Jakarta should stop begging Washington to be nice

The world is reeling from the return of United States President Donald Trump’s “America First.” Analysts rush to label it chaos, an impulsive, predatory doctrine that shreds alliances, slaps arbitrary tariffs and plunges the globe into a dog-eat-dog anarchy. Allies tremble, adversaries recalibrate and everyone braces for a leader who seems to govern by instinct rather than strategy.

This narrative is comforting because it reduces everything to one man’s temperament. If we just wait him out, the familiar rules-based order will supposedly return.

But what if we are misreading the moment entirely? What if this is not madness but the brutal unveiling of a coherent logic, a structural rupture far deeper than any single personality?

Beneath the noise lies a colder truth: The post-war liberal order was a historical anomaly: a brief window when the hegemon underwrote global stability for its own benefit. Today, facing a rising China and decades of allied free-riding, the US is rationally discarding that burden. “America First” is not an aberration; it is a reversion to the harsh reality of international politics, where power, not rules, remains the only reliable currency.