America the Predatory Hegemon

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Steve, thank you for joining me and for your trenchant and eloquent piece in our new issue. It’s called “The Predatory Hegemon.”

STEPHEN M. WALT

Thanks very much. Nice to be with you, and I appreciate the kind words.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

The piece is a very comprehensive and quite incisive critique of the Trump Two foreign policy and its implications for the future of American power, but it’s, I think, particularly interesting coming from you. I mean, given the byline and the fact that you are someone who has not, to put it mildly, exactly been a champion or a fan of post–Cold War American foreign policy. You were an incisive critic of the American foreign policy establishment long before you were a critic of the not especially established foreign policy carried out by the current administration, which is to say, this is not born of some reflexive defense of traditional American statecraft, and that makes me particularly interested in your account of how we got here. What in American foreign policy, especially in the post–Cold War, accounts for the rise of Trumpism in your view?

STEPHEN M. WALT

Oh boy, that’s a huge question. I’ve been taken to saying that just because things are bad doesn’t mean they can’t get worse, and that’s in a sense what we’re seeing now. I think you could argue that an element of Trumpism is a predictable reaction to the excesses of American foreign policy during the unipolar era. The fact that we committed ourselves to hyperglobalization without thinking through what either the strategic or, more importantly, the domestic consequences were going to be. We got involved in this rather ambitious project to try and remake the world in our image, which had some positive features to it, but also had big negative consequences, both, I think, in contributing to the deterioration of relations with Russia, but also, of course, eventually trapping us in these forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And that, combined with the financial crisis in 2008, which is also in a sense a reaction to hyperglobalization, it opened the door for someone like [U.S. President Donald Trump] to come in and say, “I’m an outsider. I don’t like the establishment. I don’t want to work with the deep state. I want to transform American foreign policy completely and turn it into ‘America first.’” And that’s what he ran on in 2016. In the first term, those instincts, the worst parts of Trump’s foreign policy instincts, I think were largely controlled by the so-called grownups in the room. And you could see hints of it at various times, but they basically kept him in line, and he didn’t really know what he was doing.

Coming to the second term, two things happened. He has much greater confidence in his understanding of world affairs. I think it’s misplaced, but he is much more confident. And second, he’s not dealing with any mainstream people anymore. He has appointed loyalists or easily manipulable people, opportunists of various kinds. So foreign policy is now very much a direct reflection of Trump’s own instincts, which are, as I argue in the article, quite predatory.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let me stick with the pre-Trump era before we get into the substance of the piece. You were not someone who reflexively celebrates the liberal international order or the rules-based order. There are people in the establishment, people writing the pages of Foreign Affairs, who would use those terms as kind of unqualified terms of praise. How should we think about the liberal international order? And if you can think about the counterfactual, right, If we treated unipolarity differently, could we have sustained that order? Would that have been a good thing in your mind?

STEPHEN M. WALT

Yeah, I think we could have. I mean, I should be clear. I like the liberal values that underscore the idea of a liberal order. And I’m glad I live in a democracy, one that is at least still a democracy. I think markets are a much better way of allocating resources in society than command economies and things like that. So many features of the so-called liberal order I like, and I’ve argued and others have argued that the liberal order that was constructed between the United States and its principal democratic allies in both Europe and Asia worked pretty well. One of the reasons it worked well is the United States ran that empire or that set of relations rather gently—played hardball on occasion, but by and large strove for legitimacy in its dealings with others.

The problem came because at the end of the Cold War, we were filled with zeal and the belief that history was now moving in our direction, that the whole world really couldn’t wait to become a liberal order, become like America. You think of [Francis] Fukuyama’s writings, the writings of [Thomas] Friedman in that era as well, that America and its model of liberal democratic capitalism was really the only game in town. And with the exception of a few backwater dictators in a few places who hadn’t gotten the memo yet, the whole world sort of couldn’t wait to join this big liberal club of ours. And that I think turned out to be completely untrue.

First of all, there were some countries, including powerful countries like Russia or China, that didn’t want to join the liberal order on America’s terms, and they began to push back in various ways. Second, trying to turn some parts of the world—Libya, Iraq, Syria, Iran, et cetera—into a liberal democracy overnight and at the point of a gun wasn’t going to work very well. Even more true in Afghanistan, and this proved to be, of course, a huge distraction. I think the final problem, of course, was the United States kept touting this rules-based order and was all too willing to break those rules whenever it was convenient. And so that level of hypocrisy also began to generate a certain amount of backlash from other countries.

