How Trump Wields American PowerHow Trump Wields American Power

Trump in the Oval Office, Washington, D.C., January 2025 Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Meanwhile, Trump could challenge the Eurasian axis by squeezing its weakest link. In recent months, Israel has brightened a grim geopolitical landscape by battering Iran and its proxies. Trump could increase the strain through aggressive sanctions and threats of fresh military action, whether U.S. or Israeli, against Tehran and what remains of its “axis of resistance.” The goal would be to bolster Middle Eastern stability by imposing new curbs on Iran’s nuclear program and limiting its capacity for sowing regional chaos. If Trump simultaneously compelled a vulnerable Iran to stop sending Putin drones and missiles—or simply revealed the limits of Moscow’s support for Tehran in a crisis—he might start the long, difficult process of straining the revisionist entente.

Trump could also craft a sharper China strategy by building on Biden-era policies that, in turn, built on Trump’s own first-term initiatives. Beijing’s belligerence should help the Pentagon keep stitching together tighter security relationships—and perhaps establish more military basing opportunities—in the Indo-Pacific. Higher U.S. and allied defense spending and larger weapons sales to Taiwan could slow the erosion of Washington’s military advantage. Harsher technology controls and tariffs could compound China’s economic crisis—if Trump doesn’t trade them away for a deal to sell Beijing more soybeans. Trump won’t win the struggle between Washington and Beijing, but he might strengthen the U.S. position for the long contest ahead.

Finally, Trump should seek to exploit escalation rather than avoid it. From Ukraine to the Middle East, the Biden administration painstakingly calibrated and telegraphed its moves to avoid escalatory spirals. Minimizing that risk sometimes allowed U.S. adversaries to predict and even dictate the tempo of these interactions. Trump, for his part, prizes unpredictability. If he showed, however, that he would cross new thresholds with little warning—by sanctioning Chinese banks that are facilitating Putin’s war or striking Iran in response to Houthi attacks in the Red Sea—he could force U.S. adversaries to contemplate uncontrolled escalation with the world’s strongest power.

All this would amount to an ambivalent defense of the liberal order. Trump might still engage in gratuitous protectionism and pick pointless diplomatic squabbles. But he could nevertheless achieve something essential: shoring up the strategic bargains and geopolitical barriers that keep the enemies of the U.S.-led order from breaking through.

REFORM OR REVOLUTION?

This agenda could stumble on its own contradictions: Trump will struggle to boost military spending, cut taxes, and slash the deficit all at once. Likewise, it will be hard to rally U.S. allies against China while pummeling them with protectionist measures. Trump could also falter because a world of ambitious, colluding autocracies is difficult even for the most skillful superpower to handle. Most fundamentally, Trump might fail because he is more of a wrecking ball than an architect—and he may take American policy down a darker course.

The most crucial question about Trump has always been whether he means to reform or revolutionize U.S. foreign policy. In his first term, the answer was usually closer to reform than revolution, thanks to the moderating influence of advisers and Republican allies and also because Trump—who delights in extorting diplomatic ransoms—hesitated to shoot the hostage by tearing up the North American Free Trade Agreement or leaving NATO. Yet Trump did, by all accounts, seriously consider pulling the trigger. His “America first” slogan is straight out of the 1930s. So if the optimistic scenario is that a president focused on posterity keeps reforming U.S. strategy for a viciously competitive era, the pessimistic scenario is that a president who now rules his party and administration will unleash the revolution with a purer, more radical version of “America first.”

This latter scenario would not mean a return to isolationism, since there is no such American tradition. Before World War I, the United States wasn’t a Eurasian stabilizer, but it was a hemispheric hegemon with a long, sometimes bloody record of territorial expansion. Today, a nastier version of “America first” would be lethal to the liberal order not just because the United States would say goodbye to Eurasian security commitments but because it would become more predatory and illiberal to boot.

The outlines of this agenda are not a mystery; Trump talks about them all the time. He has long mused about quitting NATO and other alliances, which bother him precisely because they tie the fate of the United States—history’s most physically secure country—to obscure disputes in distant regions. If U.S. allies cannot or will not hit higher spending targets, perhaps because Trump makes his demands too extreme, he might finally obtain his pretext to bring the legions home.

Trump is more of a wrecking ball than an architect.

