Trump ending the postwar security order

Having read extensively about international security and the post-WWII US-backed security order, it is very disturbing to see it all being smashed apart. From Foreign Affairs today:

Carrying out economic warfare on allies sows distrust and risks fracturing the transatlantic and Indo-Pacific security architectures that have underpinned global stability for decades. If Washington imposes tariffs on European and Asian allies, it will create a wedge that adversaries such as China and Russia will eagerly exploit. Beijing, for example, is seeking to drive a deeper divide between the U.S. and Europe by presenting itself as a more reliable economic partner. For its part, Moscow is capitalizing on transatlantic tensions to weaken NATO cohesion. The growing strategic partnership between these two authoritarian powers—cemented through military cooperation, economic agreements, and shared hostility toward the West—represents a direct challenge to the U.S.-led global order. By undermining trust with allies through indiscriminate economic aggression, Washington risks isolating itself at a time when maintaining strong, unified alliances is more critical than ever.

I think my work on regional nuclear weapons proliferation is going to become a lot more pertinent-seeming in the weeks, months, and years ahead.

Author: Milan

In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. Between 2005 and 2007 I completed an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford. I worked for five years for the Canadian federal government, including completing the Accelerated Economist Training Program, and then completed a PhD in Political Science at the University of Toronto in 2023.

25 thoughts on “Trump ending the postwar security order”

  7. Order rests on a stable distribution of power among states, norms that influence and legitimize the conduct of states and other actors, and institutions that help underpin it. The Trump administration has rocked all these pillars. The world may be entering a period of disorder, one that settles only after the White House changes course or once a new dispensation takes hold in Washington. But the decline underway may not be a mere temporary dip; it may be a plunge into murky waters. In his erratic and misguided effort to make the United States even more powerful, Trump may bring its period of dominance—what the American publisher Henry Luce first called “the American century”—to an unceremonious end.

    https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/end-long-american-century-trump-keohane-nye

  8. More than half of people in key U.S. allies – including France, the United Kingdom, Germany, South Korea and Japan – have no confidence in President Trump’s leadership in world affairs, according to a new global survey by the Pew Research Center.

    People in 15 of 24 countries downgraded their ratings of the U.S., according to the survey of more than 28,000. In addition, majorities in almost every country surveyed describe Trump as “arrogant” and “dangerous.”

    https://www.npr.org/2025/06/12/nx-s1-5431366/us-allies-no-confidence-trump-poll

  9. The second Trump administration has done far more than withdraw from international agreements and organizations. The very nature of the new U.S. government—unaccountable, unlawful, opaque, corrupt, arbitrary, and erratic—makes it a poor partner for cooperation. It is difficult to imagine Washington returning to any kind of pre-Trump normal. Trump has not simply reduced the United States’ international commitments. He has hollowed out the country’s ability to play a significant and trusted role in the world. These effects will be extremely difficult to reverse because, unlike after Trump’s first term, there will be few experienced professionals to rebuild the institutions and relationships that make foreign policy work on a day-to-day basis.

    https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/imperial-president-home-emperor-abroad

  10. There is an increasing realization that if China made a move against Taiwan, Chinese President Xi Jinping “would first make sure that he makes a call to his very junior partner in all of this,” NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Rutte has previously branded Putin the Chinese president’s subordinate.

    Xi would tell the Kremlin leader that Russia needs to “keep them busy in Europe by attacking NATO territory,” Rutte told The New York Times.

    “That is most likely the way this will progress.” he added.

    https://www.newsweek.com/nato-mark-rutte-china-taiwan-vladimir-putin-russia-2095125

  12. Following two impeachments (and two acquittals), an insurrection and another election, Trump is back in the White House and bent on revenge. “Donald Trump hates the CIA,” Weiner said, noting that Trump considers the agency the beating heart of a “deep state” that he believes is working to undermine him. Consequently, the president has appointed “a coterie of dangerously incompetent and servile acolytes to the highest positions of national security”. Weiner describes the new CIA director, John Ratcliffe – a former personal injury attorney, Maga congressman and, briefly, director of national intelligence in Trump’s first term – as “a spineless person who will do whatever Trump tells him to do”.

    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jul/15/tim-weiner-cia-trump

  14. Making America Alone Again
    History Offers Few Parallels for Washington’s Repudiation of Its Own Alliances
    Margaret MacMillan

    …

    It is difficult to find a plausible explanation for the policies of the second Trump administration. If the president is impatient with existing alliances, he has offered few alternatives beyond an apparent attachment to the old concept of spheres of influence, in which a handful of powers dominate their immediate neighbors, and multilateral organizations, if they survive at all, have little power or authority. Such a world offers greater threats in the future to the United States as the other spheres—presumably including a Chinese-dominated Asia and perhaps a Russian zone in eastern Europe and Central Asia—jostle against it and smaller powers within each sphere either accept their fate often resentfully or look for new hegemons.

