How Trump dismantled the international liberal order
The US president dislikes multilateralism and deprioritises values-based alliances, instead preferring to do bilateral business with authoritarian dealmakers, leaving the postwar order in tatters
Ewan_White
How Trump dismantled the international liberal order
Donald Trump continues to represent a complete rupture with the legacy of American foreign policy, seeking not to manage the existing system but to undermine it systematically. Trumpism, therefore, transcends the traditional partisan divide; it represents a structural challenge to the established institutional order.
Trump is no rules-based player; he is a subversive within the system, who is now targeting the bureaucratic and values-based foundations upon which American policy has stood since the end of World War II. Trump’s paradigm centres on 'deals and sovereignty' (values seem to come a distant second). This is about more than just his personality. Rather, it is a broader phenomenon that he embodies.
His transformation of American foreign policy was, firstly, a direct reflection of deep divisions and political conflict in America has transcends traditional partisan disagreements, becoming a clash of identities between tribes. These tribes—whether conservative, populist right, or progressive left—draw their news from distinct media ecosystems within isolated social bubbles. Today, national dialogue is nearly impossible. Trump embodies this tribal reality. His tribe is the dominant 'America First' movement. Others are cast as adversaries to either negotiate with or confront.
NATO and Europe
From 2017, Trump directed his first blows at the US-initiated foundations of the post-World War II global order by targeting its cornerstone: the transatlantic relationship. His was a deliberate rejection of the ideological underpinnings of this NATO alliance. The Marshall Plan of 1948 was not merely economic aid to rebuild Europe, but an ideological investment to forge strong allies against the Soviet threat. For seven decades, this was a values-based partnership uniting liberal democracies.
Trump, driven by purely utilitarian logic, saw no enduring value in this legacy, viewing it instead as a failed business deal that drained American resources. By reframing the US security guarantee as a paid service, rather than a global commitment, Trump replaced ideological bonds with the transactional logic of cost and return. To his populist base, Europe was not an ally. Rather, it represented a condescending globalist elite, mirroring the Washington establishment Trump saw as his enemy.
In essence, Trump redefined what an ally was. For him, the likes of Germany and Japan were not strategic partners but economic competitors, exploiting American generosity by selling their goods on US markets while benefiting from America's military umbrella. He argued that trade deficits with countries like Europe posed a threat. For him, trade rivals were almost as bad as military rivals.
Trump's repeated calls for burden-sharing were cast as efforts to redefine the US-NATO relationship. In truth, these weren't genuine efforts to reform the alliance. They more closely resembled blackmail to end America's sponsorship. By threatening to withdraw or withhold US defence commitments from NATO allies who failed to pay their share, he undermined Article 5, the mutual defence clause.
China and elites
When it came to China, Trump tore up Henry Kissinger's decades-old doctrine of engagement. Since the 1970s, the US has assumed that integrating China into the global economy through trade would spur its political liberalisation. Trump felt this was naive, arguing that it had instead forged a strategic rival, one that exploited the global trading system to undermine its primary architect: the United States.
Again, this shift embodied the populists' rejection of Washington's elitist consensus, which favoured the interests of multinational corporations and global finance, by framing China as an industrial partner. For Trump, this overlooked the erosion of America's heartland industrial base—the one that elected him. In doing so, they elected an outsider to this elite, who, in turn, harnessed the anger of the neglected.
For him and those who listen to him, globalisation—whether embodied by China, Europe, or Davos—had sacrificed American workers for profits. He argued that this sacrifice was founded on a values-based illusion: the assumption that economic openness inevitably fosters political liberalisation along Western lines. Yet for Trump, this was not working. China was reaping the benefits of the global trading system, while unbound by its ideological and values-based strictures, spawning an economic colossus that preyed on the liberal order's naivety for its own ascendancy.
Trump designated China as a strategic competitor, rather than a partner. This was no cosmetic adjustment; it marked a radical shift in doctrine. Yet their rivalry differs from the US-Soviet Cold War face-off, which was both ideological and military in nature. Instead, the US-China rivalry is a techno-economic Cold War. Its fault lines are not nuclear weapons, but 5G networks, supply chain infrastructure, and Artificial Intelligence.
A controversial personal affinity with Putin dominated Trump's approach to Russia, which critics saw as undermining the traditional NATO bulwark against Moscow
Picking fights
Now openly confronting Beijing, Trump reformulated its relationships with other major powers, not least Russia and India. A controversial personal affinity with President Putin dominated Trump's approach to Russia, which critics saw as undermining the traditional NATO bulwark against Moscow. Trump's outstretched hand can be interpreted as a move to reposition Russia as a trading partner.
During Trump's first term, the US partnership with India deepened. He saw New Delhi as a strategic and economic counterweight to Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific. With both Russia and India, pragmatic partnerships emerged in place of the old, values-based bloc. Flexible, temporary alliances aligned with 'America First' principles were the new order of the day, with deals the focus.
