CNN
 — 

Luis Ibáñez Jiménez was driving on a highway in east Madrid when Spain lost power.

“Suddenly, there were no traffic lights,” the resident of the capital told CNN. Cars piled up, and nobody had right of way. “I was stopping so that people could pass… I saw a massive bus coming, and I had to accelerate a lot to go past it,” he said. “It was a bit of a jungle.”

Jiménez had just seen his entire country’s electrical supply wiped out in a matter of seconds. The lights went out in cities, villages, airports and train stations; computer screens and payment terminals shut to black in an instant. Confusion and concern coursed through Spain and Portugal. And for officials in the two countries, a race was sparked against the setting sun.

It was a battle the neighboring nations would lose. Several hours would pass until power was meaningfully restored; by nightfall, families gathered in candlelight and exchanged stories from a remarkable Monday.

“It was definitely one of the weirdest days of my life,” said Jiménez, a 29-year-old chief operating officer for a vocational training provider.

The outage was baffling, and a day later, remains unexplained. In the space of five seconds, 15 gigawatts of energy suddenly dropped from Spain’s supply, Spanish government sources told CNN – equivalent to 60% of the electricity being consumed at the time – and the entire Spanish grid collapsed as a result.

Virtually all energy had finally been restored by Tuesday morning, but confusion is still pulsing through Spain. “The investigation into the causes is ongoing,” a government source said. “All hypotheses remain open, and more details will emerge in the coming hours.”

Chaos, confusion and cash payments

Alanna Gladstone, a 40-year-old film editor, had landed in Portugal’s capital, Lisbon, on a flight from New York hours before the outage. She checked into her Airbnb and took a nap; by the time she woke up, the technology that the country takes for granted had gone dark.

“I didn’t know what was going on,” the New Yorker said. She went out looking for supplies, with two euros and 10 US dollars to her name.

“There was a bit of a pandemonium, and a bit of a frenzied energy,” Gladstone told CNN. Supermarkets were closed, so lines snaked through the street into fruit markets, where shopper after shopper was told they couldn’t pay with cards.

It took some time before Spanish and Portuguese people understood the scale of what was happening. “People were asking: is this hacking from Russia? Is this an act of terrorism?” Gladstone said.

Ellie Kenny, a holidaymaker inside Lisbon’s Humberto Delgado airport, said hundreds of people were stood in the dark in lines, with no air conditioning or running water. Shops were only accepting cash, she told CNN.

Hours later, with the power still out and the working day ending, people were adjusting to a strange new reality. Police officers directed traffic with hand signals. Major cities were clogged with traffic, and pavements heaved with busy crowds, trying to find a way home.

Jiménez drove home – carefully. “People were surprisingly polite and well coordinated,” he said. “But the whole city was blocked by around 4 p.m.” His journey, which usually takes 30 minutes, lasted two hours.

Gladstone had another problem: She returned to her apartment with shopping, but the electronic keypads that allowed access to the building and to her unit were down. After banging on the main entrance to no avail, a neighbor found a way into their own apartment, and welcomed her in for the night.

Madrid’s firefighters carried out hundreds of “elevator interventions” across the city on Monday, its Emergency Information Office said; members of Spain’s Civil Guard carried an elderly woman in a wheelchair to her apartment on the sixth floor, the agency said.

By early evening, with the sun sinking and power still out for most of Spain and Portugal, misinformation swirled online and in person. “The rumor mill was just going crazy,” she told CNN. A false theory circulated that all of Europe’s power was down, and with phone and internet access intermittent, it was impossible for many to check whether that was true.

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez urged people to use phones “responsibly,” to make calls only when necessary and to keep them brief to ease strain on the system.

By early evening, with the sun sinking and power still out for most of Spain and Portugal, camaraderie became commonplace. “People took the opportunity to ‘get on it’… You could see people drinking beer everywhere,” buying rounds until the batteries in card payment machines went flat, Jiménez said. “All the terraces were full.”

In Lisbon, the lights came on around 10:30 p.m. By then, Gladstone’s neighbors had became her friends. “We spent the night discussing life, and how strange everything is,” she said. “They made food by Mag-Lite and flashlight, and we drank wine.”

