We are not witnessing the return of empire. We are witnessing the end of its politeness

Trump’s America has made explicit what was long implicit: power precedes principle

Opinion

By Nandini Bhautoo

For decades, the world comforted itself with the belief that imperial ambition had been consigned to history. Power, we were told, now moved through institutions rather than invasions, procedures rather than plunder. Even when states violated norms, they did so with embarrassment – through euphemism, deniability, and ritualised diplomacy. That illusion is now collapsing.

Donald Trump’s return to power has not revived imperialism; it has stripped it of its manners. What previous American administrations practised discreetly – economic coercion, territorial exceptionalism, alliance hierarchy – Trump performs openly, theatrically, and transactionally. The danger is not simply his behaviour, but what it does to the standards by which power is judged. This shift is reshaping South Asia’s most enduring fault lines – and exposing the precarity of small states like Mauritius, whose survival has long depended on the very norms now being eroded.
When seemingly the most powerful state in the world speaks casually of acquiring, invading, appropriating territory, publicly insulting allies, monetises diplomacy, and treats tariffs as instruments of humiliation rather than policy, it sends a worrying signal: coercion no longer requires justification. This is disastrous for regions like South Asia, where restraint has always been fragile and regionally problematic. These newly unleashed, undisguised neo-imperialist ambitions hold a different type of challenge for small island states like Mauritius.
Nothing reveals the double standards of the western moralising mainstream institutions more starkly than their selective outrage. When Trump threatens punitive tariffs against European economies, alarm bells ring across Brussels, Paris, and Berlin; commentators invoke trade law, alliance norms, and systemic risk, and editorials warn of systemic collapse. Yet when similar – indeed, reportedly far harsher – tariffs are imposed on Indian goods, the response is muted. There is no equivalent invocation of the “rules-based order,” no sustained alarm over precedent.

The implication is unmistakable: coercion becomes a crisis only when it touches the West. For India, this reinforces a long-standing structural reality. It is expected to absorb pressure quietly, to uphold norms even when they are unevenly applied, and to remain strategically “responsible” in a system that increasingly rewards blunt power. This asymmetry weakens universalism and strengthens the logic of strategic autonomy – not just for India, but across the Global South.

The consequences are even starker for small states.

Mauritius offers a textbook case. Its decades-long struggle over the Chagos Archipelago was a rare post-colonial success story achieved by the book: international law, UN resolutions, an ICJ advisory opinion, and painstaking diplomacy. The eventual UK-Mauritius agreement preserved Western security interests while restoring sovereignty in principle. Trump’s abrupt denunciation of that deal – and his implied willingness to reopen it – reveals how fragile such victories are in an age of imperial candour. What changed was not the legality of Mauritius’s claim, but the political mood in which legality operates. For small island states like ours, power lies in international law, multilateral consensus, reputational legitimacy, and procedural persistence.

When a dominant power treats sovereignty as negotiable and legal process as expendable, it nullifies the paradigms of international diplomacy and returns us almost to a pre-modern imbalance of power. Trump’s defenders argue that blunt realism merely reflects how the world has always worked. But this misses the point. For a lot of these keyboard warriors, historical amnesia or the global failures of the education system have silenced some stark truths – that the economic take off of all western nations was based upon the plunder of the rest of the world – a fact carefully still hidden from the mainstream.

If the post-1945 order functioned, it was not because power disappeared, but because power was ritualised. Hypocrisy, paradoxically, acted as restraint. By removing shame, Trump lowers the cost of aggression for others. China no longer needs to pretend that its territorial ambitions in Asia are defensive; it can call it interest-assertion. Pakistan can normalise occupation as “ground reality.” Small states can be told that law matters only insofar as it aligns with the convenience of power.
For small states like Mauritius, survival lies in density, dense diplomatic networks, regional embedding, issue-linkage across climate, trade, and security, and ensuring that any violation triggers multiple stakeholders simultaneously. Isolation is fatal; entanglement is protection.

We are not witnessing the return of empire. We are witnessing the end of its politeness. Trump’s America has made explicit what was long implicit: power precedes principle. For small island states, it exposes a dangerous truth: legality without power is fragile unless collectively defended. The task ahead is not to abandon norms, but to re-anchor them in coalitions, endurance, and strategic clarity. In a world that has lost patience for pretence, restraint must be rebuilt – not through illusions of benevolence, but through the hard work of making coercion costly again.

The real crisis, then, is not that rules are broken – but that only some breaches are deemed worthy of concern.

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 23 January 2026