US President Donald Trump has spent his second term dismantling much of what remained of the existing postwar international order. In a flash, he has disrupted longstanding diplomatic norms, weaponized tariffs, and wielded US security assistance as a bargaining tool to pressure US partners to strike favorable economic deals. By the end of his first year back in office, the president used military force to remove the leader of a sovereign state and threatened to acquire the territory of a NATO ally.
During his first adminstration, Trump was disruptive with respect to international diplomacy, but restrained in his use of military force. His foreign policy critique singled out NATO, but the president also used multilateralism when it was convenient to do so, blasting America’s allies from the halls of the UN General Assembly or storming out early from the G7. Then, China was top of the president’s mind, and this grew more pronounced as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. Trump spoke of “the China virus” to deflect attention from his own difficulty in managing the spread of the virus.
In the perilous days of Trump I, the focus on the China challenge, the turn away from multilateralism and free trade, and attacks on radical Islamist terrorism provided some minimal outline of Trump’s foreign policy doctrine. US foreign policy experts debated whether Trump’s foreign policy was a symptom of the failings of neoliberalism, and of the liberal international order, or a cause of a new brand of illiberalism and a transactional foreign policy. The weight of opinion pinpointed Trump as a symptom, not a cause, of a previous set of foreign policy choices that had created a steady and dramatic increase in domestic inequality, and, particularly among white working-class men, an economic crisis and disillusionment fueled by the loss of manufacturing jobs and the entrenched power of Washington foreign policy elites. The Democratic Party’s failure to find common cause with white working-class Americans is widely seen to have helped secure Trump’s ascent to power.
Fast forward to Trump II, and the debate about symptom versus cause has receded to the background as President Trump has taken the reins, ensured loyalty across the highest ranks of his administration, and proactively executed on a foreign and domestic policy agenda designed to finish off the liberal international order and reposition the US as a hemispheric hegemon with robust great power relationships. Trump has transformed his executive authority, diminishing at least for a time any semblance of internal restraint. As his first year back in office came to a close, the contours of Trump’s doctrine had become remarkably clear as had its price: The transatlantic partnership that had anchored the liberal international order for eight decades appeared to be at a breaking point.
The Liberal International Order
The end of the liberal international order has been declared too many times to recount. The core tenets of the order were a commitment of its core participants to democracy at home, and to multilateralism and free trade in their international relations with members of the order. The 2008 global financial crisis spurred many people to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the order, its neoliberal turn, and the commitment to open economic relations that it had required of its members.
The 2016 election of Donald Trump—who openly campaigned on an agenda that rejected multilateralism and free trade—led to further pronouncements of the end of the order. The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a global turn inward, marked by border closings, vaccine nationalism, and talk of supply chain resilience and friend-shoring. Especially in the Global South, Western nations’ response to the pandemic gave rise to allegations of Western hypocrisy and the end of the liberal international order. Two years later, Russia’s brazenness in its illegal invasion of Ukraine and blatant attempt to use force to alter borders further emboldened those who proclaimed the end of the order. The 2023 terrorist attacks on Israel, and the support of the US for Israel in the war that ensued between Hamas and Israel in Gaza, further escalated charges of Western hypocrisy. Trump’s 2024 re-election was the final straw, and his overt attacks on US allies in Europe once again led to proclamations that the order was over. As if to shut down any remaining debate, the Trump administration issued its National Security Strategy (NSS) in December 2025 and boldly stated that the older order was over. However, the contours of a successor remain elusive. It may be decades before a new international order has settled.
The greatest blunder of those who anticipated Trump’s return was to equate Trumpism with isolationism. The president has bombed Iranian nuclear facilities, removed President Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela, and is now threatening to attack Iran, once again, in response to the regime’s devastating crackdown and killing of its citizen protesters. The US president has made a territorial claim to Greenland in the most egregious violation yet of sovereignty, even if no force has as of yet been delivered.
Already, a Trump doctrine has taken shape. Some of its most essential components are about style and tactics, not substance, and did not make their way into the NSS—disruption, transactionalism, and high drama. In his attempt to secure the best deal possible or advance his policy ambitions, Trump rejects convention, diplomatic norms, and legal constraints. His strategy is premised on being disruptive but also unpredictable, in order to create uncertainty and to unsettle the rules. In this sense, it is the antithesis of a rules-based liberal international order.
The Trump doctrine goes further and rejects two of the bedrock principles of democracy in America and postwar foreign policy: that there is a distinction between the best interests of the US president and the best interests of the United States; and that the US should discriminate in favor it its allies, but not of its adversaries.
Trump’s doctrine also has a substantive core—and geography comes first. The NSS waxes about the need for the US to establish its preeminence over the Western Hemisphere and exclude US adversaries. The sheer ambition was startling to many readers, harkening back to the Monroe Doctrine and a 19th-century view of US power, albeit with a Trump corollary, but it should have come as no surprise. Already in his inaugural address the president had indicated his desire to establish Canada as the 51st state; assert US control over the Panama Canal and, especially, Greenland; and rid America’s backyard of China’s influence. As he approached the end of his first year back in the White House, Trump executed on his hemispheric ambitions with the dramatic capture of Maduro and US coercive control over Maduro’s successor.
