That macabre banquet presaged a recent luncheon President Donald J. Trump hosted at the White House for this nation’s top tech executives, which became a symphony of shameless sycophancy. Billionaire Bill Gates praised the president’s “incredible leadership,” while Apple CEO Tim Cook said it was “incredible to be among… you and the first lady” before thanking him “for helping American companies around the world.” Other executives there celebrated him for having “unleashed American innovation and creativity… making it possible for America to win” again and making this “the most exciting time in America, ever.” As Trump served up the corpse of American democracy, those tech courtiers, like so many of this country’s elites, downed their slice of the cadaver with ill-concealed gusto.
With Congress compliant, the Supreme Court complicit, and media corporations compromised, President Trump’s vision for America and its place in the world has become the nation’s destiny. Since the inauguration for his second term in office in January 2025, he has launched a radical “America first” foreign policy that seems primed to accelerate the decline of Washington’s international influence and, more seriously and much less obviously, degrade (if not destroy) the liberal international order that the US has sustained since the end of World War II. Largely ignored by a media overwhelmed by daily outrages from the Oval Office, that initiative has some truly serious implications for America’s role in the world.
Trump’s Geopolitical Vision
Amid a torrent of confusing, often contradictory foreign policy pronouncements pouring out of the White House, the design of the president’s dubious geopolitical strategy has taken shape with surprising, even stunning speed. Instead of maintaining longstanding security alliances like NATO, Trump seems to prefer a globe divided into three major regional blocs, each headed by an empowered autocrat like himself—with Russia dominating its European periphery, China paramount in Asia, and the United States controlling North and much of South America (and Greenland).
Reflecting what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called a “loathing of European freeloading” and Vice President JD Vance’s complaint that Europe has abandoned “our shared democratic values,” President Trump is pursuing this tri-continental strategy at the expense of the traditional transatlantic alliance embodied in NATO that has been the foundation for US foreign policy since the start of the Cold War.
Admittedly, Trump’s reach for complete control over North America does lend a certain geopolitical logic to his otherwise quixotic overtures to claim Greenland, reclaim the Panama Canal, and make Canada the 51st state. In Trump’s vision of fortress America, the country’s more compact defense perimeter would encompass the entire Arctic, including Greenland, march down the mid-Atlantic with an anchor at the Panama Canal, and encompass the entire Pacific. Not only does such a strategy carry the high cost of alienating once-close allies Canada and Mexico, but every one of its key components comes laden with a potential for serious conflict, particularly the administration’s plans for the Pacific, which run headlong into China’s ongoing maritime expansion.
Demolishing the Liberal International Order
At a broader level, President Trump’s foreign policy represents a forceful repudiation of the three key attributes of the “liberal international order” that has marked US global hegemony since the end of World War II in 1945: alliances like NATO that treated allies as peer powers, free trade without tariff barriers, and an ironclad assurance of inviolable sovereignty for all nations, large and small. In a matter of months, Trump has crippled NATO by expressing doubt about its critical mutual-defense clause, imposed an escalating roster of punitive tariffs antithetical to free trade, and threatened to expropriate several sovereign states and territories.
Not only is his ongoing demolition of Washington’s world order inflicting a good deal of pain on much of the globe—from Africans and Asians denied the US Agency for International Development’s lifesaving medicines (and potentially suffering 14 million deaths) to Eastern Europeans threatened by Russia’s relentless advance—but it also undercuts America’s future position on a post-Trumpian planet. His successor could, of course, try to reconcile with Canada and Mexico, placate an insulted Panamanian leadership, and even repair relations with NATO. But the president’s ongoing demolition of Washington’s world system is guaranteed to do lasting, long-term damage to the country’s international standing in ways that have so far eluded even informed observers.
To grasp the full extent of the harm Trump is inflicting on America’s place on this planet, it’s important to understand that Washington’s “liberal international order” is nothing more than the latest iteration of the “world order” that every global hegemon has created as part of its apparatus of power since the 15th century. To understand our own present and future, it’s necessary to explore the nature of those world orders—how they formed, how they functioned, and what their survival and destruction tell us about America’s declining imperial power.
Twain suggested that empire abroad would, sooner or later, bring autocracy at home—an insight Trump confirms with his every tweet, every speech, every executive order.
