By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

American Strategy and the Delusion of a Post-Trump Restoration

In Donald Trump’s first go-round as U.S. president, his heterodox approach seemed to portend a dramatic transformation in American foreign policy and potentially even the end of the rules-based international order. And yet for the most part, prevailing institutions, groupings, and rules endured. Washington’s alliances held fast, U.S. adversaries advanced their interests in real but limited ways, and American power proved resilient. As a result, the Biden administration was able to renew traditional elements of American influence and restore key fundamentals of U.S. foreign policy, such as active global leadership, alliances and partnerships, and the defense of an open, rules-based international order.

But when Trump leaves office in January 2029, there will be no going back. Trump’s reelection dashed the view that his first presidency was a mere aberration, and his second administration’s early, seismic actions on global trade, skepticism toward allies, and affection for erstwhile adversaries have already changed the United States’ role and image in the world. Some may argue that it is too soon to plan the next administration’s foreign policy because no one knows what further disruptions are coming. But thinking of the future of American foreign policy solely in terms of the post-Trump inheritance runs the risk of being overly reactive or reflexively restorationist. One notable lesson from the early months of Trump’s second term has been the scope and scale of policy change that is possible in a very short period. The next president should enter office with a clear and constructive vision for the future of American foreign policy and move to realize it with the same alacrity the Trump administration has displayed in its first 100 days. It is not too soon to start debating the contours of that vision.

To begin, the United States needs what accountants refer to as a “zero-based” review of its foreign policy: a clean slate from which to reevaluate and justify its long-held interests, values, and policies. Four years from now, many of the familiar pillars of U.S. grand strategy - from alliances to multilateral organizations to global treaties - will likely be transformed beyond recognition. What’s more, the world these tools were intended to help manage will have changed profoundly. No new president, whether a Democrat, a more traditional Republican, or a Trump disciple, will have the option of returning to the familiar approaches of the post–Cold War era. Starting from a zero base will guard against the tendency to default to old structures and concepts that might no longer reflect the United States’ vital interests and geopolitical context or the needs and preferences of the American people.

Trump has exposed the growing cracks in the U.S.-led international order. But he is not interested in fixing them - quite the opposite. By the time his second term is over, that old order will be irreparably broken. Whoever follows Trump will have to reckon with a complex, multipolar international order and decide what role the United States should play in it.

 

Back To Normal?

During his first term, Trump’s animosity toward international trade, opposition to multilateralism, and deep skepticism of alliances signaled an end to the rules-based international order. His unorthodox policy views had a magnifying effect on major global trends that had been well underway before Trump was elected, including the global diffusion of power, rapid and disruptive technological change, and political polarization and policy volatility. The United States would have to tend to an international order that was badly in need of renovation, including in the domains of critical and emerging technologies and through new forms of order-building in the Indo-Pacific.

But to a degree that surprised us even after we joined the Biden administration, American power and global leadership proved highly resilient once Trump departed the scene. When President Joe Biden told the world, “America is back,” the world largely believed him. Relieved that the Trump era appeared to have passed, U.S. allies and partners aligned more closely with the United States. Growing coordination between China and Russia helped the Biden team rally Washington’s closest partners in both Asia and Europe. The U.S.-led response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrated the United States’ unparalleled ability to provide decisive military and intelligence assistance while isolating Russia from the global financial system.

Meanwhile, the combination of China’s coercive “wolf warrior” diplomacy, draconian COVID-19 pandemic response, and worsening economic slowdown highlighted the benefits of aligning with the United States and diminished the appeal of hedging strategies that courted closer economic and technological ties with Beijing. The impressive post-COVID economic recovery in the United States - the strongest among advanced industrialized economies - underscored continued U.S. power, and allies and partners embraced Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy by aligning their foreign policies with the United States and one another, spending more on defense, and pushing back against Beijing’s aggressive actions from Taiwan to the South China Sea.

For at least the first two years of the Biden administration, American politics appeared to have moved past Trump, creating space for some notable areas of bipartisanship. Trump’s decisive loss in 2020, the outrage at his attempts to overturn the result and at the ensuing insurrection, and the strong performance by Democrats in the 2022 midterms all seemed to indicate that Trumpism had run its course. Although partisan polarization remained as acute as ever, the passage of major legislation such as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act suggested that Congress was not only able to function but also finally ready to make much-needed generational investments in U.S. competitiveness that could modernize the country’s global role.

