Outside the Beltway

Trump and the Liberal Order

America is getting screwed by playing by the rules it created.

James Joyner · Tuesday, March 4, 2025 · 11 comments

The latest episode of the Ezra Klein Show, “The Dark Heart of Trump’s Foreign Policy,” a conversation with Fareed Zakaria, gets after a lot of issues that I’ve been working through in my recent series trying to analyze this subject. It’s lengthy and valuable, such that I’m going to devote three separate posts to it.

This one, as the headline implies, will discuss President Trump’s view of the post-World War II order that the United States fundamentally built and led. This will be followed by posts on what “America First” means when translated to foreign policy and one on the overall implications of such a fundamentally different foreign policy worldview in an administration unchecked, as the Trump 45 administration was, by “normal” foreign policy hands in key posts.

My intent in this post, as in previous posts in the series, is to understand rather than to opine.

Zakaria’s introductory statement sets the discussion up nicely:

Part of the problem with Trump is that he is so mercurial. He’s so idiosyncratic that, just when you think you figured out the Trump doctrine, he goes and says something that kind of sounds like the opposite of the Trump doctrine.

But I do think that there is one coherent worldview that Trump seems to espouse and has espoused for a long time. The first ad he took out when he was a real estate developer was in 1987. It was an ad about how Japan was ripping us off economically and Europe was ripping us off by free-riding on security. And what that represents, fundamentally, is a rejection of the open international system that the United States and Europe have built over the last eight decades.

[…]

And what Trump has taken away from that whole world is: The U.S. has been the sucker. The U.S. has been the country that has had to underwrite it. The U.S. is the country that has opened itself up to the world, and everyone takes advantage of the U.S.

I don’t know if he wants to tear the international order down, but he wants to seriously renegotiate or perhaps even redo that system.

This is almost exactly how I see the situation. As noted in previous posts, I don’t see a policy here so much as an instinct. But it’s been a pretty consistent instinct over the decade that Trump has been running for (or serving as) President and, indeed, was reflected in his attitudes as a businessman for decades before that.

Klein amplifies:

But the critique from Trump is that’s not true: Of every country, America, as the strongest, is harmed the most by these restraints, rules and laws. Because we have so much leverage we could be using. We could slap tariffs on anybody for any reason and get them to do what we want. We have the strongest military of all the militaries. Everybody wants to be on our side, and everybody fears being on our bad side.

And what Trump is doing is systematically searching out the strength America has — the ways we can wield our weight and leverage. He’s untying our hands from behind our back.

And I don’t think this is just posturing for the rubes; I think Trump honestly feels this in his gut.

Like Klein, Zakaria, and the overwhelming mass of foreign policy intellectuals, I see i differently. Klein again:

After World War II, we decided we would open up our markets to Europe and East Asia, to Japan and South Korea. And the reason we did that was we were trying to build an international system where everyone benefited, where there really wasn’t that feeling of a beggar-thy-neighbor, zero-sum game, where everyone went into a competitive spiral, which then ended up in nationalism and war.

We were trying to build something different. And we thought: We can be a little generous here. Let’s let everyone grow, and we’ll do fine in the process.

And of course, the data is overwhelming. Yes, Europe, Japan, South Korea and places like that grew. But the United States absolutely dominated the world. Because it’s a classic positive-sum game. We created a much larger global economy — much larger trading system, huge capital flows — and we were at the center of it.

The dollar was the reserve currency of the world, which alone gives us incredible advantages. We’re the only country that doesn’t have to worry that much about debt and deficits, because we know that, at the end of the day, the dollar is the reserve currency.

And my feeling is, if you take that system and say: OK, we’re going to look at each bilateral relationship and see if we can squeeze this country for a slightly better deal, you probably will get a better deal. But two things will happen: The first thing is you will end up fracturing your alliances. Because the people with whom you have the most leverage are your allies.

We have more leverage with Canada than we have with Russia because Canada depends on us for security. Canada trades with us a lot. Its economy is intricately tied to the U.S. economy.

So you can bully Canada. But you can’t really bully Russia that much because we don’t do much trade with them. You can’t bully China. It’s another vast continental economy that can survive just fine.

So the result of the Trump doctrine in action has been a war on America’s allies. But the second more important part is: Yes, you’ll gain a little bit here and there by getting slightly better tariff deals. And just so people understand, tariffs in the industrialized world are around 3 percent. They’re very low. So we’re not getting penalized in any large way. You can cherry-pick a few examples to the contrary. But mostly, among liberal, democratic states, it’s a free-trade world.

And what you will do, by squeezing each of these individual countries, humiliating them, forcing them to accept renegotiation of terms, is that you lose the relationships that you had built over eight decades, that created this extraordinary anchor of stability in the world, which was the Western alliance. And the gains are not that great.