    By trashing alliances that have served it well, the United States risks a general breakdown of stability and order that will, in the long run, prove highly costly, whether in military expenditure or unending trade wars, as each great power seeks advantage where their zones of interest meet. The striking lack of historical precedents for such behavior does not suggest a clever Machiavellian policy to enhance American power; rather, it shows a United States acting against its own interests in bewildering fashion, undermining one of the key sources of that power. And this comes at a time when American global leadership and economic and technological dominance are already under growing pressure from China and other major rivals.

    …

    Today, Trump is freer to act on his impulses because those established and respected advisers who stood up to him in his first term have been replaced by courtiers and sycophants. From time to time, Trump still has to deal with other democratic powers or even multilateral organizations, and he has made clear his impatience with them. With few exceptions, the Oval Office has become the stage set for a demonstration of Trump’s dominance, and when he makes an appearance at international meetings, he keeps it as brief as possible. And the gratuitous insults—to NATO allies, the European Union, the BRICs, the United Nations, or the World Health Organization—continue to flow from the president. It is hard to make out an overall purpose beyond keeping him the center of attention.

    …

    The United States is now experiencing what the United Kingdom did even in the heyday of its empire. Being the world’s greatest military power is a heavy burden, and partly as a result, the U.S. debt continues to grow to staggering levels. Ambitious powers, China in particular, are pouring resources into an arms race that gets ever more expensive. And, as has happened many times before, other nations are tempted to abandon the old power for the new or group against it to take advantage of what they see as its decline. If Trump’s current hostility to alliances continues and the administration keeps insulting, belittling, and even economically harming its long-standing partners, the United States is going to find the world an increasingly unfriendly place.

  15. The final cost to Trump’s diplomatic charade will be measured in the currency of American power. Washington has a rich history of peacemaking in Europe. President Woodrow Wilson’s journey to Versailles in 1918 may not have made the world safe for democracy, but his proposal for a world based on deliberation rather than war came to inform the European Union, the United Nations, and the best of intentions of twentieth-century American foreign policy. In the final months of World War II, President Harry Truman did not get everything he wanted at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, but he did erect the NATO alliance, ensuring a Western Europe at peace with itself. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush pursued artful diplomacy with the Soviet Union and, along with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, they found a peaceful end to the Cold War. Postwar Europe is the crown jewel of American foreign policy, and Trump is tarnishing it.

    Even if the president can maneuver Russia and Ukraine toward a temporary cease-fire, which he would surely label as the achievement of perpetual peace, Trump’s efforts will cost Washington influence. Methods and manners matter in international relations. Trump’s processes are too chaotic, his speech too riddled with falsehoods, and his policy shifts too abrupt for foreign leaders to trust him. Without trust, there is no persuasion and no genuine cooperation; without trust, alliances lose their validity. If its trustworthiness is a fully spent commodity, all Washington will have left is the limited tool of hard power.

    https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russia/pernicious-spectacle-trumps-russia-ukraine-diplomacy

  16. ‘I’m leaving,’ Trump said. ‘There’s no reason to be here any more’: inside the meeting that brought Nato to the brink

    Former secretary general Jens Stoltenberg recalls the rollercoaster ride of dealing with Donald Trump – and how close the US president brought the alliance to the point of collapse

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/04/im-leaving-trump-said-theres-no-reason-to-be-here-any-more-inside-the-meeting-that-brought-nato-to-the-brink

    …

    Then, finally, it came, the moment I had feared since our conversation 12 days earlier, when Trump had said the United States would only continue to be a member of Nato if Germany and the United States paid the same.

    “I’m leaving this meeting. There’s no reason for me to be here any more,” Trump said.

    Now everything’s going to fall apart, I thought. I looked around the room. All the leaders wore grave expressions. Everyone understood things were on the brink of collapse – the entire summit, all the declarations of agreement. If an American president says he no longer wishes to defend the other allies and leaves a Nato summit in protest, then the Nato treaty and its security guarantee aren’t worth very much.

    This might be the meeting at which Nato is ruined, I thought. And it’s happening on my watch. The alliance had managed to operate successfully for 70 years – but not after 12 July 2018.

  18. ‘We need Greenland’: Trump repeats threat to annex Danish territory

    https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g0zg974v1o

    Donald Trump has again proposed annexing Greenland, after Denmark’s leader urged him to “stop the threats” over the island.

    Speaking to reporters, the US president said “we need Greenland from the standpoint of national security”.