“The kindness of strangers never ceases to amaze.”

CNN
 — 

Mankind’s achievements over the millennia have been bountiful. Their evolutionary fruits – from fire, to vaccines, to the art of diplomacy – were never low hanging; they were imagined before they were ever grasped.

But once held, they became indispensable. Until now that is, as 100 days into his presidency US President Donald Trump seems determined to throw this painful learning to the wind, risking a world forced into reverse.

A torrent of tariffs, unleashed against the better judgement of experts, yet exalted by Trump’s acolytes as the work of a deal-making genius are a case in point. So too is his willingness to throw allies to the wind, by threatening to grab Greenland, Canada even Panama by force if necessary.

Whatever one’s view of the policies themselves, Trump’s total upending of the global status quo has sewn fear and uncertainty among America’s friends, exacerbated market volatility and normalized economic aggression. It’s a formula that over the centuries has rarely served the world well.

The president’s apparent over-arching ethos – might is right, and mine is greatest – is now demolishing geopolitical norms at speed. It is Ukraine that should give in to Russia, which “has all the cards,” Trump says. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “pretty big concession,” his US counterpart adds, is not “taking the whole country.”

Yet despite three years of “meat-grinding” war, Putin’s aim remains as contrary to international law as it was when he launched his unprovoked, full-scale invasion.

It is clear then why Trump struggles to do what all his allies find easy: to blame Putin for defying the rules-based world order in a brutal campaign to swallow his smaller neighbor. The US president often even blames Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky for the war in which at least 42,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed or injured, according to the United Nations, saying “he should never have started it.”

The implication – that the weak should capitulate to the strong – is an upending of millennia of evolution, culminating in the post-World War II, US-inspired rules-based international order that led to an unprecedented eight decades of relative global peace, prosperity and unimaginable scientific innovation.

Trump, as British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has commented, has broken the mold. “Old assumptions can no longer be taken for granted, the world as we knew it is gone,” he said.

The president’s world view was nurtured by his property-developing, landlord father Fred Trump. Poor tenants unable to pay their rent claimed they were evicted; not an uncommon practice at the time, or since, but one that advantages the powerful over the weak.

The parallels are not hard to spot: the world’s most powerful man still relies on bravado and bullying to get what he wants. Today everyone is in his firing line. America has been “taken advantage of by virtually every country in the world,” Trump inaccurately claims, “we’re no longer going to be the country that’s ripped off by every country in the world.”

But here’s the rub. Such is Trump’s braggadocio, no one he trusts appears brave enough to challenge him. Only when global markets soured, and his Petri dish economic experiment turned putrid, did he backslide on the threat to impose immediate tariffs on both friends and foes of the US, and even then, it may not be enough to avoid economic pain.

China seems ready to wait out his trade-defying tariffs, having been preparing for this moment since Trump’s first term.

Now, it seems, he must learn a costly lesson for himself that economic evolution had already taught the experts.

And while Trump’s defiant pose after the July 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, was enough to convince Putin that he was “a courageous man,” the US president is already backing down on some of his tariff bravado, chastened by his loyalists who found their voices as bond markets tanked.

In the view of both Putin and Trump, it is the tough who set the rules, and the man in both their crosshairs, Ukraine’s President Zelensky, got this message Wednesday, “the man with ‘no cards to play’ should now, finally, GET IT DONE,” as Trump wrote on his social media platform.  Trump has since criticized Putin, questioning whether the Russian leader is interested in peace and suggesting “he’s just tapping me along.”

The world Trump and Putin seem to crave is one of spheres of influence run from islands of power, where diplomacy is a time-consuming irrelevance replaced by imperial decrees.

It would be a reset harking back to a darker time, essentially overturning the rules-based order. In the aftermath of great empires, regional warlords allied, feuded and fought each other for centuries before nations emerged, and largely did the same.

By the 19th century diplomats like Klemens von Metternich, the Chancellor of the Austrian Empire, spent entire careers attempting to balance Europe’s feuding powers. He famously said, “when France sneezes, the rest of Europe catches cold.”

