"
Subscribe to
Our editors’ top picks, delivered free to your inbox every Friday.
Sign Up
* Note that when you provide your email address, the
Foreign Affairs Privacy Policy and
Terms of Use will apply to your newsletter subscription.
LIVING IN THE REAL WORLD
Let’s start with what anarchy is—and what it is not. Most realist scholars of international relations take anarchy to be the starting point of their theories, and the Trump administration itself says that its policies are informed by a realist understanding of the world. Realists define anarchy simply as the absence of authority in the international system. Without any authority enforcing the global rules of the game, countries can rely only on their own power and strategy to survive. As the political scientist Kenneth Waltz put it, the international system is one of self-help. In a world of anarchy, war is a normal part of international relations.
But anarchy does not mean chaos. Realists contend that the absence of a central authority does not necessarily mean constant disruptions to the international system. Anarchy also functions as a powerful constraint, forcing states to act prudently and husband their resources. The risk of war can cause even great powers to think twice about taking aggressive actions so as to avoid triggering a balancing coalition. The realist political scientist Charles Glaser has argued that such a worldview is not necessarily pessimistic and that countries could engage in self-help through cooperation.
Realists therefore believe that order and stability are possible in an anarchic world. Indeed, although realists themselves still debate what pursuing a realist foreign policy means, they agree that anarchy should not mean abandoning strategy or taking every opportunity to fight or meddle in other countries’ affairs.
One of the most prominent theories of the way order emerges from anarchy is “hegemonic stability theory,” or the idea that the international system is more stable when one country dominates. For example, the political scientist Robert Gilpin argued that the hegemonic state provides international public goods such as monetary institutions or security alliances, creates and enforces rules (which usually benefit the hegemon), and facilitates economic exchange and cooperation. Such hegemonic orders, Gilpin argued, emerge from global wars and were destined to eventually fall as the old hegemon overexpanded and new powers rose and challenged for global dominance.
At first glance, this story seems to describe the current moment quite well. One could argue that the
United States reached the point of what the historian Paul Kennedy famously called “imperial overstretch” long before Trump. The costly, failed invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq stretched American military power almost to its breaking point. A rising China, meanwhile, is challenging the United States for global leadership, technological supremacy, and economic dominance. In this view, Washington’s best bet is to conserve its resources, maintain its network of allies and partners, and prepare itself for the potential clash with its challenger.
Indeed, many observers thought the Trump administration would refocus on
China, including by pulling resources out of Europe and the Middle East. Although Trump did not inherit a peaceful international environment, he still had time to act: even with wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan raging on, no global war had erupted, and Washington had partners in Europe to help stop Russia, the closest thing to a revisionist great power, from conquering Ukraine following its full-scale invasion in 2022. The United States still had a powerful network of allies, a competent and extensive diplomatic apparatus, and the strongest scientific research base in the world.
In one year, however, Trump has undone most of those advantages, gutting or surrendering them despite their value to the United States in its competition for great-power dominance. In their place, he has embraced extraction, corruption, and transactional arrangements he can revise at will.
HEGEMONIC INSTABILITY THEORY
Over the past year, Trump has halted efforts to preserve what is left of the U.S.-led order, picked unnecessary and increasingly dangerous fights with crucial allies, and undermined the very foundations of U.S. power. Russia’s
war in Ukraine, in which Trump seems to have little interest, and the competition with China, on which the Trump administration’s latest National Security Strategy is largely silent, represent the most serious threats to the U.S.-led liberal order. Yet the U.S. military is swarming the Caribbean and moving a carrier from the South China Sea to the Mediterranean after protests in Iran. Trump’s threats to the sovereignty of Greenland and Denmark—and with it, his evident willingness to blow up NATO—have needlessly antagonized European countries who are otherwise eager to allow Washington the kind of access most countries could only dream of.
The result is a declining hegemon that is not trying to maintain its position but rather is becoming a revisionist power. The United States is injecting aggression into the system, seemingly for its own sake, while reducing the capabilities that helped create and maintain the order from which it benefited. As Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro have argued
in Foreign Affairs, Trump is creating a world in which “not only would the rules be unpredictable, they would depend entirely on the impulses of whoever happens to command the most coercive power at a given moment.”
The world Trump is creating is not the anarchy that contemporary realists write about, in which states must make prudent choices about when and where to act, with whom and against whom to ally, and how and how much to impose their will on others. In that world, order remains possible. Trump, by contrast, makes critical decisions with little to no process at seemingly random times—unprompted by emergencies. By seizing the tools of hegemony, Trump is acting aggressively in multiple regions at the same time, at a speed that no previous great power could contemplate. Over the course of just one week in January, the Trump administration executed a military mission in Caracas to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, issued threats to its
NATO allies about seizing Greenland, and surged the deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to Minneapolis despite widespread protests.
