By the time Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney left the stage at the World Economic Forum on January 20, observers understood his speech’s importance. In front of the elite audience at Davos, with which he is intimate as a former central banker for Canada and the United Kingdom, Carney said that “middle powers” such as Canada needed to cooperate to resist the weaponization of the global economy by the great powers. The rules-based international order, he admitted, had always been partially fictional, but now even the pretense of its existence was impossible. “The old order is not coming back,” Carney said. “In a world of great-power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice: compete with each other for favor or to combine to create a third path with impact.” Carney’s address was a rare one in Davos history to earn a standing ovation.
At Davos, the speaker was the message. Carney’s remarks reverberated so profoundly partly because they offered a reality-affirming assessment of a disturbing international situation, but more because they were a suggestion for reorientation away from the United States—delivered by Canada. Canada. “For the last century and most of this one, especially the postwar period, the United States was a country with which we had a special relationship, arguably a privileged relationship,” said Carleton University political scientist Fen Hampson, co-chair of the Expert Group on Canada-U.S. Relations. Canada has long snugly positioned itself in the U.S. orbit, largely following the American lead on trade and global security and offering support and legitimacy in return.
No longer. “The U.S. is now viewed by key allies, including Canada, as a hostile state actor—because of its president,” said Hampson. Notably, Carney’s speech was also backed by action. Days earlier, he announced a “new strategic partnership” between China and Canada, reviving relations between the two countries that had been strained for years. That included welcoming Chinese electric vehicles into Canada for sale, a potentially huge threat to the U.S. economy. As a rallying cry to smaller countries to unite against the great powers, Carney’s move “was a bit of David versus Goliath,” as Hampson put it.
Carney’s call for middle powers to redirect their strategy was not well-received in the White House. “Canada lives because of the United States,” President Donald Trump said at Davos days later. “Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.” He threatened to levy more tariffs against Canada. Other officials in his administration made similarly dismissive statements.
In the Trumpian worldview, weaker countries have little choice but to submit to U.S. demands. The New York Times’ Ezra Klein spoke to Trump’s advisers about the president’s theory of international politics at the outset of his second term and reported, “Every one said some version of the same thing: America has leverage it does not use. Under Trump, it is going to start using it.” In the president’s line of thinking, U.S. bullying of less powerful countries could never backfire because America is so powerful that, while other nations might complain about their shabby treatment, they would have little recourse but to bend. As Fox News host Jesse Watters put it in defending Trump’s threats to annex Greenland, “We don’t need friends…. America is not handcuffed by history.”
This Darwinian perspective is seductive because its ruthlessness appears superficially realistic in a harsh world. But ironically it is, in fact, deeply naïve. Countries don’t abandon the pursuit of their interests in the face of coercion; they alter their approaches, including, eventually, perhaps even cooperating with one another in opposition to what Carney called “American hegemony.” Wise policymakers have always known this to be true. George F. Kennan, the diplomat and founder of the Cold War strategy known as containment, said in 1999, after the Soviet Union’s collapse and during the supreme era of American power, “I can say without hesitation that this planet is never going to be ruled from any single political center, whatever its military power.” Even Republican hawks from previous eras understood that the world cannot simply be commanded entirely from Washington. In 2002, Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush’s national security adviser and secretary of state, spoke about securing “a balance of power that favors freedom.” The notion that other countries, if they feel threatened enough, can “balance” not with but against the United States seems mystifying to the Trump administration. But assuming that smaller countries will permanently allow themselves to be bullied by the United States is unrealistic.
“States have a variety of options” in response to bullying by a greater power, said Stephen Walt, a Harvard University political scientist who fashioned the notion of countries balancing against perceived threats. Nations can diversify their economic and security ties; give lip service to acceding to U.S. demands while shirking their commitments; and, finally, simply defy the United States and endure whatever consequences arrive. Said Walt: “What is making such actions more likely is the growing awareness that trying to flatter and appease Trump doesn’t buy you any long-term goodwill or cooperation; he just comes back with more demands later.”