And finally, the benefits of this, and there were clearly benefits. I benefited from a hyperglobalized economy. You probably did, Wall Street certainly did for a while, but many parts of America, sort of Main Street, did not visibly benefit from those arrangements. And some parties, manufacturing workers and some sectors, lost big. So you put all that together and you had, I think, what was ultimately a failed attempt to create a global liberal order and has led us now to where we have essentially the United States in retreat from most of those principles, but also adopting an increasingly predatory policy toward friends and foes alike.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I’m interested in how you process the Mark Carney speech—Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada—which he gave at Davos, when he talked about the “rupture,” and what struck me in listening to him was obviously a very kind of eloquent speech, and I think said out loud what a lot of policymakers and allied capitals are saying quietly or saying in private. But there did seem to be this piece of it that was not entirely sincere in that I think Mark Carney and many American allies were quite happy with that order. I mean, he used this shopkeeper analogy, referencing [Vaclav Havel], they would roll their eyes at the hypocrisy. There were things the United States did in the unipolar era that they didn’t like, but most allies seemed quite comfortable with the balance that had been struck in that time and would’ve sustained it for longer if they could have.

STEPHEN M. WALT

I mean, they were not always comfortable with it. But the United States, despite the enormous power it had, tended to exercise that power with a certain degree of restraint toward its allies. Didn’t push for every advantage, consulted with them, used multilateral institutions, which at a minimum at least gave everybody a chance to voice their concerns. Treating partners with respect, even when you disagreed with them. Sometimes when you think about our relationship with France under [President Charles de Gaulle], there were pretty significant disagreements there, but we didn’t constantly insult de Gaulle, didn’t say lots of mean things about him in public as well. So there was a certain amount of respect and deference, and that, I think, made America’s overwhelming power and leadership position in that order tolerable to others, even if they occasionally resented it.

As for the Carney speech, I mean, I thought it was a remarkable speech and for a number of different reasons. I mean, first of all, Carney got elected in Canada in part because he had run essentially an anti-Trump campaign. He benefited from the fact that Trump was adopting a predatory approach to Canada, and his view was, “Well, we in Canada, elbows up.” So this is something that he gets political benefits from at home. But I thought it was also striking that the tone of the speech was regretful. It was not an angry speech. It’s not the kind of speech that [Cuban leader] Fidel Castro would’ve made, or [Libyan leader] Muammar al-Qaddafi. It was saying, “We had a relationship with you, there were problems with it, but we wanted it to continue. It was beneficial for the most part to both sides, and it is with genuine regret that we now see this rupture taking place. This is a new world, and we’re pretty confident we can’t go back to the old world.”

And then the rest of it is really a plea to other medium powers, countries like Canada, to overcome the big collective action dilemma they face where all are tempted to try and cut deals and start working together, not because they’re anti-American, not because they want to punish the United States, but because they want to defend their own interests in a world where they see the United States as increasingly dangerous, as increasingly predatory. And of course, there are no other similar powers to the United States that they want to get really close to. It’s not like they want to jump into bed with China in a big way. Certainly, they aren’t going to align with Russia. In a world of that kind, medium powers that share certain values and commitments should be working together again, not because they’re mad, angry, but because they’re somewhat fearful. And it’s only by acting together that they can maybe restore or defend their own interests and perhaps be able to partner with the United States on a more equitable basis.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I’m interested in how you understood the Biden foreign policy. There was a strain in it that seemed like a kind of eager return to the pre-Trump consensus, certainly [U.S. President Joe Biden’s] rhetoric reflected that, but also a fair amount that I think departed from the pre–Trump One consensus that most people in the Biden administration would share your view of some of the harms of hyperglobalization and overreach of American power. To what extent do you think Biden was a missed opportunity or a useful corrective?

STEPHEN M. WALT

I agree with exactly the way you characterized it. Many features of the Biden foreign policy were an attempt to turn the clock back to an America that respected allies, didn’t push them around too much. Occasionally, but not too much. Wanted to work with them and saw them as partners for both strategic reasons and also because we shared certain values. Lots of rhetoric about the shared values as well.

The big departure was on free trade, where the Biden administration basically took the tariff policy that Trump had adopted in his first term, especially vis-à-vis China, and amped it up in a variety of ways. That was, again, partly for strategic reasons, partly justified as a sort of foreign policy for the middle class: defend manufacturing jobs, things like that. And use those policies also to advance something that Trump completely rejects, which is the so-called green transition. So I think Biden was, in a sense, mostly an attempt to restore the old order in a variety of different ways, but it did adopt some elements of the critique that Trump had made in his 2016 campaign and had implemented in his first term.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Before we get to your preferred label for the Trump Two foreign policy, I want to get your reaction to a label that many members of this administration like to apply to themselves, and that’s realist or realism. You are one of the most prominent international relations realists around. The National Security Strategy that the Trump administration released in December talks about flexible realism, other parts of the administration will use different terms. Why is this not realism in your view?

STEPHEN M. WALT

Well, nobody wants to have a nonrealist foreign policy, right? Nobody wants the label of being unrealistic, let alone overly idealistic. So lots of people have been trying to claim this label for a long time. [Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo], in the first term, liked to talk about American realism, and I think that was just dead wrong. I think the most obvious point is a realist, first of all, first and foremost, a realist would not be doing the things that Trump is doing that are weakening the United States at home. And here I would point to the cutting research and development spending, cutting support for universities and research labs and things like that. This is very foolish if you’re in the twenty-first century, where technological advances and technological competition are really critical to national power, and where you have in China a serious rival on all those dimensions now. So a realist would say this is incredibly short-sighted.

