By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The End of American Exceptionalism

The only thing uncontroversial about Donald Trump is how he won his second term. Despite polls showing a statistical dead heat and fears of a long, drawn-out wait for election results, Trump was declared the winner early last Wednesday morning. Unlike in 2016, he won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College, improving his margins in almost every demographic. Republicans won a strong Senate majority of 53 seats, and they look likely to maintain control of the House of Representatives. To the rest of the world, the picture should be clear: Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement will define U.S. foreign policy for the next four years.

Any close observer of Trump’s first term should be familiar with his foreign policy preferences as well as his foreign policy process. However, there are likely to be three significant differences between Trump’s first- and second-term foreign policies. First, Trump will come into office with a more homogeneous national security team than he had in 2017. Second, the state of the world in 2025 is rather different than it was in 2017. And third, foreign actors will have a much better read of Donald Trump.

Trump will navigate world politics with greater confidence this time around. Whether he will have any better luck bending the world to his “America first” brand is another question entirely. What is certain, however, is that the era of American exceptionalism has ended. Under Trump, U.S. foreign policy will cease promoting long-standing American ideals. That, combined with an expected surge of corrupt foreign policy practices, will leave the United States looking like a garden-variety great power.

 

The Rules of the Game

Trump’s foreign policy worldview has been clear ever since he entered political life. He believes that the U.S.-created liberal international order has, over time, stacked the deck against the United States. To change that imbalance, Trump wants to restrict inward economic flows such as imports and immigrants (although he likes inward foreign direct investment). He wants allies to shoulder more of the burden for their defense. He believes that he can cut deals with autocrats, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin or North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, that will reduce tensions in global trouble spots and allow the United States to focus inward.

Equally clear are Trump’s preferred means of getting what he wants in world politics. The former and future president is a strong believer in using coercion, such as economic sanctions, to pressure other actors. He also subscribes to the “madman theory,” in which he will threaten massive tariff increases or “fire and fury” against other countries in the firm belief that such threats will compel them into offering greater concessions than they otherwise would. At the same time, however, Trump also practices a transactional view of foreign policy, demonstrating a willingness during his first term to link disparate issues to secure economic concessions. On China, for example, Trump displayed a recurring willingness to give ground on other issues—the crackdown in Hong Kong, the repression in Xinjiang, the arrest of a senior executive of the Chinese tech company Huawei—in return for a better bilateral trade deal.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump taking the stage on election night, West Palm Beach, Florida, November 2024

Trump’s foreign policy track record during his first term was decidedly mixed. If one looks at the renegotiated deals for the South Korea Free Trade Agreement or the North American Free Trade Agreement (rebranded as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA), his attempts at coercion produced meager results. The same is true with his summitry with Kim Jong Un. But one can argue that this might have been because of the rather chaotic nature of the Trump White House. There were plenty of times when Trump seemed at war with his own administration, often leading to the characterization of his more mainstream foreign policy advisers (such as Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster) as the “adults in the room.” The result was a lot of personnel churn and inconstancy in foreign policy positioning, which degraded Trump’s ability to achieve his aims.

That should not be an issue for Trump’s second term. Over the past eight years, he has collected enough acolytes to staff his foreign policy and national security team with like-minded officials. He is far less likely to meet resistance from his political appointees. Other checks on Trump’s policy will also be far weaker. The legislative and judicial branches of government are now more MAGA-friendly than they were in 2017. Trump has indicated numerous times that he intends to purge the military and bureaucracy of professionals who oppose his policies, and he will likely use Schedule F—a measure to reclassify civil service positions as political slots—to force them out. For the next few years, the United States will speak with one voice on foreign policy, and that voice will be Trump’s.

Although Trump’s ability to command the foreign policy machinery will be enhanced, his ability to improve the United States’ place in the world is another matter. The most prominent U.S. entanglements are in Ukraine and Gaza. During the 2024 campaign, Trump criticized Biden for the chaotic 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, asserting that “the humiliation in Afghanistan set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world.” A similar outcome in Ukraine would create similar political problems for Trump. In Gaza, Trump has urged Benjamin Netanyahu to “finish the job” and destroy Hamas. Netanyahu’s lack of strategic vision to accomplish this task, however, suggests that Israel will be prosecuting an ongoing war that has alienated many potential U.S. partners in the world. The reality is that Trump will find it more difficult to withdraw the United States from these conflicts than he claimed on the campaign trail.