Not everyone agrees that we are witnessing a return to a balance of power where countries unite against the superpower. Morten Andersen, an international-relations expert at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, conceded that Norway indeed views the situation “more on Carney’s line.” As a Northern European state that isn’t part of the European Union, Norway is more careful about signaling than Canada, he said, but it “more or less” has the same perspective. However, Andersen believes that, instead of hastening a return to a world where countries balance against hegemons, Trump is leading the world toward a system of “great power collusion.” While in his first term, Trump spoke about “great power competition,” Andersen said, now the president focuses less on the challenge China poses than on supposed transgression committed by countries like Venezuela, Denmark, and Canada. Trump states overtly that he makes decisions involving war and peace based on how many international prizes he receives.
Trump may envision a world where powerful countries themselves cooperate to ransack weaker countries in “a new kleptocratic international order,” said Andersen. He mentioned “neoroyalism,” a term coined by two American political scientists, Stacie Goddard and Abraham L. Newman. They have argued that what drives Trump is not any grand ideas about the national interest but wealth and power for himself and his family. “Rather than compete with rivals, Mr. Trump is willing to collude with them in order to advance his court’s parochial interests,” they wrote. But, they also said, “A neoroyalist world is not inevitable. Countries—including America’s closest partners—now need to offer a coherent alternative, mobilizing their own sizable collective resources to counter Mr. Trump and support a system based on fair rules and predictable diplomacy.” Mark Carney’s rousing address might mark the beginning of this mobilization. But such endeavors will be difficult as countries are tempted to pursue their own separate strategies in dealing with an unshackled United States.
Here, we look at how four of the most important global power centers are thinking about their security and positioning in the age of Trump.
Beijing: Trump Gets Distracted, Xi Bides His Time
It can be difficult to remember now, but there once was a time when Trump presented himself as deeply concerned with China’s ascension in Asia and its exploitation of the United States. “There are people who wish I wouldn’t refer to China as our enemy,” he wrote in his 2015 book, Crippled America. “But that’s exactly what they are.” As president, however, Trump supplemented his harsh actions against China with praise for leader Xi Jinping and the country’s illiberalism.
And so China fretted about a second Trump term. “Beijing began in 2024 quite concerned that Trump would be difficult to manage because of his unpredictability and willingness to take huge risks,” said Scott Kennedy, trustee chair in Chinese business and economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But the Chinese have been pleasantly surprised. The Trump who once seemed obsessed by the threat China posed to the United States is now far less invested in such things—a transition that has not gone unnoticed in Beijing. “Over the last year, they figured out how to manage him and believe they have the upper hand,” said Kennedy. “They feel they know what moves him.”
In China’s view, Trump is superficially aggressive and demanding, but when confronted with opposition, he settles for half measures or other face-saving compromises. In April 2025, he grandiosely announced tariffs on China as part of his “Liberation Day” campaign. But after China announced retaliatory measures by withholding rare earths, Trump soon reversed the tariffs that he had said were critical to saving the U.S. economy. “Their aggressive retaliation has worked,” as Kennedy said.
What China never anticipated in its fondest fantasies of a second Trump presidency was the extreme hostility the president would engender with his closest allies. “Beijing can’t believe its luck,” said David Sacks, a China specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, or CFR. By not simply insulting but actually threatening the closest friends of the United States, the Trump administration has pushed them into the waiting arms of the rising power in Asia. Trump is “doing China’s work for it,” said Sacks. Prime ministers from Canada and the United Kingdom have both already visited Beijing in 2026, after years of their countries’ government leaders conspicuously abstaining from traveling to China. They followed leaders from France, Ireland, South Korea, and Finland in making such trips. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz visited China in late February. As Wendy Cutler, a longtime diplomat who is currently senior vice president of the Asia Society Policy Institute, said with considerable understatement: “China is welcoming the apparent strains and tensions in the Western alliance.”
Notably, China has attracted these wealthy liberal democracies to its orbit without making a single concession around its human rights violations, designs on Hong Kong and Taiwan, or trade practices. When British leader Keir Starmer met with Chinese officials on his trip, he failed to secure promises to release Hong Kong democracy activist Jimmy Lai, a British citizen who has been detained for more than five years, much of the time in solitary confinement. Starmer reportedly raised the matter with Xi, but the Chinese leader didn’t feel compelled to acquiesce to releasing Lai, who will likely die in a Chinese jail. “Beijing’s playbook is working,” said Zongyuan Zoe Liu, a Chinese-born analyst at CFR.