A second thing most realists would say is, in a competitive world, you want lots of friends and partners, and you want to deny them to your adversaries as much as you possibly can. And my feeling is that Trump is gradually alienating most of the states we’ve relied upon in the past, and not turning them necessarily into adversaries, but turning them into countries that we can’t go to any longer and expect them to do things for us. And some of them are going to reach out, at least in economic terms, to countries like China in ways they might not have if we had not in a sense pushed them in that direction. So I think both of those things are something that no realist would entertain.

And finally, realists tend to think of foreign policy as a pretty dangerous activity where you want to be really prudent. And you could argue, in his first term, Trump was quite prudent, very careful in the use of military force, perhaps not as enthusiastic as some of his predecessors had been. I don’t see that same level of restraint in the second term. He’s certainly been very enthusiastic about using force in a variety of places. Yes, always against weak states, mostly with air power and things like that. But we’ll see. This is just the first year, and he has already in this confrontation, say with Iran, gotten himself in a position where he may have to use force, even if it doesn’t really accomplish any positive purpose one can point to.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So if it’s not realism, let’s go to your preferred label, the one you use in the piece, and that’s predatory hegemony. I’m interested in how you would unpack both those terms and also how you would distinguish this from just good, old-fashioned bullying. What makes this a distinct form in your mind?

STEPHEN M. WALT

So let’s go in reverse order. The hegemony part doesn’t refer to the United States being a complete global hegemon that just dominates the entire world, but it does convey that the United States over the last 75 or 80 years has developed a set of relationships that give it enormous potential power over many other countries, and especially America’s allies. Some of that is our military protection we provide for them. Some of that is just the sheer size of the American economy, the fact that the international financial system is based on the dollar and all transactions at some point or another run through American institutions and can therefore be cut off. And finally, just relations of familiarity and connection and business ties. All of these things give any American president enormous leverage, and all American presidents have used those levers from time to time.

The difference here, and this is the predatory part, is that all great powers are predatory toward their rivals. They’re always trying to get the better of them in one way or another. They certainly don’t want to agree to anything that gives a rival an advantage. They want the better part of any deal, even if it’s something like an arms control deal. That’s how you deal with potential rivals. But a predatory hegemon acts that way toward everyone, toward its adversaries, certainly, but also toward its allies. It tends to view all relationships in a zero-sum fashion and wants to make sure it gets the lion’s share of any deal.

So what you see in the second Trump term in particular is using all of those levers of power in various ways to try and extract concessions, tribute, financial benefits, sometimes personal benefits for Trump himself, with nearly everyone and certainly even with countries with whom we have had long-time, quite friendly, quite supportive relations like Canada, like Denmark and some others. And that’s really unique in American history. I can’t think of any prior president that had the same approach to both enemies, but also to some of our closest friends.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

A couple of the other terms that other scholars and analysts of American foreign policy have used in the last several months to try to capture what’s going on, those include “neoroyalism,” [which] was first put forward by Stacie Goddard and Abe Newman in a piece in the journal International Organization. Others have talked about spheres of influence and return to a spheres-of-influence world. Do you see those as consistent with predatory hegemony? Do those not capture exactly what’s going on for one reason or another?

STEPHEN M. WALT

I think there are slight differences among all of these ideas, but they’re certainly compatible. I like the neoroyalism argument. It’s a great article, by the way. And one of the things I like about it is that they’re proposing this, but they don’t oversell it. I think it’s a potentially useful way to think about things. So you could argue that Stacey and Abe and I are now in sort of a trademark war to see whose label gets the most traction. But I like theirs, and I mean, I think they are basically compatible.

Their claim is that much of this power is being exercised on behalf of transnational networks led by powerful leaders and their entourages, their networks of oligarchs and supportive penumbra of businessmen or whatever. And if you think of the Trump organization, the Kushner family, some of the ties he has to the tech-bro world. Or the way that leaders like [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan in Turkey, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin in Russia have also sort of operated through elite networks, that’s kind of what they mean by neoroyalism. And that’s not at all incompatible with my idea that Trump is basically taking all of the channels of influence and levers that the United States has built up over the last 70 or 80 years and now trying to use them to extract as many short-term gains as possible.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And what about spheres of influence? Do you find that a useful way of thinking of what’s happening now?

STEPHEN M. WALT

Right, because a sphere of influence is one where a great power tries to exercise a sort of dominant role within its immediate area, immediate geographic area. It’s worth noting, by the way, that you could exercise such influence in a relatively benevolent fashion. People would point back to [U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt’s] Good Neighbor policy, which was an attempt to improve America’s relations with Latin America back in the 1930s by being more benign. So you don’t necessarily have to be completely exploitative, but a sphere of influence is certainly one where a major power is trying to exercise predominant influence and set some red lines, sort of things that countries within its sphere can’t do, which [is] mostly for security reasons. So when people talk about the United States having a sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere, its most important feature is no foreign military presence, particularly American rivals of any size, in the Western Hemisphere.

