Western officials are candidly acknowledging that recent US rhetoric has deepened Europe’s doubts. Brookings analyst Constanze Stelzenmüller noted that Secretary Rubio’s Munich speech sent a stark message: it effectively identified Europe’s rising nationalist parties as Washington’s preferred partners. 

The “real West” in Europe, Rubio implied, are not the old centrist mainstream but the hard-right nationalist bloc, a line which, Stelzenmüller observes, shocked many European audiences. 

Chancellor Merz himself felt compelled to publicly rebuff this direction, explicitly warning that Europe would not follow the United States into a transatlantic “MAGA culture war”.

“Europe,” Merz declared, “has ended a long break from world history,” now navigating a world order “openly characterised by great-power politics”. He stopped short of writing off the US entirely, but stressed that “a sovereign Europe is our best answer to the new era,” and that “uniting and strengthening Europe is our most important task today”. 

In Merz’s formulation, the era of asking permission from across the Atlantic has given way to urgent operational autonomy: “strategic autonomy” has shifted from a vague ambition into an imperative

Such reactions underscore how greatly the story has changed.

As global production shifts geographically, diplomatic influence tends to migrate accordingly. 

Over the past three decades, manufacturing output, infrastructure investment and technological innovation have progressively migrated toward East and Southeast Asia. The economic base of the international system has moved, and the superstructure of alliances, norms and voting blocs is now adjusting to that altered base. 

Projections that the global “centre of gravity” may shift toward China by the late 2030s are therefore not mystical. They are extrapolations from differential growth rates, infrastructure diffusion and the networked nature of 21st-century capitalism. The fast-growing economies of the world are clustering within frameworks increasingly tied to Asia’s factories and financiers. As that happens, even UN voting alignment becomes a trailing indicator of economic orientation.

Leadership within the capitalist world economy tends to track where productive capacity lies. The postwar “infrastructure of alignment” — markets, trade regimes, development banks — was built around US centrality. As economic gravity diffuses, those alignments are recalibrating accordingly.
Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is instructive here. Durable leadership depends not only on coercive capability but on the capacity to universalise particular interests as common sense. The postwar liberal order functioned insofar as American leadership appeared materially beneficial and predictably administered.

As domestic inequality within advanced capitalist states intensifies and US foreign policy becomes increasingly volatile across electoral cycles, that perception of reliability weakens. The ideological glue binding alliance systems begins to dissolve, prompting partners to pursue hedging strategies — strategic autonomy, diversified financing arrangements, and engagement with alternative development partners.

Therefore, the contemporary moment represents not simply a redistribution of power but a legitimacy crisis within the institutional architecture of US hegemony.

“The international order based on rights and rules is in the process of being destroyed,” Merz said in his speech. “This order – imperfect even its best times – no longer exists in this form.”