Trump as Sultan: Sultanism and the Geopolitical Return of the Decision -from a German perspective
Trumpism is often read in Germany, also in Europe, as a domestic political aberration: as an authoritarian temptation, a populist regression, or a normative rupture with liberal democracy. This perspective narrows the view. It underestimates the fact that Trumpism represents less a domestic deviation than a response to a profound shift in the global order. Trump is not primarily the symptom of a defective democracy, but the embodiment of a world in which geopolitical competition, geo-economic instruments of power, and imperial spheres of influence are returning.The late-liberal order rested on the assumption that politics could be domesticated through rules, procedures, and multilateral institutions. This order has not collapsed, but it is exhausted—if it ever truly functioned as such. Its…