On the biggest foreign policy challenges the Biden administration faced, Republican members of Congress often pushed for sharper versions of the administration’s preferred policy, such as advocating more aggressive support for Ukraine. Indo-Pacific policy was remarkably bipartisan, and a solid consensus formed around central tenets of Biden’s China policy, which itself reflected some continuity with Trump’s first-term approach. Taken together, these dynamics made the Biden presidency feel like a return to normalcy - a restoration, not an interregnum.

Yet the immediate success of this approach reduced the urgency within the administration to more fundamentally remake U.S. grand strategy for a new era. The war in Ukraine, in particular, appeared to reinforce the centrality of traditional foreign policy constructs by positioning the United States as the leader of a coalition - centered on its NATO allies - to defend the free world against the threat of Russian aggression. In areas in which the Biden administration recognized that reforms were needed - to modernize alliances, create new multilateral configurations, and attempt to build a post-neoliberal approach to international economics - the changes were evolutionary and in some cases incomplete. For instance, the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan and reduce the United States’ global counterterrorism footprint was bold and necessary, and it could have set the stage for a new era of strategic discipline. But despite defining China as the most consequential challenge for the United States and elevating the Indo-Pacific as the primary theater of competition, the Biden administration was consumed, from 2023 onward, by the war in Ukraine and conflicts in the Middle East, precluding military posture changes and readiness investments that would have better aligned U.S. assets with U.S. strategy.

The risks of metastasizing instability in Europe and the Middle East, threats to Israel and close allies in NATO, and domestic political pressures diverted attention from long-term strategic adjustments to immediate crisis management. In short, the allies’ and partners’ warm reception of the American return, coupled with challenging conflicts, meant that in the time it had, the Biden administration prioritized foreign policy restoration over reinvention.

 

Fool Me Once

No responsible analyst can claim to predict what will happen over the first year of the new Trump administration - let alone all four. But the haphazard rollout of unprecedented global tariffs in April and the White House’s goal of reshaping the postwar order indicate that upheaval is not just incidental but a central policy objective. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was explicit on this point in his confirmation hearing: “The post-war global order is not just obsolete,” he told Congress, “it is now a weapon being used against us.”

Although the secretary’s characterization is extreme, it contains a kernel of truth: as the United States and the world have transformed, the liberal international order has not kept pace. Thanks to early moves by the Trump administration and dramatic shifts in economic, military, and technological power, the United States no longer has the option of returning to the international order and grand strategy it has known since the Cold War, perhaps even World War II. Trump’s foreign policy is hastening the arrival of a multipolar world by unleashing and accelerating forces that will be difficult to reverse. Trade policies intended to punish China may well advantage Beijing and diminish the United States. As allies and partners grow more capable of self-defense, they will also become more autonomous. Already faltering multilateral institutions will further diminish in capacity. Threats to invade allies will undermine international norms of sovereignty and nonaggression. And great-power competitors will seize diplomatic ground that the Trump administration freely cedes.

These trends converge most clearly in trade and economic policy. Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement in April was expected to target China, a great-power competitor with whom the United States has a large trade deficit by dint of China’s role as a manufacturing powerhouse that sends American consumers inexpensive goods. The 125 percent tariff that was levied outstripped even the most extreme forecasts and led to a monthlong trade war that roiled the global economy. Although a truce was reached in Geneva, it is a fragile one that could easily be broken by new U.S. sectoral tariffs. And in exchange for the upheaval, the United States extracted no concessions from Beijing.

Meanwhile, close U.S. allies and partners in Asia, including Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam, were not spared from Trump’s crippling tariffs. These countries are also manufacturing giants and were critical partners in U.S.-led efforts to break China’s monopoly on global manufacturing. Many U.S. companies and partners are moving their supply chains out of China to push back against the rising power’s coercive economic efforts. Now, even if these partners manage to negotiate lower rates for themselves, the Trump administration’s ten percent baseline tariff, should it stand, may make such an undertaking prohibitively expensive. Should these allies ultimately face tariff levels that are similar to China’s, the “China plus one” strategies pursued by many companies to diversify manufacturing to countries other than China will be infeasible. Regardless of what tariff levels land, including as court proceedings play out in the United States, the shock of being economically kneecapped by a close ally has made many Indo-Pacific states rethink their reliance on the United States as a guardian of an open international economic order.

