To understand what Donald Trump hath wrought on the world during the first year of his second term, we need to go basic to the foundational principles of international relations. Any introduction to international relations theory class worthy of the name inexorably teaches the following key concepts:
The modern international system is defined by anarchy — that is to say, what makes international politics distinctive from other realms of politics is the absence of any legitimate authority governing the globe.1 In contrast to domestic politics, where authority is more hierarchical, there is no central government that spans the entire world. Anarchy in this sense merely means the absence of a centralized, legitimate authority.
Anarchy does not mean the same thing as chaos. Anarchical systems can be stable and enduring. Indeed, Kenneth Waltz’s most important arguments in his widely-cited book Theory of International Politics was that the international political system demonstrated constancy far more than it demonstrated change or evolution.
Anarchy is what actors make of it. This is the principal insight that Alexander Wendt made in his seminal article on the topic. His point was that while the international system could indeed be a Hobbesian one, it was also possible for other orders to be socially constructed that centered around Lockean or even Kantian principles. It is possible for actors to alter the rules, norms, and culture of anarchy — even if those changes take time.
It is worth keeping these principles in mind when thinking about what the Trump administration has done in the past week alone: launch an incursion into Venezuela, seize that country’s oil, repeatedly threaten to invade Greenland, and withdraw from a bevy of international organizations and treaties. This comes on top of a bevy of other coercive threats and actions ranging from bombing Iran to the Liberation Day tariffs.
Now it is undeniably true that the United States has done all of these things before. Anyone who has studied American history is well aware that past administrations have launched incursions into Latin America, threatened to invade other territories, withdrawn from international organizations, and enacted punitively high tariffs. Which makes this recent New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner observation stand out: “Trump does some things that are really uniquely bad and other things that are in line with the behavior of past American Presidents, but that feel more disturbing because of how he goes about them.”
The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World posits that what feels more disturbing about what Trump is doing is that his administration is single-handedly shifting the culture of anarchy from a Lockean order to a Hobbesian order. Or, to put it another way, the difference lies in what is perceived to be exceptional and what is perceibed to be common in the international system.
Even during the peak of the post-Cold War liberal international order, the United States occasionally did things that contradicted its stated principles for global order. It managed to take these exceptional actions without disrupting the system for two reasons. First, the U.S. was undeniably the most powerful actor in the world. Second, the exceptions were rare enough for the rest of the world to treat them as genuinely exceptional and not the norm.
With Trump, the exceptional has become the norm.
When Stephen Miller says things like, “We live in a world, in the real world… that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time,” he’s signaling2 that the Trump administration will continue to do whatever it wants to do when dealing with weaker states until a more powerful actor stops it.3
As my colleague Elizabeth Saunders pointed out in her Good Authority column over the weekend, this dramatically widens the variation in possible outcomes in the world, and not in a good way. The key section:
Almost every international relations course starts with the principle of anarchy, because there is no world government to keep order in the international system. But since the end of World War II, for better or (often) for worse, the U.S. has dominated the global order. To be sure, the rules the U.S. imposed were often self-serving, and the U.S. violated them many times. But the U.S.-led order was not a world of pure anarchy.
As Susan Hyde and I recently wrote, Trump didn’t start the attack on the U.S.-led order, but he dealt it mortal blows. Once countries feel there are few penalties for invading neighbors or seizing resources, all bets are off. As the IR scholar Paul Musgrave put it, “We are about to speedrun the rediscovery of why states stopped acting like this.” It is not so much falling dominoes, as the U.S. feared would happen during the Cold War if countries joined the communist camp, as smashing the domino table.
With the U.S. not just unwilling but unable to underwrite any order, it’s Trumpian anarchy. There is a sudden vacuum in the world order, while Trump wields diminished U.S. military and diplomatic power wildly, with no constraints.
Nobody knows what happens next.
What do Trump and his acolytes want? Maybe my colleague Monica Toft is right and the goal is spheres of influence. Maybe Stacie Goddard and Abraham Newman are right and the goal is a neo-royalist order.4 Maybe Elizabeth Lopatto and Sarah Jeong are right and the goal is simply to attain more online clout. Or maybe assigning coherence to this administration’s actions is an exercise in futility.
My point is that the United States used to be the actor that shepherded the world away from a Hobbesian order to something more peaceful and prosperous. But now Donald Trump has decided to make the anarchical system way, way more chaotic — at home and abroad.
Buckle up.
Yes, yes, there is some hierarchy as well, but that part is not taught until the advanced classes.
Miller is also signaling that he never read what happened to Athens after the Melian Dialogue — but that’s a subject for another day.
See, for example, China’s successful response to U.S. tariffs.
See also Paul Krugman’s latest on this point.
This analogy isn’t quite right, but the last week has felt as if John Gotti had realized that the most potent military in history was available as muscle. It’s not just a foreign policy of plunder. It’s a world where intimidation is the only currency. Senseless threats are good for business. Of course, this comparison is probably unfair to Gotti, who had a sense of propriety among thieves. But he faced more restraints than Trump does.
With the new White House stated goal of going from a military budget of $1T to $1.5T, reasonable observers would conclude that we are faced with a threat of the same nature and scale as Nazi Germany, with the same necessary response. Americans will resist such analysis for understandable cultural and psychological reasons, but for other states it would be dangerous not to act accordingly.