It’s just not Trump’s nature to think about longer-term effects. One would think that, in business, gaining a reputation for reneging on agreements and generally screwing people over would harm your reputation and make it harder to do business in the future. But that hasn’t been his experience. At all. So why should world politics be any different?

Quite a bit later in the conversation, Klein observes:

A pretty significant difference between Trump’s first term and his second is the intensity of his fascination with territorial expansion now.

I think Trump and the people around him believe the norms of the world turned against territorial expansion in a way that was bad for America. In the 19th century, America expanded; other countries did, too. We are still powerful, and there are things we should want: Canada should be the 51st state — or at least it should act like a vassal state of America. If we want Greenland, we should have it.

Trump fundamentally wants the landmass of America to be larger when he leaves office than when he came in. How have you taken Trump’s renewed interest in gaining territory?

Zakaria agrees:

Yes. I think you have it exactly right. And he has a kind of fascination, I think, not just with America in the 19th century but also in the geopolitics of the 19th century, to the extent that I think he understands it, which is: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must” — to quote Thucydides.

The idea that we are powerful and we should be unconstrained — it’s very familiar in a sense. That’s what the Chinese foreign minister said at a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. He was telling I think the Philippines or Singapore: You’ve got to understand, we are big and powerful, and you are not. We are going to tell you what to do.

Obviously it is the way Putin views the world. That’s why I think Trump has a much more benign view of Putin’s desire to have a sphere of influence, a kind of a group of satellite states around him, including Ukraine.

He has a much more benign view, I think, of Chinese expansionism. He very rarely criticizes it. I can’t remember him ever doing it. So then he looks at it and says: Well, the United States should similarly have that kind of sense of the Monroe Doctrine, the Western Hemisphere.

Again, to me, it misses the central point about the transformation of the international system after World War II, which is that you don’t need territory to become rich, powerful and incredibly effective in the world. Look at South Korea. South Korea has — I forget now — 15 times the per capita gross domestic product of North Korea. Look at tiny Israel, which is now essentially an advanced industrial country on a tiny spit of land.

Think about all the richest and most powerful countries in the world. Land acquisition has almost nothing to do with it. You know who has a lot of land? Russia.

It feels to me like a kind of bizarre, anachronistic way to look at the world. But I agree with you, that is the way Trump is thinking about it. You could get whatever minerals you wanted to get out of Greenland by just signing a couple of deals with them. You don’t actually need to own it. You could redo the Panama Canal treaty. And it would be much easier, by the way, to let the Panamanians run it — and just renegotiate with terms you like.

Part of it is this old-fashioned view. But I do think, at the end of the day, there’s a strong element of narcissism that infuses everything that Trump does. He loves the idea that he would be able to put his stamp on history by saying: Trump added Greenland or something like that to the United States. The physical expansion of America would be a great legacy to Trump.

With regard to Russia-Ukraine, Zakaria observes:

Again, it’s almost impossible to have a clear through line, because his stance has moved so much. He had a post in which he said: Putin better realize this war has ruined his country. He better settle. And if he doesn’t, we’re going to put additional sanctions and his favorite weapon tariffs on Russia.

His post seemed to suggest that he understood that the principal obstacle to a peace deal was not Zelensky but Putin.

But Trump has shifted entirely and enormously in the last few weeks. He has called Zelensky a dictator. He said Zelensky started the war. All that stuff — including the United Nations resolution where the United States sided with Russia, North Korea and Belarus.

You could argue that, again, in Trump’s case, so much of it is personal. He doesn’t like Zelensky.

But if you step back from that, I think that Trump in his heart believes that Russia has legitimate claims over Ukraine and so has a much softer line on Russia. I think he thinks that the Russians should keep the territory they’ve acquired. He thinks Ukraine should not be a part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He thinks that maybe Ukraine should have a kind of neutrality in foreign policy. These are all essentially the Russian demands.

There’s no way to read his mind, but my sense from listening to him and watching him is Trump thinks all those Russian claims are broadly legitimate.

Klein pushes back:

Let me push on this. You know all this much better than I do. But I don’t think he thinks anything about Ukraine and Russia — or whose claims are legitimate.

I think he thinks Ukraine is worthless to the U.S. And somebody at some point persuaded him there are mineral rights there. And he thinks there is value for the U.S. economy and for Trump personally to have access and good relations to Russia. And there is some part of him that genuinely doesn’t understand why we give an [expletive] about Ukraine — as opposed to cutting a deal with Putin and getting something out of that transaction.

Which I think is exactly right. And Zakaria is warm to it as well:

Yes. If you think about the countries and the leaders he likes, it’s either the country is very strong or the leader is very strong: Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Viktor Orban, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Those are the people he talks about with respect. The more muddled, compromised weaker leaders of coalition governments in Europe he finds feckless and uninteresting.

