Trump Has Launched a Second American Revolution. This Time, It’s Against the World.

Just two months into his second presidency, Donald Trump is revolutionizing U.S. foreign policy. His policies will upend world order by destabilizing and ultimately destroying established institutions and patterns of international cooperation. Since 1945, the United States has been the leading champion, underwriter, and guarantor of an open, rule-bound global system under international law. Now, it rejects the logic of multilateralism, including any self-restraints on the exercise of U.S. power and any responsibilities for global leadership and stability. 

In its scope and speed, this wholesale reorientation in U.S. foreign policy has few precedents in American history outside responses to surprise attacks such as Pearl Harbor or 9/11. One analogue is the sudden U.S. embrace of containment during the celebrated “fifteen weeks” of February-June 1947, bookended by the enunciation of the Truman Doctrine and the launch of the Marshall Plan. The difference today is that we are not at the creation but the destruction. American hands are shattering the institutional framework for global cooperation the world has long taken for granted. On the eve of the nation’s 250th birthday, Trump has launched a second American Revolution. He is declaring its independence from the world America made.

This revolution in U.S. foreign policy is reverberating globally. Even long-standing U.S. allies are stunned by the speed of the administration’s about-face, from its embrace of authoritarian Russia to its snubbing of democratic allies to its dismantling of foreign aid. Like Edmund Burke in his 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France, they are grappling with the sudden demise of the ancien régime—and considering how best to escape its upheavals.

Ten Themes in Trumpian Foreign Policy

During the president’s first term, analysts struggled to define a “Trump doctrine.” It was a fool’s errand. Temperamentally capricious and instinctively transactional, Trump doesn’t do grand strategy. His primary purposes are pecuniary, petulant, and patrimonial. There can be no unified theory of Trumpian engagement.

Still, certain recurrent motivations, preferences, and themes that collectively amount to a worldview are discernible in the Trump administration’s flurry of executive orders and policy pronouncements, to which foreign partners will need to respond.

An abdication of U.S. leadership and responsibility. In the decades following World War II, successive U.S. administrations championed, invested in, and defended an open, rule-bound international order, embedding America’s power in multilateral institutions like the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, NATO, and the Organization of American States. They wanted to enhance the predictability, legitimacy, and stability of the international system by facilitating international cooperation on shared dilemmas and discouraging revisionist efforts to overthrow it. 

By contrast, Trump perceives and indeed welcomes a cutthroat world in which norms and rules mean nothing, all relationships are transactional, and outcomes ultimately reflect the naked exercise of power. He has articulated no positive vision of America’s global purpose, no U.S. responsibility to sustain and defend world order, and no belief that the United States should stand for anything but its own narrow national interest. “Global leadership” is not in his lexicon.

A mindset of sovereignty on steroids. The administration has embraced a defensive and distorted interpretation of sovereignty that is skeptical of international organizations and treaties. Conservative nationalists have long opposed binding multilateral commitments on the specious grounds that they place unacceptable limits on U.S. freedom of action and endanger constitutional self-government, while allowing weaker players to gang up on the United States.

Consistent with this view, the president has directed his secretary of state to examine all international treaties the United States is party to, and international organizations it is a member in, and to recommend by late July which obligations it should terminate. Trump has already repudiated the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organization. Hundreds of other conventions and bodies are now in the crosshairs—including, in theory, the United Nations itself.

A denigration of the West—and U.S. alliances. In stark contrast with his predecessors, Trump lacks any solidarity with the other advanced market democracies that collectively constitute “the West.”

Consider NATO. Trump treats it as nothing more than a protection racket, ignoring the collective identity that has long undergirded history’s most successful alliance. The preamble to the 1949 treaty that established NATO celebrates this inheritance, noting the signatories’ “determination to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.”

Trump’s willingness to attack the West—evident in his confrontational approach to NATO, the G7, and the EU—has perturbed partners. Lacking confidence in America’s collective defense guarantee under NATO’s Article 5, Germany has begun talks with France and the United Kingdom about sharing nuclear weapons. As EU Foreign Secretary Kaja Kallas declared after Trump’s disastrous White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, “The free world needs a new leader.”

A revival of spheres of influence. Trump’s strength-focused worldview is most obvious in his quest for a zone of exclusive U.S. privilege in the Western Hemisphere. His determination to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal, incorporate Canada as the fifty-first U.S. state, and deploy the military to Mexico resurrects the Monroe Doctrine. Beyond alienating neighbors and allies, Trump’s posture legitimates similar efforts by Moscow and Beijing, respectively, to reassert control over Russia’s “near abroad” and to dominate the South China Sea.

Although articulated in the nineteenth century, great power spheres of influence became more implicit during the twentieth, aligning with norms of nonintervention and sovereign equality. In late 1944, then British prime minister Winston Churchill cautioned Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to keep mum about their infamous percentages agreement that delineated their respective shares of control in the postwar Balkans, “because the Americans might be shocked.” One doubts Trump would be so circumspect today.

A dismissal of international law. Unlike his predecessors, Trump prefers the law of the jungle to the rule of law in world politics. During his first term in office, the president sought largely in vain to weaken the international legal order. His return to power offers him another shot, in areas from human rights to territorial aggrandizement.

