By Patrick P Sawian
By Patrick P Sawian
For millions across the world, Donald Trump appeared either as a revolutionary outsider, a nationalist saviour, a dangerous demagogue, or the final boss battle of liberal democracy. But perhaps the more unsettling possibility is simpler. What if Trump was never the central player at all? What if he was merely another highly visible piece on a board controlled by forces far older, wealthier, and more structurally permanent than any elected president?
This increasingly cynical interpretation of geopolitics has gained traction not only among internet conspiracy circles but also through the writings and warnings of respected scholars, econo-mists, diplomats, and military analysts over decades but the underlying theme often converges -modern democra-cies may be far less governed by ordinary citizens than by entrenched networks of in-stitutional, financial, military, and geopolitical power.
Modern politics increas-ingly resembles a gigantic emotional management sys-tem. Citizens are encouraged to choose tribes, hate oppos-ing tribes, worship charis-matic personalities, consume outrage as entertainment and mistake elections for deep structural transforma-tion. Meanwhile, beneath the spectacle intelligence systems, military alliances, banking structures, lobbying networks, and multinational corporate influence remain, and strategic geopolitical objectives continue across administrations. Presidents come and go but the machin-ery survives. This was one of the recurring themes in the broader works of Chomsky, who frequently argued that democratic systems often manufacture public consent rather than reflect fully in-formed public will. Media systems, political institutions, and elite interests interact to create the illusion of broad participation while limiting acceptable boundaries of policy debate. In this inter-pretation, Trump was not necessarily the destroyer of the system. Nor its saviour. He may simply have been one more spectacularly loud actor inside it.
The phrase “deep state” has become controversial because it is often used care-lessly. Yet stripped of sensa-tionalism, the concept simply refers to the possibility that unelected power networks possess enormous continu-ity independent of electoral cycles. Not necessarily se-cret cults in underground tunnels. Rather intelligence bureaucracies, defense con-tractors, transnational finan-cial institutions, lobbying ecosystems, strategic think tanks, multinational corporate interests, permanent diplo-matic establishments and geopolitical alliances whose incentives outlive individual politicians.
This interpretation be-comes harder to dismiss when one notices how often wars continue across presiden-cies, surveillance expands regardless of party, financial systems protect the same interests and foreign policy continuity persists despite dramatic campaign rhetoric. Trump may have disrupted elite aesthetics, but the under-lying architecture of power
remained remarkably intact. Economist Jeffrey Sachs has repeatedly criticized what he sees as catastrophic inter-ventionist policies pursued by sections of the American foreign-policy establishment after the Cold War. Sachs argued that NATO expansion, regime-change strategies, militarized geopolitics and re-fusal to accommodate emerg-ing multipolar realities have contributed dangerously to global instability. Similarly, scholars such as Mearsheimer warned for years that push-ing geopolitical confronta-tion toward Russia’s borders would eventually produce severe consequences. Yet
these warnings were often marginalized while military-industrial momentum con-tinued moving forward. The deeper tragedy is that modern states increasingly appear trapped inside systems that reward escalation more easily than restraint.
Trump marketed himself as an enemy of the establish-ment and in some cultural respects, he genuinely fright-ened sections of the political elite because he shattered traditional norms of presenta-tion and communication. But critics argue that structurally the empire remained opera-tional. Military spending remained immense. Sanc-tions intensified. Strategic rivalries escalated. Defence industries continue to prosper. The dollar-centered financial order remained central. The personalities changed and the machinery adapted. This creates the unsettling sus-picion that modern politics often resembles professional wrestling: the rivalries are emotionally real to audiences, yet the arena itself remains owned by the same interests regardless of who wins.
Perhaps the most danger-ous aspect of the present geo-political moment lies beneath ideology entirely: the struggle over the future of the global financial order. For decades, the U.S.-centered system ben-efited enormously from dollar dominance, energy markets priced in dollars, SWIFT infrastructure, sanctions le-verage and institutional con-trol through organizations such as the IMF and World Bank. This architecture gave the United States extraordi-nary global influence. But now a growing bloc centred around China, Russia and the broader BRICS framework is increasingly attempting
to build alternative systems by de-dollarisation, parallel financial infrastructures, local currency settlements, energy diversification and multipolar economic arrangements. To old-school Atlantic power structures, this is not merely economic competition. It is existential, because empires can tolerate many things more easily than they tolerate monetary decline.