Trump’s two administrations have released very different National Security Strategy, or NSS, documents—a white paper delivered periodically by all administrations that announces their broad global priorities—and this illustrates the shifts in priorities. In the initial NSS document Trump released in late 2017, China was mentioned 33 times (nearly twice as many times as in the Obama administration’s final NSS), with nary a positive reference among them. The report accused China of trying to “displace the United States in the Indo-Pacific region, expand the reaches of its state-driven economic model, and reorder the region in its favor.” Chinese officials lambasted the paper, saying that the United States was contradicting itself by seeking to cooperate at times but portraying Beijing as an adversary at other points.
In December 2025, by contrast, the second Trump administration released its first NSS, and it offered a markedly different assessment of China. Rather than treating great-power competition as the predominant reality facing U.S. foreign policy, this new analysis relegated China to the background. There was no reference to China being a “strategic competitor” or anything similar. Instead, the emphasis was on the alleged dangers to the Western Hemisphere supposedly sprouting from Latin America—ranging from “narco-terrorists” to drug cartels to immigrants.
This shift occurred even though China was arguably stronger, wealthier, and better positioned globally in 2025 than it had been eight years earlier. The Chinese also had four years of dealing with Trump under their belt and had a better idea of what to expect with Trump 2.0. This time around, “Beijing is much better prepared economically, strategically, and politically,” said Liu.
With Trump both less concerned with confronting China and more focused on the Western Hemisphere, Beijing is content to simply wait for the United States to expend crucial resources combating phantom dangers. China “feels very much time is on its side,” said Cutler. The country is highly confident in its technological capabilities and simply wants time and space to become stronger and more self-reliant, she said. Given this self-confidence, China is aligned with the second Trump administration in seeking to stabilize the bilateral relationship instead of being on a more adversarial footing.
At the same time, China’s business community is less enamored of the Trump team, seeing it as too erratic to make investment a smart opportunity. And Beijing is not naïve enough to believe that American policymaking elites fail to see China as a competitor, even if it’s not seen as the menace Trump portrayed circa 2015. Said Liu: “They are confident they know how to handle Trump and see no need to make concessions without receiving benefits.”
Brussels: So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Adieu
Trump routinely disparaged European allies on the campaign trail in 2015 and 2016, reserving expressions of fondness for Russian leader Vladimir Putin and various other autocrats, dictators, and tyrants. In 2016, he complained several times about NATO allies—all of whom are European, except for Canada—of free-riding on the United States and called the organization itself “obsolete.”
Given that history, the U.S. relationship with the European Union and its 27 member-states proved surprisingly resilient in Trump’s first term, despite his invective about the immigration policies of countries like Germany. He did surprisingly little to destroy the alliance, as some had feared. And with the Biden administration all-in on boosting traditional allies and NATO, Brussels could be forgiven for having thought the crisis had passed.
That was then. It is fair to say that, while much of the world is surprised by Trump’s behavior and rhetoric in his second term, the countries that make up the European Union are the most bewildered. “While turbulence was expected, few were prepared for the scale of disruption that followed, more akin to a political earthquake than the manageable aftershocks many had anticipated in transatlantic relations,” said Kader Sevinç, a Brussels-based expert who was formerly a senior EU affairs executive.
When Trump disparaged Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky in a White House meeting in full view of cameras in February 2025, he signaled not just a different approach to the Russian-Ukrainian War but to relations with Europe in general. The forced dustup illustrated not just the president’s scorn for Ukraine’s brave battle for independence but his willingness to disregard priorities, such as Russia’s incursions into Eastern Europe, that EU members see as essential to their security. Countries closer to Russia have more to fear from Moscow than those in the Western Hemisphere, after all, but they weren’t consulted before Trump’s shocking tirade. “Brussels is in a panicking mode and has been for almost a year now because of the unpredictability—I think they feel that the unpredictability is really something they can’t deal with because there’s so many issues that come up at, I wouldn’t say a short notice, but the issues come up when you least expect them,” said Engjellushe Morina, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
In 2019, Trump suddenly expressed interest in acquiring Greenland, which is semiautonomous and militarily protected by Denmark. “Essentially a large real estate deal,” he said, adding that the issue “came up,” and he was intrigued. Responsibility for Greenland cost Denmark oodles of money, he claimed, so he was open to buying Greenland. But when Danish leaders said its territory was not for sale, Trump canceled a planned visit. He said at the time about purchasing Greenland: “It’s not number one on the burner, I can tell you that.”