What’s interesting about the National Security Strategy, it’s also telling countries in Latin America, “We don’t want you to have extensive economic ties with states like China because we worry that that gives them more influence.” And I think that’s going to be a much harder sell toward much of Latin America, given the benefits they’ve gotten from dealing with China. And notice that if the United States tried to impose that, then we essentially become responsible for the economic health of all of the Western Hemisphere. And if countries have economic problems, they can blame them on Washington for not letting them have the economic ties they would like to have. So again, that’s I think a more expansive view of spheres of influence and one that is not likely to work out well for us.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

The heart of your critique of predatory hegemony, as I read it, is that it’s going to drive others away from the United States on both security and economic relationships in time. There’s a line in the piece where you write, “Weaker states will tolerate [these] coercive pressures if they are heavily dependent on access to the hegemon’s larger market or if they face still greater threats from other states and must therefore depend on the hegemon’s protection, even if it comes with strings attached.”

I think if you talk to officials in the Trump administration, they would say, look, given just the sheer size of the American economy and frankly the success of the American economy, often despite ourselves in recent years, and their dependence on us for security in the face of threats to them that are much closer to home, right, if you’re a European looking at Russia or an Asian ally looking at China, the United States, even if that threat increases, still looks far more benign than the hegemon nearby. The Trump people would say, “Look, they just don’t have options and we can be pretty predatory. We can drive a pretty hard bargain, and they’re still ultimately going to come to. They might reduce their dependence a little bit. There’ll be a little bit of hedging, but there’s not that much they can do.” How would you engage that argument from unnamed administration officials?

STEPHEN M. WALT

Yeah, no, that’s an absolutely coherent position. The United States, first of all, gets enormous free benefits from its geographic location, the fact that for many countries around the world, there are dangers nearby, where the United States is far away across the ocean and therefore they want American protection because the United States doesn’t look as dangerous as somebody who might be next door. Our partners in Asia are a perfect illustration of that. You could maybe argue now with the Ukraine war and the relationship between Europe and Russia that that’s also true in Europe as well. So that’s one big benefit.

Second, there is a collective action problem. None of these countries are strong enough to stand up to the United States entirely on their own, and that would allow the United States to play divide and conquer in a variety of other ways. As you said, the combination of America’s economic weight and its military capabilities gives states lots of reasons to want to be on good terms with us and not to tick us off and therefore to make concessions when we press. And they’re making a bet that you can do this more or less forever, and I’m skeptical of that for a couple of reasons.

First of all, the first move of these countries has been to try and accommodate the Trump administration in a variety of ways, partly by rather gratuitous acts of flattery, partly by making economic promises of one kind or another. Partly by just swallowing hard and saying, “Okay, we’ll deal with it,” as well. So the European Union signed a pretty asymmetric trade deal, and I think it was largely in order to persuade Trump to continue to back Ukraine to some degree. The problem is, first of all, if you’re a predator, you take the concession and then you start asking for more. And what is starting to become clear now is that flattering and accommodating and appeasing doesn’t necessarily buy you very much. The administration is back a few months later with a new demand or a new request. So the Europeans acted nicely, and the next thing they learned was that Trump was back wanting to take Greenland from Denmark, which of course led to, I think, a very sharp reaction in Europe as well.

The other thing you’ll see states doing over time is starting to “de-risk.” They will start to hedge. They will start to try and diversify their economic ties as much as possible because they don’t want to be as subject to American pressure as they are right now. And very importantly, they don’t want to have to deal all the time with a partner who keeps changing its mind and making new demands. I mean, one of the things that is, I think, counterproductive in Trump’s tariff policy is the sort of on-again, off-again, it’s ten percent, it’s 20 percent, it’s 45 percent, it’s back down to five percent. You never know. At some point, the business community in other countries and other governments would rather have a somewhat less acceptable arrangement that was predictable, that stayed in place for a while, as opposed to one that you can’t count on, where you’re dealing with a partner who changes his mind or makes new demands all the time.

And so we’re already seeing this. So, to take Mark Carney, Canada has signed a trade deal with Indonesia, the first time ever. He is working to try and bridge a trade agreement between the [Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership] in Asia and the European Union. The European Union has signed a new trade deal with India, has essentially inked, finally, a deal with the Latin American trading bloc Mercosur. So you’re seeing, in lots of different places, countries starting to diversify their economic ties and doing it quite consciously in response to what they see as a predatory United States.

And then finally, and this is in response to Greenland, you are seeing the desire to take Greenland. You’re seeing Europeans getting increasingly serious about defense, but not just because they’re worried about Russia, not just because they no longer trust the United States to help them. That’s both true, but also because they’re increasingly worried that the United States itself might be a problem, and certainly that relying on American protection is just handing a lever to the United States that they don’t necessarily want to be subject to. So again, I think in the short term, states have tried to accommodate, but in the long term they will do what they can to reduce American leverage and make it possible for them to ignore American requests.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I have to say, when I hear Trump administration officials defending the bet they’re making about how much choice allies will have, allies and partners will have over the long term, I feel like they’re giving me a kind of crude version of Steve Walt balance-of-threat theory from 30 or 40 years ago. Maybe they’re misapplying it, but I do see some of that there.