Shipping containers from China at a port in San Pedro, California, May 2025

The Chinese government intends to use the U.S.-led turmoil to its advantage. Throughout the standoff, official statements from Beijing projected confidence in the resilience of the Chinese economy, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping toured the Southeast Asian countries hit the hardest by U.S. tariffs, promising close partnerships and portraying China as the defender of the international order. That the United States folded so quickly has almost certainly validated Beijing’s approach. Beyond its trade policy, the Trump administration has given little indication of its broader strategy toward China or the rest of the Indo-Pacific, creating ample incentive for even close allies to resume hedging and for Beijing to gain ground.

Indeed, Trump’s hard protectionist turn strikes at the heart of the U.S. alliance system, which has historically paired strategic alignment and security guarantees with privileged access to American markets, resulting in impressive development curves for many American allies. The trade deficits that Trump abhors were a predictable and benign byproduct of this arrangement, particularly because the United States exports services that do not figure in these tallies to many of its closest partners. After 1945, the United States assumed global security and economic leadership because it believed that both served Washington’s best interests. Redefining these interests is not simply a U.S. policy matter; it means the postwar international order is less appealing to the countries that accepted American leadership as the price for a system that enabled their security and prosperity.

Trump’s erratic approach to trade is converging with other economic and technological policies to undermine the United States’ preeminent role. The American economy still has unmatched capacity for resilience and growth. But assuming that some tariffs will remain, many analysts have projected that the United States will likely enter a recession before year’s end, if it is not already in one. Bond market volatility is also calling the dollar’s primacy into question, and the United States’ global credit rating has slid. Coupled with acute uncertainty, rising prices, and supply shortages, the American economy is wobblier than at any point since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Technologically, the United States can continue to lead in AI and other critical sectors, but it faces more challenges to its innovation edge than at any time since the Cold War. Sectoral tariffs may make it more challenging for the Trump administration to invest in domestic manufacturing, including in critical technologies such as semiconductors, since the levies would increase the costs of imported components and make U.S.-manufactured chips less globally competitive. The administration’s rescission of Biden’s rules on AI chip exports, meanwhile, may make it easier for exquisite technologies to wind up in competitors’ hands. And the administration’s turn away from investments in clean energy technologies increases the likelihood that China could come to dominate that sector, while cuts to education and basic research funding undermine long-term U.S. competitiveness overall.

These shifts will impose compounding geopolitical costs on the United States. Although it’s difficult to know how much ground China or Russia may gain, it already appears likely that U.S. partners from Southeast Asia to Europe will hedge in China’s direction. As revisionist authoritarian states such as China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia continue deepening their cooperation, the United States is inching further back from its role as the leader of a coalition of advanced industrial democracies. This is not an accident. In stark contrast with his first term, in which many senior officials steered the administration to focus on great-power competition, Trump appears to be pursuing a transactional approach to geopolitics based on dealmaking with other major powers. His early desire to coerce Ukraine into an unfavorable deal with Russia, for instance, and signs that he could seek an accommodation with China have raised fears that the United States will recede to the Western Hemisphere and leave Europe and Asia to Russia and China, respectively.

Whether Trump will commit to a spheres-of-influence approach is uncertain. But the question of which countries Washington views as adversaries and allies and why is very much open, particularly as the world watches Trump’s assault on democratic norms and institutions at home. Partners will be hard-pressed to escape the conclusion that Washington has completely redefined its self-interests, even if the nature of its desired leadership role is not yet clear.

All of this will accelerate a profound global reordering. Some global rules, institutions, alliances, and groupings will withstand the test. But even as familiar structures remain, their roles, missions, and contexts may shift beyond recognition, and global perceptions of the United States will be forever altered. The post-Trump world will present both an opportunity and an epochal challenge: the need to build a new American strategy that goes beyond merely reacting to Trump and also avoids reverting to decades of postwar policy thinking.

Since the global financial crisis and the failed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it has been clear that the United States is overstretched. But the temptation to tweak the United States’ role in the world rather than overhaul it has carried the day in the last two Democratic administrations. After Trump’s second term, the impulse to merely repair and restore traditional American leadership will seem quaint at best. The next administration will inherit something closer to a grand strategic tabula rasa than policymakers have seen since the end of World War II.