For the past 500 years, every succeeding global hegemon—Spain, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States—has not only amassed wealth and military strength but also used that extraordinary power to propagate a world order that often transcended its narrow national interests. And once the inevitable imperial decline set in, a fading global hegemon often found that its world order could serve as a diplomatic safety net, extending its international influence for years, even decades beyond its moment of imperial glory.
While even the most powerful of history’s empires eventually fall, such world orders entwine themselves in the cultures, commerce, and values of countless societies. They influence the languages people speak, the laws that order their lives, and the ways that so many millions of us work, worship, and even play. World orders might be much less visible than the grandeur of great empires, but they have always proven both more pervasive and more persistent.
By structuring relations among nations and influencing the cultures of the peoples who live in them, world orders can outlast even the powerful empires that created them. Indeed, some 90 empires, major and minor, have come and gone since the start of the age of exploration in the 15th century. In those same 500 years, however, there have been just four major world orders—the Iberian age after 1494; the British imperial era that began in 1815; the Soviet system that lasted from 1945 to 1991; and Washington’s liberal international order, launched in 1945, that might, based on present developments, reach its own end somewhere around 2030.
Successful global empires driven by the hard power of guns and money have also required the soft power of cultural and ideological suasion embodied in a world order. Spain’s bloody conquest of Latin America soon segued into three centuries of colonial rule, softened by Catholic conversion, the spread of the Spanish language as a lingua franca, and that continent’s integration into a growing global economy. Once permanent mints were established in Mexico City, Lima, and Potosí during the 17th century, Spanish galleons would carry millions of minted silver coins—worth eight reales and thus known as “pieces of eight”—across the globe for nearly three centuries, creating the world’s first common currency and making those silver coins the medium of exchange for everyone from African traders to Virginia planters.
During its century of global hegemony from 1820 to 1920, though it seldom hesitated to use military power when needed, Great Britain would also prove the exemplar par excellence of soft power, espousing an enticing political culture of fair play and free markets that it propagated through the Anglican church, the English language, an enticing literature, authoritative mass media like the global Reuters news service and the British Broadcasting Corporation, and its virtual creation of modern athletics (including cricket, football or soccer, tennis, rugby, and rowing). On a higher plane of principle, Britain’s protracted anti-slavery campaign throughout much of the 19th century invested its global hegemony with a certain moral authority.
Similarly, the raw power of US military and economic dominance after 1945 was softened by the appeal of Hollywood films, civic organizations like Rotary International, and popular sports like basketball and baseball. Just as Britain battled the slave trade for nearly a century, so Washington’s advocacy of human rights lent legitimacy to its world order. While Spain espoused Catholicism, and Britain an Anglophone ethos of rights, the United States, at the dawn of its global dominion, courted allies through soft-power programs that promoted democracy, the international rule of law, and economic development.
Such world orders are not the mere imaginings of historians trying, decades or centuries later, to impose their own logic on a chaotic past. In each era, the dominant power of the day worked to reorder its world for generations to come through formal agreements—with the Treaty of Tordesillas dividing much of the globe between Spain and Portugal in 1494; the 1815 Congress of Vienna (convened to resolve the Napoleonic wars) launching a full century of British global dominion; the San Francisco Conference in 1945 drafting the United Nations charter and so beginning Washington’s liberal international order; and the Moscow meeting in 1957 assembling 64 communist parties at the Kremlin for a shared commitment to socialist struggle and putting the Soviet Union atop its own global order.
Just as the British imperial system was far more pervasive than its Iberian predecessor, so Washington’s world order went beyond both of them and the Soviet Russian system, too, to become deeply embedded on an essentially global scale. While the 1815 Congress of Vienna was an ephemeral gathering of two dozen diplomats whose influence faded within a decade or two, the San Francisco conference of 1945 formed the United Nations, which now has 193 member states with broad international responsibilities. By the start of the 21st century, moreover, there were nearly 40,000 “UN-recognized international nongovernmental organizations” like the Catholic Relief Services, operating “in the remotest corners of the globe.”
But the similarities were perhaps more important. Note as well that both victorious powers, Great Britain and the United States, used those peace conferences to launch world orders that militated successfully against major wars among the great powers, with the pax Britannica lasting nearly a century (1815-1914) and the pax Americana persisting for 80 years and still counting.