    Trump has repeatedly raised the prospect of the semi-autonomous Danish territory becoming an annexed part of the US, citing its strategic location for defence purposes and mineral wealth.

    Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens Frederik Nielsen responded by saying “that’s enough now” and described the notion of US control over the island as a “fantasy”.

    He said: “No more pressure. No more insinuations. No more fantasies of annexation. We are open to dialogue. We are open to discussions. But this must happen through the proper channels and with respect for international law.”

    Earlier, Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen had said “the US has no right to annex any of the three nations in the Danish kingdom”.

  21. But what may be in store could be even worse. In the short term, the world faces deep instability; leaders may sometimes invoke the postwar rules but may also increasingly ignore them, depending on what is convenient. This is a recipe for unrelenting conflict, as states would be in doubt about what the rules are and therefore unsure of how to avoid provoking violence. Until a clear set of rules takes hold, the world will be a profoundly dangerous place.

    A longer-term possibility is a world in which states are no longer prohibited from resorting to force and at least one superpower acts as if there are no rules at all. In this world, not only would the rules be unpredictable, they would depend entirely on the impulses of whoever happens to command the most coercive power at a given moment.

    What is worrying is that the Trump administration seems to be ushering in such a world. The day after the United States kidnapped Maduro and his wife in Venezuela, the senior Trump aide Stephen Miller explained the administration’s thinking in an interview with the CNN host Jake Tapper. “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Miller said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Neither Miller nor anyone else in the administration offered any real legal justification for launching a military assault on Venezuela—an operation that killed at least 75 people. There has been no legal justification, either, for the plan Trump announced on social media to seize “between 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels” of Venezuelan oil. Instead, the State Department shared an image of the U.S. president emblazoned with the words “This is OUR Hemisphere,” and Trump styled himself in a Truth Social post as the “Acting President of Venezuela.” Now, the administration has begun to turn its sights on Greenland. A White House statement issued days after the capture of Maduro claims that the United States “needs” Greenland and that acquiring the territory is a “national security priority.”

    What is so troubling about the Trump administration’s words and actions is not just that the administration is breaking the law. And it is: the intervention in Venezuela clearly violates the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force. But more than that, U.S. officials have discarded the idea of legal constraints altogether. The only constraint, Trump said in an interview with The New York Times last week, is his “own morality.” There is no real argument to defend the government’s behavior. No pretense. No attempt to persuade. When a policy is announced in an online post, without explanation or justification, one has the unsettling sense that its makers see no need to bother cloaking it with a lie. A system of rules can survive some hypocrisy, but nihilism will bring it down.

    https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/world-without-rules

  23. “Russia and China — especially China — are not threatening Greenland,” he adds. “The thing that has successfully protected Greenland, including U.S. interests there, for now about 80 years, has been the NATO alliance. … Greenland was secure. U.S. interests there were secure. And the only thing that is actually threatening that is Donald Trump, not another country.”

    Grossman explains that “breaking up NATO has been Russia’s top foreign policy goal for many years, and something that has been a personal goal of Putin’s.” Trump’s attack on the alliance from within “goes decently beyond anything that Russia could do to NATO by itself.”

    https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-push-take-over-greenland-delights-russia-1235501604/

  24. Today, the most powerful country is leading the world into a different kind of anarchy. Although U.S. President Donald Trump did not single-handedly bring about the decline of the post-1945 order, he has, in his first year since returning to office, accelerated and even embraced its demise. Trump’s appetite for territorial expansion eviscerates the most powerful post-1945 norm: that borders cannot be redrawn through the force of arms. And his disregard for domestic institutions has allowed him to run roughshod over any attempts at home to check those foreign expansionist dreams.

    The anarchy that is emerging under Trump, in other words, is more chaotic. It is closer to the more primitive anarchy of the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes—a world of “all against all,” where sovereign power cannot be challenged domestically or internationally. In this Hobbesian order, driven by a leader who rejects any constraints on his ability to act and who is emboldened by technology to move at a whirlwind pace, anything goes. Order may well eventually emerge from this anarchy, but that order is unlikely to be led by—or to benefit—the United States.

    https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/trumps-year-anarchy

  25. “The foundations of American power are rooted in the rule of law at home and credible commitment abroad, the very things that Trump has attempted to dismantle. Trump’s gutting of foreign aid and the infrastructure of U.S. scientific and technological dominance, his dangerous confrontation with stalwart European allies, and, most damaging of all, his use of the military and federal security forces to consolidate his domestic authority will, in the long run, undermine American power. Estranged allies are already reaching out to China and one another to hedge against an erratic United States. Whether these actions succeed or not, they weaken the United States and make China relatively more attractive for smaller powers seeking security. In Trump’s zero-sum global order, it is the United States that will eventually pay the price.”

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