 

Zeroing Out

In accounting, zero-based budget exercises begin with clean financial slates in order to justify every expense and allocate resources efficiently to meet strategic goals. In foreign policy, strategists should use this moment to zero out their assumptions about the U.S. role in the world rather than accept inherited premises. In bucking conventional foreign policy wisdom, the Trump administration has conducted a version of this exercise, one guided by impulse instead of analysis and strategy. The next administration can and must do better, taking advantage of an American foreign policy “Overton window” that has been blown wide open.

Such a review must start by taking stock of the conditions that best assure the security and prosperity of the American people. American grand strategists, for instance, have long defined U.S. interests in terms of preventing a hostile power from dominating Eurasia. But this construct implicitly favors military calculations and neglects the power and influence that come from dominating technological ecosystems, such as AI, clean tech, and quantum computing - the advantages of which may prove more consequential than securing particular geographies over the coming decades. Revising this assumption could reorient American strategy, centering technology cooperation with allies and partners and elevating the importance of Africa and Southeast Asia as regions whose demographics create opportunities for rapid growth in their digital economies. It could also put a premium on new tools of economic statecraft, such as revamped development finance and a U.S. government strategic investment fund, that enable Washington to help finance other countries’ purchase of U.S. technology and infrastructure.

American grand strategists also need to ask whether the country still benefits from being the preponderant provider of global public goods, such as freedom of navigation. Defending the global commons - particularly shipping lanes - has been a guiding principle for the U.S. military in the post–Cold War world, whether countering piracy in the Horn of Africa, defending against Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, or conducting freedom-of-navigation operations in the South China Sea. A zero-based review could help prioritize these missions, assessing whether the United States has sufficient capacity for the most taxing contingencies and identifying areas in which other countries could accept greater responsibility.

A zero-based review could also consider the appropriate place for values in American foreign policy. American grand strategy has long been oriented around the country’s identity as a democracy. But is the spread or at least the defense of democracy still in the national interest? What role should democracy and human rights play in shaping Washington’s global objectives and identifying its partners? A review might suggest a more modest emphasis on values as a matter of both rhetoric and substance and reckon with diminished American moral authority as a result of democratic challenges at home and perceptions of hypocrisy abroad. Such an approach might center international partnerships on shared principles rather than shared values, expanding the role for nondemocracies in U.S. coalitions. It could call for greater restraint in the use of sanctions to performatively punish countries for their internal conduct - especially if those sanctions compromise the United States’ ability to cooperate on areas of mutual interest. And it could create space for expanded diplomatic engagement with countries whose values the United States finds repugnant.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at a NATO meeting in Brussels, June 2025

Finally, a zero-based review must account for newfound constraints on American power and allow for tradeoffs demanded by a more multipolar world. Multipolarity, after all, does not imply equipoise. This version of it will be complex, with significant power wielded by the United States and China but with major roles for other players, including an increasingly autonomous Europe, a recalcitrant Russia, and an ever more powerful India. It will require a realistic assessment of American capabilities - acknowledging, for example, that the U.S. military already faces a readiness crisis, the cost of servicing the U.S. debt already exceeds spending on defense and Medicare, and Trump’s cuts have already slashed the capacity of the federal workforce, including diplomats and development experts. In a more multipolar world that no longer presumes consistent American leadership, the exercise of influence over newer forms of international order could prove more taxing. With more limited capabilities, strategists will want to work with, rather than resist or reshape, the major geopolitical changes that are already underway.

Consider how policymakers might choose to approach the U.S. alliance system in a post-Trump world. The next several years could witness a crisis that tests alliances in Europe and Asia, as the United States continues to press partners to spend more on defense and threatens to pull back its commitments - and perhaps even does so. American unpredictability is already inspiring allies to take steps to invest in their self-defense individually and through new collective arrangements, and could result in some allies seeking nuclear capabilities.

Rather than reflexively aiming to reverse these trends, zeroing out decades-old assumptions could yield a fresh approach. New alliance bargains could prioritize countries with which the United States has the greatest strategic alignment and focus on domains that benefit the American people while dispensing with the separation of security, economic, and technological cooperation that has traditionally characterized U.S. partnerships. Alliances have long focused on nuclear and high-end conventional deterrence, but they could be recentered on economic and technological cooperation. New negotiated arrangements could include the harmonization of industrial policy; cooperation on vital supply chains, such as critical minerals and semiconductors; the alignment of climate and tax policy; and frameworks for collaboration on frontier technologies, such as AI, including aligned tech regulations and standards. Refashioning alliances in this way, moreover, will bring them into domains that manifestly benefit everyday Americans and better align them with the requirements of long-term competition with China.

