Trump Is More Symptom Than Cause of the Twilight of U.S. Hegemony
Each day, and seemingly multiple times a day, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump is issuing a new executive order or announcing a new direction for U.S. policy. Whether reducing funding to a host of programs, ending U.S. commitments to global institutions or, through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, eliminating a host of federal bureaucratic positions, the Trump administration seems bent on remaking the role of the U.S. government, at home and abroad.
Bear in mind that, much like the attempts at big policy changes during Trump’s first term, it remains to be seen which of his proposals will have lasting impact this time around. Derek Thompson of The Atlantic perhaps put it best when he wrote, “I’d forgotten that one of the hallmarks of the Trump presidency isn’t just that things keep happening, but also that things keep … un-happening.”
Think back to Trump’s desire to build a wall along the border with Mexico during his first term. Despite pronouncements otherwise, the truth is that his administration built very little wall—less in fact than was built during former President Joe Biden’s four years in office. And since returning to the White House less than a month ago, Trump has already backed down from imposing large tariffs on Canada and Mexico, while his overtures toward acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal already seem forgotten. As for his stated intent to take over and rebuild Gaza, that seems very unlikely to come to fruition.
No doubt the onslaught of policy proposals is disruptive, both domestically and abroad. Moreover, some of his policies will stick and have a lasting impact. But it is critical for observers of international affairs to not overstate Trump’s specific impact. This is because, despite his best efforts, Trump will ultimately not steer U.S. policy in a direction that isn’t already dictated by the structure of the international system.
In the overall scheme of international politics, Trump, like any leader, is constrained in the policies he can pursue. This isn’t to say that leaders don’t matter. But the foreign policy pursued by a country, the U.S. included, is highly shaped by its position in the international system.
For the U.S., that position is changing. Consider a bit of history. Prior to World War I, the U.S. was a new major power that largely focused on developments in its own hemisphere, while seeking to expand trade markets in Asia—particularly with China—and stay out of the disputatious affairs of Europe. It was a 19th-century power like any other, focused on its own sovereignty and autonomy.
That began to change with World War I, which made clear not only that the U.S. could not stay “above the fray” when it came to the problems of Europe, but that it could benefit by engaging in those affairs. However, that lesson was not fully learned until after World War II, when the U.S. not only saw the need to be engaged globally, but also the opportunity to shape the global order, or at least the portion of it not under the direct control of its wartime ally turned systemic rival, the Soviet Union.
Imposing tariffs, making threats and seeking territory are all things we would expect from a state that perceives itself as losing status on the international stage.
Under this bipolar system, the U.S. engaged in both fostering global institutions that served its interests and wielding its military power abroad to stop challenges to the order they upheld. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991, leaving the U.S. as the lone global power, the opportunity arose for Washington to further its global influence, both economically and politically. As Hal Brands described it, U.S. policy after the Cold War was predicated on the idea that “military hegemony would tame potential challengers until economic integration transformed them.”
But that unipolar moment was short-lived. Within a couple decades, a new global power emerged in China, and Russia sought to once again lay claim to its imperial ambitions. That is the world that led many Americans to seek “hope and change” by electing former President Barack Obama in 2008 and subsequently to “make American Great Again” with Trump in 2016 and again last November.
In other words, if the global institutions that the U.S. created and sustained after World War II are fracturing, it is not because of Trump’s belligerence, but because the system in which they were created to operate—a bipolar system pitting the U.S. against a staunch rival or an era of unquestioned U.S. dominance—is no longer in play. Instead, the world is becoming multipolar, returning back to the era of spheres of influence, great power competition and conflicting interests.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio observed as much in a recent interview, when he stated that “it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power” and that what he characterized as a post-Cold War “anomaly” has given way to “a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet.” This is likely also the “stark reality” that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was referring to when he “directly and unambiguously” informed Washington’s European allies this week that “strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.”
Interestingly, Rubio and Hegseth are not the first top U.S. officials to observe that the U.S. needed to adapt to a changing international system. Rubio’s comments in particular echo the views of President Barack Obama’s second secretary of state, John Kerry, who remarked in a 2013 interview that “we live in a world more like the 18th and 19th centuries, not the superpower rivalry of the Cold War.”
That Trump embraces this earlier time period and views the late 19th century as the time when America was “great,” perhaps informs his desire for the U.S. to once again adopt the posture it did in that time. But his desires, one way or another, won’t change the overall trajectory of the shifts he is responding to. Stephen Wertheim recently highlighted how recognizing that the U.S. now operates in a multipolar world, rather than a world of unipolar dominance, “could lead down any number of roads.”
It seems the road being chosen by the Trump administration is one that is more insular and less cooperative, even “predatory.” That’s in part because of Trump’s preferences, but imposing tariffs, making threats and seeking territory are all things we would expect from a state that perceives itself as losing status on the international stage. Russia and its attempt to rebuild its imperial past by invading Ukraine fits the pattern as well. While the acts are meaningful, they are also performative: desperate attempts by the state to show that it is still in control even if the forces of the system dictate otherwise.
None of this is to excuse Trump for his excesses in foreign and domestic policy. His actions still matter, as they can harm—or help—individuals or entire groups. But for those who lament that Trump is hastening the decline of U.S. leadership, the end of the unipolar moment or a transformation of the global order, they should refrain from granting him so much credit. All those things were happening already, which in part explains Trump’s emergence and rise in the first place.
Paul Poast is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago and a nonresident fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
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