Fakiha Noor
There is something oddly medieval about contemporary politics. Amid tariff wars, military interventions, sanctions, and declarations of national greatness, one occasionally encounters a political imagination that seems less at home in the 21st century than in the age of the emperors and universal monarchs. President Donald Trump invites an intriguing comparison with the political philosophy of Dante Alighieri, the great Florentine poet whose Divine Comedy remains a profound reflection on power, order, and human destiny. Dante dreamed of a world governed by universal authority in his political treatise De Monarchian and argued that humanity could only achieve peace when guided by a single sovereign power capable of transcending competing interests. The purpose of this authority was not conquest for its own sake but the establishment of harmony. A universal monarch, in Dante’s imagination, would stand above factional conflict and create conditions under which humanity could flourish.
Yet history repeatedly demonstrated a tragic irony; rulers who pursued universal peace often became the architects of conflict. The language of order could easily become the language of domination.
The contemporary foreign policy posture associated with President Trump reflects a similar aspiration toward centrality. When the international system moves from American unipolarity to a more complex multipolar order, it defies Trump’s rhetoric of global stability as the continued primacy of the United States. This challenge of maintaining global relevance identifies this transition as one of the defining geopolitical pitfalls of our time. The rise of China, the resurgence of Russia, and the growing influence of regional powers Iran, Turkiye, Brazil have challenged Washington’s ability to act as the unquestioned center of world politics. The post-Cold War period of the United States functioned as what many scholars described as a liberal hegemon. Its power rested not only on military strength but also in institutions, and alliances
However, the America First approach has significantly shifted to transactional diplomacy, selective multilateralism, and renewed power politics. Like Dante’s universal monarch, Trump often presents himself as the indispensable leader through whom global disputes must pass. Whether discussing the Middle East, Ukraine, the Iran-Israel-US conflict, trade negotiations, or international security, he adopts the posture of a singular peacemaker capable of restoring order, sarcastically, where others have failed. The implication shows that stability returns when nations return to Washington without any fluctuation.
Yet unlike Dante’s ideal ruler, whose authority derived from wisdom and moral purpose, Trump’s claims to centrality are often enforced through the instruments of irony in greed in manufacturing relocation through strategic pressure. The most visible example is Trump’s exposed fascination with tariffs, which are not merely a tool of economic coercion but the mechanism of discipline. Nations that challenge American preferences are confronted with the prospect of punitive economic measures like a 100% levy. Friends and rivals alike are reminded that across the American market comes with tantrums and trade showdowns. The tariff becomes a modern imperial decree that demonstrates who possesses the power to impose costs.
This logic extends beyond trade. Trump’s statements regarding allies, rivals, and international institutions reveal that his cooperation is valuable only when it reinforces American leverage. Institutions become useful when they serve American interests and dispensable when they do not. It reflects a hybrid strategy combining realism, identity, politics and selective engagement in a bleak picture.
The ongoing escalation between the United States, Israel, and Iran has exposed the contradictions at the heart of current American power. The US narrative presented intervention as a defence of global security, but critics question how these objective masks deeper concerns about maintaining strategic dominance in a changing world in an oblique manner.
Here again, Dante provides a revealing lens that human beings possess a natural inclination toward peace and fulfilment, and political authority was justified only insofar as it enabled humanity to pursue these higher ends. Trump’s language of peace frequently coexists with the language of force, which makes military pressures a pathway to negotiation, Economic punishments as the tool of reconciliation, and Escalation is presented as the pre-requisite for stability.
This creates the paradox worthy of Dante’s own imagination, where the pursuit of peace resembles the preparation of war. The contradiction is not distinctive to Trump and reflects the broader dilemma in confronting NSS in the 21st century. Trump wants to preserve its global influence in a world of aligned multilateralism. Under new poles, Washington faces a choice between adaptation and coercion.
The true tragedy in the Divine Comedy is not merely sin or error but the inability to imagine limits. Dante’s damned Inferno was also trapped by refusal to recognize reality beyond his own desires, which mistook power for wisdom, certainty for truth, and ambition for destiny. The United States faces a similar temptation as the world’s most influential nation, but influence is not the same as omnipotence. The age of uncontested American primacy has passed. The challenge is not to recreate a vanished unipolar order but to exercise leadership within a multi-polar one. Dante’s “Perfect Human” lacks imagination; the same is Trump, a version stripped of humility who seeks obedience without consensus, authority without restraint, and centrality without imagination. The future belongs not to empires but to the states capable of building cooperation amid diversity.
That is a lesson Dante understood centuries ago, and one modern leader would do well to remember it.