STEPHEN M. WALT

There’s one other point that I make in the article that should be brought out here, that one of the key sources of American leverage is the protection we have provided for allies, both in Europe and in Asia, for many years. And it’s important to remember that we didn’t do this as an act of charity. We didn’t do this because we were just feeling warmly toward these countries. We did it because it was in our strategic interest to do so. This was not a gift. In any case, if the Trump administration keeps threatening to sever those ties as a way of getting them to make, say, economic concessions, keeps threatening to do that, but never actually pulls the trigger, never actually withdraws, say, from NATO or something like that, then it gets exposed as a bluff and it starts to lose its leverage.

Our allies will understand that we really, at the end of the day, see these relationships as being in our interest and that we’re not going to break them. On the other hand, if we do break them, if we say, “Okay, fine, we’re out of here,” then the leverage is gone. So in a sense, even the military protection we provide can be a source of influence. It can be something that others will take into account. American presidents have used the possibility of reducing American support as a tool in the past, but it’s not the kind of threat you can repeat over and over and over again and expect it to keep delivering.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

It strikes me that India is the really interesting test case here, both the origins of the recent rift in the U.S.-India relationship, which was really about kind of egos and sloppy diplomacy and some kind of Pakistani tribute and corruption. And then, of course, you saw Prime Minister [Narendra] Modi of India go to Beijing and have a warm meeting with Putin. That was a pretty clear signal to the United States. But you do also hear from people in both governments that the U.S.-India relationship has been getting better over the last 20 years kind of continues on its course. And you can imagine that after all of this drama, we won’t see a dramatically changed relationship. The trajectory will be roughly the same three or four years from now. And that to me is a really interesting question about whether the effects of this predatory hegemony are enduring or not.

STEPHEN M. WALT

Yeah, I think India is an interesting test case, and as India continues to develop and become more powerful, you can imagine it as being an emerging pole in an increasingly multipolar world. We have the United States, we have China, we have Russia as a sort of distant third place. India, most populous country, developing quite rapidly, increasing a number of its capabilities, you can think of it as maybe an emerging fourth pole. Given where it is located, you would expect it to be especially concerned about China, which it is, therefore especially interested in support from the United States, also hedging a bit in its relationship with Russia for both economic reasons, purchasing oil and things like that, but also I think for long-term strategic reasons.

And I would expect India to sort of follow a course where it leans toward the United States, but not to the point of being a victim or a vassal, and it’s not going to be comfortable with a relationship with the United States that’s “we’re all take and no give.” And in a multipolar world, they will have options. That the degree to which they are willing to back our ideas for how to organize the Indo-Pacific region or how to contain China’s influence within that region, they can support those with varying degrees of enthusiasm depending on the kind of treatment they’re getting from the United States. They will also, of course, reach out as they have been doing to other economic actors like the European Union, which is itself a large bloc in international economic terms because they’re not sure they’re going to get a fair deal or a stable deal with the United States.

The other point I would emphasize here is most of this is completely unnecessary in the sense it’s not clear that acting like a constant predator is actually gaining the United States an enormous amount of tangible benefits. I think it may be making Trump richer, it’s certainly going to benefit some of the people in his entourage as well, but it’s not clear that it’s actually improving America’s image in the world, making Americans richer, or creating a set of partnerships around the world that you can count on in a pinch.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let me try to steelman the Trump case here. I think they would say, look, at the end of this, you’re going to have American allies in Europe and Asia that are spending much more on their own defense and contributing much more to deterring China and Russian action against NATO. This has been a complaint of American policymakers for decades, and Trump is finally getting it done. And blunt as the approach is, he is going to force many of these allies and partners to de-risk a little bit or decouple more from China. Or in the case of India, they’re going to reduce purchasing of Russian oil. So when all is said and done, allies will be stronger. They will have reduced their economic dependence on American adversaries. And yeah, there might be some reduced trust, but ultimately those material changes are going to be more meaningful. How would you respond? I’m not endorsing that. I’m simply trying to make the strongest case.

STEPHEN M. WALT

And that’s explicitly the case they’ve already made repeatedly. I mean, first of all, there’s a little bit of overclaiming here. European defense improvements or greater efforts began before Trump was reelected. They actually began before Trump was elected the first time in response to the seizure of Crimea in 2014. This was something of a wake-up call for Europe, and they began thinking more seriously about rearmament. That continued in the Biden administration. So this is a trend for which Trump can claim some credit, but certainly not sole credit. Of course, that’s his tendency, is to claim sole credit for almost everything.

But I think one doesn’t also want to underestimate the importance of a shifting perception of the United States. And what I always like to point to is the Biden administration went to a Dutch firm, I think it’s ASML, that’s a lithography firm, makes the world’s most sophisticated chip-making machines—and you need these machines in order to make the best semiconductors out there—and said we didn’t want them to sell those machines to China. Now, this firm could make a lot of money doing that. It would be beneficial to the firm, it would be good for the Netherlands in purely economic terms. But the Dutch government and the firm agreed that they would not sell these things.

