Three scenarios for a post-Trump world

A US-captained bloc would feature democratic allies around the Eurasian periphery. An array of swing states—from India to Saudi Arabia, Brazil to Indonesia—would align selectively with these blocs while manoeuvring opportunistically between them. The future of international politics would lead back toward the Cold War past.

This wouldn't be a perfect rerun: A globally connected China has much better options for economic attraction and coercion than the Kremlin ever did. But this scenario would see a progressive fragmentation of the international economy, as sanctions and supply chains are weaponised. Decoupling would be less a question of if than of when and on whose terms. As in the Cold War, a bipolar rivalry would ensnare every region. The most dangerous places—Ukraine, Taiwan, the South China Sea—would sit along the geopolitical divide.

Like it or not, strong structural forces are encouraging this future. US-China tensions may rise or fall with this summit or that crisis. US President Donald Trump may refer to Chinese President Xi Jinping with reverence and awe. But the fundamental clash is only intensifying as China's drive for mastery—in key technologies, in global trade, in the Western Pacific—slams into US power and prerogatives. Great-power fights tend to polarise world politics; interdependence becomes a source of vulnerability amid vicious disputes.

In many respects, the momentum toward this future is accelerating. Russia's war in Ukraine has turbocharged economic, technological, and military alignment among the Eurasian autocracies. Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin know they can triumph only by fighting back-to-back against the democratic community. The question, really, is whether Washington can still rally the free world.

The better angels of Trump's policy could set up Washington and its allies for success in a new cold war. The demons tell a different story.

To Trump's credit, his administration is building an armed-up democratic community by demanding higher military spending to resist interlocking threats. Trade deals that bring allied investments to the US innovation base could catalyse the pooling of resources and production needed to match China's economic scale. Critical-minerals partnerships offer a path, albeit a long one, to escaping China's chokehold. Not least, Trump has bloodied the autocratic axis by pummeling its weaker members, Iran and Venezuela. Perhaps Cuba will be next. And if history is any guide, his drive to reassert hemispheric hegemony—his Donroe Doctrine—is a prerequisite to projecting power in the wider world.

Trump's ethos, in which big states call the shots and little ones accept their lots, makes him a better match for Xi and Putin than for most US allies. His coercive, asymmetric dealmaking gives the impression that he cares less about strengthening the democratic community than wringing maximum concessions out of it. His demands for Greenland and Canada threaten to align Washington with land-hungry revisionists—and rip the trans-Atlantic core of the free world apart. More and more, European allies fear finding themselves trapped among three greedy powers: China, Russia, and the United States. If that's the case, there won't be a new cold war—because there won't be a democratic bloc to blunt the autocratic one.

Still, don't discount the two-worlds scenario. The Trump era will leave construction as well as carnage. As autocratic threats intensify, so will the incentives for even transactional cooperation among democracies. If Trump's successors can tell a story of common purpose, rather than simple self-enrichment, they might reforge a free-world compact, with new levels of collective effort and new approaches to burden-sharing. This future will still bring crisis and conflict; there will be no shortage of peril. But it's still the best scenario, for all democracies. Two worlds are preferable to a Chinese-run system—or one that fragments further still.

This second scenario is that the post-American world shatters not into two great blocs but into several smaller, regional spheres. The United States seeks strategic insulation by refocusing on a hemispheric empire spanning Honolulu and Nuuk, the Arctic and Argentina. As Washington bids farewell to transoceanic burdens, China surges to primacy along the vast crescent from Southeast to Northeast Asia. Russia consolidates, perhaps bloodily, its dominance in the former Soviet space and parts of Eastern Europe.

But this spheres-of-influence partition isn't just a great-power game. In a fragmenting world, India grabs for primacy in South Asia and the Indian Ocean. Türkiye stakes out a post-Ottoman domain at the intersection of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other contenders jostle for hegemony in the Red Sea complex that links the Arabian Gulf and the Horn of Africa. After Pax Americana comes a new age of empires.

Those empires need not be hermetically sealed or militarily occupied, like Nazi-ruled Europe: Hegemony can be expressed in many forms. Yet in this future, global order breaks upon the rocks of power politics.

International law disintegrates as regional potentates set norms of acceptable behaviour; they pressure or topple disobedient clients. Regional masters rewire flows of trade, investment, and resources; they also enforce strict limits on weaker neighbours' ties to other powers. In a new age of empires, there will be no European or Asian military bases in Latin America; Washington's overseas alliances are dead or in tatters. Think of this as a set of Monroe Doctrines for various parts of the world.

