The system America took 80 years to assemble proved surprisingly fragile in the face of Trump’s assault, a revolution in how the country exercises power across the globe.
In a span of only 50 days, President Donald Trump has done more than any of his modern predecessors to hollow out the foundations of an international system that the United States painstakingly erected in the 80 years since it emerged victorious from World War II.
Without formally declaring a reversal of course or offering a strategic rationale, he has pushed the United States to switch sides in the Ukraine war, abandoning all talk about helping a nascent, flawed democracy defend its borders against a larger invader. He did not hesitate when he ordered the United States to vote with Russia and North Korea – and against virtually all America’s traditional allies – to defeat a UN resolution that identified Russia as the aggressor. His threats to take control of the Panama Canal, Greenland, the Gaza Strip and, most incredibly, Canada, sound predatory, including his claim Tuesday that the border with America’s northern ally is an “artificial line of separation”.
He cut Ukraine off from arms and even American commercial satellite imagery, partly out of pique over his blowup in the Oval Office with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, but largely because the Ukrainian President insists on a guarantee that the West would come to his country’s aid if Russia rebuilds and reinvades.
Trump has imposed tariffs on his allies after describing them as leeches on the American economy. And he has so damaged trust among the Nato allies that France is discussing extending its country’s small nuclear umbrella over Europe, and Poland is thinking of building its own atomic weapon. Both fear the United States can no longer be counted on to act as the alliance’s ultimate defender, a core role it created for itself when the Nato treaty was written.
No one knows how successful Trump will be in ripping asunder what every American President since Harry Truman has built – an era of institution-building that Truman’s Secretary of State memorialised in a book entitled Present At the Creation. To live in Washington these days is to feel as if one is present at the destruction.
It could be four years or more before we know whether these changes are permanent or whether the guardians of the old system will hunker down, like soldiers seeking to survive in the trenches of Donbas. By then, the Western allies may have moved on from an America-centric system.
Or, as Joseph S. Nye jnr, the political scientist known for his work on the nature of soft power, said of Trump recently, “He is so obsessed with the problem of free riders that he forgets that it has been in America’s interest to drive the bus”.
But perhaps the more remarkable thing is that Trump is eroding the old order without ever describing the system he envisions replacing it with. His actions suggest he is most comfortable in the 19th-century world of great-power politics, where he, President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Xi Jinping of China, negotiate among themselves, and let lesser powers fall in line.
Trump is already claiming successes. To his advocates, Ukraine’s agreement Tuesday to a proposal for a temporary ceasefire, one Russia has yet to accept, appears to demonstrate that Trump’s use of his leverage over Zelenskyy was worth the uproar. But historians may determine these 50 days were critical for reasons that had little to do with Ukraine.
“The big debate now is whether this is a tactical move to reshape our foreign policy or a revolution?” said R. Nicholas Burns, the US ambassador to China under President Joe Biden and to Nato under President George W. Bush.
“I’ve come to think it’s a revolution,” he said. “When you are voting with North Korea and Iran against Nato allies, when you are failing to stand up to Russian aggression, when you are threatening to take the territory of your allies, something has fundamentally changed. There is a breaking of the trust with allies we may never be able to repair.”
‘Nothing will stand in our way’
In retrospect, the first sign that Trump’s approach to the world would be dramatically different from the one he pursued in the first term came on a chilly morning early in January at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.
For weeks he had sounded increasingly martial about the need for the United States to control Greenland, because of its mineral wealth and its strategic location near Arctic waters used by Russia and China. He accelerated his demands for access to the Panama Canal and kept repeating the need for Canada to become a 51st state, until it became clear that he was not joking.
At a news conference on January 7, two weeks before his inauguration, he was asked whether he would rule out using military or economic coercion to achieve his goals in Greenland or Canada. “I’m not going to commit to that,” he said. “You might have to do something.”
It was a stunning threat. An incoming President had threatened to use the world’s largest military against a Nato ally. Some brushed it off as Trump bravado. But in his inauguration, he doubled down. He said the world would no longer exploit America’s generosity and the security it offered to allies. He spoke of an America that would “pursue our manifest destiny,” a rallying call from the 1890s, and praised William McKinley, the tariff-loving President who took the Philippines in the Spanish-American War. And he spoke of creating an “External Revenue Service” to “tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens”.
