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foreign policy
A Moral or Militarized American Foreign Policy?
Instead of a values-based foreign policy, what has come out of the Trump White House this past year was a steady drumbeat of aggressive militaristic taunting.
Jan 04, 2026
As the world takes stock of the United States’ most recent military venture in South America, it seems an appropriate moment to consider the possible long-term implications of what will be wrought from the seizure of Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro and President Trump’s declaration that “we’re going to run the country.”
Americans historically have wrestled with balancing power politics and moral concerns in their approach to foreign policy. An accounting of the second Trump administration’s first year in office, however, suggests that those leading in Washington today are not all that concerned with such dynamics. This should cause concern, especially after the current military strike on Venezuela. As US foreign policy became less guided by moral ambitions in 2025, it became, perhaps inevitably so, more militarized.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, laying out the new administration’s priorities back in January 2025, mandated that US foreign policy should answer “three simple questions: Does it make America safer? Does it make America stronger? Does it make America more prosperous?” Nowhere in this guidance did Rubio speak of setting an example based on moral virtues, on values that might favor diplomacy over raw military power within the international arena.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the latest National Security Strategy, published in November, remained equally silent on morality’s role in defining American grand strategy. It did, though, state that the United States would “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere.”
Instead of a values-based foreign policy, what has come out of the Trump White House this past year, culminating with the attack on Venezuela, was a steady drumbeat of aggressive militaristic taunting, much of it threatening military violence and economic sanctions while politicizing the nation’s armed forces, both at home and overseas. These actions, of course, sit at odds with the president’s 2025 inaugural address in which Mr. Trump, evoking Richard Nixon, argued that his “proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.”
A chaotic year in, one might question that historical inheritance. Conjuring a near existential threat at the nation’s southern border, for instance, the president began his term by ordering the Pentagon send some 1,500 active-duty troops to assist with border patrolling and “alien” deportation missions.
Equally belligerent language targeted Denmark over the intent to take Greenland, with Trump declining to rule out the use of military force to achieve his aims. Nearly a full year later, the president is still arguing that the world’s largest island is “essential” to US national security, suggesting that forcible annexation of an ally’s territory is warranted as long as the commander-in-chief deems it so.
Closer to home, the administration also set its sights on the Western Hemisphere, claiming the United States’ command of the Panama Canal despite a 1977 treaty guaranteeing its neutrality. Then, with little restraint and less legal authority, the Department of Defense began attacking suspected drug-smuggling craft off the coast of Venezuela, escalating tensions throughout the second half of 2025 that led to a blockade of the South American country, the CIA carrying out drone strikes on its coastal port facilities, and now a unilateral, illegal invasion ostensibly aimed at regime change and command of the Venezuelan oil industry.
This devaluation of diplomacy is not new. It marked Trump’s first year in office, as the State Department abruptly paused all foreign aid and assistance with little to no warning soon after inauguration, with critics lamenting the impact such suspensions have had on global health programs over the course of 2025.
Such breakneck, unprincipled flexing of American power abroad this arguably was matched by a similar lack of moral concerns at home. The pardoning of domestic terrorists who attacked the US capitol on January 6th, 2020—with far-right extremist groups like the “Proud Boys” vowing revenge for their jail time—and the unlawful militarized policing of American cities were but just two examples of an administration acting with few self-imposed ethical guardrails.
But morals matter, both at home and abroad. They always have, even if the United States historically has not always lived up to its idealistic founding principles. Morality is not irrelevant to a nation’s foreign policy, despite noted State Department diplomat George Kennan once arguing that the “interests of the national society” such as “military security” and “the integrity of its political life…have no moral quality” of their own.
Of course, power matters, too. But power unhinged from ethical reasoning (and restraint) leads to a dark world in which military power becomes the inevitable answer to nearly any foreign policy question. Even a realist like Hans Morgenthau, author of the 1948 Politics Among Nations, counseled that the “aspiration for power” should, in some sense, be “in harmony with the demands of reason, morality, and justice.” As the famed political scientist put it, morality, mores, and law reinforced each other and offered “protection to the life of society and to the lives of the individuals who compose it.”
