We’ve been here before. In the spring of 1941, as Hitler’s armies swept across Europe, American conservative James Burnham published a book outlining his vision for a new global order: a post-democratic world centered around a few powerful blocs he called “super-states.” These great powers would exercise complete dominion over their designated regions while locked in perpetual rivalry with each other. The United States, Burnham thought, should “draw a ring” around the Western hemisphere, securing the Panama Canal and reducing Canada to “a satellite.” This new order would be governed not by international law but by personal dealings among the great powers, who would control the sovereignty of weaker states and suspend it as they wished.
Once we make sense of his preferences for the post-liberal order, Trump’s treatment of Canada—but also of Russia, Greenland, and others—begins to make a lot more sense. Trump’s approach to the international system is a strange blend of neo-feudal hierarchy with transactional politics guided by five principles: dominance of great powers, conditionality of alliances, weaponization of trade, irrelevance of institutions, and personalization of diplomacy.
Rule #1. Great Powers Run the World
It’s not an outright defense of conquest, exactly. More like an acknowledgment of gravity: Russia is big. Ukraine is small. To pretend otherwise is foolish. Trump’s instincts resemble an older, pre-twentieth-century tradition of geopolitics. He’s not interested in defending the sovereignty of small nations, especially if it doesn’t offer an obvious payoff.
This worldview underpins his approach to Russia and Ukraine, where Trump is clearly willing to accommodate Russia’s bid for regional dominance. He has dismissed Ukraine’s NATO aspirations as a provocation and has repeatedly hinted that Russia’s control over Crimea is legitimate. His administration now openly states that Ukraine and others must consider Russian interests in the region.
Since great powers run the show, their allies are, at best, useful sidekicks, and at worst free-loaders who refuse to recognize their vassal-like status. It’s a billionaire’s idea of allies—hired help, not strategic partners. There is no trust or shared purpose, but rather temporary arrangements, maintained at the pleasure of the powerful. If an ally fails to pay or align with Trump’s priorities, the U.S. walks away.
Rule #3. Global Trade Is a Weapon
This reflects a deeper belief: that trade is a weapon of the state, not a byproduct of the market. Interdependence is not a source of peace, but a vulnerability to be exploited. Breaking with his party’s free-market ideologues, Trump sees concerns about economic efficiency and mutual benefit as secondary, if they matter at all.
The Trump administration sees institutions like the UN, WHO, and WTO not as tools of influence or pillars of a stable world, but as institutions rigged against the U.S., and obstacles to American sovereignty. In his first term, he withdrew from (among others) the Paris Climate Accord, the Iran Nuclear Deal, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In his first few weeks back in office he has withdrawn from bodies like the WHO and UNESCO. Democracy promotion via international institutions, once a central if controversial plank of U.S. global engagement, has been discarded completely, with the shuttering of USAID perhaps the most dramatic example.
Rule #5. Diplomacy is Personal Negotiation
So what kind of order is this? It’s clearly not the liberal international order, but it’s not realist, either. Classical realism, as articulated by thinkers like Hans Morgenthau and Henry Kissinger, centers on the careful management of state power, the preservation of stability, and the rational pursuit of national interest. Trump’s approach is erratic and personalized, replacing “national interest” with patronage and personal rule. It’s almost pre-modern, rejecting even seventeenth-century Westphalian sovereignty as a pretense while elevating vassal-like tribute and gratitude, kleptocracy and brute power—a kind of primordial politics that prizes dominance over cooperation, loyalty over legitimacy, and short-term gain over systemic stability.
Of course, realists have long questioned the utility of multilateral institutions, and NATO burden-sharing has been a point of contention for decades. What sets Trump apart is not the originality of any single position but the way he fuses these elements into a confrontational vision that challenges the foundational norms of the postwar American order, at a moment when that order appears weakest. His disdain for allies, open transactionalism, use of trade as a bludgeon, the rejection of legalism, and personalization of diplomacy are brought together with an intensity, explicitness, and indifference to constraint that amounts to a rupture.
For all its faults, the liberal order established in 1945 and solidified in 1991 offered a measure of predictability to many less powerful states. That predictability is now quickly disappearing in favor of a system with a more brutal logic. Those who lamented the liberal order’s shortcomings may soon discover, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, that it really was the worst kind of order except for all the others.
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