Preparing for the World After Trump

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Rebecca, Mira, it’s wonderful to have the chance to talk to both of you today and to have you back on the pages of Foreign Affairs after four years in which you were both otherwise occupied in a slew of jobs on the National Security Council.

MIRA RAPP-HOOPER

Great to be with you, Dan, and great to be back at Foreign Affairs.

REBECCA LISSNER

Always a pleasure, Dan. Thanks for having us.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So I want to start with the essay that the two of you co-authored in our new issue. It contends that, as the piece’s introduction crisply puts it, “There is no going back in the wake of Trump’s second term to the pre-existing international system, whether we call it the rules-based order or something else.” You both acknowledged that similar predictions were prevalent in Trump’s first turn but turned out to be overblown. That brought to mind a piece that future U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2018, arguing if the order would in fact survive Trump. And you two do acknowledge in this new piece—quoting you here—“To a degree that surprised us, even after we joined the Biden administration, American power and global leadership proved highly resilient once Trump departed the scene.” If we go back to Trump’s first term and the world you had to contend with reentering government in January 2021, what did the prophecies in Trump 1.0—what did those prophecies of the order’s demise get wrong? What proved unexpectedly enduring as you got back into government? Rebecca, let’s start with you on this.

REBECCA LISSNER

Well, thanks again for having us, Dan, and it was great to be able to publish this essay in Foreign Affairs, as you said, picking up on some of the work that we had published back in 2019 as we were anticipating a post-Trump Biden administration the first time around. And you’re exactly right: during the first Trump administration, many of us, including Mira and I, prophesied that the liberal international order had met its demise. President Trump was such a heterodox force in American foreign policy. He broke so many taboos and he slayed so many shibboleths when it came to American grand strategy that it really seemed like there would be no going back.

And yet, to an extent that really surprised both of us as senior White House officials, once we got in, to the Biden administration, [U.S. President Joe Biden] went out in the world and he proclaimed that America was back. And to a really surprising extent, the world largely believed him.Our alliances proved far more resilient than we might’ve expected in the Trump years. America was able to reclaim global leadership, including in the context of multilateral institutions that President Trump had left. And so the order did prove remarkably resilient, and American power did prove remarkably resilient. And, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic has an important role to play in explaining that story because in the end, thanks to the policies of the Biden administration and also just the strength of the U.S. economy, we had the best post-COVID recovery of any advanced industrial economy. At the same time, China, which had seemed so ascendant in the first Trump administration, not only pursued a misguided approach to wolf warrior diplomacy and coercive COVID diplomacy, but also itself mishandled its own economy and its own post-COVID recovery that put us in a much stronger sense. So in all of those ways, the Biden administration was able to re–take up the mantle of American power in a way that proved really surprising.

Now, if I could, I’ll just say:here’s why this time is different, because that’s pretty central to the argument we make in the essay. And the core point is that, this time, there really will be no going back to foreign policy business as usual after this second Trump presidency. And there are a few reasons.

I mean, the first is just the mere fact of Trump’s reelection. As we say in the essay, it seemed in the Biden years that Trump’s first term was an aberration. But now we know that Biden himself was the interregnum between two terms of Donald Trump. And that really underscores the volatility and the polarization that is a core feature of American politics now, and that undercuts our ability to serve as a reliable and predictable global leader and ally.

A second reason is that this Trump administration is just moving much more quickly and making much more dramatic changes than it did in the first Trump administration. And whether that’s siding with Russia over Ukraine and NATO or whether that’s hiking up tariffs on strategically vital allies in the Indo-Pacific, these are seismic moves that the world will never forget the United States did, no matter what happens next.

And the third reason why this Trump administration is different is the speed with which Trump is actually dismantling the foundations of American power. And these aren’t only manifest in our foreign policy, but we see it with U.S. leadership in scientific research, our ability to attract global talent, the strength of the U.S. dollar and its status as the global reserve currency, rule of law, and democracy at home, all of these are advantages that America has built up over more than a century that undergird our global power and that have become firmly in the crosshairs of Trump administration policy just over the first six months, and we don’t even know what’s coming over the next three and a half years.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I want to pick up a lot of those elements, especially the forward-looking ones, but let me linger on some of the backward-looking elements of the piece first. Mira, there’s a line that the two of you include in the essay, when you’re talking about the kind of impulse to restore a more traditional American foreign policy, when you write, “The immediate success of this approach reduced the urgency with the administration to more fundamentally remake U.S. grand strategy for a new era,” and you acknowledge that the administration prioritized foreign policy restoration over reinvention. The piece’s argument is, of course, forward-looking and about what comes next, but there is a kind of significant element of this retrospective critique of the Biden foreign policy—or self-critique, since you two were both central players in it. And there were lots of creative and innovative elements of that policy that we can go through. But on the whole, the thrust was that America is back, and the focus was really on rebuilding traditional tools of American leadership, whether institutions or alliances or much else. As you look at that kind of restorationist impulse, first of all, what accounted for it? How did we get there, and what, in retrospect, were the downsides of that approach? Where do we see the cost of restorationism?

MIRA RAPP-HOOPER

Yeah, thanks, Dan. Look, I think as we say very clearly in the piece, in part, the impulse to restoration was born of success. As Rebecca has already indicated, we ourselves were pretty skeptical that America’s reputation in the world was going to bounce back as quickly as it seemed to in the early part of 2021, or that when the United States returned to the global stage with agendas that were intended to do things like remake and modernize our alliances, that allies would not only agree and step up, but they would step up bigger and bolder than we expected.