Today it is Trump spreading a chill. The Manhattan real estate developer has said he is going to “get” Greenland “for national security reasons.” Greenland and its Danish patron, a NATO ally that is no match militarily for the USA, say no.

Canada’s prime minister says the same about Trump’s plans to make his northern neighbor the USA’s 51st state, insisting “it will never happen.” Mark Carney, a former central banker already battling Trump’s aggressive trade tariffs, knows the threat is real, telling voters ahead of Monday’s election in which his Liberal Party won a stunning fourth consecutive victory “the Americans want our resources, our water, our land, our country.”

Trump’s world view is clear: he speaks as though he can reach out and take these things, and clearly believes he is working from an island of power, isolated from the negative consequences of his assumed conquests.

But no man, nor nation, is an Island.

Trump’s weakness is not just that he might buy Putin’s lie that he can conquer all Ukraine, or be outfoxed by Xi on tariffs, but that the rest of the world increasingly sees through his mantle of self-belief.

The costs of this muscle-power politics will be revealed more slowly than the near-instantaneous economic market pain to his trade tariffs. But it still marks a return to an era of dog eat dog. History has shown how that turns out.

CNN
 — 

Donald Trump thinks he’s running the world.

His ambition is boundless. But it also reeks of dangerous hubris and raises a grave question: Where will the planet end up under the leadership of this chaotic and vengeful president?

Trump revealed his plan for global dominance in a new interview with “The Atlantic.” He said he had rid himself of the “crooked guys” and investigations that limited his first term. “The second time, I run the country and the world,” he added.

The president is attempting a massive, simultaneous transformation of life in the United States and the American-led global political and economic systems that have cemented Washington’s primacy since World War II.

He’s indisputably the most ubiquitous world figure, 100 tumultuous days since reclaiming the Oval Office. No one knows what he’ll do next – not the US’ allies nor its enemies. And in this upside-down era of MAGA foreign policy, it’s sometimes hard to know which is which. From Moscow to New Delhi and Gaza to Rome, Trump has a finger in every geopolitical pie.

Many foreigners might be revolted by the president. But they can’t ignore him. That must be especially sweet for a commander-in-chief whose entire life has been a quest for notoriety.

The reality of America’s global role means that the person who has the top job has immense authority, said Majda Ruge, a senior policy fellow at the United States program at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“Take Ukraine, which is on the borders of the European Union – it’s practically a European issue, but the fact is that without American intelligence, military support and American nuclear deterrence, Europeans are not able to continue supporting Ukraine to the extent that is needed for Ukraine to actually advance on the battlefield,” said Ruge, who was speaking from Brussels.

“Going back to the quote, ‘I run the world,’ there is truth to that because of America’s huge impact on world politics and foreign policy,” Ruge said.

“But the question is, is he actually running it in the direction that is constructive, rather than disruptive and a little bit all over the place? And secondly, is he even running it in a strategic manner to ultimately arrive at the place he wants to go?”

Trump’s supporters argue that the traditional American approaches to foreign policy brought nothing but humiliation. They remember two lost wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and think Europe built bloated welfare states under America’s generous military umbrella.

The president’s bombast puts a lot of people off. But he often asks pertinent questions. For instance – did two decades of US economic engagement with China buy nothing more than a 21st-century superpower rival while destroying American manufacturing? And 80 years after the defeat of Nazism and three and a half decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, shouldn’t Europeans now be taking care of their own defense?

The problem is that Trump’s approach to addressing these questions risks undermining the security and the stability of the world he professes to lead.

Signs for Trump’s foreign policy priorities don’t currently look promising, especially after he launched trade wars that have rocked global markets and that have no easy way out.

But perhaps his unorthodox approach can find a way to end the Ukraine war that a more traditional US president might miss. He’s surely due something for his frequent genuflecting to Russian President Vladimir Putin. And after trashing the last Iran nuclear deal in his first term, he’s seeking another one to forestall the horrible prospect of US military strikes.