More recently, Joseph S. Nye, Jr. argued that we should consider the potential benefits of “maintaining an institutional order that encourages moral interests.” In short, the tension between morality and power has been healthy in our past debates over foreign policy. (Even if Morgenthau himself warned against the “intoxication with moral abstractions.”) Historically speaking, moral aims have set examples abroad, highlighted the values of human rights across the globe, and informed critiques against those who support more imperialistic and militaristic policies.
But what happens when the president of the United States, in both rhetoric and deeds, flaunts power and interests above all else? When morals are deemed an inconvenience at best, a threat to rational decision-making at worst? The likely result is the militarization of the nation’s foreign policy.
True, Mr. Trump has boasted that his deal-making has ended eight wars while complaining that he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. Yet motives matter when it comes to moral concerns. Was the president seeking peace or adulation? Moreover, Mr. Trump has seemed reluctant to wade into the details for achieving lasting peace in the Middle East or for holding Vladimir Putin to task for Russia’s unbridled aggression against Ukraine.
In a world deemed existentially dangerous, then only war and the threat of war, the flawed argument goes, will keep the nation safe when morals no longer matter. Seemingly, Mr. Trump sees the world this way. In his inaugural address, the president stressed his responsibility to “defend our country from threats and invasions…at a level that nobody has ever seen before.” Such martial rhetoric has been reinforced this past year by Secretary of Defense (“War”) Pete Hegseth who, in critics’ eyes, views military morality through the lens of “might makes right.”
In our heated, if not fractured, political moment, debating the value of morals guiding our nation’s foreign policy will be a difficult task. Indeed, even finding consensus today over what we mean by “moral behavior” seems a fraught enterprise. But the discussion is needed. Surely, President Barak Obama’s drone-based “targeted killing program” or Joseph Biden’s “unconditional” support of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s exterminationist policies against the Palestinians warrant examination, if not condemnation. So too the militarized actions of the Trump administration this past year. In short, effective American leadership is moral leadership, both at home and abroad.
Moreover, a nation broken free of its ethical moorings will engender only resentment and retaliation on the world stage. In such a scenario, a reliance on military force likely will grow as fears of America losing its “greatness” feed into themselves. If the Trump administration spies a dangerous world beyond its shores, then a foreign policy lacking in any moral principles hardly will dispel those threats, as real as they may be. Indeed, those threats will likely only escalate.
If we can agree with the proposition that power and morals can—and should—reinforce each other, then the opening year of the second Trump administration serve as a warning sign for the coming implications of a nation’s foreign policy bereft of moral criteria. Militarization surely will follow immorality.
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What Mess Will Trump Have Made of the USA by 2029?
If he simply persists in his policies for another 37 months, his impact on the American version of a world order will undoubtedly prove so profound that it will strain the limits of language.
Dec 26, 2025
For writers, the future has long been a tricky terrain. While the past can prove unsettling and the present uncomfortable, the future seems to free the mind from reality’s restraints and let the imagination soar. Yet it has also proven full of political pitfalls.
Sometimes writers can tweak a trend of their moment to produce a darkly dystopian future, as with George Orwell’s omniscient tyranny in 1984, Margaret Atwood’s institutionalized misogyny in The Handmaid’s Tale, or Ray Bradbury’s book-burning autocracy in Fahrenheit 451. And ever since H.G. Wells’s novel War of the Worlds (about technologically advanced Martians invading this planet) was published in 1898, space has been a particularly fertile frontier for the literary imagination. It has given us Isaac Asimov’s seven-part galactic Foundation fable, Frank Herbert’s ecological drama Dune, and Philip K. Dick’s post-nuclear wasteland in Blade Runner, opening us to possible techno-futures beyond our mud-bound presence on this small planet.
From the time that Henry George published his influential futuristic treatise Progress and Poverty in 1879, inspiring many of the Progressive Era’s key reforms, American writers across the political spectrum have used the future to frame an agenda for present-day political action, sometimes progressive, sometimes violently regressive. Published in 1938, Ayn Rand’s second novel, Anthem, was a futuristic saga whose hero, named “Equality 7-2521,” rejected the socialist society that raised him and struggled to rediscover his inherent individuality, articulating libertarian ideals that would inspire generations of American conservatives. And amid the social turmoil of the 1970s, William Luther Pierce’s The Turner Diaries imagined a future armed revolt against the US government that has provoked violence from generations of white nationalists.