It was on the burner when he returned to office, however. Even before his second inauguration, Trump in January 2025 wouldn’t rule out using force to obtain Greenland and threatened tariffs against Denmark if it refused to sell it. “We need Greenland for national security purposes,” he said, making similar claims throughout the year about the United States getting the territory “one way or another.”
After invading Venezuela in early 2026, Trump seemed emboldened enough to want to make good on his pledge. France, Germany, and Norway promised to contribute troops to a multinational force to defend Denmark as the president refused to budge. Although a direct confrontation was avoided when Trump backed down and pretended an impressive agreement had been reached over Greenland, enormous, fatal damage was inflicted on Europeans’ trust not just in Trump but perhaps in U.S. foreign policy generally. “That was a threat of force used on a NATO ally,” said Simon Smith, an international-relations specialist at the Royal Danish Defense College in Copenhagen. “No one is going to forget that.”
There is a contrast between what is said in public and what is said behind the scenes, stated Smith. Countries avoid provoking Trump and some speak publicly about the United States continuing to be a vital part of NATO. In private, however, leaders alternate between discussing NATO as an organization in which the U.S. presence is nominal—or even what it might mean to create a duplicate organization without the United States.
But the reality is that it can take years before European countries are capable of defending themselves. “We are still heavily dependent on the United States,” said Jean-Louis De Brouwer, director of the European Affairs Programme at the Egmont Institute in Brussels. Coordinating among more than two dozen countries is difficult, a problem solved by having the United States provide most of the resources and direction for NATO and the Western alliance.
Even so, the large partners of the EU seem determined to set the direction for continental security policy in a way that has not been true since World War II. Said De Brouwer: “Call it decoupling, good decoupling. Call it de-risking, I don’t know but that we should take for granted once and for all that the less dependent we are going to be to the United States, the better position we are in.”
Moscow: Waiting for NATO to Implode
During Trump’s first presidential campaign, his special affection for Vladimir Putin appeared baffling and deeply worrisome to anyone concerned about Russia’s subversion of liberal democracies, to say nothing of its designs on its immediate neighbors. But despite Russia’s interference in the 2016 election on behalf of Trump, his administration largely maintained an adversarial relationship in dealing with the country. “In his first term, he was surrounded by aides who were conventional in their thinking,” said Robert Orttung, a Russia expert at George Washington University. With Vice President Mike Pence, national security adviser H.R. McMaster, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Trump was guided by individuals who had typical conservative views on dealing with Russia. “What Trump was thinking was different than what was happening,” said Orttung. That led to disappointment and frustration in the Kremlin, according to Thomas E. Graham, a Russia adviser and diplomat during the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. And so “Russia didn’t look at Trump’s second term with heightened expectations,” Graham said.
In his second term, however, Trump is more confident in asserting himself, and he is surrounded by individuals who share his views or are simply more willing to do his bidding (“obsequious lackeys,” in Orttung’s words). The president seemed intent on betraying Ukraine during his infamous televised White House spat with President Zelensky, and he has repeatedly praised Putin as a reasonable man intent on peace. Trump has several times grandiosely announced that a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine was impending, and members of his administration have said that Ukraine must be prepared to relinquish some of its territory to Russia. Putin also understands that Trump is into “value-free diplomacy,” in the words of Anna Ohanyan, a Russia expert at Stonehill College.
But while Trump might be willing to sacrifice Ukrainian territory, sovereignty, and interests for the sake of a peace deal, he is no more committed to doing so than to any other foreign policy objective. Given his short attention span and competing priorities such as maintaining domestic popularity, demonstrating strength, and projecting an image as a brilliant dealmaker, he has proved unwilling to follow through with pressure on Kyiv to completely surrender. “Russia continues to see Trump as a mercurial president and sees that he likes a large defense budget,” said Andrew Weiss, who previously served as director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian Affairs on the National Security Council staff and is currently with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. For all Trump’s friendly rhetoric toward Moscow, the Kremlin doesn’t look at him as a friend of Russia, said Weiss. He pointed to the National Security Strategy, which treats Russia as a minor, regional power, hardly an important country whose interests must be accommodated. While other critics felt that Russian malfeasance was absolved in the report, Weiss suggested that the Russians look “at what [Trump] is doing with apprehension.” He is simply too unpredictable and erratic to be relied upon.