Historically, some spheres of influence have been created by gangsters' pacts, the classic case being the division of Eastern Europe by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Some contemporary analysts imagine Xi, Trump, and Putin hatching their own globe-slicing bargain. But spheres of influence can also emerge informally or incrementally.

If the United States breaks NATO by stealing land from its members, the rise of a US sphere in the Western Hemisphere could abet the rise of a Russian sphere in Eastern Europe. If a relentless Chinese buildup makes the first island chain—running from Japan to Taiwan to the Philippines—indefensible, the Western Pacific will fall under Beijing's shadow even if the Pentagon never explicitly concedes that fact. So, if Washington goes all-in on hemispheric hegemony while taking the view—as Trump himself has said—that events an ocean away are someone else's problem, a multisphere world could be the result.

That sometimes feels like the direction of travel. Russia and China are years into quests for regional mastery. Now, Trump is ruthlessly enforcing Washington's writ in the Americas—forcibly removing hostile rulers, laying claim to vital resources, using lethal force on the high seas—while pushing front-line Eurasian allies to take charge of their own defence. Trump's nose-thumbing at international law is a 21st-century echo of Secretary of State Richard Olney's 19th-century declaration that Washington was "practically sovereign on this continent." We're glimpsing the possibility that hemispheric primacy could one day replace, rather than enable, global presence.

Yet Trump is no rigid hemisphericist: He touts the Donroe Doctrine while pushing for peace deals on far-off continents and waging wildly ambitious wars in the Middle East. Perhaps that's because he knows that a world strictly divided into spheres would be a bruising comedown for a superpower.

There would be no more one-sided trade deals with Eurasian allies desperate to keep US protection, no reason for Japan or Germany to prop up dollar dominance. If the United States is squeezed out of East Asia, with its dynamic economies, crucial trade routes, and high-value supply chains, it will surely struggle to compete with China: Taiwan for Honduras isn't a good trade. Global leverage comes from global engagement.

And if a spheres-based system weakens US power, it may also weaken the very stability its proponents crave. In theory, spheres of influence purchase great-power peace through lesser-power subservience: Strong states divide the globe and keep unruly elements in check. It's true that there won't be a US-China clash over Taiwan if Washington quits the Western Pacific. But don't count on lasting peace.

Complex interdependence makes the shift to spheres acrimonious: It will take a lot of US coercion to roll back China's digital penetration and infrastructure presence in South America. Conversely, the achievement of a sphere in East Asia might simply be the beginning, rather than the end, of Chinese ambitions: For the United States, hemispheric primacy was a jumping-off point for global intervention.

Most important, spheres of influence aren't simply granted or given; their origins are often bathed in blood. Ambitious autocracies have a penchant for brutality, even genocide, in areas they control. And small and medium states, knowing what may await them, have options other than passively accepting domination. Ukraine has fought ferociously to stay clear of Russia's empire. Japan might well do likewise—or simply build nuclear weapons—to avoid submission to Beijing. That danger points us to a third scenario that could come after our waning order: ugly, violent disarray.

At this year's World Economic Forum, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declared that the rupture of the old order offered a middle power opportunity. By working together and strengthening their capabilities, he argued, these countries could carve a path between the great states and preserve a tolerable system for themselves.

It's an old dream. Since the 1970s, scholars and strategists have hoped that the world can have rules without rulers—that smaller states can somehow preserve the best parts of the US-built order even after US leadership is gone. It's also an illusion. Order cannot be sustained absent the commitment—much less over the objections—of the mightiest actors. So the likeliest alternative to a new cold war or new age of empires is an anarchic mess.

In this scenario, the United States goes rogue: Trump's darker impulses foretell the emergence of a brutish, norm-busting superpower. Washington engages in aggressive territorial expansion. It appropriates, through force or coercion, vital resources from weaker powers. It demands ever-greater tribute from dependencies; it interferes incessantly, on behalf of illiberal populists, in the politics of Europe and other regions. The United States weaponises, not abandons, its global role.

This scenario is so dire because US behaviour creates a world in which all three of the great powers are grasping, rapacious revisionists. Smaller powers, especially along Eurasia's fault lines of conflict, are in danger of being squeezed on several sides. Self-help—essentially, every nation for itself—is the only plausible response.

Territorial aggression, even the disappearance of states, becomes far more common because there is no great power committed to preserving the status quo or vindicating the sovereignty of weaker nations. A self-help world thus sees some vulnerable states smashed, subordinated, or vivisected. The war in Ukraine might be a preview of the future, rather than an ugly reminder of the past. Other states would arm themselves feverishly, perhaps seeking nuclear weapons as the best guarantee of survival.

Meanwhile, rivalries long smothered by US power might reignite: If European states rearm while the European Union—perhaps under combined US and Russian pressure—fractures, look out for a return of the arms races and security competitions that were once so common on that continent.

