It’s probably the case that children have already died as a result of Donald Trump’s war on U.S.A.I.D. If the freeze on foreign aid and mass furlough by fiat goes forward, many certainly will.

很可能已经有孩子因为特朗普对美国国际开发署开战而死。如果冻结外国援助和大规模强制休假令继续下去，可以肯定会有很多孩子死去。

But the agency is not just a faucet of humanitarian money, distributing $40 billion in global aid, supporting soup kitchens and lead abatement and vaccination programs and saving millions of lives. It has also always been one face of American empire. Established during the Cold War to counter Soviet influence, the agency has funded health and development, but it has also supported business-friendly politics and what are often called democratic reforms to draw more of the world’s poor countries into the sphere of American influence.

这个机构在全球范围内分发了价值400亿美元的援助，支持施食处、减铅和疫苗接种项目，拯救了数以百万计的生命，但它不仅仅是人道主义资金的一个水龙头。它也一直是美利坚帝国的门面。该机构成立于冷战期间，目的是对抗苏联的影响，它为卫生和发展提供资金，但也支持有利于商业的政治，以及通常被称为民主改革的举措，吸引世界上更多的贫穷国家进入美国的影响范围。

And so the sprint to “delete” U.S.A.I.D. on grounds of waste and ideological bias also sent its own bigger message: that soft power, properly understood, is not really power at all, only a shackle restricting the exercise of the harder and more old-fashioned kind.

因此，以浪费和意识形态偏见为理由“删除”开发署的突击行动也是在发出一种更大的讯息：如果正确理解软实力，就会认识到它根本不是真正的实力，只是一种枷锁，在限制对更强硬、更传统的实力的施展。

During his last time in office, Trump was pictured with a hurricane map marked up with black Sharpie ink so that the potential path of the storm matched his own ignorant projection. This time, he’s marking up some notional maps of American empire, which he says he would like to see stretching north through Canada and Greenland, south through the “Gulf of America” to the Panama Canal and across to the decimated rubble of the Gaza Strip, which he has taken to calling the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

特朗普在上次执政期间有一张照片，是他拿着一张显示飓风的地图，上面用黑色记号笔标记了飓风的可能路径，与他自己的无知推断相吻合。这一次，他是在标注一些美利坚帝国的假想地图，他说他希望看到这个帝国向北延伸，覆盖加拿大和格陵兰岛，向南穿过“美国湾”，到达巴拿马运河，最终远及被夷为平地的加沙地带，他称那里为“中东的里维埃拉”。

It’s not clear, of course, that any of this will (or even could) happen — Francis Fukuyama described the Gaza plan as a “nonstarter” in an essay announcing both “the new American imperialism” and a return to the world of the 19th century. But each declaration of imperial desire is that mercurial kind of Trumpist speech act, in which a given utterance can be both meaningless and full of portent at the same time, self-disavowing even as it also demonstrates the president’s world-shaping power. Foreign leaders including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada and Denmark’s foreign minister Lars Rasmussen have warned that Trump’s acquisitiveness is deadly serious. And whatever comes of Trump’s retrograde dreams of manifest destiny, the implicit challenge to the legacy geopolitical order is just as striking: If we want these things and these places, who is going to stop us?

当然，目前还不清楚这些是否会发生（甚至是否可能发生）——弗朗西斯·福山在一篇宣告“新美帝国主义”和19世纪世界回归的文章中称加沙计划“毫无希望”。但每一次对帝国欲望的宣示，都是那种反复无常的特朗普式演讲行为，其中的某一句话既可能毫无意义，又可能充满预兆；既自我否定，又展示总统塑造世界的力量。加拿大总理特鲁多和丹麦外交部长拉尔斯·拉斯穆森等外国领导人警告称，特朗普的占有欲是非常认真的。无论特朗普关于美国昭昭天命的倒退梦想会带来什么结果，它所隐含着的对传统地缘政治秩序的挑战同样引人注目：如果我们想要这些东西和这些地方，谁能阻止我们？

Among Trump’s Day 1 executive orders were withdrawals from the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization, which led some to describe the new president’s emergent foreign policy as a kind of strategic retreat, even an effort to “unwind” or “reorient” American power abroad, as Ryan Grim put it. But another first-day order designated Mexican drug cartels as terrorist groups, and as he assumed office, the new secretary of defense affirmed that when it came to military action in Mexico, “all options will be on the table.” The national security adviser has suggested the United States must recoup the money it has sent to Ukraine by plundering the country’s natural resources, and the president has threatened harsh tariffs on Denmark over Greenland, too. In addition to China, the first round of Trump tariffs targeted allies, with longstanding trade deals in place renegotiated not that long ago by Trump himself — and although the tariffs were withdrawn quickly in response to trivial concessions, you couldn’t help feeling it wasn’t safe to assume any existing arrangement would last for very long, with Trump likely to stress-test many aspects of the world order, country by country.

