At the iconic Munich Security Conference held last month, the United States of President Donald Trump read out the riot act to Europeans in tones which suggested that their security was no longer indivisible from America's. In the words of Michael Hirsh of Foreign Policy magazine, a noted commentator whose article evoked the horrors of World War II that had followed from Britain's capitulation to Nazi Germany at Munich in 1938, for "more than eight decades, the word 'Munich' has meant one thing in international relations: a catastrophic policy of appeasement. Now, 'Munich' may soon take on a fresh - and possibly even more fraught - meaning: the voluntary surrender of global hegemony" (this time by America).

Britain's refusal to block Nazi aggression, so as to avoid a war with Germany, not only failed in 1938 but embroiled Britain, then the hegemonic power, in a world war that led to the collapse of the global British Empire and Britain's relegation to being a largely European power. By seeking to avoid war with Russia, whose invasion of Ukraine three years ago galvanised Europe into countervailing defiance, Americans might be bowing out of the global race for hegemonic power without a fight with Russians.

The scapegoat is Europe in this case. According to Katya Adler, the BBC's Europe Correspondent, leading "European powers have been shocked to the core by the Trump administration, which suggests it could revoke the security guarantees to Europe in place since 1945". The American reason is to pursue a peace settlement with Russians in the Ukraine war over the heads of Ukraine itself and the European powers that have supported it against Russia. Americans wish to partner with Russians geopolitically.

Europeans did not take long to reciprocate those hostile American sentiments. New German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, elected in a vote that followed the Munich Security Conference closely, declared America to be indifferent to Europe's fate; questioned the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (or NATO, which binds America and Europe to each other's security); and demanded that Europe improve its own defences quickly.

"This tone from the close US ally - and from Friedrich Merz who is known to be a passionate Atlanticist - would have been unimaginable even a couple of months ago," Adler writes. "It's a seismic shift. That may read like hyperbole, but what we are now experiencing in terms of transatlantic relations is unprecedented in the 80 years since the end of World War Two."

Over in Asia

The two primary oceanic extensions of American power lie across the Atlantic and the Pacific. America is an Atlantic creation and hence its historical instincts have drawn it close to Europe, where it faced its greatest challenge from the erstwhile Soviet Union. The Pacific came to the fore as America's global interests expanded and brought it into conflict with imperial Japan and then communist China. (There is a secondary realm of non-negotiable American influence, the Middle East, which is important because of its Jewish/Christian heritage and its Muslim oil wealth. No wonder that Israel and Saudi Arabia are America's closest allies in the Middle East.) A truism of America's grand strategy has been its refusal to countenance the rise of a rival power in Atlantic Europe or Pacific Asia. America's proclaimed ability to fight two regional wars concurrently is predicated on the crucial importance of Europe and Asia to its grand strategy.

America's National Defence Strategy of 2018 put matters bluntly: "The central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security is the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition by what the National Security Strategy classifies as revisionist powers. It is increasingly clear that China and Russia want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model - gaining veto authority over other nations' economic, diplomatic, and security decisions." The moral of the story: America, founded on the principles of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, would not allow that to happen globally.

These were the verities. Now, they ring hollow. The American appeasement of Russia in its planned pacification of Europe raises the obvious question of the role of China in a possible pacification of Asia sanctioned by an America in global retreat. It might be argued that America is appeasing Russia in order to concentrate on containing an economically- and strategically-expansive China, which is a far greater threat to American hegemony than a strategically-assertive but economically-enfeebled Russia.

However, this assumption would pre-suppose that Russia would be willing to ditch its new alliance with China in the interests of an America that is already conceding defeat in the race to remain the world's so-called indispensable power. It would also be to pre-suppose that China, the world's second-largest power, would be willing to relinquish its race to the top because of an unstable alliance between a retreating America and the third most powerful actor, Russia.

Instead, it is not impossible that the Sino-Russian alliance would prevail for the time being against a common enemy, America, precisely because that America is opting out of the race. Should that possibility materialise, the Sino-Russian agreement would fall apart, but not before then.

All said, Munich 2025 will go down in history as the place and date where and when the internationalism built into the core of the American ascendancy since the end of World War II was discarded in the pursuit of a policy of America First - whatever that means in the globalised world of America's own making.

Asia, like Europe, will not be what it has been for eight decades.

In my subsequent columns, I shall try to bring to you, dear readers, a sense of how Asia is repositioning itself in a new world order (or disorder) where the verities of the past are making way rapidly for the realities of the present.

Bangladesh and Singapore, two small yet resilient states, will have to preserve their agency in South and Southeast Asia. You and I cannot control what (alphabetically) the Americans, the Chinese and the Russians do. But we can still be in charge of our destinies.

The writer is Principal Research Fellow of the Cosmos Foundation. He may be reached at epaaropaar@gmail.com