This piece is part of a Carnegie series examining the impacts of Trump’s first 100 days in office.
“Agitation and mutability,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville as he sought to explain the U.S. system, “are inherent in the nature of democratic republics.” As American democracy serves up another term for President Donald Trump and the world reels from his administration’s chaotic start, the French statesman-scholar seems to have badly understated the point.
In any country that deserves to be called a democracy, elections have consequences. In the United States, the 2024 vote channels even larger doses of “agitation and mutability” for the rest of the planet because of crumbling domestic trust in the wisdom of experts and weakening of long-standing pillars of foreign policy making.
Trump arrived on the shores of the Potomac determined to upend Washington’s relationships with the rest of the world. He succeeded: U.S. allies and adversaries alike are confronting the disruptive effects of the president’s first 100 days in office, which have left some reeling and others optimistic. With American global influence already in decline, this period of rapid change is likely to accelerate a shift toward a more fragmented, de-Americanized world. How countries respond to the upheaval will determine not only their own trajectories but also a new global order.
Trump’s actions and their consequences are explored in the Carnegie Endowment’s series on the president’s first 100 days. What these pieces underscore is that countries are not taking these shocks sitting down—though they are responding in different ways. Some, including the EU, Germany, Canada, Japan, and South Korea, are busy cultivating new relationships to compensate for the strain on ties with the United States. Even South Africa and Brazil are pursuing their own flavor of this strategy, using this moment to increase their influence on the global stage and promote a more inclusive international order. China, too, is seeking to capitalize on the disruption and shore up its regional relationships. Still, the disruption is significant enough that countries are, to varying degrees, racing to Washington to negotiate deals, even as they look to deepen ties elsewhere.
In another camp are countries doubling down on transactional plans or hopes for strategic alignment with Trump. Moscow, Riyadh, Ankara, and New Delhi, among others, all see opportunity in Trump’s return. Yet closer ties to the United States are unlikely to shield them from the global economic turmoil, or the security vulnerabilities that may arise from how Trump deals with NATO (for Türkiye) and Iran (for Saudi Arabia), or what the demise of the liberal international order may mean for China’s continued rise (relevant to India). At the same time, these countries’ optimism does not mean they will blithely bend to Washington’s desires, as they also hedge their bets to mitigate the risks from mercurial White House decisions and the continued relevance of the electorate who put him there.
Iran stands in a camp of its own. It faces a “maximum pressure” campaign and threats of military action from Trump. Yet Tehran is acutely aware that the nuclear discussions could bring economic relief, and the broader U.S. retreat from upholding the international order ultimately coheres with Iran’s strategic ambitions.
Few policymakers have the luxury of waiting for history to judge these deeds. What we can cautiously observe in the meantime is what these camps have in common, and what questions the world is facing as the United States and the world respond to each other.
We know that the existing global order has been irreparably damaged. Its one-time chief architect is now its chief disruptor, and this upheaval is playing out against the backdrop of declining U.S. economic might. The U.S. share of global GDP has nearly halved since its peak in 1960, from about 40 percent to 26 percent in 2023, in nominal terms. The picture is starker when adjusting for purchasing power parity (PPP), which eliminates differences in price levels. In PPP terms, the United States holds about 15 percent of GDP, China holds about 20 percent, and the BRICS countries collectively hold about 35 percent (not to mention 45 percent of the world’s population).
These structural changes put the Trump administration’s actions in a different light. Despite Trump’s stated objective of using tariffs to reassert America’s economic might, the opposite may be true. Countries may be less willing to invest in or trade with the United States or continue to increase their use of non-dollar currencies. Retreating from multilateral institutions and pulling away from security alliances may free up some resources, but these actions are likely to weaken, not strengthen, U.S. influence abroad. Whatever the exact outcomes, the architects of this disruption are unlikely to achieve what they intended. At the same time, there will be no return to the alliances, institutions, and U.S. efforts to uphold the rules-based international order.
Precisely what new global order will take hold remains to be seen, but three key factors can help us map out the emerging world, while also raising important questions about that future.