Furthermore, the global rules of the game have changed since 2017, when existing U.S. initiatives, coalitions, and institutions still had a lot of juice. In the interim, other great powers have become more active in creating and bolstering their own structures independent of the United States. These range from the BRICS+ to OPEC+ to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. More informally, one can see a “coalition of the sanctioned,” in which China, North Korea, and Iran are happy to help Russia disrupt global order. Trump may very well want to join some of these groupings rather than create compelling substitutes for them. His stated efforts to divide these groupings will likely fail. Autocrats might distrust each other, but they will distrust Donald Trump more.

The most important difference between Trump 2.0 and Trump 1.0, however, is also the simplest: Donald Trump is now a known commodity on the global stage. As the Columbia professor Elizabeth Saunders recently observed, “In the 2016 election, Trump’s foreign policy was somewhat mysterious. . . . In 2024, however, Trump’s actions are far easier to predict. The candidate who wanted to be the ‘madman’ and loved the idea of keeping other countries guessing has become a politician with a pretty predictable agenda.” Leaders such as Xi, Putin, Kim, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and even French President Emmanuel Macron have seen Trump’s schtick before. Both great powers and smaller states know by now that the best way to deal with Trump is to shower him with pomp and circumstance, abstain from fact-checking him in public, make flashy but token concessions, and remain secure that, by and large, their core interests will be preserved. Trump’s negotiating style yielded minimal concrete gains in his first term; it will yield less than that in his second term.

 

No Longer an Exception

Does all of this mean Trump 2.0 will just be more of the same? Not exactly. Trump’s reelection augurs two trends in U.S. foreign policy that will be difficult to reverse. The first is the inevitable corruption that will compromise U.S. policies. Former policy principals in prior administrations, from Henry Kissinger to Hillary Clinton, have profited from their public service through book deals, keynote speeches, and geopolitical consulting. Former Trump officials have taken this to a whole new level, however. Advisers such as Trump’s son-in-law and White House aide Jared Kushner and Richard Grenell, a former ambassador and acting director of national intelligence, leveraged the ties they made as policymakers to secure billions in foreign investment (including from foreign government investment funds) and real estate deals almost immediately after they left office. It will not be surprising if foreign benefactors approach Trump’s coterie of advisers with implicit and explicit promises of lucrative deals after their time in office—as long as they play ball while in power. Combine this with the expected role that billionaires such as Elon Musk will play in Trump 2.0, and one can foresee a dramatic increase in the corruption of U.S. foreign policy.

The other trend that Trump 2.0 will accelerate is the end of American exceptionalism. From Harry Truman to Joe Biden, U.S. presidents have embraced the notion that American values and ideals play an important role in U.S. foreign policy. This claim has been contested at various times, but promoting democracy and advancing human rights has been identified as in the national interest for quite some time. The political scientist Joseph Nye has argued that these American ideals are a core component of U.S. soft power.

U.S. policy blunders, as well as Russian “whataboutism”—deflecting criticism of one’s bad behavior by pointing to another’s bad behavior—have eroded the power of American exceptionalism. Trump 2.0 will bury it. Indeed, Trump himself embraces a version of whataboutism when it comes to American values. Early in his first term, he noted, “We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think—our country’s so innocent?”

Back then, foreign audiences could rationalize that most Americans did not believe this, given that Trump did not win the popular vote. The 2024 election shatters that belief. During the campaign, Trump promised to bomb Mexico and to deport legal immigrants, called opposition politicians the “enemies from within,” and claimed that migrants were “poisoning the blood” of the country. Despite all this—or perhaps because of it—Trump won a popular majority. When the rest of the world looks at Trump, they will no longer see an aberrant exception to American exceptionalism; they will see what America stands for in the twenty-first century.

 

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