No other hegemon in history has had the power projection capabilities the United States still possesses or the communicative speed and reach made possible by the digital age. In the next month, it is just as possible that Trump will decide to bomb Iran again—or to cut a deal with Iran’s clerics to win oil concessions. Maybe he will reaffirm the U.S. commitment to NATO—or invade Greenland. If unpredictability has any value as a geopolitical tactic, it must be used strategically and sparingly. Trump’s mercurial impulses, on which he can act more quickly and easily than any leader in history, represent a new level of chaos.
BUILD-A-LEVIATHAN
The new Trumpian anarchy is different in another important way: at no other point in history has a dominant power that was for centuries a consolidated (if never complete) democracy so quickly started to backslide and unwind its democratic institutions. The United Kingdom, for example, slid from its great-power status as it became more democratic in the nineteenth century, not less. Today, the United States is ripping up the old international rules and attempting to tear down its domestic institutional constraints and foundations of power in the span of one dizzying year.
In this way, Trump’s world view is closer to Hobbes’s understanding of anarchy than that of the realists. Although most realists think of Hobbes as part of their intellectual tradition, his vision of order extended deeper into the domestic realm than most realists care to go. He famously described anarchy as a war of “all against all,” in which life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” Less well known is his belief that for a commonwealth to survive in such a brutal world, a sovereign has to be able to exercise nearly unconstrained power at home. Hobbes disdained any separation of powers or any domestic agglomeration of power outside the sovereign himself.
In the first year of his second term, Trump has tried to consolidate both international and domestic authority. At the international level, he has made it clear that he does not believe himself to be constrained by any form of international law or norm. In an interview with
The New York Times, he declared his own morality to be the only constraint on his actions. “I don’t need international law,” he told reporters. His administration has acted accordingly. Shortly after his confirmation, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fired the military’s top lawyers, making it clear that he believes legal limitations on warfighting to be a hindrance to U.S. power. Hegseth now stands accused of violating international law after the United States’ strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and the operation to remove Maduro in Venezuela.
Trump has also taken steps to eliminate domestic constraints on his power. During his first term, Trump chafed against a number of domestic bulwarks against his impulses and policy preferences: Congress, the judiciary, and even the so-called adults in the room within his own administration. In his second term, however, Trump has ignored, bypassed, or bulldozed over any legal or institutional restraints. With little in the way of opposition from Congress or the Supreme Court, he has declared ten different states of emergency during his first year in office on matters as varied as energy, immigration, and the International Criminal Court, actions that enhance the power of the executive. He has enacted a tariff regime of dubious constitutional provenance in an attempt to remake the global economy and rebuild the U.S. manufacturing sector. He has deployed federal officers and National Guard troops in cities in direct defiance of local leaders’ wishes to accelerate his mass deportation campaign. He has fired and attempted to fire executive branch officials previously believed to be independent from presidential prerogative. He has weaponized the Department of Justice to pursue his political vendettas. And he has assaulted the foundations of national power, slashing funding for scientific research and diplomatic expertise.
In June, one of us (Saunders) argued
in Foreign Affairs that the United States has the foreign policy of a personalist dictatorship. Today, both domestically and internationally, the president of the United States acts with few constraints. The residents of the United States now find themselves subject to the same Hobbesian anarchy that Trump has unleashed on the rest of the world. Judges, juries, and citizens are pushing back and may ultimately deny Trump the consolidated autocracy he appears to seek. But rebuilding trust in U.S. institutions at the domestic level, much less the international level, will be a difficult and lengthy process.
NASTY, BRUTISH, AND SHORTSIGHTED
The political scientist Alexander Wendt once argued that “anarchy is what states make of it.” The Trump administration has seized the vast powers granted to the president of the still dominant United States to make a version of anarchy that is Hobbesian all the way down. It has called its strategy “peace through strength” and declared a foreign policy of “flexible realism,” which its authors understand as being “realistic about what is possible and desirable to seek in its dealings with other nations.”
Trump’s supporters would argue that this approach has enhanced U.S. hegemony. Indeed, with his manic actions around the world, Trump has highlighted all the advantages the United States has accrued over the course of the American century. His administration, however, is using them in ways no realist would advise.
The foundations of American power are rooted in the rule of law at home and credible commitment abroad, the very things that Trump has attempted to dismantle. Trump’s gutting of foreign aid and the infrastructure of U.S. scientific and technological dominance, his dangerous confrontation with stalwart European allies, and, most damaging of all, his use of the military and federal security forces to consolidate his domestic authority will, in the long run, undermine American power. Estranged allies are already reaching out to China and one another to hedge against an erratic United States. Whether these actions succeed or not, they weaken the United States and make China relatively more attractive for smaller powers seeking security. In Trump’s zero-sum global order, it is the United States that will eventually pay the price.
You are reading a free article
Subscribe to
Foreign Affairs to get unlimited access.
Close
This one is on us."
The unconstrained presidency and the end of American primacy.
www.foreignaffairs.com