I myself had the privilege, as you know, of working on the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy, which is one of the administration’s, I think, greatest foreign policy achievements, mostly because it was largely successful. But it was largely successful because when the United States put a strategy down on the table and said, “Here’s our vision for Asia,” nearly every ally who was involved in that strategy said, “I’m in, and I’m going to go bigger than you were expecting me to go,” none more so, for example, than the prime minister of Japan, who literally oversaw a security revolution in Japan alongside President Biden, and in partnership with him.

So with moves like that in mind, it reduced the urgency to feel like a fundamental transformation of the international system was needed. And to some degree, even the biggest challenges that the Biden administration faced—I would note, in its second year, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine— seemed to reaffirm the fact that the United States could lead in coalitions with other countries, and in ways that might feel a little bit more traditional: rallying to NATO support, leading the drive to provide support and weapons for Ukraine with kind of traditional battle cries of freedom and democracy and all of these basic touchstones of traditional American leadership. So in large part, the restoration impulse, again, was a result of the fact that this really seemed to be working as an approach, and seemed to be a way that President Biden and his top national security leaders were actually able to affect a lot of the things that they wanted to see in global politics.

Now, of course, that came up against its limits at the point that the Biden administration was facing a second war, in the Middle East. There started to be some real trade-offs in terms of resources and in terms of prioritization. And certainly one could critique the fact that, although President Biden did take some very bold moves, like withdrawing the United States from Afghanistan, the administration did not perhaps completely pivot to Asia the way we laid out in our interim national security guidance or was able to fully materialize its vision for foreign policy when it first took office. Now of course, that’s a liability that faces most administrations, right? You have your vision that you come into office with and it is always challenged by crises and conflicts on the ground that drive competition for resources and competition for time. And that was extremely true in the case of both Ukraine or the Middle East.

But the basic proposition here is that the Biden administration largely found reciprocity in most of its policies. So the need to be truly revolutionary was reduced. Couple that with the fact that, as Rebecca noted, for at least the first two years of the administration, it did not seem that President Trump was coming back. Particularly, in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection and Democrats outperforming expectations in the midterms, it seemed like we actually were living for a while in a post-Trump era in which there was a fair amount of bipartisanship on all of the areas of foreign policy that I’ve just laid out: a huge amount of bipartisanship on the idea of having a strong policy for Asia, certainly strong bipartisanship on supporting Ukraine, with Republicans often calling for harder, faster versions of the same policies that the Biden administration itself was implementing. So one could be forgiven for thinking that returning the United States to what felt like a fairly familiar role was, in fact, meeting the moment.

Now, I want to acknowledge that there were some areas in which the Biden administration was quite revolutionary. I think we would all acknowledge that our technology policy, and in particular the emphasis we put on semiconductors, was both really challenging for some of our allies and really cut a novel path in terms of how to define national security and work with others abroad to bring it about. But as Rebecca and I had written prior to the Biden administration, the Biden administration did not necessarily achieve a wholesale renovation of America’s approach to the international order, partially because it did not appear to be necessary.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Rebecca, when I look at that roughly six month period from the withdrawal from Afghanistan to the beginning of the war in Ukraine, it’s really striking to me that Afghanistan, while a kind of departure from the mainstream American foreign policy thought up to that point—though, of course, Trump had been in the same place—Afghanistan was perceived as a foreign policy defeat for the administration. Even if you kind of approved of the choice, the kind of cost of withdrawal, and just the way it was in fact implemented, I think, did not look like a win to most people in that moment. Then Ukraine, which felt much more traditional, as the two of you note persuasively in the piece, was seen, early on especially, as this great achievement. I mean, I imagine that, in some ways, gutted the impulse as well that the thing that was the departure from tradition had not played so well and then this more traditional role had.

REBECCA LISSNER

Absolutely. To be disruptive, to break from tradition is always to assume risk. Sometimes strategic risk, but also political risk. And we know that for all that American foreign policy is forged with the national interest at heart, it also happens in a political context. So I do think it’s important to point out that President Biden’s poll numbers dipped after the Afghanistan withdrawal, and they never recovered for the duration of his presidency. So I was never part of any conversation in which that was explicitly referenced as a deterrent to do X, Y or Z, but certainly it’s a cautionary tale about what can happen when you take a big political risk like that. And even as it is the strategically sound and prudent choice, sometimes just the horrible visuals, the stories, the human toll of the Afghanistan withdrawal in August of the first year definitely lingered.

Now, I would say, though, that there were some positive lessons that came from the Afghanistan withdrawal that contributed to the success in Ukraine. So it wasn’t just that, as Mira was saying, the Russian invasion of Ukraine enabled the United States to assume this very comfortable, almost Cold War–feeling role of rallying the free world in defense of a country that had fallen victim to Russian aggression, and rallying our NATO allies. It was also that the success of our early Ukraine policy, in particular, was the result of some very careful strategic planning that was happening out of the National Security Council, and I was a part of that effort as well. And I think to the great credit of the president and his national security team, they saw what had happened in Afghanistan and the strategic surprise that occurred as we were withdrawing—the rapid collapse of the Afghan government, the rapid progression of the Taliban—and recognize that there was more we could have done to contingency plan, and to anticipate what could happen during the withdrawal and ensure our preparation for it.

