Hope out of chaos: how the dark era of Trump is creating a new approach to global politics

Key points

• Antonio de Aguiar Patriota, Brazil’s ambassador to London, had no difficulty joining the dystopians describing the modern world in a recent speech, a world suffering from “global warming and environmental degradation, multiple conflicts, rising military budgets, disregard for international law and international humanitarian law, disruptions to trade, erosion of democratic governance and technological developments that are met with excitement and fear”.
• Yet beneath the surface, he said, “something is happening.
• Something is moving.” The change Patriota could detect in “the global north” was a new division into “two poles, a unilateralist superpower on the one hand and a majority of multilateralists on the other”.
• “The highly unpopular and illegal war in Iran is fast becoming a vivid example of the chaos and instability bred by unilateralism,” he said.
• “It is laying bare a perception that the world will not be made unipolar again.” The argument that the current dark era...