But Trump’s ultra-personalized and volatile approach to the world seems as likely to backfire.

The president made his name as a builder. But he’s better at tearing things down. And barging into the center of global events and tunneling into the psyches of hundreds of millions of people with social media eruptions is hardly statesmanlike. Nor is making up huge tariff rates off the top of his head.

Far from enhancing US power, Trump risks buckling it.

His bullying is forcing foreign nations to hurriedly reevaluate their relationship with the United States. They face the same choice as university presidents, CEOs and media bosses in the US, only with greater stakes: Do they resist America’s new king or flatter him?

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer came to Washington with an offer of a state visit with King Charles to try to play on Trump’s love for British royals.

But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tried standing up to Trump – and got kicked out of the White House after a televised dressing down in the Oval Office.

And Canada, one of America’s closest friends, just held an entire election dominated by the need to break with Washington over Trump’s tariffs and his demands it become the 51st state.

“The president and those around him feel they have greater freedom of action today,” said Ian Lesser, distinguished fellow and adviser to the president of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “That includes not having to take into account the views of traditional allies … It can produce successes. But it also brings with it systemic risks.”

One of those risks is the fracturing of alliances that have bolstered US power and goodwill for decades because Trump views traditional American friends as freeloaders.

He’s made no secret that he’d rather sit down with tyrants such as Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping – who he regards as strongmen in his own image – than leaders of allied nations that have shed blood with the United States to protect freedom and democracy.

While Trump’s foreign policy actions often seem sudden and ill-thought-out, there’s a clearer ideological basis to his second-term ambitions. It’s just a not very palatable one for nations that have long relied on the United States.

In a new article in the journal Internationale Politik Quarterly, two German foreign policy experts argue that Trump’s behavior is not that of an erratic or “short-tempered hothead” but rather exhibits a coherent worldview.

“Trump knows neither friends nor enemies, he knows only strength or weakness,” wrote former German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel and Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, a former adviser to the German presidency who now heads the German Council on Foreign Relations. Trump, they argue, “thrives in a world of social Darwinism.”

If this is the case, one of the pillars of US power has been lost.

The country that was a bastion of stability and led the West to face down Nazism and communism is now the most unpredictable force in global politics.

Trump is hardly the grand master of geopolitical chess he imagines himself to be. His tariff clash with China underestimated Beijing’s pride and unwillingness to fold. (China’s leaders want to run the world, too.)

And, paradoxically, Trump’s aggressive attempts to use US power could result in his frittering away of important areas of US leverage.

One possible outcome of the US trade war with China is a decoupling of the two deeply entwined economies. That could be a painful process for consumers in both nations. But it could also remove one of the factors that might deter Beijing from invading Taiwan: the possibility that a US trade cutoff during a time of war could destroy the Chinese economy.

A similar loss of power could be in store for the US in Europe.

If US allies follow through on vows to rearm amid fears about future US support, their independence might also weaken the Atlantic alliance that has multiplied American power for generations.

Trump’s approach is also shattering the trust allies placed in Washington, draining US non-military power and influence by the day.

Not only is the president apparently willing to recognize Putin’s illegal land grabs in Ukraine, he’s mulling one himself in Greenland.

And he’s reversed President John Kennedy’s maxim that the US does not lead by the example of its power but the power of its example. His disdain for human rights and the rule of law; his elevation of despots over democrats; and his eradication of foreign aid that kept millions of Africans alive may irrevocably tarnish America’s reputation.

Many US friends are now wondering whether they even share the same values as Americans who twice elected a president whose beliefs they reject.

Some US allies in Asia are starting to reexamine their assumptions about US support in a region increasingly dominated by China.

In Europe, Trump’s return to office has supercharged fears that the US has other strategic priorities and its allies must learn to fend for themselves.

“I think that Trump’s election victory has, in a sense, given history a shove, and that a concern that had been in some sense theoretical or a long-term anxiety has suddenly turned into a near-term priority to address,” said Lesser, who was speaking from Ankara.

Trump may think he is running the world now, but he is almost certainly making it more difficult for future presidents to do so.