What makes the situation particularly dangerous is psychological. Great pow-ers rarely accept decline gracefully. History repeat-edly shows that dominant systems often become most volatile precisely when they sense erosion of their su-premacy and this is where the modern world begins entering frightening territory. If sections of the Western es-tablishment perceive BRICS expansion, Chinese industrial
dominance, Russian strategic resilience and the emergence of parallel financial systems as existential threats to the post-1945 order, then geo-political escalation becomes increasingly probable. Not necessarily because leaders are irrational, but because systems fighting for survival often become incapable of compromise. Meanwhile the opposing bloc sees itself not as revolutionary aggressor, but as correcting centuries of Western dominance. Thus both sides increasingly view themselves as defensive civi-lizations. That is historically a very dangerous combina-tion.
Perhaps the most despon-dent realization of all is that ordinary citizens across the world may possess far less in-fluence over these trajectories than democratic mythology suggests. Americans, Europeans protest, Russians mobilize, Chinese strategize, developing nations hedge, yet enormous structural forces continue moving beneath public consciousness: finan-cial systems, energy routes, military alliances, resource competition, technological supremacy, and elite geopo-litical calculations. The pub-lic watches political theater. The deeper systems negoti-ate survival and somewhere beneath the noise lies a grim possibility: that humanity is approaching a historical transition where an old global order refuses to surrender dominance while a rising alternative refuses to remain subordinate. History teaches that such moments are rarely peaceful.
Some of the darker and more cynical interpretations of modern geopolitics go even further. They argue that systems facing existential geopolitical transition often require political figures will-ing to operate beyond the polished restraint of conven-tional statesmanship. In that interpretation, a disruptive and unpredictable leader becomes strategically use-ful precisely because he can say and do things that more disciplined establishment figures would hesitate to attempt publicly. To critics holding this view, Donald Trump appeared almost per-fectly engineered for an age of escalating confrontation: combative, unfiltered, trans-actional, media-obsessed and seemingly immune to the diplomatic etiquette that constrained earlier presi-dents. Supporters viewed this as authenticity. Opponents saw recklessness. But some geopolitical skeptics inter-preted it differently: as the ideal personality for an era in which sections of the po-litical establishment wanted to intensify pressure against rising powers such as China and Russia while maintaining plausible distance from the consequences. In this cynical reading, Trump’s chaos was not necessarily a malfunction of the system -but part of the system’s utility. His confron-tational rhetoric, trade wars, institutional disruption and constant media turbulence created an atmosphere where extraordinary policies could emerge beneath a permanent cloud of spectacle and emo-tional exhaustion. Whether one agrees with that inter-
pretation or not, it reflects a growing public suspicion that modern politics increasingly rewards theatrical person-alities capable of dominating public attention while deeper structural forces continue op-erating in the background.
This also feeds another recurring theme in politi-cal cynicism: the idea that democracies often preserve legitimacy through carefully staged conflict between insti-tutions. A president is inves-tigated. Congress performs an outrage drama. Media ecosystems amplify scandal. Courts intervene. Opposition parties condemn abuses. The machinery of accountability becomes highly visible. And yet critics argue that despite the spectacle of resistance, many deeper geopolitical tra-jectories remain surprisingly continuous across adminis-trations. Thus emerges the haunting perception among some observers that political systems sometimes function like enormous theatre produc-tions – public conflict on the surface, institutional continu-ity underneath. Within that framework, even impeach-ment battles, investigations, or political obstruction can appear less like revolution-ary ruptures and more like mechanisms designed to re-assure the public that checks and balances remain fully operational.
The tragic irony is that citizens across the world increasingly distrust both extremes simultaneously: they distrust charismatic lead-ers, yet they also distrust the permanent institutions supposedly restraining them. And once a population begins suspecting that both rebellion and opposition may merely be different performances inside the same structure, politi-cal despair deepens rapidly, because the most unsettling possibility is not necessarily that hidden actors control every event. It is that mod-ern systems of power have become so large, intercon-nected, and self-preserving that individual leaders, no matter how often they dra-matically shoot themselves in the foot, increasingly func-tion as temporary performers inside forces far bigger than themselves.
Whether Trump is hero, villain, disruptor, or pawn may ultimately matter less than the larger system sur-rounding him. The deeper struggle appears increasingly civilizational, between an aging unipolar order attempt-ing to preserve financial and
geopolitical supremacy and an emerging multipolar bloc, determined to reshape the architecture of global power. The tragedy is that neither side appears psychologically prepared for graceful transi-tion. Old empires fear humili-ation. Rising powers reject subordination. Economic sys-tems harden into geopolitical weapons and populations everywhere are emotion-ally mobilized through media narratives that reduce vast structural conflicts into tribal spectacles.
Meanwhile ordinary citizens -American, Rus-sian, Chinese, European, Indian, Middle Eastern and African -continue living beneath systems far larger than themselves, watching leaders perform certainty while the world edges uneas-ily toward a future nobody fully controls.
