Originally published June 19, 2026 for our weekly Issue of Mindful Intelligence Advisor. Subscribe to get weekly issues.
“Let the world see that this nation can bear prosperity; and that her honest virtue in time of peace is equal to her bravest valor in time of war.” – Thomas Paine
By Bill Collier, Publisher
In this Final Thought, I wanted to share my insight into the thinking behind the Trump World Order, with the Iran Deal as the bellwether for how that works in practice. This is not an evaluation of the efficacy of the approach, but rather a description of what I observe it is, especially now that details of the Iran deal have been coming out.
Again, I want to emphasize, this is neither an evaluation of Trump’s World Order efficacy nor an advocation for it.
Trump’s Word Order assumes material prosperity deeply felt by the vast majority will wash away the sectarianism that divides us from one another.
Whatever anyone thinks of President Trump, his supporters, or his opponents, this era may be defined as the Trump World Order, for it may outlast President Trump by many decades.
The Iran DEAL, as Trump calls it (with a subtle homage to his “Art of the Deal”) crystalizes the Trump Worldview. Trump sees political states as corporations, citizens as stakeholders, and ethnogroups as fluid demographic realities.
The Trump World Order defines success by looking not only at GDP, but also by measuring per capita median incomes, material well-being, and stock market values. THESE are the benchmarks of civilizational success.
What is Trump offering the world in his Middle East vision?
In his schema, the religious and ethnic conflicts and disputes will melt away when everyone is trading with each other. When the average person can have a good life, in material terms, sectarian violence will fade away.
When good economic indicators become the goals, and even the proof of the efficacy of foreign policy, rogue states will become trustworthy trade partners.
Making deals, getting investments, and making money in a way that genuinely benefits most of the people in felt ways will replace historical grievances, territorial disputes, and religious and ethnic sectarian violence.
The assumption is that Capitalism, within moral and ethical constraints, becomes the ideology of a restored Western Civilization. Morally Constrained Capitalism can revitalize the world, at least in material terms.
Let the family, the church, and private social organizations tend to the spiritual and cultural needs of the people, so long as it doesn’t interfere with material prosperity for the vast majority. Regardless of what critics say, this vision, in its ideal form, is not “profit over people”, but profit for individuals, companies, and whole countries.
Profit all the way up and down is the fuel of civilization, in this paradigm.
The solution to the ongoing conflict is to constrain Iran long enough to get them to engage in the regional economy. Then they will engage with the world economy, because prosperity with dignity will wash away the religious detritus that is holding Iran back from joining the world community of reliable trade-partner nations.
The fruit of the policy will bear out soon enough. The novelty of the policy, however, should also lead one to include that absolute skepticism is unwarranted.
Will profit and the desire to prosper truly win the day? Will nations like Iran choose the velvet glove of “mutual prosperity” over the US military’s violent potential to bring “clarity” to all sides?
Will the forces of the sociocultural, ethnic, and religious dynamics be too powerful to overcome through material prosperity alone?
Some may consider this approach to be very similar to the approach once touted for China. If we bring them into the world economy and give them a seat at the table, they will “calm down,” both in terms of their foreign policy and their domestic policies, especially regarding dissent.
WTO membership was supposed to make China kinder and gentler, to use a phrase from the Bush era.
I would submit that it would be hasty to compare Trump’s approach now to the China approach then. The difference is that when profit motives fail to bring “wisdom” and restraint, the US military (in Trump’s World Order) WILL bring extreme clarity to the situation. China had no real fear of such a consequence.
The Bush-Clinton World Order was built primarily on market access power. They checked dissent mostly through market access threats.
The whole system relied, fundamentally, on an assumption of American military power protecting the agreement and world trade lanes. The agreement also restrained American military power, even when it worked against American interests.
Trump’s approach is very different. Both tend to believe that economic engagement leads to peace, prosperity, and freedom, but that might be where the similarities end.
Here are five key points of Trump’s World Order:
- Trump does not lean on the velvet glove of economic engagement alone; for that velvet glove is backed by a massive military capability that can be unleashed with rapid fury on those who refuse to “get along” with the world economy. He has already demonstrated a willingness to follow up with that threat.
- Trump is not restricted to any coalition or international institution. IF they serve his end, he will “allow” them a seat; but if they aren’t fit for purpose, he may jettison them. We’ve seen this with NATO and the UN, and other world entities who either conform to Trump or, so far, mostly become irrelevant.
- In Trump’s World Order, good outcomes are not limited to the world economy and leading economic indicators, they must materially impact the working class and the investor class. The preferred classes of the NWO, the managerial class, the trust fund class, and the bureaucracy class, are not merely a non-factor in his calculations, they are contemptible to him.