It would be mistaken to assume that Trump’s hemispheric ambitions naturally correlate to a willingness to cede the rest of the world to Russia and China and accept a world divided into spheres of influence. There is little sign, in word or in action, that the US intends to abandon its role as an Asian power or walk away from its alliances.
Trump has challenged Europe more than any other region. And yet, the US remains in NATO. The demand that the Europeans do more and spend more to provide for their own defense is hardly new, even if the threat is more credible and the context is more fraught. Regulatory disagreements are also not new, but the coercion and linkage politics that underpin US pressure especially on the European Union and the United Kingdom to deregulate or resist regulation is of a different kind. They strike at the core of Europe’s values.
Rhetoric and Reality
So what does the Trump Doctrine hold for great power relations? The demotion of China as the overwhelming policy priority is the most radical shift of all. After decades of building a bipartisan consensus on China, marking it out as the United States’ most significant challenge, this singular focus on China appears to have vanished into thin air. There’s little doubt that the spirit of economic competition and bilateral trade deficits continue to motivate Trump’s approach.
In practice, however, Trump has been forced to accommodate China’s leverage, bringing down its threatened tariff rate when Beijing retaliated with the threat to withhold the export of rare earth minerals. On Taiwan, no one is certain of the exact meaning of the statement in the NSS that the US will deter China from its ambition of reunification, and this is probably by design.
With regard to Russia, also, Trump has sought to accommodate power, negotiate peace, and seek strategic stability. He has sidestepped ideological labelling (there is no sign of going back to the Biden administration’s “democracies vs autocracies” framing). But his efforts have not delivered success. The war in Ukraine continues. And the role the Trump doctrine ultimately assigns to Russia remains uncertain.
Even on multilateralism, there is a gap between rhetoric and practice. If the US president has been doctrinal in any aspect of his foreign affairs, it is surely his antipathy for multilateralism (and his support for tariffs). Just days after unseating the president of Venezuela, the administration released its long anticipated list, announcing the US withdrawal from no fewer than 66 international organizations.
However, the Quad security format is intact, which brings together the United States, Japan, India, and Australia, as is AUKUS, the Australian-British-American alliance focused on submarines. The major postwar multilateral institutions escaped attack—the UN General Assembly, the UN Security Council, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, NATO, even the World Trade Organization. In this regard, the Trump doctrine is set on disruption from within. The US government has reduced its spending on these international organizations, caused untold disruption, chaos, and uncertainty, but it has not withdrawn.
Still, the Trump doctrine is brazen in its call to override protected domains. Trade relations were seen as fundamental to stability and security under the liberal international order. Trump’s negotiating tactics have upended this norm, as he continues to explicitly cross boundaries and link US security guarantees to the tough bilateral trade negotiations that followed “Liberation Day.”
Is Trump an old-school realist? Sometimes. He has freed the US from its hypocrisy and unabashedly runs roughshod over sovereignty, if only that of weaker states. In this aspect, the Trump doctrine is more a throwback, a precursor, than a successor, to the liberal international order. The international relations scholar, Stephen Krasner, famously set out the case for sovereignty as organized hypocrisy. Inconsistencies and contradictions abound. The most egregious demonstration of such selectivity was, of course, the seizure of Maduro. Trump has since continued to coerce the interim leader, Delcy Rodríguez, conditioning US restraint on specific regime behaviors. He has also been talking of taking over the Venezuelan oil industry altogether.
Far more radical even is the effort to subvert Europe’s democracies, foment the far right in the disguise of patriotism and freedom of speech, and allege “civilizational erasure” if immigrants are not blocked. None of this suggests that the Trump doctrine has at its core anything even vaguely close to a hard-headed sovereigntist approach to international relations.
A World Without Restraint
So far, there is little reason to believe that Trump faces any significant constraints at home. His lock on the Republican Party has given him inordinate power, especially when Republicans control both the Senate and the House of Representatives. This may change in the year ahead. There are divisions in the MAGA world, and the midterm elections could see Democrats regain control of the House. In any case, Congress is now more inclined to exercise oversight than it was just a few months ago. But the bar is low and Americans may fail in the quest to bring moderation to the White House during Trump’s tenure in office.
Will this mean the end of the transatlantic partnership, as some have proclaimed? In the absence of American sources of restraint, the onus on Europe to serve as an anchor for the international order is nothing short of profound. Europe finds itself between a rock and a hard place as it faces Russia’s aggression, a land war to its East, alongside a dramatic transformation in its closest security partner and ally.
However, the transatlantic partnership hangs together not only for what it provides at any given point in time, but also for lack of a realistic and compelling alternative. The Europeans are certainly right to focus on building cohesion and resilience. The ambition to diversify Europe’s partnerships is probably inevitable, but won’t be fast. And in the face of an overwhelming security threat, it is unlikely to be enough. Therefore, even in times of the Trump doctrine, the prospect of a genuine, forever rupture between the US and Europe anytime soon seems as slim as it is undesirable.
Leslie Vinjamuri is president and CEO of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
