“I DON’T think we’re going back to the one we had before.” That was the prognostication of Alex Younger, a former chief of Britain’s foreign intelligence service MI6, whose remarks last week during BBC’s “Newsnight” on the state of the international order in President Donald Trump’s second term went somewhat viral.
“We are in a new era where, by and large, international relations aren’t going to be determined by rules and multilateral institutions,” Younger said. “They’re going to be determined by strongmen and deals … That’s Donald Trump’s mindset, certainly [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s mindset. It’s [Chinese President] Xi Jinping’s mindset.”
Trump did little to disabuse Younger of his views in the days thereafter. On Monday, the United States voted alongside Russia, North Korea, Belarus and a clutch of West African juntas against a United Nations General Assembly resolution condemning Russian aggression on the third anniversary of the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The move shocked analysts and European onlookers, who saw it as the most brazen indication yet of Trump’s willingness to flout norms and bully partners.
If launching trade wars and cratering alliances weren’t enough, here was the U.S. president seemingly whitewashing Russia’s land grab in a weaker neighbor. Richard Gowan, a U.N. expert at the International Crisis Group, told my colleagues the divide between the United States and Europe now marked “the biggest split among Western powers at the U.N. since the Iraq War — and probably even more fundamental.”
Trump seems keen for a rupture and has cast himself as an agent of peace. “We’ve had some great conversations, including with Russia, since my return to the White House,” Trump said at a White House news conference this week. “My administration is making a decisive break with the foreign policy values of the past administration, and, frankly, the past.”
But it’s also returning to a more distant past. Trump’s “America First” agenda has little interest in the universalist internationalism that broadly undergirded generations of postwar U.S. foreign policy. He doesn’t see the extent to which the international order largely built by Washington has helped guarantee U.S. primacy and boosted American prosperity. Instead, he looks out at an international arena and sees a United States that has been asked to do too much, has been hoodwinked by its allies and exploited by its adversaries.
Better then, the White House’s thinking goes, to reckon with a world shaped only by great powers and their supplicants, and to behave like the greatest power of them all. His attempts to strong-arm neighbors in Mexico and Canada, to threaten the annexation of the Panama Canal and call for the absorption of Greenland were all gestures of an imperial potentate grasping for his sphere of influence.
“Trump’s foreign policy treats the nations of the world less as sovereign, independent nations than as sites of arbitrage, evasion, and extraction,” wrote Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, author of “Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World.” “Call it ‘national globalism’: the pursuit of extraterritorial space to advance American interests.”
Michael Kimmage, director of the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, laid out in a thoughtful Foreign Affairs essay how Trump is seemingly more aligned with strongmen such as Putin, Xi, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — all, to varying extents, right-wing leaders of so-called “civilization states” that see their nations tethered to a glorious past that must be redeemed in the future. They abhor the cosmopolitanism of urban elites in their own societies, and are skeptical about the liberal pretensions of the fraying “rules-based” order backed by the United States for almost a century.
“With Trump in power, conventional wisdom in Ankara, Beijing, Moscow, New Delhi, and Washington (and many other capitals) will decree that there is no one system and no agreed-on set of rules,” Kimmage wrote. “In this geopolitical environment, the already tenuous idea of ‘the West’ will recede even further — and, consequently, so will the status of Europe, which in the post-Cold War era had been Washington’s partner in representing ‘the Western world.’”
Europeans are already coping with that shock. Friedrich Merz, Germany’s incoming center-right chancellor and a veteran transatlanticist, has vowed to lead his nation’s “independence” from decades of reliance on the United States’ security umbrella. He expressed outrage at Trump’s seeming embrace of Kremlin talking points on the Ukraine war, including his suggestions that Kyiv’s desire for NATO membership provoked the conflict.
“This is basically a classic reversal of the role of perpetrator and victim,” Merz told a German radio station. “This is the Russian narrative, and this is how Putin has been portraying it for years. And I am honestly somewhat shocked that Donald Trump has now apparently made it his own.”
We are likely seeing “the opening salvo in a major U.S. effort to renegotiate the terms of its bond with Europe,” wrote Christopher Chivvis, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, citing also the rhetorical bombshells dropped by Trump’s lieutenants during their visits to the continent this month. “How far the Trump administration will get cannot be known, but this foundational relationship of U.S. statecraft, which was born in the moment of the U.S.’s rise to global superpower status, will change in fundamental ways.”
Trump and his allies see themselves as carrying out a great feat of “rebalancing” on the world stage. They seem to harbor hopes of carrying out a “reverse Kissinger” — that is, forging an opening with Moscow in a bid to drive a wedge between Russia and China, just as President Richard M. Nixon undermined the Soviet Union when achieving a détente with Beijing in 1972.
Most analysts, including onlookers elsewhere, doubt the White House can pull that off. “China and Russia have built a more comprehensive partnership that extends beyond security to economic development,” Cui Hongjian, a scholar of European studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University, told my colleagues. “These are not the same countries they once were. As a Greek philosopher famously said, ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice.’”
As he wades back into the maelstrom of great power politics, Trump seems keen to prove that philosopher wrong.