And they brought those lessons to preparing for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So because we had all of this early intelligence in the fall of 2021 that indicated that Russia was massing these brigade combat teams on the border of Ukraine and likely to go in, we actually had good warning and were able to undertake a tiger team planning process that allowed us to think about, what are the key moves we need to make in the first 24 hours of the war? What are the key moves we need to make in the first 48 hours of the war? What are the early sanctions that we should put on Russia? Who should call whom, and how do we rally the allies? And so that preparation I do think is an important part of the story and the sequence of how we got from the difficulties of the Afghanistan withdrawal to the successes of the Ukraine policy, especially in the early months, which I think count as probably the high watermark of the Biden administration’s foreign policy.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Mira, you noted that there have been these repeated failures to pivot to Asia. I mean, this kind of goes back to I guess four presidential administrations now: probably to Obama, Trump I, Biden, and now Trump II. There is a debate within the Trump administration about whether Ukraine is solely a distraction from a focus on deterring China in the Indo-Pacific, or whether the demonstration of American credibility and strength is in fact a benefit when it comes to deterring China. I imagine these debates played out in the first couple of years of the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. You’re watching this as someone who worked in the Indo-Pacific. How do you understand those trade-offs and how did you understand them at the time? But also, as you look forward and look at a world, which as the two of you note very compellingly in the piece, you’re facing threats in lots of theaters and the United States can’t handle them all on their own. How do you understand the kind of balance between Ukraine and focus on China? How should we kind of construct that the right way for policy?

MIRA RAPP-HOOPER

Yeah, it’s a great question, Dan, and it’s one that I think is always really challenging, both for policymakers and for analysts and academics. Because the answer really rests a lot on where you think credibility comes from. If, for example, being competitive with China and being able to deter China from actions you don’t want it to take—let’s say provoking a crisis in the Taiwan Strait—comes from the United States force posture and presence solely in Asia, then of course, anytime you get involved in a crisis or a conflict in another region, that could be seen as net detracting from your ability to stand up to China. But if China’s perception of deterrence and ability to make cost calculations is actually global, then mounting a really strong alliance response against Russia in Ukraine; sustaining sanctions over a course of years; keeping that coalition together despite the odds; finding ways to continue to arm Ukraine even when it gets incredibly hard is also sending a set of signals to Beijing about how hard a Taiwan contingency would be for the [People’s Republic of China.]

I tend to think, based on the information I’ve seen, but also the views of many of our partners in the region, that the U.S. coalition-building leadership in Ukraine and Ukraine’s performance in the war, has sent a set of cautionary signals to the PRC, because we are still talking about this effort in 2025, when for a very long time, we thought that it was possible that Russia’s invasion would be quick, short, sharp, and over. That would have been the worst possible lesson for Beijing to learn: that it was possible to invade a neighboring country and to have it be over relatively quickly. And what they have seen is the exact opposite.

I would say just as significantly, we know that other leaders throughout Asia have commented, and believed to their core, that it was important for them to be involved in supporting Ukraine because they wanted the PRC to learn that what was happening in Europe right now could not succeed in Asia. And no one was more vocal about that fact than the prime minister of Japan, who literally turned Japanese foreign policy on its head to support Ukraine and come out strongly against Russia in the opening weeks of the war. Traditionally, Japanese prime ministers from his right-leaning party had generally been very favorable towards Russia. So we saw this coalition emerge that included many Indo-Pacific partners, in part because they genuinely believed that stopping a conflict like this in Ukraine was necessary to their long-term peace and prosperity in Asia.

Now, of course, as the war dragged on, there were trade-offs to be faced. From my perspective as someone who watched the Indo-Pacific closely, I would’ve liked to have seen Indo-Pacific budgets rise higher and faster than they did, although I will note that we never backtracked on Indo-Pacific budget rises. They increased at least incrementally year-over-year and we were able to fund all of our priorities year-over-year during the Biden administration. We also faced trade-offs at some point with respect to actual weapons of war by providing Ukraine with absolutely necessary air defenses. We had to push back further some deliveries of those air defenses to critical Indo-Pacific allies.

But in sum, I think the demonstration effect during the Biden administration that was achieved from our support of Ukraine added a great deal to the perception of credibility of our alliance commitments in the Indo-Pacific and the belief of many Indo-Pacific leaders that the world would act to deter or defend against a Chinese invasion if one ever came. Of course, that’s now potentially in question when the Trump administration itself decides what it will do over Ukraine. But I think we should make no bones about the fact that the PRC is certainly able to evaluate and base its own judgment on a set of global signals.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Another way in which Biden seemed like a throwback was his tendency to talk about things in terms of democracy versus autocracy, or the free world versus the axis of whatever-we-want-to-call-it. In a 2019 piece called “The Open World” that the two of you wrote in Foreign Affairs, you, even then, were suggesting that America needed to be more willing to work with illiberal states and non-democracies. You reinforced that suggestion in the new essay. This has been a perennial tension in American foreign policy. What do you think, going forward, needs to change about the way we get the right balance between a focus on democracy and on democratic values, and more kind of hard-headed, near-term strategic interests? Rebecca, I’ll kick that to you.

REBECCA LISSNER

Sure. Well, it’s no secret that there has been a long-running debate in Democratic foreign policy circles about how best to frame the way that we align an ally with countries around the world. And that debate was definitely active in the early months and years of the Biden administration, and I don’t think it will surprise you, given our past work, to learn that I think both Mira and I favored a strategic frame that was somewhat less ideological, less focused on democracy versus autocracy, and more focused on interests, principles, the type of global order we wanted to lead and build, and trying to build a broad coalition that would join the United States in that effort.

Now, President Biden, of course, spoke often about the importance of democracy triumphing, demonstrating that democracy delivers. And my interpretation has always been that, for him, he really saw the fight to save American democracy at home as coextensive with a global struggle to show that democracy could triumph around the world, and that democracy rather than autocracy was the best answer to the challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first century. So when he spoke about democracy versus autocracy, I don’t believe that it was about excluding the possibility of cooperating with autocratic states so much as really the need to provide proof of concept that this form of government really could work even in the modern age.

