Hal Brands
Donald Trump has already transformed the American political order. Not since Ronald Reagan has a president so dominated the national landscape or shifted its ideological terrain. In his second term, Trump could reshape global order in ways no less profound.
Today’s reigning, U.S.-led international system—call it Pax Americana, the liberal order, or the rules-based international order—arose from a brutal Eurasian century. The great global struggles of the modern era were contests to rule the Eurasian supercontinent. They inflicted horrific damage on humanity. They also created the most successful international order the world has ever known. That system has provided generations of great-power peace, prosperity, and democratic supremacy. It has bestowed pervasive, world-changing benefits that are now taken for granted. After the West’s victory in the Cold War, Washington sought to make that order global and permanent. Now, however, a fourth battle for Eurasia is raging, and the system is being menaced on every front.
All around Eurasia’s vibrant, vital periphery, revisionist states are on the move. China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia are attacking the regional foundations of Eurasian stability. They are forging alliances based on hostility to a liberal system that threatens illiberal rulers and inhibits their neoimperial dreams. War or the threat of war has become pervasive. The norms of a peaceful, prosperous world are under assault. The recurring terror of the last century was that Eurasian aggressors might make the world unfit for freedom by making it safe for predation and tyranny. That danger has flared anew today.
Trump isn’t the ideal defender of an imperiled American order. Indeed, one suspects he hardly thinks about international order at all. Trump is a hard-line nationalist who pursues power, profit, and unilateral advantage. He thinks in zero-sum terms and believes the United States has long been made a sucker by the entire world. Yet Trump intuitively understands something that many liberal internationalists forget: order flows from power and can hardly be preserved without it.
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