This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on February 24, 2025 - March 2, 2025

As the tsunami of earth-shaking executive orders bursts out of US President Donald Trump’s Oval Office, the world tries to stay upright. Our legs seem rubbery though. Now we know what collective vertigo feels like.

For now, the shock is greatest for Washington’s closest allies. Learning from his ineffectual first term, Trump had apparently realised that reforms of any colour are a revolutionary undertaking. You hit fast and furious, you hit to shock and awe, and you hit below the belt whenever necessary. Also, as all bullies know, the easiest victims are those closest to them.

But the trouble for a reformist revolutionary though, is that he does not know where he will succeed and where he will not. It is a gamble. He throws the dice as quickly as he can, and hopes for some rationality in the randomness, for some method in the madness, and for some pattern to appear from the chaos.

What the rest of the world fears, especially small nations, is their own political resilience. How long can they survive the chaos, uncertainty and commotion? Elephants can survive long battles, the deer at their feet cannot.

Tariffs and sanctions are one thing, but the moral shifts that will clearly undermine American soft power, and the ability of the US to maintain a rules-based order, are much more interesting to watch. The latter are a writing on the wall; the former are just flavours of the day, distractions.

In Southeast Asia, the first weeks of Trump 2.0 are something to approach with a mix of disbelief and schadenfreude; the first because we know that power depends on predictability, which is missing at the moment, and the second because rule-setters are as much despised for their hypocrisy as they are revered for their power.

In the thick of all this, a country like Malaysia will need to identify what its weaknesses and strengths are, how the present world order will be carrying out damage control, and what succeeding world order is possible and desirable.

Already before Trump 2.0 began this year, Malaysia had made global gestures to demonstrate dissatisfaction with Pax Americana, through its traditional support of the Palestinian cause and through its wish to be a member of BRICS, among others.

It has been clear to many discerning analysts that Malaysia’s long-term political discourse based on interracial and interfaith divisions is a cul-de-sac. It is a dead end. It can only lead towards a bankruptcy in ideas and purpose, and a preference for coercion over cooperation.

The gigantic shifts in geopolitics and geo-economics in recent years should cause a country like Malaysia to give pause, and to reconsider what it is as a country, what path it can take given the nature of the big powers it has to deal with, and what role it has in the future of humanity.

First of all, it has to consider its essence as a nation state. Was Malaysia born out of a democratic passion from within, or was it a result of colonial damage control, of British power retreating effectively and self-servingly? The answer lies somewhere in between, I assume.

Second, why was Malaysia constructed as a federation? Twice over. Was it just a means to an end, the end being a centralised state, as someone like Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad would surely have thought? Or is the federalist model a sincere expression of the essence of Malaysian society, not to be meddled with? On that last front, we do see that practically all countries end up, or seek to end up, as de facto federal entities.

Third, all countries in the region took their modern shape during the Cold War. What was this Cold War in essence? Was this something that could end? Is socialism something whose objectives can be ignored? The First World War did not end, leading as it did to the Second World War, and the jury is still out on whether the Second World War is really over or not. Most saliently, with the rise of Trump and the polarisation of the American population, it is hard today to declare that the American Civil War did cease in 1865.

Beginnings and endings may be illusory in history. In fact, whatever patterns we observe from the past should not coax us into thinking that they will repeat themselves, and that we are imprisoned by powerful iterative forces. We should instead understand these, and learn to sidestep or neutralise them. We do not have to be prisoners of the past. Not always.

What seems to be the inevitable key subject of discussion in the coming years is “power”.

The Make America Great Again (Maga) movement that Trump now fronts seems to be about, paradoxically, focusing on the US as a nation state, not a global hegemon. Perhaps this is a rowdy acceptance on the part of the American people of the multipolar reality that had crept in over the last two decades.

Is the Trump phenomenon America’s way of retreating from being a global hegemon to being just a powerful nation state? Are its foreign policies damage-­control policies, and are its domestic politics typically polarising the way nation-building processes often are?

In the longer historical perspective, did the US get drawn into becoming Britannia 2.0 in the 1940s, stalling the American nation-building and the American Dream? Furthermore, fighting communism made it believe that any society-building is socialism, and therefore a taboo. Thus, its nation-building was put into cold storage.

What looms ahead, behind the Trump tsunami of executive orders is the possibility — and probability — of a multipolar world. To the extent that the US begins to act like a nation state, no matter how chaotically, a multipolar world becomes more possible. The other poles, apart from China, are all emergent to some degree. The Muslim world should coalesce around certain powers, be this Turkey or Saudi Arabia or Iran. Africa would have its regional centres of influence, Latin America has Brazil as the main drummer for the march of BRICS, India appears unstoppable at the moment. Europe should regain its voice — or voices — sooner or later.

Southeast Asia is in fact a place to watch closely. It will have many de facto middle powers, and Asean promises to be the vehicle that enhances possibilities for all its member states.

Indeed, region-building should matter a lot to Malaysia, mainly because its nation-building is also in a cul-de-sac. It needs some balloons to fly out of the dead end its neglect of federalism and regionalism has steered it into.

Datuk Dr Ooi Kee Beng is the executive director of Penang Institute and senior visiting fellow at ISEAS — Yusof Ishak Institute. He is the award-winning author of The Reluctant Politician: Tun Dr Ismail and His Time (ISEAS 2007) and founder-editor of Penang Monthly and ISEAS Perspective. His other impactful books include The Eurasian Core and Its Edges: Dialogues with Wang Gungwu on the History of the World (ISEAS 2016). Web page: wikibeng.com.

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