This narrative is comforting because it reduces everything to one man’s temperament. If we just wait him out, the familiar rules-based order will supposedly return.

But what if we are misreading the moment entirely? What if this is not madness but the brutal unveiling of a coherent logic, a structural rupture far deeper than any single personality?

Beneath the noise lies a colder truth: The post-war liberal order was a historical anomaly: a brief window when the hegemon underwrote global stability for its own benefit. Today, facing a rising China and decades of allied free-riding, the US is rationally discarding that burden. “America First” is not an aberration; it is a reversion to the harsh reality of international politics, where power, not rules, remains the only reliable currency.

Yet realism alone cannot explain the sheer velocity of the disruption. Something more dynamic is at work.

Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction”, the gale that obliterates obsolete industries to birth innovative ones, offers a sharper lens. Economists like Philippe Aghion, Peter Howitt and Joel Mokyr have formalized this process: sustained growth demands not preservation of the status quo but relentless competition, institutional openness and the deliberate displacement of outdated systems. Their work proves that monopolistic stagnation must be shattered for progress to resume.

In geopolitics, therefore, “America First” emerges as exactly that gale. It is systematically dismantling the 20th-century liberal order, an order that had grown inefficient, fostering fragile supply chains, strategic dependency and complacency. That system was a horse-and-buggy relic in a hypersonic world. Tariffs, threats and transactional diplomacy are not tantrums; they are the demolition tools clearing space for whatever comes next.