First is the matter of American power: its sources, limits, and effectiveness. American power has historically encompassed not only security and economic might but also its ability to attract immigrants, catalyze scientific and technological innovations, and spread democratic values—all of which are under strain. But the current disruption is rooted in more than just the whims of a single mercurial individual in the Oval Office.
Although voters embrace candidates for multiple reasons, the president’s coalition won a clear majority of the two-party popular vote. Within that coalition are prominent voices frustrated either by the extent of American global security commitments or the short-term constraints America faces from multilateral institutions in exchange for maintaining some version of the rules-based order. The latter in particular triggers vigorous debate, and some of its foundations were rickety from the start. Well before Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine, even its most eloquent defenders sometimes felt compelled to point out where it was fraying: the past breaches of its norms, the nonstate actors who sought to disrupt it, the mixed motives that only partially aligned countries’ incentives for responsible behavior, and in advanced industrialized countries’ waning support.
Wielding American power effectively going forward will almost certainly require new coalitions, if not outright elite convergence, that have a prayer of reconciling seasoned expert judgement with public concerns about the country’s material and military commitments and ultimate goals. The Cold War and the degree of faith in expertise it wrought insulated American foreign policy from potentially big swings in public opinion. Yet as institutional trust eroded—starting with the Vietnam War and accelerating over time—so too did that stability. Given the president’s central role in conducting international affairs, constraints coming from elite consensus and the electorate are even more important.
Second is the challenge of reimagining international governance in a de-Americanizing world. Presidential administrations vary in their appetite for drastic change—the present one being an outlier in its penchant for disruption. But political capital is scarce, and domestic and international allies’ willingness to accept or support changes is finite. So much depends on the sequencing of actions and the crispness of policy execution (as the previous administration discovered during the Afghanistan withdrawal). Failure to use political capital to advance an agenda risks having some of it melt, as windows for policy change close. Sensible leaders ignore political capital’s scarcity at their peril, as bounced checks on the reputational bank often cost more than they predicted.
An unrestrained American president and his team can legitimately remake much of the country’s foreign policy, and the current team is finding ways even to push the limits of capacious presidential authority in this domain. The lights are out at the U.S. Agency for International Development and flickering at Voice of America. The United States all but changed sides on the Ukraine conflict. Long-term American security commitments are in flux. Flickers of concern about tariffs even managed to unsettle the bond market’s confidence in U.S. Treasuries.
This new chapter in the story of America’s relationship to the rest of the world has the country barreling into uncharted terrain. European leaders are reassessing their security strategies and geopolitical relationships. The alchemy of the BRICS bloc, never entirely stable, is subtly changing. And China is poised to draw closer to those countries dependent on aid to manage health emergencies or shape commitments to the rule of law.
Third is how changes in international and regional security dynamics might interact with technological progress to fuel geopolitical changes. Security alliances and military decisions will depend not only on geopolitical goals but also advances in AI, synthetic biology, and emerging nuclear technologies. If AI progress translates into decisive strategic advantages, then countries may push the frontier at the risk of undermining strategic stability. For synthetic biology, the falling costs of DNA sequencing and synthesizing, along with advancing AI capabilities, are lowering the threshold to states and nonstate actors developing offensive biological weapons. Absent U.S. leadership, risks of nuclear proliferation will continue to grow among U.S. allies and adversaries alike, especially as new technologies show signs of making the development of nuclear weapons faster and cheaper. How this plays out depends on countries’ construction of even modest structures to govern shared risks and possibilities from these technologies.
Understanding the global disruption underway and its consequences depends on remembering that the United States is more than its executive branch leaders or even the coalitions supporting that leadership. Lawmakers, scientists, scholars, and governors are just a few of the figures also embedded in roles integral to American power, and their relationships will become central as the federal government upends its role and new coalitions of countries begin writing their own version of the “agitation and mutability” story. As these actors play their part, they will need to bridge the divide between longer-term values integral to global cooperation and the starker realities that may make our past world order seem as quaint as the fashions and phrases of Tocqueville’s day.
Read more from this series.