Well, if you treat your allies as vassals constantly and you’re always looking for ways to extract advantages from them, and also you’re threatening in some cases, and here’s where Greenland comes out again. You’re threatening to use military force to take something that doesn’t belong to you, and it’s not an unpopular country in like Libya or something like that. It’s a long-time ally. Denmark was probably the most pro-American country in all of Europe. When you do something like that, you’re going to be greatly diminishing the willingness of allies to make adjustments and make concessions.

And indeed, the Danish military intelligence now says the United States is a potential threat. It’s quite remarkable that we’ve managed to turn a country like Denmark into one that is now actually actively wary of what the United States is doing and is therefore going to be, I think, much less likely to cooperate with us. The fact that Trump has also treated their sacrifices in the war in Afghanistan, for example, with a certain contempt has just fueled that. And you could say much the same story with respect to Canada. So I don’t think one wants to underestimate the long-term consequences of the loss of comity within these relationships.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

The other big question is how China uses this opportunity. You note this in the piece that [Chinese leader Xi Jinping] has tried to portray China as responsible and an unselfish global power, kind of source of stability, and still committed to win-win approaches on economic issues, at least. And while China has not gone full “wolf warrior” as it did during Trump One, it’s not exactly been accommodating in either security terms or on economic terms. How do you read China’s response to Trump Two? How do you think they’re using this opportunity?

STEPHEN M. WALT

First of all, the Chinese response to Trump Two shows you that you can’t bully everybody. And the Chinese responded pretty aggressively by linking access to rare earths, where they have a monopoly of production, to Trump’s economic demands. And Trump has basically, if not surrendered, backed off greatly. We’ll see what happens when he meets with Xi later this year, but it’s quite clear he can’t push the Chinese around in the way that he has tried to push other countries.

Second, I think they’ve seen this behavior as a great opportunity for them to present themselves in a much more benign and benevolent way. I think that representation of Chinese behavior isn’t accurate, right? They have been predatory in certain respects, especially in parts of Asia as well, but they have been trying to present themselves as the predictable, responsible, mature great power that wants a world order that is stable and respectful, where sovereignty is respected, where borders are not being challenged constantly. Again, I don’t want to say that the Chinese are necessarily right in this portrayal of themselves, but that’s the argument that they’re making.

And of course, when the United States is lashing out at friend and foe alike in various ways, this just makes this argument easier for them to make. Related to that, of course, at the same time that the United States is doing all of these things, we’re also systematically gutting our capacity to do regular diplomacy. We’ve withdrawn from some 60-plus international organizations, so we’re just not there anymore. And these are organizations, some obscure, some more important, that play a critical role in sort of writing the software by which a lot of normal business gets conducted in world affairs. And if the United States isn’t there, others are going to write rules in those domains and develop practices in those domains where we’ve had no influence. And the Chinese are in all of these places and very energetic and very active.

Second, of course, the United States has lots of unfilled ambassadorships around the world. The Chinese don’t. China has actually more consulates and embassies in the world than we do now, and that means, again, that they have well-trained, experienced people conducting the day-to-day business of presenting China’s case in lots of places around the world, and we’re not. And I think you see this now evidenced in public opinion polls. So the Pew global survey organization did a survey in, I think it was July this summer, basically asking 24 countries around the world, Do you have a more favorable view of the United States or a more favorable view of China? The United States is still ahead by one country. It’s roughly even, but the trend is very much in China’s favor, that they’ve improved their standing in the world while ours has fallen. And I don’t think it’s surprising. I think it’s easy to see why, when you have an administration that is acting like a predator, others are going to back away, and they’re going to see alternatives in a more benign light.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

How do you understand the shift in Trump’s policy on China? He was very hard-line in the first term and in the second term, especially after China’s response to American tariffs and its weaponization of its control over the critical-mineral supply chain. He’s become much more accommodating, seems quite interested in some kind of deal or détente. You, I think, have been skeptical of some of the most hard-line turns in U.S.-China policy over the last several years. Do you see a useful corrective here, or at least an opportunity for one?

STEPHEN M. WALT

I think the relationship between the United States and China is going to be a wary one regardless, just for structural reasons. The two most powerful states are not going to be buddies. They’re going to eye each other pretty carefully all the time and compete for power and influence, and we’ll see that in lots of different domains. The question is how it gets managed over time. And here, Trump, I don’t think his views on China are actually particularly consistent or particularly sophisticated. On the one hand, he recognizes that it is a potential rival, that it is a powerful country, and that it’s possibly inimical to American interests in a variety of ways. He certainly doesn’t like the trade deficit, doesn’t like what he thinks China did to American manufacturing, which he blames, of course, not on China, but on us as well.