Going forward though, as we argue in the piece, American foreign policy really needs to reckon with the challenge of severely diminished moral authority in the wake of this Trump presidency, and frankly in the wake of challenges that predate this Trump presidency. I think, regardless of how any one person may feel about U.S. policy towards Israel and the war in Gaza, in the eyes of the world, there has been a dissonance between the very strong defense of international rules and norms that Mira just discussed in the context of Russia’s aggression and brutal invasion of Ukraine, versus the optics of our support for Israel and its war in Gaza, which the U.S. government doesn’t believe is violating international law, but there are many countries around the world who feel that it is. And they see those two things as not making a good deal of sense together. So I think that has created a certain sense of global hypocrisy.

And then you add on top of that the reality of Donald Trump really attacking democracy, rule of law, due process here in the United States, not to mention anti-corruption policy here and around the world, and it becomes much harder to imagine American foreign policy that is predicated on us having the authority and the standing to go to other countries and tell them that they are not taking the right steps to respect human rights, that they are not taking the right steps to prevent corruption in their countries, and that they are not sufficiently democratic in X, Y, Z ways. And also, even taking steps that are punitive, like Global Magnitsky Sanctions to penalize those countries for not adhering to a certain set of values that perhaps we are not even upholding in our own country.

So that challenge is profound, because idealism has always been an important anchor for American foreign policy. I feel that it should be: it is critical that the United States stand for something in the world that isn’t just our raw self-interest, not to mention the personal self-interest of our leaders. But I do think we need to have a certain humility going forward in terms of how the world now sees us in a post-Trump reality. And so as we grapple with the post-2029 foreign policy agenda, we need to think really clearly about what is the appropriate role for values in American foreign policy, and how can we lead globally in a way that remains very principled but doesn’t draw hard lines in a way that can be antithetical to our strategic interests.

So what does that mean in practice? I think it means building a broad coalition of countries that, again, share interests and principles with us, even if they don’t share all of our values. It means looking for opportunities to do diplomacy that advances U.S. interests, even if it means talking to regimes that we find to be otherwise quite odious. And I think it means laying out a vision for the future of international order that isn’t predicated so much on democracy and human rights and a certain set of American-coded values so much as a vision for the type of world that we want to lead a set of principles, similar to what Mira and I had talked about in our old work, that a lot of countries can see themselves in and form the basis of a coalition that we can lead and that will allow us to set the terms for the remainder of the twenty-first century.

MIRA RAPP-HOOPER

If I may jump in on this one quickly, Dan, I do think the Biden administration was well on its way to this understanding for all that the democracy-versus-autocracy framing was really important to the president. If you look at the national security strategy, it’s clear that we embrace—have a preference for—working with democratic allies, but we’re very clear in that document—of course, Rebecca had a huge hand in it—that we are willing to and welcome working with any partner who shares our objectives. We’re very clear about that. Likewise, in our Indo-Pacific strategy, democracy versus autocracy does not actually feature as a frame. And the reason that it didn’t is because it would not have worked in Asia, here the primary objective was gaining ground in competition with China and restoring the balance of power in Asia. And in Asia, many countries are non-democracies, and even if they are democracies, don’t necessarily want to be preached to in a specific way that assumes a specific manifestation of democracy.

So if we’re trying to advance a strategy, for example, in Southeast Asia, hammering the democracy-versus-autocracy dichotomy is a particularly ineffective way to gain partners on our side. That’s why we chose focusing on phrases like “free and open Indo-Pacific,” which means an Indo-Pacific that is un-dominated in which you can make your own choices. And those same set of phrases were repeated back to us by the government of Vietnam as we led up to our conclusion of a comprehensive strategic partnership. They were very clear that we had put together a framework that created space for them to advance their own interests and values alongside of us by choosing words like that. So I do want to acknowledge that I think our leadership was well aware of the fact that we had to create some space. But in the week of everything that Rebecca has just identified that’s now taking place at home, it is going to be all the more incumbent upon us to figure out how to build those coalitions in ways that are efficient and effective and speak to common objectives in the world.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

One element of Trump’s wholesale dismantlement of the traditional tools of American foreign policy that the two of you seem to mostly approve of is his willingness to sit down or have his senior officials sit down with almost anyone, whether it’s North Korean officials or Iranian officials or Hamas or Venezuelans or the new leader of Syria. You can imagine the Biden administration just would’ve taken much longer to hold that meeting. If you were back in government, Rebecca, would you just do away with this notion that diplomacy should be held out as a prize and just get over the political obstacles to meeting with anyone? What’s the right lesson of Trump’s disruption here?

REBECCA LISSNER

I think that there is a time and a place for meeting even with regimes that we deeply, deeply dislike. And to say that we should consider it sometimes isn’t to say that it is always the right answer, but I do believe that we have often, as the United States, been too reluctant to speak directly even to countries that we consider adversaries. And that has sometimes been to our diplomatic detriment. The reason in many cases that I believe we do that is one, we often see meeting with senior U.S. officials as a reward, and two, because sometimes the political costs of having those meetings become impossible to bear or feel very, very high. So part of what Trump has been able to do, because he’s a Republican and because the criticism of that type of diplomacy so often comes from the Republican Party, has been to scramble the dynamics around how the policy and the politics come together when it comes to those sorts of conversations. So in their willingness to speak directly to Hamas or speak directly to the Iranians, Trump has done something that I think it would be very hard for almost any other politician to do.