“Nothing will stand in our way,” he declared. And nothing has.
The effort to rip apart the US Agency for International Development, created by President John F. Kennedy as part of the vanguard of American soft power, took just a few weeks; the primary argument playing out in the courts is whether the Government has to pay contractors US$2 billion ($3.5b) for work already completed. Trump and Elon Musk, who is leading the charge in remaking the Government, recognised that foreign aid is so derided by the Maga movement as a hotbed of liberal values and corruption that the agency was an easy first mark.
Dismantling it, they knew, would also strike fear into the hearts of government employees who realised they could be next. Groups that do similar work and were once lauded by Republicans – like the United States Institute for Peace and the National Endowment for Democracy – are on life support.
Ukraine: The first test
The biggest shift was still to come: Ukraine.
For three years, Democrats and most Republicans had largely viewed the war through the lens of traditional US foreign policy. It was incumbent on the United States to defend a struggling democracy that had been illegally invaded by a larger power seeking its territory.
But now, as President, Trump called Zelenskyy a “dictator,” while refusing to say the same of Putin. He justified his refusal to call Russia the aggressor in the war as a necessary measure to act as a neutral mediator. Then, on his first trip to Europe, his Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth, declared that the United States would never agree to Ukraine’s admission to the Nato alliance, and said it would have to give up the territory it had lost to Russian aggression.
With Trump’s blessing, they had given Putin two of his upfront demands, while making it clear that if Ukraine wanted a security guarantee, he should talk to his European neighbours – but the United States would not participate. The other day Trump said he found dealing with Russia easier than dealing with Ukraine.
“He has turned US policy on the Russo-Ukraine war 180 degrees,” said John Bolton, Trump’s third, and perhaps most embittered, national security adviser. “Trump now sides with the invader.”
But Europe has dug in deeper with the Ukrainians, essentially dividing Nato’s largest power from all but a few of its 31 other members. Not since the Suez crisis in 1956 – when France, Britain and Israel invaded Egypt – has the United States found itself on the other side of a conflict from its closest allies. But this breach has been deeper, and more fundamental.
One senior European official, speaking shortly after the Munich Security Conference last month, said that it was clear that Trump’s real agenda was to simply get a ceasefire – any ceasefire – and then “normalise the relationship with the Russians”.
The prospect so concerned European officials, who believe they could be next in Russia’s sights, that Friedrich Merz, the longtime promoter of the trans-Atlantic alliance who is poised to be the next chancellor of Germany, declared on the night of the German elections that his “absolute priority” would be to “achieve independence from the US”.
“I never thought I would have to say something like this,” he said, but he had concluded that the new administration was “largely indifferent to the fate of Europe”.
Rethinking the future
Perhaps one reason that the Trump revolution has taken the world by such surprise is that many Americans, and American allies, thought that Trump’s behaviour in the second term would roughly mirror what he did in the first.
He would largely hew to the national security strategy issued in his first term, they thought, which lumped China and Russia together as “revisionist” powers “determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence”.
Read today, that document appears to come from a different era. Bolton contends that Trump “does not have a philosophy or a national security grand strategy”.
“He does not do ‘policy,’ but a series of personal relationships”.
Now his aides are scrambling, with little success, to impose a logic to it all.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a classic Russia hardliner before he took his current post, suggested that Trump was trying to tear Russia away from its growing partnership with China. There is no evidence that this is working.
Other members of Trump’s national security team have talked about a “Monroe Doctrine 2.0”. That suggests a world in which the United States, China, Russia and perhaps Saudi Arabia take responsibility for their distinct spheres of influence. Sir Alex Younger, the former head of MI6, the British spy agency, said in a BBC interview that it reminded him of the Yalta Conference – the meeting of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin in 1945 – where “the strong countries decided the fate of small countries”.
“That’s the world we’re going into,” he predicted, adding “I don’t think we’re going back to the one we had before”.
Of course, such an arrangement has long been a dream of Putin’s, because it would elevate the power of his economically declining state. But as Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian President, said on social media the other day, “If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US President, I would have laughed out loud.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: David E. Sanger
Photographs by: Doug Mills, Ivor Prickett, Ariana Drehsler, Tyler Hicks and Tierney L. Cross
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