Say goodbye to freedom of navigation: As international stability breaks down, countries and even quasi-state actors will scramble to control vital chokepoints, from the Panama Canal and Northern Sea Route to the Bab el-Mandab and Strait of Hormuz. In a lawless world, physical control of trade, resources, and markets looms larger—which simply reinforces other motives for conquest.

Even if the world ultimately finds a new model of stability, it might also find that the soaring achievements of the post-1945 era have, in the intervening havoc, been undone.

This all sounds like a nightmare. But viewed through the lens of history, it's not such a stretch.

The end of British hegemony in the early 1900s didn't promptly usher in a new world. It unleashed decades of chaos. For centuries before the rise of British hegemony, a multipolar Europe—then the centre of the international system—was a hothouse of tyranny and war.

Our belief that relative stability is the norm and rampant brutality the exception is the intellectual residue left by generations of benign US hegemony. If that hegemony ends or turns predatory, get ready for a nasty relapse.

In fact, anarchy is never as fully suppressed as we think it is, and hints of a self-help world are already here. Fears about US reliability are stimulating nuclear curiosity: Witness the interest of South Korea and Japan in obtaining nuclear-powered submarines or the nuclear armament debates that are intensifying even in Sweden and Germany. Worst-case planning is gaining currency. For the first time in generations, Canada is reportedly preparing to protect itself from US invasion.

New defence partnerships are emerging, often creating new tensions. The Pakistan-Saudi Arabia defence pact signed last year has already inflamed Indian anxieties; it could aggravate Middle Eastern rivalry with Israel if Türkiye joins. Rivalry is roiling key regions. The situation in Libya and across the Horn of Africa, where proxy wars rage as several powers chase resources and strategic real estate, may be a window into the multipolar disorder ahead.

That chaos wouldn't last forever: Eventually, a new hierarchy with new rules would solidify. But it took a global economic depression and two world wars to bridge the interregnum between Pax Britannica and Pax Americana. Even if the world ultimately finds a new model of stability, it might also find that the soaring achievements of the post-1945 era have, in the intervening havoc, been undone.

Think of our moment as a crossroads—a point from which global politics can take one of several paths. The uncertainty is profound because the paths lead to very different destinations. What we already know is that the next era will be more divided and dangerous than the last.

A decade ago, another cold war seemed like a worst-case outcome. Now, it's probably our best hope. A two-worlds scenario would see perilous crises and further fracture the global economy. Outcompeting a confident, combative China will require vast resources and acumen from the democratic bloc. But that scenario at least preserves "half a world," as former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson once wrote; it entails sufficient democratic cooperation to sustain a tolerable balance of power and hold Beijing's most ambitious impulses in check.

The other scenarios—a new age of empires that proves far less stable and advantageous than advertised or a descent back into chaos—are uglier. Those paths may tempt a superpower that has largely forgotten just how awful the period that preceded Pax Americana was—but be assured, they end in darkness.

The irony is that the United States still gets an outsized say in what follows the order it created because—for better or worse—the choices of the world's mightiest actor still matter the most. If the country channels Trump's best policies, it might steer a reformed, if badly ruffled, democratic community toward the collective effort required to resist autocratic pressure. If, however, Washington pulls back from overseas theatres, it will invite a scramble for spheres of influence. If the United States turns renegade, it will join the revisionists, tearing down the old order and thrusting the world into a new era of self-help.

There are signs of all three tendencies in Trump's eclectic foreign policy. The coming years—and US electoral cycles—will determine which of those tendencies harden into patterns that become progressively more difficult to reverse.

Perhaps the lack of US. domestic support for seizing Greenland shows that Trump's excesses will eventually discredit his wilder instincts. His successor, whether a Democrat or Republican, may find a way of marrying more traditional foreign-policy ideas to the domestic political realities of an America First era. That president could moderate Trump's disruption while exploiting his more helpful legacies to rebuild the free world for a new cold war.

Alternatively, perhaps one of Trump's military adventures backfires. In the aftermath, the neoisolationist wing of the MAGA movement—the part that takes its cues from pundits such as Tucker Carlson—triumphs, and a superpower hunkers down in its hemisphere. Or maybe Trump's true successor, in the Republican Party and the presidency, will be someone who argues that he didn't go far enough in using US power to wreck the established order. It wouldn't be the first time a revolution was eventually captured by its most radical elements.

The old order is dying: Eulogising a globally minded, liberal international order won't bring it back. The critical question, to be answered in the coming decade, is whether Washington tries to replace that world with something fraught but tolerable—or drives the present uncertainty toward something radically worse.