So, with some trepidation, let me venture into the immediate future and imagine what the United States will be like when President Donald J. Trump finally leaves office (if, of course, he does) in January 2029. To keep such projections within the bounds of possibility, let’s clip the wings of our imaginations and hew closely to Trump’s policies and policy statements.
America’s Place in the World of 2029
In just 11 action-packed months since his January inauguration, President Trump has already demolished the fundamental geopolitics that have undergirded US global hegemony for the past 80 years. Even if he simply persists in his policies for another 37 months, his impact on the American version of a world order will undoubtedly prove so profound that it will strain the limits of language.
To grasp something of the scope of his impact, it’s necessary to briefly outline the world order Washington built over those 80 years. After fighting for four years and sacrificing 400,000 lives during World War II, Washington captured vital bastions at both ends of the vast Eurasian land mass and spent the next 40 years of the Cold War ensuring its control of that strategic continent with circles of steel—military alliances like NATO, hundreds of overseas military bases, powerful naval fleets, and a massive armada of nuclear-armed aircraft and missiles. With the Sino-Soviet communist bloc largely trapped behind what came to be known as the Iron Curtain, Washington crushed most of their attempts to break out of geopolitical isolation with deft covert operations. As the communists flailed, the US continued to build a global order, while patiently waiting for those socialist economies to implode.
President Trump has put forward a tricontinental geopolitical vision for the world’s major powers—with Russia dominant in the old Soviet sphere, China acting as an Asian hegemon, and the US securing the Americas.
When the Cold War finally ended in 1991, Washington got busy knitting the world into a unified market through massive capital exports, free-trade agreements, and a grid of global communications, thanks in part to satellites and fiber-optic cables. Beyond its awesome array of raw economic and military power (and the distinctly less than successful wars that it fought), Washington prettied up its intrusions into sovereign societies worldwide through its advocacy of universal human rights, its commitment to the rule of law (unless it got in the way of American interests), and its support for international institutions like the United Nations that assured inviolable sovereignty for even the smallest of countries. Thanks to a delicate balance of force, beneficence, and self-interest, the United States would enjoy both great national wealth and historically unprecedented global dominance.
Washington’s world order, like any complex global system, was distinctly flawed and its failings were (to say the least) legion, but its achievements weren’t inconsequential either. After two world wars that left 100 million dead, there has not been a major global conflagration for 80 years (though from Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq, there were all too many disastrous American-inspired local or regional wars). The share of the world’s population living on less than $3 a day dropped markedly from 43% in 1990 to just 11% in 2020. Reflecting those improved conditions, average life expectancy worldwide rose sharply for the first time in several centuries, from 46 years in 1950 to 72 years in 2020. Similarly, the world literacy rate climbed from 66% in 1976 to 87% in 2020. Whether from choice or necessity, we humans have enjoyed increasing freedom of movement, with the number of migrants globally reaching a record 304 million in 2024, representing nearly 4% of the total global population.
Not only did the US have the largest economy and military budget, but until recently, it was the world’s leading donor for public health and poverty eradication, sparing many millions of the world’s poor from the worst kinds of hunger and disease. All of those significant improvements in the human condition had complex causes, but the fundamental fact remains that they were products, direct or indirect, of Washington’s world order.
Then came President Donald Trump. From the first day of his second term in office in January 2025, he set out to tear down the US global order and transform America’s place in the world. With billionaire Elon Musk serving as his in-house wrecking ball, he quickly demolished the US Agency for International Development (USAID), slashing more than 80% of American nutritional and medical aid in ways expected, by 2030, to lead to a staggering 14 million extra deaths globally (including more than 4.5 million children). The misery now being inflicted on poor people crowded into cesspool camps from the Congo to Bangladesh defies description. In addition, by shutting down Voice of America broadcasts along with those USAID programs, the US has committed what one former NATO official called “soft power suicide,” clearing the way, as political scientist Joseph Nye put it, for China “to fill the vacuum that Trump is creating.”