But part of what we argue in the piece is that there’s a certain opportunity that comes with all this new political space that Trump has created. And I’m not under the illusion that any future president will be able to have the same sort of Political Teflon that Trump has been able to manufacture himself, and with his real degree of control over the Republican Party. But I do think that we should be eyes-open about the places in which he has expanded what we call the Overton window, in terms of the bounds of what’s acceptable to talk about and to pursue as U.S. foreign policy and think about, even for a future administration that disagrees with the way in which Trump has utilized all this flexibility, how can it be put towards a different end? And how can it break down the types of barriers that have sometimes hindered our ability to do foreign policy?

So I’m not saying that any president should, just for the sake of it, sit down with [North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un] and begin a dialogue with the North Koreans, but nor should we rule it out as a potentially useful policy lever for the United States to advance our interests, especially in a world in which we may not see the resort to military force as a preferable option and may actually see diplomacy as being a more durable tool to create the kinds of long-term solution sets that we seek.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So much of the argument that you and others make about not being able to go back to what existed before is about the alliance system and about American alliances. You know, Trump I, there was lots of fear of this as well and lots of speculation that none of these alliances would ever recover. And as you note in the piece, they were in much better shape than I think most people feared as the Biden administration was starting. And you can look at Trump’s relationship with allies now and I think be similarly kind of optimistic about where those land if you want to be. And the NATO allies have done a pretty good job of using obsequiousness and some creative math about defense spending to more or less placate Trump on transatlantic issues.I don’t imagine that NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte likes referring to Trump as “daddy,” but he’s willing to do it to save the alliance, and it seems to be working. Similarly, in Asia, there aren’t the kind of fears from the Japanese and South Koreans that we saw. They’re not quite as acute, at least this time around. The one area where it does seem to be really different is tariffs, and I imagine that will leave a shadow. So Mira, given your long experience with this as a policymaker and scholar, how do you think about the evolution of alliances as they contend with these forces projecting forward a bit to the end of this term?

MIRA RAPP-HOOPER

Yeah, and it’s another great question, Dan, and I think one that challenges all of our thinking when we think about the ways that alliances form and function. As you’re suggesting, I don’t think we are currently living in a world, although one can be wrong anytime they make predictions about President Trump, where the president is planning to pull an Article 5 guarantee out from under an ally. That was what NATO’s whole push and rally to the supposed five percent was about, was keeping Article 5 in place, rhetorically, while they kind of sift through the question of what they will do next. But I do think what is happening is something that is pretty fundamental and will probably play out along a number of different dimensions. And that will be allies thinking more and more, independently or in subgroups with one another, about how they can ensure their defense is provided for in a world where the United States feels less predictable and dependable.

Well before Trump recommitted to Article 5 in NATO, we saw, almost immediately upon his election, European allies talking about majorly upping their own defense spending,not just because they wanted to placate the United States, but because they worried they couldn’t trust us anymore. And a major precipitating event for that was the knowledge not only that the United States was willing to deal with Russia, but that we had briefly cut off intelligence sharing with Ukraine. That was a really significant moment, where it seemed like U.S. interests were perhaps no longer aligned with Europe in a way that was so fundamental, that suggested to many of our partners they would have to figure out their own way to keep going. And my expectation is that we will see a lot of European investment in indigenous defense capabilities over the course of the next three years or so. But I think that’s likely to be true in Asia as well. And even though the waters have not yet gotten choppy, I also think it’s much too soon to say that they’re calm.

I’m watching a number of data points which could play out over the course of the next few months that I think would significantly rattle our allies’ perception that the United States is a dependable security guarantor. That includes on the Korean Peninsula, where it’s been publicly reported that the Trump administration is thinking of withdrawing a Stryker brigade, which would bring the U.S. presence down to about 20,000 troops, the lowest it’s been since the end of the Korean War, and which could potentially open up space for some real deterrence challenges or miscalculation by Kim Jong Un. And that could happen in an environment in which there’s brand new leadership on the Korean Peninsula, and the Trump administration, on this new team, have not yet established a working relationship.

Likewise, there’s a possibility that the United States will actually change tacts with Japan and argue that it should not reposition several thousand marines to Guam that are currently in Japan, that have been long promised to transition out. So there are security bumps in those relationships that could well be in the offing in the near term.

But you also brought up tariffs, Dan, and that’s another really important part of this picture. In the April 2 tariff announcements, we saw staggering levels of tariffs levied against treaty allies, including South Korea and Japan, both numbers in the mid-20s. And, of course, many countries in Europe were hit hard as well. Even though the initial China numbers were also quite staggering, we’re now living in a world in which the Trump administration seems keenly focused on getting to “yes” on a trade deal with China, even while trade negotiations with South Korea and Japan are slowing over some really critical issues like auto tariffs, and which it’s very difficult for these allies to compromise for domestic political reasons. So the signal that is being sent, at the same moment that our allies are wondering whether we’ll really be there for the long haul in our security commitments, is that our economic relationships no longer create pride of place for those allies.

And that security commitment and that economic commitment have traditionally traveled together. Allies typically have privileged access to U.S. markets and that’s part of what has helped them all to grow, alongside and underneath that security umbrella. So while the fundamental foundations may still appear to be intact, there are all of these blows being swiped from different directions at the fundamental compact that has held our alliance system together that suggests to us that it may look quite a bit different a few years from now.

REBECCA LISSNER

The one thing I would add to that is, as we see our allies become more capable, or at least signal that they intend to become more capable, whether, as Mira referenced, with Japan’s trajectory on defense investment or the recent NATO five percent—or really 3.5 plus 1.5 percent—defense spending pledge over the next decade, if those all come to pass and our allies do close the gap in terms of what they’re able to do for their own security versus the extent to which they rely on us, there’s a lot about that that’s good, because it frees up the United States to do other things. And it gives these countries a greater stake in their own self-defense, which is something that presidents of both parties have been calling for for quite a long time, and which should be net beneficial to deterrents, whether of China or of Russia or of North Korea.