But on the other hand, Trump’s worldview also very much is, the world is run by strong leaders of strong countries, and those leaders should get together and manage the world themselves, almost a great power condominium based on personal ties. And you saw this in the first term when he thought he could go to North Korea and some combination of charm and offering condos on the beach would transform the U.S.–North Korean relationship. And I think he sees that in his approach to Putin: “I can work with this guy. I can cut a deal with him.” His approach to dealing with Xi, as well. I think that’s yet to be demonstrated, right? We got nothing out of the opening to North Korea. I don’t think Trump is going to be able to charm his way to China, making major concessions on a variety of things. He certainly hasn’t been able to charm Putin into ending the war in Ukraine.

So this belief in personal diplomacy doesn’t seem to be borne out by the facts, but I think it is part of Trump’s basic worldview that he alone is the one that matters. And if you can just get in the room with the leader of the other side, then he can work everything out and everything will be fine. Notice, by the way, this is also an approach that keeps all of our attention riveted on him, as opposed to thinking about the larger structural forces at work between the two countries, with those countries and the rest of the world, and inside of those countries. And of course, that’s what Trump likes. He wants us all to be focused on him 24/7.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

The Board of Peace is Trump’s most recent attempt to keep the theater of this focused on him. Is there a version of this that would be a good idea, given how ineffective existing institutions have been, especially when it comes to matters of war and peace? The UN Security Council would be the most prominent example here.

STEPHEN M. WALT

Well, I would favor significant reforms to the existing set of institutions as opposed to the creation of something like the Board of Peace. The Board of Peace is not a serious operation. The way it’s set up gives Trump almost sole control over it. The invitation list is, at least at a minimum ironic, inviting some of these leaders to a Board of Peace when they are responsible for some of the worst conflicts we’re seeing around the world. The fact that people have to pony up billions of dollars to join, et cetera, and then have no control over how the money’s going to be spent. Again, I think this is Kabuki theater and not a serious alternative.

If you wanted to say, “Look, the United Nations isn’t working, needs to be fundamentally rethought,” that would be a different problem, and that would involve a very different institution-building exercise that I don’t think Trump has any interest in or ability to pull off. I might add, this is a president and a government that has never really liked rules and institutions. That was true of his career as a businessman, heavily litigious, lots of rule breaking, and that’s been true of his domestic politics both terms, and it’s true in his conduct of foreign policy. They don’t like institutions because institutions get in the way of the things they want to do. And so ignoring the United Nations and trying to create a phony institution that you control is part of the playbook too. But I don’t think it’s particularly meaningful.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You talked earlier about Trump’s use of force and the way that he has used force in the second term. It’s interesting in a way. It’s on the one hand been quite reckless but also showed real, I think, a degree of discipline, frankly, when it comes to long-term interventions that would result in the kinds of forever wars that characterized American foreign policy over the previous couple of decades. I think one question is what this means for norms about use of force in the international system, going more broadly beyond Trump. Do you see real erosion in those norms in a way that will make war and conquest much more frequent and more likely in the years ahead?

STEPHEN M. WALT

Yeah, I think there’s no question that the normative framework that has to some degree shaped the use of force over the last 50-plus years is eroding, and that’s not entirely due to Trump. I mean, some of that began well before Trump. Just one example: there had been a pretty powerful international norm against political assassination that developed, reached its heyday probably in the early 20th century, where political leaders didn’t try to kill each other. Military targets, yes, but the Allies never tried to kill Adolf Hitler. Germans did, but the Allies didn’t, and vice versa. And that has been eroding, I think, fairly steadily. The United States attempting to assassinate a number of foreign leaders at various times, the drone war against suspected terrorists, targeted killings against people based on signature strikes—all of this began to lower the threshold at which people were using force and where they were using it as well. And again, that predates Trump. Certainly, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a violation of the norm that you didn’t try and take territory by force. There had been some violations of that in the past, but this was a pretty substantial one. When an American president says, “We’re going to take Greenland,” that’s another way of saying these lines on the map, they don’t really matter, and if you’re big enough, you can just take it and hold it and keep it forever. And that, I think, to the extent that it continues, starts to open the door for others to have similar ambitions as well.

Trump, as you said, has been careful so far to try and use force only against weaker adversaries that can’t really hit back, to use it for brief periods of time, to keep boots from being on the ground. And that has worked so far. It doesn’t necessarily lead to positive political developments or permanent solutions to problems, most true I think in the Middle East. We were told a few months ago that Iran’s nuclear program had been obliterated, and we’re now being told that we might have to go to war again if they don’t agree to get rid of their nuclear program. These pinprick uses of force don’t seem to solve the underlying political problem, and you can’t be sure that this run of good luck is going to continue forever because, of course, one of these things can spiral out of control. Vladimir Putin did not expect to be in a four-year war when he went into Ukraine four years ago, and look where he is today.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Very fair. Let me, before we close, allow you to get back into establishment-critic mode. As you’ve watched the foreign policy establishment or “the Blob’s” reaction to Trump two, what do you think it’s getting wrong? What worries you in that response?

