Review of World Affairs

Trump’s Dismemberment of the Liberal World Order:Radicalization of International Relations

By Shashi P.B.B. Malla

In a succinct and precise essay, the American analyst of current international affairs, Stewart Patrick describes how Donald Trump has launched a ‘Second American Revolution’.

Only this time, it’s against the world – and against its own citizens!

Patrick elucidates how the rogue American president – in ten dramatic shifts – has declared independence from the global system that America itself helped to construct in 80 laborious years after the Second World War.

Just two months into his second presidency, Donald Trump is radicalizing U.S. foreign policy.

His policies will drastically refashion 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, under Trump, 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 of U.S. foreign policy – in a perverted mode --  has no precedent in American history.

The only analogue, but in a positive direction, was the sudden U.S. embrace of containment, bookended by the enunciation of the Truman Doctrine and the launch of the Marshall Plan.

Truman’s policies were that of creation, whereas Trump’s are of death and destruction!

American hands are shattering the institutional framework for global cooperation the world has long taken for granted.

Trump is running totally amok without any guardrails – in the domestic sphere, as well as the international arena.

The tragedy for humankind is that there is nobody challenging him effectively – in both areas!

This radical metamorphosis in U.S. foreign policy is reverberating globally.

Even long-standing U.S. are flabbergasted by the speed of the administration’s volte-face, from its embrace of authoritarian Russia to its snubbing of democratic allies to its dismantling of foreign aid.

[Truman Doctrine (1947): A principle of US foreign policy aimed at containing Communism. It was enunciated by President Truman in a message to Congress at a time when Greece and Turkey were in danger of a communist take-over.

It was seen by Communists as an open declaration of the Cold War.

It confirmed the awakening of the U.S. to a new global responsibility.

Marshall Plan:  named after the then U.S. Secretary of State, George C. Marshall.

He proposed that the U.S. establish a programme of economic assistance to help European governments and peoples rebuild their economies that had been shattered as a result of the Second World War.

Containment: The guiding principle of post-war U.S. foreign policy.

Originally advocated by diplomat George Kennan who declared that the basis of U.S. foreign policy should involve ‘long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment [ keep in check ]of Russian expansionist tendencies’.

Ten Themes in Trumpian Foreign Policy

According to Patrick, Trump is temperamentally capricious and instinctively transactional.

Trump doesn’t – and cannot execute grand strategy.

His primary purposes are pecuniary, petulant, and patrimonial.

Therefore, there can be no unified theory or so-called ‘Trump Doctrine’ of Trumpian engagement.

However, Patrick discerns certain recurrent motivations, preferences, and themes that collectively amount to a worldview can be observed in the Trump administration’s flurry of executive orders and policy pronouncements.

1. 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 World Bank/International Monetary Fund, World Health Organization (WHO), NATO, and the Organization of American States (OAS).

They wanted to enhance the predictability, legitimacy, and stability of the international system by facilitating international cooperation on shared problems 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 astute American commentator Patrick deduces that the administration has embraced a defensive and distorted interpretation of sovereignty that is skeptical of international organizations and treaties.

Conservative U.S. 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 states 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 of, 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 organizations are now in the crosshairs – including in theory, the United Nations itself.

If the unthinkable really happened – in Trump’s capricious agenda everything is possible – it would indeed be a very black day in the annals of international affairs!

• A Denigration of the Political West & U.S. Alliances

In stark contrast with his predecessors, Trump lacks any solidarity with the other advanced market democracies that collectively constitute “the political 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 military 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 propensity to attack the West – evident in his confrontational approach to NATO, the G – 7, and the European Union (EU) – has perturbed partners.

Lacking confidence in America’s collective defence guarantee under NATO’s Article 5, Germany has begun talks with France and the United Kingdom about sharing their “nuclear umbrella”.

As EU Foreign Commissioner 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 power-focused world view 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 51^st U.S. state, and deploy the military to Mexico resurrects the Monroe Doctrine.

Beyond alienating neighbours and allies, Trump’s posture legitimates similar efforts by Moscow and Beijing, respectively to reassert control over Russia’s “near abroad” and China to dominate the South China Sea.

[Sphere of Influence: Refers to a territory or region over which an outside state claims control, influence or preferential status.

The preferred state does not claim sovereignty but does claim military, political or economic exclusiveness.

5.The Repudiation of International Law

Unlike his predecessors, Patrick notes that Trump prefers the law of the jungle to the rule of law in world politics [ and also in domestic politics].

During his first term in office, the president sought largely in vain to weaken the international legal order.

With his return to power, he is pursuing this with a vengeance, in areas from human rights to territorial aggrandizement.

Already, he has sided with Russia in its war of aggression against Ukraine, remaining silent on Russian atrocities there.

The Trump administration is also abetting Israel’s genocide in the Gaza strip and its violent policy of attrition in the occupied West Bank.

Previous administrations have 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 deal-making, 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 prefers hub-and-spoke arrangements that place the United States in charge, suchb 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 (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO).

The pillars of this global trade regime were non-discrimination and reciprocity, embodied in the most-favoured 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 the WTO’s death notice.

The president has embraced destabilizing tariffs and rejected the MFN principle in favour 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.

This has had 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 in the millions.

Not content simply to demonstrate its own miserliness, the administration has also effectively declared war on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, announcing that it will oppose their mention in UN resolutions and decuments, on the grounds that they somehow threaten U.S. sovereignty.

Fear is also growing that the United States could even withdraw from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and multilateral development banks.

Trump would be risking the collapse of the international financial system.

• An Abandonment of Democracy Promotion

With his affinity for autocratic strongmen, Trump has reversed a decades-long, 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 (VoA), among other bastions of countering false propaganda.

Although U.S. democracy promotion has often been selective – exposing America to charges of hypocrisy – and susceptible to overreach – as in the Biden’s 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 a beacon of liberty.

• A Rejection of Global Public Goods

Finally, the Trump administration denies any need for multilateral institutions to provide global public goods – or mitigate global defects and deficiencies – across a range of issues.

The Trump administration vehemently:

• Denies the reality of climate change,
• Ignores biodiversity collapse,
• Downplays pollution’s harms, and
• Disputes the rationale for environmental cooperation.

It has repudiated global health governance, withdrawing from the WHO.

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.

Thus, the United States is on the slippery path to develop itself into the leading, villainous international pariah.

The writer can be reached at:

shashipbmalla@hotmail.com