Trump was right.

Trump was right

The G20 in Johannesburg proceeded without the United States. Trump absented himself citing tensions with South Africa, Xi Jinping sent a second-tier delegation, other leaders discovered more pressing domestic urgencies. The event carried on regardless, with South Africa declaring serenely: "the world can move on without the US."

Here emerges the paradox no one wishes to confront: Trump is correct that the G20 is largely ineffective theatre. Yet in publicly demolishing this theatre, we are discovering how costly it is to lose even the fiction of global coordination.

The question only some can afford

Why can Trump conduct this institutional reality test whilst the European Union cannot? It is not a matter of courage or leadership. It is pure structural asymmetry.

The United States possesses what option theory terms a credible outside option. They can exit multilateral frameworks because they have functioning alternatives: consolidated bilateral relationships, military supremacy requiring no collective approval, the dollar as reserve currency, a domestic market sufficiently large to absorb short-term shocks. Two oceans as natural moat complete the picture.

The European Union holds none of these cards. It depends on NATO for security, has land borders with zones of instability, requires multilateral frameworks to manage trade and migration. Its very identity is built on multilateralism as antidote to the nationalism that devastated it in the twentieth century. It cannot "exit" coordination systems because it would not exist outside them.

This is pure institutional economics: those who built the system and possess alternatives can defect. Those who depend on the system to exist must defend it even when dysfunctional. Europe is structurally trapped into sustaining institutions it knows to be ineffective, because the alternative is the collapse of its global relevance.

The theatre concealing operational infrastructure

The G20 has no formal charter, issues no binding decisions, possesses no enforcement mechanisms. It is essentially a media opportunity where joint communiqués are produced that rarely translate into concrete actions. Trump has simply made explicit what was evident: when the United States fails to appear, nothing dramatic occurs.

Yet there exists a layer beneath the theatre we are losing sight of. These summits, however ineffective at producing policy, maintained a network of relationships, informal communication channels, tacit knowledge of how to coordinate during genuine crises. It is not so much the formal meeting that matters, as the fact that a coordination infrastructure existed always active in the background.

When you publicly demolish the legitimacy of these institutions, you lose not merely the theatre. You lose the institutional memory of how to conduct global coordination when it genuinely matters. It is rather like ceasing evacuation drills because "there will never be a real fire", technically true until it is not.

The historical analogy that withstands scrutiny is the League of Nations in the Thirties. It still formally existed, leaders still convened, documents were still produced. But everyone knew that when it truly mattered, Ethiopia, Spain, Czechoslovakia, it was irrelevant. There was no need to formally "demolish" it. Simply no one used it anymore for decisions that counted. By the time a crisis arrived requiring genuine coordination, the capacity had already evaporated.

Brazil's reality test

There exists, however, an illuminating counter-example in this story: Lula defeated Trump on the tariff battleground, and his model reveals something important.

July 2025: Trump threatens 50% tariffs on Brazil, demands the government halt proceedings against Bolsonaro, deploys the full weight of American economic power as cudgel. Lula holds firm. "We do not want an emperor, we are sovereign nations." He refuses to bend, maintains judicial proceedings, signals willingness for reciprocal tariffs.

Late July: Trump grants significant exemptions on key Brazilian products. Bloomberg headlines: "Lula's defiance pays dividends as Trump backs down."

Why did it function? Applied behavioural economics: the United States runs a trade surplus with Brazil, not a deficit. American firms require Brazilian aircraft, orange juice, coffee, steel. Domestic pressure exceeded ideological posturing. Lula had genuine skin in the game, needed to defend judicial sovereignty, whilst Trump was bluffing for a political ally.

The model for middle powers is clear: do not capitulate immediately, verify whether the bluff has substance, maintain alternatives ready, hold position when your interests are existential whilst the other party's are performative. Yet how many leaders will possess the structural context and political capital to replicate this?

The hidden costs of delegitimisation

The "emperor has no clothes" moment carries consequences beyond the immediate. When Trump states publicly "this is a waste of time" and other leaders discover they can say the same without immediate consequences, what collapses is not merely the institution's effectiveness but its symbolic legitimacy.