These changes could also transform the United States from a wholesale security provider to something more like a security enabler, with allies assuming more responsibility for conventional deterrence and the United States supporting them with weapons sales and coproduction, technology sharing and innovation partnerships, intelligence collaboration, and operational integration. With European allies in particular, there could be an opportunity to strike a new bargain that accelerates investments in independent European self-defense, focuses allies squarely on the Russian threat, and reassesses the U.S. military posture on the continent. If smaller configurations of European defenses are layered atop NATO, the United States could explore new alliance approaches that leverage those efforts.

Such shifts would allow Washington to update its global force posture without hasty changes that surprise allies and create security gaps leading to deterrence failures. The United States could concentrate its military presence in a relatively small number of frontline allies, prioritizing Asia but including Europe, and it could focus on partners whose threat perceptions and capabilities are most closely aligned, such as Japan, the Philippines, Poland, South Korea, and the Baltic states. Within other alliances, the United States could then pay more attention to the areas of cooperation that benefit it most, such as technology cooperation and defense coproduction.

Without a zero-based review, strategists risk succumbing to restorationist tendencies that will leave the United States unequipped to meet the moment. In the wake of Trump’s disruptive presidency, for instance, policymakers might choose to recommit to all treaty allies in Europe and Asia equally, particularly if Russia continues to threaten eastern Europe and Chinese-Russian cooperation increases. But in a world in which a smaller subset of European allies have supercharged their own defenses, an undifferentiated return to NATO risks perpetuating age-old frustrations about allied defense spending and burden sharing. A return to business as usual for NATO would also make it difficult to deal with the reality that some NATO allies will have warmed to China and others to Russia as hedges during the Trump years. What’s more, it would fail to account for increased European capability and autonomy, and it would risk a recommitment of resources to the continent that the United States cannot afford.

A zero-based review would also create an opportunity to account for the American people’s foreign policy preferences, when they are discernible, and free strategists from imagined political constraints. Foreign policy practitioners and thinkers often discount the role of public opinion in foreign policy, arguing that the American people’s preferences need not constrain the options available to policymakers. But this moment of profound change is occurring precisely because of a widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo. Many Americans, for instance, believe that the faraway military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq were a mistake. Nearly every year since 2004, a majority of Americans have reported that they are dissatisfied with the country’s role in the world. Although the public does not have formed consensus views on many issues, post-Trump planners have an opportunity to better align grand strategy with public perceptions, which in turn should make public support for U.S. foreign policy more stable over time and across parties.

A zero-based review should also embed the new political openings that the second Trump administration will have enabled. In the past, U.S. presidents on a bipartisan basis have winced at foreign policies that might be seen as controversial within and across parties, including initiatives to negotiate with adversaries such as Iran or North Korea, or the fundamental necessity of pressing allies to increase burden sharing. With the Trump team dispensing with all policy assumptions and conventions, more options will be available to whoever comes next.

 

Begin Again

Some might refer to Present at the Creation, a book by former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, when discussing the extraordinary global order-building effort undertaken by the United States after World War II. Explaining the title, Acheson noted that in the immediate postwar world, the Truman administration’s task was “just a bit less formidable than that described in the first chapter of Genesis. That was to create a world out of chaos; ours, to create half a world, a free half, out of the same material without blowing the whole to pieces in the process.”

Acheson’s creation, of course, survived remarkably well. It was refashioned and embellished many times over and persisted after the end of the Cold War, which it helped win. Because history at that moment broke in Washington’s favor, it produced a world in which American policymakers saw few constraints and many opportunities. The alliances and institutions that survived the midcentury competition between East and West appeared too healthy and American power too strong to warrant a post–Cold War overhaul.

The picture is completely different today. As new technologies, new rising powers, and long-standing tensions combine to form fresh chaos, the Trump administration has decided to wipe the slate clean. The world’s opinion of the United States and receptivity to its desire to assume a refashioned leadership role are themselves new variables. Although global demand for American power has proved resilient before, there are no guarantees that an American president of either party, come 2029, will be able to shape patterns of trust and cooperation the same way presidents have in the past. The world, meanwhile, continues to churn, as allies, partners, and adversaries make consequential decisions that will constrain the choices available to the next U.S. president. Washington needs a strategy fashioned for this post-primacy reality. To deflect this task would be to miss an exceptionally rare chance not only to be present at the creation of a new order but to be prepared for it.

 

 

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