But we also need to be eyes-open about the fact that it will somewhat diminish America’s influence over our allies. And so as our allies become more capable, they will also become more autonomous. And that is a part of the mix. And so when we think about the way that the world is changing around us, whether it’s coalitions of allies that are coming together to work together in new ways that don’t include us or just the sheer capacity issue, I do think that in the world of 2029, 2030, and onwards, we should expect to see allies that are just much more used to working individually and collectively without us. And the United States will have to find a way to assert influence, but also just work with those trends rather than working against them. And that’s a major dynamic that post-Trump planners should have in mind.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Rebecca, let me stick with you for one more key relationship. If the war in Ukraine was the first big surprise in the administration, the second was the war in Gaza, and it consumed, I imagine, much of your last year or year and a half in government. You note that it’s not too early to have a big debate about the future of American foreign policy. I imagine the Democratic version of that will be consumed with debates over the U.S.-Israel relationship and over the war in Gaza. This was, I think, a place where President Biden at least had a fairly traditional view, a restorationist impulse. He would even, any time he talked about this, go back to his relationship with Golda Meir, who was prime minister of Israel in the 1970s. As you look at the need to examine American foreign policy across the board, you call for a zero-based review. If you apply that to the U.S.-Israel relationship, do you see a need for a fundamentally different kind of relationship? What would that look like?

REBECCA LISSNER

I think you could apply the question to the whole Middle East, where all of the strategic dynamics of that are so much in flux right now, and in ways that we don’t yet quite understand where they are going to net out, although they seem to be stabilizing in a way that really has placed Israel as the dominant player in the region. But if you think about the trajectory of the Middle East over the course of the Biden administration, and others have pointed this out even on the Foreign Affairs website and in the pages of your magazine, in many ways the trajectory is a sort of stunning triumph in terms of the way in which, at the beginning of the administration, you had an Iran that was still quite formidable, you had Hezbollah, you had Hamas, you had the Assad regime seemingly still very strong in Syria. And then through a series of diplomatic and security moves by sort of sticking close to the Israelis, by the end of the Biden administration, the inheritance that Trump received in the region was actually stunningly better, where you had the overthrow of the Assad regime; where you had Hezbollah effectively neutered and the first shot at a more legitimate democratic Lebanese government than you’d seen in a very long time; where you had Iran, already then on its back foot and then obviously now has been further set back. There’s an enormous, incredibly consequential caveat to that, which, of course, is Gaza and the plight of Gazans and the Palestinian people who are there, and frankly in the West Bank as well. But at a 30,000-foot level, the strategic picture is dramatically changed, and I think there we do need to see the opportunity for a region that looks really different than it has in the postwar and post–Cold War era.

The opportunities for Israel to cement normalization with other countries in the region is really significant. The possibility of sidelining Iran in a way that is durable and maybe even puts their nuclear program back in a box through diplomacy—we’ll see—could be really beneficial. And you really have the dismantlement of the so-called axis of resistance that Iran has been running, which has been firing projectiles and UAVs at U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria for quite a long time. It could also then provide opportunities both for adjustments to our military posture in the region and also new opportunities, for example, investment alongside Gulf partners and building out AI infrastructure, and so on.

And so, all of which is to say, when we think about zero-basing our policy in the Middle East, there is, of course, a very important debate to be had about the future scope and scale of the United States relationship with Israel.That has to do with what our policy is towards an [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] Israeli government, but also has to do with much longer-standing, enduring ties that we have with the country and the people of Israel. I’m certainly not in favor of breaking with that tradition wholesale, but, of course, the healthy policy debate to be had is about what the right balance is. So we’ll have that Israel debate, no question. But it does need to be placed in the broader context of, what are U.S. interests in the Middle East today? How can we finally move towards realizing that the pivot to Asia that you referenced a few minutes ago, and the sort of turn away from the post–9/11 approach in the Middle East that we’ve been attempting for so long. And I actually think that at the end of the Biden administration, we left a legacy that puts us potentially on our way to seeing through some of those actually very long-standing strategic goals. And we should be thinking in a really fresh and interesting way about what will be required to do that going forward.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

One of the key forward-looking prescriptions in the piece is that we should learn lessons from Trump’s willingness to change policy in radical and fast-moving ways and not be quite as cautious about some of those changes. Mira, as you look at what Trump has managed to do in, I guess, under six months, and being back in office this time, what does he understand about the tools of American power that you think we should take from him, that you would apply to a future administration? And let me just focus on the process elements of this. I mean, a lot of what, as you know better than anyone, makes policy slow is that you want to have a kind of proper process with the “interagency” and Deputies Committee and the National Security Council, and you need to kind of work things through the full set of considerations of risks. It’s hard to imagine that you would’ve had a meeting with Ahmed al-Shara, the new leader of Syria, so quickly if it had to go through that kind of process. How do you balance the right lessons from Trump with the need to be careful and cautious and deliberate about how we do things?

MIRA RAPP-HOOPER

Yeah, perhaps I’ll start with the process element first. I think it’s an important point, which is to say that U.S. government bureaucracy slows down quick action. It’s also U.S. government bureaucracy that ultimately implements action, right? So while it’s strictly true that maybe you lose a couple days if you need to have a deputies meeting, I think one of our colleagues, [Former Deputy National Security Adviser Jon Finer], mentioned to us at some point the multiple hundreds of deputies meetings that he chaired while he was deputy national security adviser. It is also strictly the case that the United States can move very quickly while also holding deputies meetings. The fact of holding a lot of meetings did not slow down our support for Ukraine, for example, or our ability to react after the October 7 attacks. It made sure we did so effectively and with a whole government response that meant we were actually putting out into the world the policy support that was necessary to make change.

