The Trump era has fundamentally changed international politics. The transformation can be captured by the term disenchantment. The sociologist Max Weber used the term disenchantment to mean the process whereby the sacredness of a world, where religion was accepted unthinkingly as true, was broken by the arrival of natural science and the Enlightenment.
As scientific theories developed more convincing explanations for the material world, the pre-reflexive spell that held humans in thrall to the sacredness of the world was broken in a fundamental sense. After the Enlightenment—or so the story goes—a disenchanted humankind had to convince themselves through rational means of the veracity of religion, a process radically different from being embedded in a sacred world from birth.
Whether we accept Weber’s theory of religion and secularisation or not, the term disenchantment points to an important process through which the spell of a deeply embedded worldview is suddenly broken, and the world fundamentally changed. I believe the Trump era represents a similar fundamental break in the unfolding of international relations, as the pre-reflexive belief in the United States as the world’s benevolent hegemonic power—whatever flaws America may have—has been irreparably broken, even among Western liberal powers.
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