If Europe is the ideological ally that Trump undermined, then Canada is the exceptional ally whose exceptionalism he shattered, proving that no alliances are sacred. Far from a 'special relationship,' Trump treated its northern neighbour as just another nation that needed to pay its way. Trump saw Canada under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as liberal, multicultural, and politically correct—everything he stood against.
Trump's feud with Trudeau was never a trade dispute over dairy (a longstanding grievance rooted in Canada's supply management system, which protects local producers through quotas and high tariffs on US imports, enraging American farmers and prompting Trump to impose retaliatory tariffs and demand concessions). It was a show of force intended to prove that his transactional approach superseded liberal values, which he sees as a weakness.
Rooted in a shared North American identity, the US-Canada relationship was rejected by Trump's rigid tribal logic, in which there is only America as the tribe, and Canada as the 'other.' This was illustrated in talks to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the USMCA (United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement). The focus shifted from continental partnership to Trump's correction of what he perceived as an imbalance—not least in dairy. From the notion of an alliance of equals underpinning the postwar system, Trump now spoke about Canada "joining" America.
US President Donald Trump signs a document reinstating sanctions against Iran after announcing the US withdrawal from the Iran Nuclear deal, in the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House in Washington, DC, on May 8, 2018.
Eyeing Iran
Trump's policy toward Iran was not merely an alternative approach; it was a deliberate dismantling of the diplomatic framework constructed by his predecessor, Barack Obama. He withdrew from Obama's 2015 nuclear agreement (the JCPOA) because he repudiated Obama's containment-through-diplomacy strategy. Trump rejected the very concept of a grand bargain, saying it simply gave Iran billions of dollars to fund the expansion of Iran's regional influence, which would only threaten allies like Israel.
His JCPOA withdrawal fits into Trump's populist campaign against an institutional elite, for whom Obama's global diplomacy was an epitome. The nuclear deal was a complex, multilateral arrangement crafted by the very establishment figures whom Trump's supporters regarded as dangerously naïve. Pulling out was a symbolic declaration that the era of 'bad deals' forged by globalist US administrations had ended.
There would be no more diplomatic compromise to avert the worst outcomes. Trump's school of conflict resolution envisaged "winning deals". He rejected half-measures; in his view, the nuclear agreement was a losing deal because it failed to confront the real issue: Iran's regional influence. Accordingly, he applied "maximum pressure" to provoke economic collapse or even regime change (though not explicitly stated as such), and joined Israel in bombing Iran's nuclear infrastructure in June 2025.
At the end of Trump's first term, he ordered the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, commander of Iran's Quds Force. He was the architect of Iran's regional ambitions and was considered the second-most-powerful man in Iran after Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Soleimani's killing signalled that the US would use force to strike at the very core of Iran's regional power structure.
First Lady Melania Trump and President Donald Trump, wearing a "Make America Great Again" hat, during a meeting with military families at the White House on 4 July.
'Global swamp'
'America First' was more than a campaign slogan; it became a doctrine of organised retreat from the institutions that the US had built and led for decades. It signalled a transition from global leadership to strategic disengagement and an assault on multilateralism, which was, at its core, a direct manifestation of populist revolt.
For Trump, the likes of the United Nations, the World Health Organisation, and the World Trade Organisation epitomised globalism, a "global swamp" governed by unelected bureaucrats. For his base, this was the international elite to whom past US presidents had repeatedly sacrificed American sovereignty in agreements such as the Paris Climate Accord, struck in pursuit of global agendas.
His withdrawals, therefore, served as a domestic political performance, demonstrating to his supporters that he was dismantling the global architecture they believed had undermined America's working class, with its bureaucratic institutions. Instead, he pursued the law of power ('might makes right') in bilateral negotiations. In Trump's worldview, the only solutions are sovereign ones that prioritise American interests, even if that comes at the expense of international instability.
At the World Trade Organisation, Trump blocked the appointment of judges to the Appellate Body, effectively 'bombing' the judicial core of the free trade system the United States had once built, rendering it nearly inoperative. This was not an attempt at reform, but an act of dismantlement: to strip the WTO of enforcement authority and restore what he saw as the natural order of power politics in trade.
(L-R)Bahrain Foreign Minister Abdullatif al-Zayani, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, US President Donald Trump, and UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan after signing the Abraham Accords on 15 September 2020.
Middle East policy
The most significant transformation in America's Middle East policy is a shift from the long-standing doctrine of conflict management to one of conflict bypass. The Abraham Accords, together with the decision to relocate the US embassy to Jerusalem, symbolised the formal end of the traditional peace process that Washington had championed since the Madrid Conference in the early 1990s.