STEPHEN M. WALT

I haven’t thought about this question. I mean, most of the foreign policy establishment, the people that you would’ve thought of as stalwarts in foreign policy, both parties have been critical of Trump. A few, [U.S. Senator] Lindsey Graham, ever opportunistic, has aligned with Trump in many respects, even though Trump’s foreign policy is very different than what Graham would’ve favored in other contexts. But by and large, I think the sort of seasoned veterans have looked aghast at some of this, including the reliance on amateur diplomats like Steve Witkoff or Jared Kushner as well. Some of that may be jealousy, some of that may be resentment, but I think there’s an element of truth in all of it, that this is a sort of out-of-control administration when it comes to the conduct of foreign policy.

What they’re getting wrong? I think the part that they may be getting wrong is the thing we’ve talked about before, the slowness with which some of the degradation is taking place. I mean, there is a tendency among people in the establishment to assume disaster is going to befall us by next Tuesday. If these tariffs are put in place, the world economy is going to collapse and every American is going to suffer. And I think we’ve seen greater resilience in a variety of places than many people anticipated a year or so ago, and we ought to be mindful of that. And at the very end of the article, I point out that the United States is not going to suddenly collapse, not going to get invaded, not likely to face a grand unified coalition of powerful foes, et cetera. I’m not predicting disaster.

Rather, I’m predicting the slow degradation of American power, wealth, and influence and security so that we end up, in a few years, in a much less favorable position than people like me have been in our entire lives and that most Americans have been in their entire lives. And in some of these cases, it may be a little bit like the famous Hemingway line about, “How did I go bankrupt? Gradually, then suddenly.” As these relationships fray and erode and other states start viewing the United States very differently than they have in the past, at some point, they really do start making dramatic decisions in other directions and we wake up in 2035 or 2040 in a very different world that is much less favorably aligned toward American interests. I think that’s what worries me. Not a sudden disaster in the next few months, but rather a progressive decline that turns out to be very difficult to reverse.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

That does seem like a problem for democratic theory. I guess this is true of most forms of economic policy or domestic policy as well, that the timelines, the effects are so delayed that you’re rarely punished for the mistakes you’ve made in office and are often punished for mistakes others have made. But that’s a bigger problem.

STEPHEN M. WALT

The other point I would make here is that some of this we’re seeing in the Trump administration, the lack of any accountability, is just the extension of a trend that’s been true for a long time and that I’ve complained about in the past, that it didn’t matter what you did while you were in office. It was hard to get removed from the legitimate foreign policy establishment. Even if you were repeatedly wrong, repeatedly deceptive, et cetera, you could go on and continue to have a great career. And that’s not a terrific way to run a democracy.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

If you look to post-Trump foreign policy, let’s say Steve Walt is national security advisor in 2029, or a counselor to the national security advisor.

STEPHEN M. WALT

That is a frightening thought.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

What should be restored of pre-Trump foreign policy? What of Trump’s doing should be preserved? What should be rethought entirely? How would you lay out a framework for that?

STEPHEN M. WALT

I would try and reassert a reliance on multilateralism to the extent that one could. Again, the United States has enormous power. It wants to exercise that power as legitimately and nonthreateningly as possible. Restoring trust in American promises, that if we say X, we will do X. If we reach a deal, we’ll stick to that deal for a good long time until it’s obviously unworkable, and then we’ll try to renegotiate something that’s mutually beneficial in the future. And that’s going to be, I think, harder to restore. It would be nice to have a greater bipartisan consensus on foreign policy, which is pretty lacking. I think that may be too hard to put together.

But the biggest problem we’re going to face is, it wasn’t that Trump can be seen by the rest of the world as an isolated episode. That’s the way you could have treated the first term, and that’s, in fact, the way many people interpreted it. The United States had done this crazy thing. They’d learned their lesson, they voted him out of office, they brought back a familiar mainstream figure like Joe Biden, we’re back to normal. Funny country, America, but it’s come to its senses. Well, we then elected the guy again. And that means in 2028, if you have the pendulum swinging, other countries are going to say, “Well, yes, but the pendulum could swing back again.” There are forces in the American body politic that won’t disappear.

And here’s the real paradox that worries me. One of the ways you could restore trust is by holding members of the Trump administration strictly accountable for laws they’ve broken while in office. Not for policy decisions you disagree with, but if they’ve broken the law, hold them accountable, put them on trial, punish them appropriately as well. The more likely that appears to be in 2028 or 2029, the greater incentive you give the Trump administration to never be voted out of power. This is exactly the same incentives that other autocratic leaders, that people like Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel have faced. If you leave office, you’re in potential jeopardy, and that’s a good recipe for getting really overt electoral fraud, rigging elections, et cetera. So the things we might need to do to restore our image abroad actually might make it harder to maintain our democracy at home.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Steve, we will pick up some of those disquieting questions as we get closer to 2029. But for now, thank you for the great piece in our current issue. It’s called “The Predatory Hegemon.” And thanks for doing this today.

STEPHEN M. WALT

Thanks for publishing it, and great talking with you.