Aside from Ukraine, Trump denied Putin’s desire to extend the New START treaty, the 2010 pact that capped the number of deployed nuclear-capable missiles, bombers, and warheads both Russia and the United States could have. Trump has said he’s open to a deal but wants it to include China. “If it expires, it expires,” he said. “We’ll just do a better agreement.” That, of course, is similar to the language the president used in 2018 when he withdrew the United States from the agreement President Barack Obama had signed with Iran in 2015 to limit its nuclear program. Alas, no better agreement with Iran was forthcoming, and the country was ultimately bombed by the United States less than a decade later.
At the same time, Trump has taken actions in Central Asia that undermine Russia’s claim to an exclusive sphere of influence. In the fall of 2025, his administration played a role in negotiating a peace deal between Azerbaijan and Armenia, part of which involved a withdrawal of Russian forces from the border between the two countries. An additional component of the agreement is the construction of a 20-mile transit corridor connecting Azerbaijan to an autonomous, mountainous region that is part of Armenian territory. The United States has rights to manage the territory for 99 years, which is now called the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity.” Unsurprisingly, Russia has reacted poorly to this assertion of U.S. power, downplaying the significance of the Americans in the region. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said, “The current stage of Armenian-Azerbaijani normalization began with the decisive and central role of Russia.” Another Russian official told reporters that countries in Central Asia obviously could not ignore their Russian partners. But, as Ohanyan said, the reality is that “Putin is on the back foot as Trump is more active in the Caucasus.”
However, in observing Trump destroy NATO and the Western alliance, particularly by denigrating European countries, Putin is very much on the front foot. “[Trump] is doing what 80 years of the Soviet Union couldn’t do,” said Graham. The administration has alienated not just countries like Germany and France but even ones like Poland and the Czech Republic, which, behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, looked to the United States as a beacon of resistance to Moscow. The Russians are “happy to sit back,” as Weiss put it, and watch NATO implode.
And yet, Russia might be concerned with the apparent determination of Europe to rearm as America withdraws. With the United States abandoning its commitment to defend European countries from Moscow’s attempts to control parts of Eastern Europe and subvert the rest of the continent, Germany and other countries are unlikely to simply accept subordination to the Russians. “They’re more concerned with Russophobia in Europe than in the U.S. right now,” said Graham. He compared the situation to the end of the Cold War, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was confronted with the dilemma of facing either a united, unarmed Germany within NATO or an armed, united Germany outside of any alliance led by the United States. Gorbachev preferred Germany within NATO, believing the United States a lesser threat to Moscow’s interests than a powerful Germany might be. Now, said Graham, “Russia might not like what self-confident Europeans will do without U.S. restraint.”
However, Europeans might not yet have the strength to prevent Trump from negotiating a peace treaty that is far more favorable to Russia than Ukraine. If Trump suspects a chance to win a Nobel Peace Prize and simultaneously please Putin by giving Moscow more than it has won on the battlefield, the president will not pass on the opportunity.
Tehran: Taken by Surprise
No country has suffered more because of Trump’s return to the White House than Iran. After being inaugurated for a second term in 2025, Trump announced he was reinstating the “maximum pressure campaign,” cutting off whatever talks Iran had held with the Biden administration over its nuclear program and other issues. This hostility was apparently a surprise to Tehran, which believed that Trump, portrayed by the White House and sometimes the media as a flexible negotiator, would be willing to make a better deal than Joe Biden had. “Iran miscalculated with the United States,” said Sanam Vakil, the Tehran-born director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House in London. The Stimson Center’s Barbara Slavin, author of a book on Iran, said that the regime believed Trump would just want a slightly better deal than the one Obama signed in 2015. That way, “Trump could get his Nobel,” she said, referring to Trump’s documented whining that he has not been awarded the Nobel Prize.
Iran’s analysis initially seemed to be correct, Slavin pointed out. In April 2025, Trump dispatched an envoy to Oman to hold talks with Iranian officials. The next month, Trump announced that a deal was imminent, apparently believing that Iran would simply capitulate. But when that didn’t happen, he let Israel initiate a large-scale bombing campaign against Iran, and the United States joined in, striking Iranian nuclear sites. Iran, in turn, mustered a response that reached deep into Israel. “They proved that their missiles are more effective than people expected,” said Trita Parsi, the former president of the National Iranian American Council who now leads the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He pointed out that Israelis wanted the ceasefire that eventually emerged, while Iran had to be dragged into it. There is a school of thought among Iranian hardliners that believes the regime should not have agreed to the ceasefire, he said, a belief that became pertinent in February 2026.