Throughout the Cold War and its aftermath, a key US force multiplier was its global network of alliances—the Rio Pact for the Americas, five key bilateral pacts along the Pacific-island chain from Japan to Australia, and, above all, the extraordinarily effective NATO alliance for Europe. In 11 short months, Trump has already ruptured all the alliances that assured America’s security for some 75 years. On April 2 (or what he called “liberation day”), the president also slapped punitive tariffs on imports from loyal allies, ranging from 20% for the European Union to 24% for Japan.
Reflecting his longstanding hostility to the NATO alliance, particularly its Article Five mutual-defense clause, Trump’s recently released National Security Strategy (NSS) states that Europe faces “the stark process of civilizational erasure,” battered by “regulatory suffocation,” multi-racial migration, and “cratering birthrates” that raise the question of whether its nations will stay “strong enough to remain reliable allies.” Through their supposed “subversion of democratic processes,” the president has also claimed that European governments are resisting US attempts “to negotiate an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine.” To save Europe from itself, in that NSS the Trump administration came out for the growth of “patriotic European parties” (in other words, far-right ones), while discouraging the very idea of NATO “as a perpetually expanding alliance.”
In case anyone missed the meaning of that message, Trump told a Politico interviewer on December 8 that some European leaders are “real stupid” because their tolerance of immigrants from places like the “prisons of the Congo” will ensure that key European nations like Germany “will not be viable countries any longer.”
The Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine
More broadly, President Trump has put forward a tricontinental geopolitical vision for the world’s major powers—with Russia dominant in the old Soviet sphere, China acting as an Asian hegemon, and the US securing the Americas. By claiming Greenland, branding Canada “the 51st state,” and threatening to reclaim the Panama Canal during his first weeks in office, Trump articulated a strategy grounded, not in global hegemony, but in geopolitical dominance over the Western Hemisphere.
Formalizing that strategy in the recent NSS, the White House proclaimed a ”Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” aimed at a “potent restoration of American power” to achieve an unchallenged “American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.” To that end, the US will reduce its “global military presence to address urgent threats in our Hemisphere,” deploy the US Navy to “control sea lanes,” and use “tariffs and reciprocal trade agreements as powerful tools” to make the Western Hemisphere “an increasingly attractive market for American commerce.” It will also push out “non-Hemispheric competitors” (think: China), giving the US distinctly preferential access to the region’s “many strategic resources.” In essence, according to the NSS, “the United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity.”
In reality, Trump was miming the convoluted Victorian rhetoric of President Theodore Roosevelt’s famed corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. In a December 1904 message to Congress, Roosevelt disdained any “unmanly” inclination to a “peace of tyrannous terror, the peace of craven weakness, the peace of injustice.” Instead, he embraced the manly duty of the “great civilized nations of the present day” to ensure that the countries of the Western Hemisphere remain “stable, orderly, and prosperous.” Cases of “chronic wrongdoing… may… force the United States, however reluctantly… to the exercise of an international police power.” Faced with the “intolerable conditions in Cuba” (then under Spanish rule), T.R. proclaimed it “our manifest duty” to take “justifiable and proper” action “in asserting the Monroe Doctrine.” (Think Venezuela at the moment!)
Though he promised the use of only a restrained “police power” in the Western Hemisphere, Roosevelt opened the door to decades of US interventionism, with the Marines occupying Nicaragua for 20 years (1912-33), Haiti for 19 years (1915-34), and the Dominican Republic for nine years (1916-24). Just as Trump’s chatter about making Canada the “51st state” has sparked “anger and incredulity” in America’s closest ally, so his proclamation of a Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, exemplified by his recent devastating gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean Sea, is likely to inflame the anti-imperialist sentiment that lies just beneath the skin of Latin America, thereby corroding relations with our southern neighbors.
Trump’s Asia-Pacific Policy
While Trump’s posture toward Latin America is grimly clear, his Asia-Pacific policy seems muddled by ambiguity, if not outright confusion. In early October, oblivious to the rapid erosion of US hegemony in Asia, Trump declared a “trade war” with China, imposing a 130% tariff on its imports and a complete ban on exporting “critical software” to that country. By month’s end, however, he had to swallow his bravado after Beijing retaliated by barring the export of strategic rare earth metals needed for the US military’s weaponry (and so much else). That forced Trump to “fold” during his October 30 summit with China’s President Xi Jinping in South Korea—quickly rescinding his high tariffs and removing the ban on the export of Nvidia’s semiconductor chips that China desperately needs for Artificial Intelligence.