特朗普上任第一天的行政命令包括退出巴黎气候协议和世界卫生组织，这让一些人把新总统正在成形的外交政策描述为一种战略撤退，甚至像瑞安·格里姆所说的那样，是在“放松”或“重新定位”美国在海外的影响力。但新总统第一天的另一项命令将墨西哥贩毒集团列为恐怖组织，而新任国防部长在就职时表示，当涉及到对墨西哥的军事行动时，“所有选项都在考虑范围内。”国家安全顾问表示，美国必须通过掠夺乌克兰的自然资源来收回它向该国输送的资金，总统还威胁要就格陵兰岛问题对丹麦征收高额关税。除了中国，特朗普的第一轮关税还针对盟友，美国和这些盟友之间有着存在多年的贸易协议，不久前还由特朗普本人进行过重新谈判——尽管这些关税因回应微不足道的让步而迅速撤销了，但你不禁会觉得，不能假设任何现有安排都会持续很长时间，特朗普可能会对世界秩序的许多方面进行压力测试，一个国家接着一个国家地来。

The new secretary of state began his stint as America’s top diplomat by effectively disavowing diplomacy, at least as we’ve known it for decades. “The postwar global order is not just obsolete,” Marco Rubio declared in his January Senate committee hearing. “It is now a weapon being used against us.” Last week, Rubio announced that the United States wouldn’t be attending the G20 in Johannesburg, explaining that “my job is to advance America’s national interests, not waste taxpayer money or coddle anti-Americanism.”

新任国务卿在开始他作为美国最高外交官的任期时，实际上就已经在否定外交——至少是几十年来我们所熟知的那种外交。“战后的全球秩序不仅仅是过时了，”鲁比奥1月份在参议院委员会听证会上宣称。“它现在是一种用来对付我们的武器。”上周，鲁比奥宣布，美国不会参加在约翰内斯堡举行的20国集团峰会，并解释说，“我的工作是促进美国的国家利益，而不是浪费纳税人的钱或纵容反美主义。”

In Trump world, Rubio counts as an unusually clear spokesman, and these two statements together form a lucid if bracing declaration of intent: that a system built over decades largely by and for American power is now being discarded largely for inhibiting or even acting against American power. The country has long been a bully on the world stage, but one which at least pretended to play nice, even as its full command over the globe has seemed recently to shrink. “Hegemony was going to end sooner or later, and now the U.S. is basically choosing to end it on its own terms,” the French observer Arnaud Bertrand wrote. “It is the post-American world order — brought to you by America itself.”

在特朗普的世界里，鲁比奥算得上是一位异常明确的发言人，他的两句话合在一起，清晰表达了一种意图：几十年来，一个主要由美国力量建立、为美国力量而建立的体系，现在正在被抛弃，主要是因为它抑制甚至反对美国力量。长期以来，美国一直是世界舞台上的恶霸，但它至少装出一副友善的样子，即使它对全球的全面控制最近似乎有所缩小。“霸权迟早会结束，而现在美国基本上是在选择以自己的方式结束霸权，”法国观察家阿尔诺·贝特朗写道。“这就是后美国时代的世界秩序——由美国亲手呈现给你。”

What comes next? New paradigms rarely arise fully formed. But if we spent the last four years watching Joe Biden’s ineffectual attempt to revive some rickety version of the moralistic postwar order, it is supremely clear what Donald Trump would like to replace that pretense with: the principle that global chaos opens up opportunity for great powers long hemmed in by convention and deference. You’ve probably heard of the madman approach to diplomacy; this is the mad world approach.

接下来会发生什么？新范式出现时很少是完全成型的。但是，如果我们在过去四年里看到了拜登徒劳地试图恢复某种摇摇欲摇的战后道德秩序，那么已经极为明确的是，特朗普想抛弃这种伪装，代之以一个原则：全球混乱可以为长期被惯例和敬畏所束缚的大国提供机遇。你可能听说过“狂人外交”；现在这就是“疯狂世界外交”。

Over the last decade, as China dropped its show of geopolitical obeisance and began to perform similar games of dominance — telling the 10 nations of the ASEAN regional alliance, for instance, China is a big country, and you are small countries, and that is a fact — it inspired a new foreign-policy term: wolf-warrior diplomacy. This scandalized the foreign policy institutionalists of the West, including Biden, who in juggling not just China but Russia and Israel dedicated much of the second half of his presidency to a nostalgic diplomatic restoration project. The MAGA riposte is, Let’s not be naïve and let’s not be suckers: We are all wolves on the world stage, and the game begins when we show our teeth.

