Artist Damien Mitchell’s “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle” mural can be seen just outside the Levee bar in New York City. It has been there since 2017.

The postwar world order is definitively over, at least in the West. Donald Trump and his minions of upheavalists — a new word for a raw time — are busy ripping apart alliances that have held for eighty years. You are on your own, they seem to say in unison, since America First chooses its partners only on the basis of their fealty to a papal president. As the newly elected chancellor of Germany, an old-school Christian Democrat, rightly observed, Europe could not and should not depend on the United States. That race was run. Now, a new and interdependent Europe must emerge, mindful of American new-wave isolationism.

New wave is an appropriate term since what is occurring is not merely American backpedaling into its own affairs. Instead, in keeping with nineteenth-century values, three imperial powers are eager to flex their muscles. There is America,which wishes to shut trade doors while threatening to invade Greenland and Panama on Trumpian whims. There is Israel, the ever-growing Middle East superpower, eager to spread north into Lebanon and east into the Jordan Valley. Palestinians, like migrants elsewhere, are cursed, damned, and expelled. And there is of course Russia, whose expansionist intentions have been known for more than a decade and whose leader now has a cozy relationship with Trump, as if the two men were anxious to behave like pre–World War I partners, exchanging compliments and shaking hands before allowing a great war to break out.

Trump represents a rupturing dam feeding on the adrenaline generated by breakage.

Little is surprising about these events. Trump represents a rupturing dam that feeds on the adrenaline generated by breakage. His supporters, political and otherwise, are like rubberneckers at the scene of an accident, eager to see smashed cars and broken bodies. They enjoy the process of dismantling because they have been trained to see it as constructive. The more one undoes, so they think, the more that is accomplished. If this accomplishment is in reverse, no matter. What matters is assertiveness. What matters is change. What matters is changing the name of a gulf because no one would have dared do such a thing before, let alone a president. What matters is dismissing military officers, because it makes the papal president feel like Harry Truman during the Korean War, firing controversial but beloved Douglas MacArthur, the star of Allied Pacific victories. The difference of course is that MacArthur defied Truman and earned his dismissal; he sought to bomb China when Truman had told him to avoid such attacks at all costs. Trump instead dismisses because he hates what was once called Affirmative Action, namely trying to give ranking and respected Black leaders a break. Yet again, his supporters applauded, and that applause can’t be discounted in an America bigoted from the top down.

The America that rallied around Ukraine after it was overrun by Russian troops three years ago has been relegated to a broom closet, along with NATO, now in search of an American-less identity. If Kiev is to continue fighting, it will have to rely on the likes of Germany and France, once again in pre–Great War fashion. The old order, headed by Washington, is headless, its compass, moral and practical, broken. Trump may yet sanction NATO, as he has the International Criminal Court, allowing the heads of the new imperial states to travel at will. The man named Putin is unbound, as is the man all love or hate as BiBi.

It was Yeats who famously wrote, “The center cannot hold,” summing First World War horrors and foretelling Second, but now there is no center at all. Nothing can hold.

The rough, slouching beast, also borrowed from Yeats, is all around. Asked what it is doing and why, it merely replies, “I break, therefore I am.” And thus the postwar accomplishments of rebuilding and prosperity are laid to waste. In their place, if you believe the new wave, is a casino and resort strip on the shores of Gaza. So then, gamble away.