In the seven years since Trump’s last trade war with China in 2018, as the Wall Street Journal reported, that country has pursued “greater self-reliance in food and energy… for an era of sustained hostilities with the US.” According to the New York Times, the vivid diplomatic defeat at that South Korean summit was an historic inflection point, showing that “China could now face America as a true peer” and had already become “America’s geopolitical equal.”
Trump’s delusions of dominance over China pervade his recent National Security Strategy. Amid all its self-indulgent palaver, it displays a dangerously willful ignorance about fast-changing geopolitical realities in the Asia-Pacific region. By the time Trump leaves office in 2029, China’s gross domestic product will already be larger than America’s and it’s expected to become 36% bigger in the years to follow.
Trump’s Domestic Legacy
Just as Trump’s “America First” foreign policy is damaging the country’s diplomatic relations with Asia, Europe, and Latin America, so his domestic policies are likely to cripple this country’s economic competitiveness. Despite his stated commitment to building “the world’s most robust industrial base,” his energy policy is damaging, if not destroying, the country’s largest industry—automobile manufacturing. In 2024, the US automobile industry produced 3% of the country’s gross domestic product, created more than 8 million jobs, supplied transport for 92% of all American households, and accounted for $1.6 trillion in consumer finance, second only to home mortgages.
By his aggressive attack on the very idea of climate change and on America’s once-promising green-energy infrastructure, President Trump is inflicting serious damage on Detroit’s future capacity to compete against China’s rapidly rising production of electric vehicles (EVs). According to the International Energy Agency, EV purchases will reach 20 million in 2025, or one-quarter of world auto sales, and are on track to hit 40% by 2030, with China already accounting for 70% of global EV production. While EVs are still 30% more expensive than gas vehicles in the US, in China they are less expensive and now account for 60% of that country’s car sales (compared to just 11% in the US).
By 2029, Trump’s inept mix of foreign and domestic policies will confront American workers with a “hell-broth” of powerful economic troubles not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
With massive robotic factories cranking out EVs by the millions, a fleet of dedicated ships to carry those low-cost cars to global markets, and new factories opening in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America, China seems poised to conquer the global car market with models like BYD’s self-driving Seagull EV priced at only $9,000. Just as making an iPhone in America now seems almost unimaginable, by the time Trump leaves office, the US automotive industry could find itself incapable of producing a competitive EV, potentially losing access to half the world’s auto market. “I have 10,000 dealers around the world,” said Ford’s CEO Jim Farley recently. “Only 2,800 are in the US. So you do the math.” And given Trump’s costly tariffs on steel and aluminum imports (among other things), that core American manufacturing industry is likely to be in truly unsettled shape by 2029.
More broadly, the Trump administration is crippling this country’s overall economic competitiveness by cutting its scientific research and conducting a shotgun wedding between fossil fuels and the nation’s electrical grid. According to the International Renewable Energy Association, in 2024, solar power was 41% less expensive (and onshore wind 53% less) than the cheapest form of fossil fuel. When backed by cost-effective storage batteries, those alternative energies now provide the quickest, most affordable means to expand electrical infrastructure in developed and developing nations.
But by slashing EV tax credits, blocking offshore wind farms, and opening yet more federal lands for oil and natural gas drilling, President Trump is using the full powers of his presidency to derail America’s adoption of cost-competitive green energy. And keep in mind that he’s doing so at the very moment when a boom in energy-intensive data centers for Artificial Intelligence (AI) is straining the national grid, while simultaneously raising electricity costs for households and businesses. By the time he leaves office in 2029, American industry, still wedded to costly fossil fuels, could be paying double the price of foreign competitors for energy, rendering its products unaffordable, even at home.
Through a mix of ignorance and arrogance, the Trump administration is also hampering this country’s ability to conduct basic scientific research, the seedbed of its economic innovation for more than a century. Although immigrants have won 36% of the country’s Nobel Prizes in science over the past 125 years, the White House has now restricted H-1B visas for skilled immigrants and imposed a nearly 20% cut in foreign graduate students at US universities. By denying university science labs such critical student workers and slashing the nation’s budget for basic science by up to 57%, the Trump White House is liquidating the world’s most successful research industry and effectively ceding the rest of the 21st century to China.