在过去十年里，随着中国不再表现出地缘政治上的顺从，开始上演类似的争权游戏——例如，告诉东盟地区联盟的10个国家，中国是一个大国，而你们是小国，这是事实——由此激发了一个新的外交政策术语：战狼外交。这让包括拜登在内的西方外交政策建制派感到震惊，拜登不仅要应付中国，还要应付俄罗斯和以色列，在他总统任期的后半段，他把大部分时间都花在了一个怀旧的外交修复工程上。“让美国恢复伟大荣光”运动的反驳是，我们不要太天真，我们不要做傻瓜：在世界舞台上，我们都是狼，当我们露出牙齿，游戏就开始了。

When Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire just before Inauguration Day, it seemed to many like a credit to Trump, whose emissaries had, on one exceptional Sabbath, apparently bullied Benjamin Netanyahu into accepting a deal that had been available for many months — and perhaps a sign that those who voted for the once and future president imagining he was the candidate of peace were not entirely deluded. But just a few weeks later, it seems clear that he regards demolition and mass displacement of millions as a straightforward matter of eminent domain. The ultimate acquisition of Gaza would be a simple “real estate transaction,” he said last week, and it wouldn’t even be Israel but the United States presiding over the closing. “We’re going to take it, we’re going to hold it, we’re going to cherish it,” he said on Tuesday — “Mar-a-Gaza,” some have called it.

当以色列和哈马斯在总统就职日之前同意停火时，在很多人看来，这是特朗普的一个荣誉，在一个非凡的安息日，他的特使显然胁迫内塔尼亚胡接受了一项已经存在了好几个月的协议——也许这表明，那些投票给这位曾经和未来的总统、以为他是追求和平的候选人的人，并非完全被蒙蔽。但是，仅仅几周后，很明显，数百万人的家园被毁和大规模流离失所在他眼里就是个单纯的土地征用问题。他上周表示，加沙的最终收购将是一项简单的“房地产交易”，甚至不会由以色列来主持，而是由美国主持。“我们要拿下它，我们要持有它，我们要珍惜它，”周二，他说——已经有人管那个地方叫“马阿加沙”。

None of this was exactly unforeseen. The American-led international order has long been criticized as a cover story for the exercise of U.S. power, especially on the left, with critics on the right more likely to see it as an anti-nationalist plot to bring about global government. And though the United States remains a central global power, we are now well past what was once called the unipolar moment and perhaps nearly as far from the time when Madeleine Albright or Barack Obama could refer to the country as the world’s “indispensable nation.” (“Hegemonic decline is a done deal,” the historian Adam Tooze remarked recently. “It’s over.”)

这一切都是意料中的事。长期以来，美国领导的国际秩序一直被批评为美国行使权力的幌子，尤其是左翼更是如此看待；而右翼的批评者更有可能将这种秩序视为一个反民族主义阴谋，目的是建立一个全球政府。尽管美国仍然是全球的核心力量，但我们现在已经远非那个曾经被称为单极世界的时代，或许也不再是马德琳·奥尔布赖特或奥巴马称世界“离不开”美国的时代。(“霸权衰落已成定局，”历史学家亚当·图泽最近说。“没戏唱了。”)

And yet Trump’s second term “marks a symbolic end to global neoliberalism,” the economist Branko Milanovic wrote last month, a sharper break than his first term — in part, Milanovic later added, because in the meantime so many impulses that once seemed outlandish (on China, on trade, on industrial policy) had quietly hardened into elite conventional wisdom.

然而，特朗普的第二个任期“标志着全球新自由主义的象征性终结”，经济学家布兰科·米兰诺维奇上月写道，这个终结比他的第一个任期更加彻底——米兰诺维奇后来补充道，部分原因是在此期间，许多曾经看似古怪的冲动（关于中国、贸易和产业政策）已经悄悄地固化为精英们的普遍认知。

The difference is also marked abroad, with far fewer global leaders falling into alignment against Trump — even if a few seem to enjoy mixing it up with him personally — and acknowledging that the basic terms of engagement have changed. The office of the Russian foreign minister has publicly applauded the assault on U.S.A.I.D., as has Viktor Orban of Hungary’s political director. China seems happy to watch America detonate large parts of its infrastructure of global power. In Europe, the European Commission’s Josep Borrell got into trouble a few years ago when he described the continent as an orderly and peaceful “garden,” surrounded by the “jungle” of the rest of the world. Now the president of the commission, Ursula von der Leyen, is striking a very similar tone — calling it a “hotheaded world” and an “era of hypercompetitive and hypertransactional geopolitics.”

这种差异在国外也很明显，全球领导人中很少有人想要联合反对特朗普——有些领导人似乎还很喜欢和他本人打交道——他们承认基本的交往规则已经发生了变化。俄罗斯外交部长办公室公开赞扬了对美国国际开发署的袭击，匈牙利领袖欧尔班·维克托也表示了赞赏。中国似乎乐于看到美国引爆其全球实力的大部分基础设施。在欧洲，欧盟委员会的何塞普·博雷尔几年前将欧洲大陆描述为一个有序而和平的“花园”，被世界其他地区的“丛林”所包围，他因这番言论陷入了麻烦。现在，欧盟委员会主席乌苏拉·冯德莱恩也开始了类似的论调，她说这是一个“头脑发热的世界”，是一个“极具竞争性和交易性的地缘政治时代”。

In other words: It’s a jungle out there.

换言之：外面是一片丛林。