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 institutions and the narrative surrounding them persist, yet their capacity for enforcement is eroding. The result is a structural deficit of sovereignty. It is precisely into this vacuum that Trumpism steps.

Post-democracy therefore does not merely mean the gradual hollowing out of democratic procedures, but their strategic impotence in a world of hard competition. While liberal politics continues to argue in normative terms, the international order has long since returned to power politics. Spheres of influence are being redefined, supply chains politicized, currencies and energy flows weaponized. Geo-economics replaces faith in free trade; geopolitics displaces universalism.

Trump is the first Western politician to acknowledge this reality not rhetorically, but performatively. His political style is not programmatic, but decisionist. It is not based on long-term adherence to rules, but on situational decision. It is precisely here that Trumpism connects with Carl Schmitt’s insight that every order ultimately rests on a decision that cannot be derived from norms. The decisionist reservation returns—not as theory, but as practice.

This practice is personalized. Trump does not act as the executor of an abstract raison d’état, but as the embodiment of decision-making power. This is where the concept of sultanism comes into play, which Wolfgang Merkel has proposed to describe Trump’s style of governance. Sultanism does not mean dictatorship, but the overlaying of institutional order by personal power. Institutions remain in place, but lose their autonomous authority. Loyalty replaces procedure, proximity replaces rule-binding, persona replaces program.

This mode of rule unfolds its true logic in foreign policy. Where liberal governments rely on consensus, legitimacy, and multilateral coordination, sultanist decisionism operates through assertion, signaling, and rupture. Foreign policy becomes a stage on which sovereignty is demonstrated.

The iconic images of Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office are exemplary in this regard. They do not show negotiations among equals, but a scene of decision. Zelenskyy does not primarily confront an institution, but a person who in fact decides on exception, support, or distance. It is not treaties that structure the moment, but power. The Oval Office becomes a geopolitical switchboard, not an administrative unit.

In this context, the return of classical doctrines of spheres of influence must also be understood. The Monroe Doctrine, long regarded as a historical artifact, once again functions as an implicit organizing principle of American power, as also reflected in the new U.S. security strategy. It no longer operates as a solemn declaration, but as a latent reservation: as a decision that can be invoked at any time not to tolerate external influence in the Western Hemisphere.

The military punitive action against the regime of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela must be understood precisely in this sense. It is neither primarily motivated by human rights nor by democracy promotion. It is an act of geopolitical self-assertion. Venezuela functions here not as an isolated case, but as a stage. The action is directed not only against Caracas, but against competing powers—against Chinese, Russian, and Iranian ambitions for influence in America’s immediate sphere.

At the same time, this intervention has a clearly recognizable geo-economic dimension. Venezuela possesses the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Its oil industry was largely built by American companies in the twentieth century and made the country one of the wealthiest states in Latin America until the 1980s. The nationalization under Hugo Chávez in the early 2000s amounted in practice to expropriation; the ideologically driven politicization of the energy sector and the subsequent mismanagement under Nicolás Maduro led to its systematic destruction.

Current U.S. policy therefore aims not only at drawing power-political boundaries, but at the possibility of geo-economic revitalization. Restoring functional production structures, reintegration into international energy markets, and the return of technological and organizational expertise would not only stabilize Venezuela, but once again open up economic prospects. Such a development would benefit the country itself—and with it the seven to eight million Venezuelans who fled the socialist collapse of the state and would only have a real prospect of return under conditions of economic normality.

The military measure is thus not an isolated act of violence, but part of a strategic policy of order. It marks a boundary, but at the same time opens a space of possibility. This is precisely the decisionist character of the action: it replaces abstract programs with concrete acts, moral appeals with strategic options.

Trumpism operates here not as an ideological project, but as order-building through decision. The message is not: we defend universal values. It is: we exercise power to establish order where order has collapsed. Legitimacy does not arise from consent, but from enforceability and effect.

Against this background, the widespread attempt to label Trumpism as “fascist” reveals itself less as analysis than as a malicious political misreading. It springs from a left-wing moralism that reflexively pathologizes every decisionist exercise of power because it lies outside the liberal framework of justification. This attribution explains nothing—it serves to reassure those who can now think of power only in normative terms.

Trumpism thus marks a rupture. It stands for the transition from a normatively regulated world order to a decisionist order of competing sovereignties. It is the expression of a political reality in which spheres of influence, power projection, and geo-economic steering once again become action-guiding.

As political realists, we Germans have no reason to complain about this, but rather to take this reality seriously and deal with it. What is required is not moral outrage, but strategic clarity. In a world of decisions, Germany too will not be judged by what it explains, but by whether—and for what—it is itself prepared to decide, according to its own interests.