A Witch’s Brew of Failure
Since the start of his second term, Donald Trump has used a seemingly random mélange of policies to mix a malevolent brew. Think of it as akin to the one that the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth cast into their cauldron to see the future, as they chanted: “Eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog… For a charm of powerful trouble, like a hell-broth, boil and bubble.”
Indeed, by 2029, Trump’s inept mix of foreign and domestic policies will confront American workers with a “hell-broth” of powerful economic troubles not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. By 2030, Trump’s tariffs will have cut US consumption by a projected 3.5% and, over the longer term, are likely to reduce average wages by 5% and GDP by 6%—a major change for an economy that has long enjoyed steady growth. With AI data centers projected to consume as much as 12% of the nation’s electricity by 2029, and Trump blocking the green energy that’s the only quick fix to meet rising demand, consumers could face an average increase of 20% in their electric bills by 2030 (and a possible 25% rise in states with data centers). While AI might raise living standards over the long-term, its unchecked expansion, as mandated by one of Trump’s executive orders, could contribute to the loss of 300 million full-time jobs globally and negatively impact two-thirds of all employment in the United States.
Worse yet, his demolition of the Biden administration’s attempt at a green energy revolution will have untold consequences for the US economy (not to say for the planet itself). As China, with its low-cost, high-efficiency EVs, conquers the global auto market by 2030 (and the larger green-energy production market as well), it will become the world’s largest economy, with exports surpassing its present record-breaking trillion-dollar mark and its currency increasingly dominant in global trade.
With the US global retreat leaving China and what’s likely to become its satellite state, Russia, dominant on the Eurasian land mass, home to 70% of the world’s population, Washington will be forced to fall even more fully back on the Western Hemisphere (where its welcome is already wearing ever thinner). With its presence certain to shrink across the planet, the dollar’s role as the global reserve currency will, as J.P. Morgan noted in a recent study, certainly “come into question.” With erratic US government policies undermining “the perceived safety and stability of the greenback” and US tariffs causing “investors to lose confidence in American assets,” there are already clear market signs of a global “de-dollarization” that will raise the cost of servicing this country’s national debt and cut into every aspect of the American economy. By 2030, the sum of those changes—compounded by a 20% increase in household electricity prices, soaring healthcare costs, and a “white collar bloodbath” as AI kills off half of all entry-level jobs—will have distinctly begun to reduce the quality of life in this country.
As Shakespeare’s witches saw the future in their cauldron’s bubbling brew and said of Macbeth, a man who would be king (whatever the cost), “Something wicked this way comes,” they also caught our Trumpian moment so many centuries later.
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Trump's National Security Strategy Heralds a New Age of American Carnage
The Trump administration is rolling out a new imperial logic that harbingers chaos and violence.
Dec 17, 2025
The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, or NSS, creates a basis for a more chaotic and violent American empire.
Already coming under heavy criticism, with Foreign Policy in Focus publishing warnings about its implications for global development and grand strategy, the strategy remains perhaps most dangerous for its imperious dictates to the world. Behind platitudes of peace and prosperity, it provides a crude imperial logic for violence and aggression, even gesturing at a need for military interventions.
“For a country whose interests are as numerous and diverse as ours, rigid adherence to non-interventionism is not possible,” the strategy notes.
The Trump administration tries to distinguish itself from previous administrations by criticizing foreign policy elites for seeking “permanent American domination of the entire world,” but it displays similar ambitions, even if framing them differently. Rather than making serious commitments to peace and democracy, the Trump administration is prioritizing national power, economic expansion, and military domination, going so far as to glorify its ability to kill people across the world.
“President Trump is hell-bent on maintaining and accelerating the most powerful military the world has ever seen, the most powerful, the most lethal and American-made,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said earlier this month.
Imperial Logics
In the 21st century, the United States has presented multiple imperial logics to the world. Despite the fact that US officials have largely refrained from associating the United States with empire and imperialism, they have developed national security strategies that have rationalized the exercise of US imperial power.