Likewise, if Trump tires of the travails of peacemaking in Ukraine, he might just walk away from that conflict and leave the Europeans to deal with the mess. If he sees Taiwan primarily as a high-tech rival, not a crucial security partner, he might slash U.S. support in exchange for economic benefits from Beijing. The United States would still maintain a mighty military, no doubt, but it would be one that is focused on fighting cartels in the New World rather than containing expansionists in the Old World. In the near term, this approach would insulate the United States from Eurasian quarrels and produce “wins” in trade concessions and dollars saved. Over time, however, it would dramatically raise the odds of key regions plunging into chaos or falling under the sway of aggressive states.

Rival powers might still suffer under this agenda. If Trump imposes the extreme 60 percent tariffs that he has threatened, he will hammer China’s export-dependent economy. If he wields tariffs mercilessly as tools of leverage, he will surely squeeze some concessions out of allies and adversaries alike. Yet harm to economic competitors might be outweighed by self-harm to the American system. Aggressive protectionism would reduce the collective prosperity that has long held the democratic world together and kill the cohesion needed to check a mercantilist China. Similarly, if Trump uses tariffs and sanctions, rather than global leadership and security commitments, to bolster the dollar’s primacy, he might make Washington look just as exploitative as the countries whose ambitions it means to thwart.

Meanwhile, the United States wouldn’t simply be de-emphasizing liberal norms and values; it would be casting a long, illiberal shadow. If Trump shutters hostile media outlets or turns the military or law enforcement agencies against his enemies, he will weaken American democracy while offering political cover, and a playbook, to every aspiring autocrat who wishes to attack a free society from within. Trump might also set back democratic values by coercing Ukraine into a lousy peace or supporting Hungarian President Viktor Orban and other rulers who seek to dismantle European liberalism. The balance of ideas reflects the balance of power. The democratic recession of recent years could become a rout if Washington quits the fight for the world’s ideological future—or, worse still, joins the other side.

Indeed, this version of “America first” wouldn’t just clear the way for Eurasia’s revisionists; it could well aid their cause. The revisionists aim to create an environment primed for expansion and plunder. Perhaps Trump gets along so well with Putin and Xi because he wants the same thing. Trump has said that the United States must annex Greenland, make Canada the 51st state, and reclaim the Panama Canal. He seems to envision a world in which strong states and strong rulers can do more or less as they like. Maybe this is all clever diplomacy—or mere trolling. But the further Trump takes this expansionist agenda, the more he risks alienating Washington’s closest allies and abetting the autocrats’ spheres-of-influence game.

These possibilities constitute a nightmare scenario for those who rely on the American order, but nightmares don’t always come true. Such a radical reengineering of U.S. strategy would face resistance from Democrats and some Republicans in Congress, and from the bureaucratic and international inertia that generations of American engagement have fostered. Stock markets would not react well to a protectionist onslaught. Yet the disquieting fact remains that a country with an extremely powerful executive branch has twice elected a president who seems deeply attracted to a slash-and-burn approach. Imagining an illiberal, renegade United States is only a matter of taking seriously what Trump says. The greatest risk of his second term, then, is not that he will abandon the liberal order. It is that he will make the United States actively complicit in its demise.

WHICH WAY IS UP?

The potential upside of Trump’s presidency is substantial. The potential downside is an abyss. The existence of such extreme possibilities is a source of international instability in its own right. It is also a testament to the double-edged nature of the hard-line nationalism Trump represents. If applied with discipline and a constructive spirit, such an approach could plausibly help the United States hold the Eurasian aggressors at bay. In a more extreme, unmoderated form, it could prove fatal to a system that requires a broad view of U.S. interests, a commitment to liberal values, and an ability to wield unmatched power with the right blend of assertiveness and restraint.

Here, unfortunately, lies the real problem with the optimistic framing: it requires assuming that Trump, a man who assiduously nurses his personal and geopolitical grievances, will discover—at the very moment he feels most empowered—the best, most globally minded and most diplomatically savvy version of himself. All those in the United States and elsewhere with a stake in the survival of the liberal order should hope that Trump rises to this challenge. But they should probably brace for the prospect that Trump’s world could become a very dark place.

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Publish date : 2025-02-24 16:00:00

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