The US action in Venezuela has led to a flurry of punditry asserting that the Trump Administration is bringing into being a new world based on the open assertion of raw, great power state interest and the emergence of spheres of influence and hegemony. I think a world of that nature is emerging. I don’t think Trump is the instigator of it, tho. Rather, he is a product of its emergence. The world it is replacing is one which has pertained since 1989, and was a place in which the US enjoyed more or less unrivalled dominance, its European allies complacently took this for granted, and powers outside of this sphere schemed and planned but could do little to challenge US primacy.

That world brought with it as a by product a trans-national elite of people who relied on US strength to underpin their world, but who pursued a politics of unreality, based on the notion of the replacement of power and interest by a new world of ‘international law,’ universal human rights, a universal commonality of interests (making feasible the notion of mass immigration from vastly different cultures) and a taboo on the use of military force.

This politics of unreality, which relied in the end on US hard power but which in an infantile way denied this, brought into being a vast cultural penumbra which has dominated the public and political discussion in the west over the last two or three decades.

I think this elite and its assumptions looks set to be the main casualty of the emergent world. The US over the last 15 years has shown that it has no interest in continuing to endlessly underwrite the illusions of this elite. Rather, facing the emergence of peer and near-peer competitors, against whom it must organize to defend its own realm, it is producing a nationalist reaction, at once narrower in scope but often of necessity more assertive in action than the previous, hegemonic, imperial style order.

The Ukraine war was a watershed moment in revealing this new reality. European countries now face the option of swift re-armament, or the real possibility that they may have no choice but to accept the diktats of a threatening, superior military power to their east. The countries of western Europe, during the years in which the above mentioned illusions held sway, imported large populations which have no loyalty to the host country. These populations, in alliance with the children and remaining adherents of the above mentioned politics of illusion, will seek to make impossible the decisions needed to make western Europe defendable in the period ahead. It’s not clear which side will win in this. From an analytical point of view, this is a fascinating process to watch. Not so pleasant to live it, of course.

From the Israeli and Jewish point of view, the emergence of this new world state of affairs is not so bad. The last time the world entered an age of iron (a very different moment to ours, by the way), in the 1930s and 1940s, this brought catastrophe to the Jewish People. But in those days, of course, the Jews were without the essential instrument required for traversing such times, namely a militarily and economically powerful state. This is no longer the case. Thanks to the efforts and sacrifices of several generations, and with some caveats, thanks to a realistic conduct of its affairs, the Jewish state today stands as the military and economic superior of all its rivals, and therefore as a worthwhile and powerful ally in the eyes of those of its neighbors not hostile to it for religious or ideological reasons. In a world shorn of the existence of a paternalist hegemon which made possible the growth of illusions in the way a powerful father can enable his children to believe in fairies, the possession of statehood, a powerful military, a strong economy, a nuclear capacity, and a durable national and religious ethos behind them are the essential tools needed for successfully traversing the current moment. Israel has these.

Lastly, an interesting by-product of the above mentioned politics of unreality, and in particular of its odd embrace and romanticization of the Muslim and Arab worlds, was an unbridled hostility to Israel and often to Jews on the part of its adherents. This was to be found in its most notable form among that class of people who staffed the trans-national institutions that formed the organizational expression of the politics of illusion – the UN, the vast NGO bureaucracy, and so on. The eclipse of the hegemonic world which allowed these structures to grow will likely lead to a decline in that particular variant of anti-Jewish sentiment, a particularly hypocritical and nauseous variant, which grew with them.

The current evidence would suggest, however, the Jewish place in human consciousness being apparently what it is, that the current changes will not lead to the disappearance of irrational hostility to the Jews. Rather this apparently eternal phenomenon can already be seen to be mutating into forms appropriate to the new world now coming into being. From this point of view, once again, the possession by the Jews of territory, and a nuclear armed state with a powerful economic engine and a locally peerless military will remain the most appropriate shield, in the coming period as in the previous one.