The Iranians overlooked Trump’s willingness to use military force to extract concessions. Having not had relations with the United States for nearly 50 years, the Islamic Republic is poorly informed about the various factions in Washington and how they differ. “There aren’t a lot of contacts between Iran and MAGA Republicans,” Vakil said, with understatement. Parsi said Iran made a “huge mistake because they wouldn’t agree to negotiate with Trump directly,” since the president likes the pageantry and power dynamics of face-to-face summits and believes he uniquely connects with foreign leaders.
The Israeli-U.S. assault on Iran was only part of the destruction Tehran has suffered since late 2023. Israel pulverized Iran-supported groups—Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon. At the end of 2025, wide-ranging protests erupted after shopkeepers in Tehran’s bazaars called for a strike. On January 4, 2026, after a shocking military operation in Venezuela, the Trump administration put Iran in its sights. “If they start killing people like they have in the past,” Trump said, “I think they’re going to get hit very hard by the United States.” But he never intervened beyond encouraging Iranians to resist—a false encouragement that led them to be slaughtered, said Slavin.
In the ensuing weeks, Trump moved an aircraft carrier, bombers, and fighter jets within striking distance of Iran. And in late February, he finally coordinated a massive assault on Iran with Israel. At press time, the attacks had killed the Iranian supreme leader and other senior political, intelligence, and military officials, and hundreds of Iranian civilians. The onslaught targeted Iran’s weaponry and military bases. For its part, Iran fired missiles into Israel, killing at least nine people, and launched weapons at U.S. targets and allies across the Middle East, killing four Americans. Hezbollah militants launched rockets from Lebanon, and Israel responded, killing 31 people at press time.
The combined effect of all this pressure is to create the biggest challenge Iran has faced since the 1979 revolution brought the Islamic regime to power. It is weaker than ever domestically and globally, facing possibly existential threats at home and abroad.
But that does not mean Iran is completely without options. “Iran is not Venezuela,” said Vali Nasr, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, who advised the Obama administration’s Middle East policy. It is unlikely to simply capitulate to U.S. demands to abandon its nuclear program or to absorb more attacks on its territory. For one thing, it isn’t clear exactly what Trump wants beyond having Iran abandon its nuclear program entirely, something the regime cannot do without losing what little internal legitimacy it retains. “U.S. objectives are not clearly spelled out,” said Nasr.
In addition, if somehow Iran were to agree to forswear even a peaceful nuclear program, it cannot be sure that additional demands wouldn’t be forthcoming from the administration. Iran already restrained itself after the summer 2025 attack on its nuclear facilities, only launching a few missiles at a U.S. base in Qatar. This was a fraction of Iran’s possible retaliation, given its stockpile of short-range and medium-range missiles. Such restraint also followed the Trump administration’s assassination of Iran’s Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani in 2020, when he was in Iraq. Iran has avoided confronting the United States directly, but that did not stop Trump from attacking the country. The regime has rejected U.S. entreaties to resume negotiations. “Their only card left is to react differently,” said Nasr. Iran is undoubtedly weaker than it was when Trump came into office. But, then, so is the United States.
Trump’s political career has been preoccupied with projecting strength, including strength for the United States in the world. “From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world,” he promised in his second inauguration speech. “We will be the envy of every nation, and we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer.”
Alas, in just over a year, Trump has squandered some of the country’s greatest sources of strength. By repelling nearly all of America’s allies—alliances that are among the best instruments of leverage Washington has in the world—he has paid China and Russia enormous dividends. His impulsive, economically illiterate tariffs, blatant corruption, and affection for authoritarianism have sapped the global economy and euthanized the U.S. order. Whatever its many flaws, that order looks preferable to the world he is constructing. Whether that is “neoroyalism” or a world balanced against the United States, the result for Americans is one they should not welcome. If Trump insists on steamrolling over other countries, the United States will eventually discover—like Napoleon’s France, Hitler’s Germany, and Stalin’s Soviet Union before it—that other countries always have options to resist. If, instead, he wants to team up with autocrats to share the spoils earned by plundering and coercing weaker nations, Trump will join Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin in ushering in a new age of corrupt authoritarianism unseen since the Middle Ages.