For decades, the Palestinian track had been the exclusive domain of the State Department's bureaucratic and diplomatic elite, yet endless negotiations had produced no tangible breakthrough. Trump, as an outsider to this establishment, viewed it as a case study in institutional failure, so he decided to circumvent it. The longstanding guiding principle of 'land for peace' was supplanted by a new formula: 'economy for peace.' This defied the experts with his transactional, results-oriented approach.
For decades, the Palestinian question was a value-based obstacle to any attempt at regional reconfiguration, a moral and historical legacy that had to be confronted before progress could occur. To Trump, it represented a sunk cost obstructing the more strategic priority of forming a regional economic-security alliance against Iran.
The Abraham Accords embodied Trump's doctrine in its purest form—prioritising the deal over the ideal, the economy and security over rights and historical claims. The objective was not peace for its own sake but the creation of an alliance of interests between Israel and the Gulf states, with a view to establishing a framework resembling NATO, unified by a common adversary: Iran.
For years, the Palestinian conflict was the central barrier to normalising relations. Still, within this new paradigm, it was relegated to a secondary issue to be addressed later or mitigated through economic means. Trump effectively reordered the region's priorities, replacing the logic of rights with the logic of deals.
Rather than resolve the Palestinian issue, he leapt over it, advancing a vision of regional integration built on security cooperation and material interests rather than historical reconciliation. Trump's brokered ceasefire in Gaza clearly reaffirmed this. Eschewing traditional multilateral diplomacy, he used pressure and threats to force a truce.
Trump's approach to the War on Terror epitomises the direct application of deal-making logic to military intervention. For him, there would be no more costly 'nation-building', such as in Afghanistan and Iraq, where efforts to build democratic systems and conduct expansive counter-insurgency operations met with little success. From a societal transformation perspective, the focus would shift to threat elimination with minimal loss, maximum benefit, and minimal cost.
Withdrawing from Afghanistan, which Trump negotiated and his successor, Joe Biden, carried out, reframed defeat as an exit deal. Large-scale ground deployments were replaced by special forces operations, intensive drone strikes, and the targeted assassinations of senior adversaries such as Islamic State (IS) leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. This was the use of concentrated force for immediate, measurable results, with no obligation for open-ended presence or nation-building.
US President Donald Trump speaks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, as they meet to negotiate for an end to the war in Ukraine, at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, US, August 15, 2025.
Strongman club
A populist persona, Trump's foreign policy became an extension of his domestic political style, replacing traditional diplomatic procedures and institutional channels with what some call "Twitter diplomacy," in reference to his social media posts addressing both US and international audiences and foreign leaders, often announcing critical decisions or issuing tariff threats in this way. This effectively bypasses his own bureaucracy.
His affinity with strong leaders such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was not merely a matter of temperament but of a shared governance philosophy. To Trump, they are fellow dealmakers who embody the model of decisive, centralised power that he admires.
European or Canadian leaders, by contrast, are regarded as administrators bound by the limitations of consensus and multilateralism. In this vein, Trump is redefining what constitutes an American ally. This is no longer contingent on democratic credentials, as it was during the Cold War, but on strength and the ability to strike deals.
Perhaps the most striking expression of this diplomatic reorientation towards 'strong' leaders was his historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore. For decades, Washington resisted such a meeting, fearing it would legitimise dictatorship. Trump, however, viewed it through a dealmaker's lens: as a potential transaction, rather than a moral compromise, so he bypassed the State Department and its protocols, framing it as a personal negotiation between two strong leaders.
Through his public admiration of leaders he deems strong and decisive, Trump bestows a kind of international legitimacy upon this mode of governance. Liberals see it as glorifying authoritarianism. On 18 October, widespread protests hit this theme. Holding placard images of a crowned Trump, they demanded: "No Kings in the US." Trump wants America to operate in a world defined by the calculus of powerful, transactional relationships. Others prefer a world defined by democratic ideals.
Pulling out of the JCPOA with Iran was a symbolic declaration that the era of 'bad deals' forged by globalist US administrations had ended
Enduring mark
There is no question that Trump and Trumpism have left an enduring mark that is likely to transcend his presidency. His dismantling of America's bureaucratic machinery has, in many cases, achieved immediate outcomes that the traditional system had long failed to deliver, such as compelling allies to shoulder the financial costs of their own defence and redirecting US policy away from open-ended wars.
It has forced both allies and adversaries to recalibrate within a global context where unchallenged American leadership is no longer assumed to be the norm. Trump's experiment proves that, however briefly, the logic of deals and sovereignty has overtaken the liberal doctrine of values-based alliances and institutions that structured the international order.
Closest to home, Trump has dismantled the institutional foundations of the Republican Party itself. The party's traditional orientation—shaped by Ronald Reagan and George Bush, based on free trade and values-based interventionism—has been replaced by his own programme of populist nationalism and an 'America First' doctrine. He is now an entrenched and ascendant current within American conservatism that promises to shape the nation's political trajectory well into the future.
