By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Price of Trump’s Power Politics

Pax Americana is gone. Born with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the U.S.-led international rules-based order died with the second inauguration of Donald J. Trump. The president has long maintained that this order disadvantages the United States by saddling it with the burden of policing the globe and enabling its allies to play it for a sucker. “The postwar global order is not just obsolete,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared in his Senate confirmation hearing. “It is now a weapon being used against us.”

Trump’s skepticism about U.S. support for Ukraine and Taiwan, his eagerness to impose tariffs, and his threats to retake the Panama Canal, absorb Canada, and acquire Greenland make it clear that he envisions a return to nineteenth-century power politics and spheres of interest, even if he does not frame his foreign policy in those terms. In that era, the great powers of the day sought to divide the world into regions that each would dominate, regardless of the desires of those who lived there—a vision of the world that Trump explicitly echoes. Trump sees few significant U.S. interests outside the Western Hemisphere, considers alliances to be a drain on the U.S. Treasury, and believes the United States should dominate its neighborhood. His is a Thucydidean worldview—one in which “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

Although the era of Pax Americana produced extraordinary achievements—the deterrence of communism, unprecedented global prosperity, and relative peace—it also planted the seeds of its destruction well before Trump’s ascent. American hubris had led to costly, humiliating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the 2008–9 financial crisis shattered faith in the U.S. government’s competence and policy prescriptions. One can understand why some Americans might feel their country would fare better in a different, might-makes-right world. The United States would seem to bring a strong hand to such an order—it commands the world’s largest economy, its most capable military, and arguably its strongest geographic position.

But it has a profoundly underrated disadvantage: lack of practice. Naked power politics is alien terrain for the United States, but it is familiar territory to its current rivals. Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin have long resented Pax Americana because it limited their geopolitical ambitions. They have learned to work together to counter U.S. influence, especially in the global South. And unlike Trump, they do not face internal checks and balances on their power. They could overplay their hands and generate a backlash to their revisionist ambitions. But if they do not, Trump’s gamble could easily go awry, leaving Americans, and the rest of the world, less prosperous and less secure.

 

Domination Over Diplomacy

As anomalous as Trump’s rhetoric can sound to ears conditioned by decades of bipartisan talk of the United States as the leader of the free world, his foreign-policy vision—of expanding U.S. influence in its immediate neighborhood while backing out of global leadership—draws from older American impulses. In 1823, President James Monroe famously declared the Western Hemisphere off-limits to further European colonization. By the end of the nineteenth century, presidents would use Monroe’s proclamation to justify U.S. territorial expansion. In 1977, the United States agreed to relinquish control of the Panama Canal only in the face of rising anti-Americanism in Latin America and over the staunch opposition of Americans who believed, as one U.S. senator put it, that “we stole it fair and square.”

Indeed, Trump’s coveting of Canada and Greenland also have roots in U.S. history. The founding American generation harbored dreams of absorbing Canada; writing at the start of the War of 1812, fought between the United States and the United Kingdom, former President Thomas Jefferson declared that “the acquisition of Canada this year . . . will be a mere matter of marching.” Such a desire persisted in cries of “54-40 or fight” in the 1840s, a reference to the latitude of the southern border of what was then Russian-owned Alaskan territory and to an appeal to seize a large swath of Canada’s Pacific Northwest. President James Polk only set aside this ambition in 1846 in favor of the current U.S.-Canadian border because he was reluctant to confront a more powerful United Kingdom over a distant and largely uninhabited territory as war with Mexico loomed. President Andrew Johnson considered purchasing Greenland from Denmark when the United States bought Alaska from Russia in 1867, and President Harry Truman, citing the island’s strategic value, secretly pitched the purchase once again in 1946.

Similar dreams of Manifest Destiny undergird Trump’s inaugural-address call for a foreign policy that “expands our territory.” His goal to increase Washington’s sway in the Western Hemisphere does in fact have some strategic logic. The Panama Canal is a vital sea route for U.S. commerce. Roughly 40 percent of all U.S. container traffic passes through the waterway, and nearly three-quarters of all containers sailing through the canal originate in or are destined for the United States. U.S. security would be endangered if another great power controlled the canal. Greenland’s strategic importance, meanwhile, has grown alongside climate change—a phenomenon that Trump ironically insists is not occurring. The melting of the Arctic ice cap will soon create a new northern waterway, bringing additional military vulnerabilities to northern North America. Greenland also boasts large reserves of the critical minerals that the United States needs for clean energy technologies. And making Canada the 51st state would eliminate trade barriers between the two countries, in theory reducing economic inefficiencies and potentially enriching people on both sides of the border.

Washington, however, has already achieved many of these strategic objectives without resorting to threats. Panama’s president, José Raúl Molino, successfully campaigned on promises to build closer ties with the United States. As an autonomous territory of Denmark, Greenland is covered by NATO’s Article 5, meaning that it falls under the organization’s security umbrella. The island hosts the U.S. military’s northernmost installation, Pituffik Space Base, formerly known as Thule Air Base. Greenlanders have proved eager to solicit American rather than Chinese investment in their economy. And the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which Trump negotiated during his first term, has already encouraged economic integration between the United States and Canada. The agreement’s 2026 review provides an opportunity to deepen that cooperation. Yet such diplomatic tools—forging alliances and creating collective security and trade agreements—are hallmarks of the world order that Trump has now abandoned.