- Trump gives no favors that aren’t earned. If a country wants a seat at the table, they will have to make it worth America’s while. We see this in how Trump has now forced NATO to start paying for its own defense through threats of NATO’s dissolution and reduced engagement not only in NATO but in Europe as well.
- Whereas the “NWO” of Bush-Clinton focused on leading economic indicators for state actors, Trump includes corporate power in the equation. Trump not only treats states as corporations but in many ways corporations as states.
Trump directly engages mega corporations, or billionaires, and even ropes them into his diplomacy, as we see with Jared Kushner and Steve Kitchener, who are first and foremost entrepreneurs with a corporate approach to diplomacy.
In Iran, many see the “new” regime as the same ideologically as the old regime. But this is the third tier of the old regime because Trump and Netanyahu literally KILLED them all with targeted strikes.
If there was ever a strategy to win a war by targeting the entire political leadership of the enemy, it failed to deliver what this war uniquely did, a rapid elimination of the key leadership of Iran not once, but twice. The U.S. military and Israel effectively eliminated not one regime, but two. This is now the third regime since the start of the war.
The Trump World Order sees the world primarily through a corporate lens, with the PEOPLE being a very strong UNION and the core stockholders. The Bush “New World Order” catered more to the topmost shot-callers in smoke-filled backrooms. It favored raw profit over people.
It is overly simplistic to characterize the Trump World Order as a “profit over people” scheme. While Trump probably believes corporations and markets are the prime movers of human civilization, he also seems to believe the average person must be an essential stakeholder.
He pragmatically believes profit must be felt materially by the vast majority for prosperity to override sectarianism. Without a broad base of mutual stakeholders, sectarianism will triumph.
I am assuming the Trump World Order will continue after him, in part because the institutions around its assumptions are already forming, and not just in the United States.
The Iran deal makes sense within the perspective of this world order.
The theory is that the threat of military action looming at any time, along with the inducement of economic prosperity from the bottom to the top of their society, will kill the regime’s current apocalyptic mission. That mission is to usher in the return of the 12th Imam, who will usher in the destruction of the world.
Not even the leadership will be interested in a mission that encourages the end of a prosperous world.
We already see possible signs of this. The “new” leader, the Speaker of their Parliament, is making noises that seem to indicate a grudging acceptance of these terms.
From the New York Post:
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, appeared to nudge his country to shift away from confrontation and toward helping Iranians prosper.
While addressing China-related policy at Tehran’s chamber of commerce, Ghalibaf, who was a key architect of the preliminary peace deal with the US, called for policymakers to focus on everyday Iranians over war.
“We must take over the trench from the launcher boys, lift people out of economic pressure, and build the country,” Ghalibaf said during his remarks, per a translation.
“I don’t want them to be left alone. No. Let’s make their lives easy and healthy. Let us build the country with power. Let us build it in all its parts.”
Nobody would be sad to see Iran focus on building its economy as opposed to building nuclear bombs and missiles.
The change in tone may or may not be real, but Iran is starting to follow a pattern very similar to Venezuela. What Trump did in Venezuela was treat the government as a corporation, while directly engaging individual corporations, but with the not-so quiet threat of US military action if we don’t like the new leaders.
Quite simply, “play nice or you will join your predecessor in prison or in the grave.” It’s brutal. It’s been compared to 19th century thinking. It might be more in keeping with Roman policy, however. Unlike the Americans, the Romans weren’t interested in changing your customs so long as they didn’t interfere with peace, security, trade, and the collecting of taxes in an orderly manner.
The Romans, however, were only interested in the comfort and material prosperity of its city dwellers, which were a significant minority of the overall population. Their stakeholders were not nearly as broad-based as Trump hopes his stakeholder base will be.
The Trump World Order isn’t 19th century thinking, it is a novel form of bottom to top and back down globalist corporatism with Roman Empire underpinnings. It sees the world as a network of competing corporations, with the people being the essential bulwarks through their share in that real material prosperity.
What he shares with the 19th century, and the Romans, is this, a completely unapologetic ruthlessness when the velvet glove comes off and the iron fist smashes the ones that don’t want to simply “play nice.”
What he doesn’t share with them is a belief that only the highest segments of society must be comfortable and prosperous to keep the prosperity-producing peace.
He believes that the base of comfortable and prosperous people needs to be much broader to assure the stability needed to keep a prosperity-producing peace.
It remains to be seen if the Trump World Order is right. Regardless, the TWO is here, and it’s not going away any time soon.