After the terrorist attacks against the United States on 9/11, the administration of George W. Bush developed a NSS that provided a basis for the United States to wage wars across the world. Under a framework of a global war on terrorism, the Bush administration claimed a need to act unilaterally and preemptively against alleged terrorists anywhere on the planet, even in violation of international law.
For two decades, the United States carried out the Bush administration’s approach, wreaking havoc across the world, especially the Middle East. The United States directed major wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, spreading devastation and destruction. According to the Costs of War project at Brown University, the United States spent about $8 trillion on wars that destabilized multiple countries and killed millions of people.
The Trump administration is trying to shift the focus away from great-power competition to sell the public on a new imperial logic that rationalizes national power, economic expansion, and military domination.
Leaders across multiple administrations defended the approach, even when facing criticisms about endless war, but US strategists eventually began turning to a new logic. Calling attention to rising powers, such as China and Russia, US strategists started to argue that the United States must exercise its military might to defend a rules-based international order against rising powers.
During the 2010s, officials in Washington began embracing the new logic, gradually rolling it out to the public. They introduced it during the final years of the administration of Barack Obama and then formalized it during the initial years of the first administration of Donald Trump.
When the first Trump administration released its NSS in 2017, it declared that the United States was competing with China and Russia in a new era of great-power competition.
“This strategy recognizes that, whether we like it or not, we are engaged in a new era of competition,” Trump announced. “We accept that vigorous military, economic, and political contests are now playing out all around the world.”
The new logic marked a shift away from the global war on terrorism, but it presented new dangers. By adopting a logic of great-power competition, the United States positioned itself for confrontations with China and Russia, two nuclear powers with growing influence across their peripheries and the world.
The new approach increased tensions with China in the Asia Pacific and rationalized conflict with Russia in Europe, particularly over Ukraine. Perhaps the greatest victim of the new logic has been Ukraine, which has suffered tremendously since Russia’s invasion in 2022.
For years, the United States and its European allies have been exploiting the war in Ukraine for the purpose of weakening Russia. They have been providing Ukraine with just enough support to defend itself but not enough to expel Russia. Their approach has kept Russian forces “bogged down in Ukraine—at enormous cost,” as Jake Sullivan noted earlier this year, when he was still national security adviser in the outgoing administration of Joe Biden.
The war in Ukraine may have resulted in enormous casualties for Russia, but it has also been devastating for Ukraine, leading current Secretary of State Marco Rubio to describe the war as a “meat grinder.”
“On the Russian side, they’ve lost 100,000 soldiers—dead—not injured—dead,” Rubio stated earlier this year. “On the Ukrainian side, the numbers are less but still very significant.”
Now that a second Trump administration is in power, it is shifting to yet another imperial logic. Facing concerns about the war in Ukraine, including the US role, the Trump administration is trying to shift the focus away from great-power competition to sell the public on a new imperial logic that rationalizes national power, economic expansion, and military domination.
Following the thinking of President Trump, who prioritizes wealth, power, and domination, the second Trump administration is embracing a cruder imperial logic that revives classical imperialism, or the use of force to open markets, seize resources, and maintain spheres of influence.
The Trump administration’s new logic takes aim at Latin America, where the United States is directing a military buildup and threatening a military intervention in Venezuela.
The NSS cites the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 to provide a justification for the Trump administration’s actions. Introducing what it calls a Trump corollary, it calls for a reassertion of US military power, the control of key geographies, and the exclusion of competitors from the hemisphere.
“The United States will restore US military dominance in the Western Hemisphere,” Hegseth declared.
Critiques
Now that the Trump administration has introduced its NSS, it is facing strong pushback from multiple directions. Not only are people across Latin America condemning the United States, particularly its unlawful killings of alleged drug traffickers in the Pacific and Caribbean, but the Trump administration is fielding a great deal of criticism from establishment figures, both in the United States and around the world.
Several European leaders have been highly critical of the NSS, especially its plans for US interference in European affairs. They have expressed shock over the administration’s call for “cultivating resistance” to European leaders.
Another source of pushback has been the US foreign policy establishment. Although the foreign policy establishment shares many of the Trump administration’s imperial commitments, especially to the Monroe Doctrine and military domination, it fears that the administration is not showing enough appreciation for great-power competition.