Already, he has sided with the Kremlin in its war of aggression against Ukraine, remaining silent on Russian atrocities there. His defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has defended U.S. servicemen convicted of war crimes, while his national security adviser, Michael Walz, advocates the use of military force against Mexican drug cartels. Although prior administrations have sometimes chafed under international legal constraints—and adopted the more self-serving formulation of a “rules-based” rather than “law-based” order—they have also recognized international law’s stabilizing influence and sought to justify any U.S. departures from it. Trump feels no such compunction.

A preference for bullying bilateralism. Given his transactional approach to diplomacy and international dealmaking, Trump unsurprisingly prefers to negotiate with other countries bilaterally, rather than in multilateral formats in which American power counts for less. Where collective action is required, he favors hub-and-spoke arrangements that place the United States in charge, such as in the Artemis Accords for space exploration. This quest for American leverage helps explain his obvious distaste for the EU, which he has repeatedly claimed was “formed to screw the United States.” More generally, the president instinctively negotiates with a zero-sum mindset. This ignores that international relations is not a single game, akin to a real estate transaction, but a repeated, iterative one, in which reputation, trust, and credibility must be earned and benefits balance out over time.

Repudiation of economic multilateralism. The post-1945 world order was defined by the emergence of an open, rule-bound, multilateral system of trade and payments, governed by the Bretton Woods institutions, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the World Trade Organization (WTO). The pillars of this global trade regime were nondiscrimination and reciprocity, embodied in the most-favored nation (MFN) principle, which holds that any concession granted to one trading partner should be extended to all. Over the past two decades, however, the WTO has fulfilled neither its trade liberalization nor dispute resolution functions. Trump seems determined to sign its death notice. The president has embraced destabilizing tariffs and rejected the MFN principle in favor of explicit bilateral reciprocity. In the words of one leading trade expert, “the WTO is toast.”

A disavowal of global development. The Trump administration has decimated USAID and incorporated its remains into the State Department, with devastating implications not only for America’s national interests and reputation but also global efforts to combat poverty, hunger, disease, instability, climate disasters, and so much else. The death toll may be millions. Not content simply to demonstrate its own miserliness, the administration also has effectively declared war on the Sustainable Development Goals, announcing that it will oppose their mention in UN resolutions and documents, on the grounds that they somehow threaten U.S. sovereignty. Fear is growing that the United States could even withdraw from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and multilateral development banks.

An abandonment of democracy promotion. With his affinity for strongmen, Trump has reversed a decadeslong, bipartisan commitment to support democracy abroad. Beyond ending the democracy promotion activities of the State Department and USAID, he has gutted the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, and the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which supports Voice of America, among other bastions of truth-telling. Although U.S. democracy promotion has often been selective—exposing America to charges of hypocrisy—and susceptible to overreach—as in the previous administration’s Summit for Democracy—it has also given aid and hope to dissidents and democrats. Trump’s actions have shattered global faith in the United States as freedom’s friend.

A rejection of global public goods. Finally, the Trump administration denies any need for multilateral institutions to provide global public goods—or mitigate global “bads”—across a range of issues. The White House denies the reality of climate change, ignores biodiversity collapse, downplays pollution’s harms, and disputes the rationale for international environmental cooperation. It has repudiated global health governance, withdrawing from the WHO on the illusory assumption that the United States can reproduce its functions on an ad hoc, national basis. It has rejected any need for international guardrails to address the growing safety, security, and geopolitical risks posed by AI, with the goal of unchallenged U.S. domination.  

Not Made in the USA

Trump has launched his revolution against the world America made. But whether it spreads globally, meets resistance, or inspires counterrevolution is largely out of his hands. Beyond undermining long-term U.S. interests and credibility, the administration’s policies have created a vacuum of global leadership that others will compete to fill, for good or ill. The world order that ultimately emerges from this turbulence will not be made in America alone.

After Trump’s first election in 2016, many countries began to hedge against a suddenly unpredictable United States. That instinct has now spread to America’s closest allies. Some “soft balancing” against the United States seems inevitable. When it comes to the multilateral system, the EU, China, and a slew of middle powers from India to Brazil face a moment of truth: As the United States embraces aggressive nationalism, will they seek to fill the vacuum of global leadership, and in pursuit of what priorities?

Historical analogies are always perilous, but one that comes to mind is the League of Nations. It is not a reassuring precedent. While the United States did not retreat into complete isolation following Senate rejection of the League Covenant in 1920, its involvement in global affairs was episodic and unpredictable, and it ultimately failed to prevent revisionist powers from overturning the status quo, culminating in World War II.

More optimistically, there are important differences between the two eras. First, the United States has not (yet) left the UN, including the Security Council. Second, the international system is vastly more institutionalized than after World War I, and these innumerable multilateral treaties, organizations, regimes, networks, and activities will not vanish just because America is AWOL. Third, the world is less clearly divided between status quo and revisionist powers. The expanding BRICS coalition, for example, is a heterogeneous grouping of states, most of which have no desire for open conflict between the West and the “rest.”

Trump’s wrecking ball has its work cut out for it. That fact alone provides grounds for hope.