 

The Putin-Xi Playbook

It is clear whose approach Trump seeks to emulate instead. He considers Putin and Xi his peers, not allied leaders such as Japan’s Shigeru Ishiba, France’s Emmanuel Macron, or the United Kingdom’s Keir Starmer. Trump regularly denounces these allies for taking advantage of U.S. largess, but he has hailed Putin as “savvy,” “strong,” and “a genius” for invading Ukraine and Xi for being “exceptionally brilliant” in controlling Chinese citizens with an “iron fist.” In his praise for these autocrats, Trump reveals his singular admiration for leaders who wield power without constraint—even those who are actively hostile to U.S. interests.

Trump, moreover, appears comfortable with ceding spheres of influence to China and Russia if they return the favor. He has blamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, not Putin, for the war in Ukraine, and he favors resolving the Ukraine war with an agreement that cedes Ukrainian territory to Russia and bars Ukraine from joining NATO. Asked in 2021 whether the United States should defend Taiwan militarily, Trump answered that if China invaded the island, “there isn’t a fucking thing we can do about it.” And Trump is comfortable with downgrading postwar alliances that extend into supposed Russian and Chinese spheres of interest. He has, for instance, repeatedly questioned the value of NATO (whose expansion he blames for triggering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) and threatened to withdraw U.S. troops from South Korea. He views such alliances as bad investments that saddle the United States with the cost of protecting countries that, to add insult to injury, also steal jobs from Americans.

Like Putin and Xi, Trump also believes that economic power should be used as a lever to extract concessions from countries that displease him. Just as Putin has used Russia’s oil and gas to intimidate Europe and Xi has manipulated China’s exports and imports to coerce countries such as Australia and Japan, Trump favors using tariffs to force both domestic and foreign corporations to relocate production to the United States. Trump also sees tariffs as instruments to compel foreign capitals to bend to his will on other issues. Mexico, for instance, now faces the prospect of higher tariffs should it fail to meet Trump’s demands to stop the flow of migrants and fentanyl across the United States’ southern border. He has threatened to use “economic force” to annex Canada. He has warned Denmark it will face higher tariffs if it refuses to sell Greenland. And just this week, he threatened to impose tariffs on Colombia for its refusal to accept military flights deporting its nationals from the United States. The creators of the postwar global order believed high tariffs only fueled destructive economic nationalism and conflict. Trump’s threats mark the dawn of a more openly coercive order in which economic intimidation replaces free trade and international cooperation as a currency of power.

 

Playing a Losing Hand

Trump’s approach may yield some successes. Canada and Mexico may agree to do more, at least symbolically, to secure their borders. The leaders of U.S. allies will visit Washington—or Mar-a-Lago—to trumpet their desire to work with Trump’s America.

But the United States’ return to nineteenth-century power politics will likely not yield the bonanza that Trump has promised. Up until now, Washington’s network of alliances has granted the United States extraordinary influence in Europe and Asia, imposing constraints on Moscow and Beijing at a scale that neither power can replicate. Ceding that advantage will come at great cost to the United States: not only will erstwhile U.S. allies no longer follow Washington’s lead, but many could also seek safety by aligning themselves more closely with Russia and China instead.

The United States may face similar setbacks on the trade front. As Elizabeth Economy and Melanie Hart noted in Foreign Affairs in January, U.S. producers are already at a growing competitive disadvantage exporting to the 12 members of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, the accord negotiated in the wake of Trump’s 2017 decision to withdraw the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The door for the United States to join CPTPP, which has remained ajar, may soon close. But it could open for China, potentially giving Beijing a say over the standards and rules that govern a wide swath of the global economy. During Trump’s first term, the European Union signed major trade agreements with Canada and Japan. It has just concluded new and upgraded agreements with Mexico and countries in South America, and it is finalizing deals with Australia and Indonesia. Trump’s willingness to slap tariffs on countries that defy him will only encourage foreign leaders to look elsewhere for trade opportunities and lock U.S. producers out of global markets.

 

Trump’s Gamble

How the United States will fare in a dog-eat-dog world also depends, of course, on decisions made elsewhere. Putin and Xi’s shared conviction that they are now driving change on a global scale may breed hubris and cause them to misstep. China’s heavy-handed “wolf warrior” diplomacy and Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine, for instance, bolstered Biden’s effort to rebuild U.S. alliances. Other countries might resent the United States, but many of them fear China and Russia in ways that could work to Washington’s advantage.

What the United States’ Asian and European allies do also matters. These countries will be tempted to try to please Trump, whether by showering him with praise, feting him with state visits, or offering preemptive concessions such as purchasing more American-made goods. Those efforts, however, will not endear them to him. Trump will happily pocket those wins and see them as vindication of his might-makes-right approach. But he will not take up the United States’ old mantle of global leadership.

To earn Trump’s respect, U.S. allies must demonstrate strength. Whether they can do so is an open question. First, they must recognize that the era of Pax Americana is over and the era of power politics has returned. The one thing Trump understands is power—and if U.S. allies work together, they can confront him with plenty of their own. If they succeed in mobilizing their resources collectively, they may also be able to blunt some of Trump’s worst foreign policy impulses. That may in turn create the opportunity down the road to forge a new global order that matches Pax Americana’s record for peace and prosperity. But if they fail, a darker era of unchecked power politics awaits—one that is less prosperous and more dangerous for all.

 

 

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