It is strictly true, however, that what Trump has done is demonstrate the extraordinary power of the presidency as a bully pulpit that has the ability to shape and public opinion. We, across the political spectrum, but certainly also as Democrats, see public opinion as endogenous or fixed. That is, we have a sense of how far the public wants us to go on support for Ukraine or support for Israel. And our objective in our policy is to hew very close to that line so that we can keep our own coalition with us and keep up support for the policy. What Trump is demonstrating is that within the bounds of a few clear limits that we know the American people have—they don’t want Americans involved in long and bloody wars, for example—there is actually an extraordinary amount of space to move quickly and in dramatic ways and then reset again within the acceptable bounds of American public opinion.

So for a president who is deeply conscious of the fact that his party, and in particular his core MAGA base, does not want the United States involved in major wars in the Middle East, using massive ordnance penetrators against Iran was a real gamble. It created the possibility that that exchange could have gone on, could have sucked the United States in further, could have been very difficult to extricate ourselves. And in some ways, that’s still true—the fact that there is a ceasefire does not mean that violence could not resume. But Trump toed a very specific line in which he executed the dramatic, somewhat surprise use of force in this stunning fashion and then immediately pivoted to a cease-fire negotiation. And that tempo, that kind of collection of extremes, is something that certainly we are not used to working with, is difficult for anyone who isn’t him probably to pull off, but does demonstrate to us that there is a set of permission structures that we have assumed as left and right bounds in foreign policy that may not always hold. That is to say, if you know where the public is and you are functioning inside those parameters and you are messaging to them clearly, and in ways that they can understand about why you’re taking certain foreign policy steps, you may actually have quite a bit more room than you think.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Mira, let me take a brief detour into something in the news. One of the elements of the Biden foreign policy that was both innovative and surprising in the way it came about was the AUKUS deal, the nuclear submarine deal among the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Australians. My perception from the outside is that that was done by a small group of people operating in fairly atypical ways just to get it through the system quickly. It’s now being reviewed by the Trump administration. Do you think it’s under threat?

MIRA RAPP-HOOPER

Look, any new administration has the right to conduct a review of any policy it wishes. I can’t remember the last administration that came into office and didn’t conduct a North Korea review, just because it is such a fraught and high-stakes area of policy. So for an expensive, important, flagship defense program, it’s not entirely surprising that the Trump administration would wish to do the same. And there’s probably also a political element to it. AUKUS, like many other multilateral groupings—the [Quadrilateral Security Dialogue], the U.S.-[Republic of Korea]-Japan partnership—it sort of became Biden focal points. So not entirely unreasonable that the Trump administration would want to take a look to see if it could leave its own stamp on the partnership.

That said, I think many smart people at the Pentagon, including in its leadership ranks, understand that terminating or doing damage to the AUKUS partnership would be a win for the PRC. It is truly unprecedented in the deterrence that it creates in the Indo-Pacific, and it is not just good for Australia; it’s good for the United States, and good for the United States by dint of having both the United Kingdom and Australia potentially involved in regional contingencies where we might not have otherwise had support. So from a deterrence, dissuasion, and cost-shaping perspective, damage to this program would be deeply damaging to the United States. And that leads me to believe that AUKUS will be just fine. I also take heart because over the course of the last three or four years since AUKUS was announced, it has developed a huge following and lots of support on Capitol Hill, where there are now multiple senators and members who are deeply invested in the program. And those folks come from both sides of the aisle and want to make sure that this program continues on.

Now, there are many steps short of a full-on dismantlement of AUKUS that could be really challenging here. For example, any relitigation of the decision to sell Australia three Virginia-class submarines to make up its capabilities gap between now and the early 2030s would also be really problematic because there’s no clear substitute for those boats at a time when the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia are just working to stand up the manufacturer of SSN-AUKUS. Nevertheless, I come back to where I started. This is a program that is intended to defend against and deter the PRC, and any undermining of AUKUS undermines that goal.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Rebecca, let me stick with this notion of an Overton window that, as the two of you put in the piece, has been blown wide open. Where do you see new space for policy creativity that didn’t exist as you at least understood it in the last term?

REBECCA LISSNER

Look, as you know, I worked for Vice President Kamala Harris and every fiber of my being wishes that she had won the 2024 election. But I think being where we are, we have to recognize that the scope and scale of destruction that Trump has undertaken and will undertake over the course of this term does, within it, create a certain opportunity. The United States, in the wake of the Second World War, created an international system and forged certain grand strategic habits that have proved remarkably durable over time. They’ve served the United States incredibly well. But here we are in 2025, we’re entering the second quarter of the twenty-first century. And it just simply cannot be true that a set of policies and a set of institutions and structures that were built for the world of 1945, or the world of 1991, remain perfectly fit for purpose for the world of 2025, 2035, 2045, and beyond.

And so where the opportunity lies in a post-Trump world is to really create a new vision for American foreign policy and a new vision for the international order that is fit for the twenty-first century, which means that we have to ask ourselves some really hard questions. What would it look like to build an American foreign policy that really takes seriously the consequences of the AI revolution? What would it mean to build an American foreign policy that actually was serious about the economic potential of our hemisphere, rather than perennially treating Latin America as an afterthought or even the global South in general as an afterthought when that will be the engine of so much economic growth over the coming decades? What would it mean to build an American foreign policy that was more humble about post-Trump realities in terms of our ability to exert moral authority and promote democracy around the world?