Empires Fade but World Orders Persist
If world orders are so pervasive and persistent, why don’t they last forever? Each transition from one to the next has occurred when a massively destructive cataclysm has coincided with major social or political change. The rise of the Iberian age of exploration was preceded by a century of epidemics, known as the Black Death, which killed 60% of the populations of Europe and China, devastating their respective worlds. Similarly, the British imperial era emerged when the ravages of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe coincided with the dynamism of the industrial revolution launched in England, unleashing the power of coal-fired steam energy and formal colonial rule to change the face of the globe.
After the unprecedented devastation of World War II, Washington’s leadership in rebuilding and reordering a damaged planet established the current liberal international order. By the middle decades of our present century, if not before, global warming caused by fossil-fuel emissions will likely equal or surpass those earlier catastrophes on a universal scale of “disaster magnitude,” with the potential to precipitate the eclipse of Washington’s world order. Compounding the damage, President Trump’s sustained, systematic attack on America’s “liberal international order”—its alliances, free trade, and institutions like the UN—is only serving to accelerate the decline of a system that has served the world and this country reasonably well since 1945.
After the Fall
Even if the empire that created it suffers a complete collapse, a deeply rooted world order can usually survive that fall, while serving as a kind of diplomatic safety net for a fading power. The Iberian empires had lost their preeminence by the 17th century, but even today Latin America is deeply Catholic and Spanish remains the main language for much of the continent.
Understanding its limits as a small island nation with a vast global empire, Great Britain conducted a relatively careful imperial retreat that enfolded former colonies into the British Commonwealth, preserved the City of London’s financial clout, retained international influence as Washington’s strategic partner, and maintained its global cultural authority through civil institutions (the Anglican Communion, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and leading universities). Today, a full 50 years after the end of its empire, Great Britain still plays a role in world affairs far beyond its small size as a nation of just 70 million people living in a country no bigger than the state of Oregon.
Even though it’s been 35 years since the Soviet empire collapsed with spectacular speed, testifying eloquently to the crude coercion and economic exploitation that lay at its heart, Moscow still maintains considerable diplomatic influence across much of the old Soviet sphere in Eurasia.
Without Donald Trump’s systemic subversion of the liberal international order and its chief creation, the United Nations, the United States might have retained sufficient international influence to lead the world toward a shared governance of a global commons on a planet whose environment is sorely threatened—its seas depleted, water evaporating, storms raging, heatwaves soaring, and its Arctic wildly warming. Instead, the United States has fully ceded leadership of the campaign against climate change to China, while not only denying its reality but blocking the development of alternative energy projects critical not only for the planet but for America’s global competitiveness. While China is already leading the world in efficient electric vehicles and low-cost solar and wind power, Trump’s America remains firmly wedded to an economy based on high-cost carbon energy that will, in the fullness of time, render its output grossly overpriced, its industries uncompetitive, and the planet a disaster zone.
Back in 2011, six years before Trump first entered the Oval Office, political scientist G. John Ikenberry argued that, while the US ability to shape world politics would decline as its raw power retreated, its “liberal international order will survive and thrive,” including its emphasis on multilateral governance, open markets, free global trade, human rights, and respect for sovereignty. With Trump having essentially demolished the US Agency for International Development’s global humanitarian work and sent a “wrecking ball” toward the United Nations, while condemning it in a recent speech to its General Assembly—“I ended seven wars… and never even received a phone call from the United Nations”—it would be difficult to make such a sanguine argument today.
Instead, Mark Twain’s classic futuristic assessment of American world power seems more appropriate. “It was impossible to save the Great Republic. It was rotten to the heart. Lust for conquest had long ago done its work,” he wrote in an imagined history of this country from a far-off future. “Trampling upon the helpless abroad,” he added, “had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.” After watching the US occupation of the Philippines in 1898 descend into a bloodstained pacification program replete with torture and atrocities, Twain suggested that empire abroad would, sooner or later, bring autocracy at home—an insight Trump confirms with his every tweet, every speech, every executive order.
Whether the United States will emulate Britain in a managed global retreat with minimal domestic damage or fulfill Mark Twain’s dismal vision by continuing to attack its own world order, diminishing if not destroying its legacy, is something for future historians to decide. For now, listening to Trump’s recent rant at the UN complaining about a stalled escalator and condemning climate-change science as a “green scam” and “the greatest con job ever perpetrated,” ordinary Americans should have received a clear sign that their president’s autocratic aspirations are subverting their country’s claims to world leadership, both now and in the future.