The G20 functioned through consensus ritual rather than concrete outputs. "Leaders have met" conferred legitimacy on subsequent policies. "Dialogue has occurred" created perception of progress. "Joint communiqué" signalled alignment. This symbolic capital held real value in reducing friction in subsequent interactions.

That capital is now burnt. And in burning reveals how fragile it already was. The problem is we are losing coordination capacity before constructing functioning alternatives. It is a transition period where the old has died but the new is not yet born, as Gramsci observed, and in this interregnum monsters appear.

China is already selectively filling created vacuums. Not through conspiracy but through pure governance logic: if the United States exits the WHO cutting 18% of the budget, someone must compensate. Who pays, commands. Research priorities, data flows, staff recruitment, all realigns towards whoever finances. One need not be pro-Chinese to see this creates structural dependence on Beijing in areas where previously there existed at least pluralism of influences.

The bill that will arrive

Over the next 18-24 months we shall have the empirical test of this grand wager. If American bilateral alternatives function better than multilateral coordination, Trump will have demonstrated strategic correctness. If instead a crisis emerges, pandemic, financial, climatic, requiring rapid coordination and we discover the channels have rusted, costs will be exponentially higher than the sum we saved by not paying quotas to "ineffective" institutions.

My clinical prediction, falsifiable: we shall see a hybrid and costly outcome. Some functions will be partially substituted by bilateral agreements. Others will visibly degrade, especially disease surveillance and early warning systems. There will be at least one event of missed or delayed detection with significant consequences. And when the next genuine crisis arrives, we shall discover that rebuilding coordination capacity during emergency is far costlier than maintaining it in reserve.

Institutions surviving beyond 75 years accumulate tacit knowledge difficult to replicate swiftly. It is not that "WHO good, G20 good." It is that coordination memory requires decades to develop and minutes to atrophy. The 2008 financial crisis proved manageable because G20 communication infrastructure already existed. COVID was a coordination disaster but at least basic channels functioned. The next pandemic with WHO hollowed and the United States disconnected? Rebuilding from scratch during crisis means exponentially greater costs.

Beyond easy narratives

It is crucial not to slip into simplistic readings. This is not "wicked Trump demolishing good order." It is "institution that failed performance test during COVID" meets "superpower with asymmetric alternatives" meets "domestic populism rewarding institutional defiance."

Nor is it "multilateralism dead." It is "this type of multilateralism, consensus ritual without enforcement, dead." New forms will emerge, more flexible, more results-oriented, probably more regional and issue-specific. But the transition will prove costly and some will lose capacities they shall not recover.

Above all: do not confuse symbolic legitimacy with operational capacity. The G20 possessed little of the former and even less of the latter. Yet publicly demolishing even the little that existed without having alternatives ready is to wager we shall not require global coordination in the near future.

History suggests this is a wager that rarely pays.

The approaching test

Trump is inadvertently conducting an experiment that will answer a fundamental question: were the post-war multilateral institutions zombies consuming resources without producing value, or were they critical infrastructure masked as ineffective theatre?

The answer will not come from television debates or research centres. It will come from reality when it presents the bill. A pandemic spreading more swiftly because WHO channels have degraded. A financial crisis escalating because the G20 no longer exists as credible forum. A climate shock striking multiple regions simultaneously without coordination of response.

Or alternatively, we shall discover that bilateral agreements function better, that flexibility defeats bureaucracy, that small coalitions of the willing produce more results than large consensus machines.

Epistemic honesty requires admitting: we do not yet know. Trump is accelerating an experiment that was probably inevitable given global power shifts and accumulated institutional sclerosis. We can only observe, document the patterns, and prepare for both scenarios.

Yet one thing is already clear: demolishing the theatre is easy. Rebuilding coordination capacity when genuinely needed is damnably difficult. And discovering you have destroyed critical infrastructure thinking it merely scenery? That is the sort of error one pays for across decades.