And so the zero-based review concept aims to seize on that opportunity: the marriage of the recognition that, for a long time, we have needed to renovate certain tenets of our foreign policy and certain tenets of the international order with this new political opportunity, this wider Overton window, that Trump seemingly has created. And when you put those two things together, it’s actually a historic opportunity, something that comes only once in a generation or even two generations, to recognize the urgency of the moment, that we need to adapt our foreign policy for the world that we face today and the world that’s coming at us as the United States of America, and the fact that so many of our national security bureaucratic institutions will be decimated to the point that they will have to be rebuilt. So how do we, to borrow a Biden phrase, build them back better? And our alliances will have evolved, the world will see us differently.

And so rather than fight against all of those changes, even the ones that we see as against our interests, how can we leverage them to create an American foreign policy that really advances our interests as we understand them today and advances the will of the American people as we see it today? So that really is the opportunity here, and that’s why, at the end of the day, we see our piece as a call to action, and a very urgent one, because if we as American foreign policy thinkers and strategists don’t seize the opportunity to build creatively from the wreckage of Trump’s foreign policy, we may miss a moment that will never come again because the world will move on without us.

And the temptation to come in in 2029, whether as a Democrat or a more traditional Republican, and either just try to repair, try to reverse the things that Trump did, and try to revert to some kind of more traditional foreign policy, or even to restore us back to some sort of golden age of yore, those are actually really dangerous temptations. Because if we do them, the United States will not have an approach to the world that is geared towards the multipolarity that is coming towards us, and that Trump is only accelerating. And so our hope is that over the course of the next few years, we will work together, and work with many others, to build out and fill in the contours of this vision, beginning with the analytic exercise of a zero-based review, but then also going well beyond that to build a full-fledged foreign policy platform that truly does meet this moment.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You note in the piece that it’s too soon to say exactly what the world will look like in 2029, but I would stress that during World War II—you refer back to [Former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson] in this piece, and the title references the title of his memoir—during World War II, American policymakers were, years before the war ended, trying to think about the order that came afterwards. So Mira, to close, to the extent that you can say anything about the kind of contours of the order that you would like to see come afterward, what does that look like and how is it different than the rules-based order that existed for decades after that “present at the creation” moment that Acheson writes about?

MIRA RAPP-HOOPER

Well, again, a great question, Dan, and I think it's important to note that it’s a successor to the rules-based order that we have been living in for the past many generations. Exactly as you say, there was this unique moment in time, perhaps the last time we’ve had, as we call it, such a “tabula rasa” moment that we’ll have in the next few years during World War II, where planners really were thinking about what would come next.

But what they built in the immediate postwar period was then embellished, layered upon, renovated in different pieces, and then finally appeared to completely triumph in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, and then was kind of an uncontested American-led version of the order that was a new iteration of what had been built in the immediate postwar period. So we haven’t had a reckoning that required us to really take about renovating this thing since then because the last major system change we had at the end of the Cold War was in our favor, and the institutions appeared to be working so well that there was no need to change them. And American power was so unrivaled that there was nothing that we couldn’t do within the bounds of this prior system.

The reason we are calling, in this call to action, for changes now that will meet the movement as we are going to find it is because we are no longer completely unrivaled in that power. And changes to the system need to be made so that we can continue to function effectively within it. So we’re not calling for an overturning of international law or rethinking of all our memberships in every international institution. Rather, we want to rethink all of these things such that we’ll be able to accomplish our goals inside of them. And what that means is really recognizing both the limitations of pieces of the system that have ceased to function because of power transitions. A great example would be the UN Security Council, where Russian and Chinese membership have basically ground the thing to a standstill. That doesn’t mean it’s not important to be a member of the UN and to participate in the Security Council, but we need to have a really reasonable reckoning with what can be accomplished there by way of agenda items that matter to us in the world.

But it also means reconfiguring parts of the system that actually still may be working for us so that we can get more done through those mechanisms with what may nonetheless be relatively diminished power. So one of the things that is still working and that I do believe will be around to be rehabilitated, at least one iteration more, is our alliance system. Whereas we have discussed, I think it’s unlikely that any given treaty commitment will be terminated, but there will be a ton of change inside of each one of these individual groupings. And whether that is empowering a more autonomous Europe or whether that is repositioning U.S. resources, military assets to privilege Asia, or whether it is reframing these alliances to center—even more—economic issues, trade issues, regulatory issues, to really bring our alliance compacts into those spaces. We’re going to need to do a lot of thinking about how to use a system that continues to promise amplification of American power in a world in which it is increasingly challenged.

So this is all to say that an America that is facing a multipolar world can still be extremely strong and extremely successful at achieving its aims in that world. It just has to be much more intentional in the way that it approaches its leadership, plans for the use of its resources, and harnesses institutions and partners to a set of shared objectives. The reason we can’t miss this moment is because if we do—if we attempt the restoration that Rebecca has warned us against—we will find ourselves returning to all of these traditional groupings with the world having moved around us, less powerful and less able to use them for the same objectives. But if we undertake this zero-based rethink and really consider what renovation is necessary, we have the ability to return to the world in a way that is still quite impressive, still pretty unprecedented, and able to achieve peace, prosperity, security, and all of the basic fundamental interests that we’ve been striving for since the end of World War II.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

One of the messages that comes through really clearly in your essay is the value of, and really the need for, a very fervent debate about some of these fundamental issues. So I will look forward to having the two of you take part in that debate in our pages and elsewhere over the next few years. But it will be, I think, part of a much broader set of discussions about questions of American foreign policy that haven’t gotten a lot of consideration in the last few years. So thank you for the essay, which really, I think, helped to set that off, and we look forward to continuing it in the months and years ahead.

REBECCA LISSNER

Thanks so much, Dan.

MIRA RAPP-HOOPER

Thanks for a great conversation.