Kori Schake
President Donald Trump’s rise to power and enduring political appeal have been fueled in part by his depiction of the United States as a failure: exhausted, weak, and ruined. In a characteristic act of self-contradiction, however, his foreign policy is based on a significant overestimation of American power. Trump and his advisers seem to believe that, despite the country’s allegedly parlous condition, unilateral action on Washington’s part can still force others to capitulate and submit to American terms.
But since the end of World War II, American power has been rooted mostly in cooperation, not coercion. The Trump team ignores that history, takes for granted all the benefits that a cooperative approach has yielded, and cannot envision a future in which other countries opt out of the existing U.S.-led international order or construct a new one that would be antagonistic to American interests. Yet those are precisely the outcomes the Trump administration is hastening.
The political scientist Michael Beckley has argued in Foreign Affairs that the United States is becoming “a rogue superpower, neither internationalist nor isolationist but aggressive, powerful, and increasingly out for itself.” That portrait is accurate but incomplete, since it does not fully capture the extent to which American dominance can be undercut or constricted by others. In the Trump era, many have speculated about whether or to what degree the United States will withdraw from its leading role in the world. But a more pressing question might be, what if the rest of the world beats Washington to the punch, withdrawing from the cooperative U.S.-led order that has been the bedrock of American power?
Some may counter that even if U.S. allies and neutral countries don’t like the way Trump exercises American power, they have little choice but to go along with it now and will accommodate themselves to it in the longer term, placating the United States as much as possible and hedging only when absolutely necessary. After all, they might come to loathe and distrust the United States, but not as much as they already loathe and distrust China, Russia, and other American rivals. In this view, the United States that Trump wants to create would be the worst possible hegemon—except for all the other possible candidates. Besides, even if other countries wanted to opt out of the U.S.-led order or work around Washington, they don’t have the ability to do so, individually or collectively. They might yearn for the days when a more internationalist, open, cooperative United States shaped the world order. But they’ll learn to live with a more nationalist, closed, and demanding United States.
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