When it became clear in the early hours of Wednesday that Donald Trump was going to be the next president of the US, Florian Philippot, chief strategist of France’s far-right Front National, tweeted: “Their world is collapsing. Ours is being built.” Amid the euphoria and self-aggrandisement, there is a scarily credible proposition.

Who are “they” whose world is collapsing? Arguably, the whole American-centred order created from the ruins of the second world war. And who are the new forces that Philippot is so confident will build on its ruins? They are in fact rather old forces: the ethnic nationalists whose logic brought the world to such a state by 1945 that a whole new order had to be built.

'As citizens we will suffer': people around the world react to Trump's win Read more

In Flann O’Brien’s parodic novel The Poor Mouth there is a map of the world as seen by poor Gaelic peasants. It comes with a compass marking the four directions: west, west, west and west. This compass might also serve for the map of the world that most Europeans have had in their heads. For all the attempts of the EU to become an independent superpower, we have continued to look west for leadership. There has been an assumption that the US is the defining power, the one whose actions, good and bad, give the world its essential shape. Now that assumption has been pulled from under us. Trump’s victory was forged in part by his stated desire that the US should no longer be the world’s policeman and arbiter – and that victory in itself shows us that, whatever the new president’s intentions, the US is in no shape to play those roles.

Early on Wednesday morning, the TV anchors rolled out the cliched phrase that comes unbidden to the lips on these occasions: “Donald Trump is the next president of the United States and leader of the free world.” A line from Elbow’s song came to mind: “The leaders of the free world are just little boys throwing stones.” For two things are clear: there is no free world any more and, if there were, Trump would certainly not be its leader.

That very phrase, in all its pomposity, once delineated not just a place but an idea. The free world in the cold war was the US, the anglophone countries, Japan and western Europe, and the American president got the title of its leader in much the same way that a new pope automatically becomes bishop of Rome. It came with the job, and it was not just an honorific. It had content. The western world order was built on US military, economic and ideological power. The US was the essential member, and de facto leader, not just of Nato but of multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation. And this free world seemed to be dramatically expanding. After the fall of the Berlin Wall it even looked like a world, stretching as it did around the planet.

The EU has a short time in which to grow up and realise that it no longer has a benign big brother to the west

And now? The title “leader of the free world” being bestowed on Trump is like British monarchs styling themselves kings of France until the early 19th century, or one of Trump’s own beauty queens being named Miss Universe. It is an absurdity. To be fair to Trump, he doesn’t want it. His “America First” slogan is, among other things, a disavowal of any ambition to lead the world. But even if Trump did want to see himself this way, nobody else would. For in the American crisis that Trump embodies, the whole concept of a US-centred world order has imploded. There may be no “western world” any more, and if there is it is not at all clear in what sense many of its citizens are going to be “free”.

In this great disruption, Trump is as much an effect as a cause. The final act may be dramatic, but the play has been on for a while. There have been two successive models of a US-led world order – one ended in triumph, one in disarray. The first was of course the cold war, with its binary division of the world into competing hegemonies. There was no other possible leader for the western hemisphere – as Britain discovered in the Suez crisis, the US alone could dictate the terms on which other countries, even those with delusions of grandeur, operated their foreign policies and military engagements. This should not be seen, in rosy retrospect, as a golden era. It had its horrors and its follies. Europeans were often uneasy under the American umbrella, during the Vietnam war, for example, or Ronald Reagan’s nuclear buildup. But the perceived Soviet threat meant that US leadership was never itself threatened.

The second version was the era of imperial hubris when the US thought of itself not only as the sole superpower but (in the typical imperial manner) as the universal civilisation. It is increasingly hard to remember, but there was a period in which even Russia seemed to be a nascent eastern America, taking its burgers from McDonald’s, its economics from Chicago, its loans from the US-led World Bank, and its political direction from Washington. Ideologically, the US formula (liberal democracy + deregulated markets + free trade = the end of history) was unstoppably ascendant. American prestige was so high that no one thought twice about, for example, having Bill Clinton as the final arbiter of the Northern Ireland peace process. Something that was technically an internal UK problem. It was what the leader of the free world did.

We know, of course, that this hubris was followed by the Iraq war and its brutal exposure of the belief that anywhere in the world could be transformed (with the help of a quick, clean invasion) into a little America. We know, too, that George W Bush’s follies created huge fissures in the facade of American leadership. But it should be borne in mind that the Europeans remained almost desperate to restore the status quo. The rapture that greeted the then presidential candidate Barack Obama in Berlin in July 2008, with more than 100,000 people gathering to adore him at the Victory Column, suggested that much of the free world was still dreaming of another JFK to whom fealty could be offered. The reign of the neocons was seen as an unfortunate episode in an enduring marriage.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest “Ich bin ein Berliner”: US president John F Kennedy gives his historic speech in Berlin on 26 June 1963. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

But Obama (and his secretary of state Hillary Clinton) could never fully restore American leadership. The ability of the US to project its power has never recovered from the Iraq disaster. The hesitations and confusions that characterised the US responses to the Arab spring were not merely a function of weak leadership. They reflected the new realities of the inability of the US to shape a messy world to its desires and the unwillingness of Americans to let their sons and daughters die trying.

Behind all the bluster about restoring America’s standing as the global alpha male, Donald Trump seems to understand these realities. His response is typically incoherent, a strange mix of anti-militarist isolationism and militarist unilateralism. But his confusion is not unique: George W Bush also won the presidency as an isolationist and we know how that worked out.

What’s different about Trump is that he wants to follow his “America First” logic in every direction, specifically into trade policy and the destruction of the Paris climate change accord. And he will bring to this a mindset that cannot be appeased, even if other leaders are minded to try to do so. He simultaneously imagines the US as pathetically weak, kicked around by its trade partners and robbed blind by its military allies, and as immensely strong, able to dictate the terms of all of its engagements with the rest of the world. That’s a formula not for deal-making, but for a toxic cocktail of paranoia and petulance that no one is going to drink.

The world can’t wait around this time and hope for a new Obama to ride in and restore the natural order of American leadership. The old Obama couldn’t even do that, and after a minimum of four years of President Trump the world will be a much more anarchic place. With Trump’s election, the US has lost for a generation the claim that underlay its supremacy: the claim to be the shining light of democracy and tolerance. If there is a world that the US leads now, it is the increasingly unfree world of the new “managed democracies”, in which ethnic nationalism and media control fuel elected dictatorships.

Who can now take up that banner of open democracy thrown aside by the US? Perhaps the spectre of Donald Trump, and of the Donald Trumps within its own borders, will scare the European Union into the realisation that it is the only large bloc left in which a revived social contract can offer the hope of real equality without which democracy cannot survive.

The EU has a short time in which to grow up and realise that it no longer has a benign big brother to the west. All it can look to is itself and the lesson it learned in its darkest days. It is the lesson the Americans are now teaching themselves: that absolute hopelessness corrupts absolutely.