I think he likes these more old-fashioned countries. I’ve thought about this once, and I don’t know if it’s a reasonable point to make. But the countries he seems fascinated by and respects are countries that you could imagine having lots of Trump Towers.

The countries he doesn’t like — you couldn’t imagine a Trump Tower in Europe, for example.

Klein’s view is darker:

But in that way, is he picking up on something real? You see this a bit with JD Vance, who is going out of his way to alienate the European governments at the moment. America is weighing in on behalf of the Alternative for Germany party in Germany.

The Trump administration’s view is that there are regimes that they have an affinity with, and the proper nature of American alliance isn’t some unchanging alliance between America and Europe because we’re all “liberal democracies.” Trump doesn’t want us to be a liberal democracy.

The proper nature is between regimes of affinity. And in that way, Putin sees the world more like Trump than Keir Starmer in the United Kingdom. Erdogan sees the world more like Trump does than Justin Trudeau does.

The nature of the alliances they are seeking is the nature of regimes that are like them. Regimes could actually have a genuine ideological affinity for who Trump is, what he wants and the world that he wants to see.

Zakaria agrees:

I think you’re raising something very important. Part of what’s going on here, this new dynamic in international relations we’re watching, is that it’s not all about power. It’s about ideology.

If you think about what Putin is reacting to in the rise and hegemony of the West after the collapse of Communism, some of it is Western power and the expansion of NATO. But a lot of what Putin has been obsessed with has been the expansion of Western liberal ideas and ideology.

The things that he talks so much about are the rise of multiculturalism in the West, the rise of a kind of libertine gender ideology, the idea of gender fluidity — he even weighed in on the J.K. Rowling controversy. These issues are central to the way that Putin thinks about Russian power and the power of his regime. So he’s viewed the rising tide and the spreading of Western liberal ideas as much of a threat as the expansion of NATO.

Notice that when he really reacted with force against Georgia in 2008 and then against Ukraine in 2014, in both cases, the issue was not actually that these countries were about to join NATO. They were not. It’s that they were going to join the European Union — or at least wanted to have better relations with the European Union.

What does the European Union represent? It represents a Western-style, capitalist, liberal democracy. He doesn’t want to be surrounded by those kinds of countries. He wants to be surrounded by countries like Belarus and Kazakhstan, quasi-democratic, quasi-authoritarian, somewhat kleptocratic regimes that he can control and manipulate.

If you listen to Xi Jinping, a lot of the things he’s talked about are the dangers of too much Westernization, too much liberalism. The Chinese have not just cracked down on the private sector, they’ve cracked down on what they called the effeminacy of men. Xi has talked about the virtues of motherhood, and women going back to raising families. So again, he views this rising tide of Western liberalism as much a threat as Western hard power.

And the irony is Trump and Vance agree with Xi and Putin. So for the first time now, you have in America a party or an ideology that says: Yes, that’s right.

And in a strange sense — and Steve Bannon would explicitly say this — our real ally should be Russia. And that becomes the new alliance system. Now that takes it further than where we are right now. But it’s those inclinations —

Klein gets back to the crucial point that I’ve been working out the past few days:

But that’s, I think, where this is really going. And the way you see it is in Vance and Musk.

In Trump’s first term, Trump is surrounded, particularly on the national security and foreign policy side, by members of the traditional Republican establishment — H.R. McMaster, Rex Tillerson, Mike Pence. And none of them want this move. This is not why John Kelly got into politics. So it doesn’t really happen. What there is instead are these weird moments in interviews and elsewhere where Trump seems to talk about Putin with real affection in a way that he never talks about anybody else in Europe.

Fast-forward, you have Trump’s second term, in which he is surrounded by people who have been spending the intervening years building the ideology for what Trump intuitively was moving toward. It’s not a complete purge in the Republican Party, but what is left is too weak — even if the Senate Republicans don’t love it in every instance.

So now you see that the war between autocracy as an ideological phenomenon and liberal democracy as an ideological phenomenon isn’t now between America and Europe and these other countries. It’s inside America, too.

And now, these people who are more framework oriented are actively weighing in, as Elon Musk did on behalf of the AfD in Germany. JD Vance going to the Munich Security Conference and telling the Europeans that the great security threat is the way they run their governments — not Russia, not climate change, but the temperament and the policy of European liberalism.

With the obvious and important exception of Trump himself, the Trump 45 foreign policy was more-or-less normal. There were way more changes in personnel than usual but, for the most part, people in key positions were trying to execute a published National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy that a Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush would have happily signed. Folks like Jim Mattis, John Allen, Mark Esper, and H.R. McMaster were genuinely committed to the postwar order and the alliances and partnerships we had built.

There’s a whole lot more to the conversation but I’ll leave it there for now and pick up on the related issue of “America First,” because there’s enough to unpack there on its own.