At its core, the Trump administration is preparing the world for future exercises of American military power.
Earlier this month, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed displeasure with the new strategy. She criticized Trump for going easy on Russian President Vladimir Putin and questioned why he is pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into accepting a deal that would leave Ukraine vulnerable to future Russian aggression.
“I think that there’s a lot that needs to be reviewed and looked at from the perspective of what are the long-term consequences,” Clinton said.
But these establishment figures’ preferred framework of great-power competition has led to significant tensions with China and Russia, including great-power conflict. Several experts have argued that the expansion of NATO provoked Russia, an interpretation that President Trump has used to explain the war in Ukraine.
Another problem for the foreign policy establishment is that there is little agreement over how to characterize China and Russia. Although some analysts warn that Russia remains a rising power, making gains on the battlefield in Ukraine, others insist that Russia is a country in decline, as indicated by its inability to conquer Ukraine.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt that from a conventional military capability the Russians could not take on the United States or frankly many of the countries in Europe, for that matter,” Rubio said earlier this year.
Within the foreign policy establishment, there is just as much disagreement over China. Many analysts repeatedly sound the alarm over China, warning that the country is seeking global domination. Others dismiss these warnings, however, claiming that Chinese leaders are not seeking hegemony, despite their aspirations for world leadership.
“They really don’t seem to have an interest in being the hegemonic force that actually the United States has been in trying to maintain and enforce the rules-based order,” former Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said earlier this month.
Perhaps most awkward for the foreign policy establishment, however, is that the second Trump administration remains focused on great-power competition. Although its National Security Strategy does not define great-power competition as the definitive feature of international relations, as the foreign policy establishment prefers, the Trump administration is making hostile moves toward both China and Russia.
The Trump administration is keeping pressure on Russia, even while the president signals his willingness to sacrifice Ukraine as part of his vainglorious quest for a Nobel Peace Prize. Perhaps most significant, the Trump administration is intensifying its economic war against Russia while pushing European countries to embrace militarization.
This past June, NATO members pledged at the Hague Summit to increase their military spending to 5% of GDP, despite Trump’s acknowledgments that Russia feels threatened by the military alliance.
“We just need to continue to get stronger and to make sure that we don’t demonstrate an inch of weakness, because we’re not weak,” US Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker said earlier this month. “As we continue to implement the 5% commitment from the Hague, I think we’re going to be, you know, really not only the strongest alliance in the history of the planet, but really a dramatic force to be reckoned with.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is making aggressive moves against China. Although the administration insists that it is not seeking conflict with China, it is overseeing a military buildup that poses a major threat to the country.
Earlier this month, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declared that China must respect US interests in the Asia Pacific, including the ability of the United States to project military power across the region. He explained the Trump administration’s approach by quoting a well-known imperial aphorism of former US President Theodore Roosevelt.
“We will speak softly and carry a big stick,” Hegseth said.
The Fundamental Problem
The fundamental problem, of course, is that the Trump administration is rolling out a new imperial logic that harbingers chaos and violence. Given all the harm the administration is already causing around the world, such as its crackdowns on immigrants, killings of alleged drug traffickers, and facilitation of genocide in Gaza, the new NSS indicates that the administration is just getting started in a new age of American carnage.
At its core, the Trump administration is preparing the world for future exercises of American military power. It is glorifying military domination, even preparing for military interventions for the purposes of seizing resources and maintaining spheres of influence.
At the same time, the administration is upending popular forms of politics and international relations. Its NSS displays contempt for democracy. Not only does it confirm the administration’s preference for monarchy in the Middle East, but it signals ongoing support for right-wing movements in Europe, which are positioning themselves to revive fascism.
Perhaps most dangerous, the strategy disregards existential threats to the planet. It embraces fossil fuels, the primary cause of the climate crisis. It even defends nuclear weapons, despite the extraordinary danger of nuclear war.
What the Trump administration is doing, in short, is laying the groundwork for a more volatile American empire. Rather than making genuine commitments to peace and democracy, it is introducing a crude imperial logic that makes the United States into a greater menace to the planet, with more horrors to come.
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