Trump favours a more ‘go it alone’ approach to foreign policy
Barely a month into his presidency, Donald Trump appears to be tearing up the United States foreign policy playbook. He wants to ethnically cleanse Gaza, dump the proxy war in Ukraine and annex Greenland and the Panama Canal.
It’s tempting to think these are the moves of an unpredictable despot. But the US is dealing with unprecedented challenges to its dominance in the world.
Far from being irrational, Trump is responding to this decline of US supremacy just like Joe Biden and his other predecessors. But he favours a “go it alone” approach.
Upon Trump’s election, the Financial Times newspaper proclaimed, “Trump’s victory signals the end of the US-led post war order”.
The US set up a liberal capitalist order after the Second World War. US imperialism wasn’t based on colonial control, but free trade and free markets that its corporations could dominate.
At the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, the US and its allies set up the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. They called this a “rules-based order”—in reality, the rules were rigged to benefit the US.
These institutions and the power of the dollar allowed the US to maintain its dominance through economic means. For example, financial “relief” from the IMF or World Bank to developing countries would always come with strings attached.
This economic dominance was backed up by military alliances, such as Nato, and a web of military bases around the world. There is nothing liberal or democratic about Nato—it simply wages war on the US’s behalf.
The US hailed a triumph for this “liberal” and “rules-based” order at the end of the Cold War in 1991. The US was the one military superpower. But sections of the US ruling class recognised that they would face intense economic competition in the coming decades—particularly from China.
Trump’s “America First” strategy is full of contradictions—and that opens up space for resistance
The wars on Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s were an attempt to send a signal that the US was still the top power in the world. But its defeats in the Middle East accelerated its crisis of dominance.
When Trump was first elected in 2016, he was seen as a threat to this liberal international order. Liberal political scientists Robert Keohane and Jeff D. Colgan said, “The time has come to acknowledge this reality. We have to push for policies that can save the liberal order before it is too late.”
But Trump’s aggressive stance was responding to the challenge of China. In 2018, the White House said that “great power competition” was the main challenge facing the US rather than the war on terror.
The crisis of US hegemony accelerated since Trump left office in 2021. The threat of China has only grown—epitomised by the development and popularity of its DeepSeek AI crashing the US stock market.
Biden’s presidency built on many of Trump’s policies. He continued the trade war with China. He passed the Inflation Reduction Act and the Chips Act, which sought to invest in US manufacturing to increase its competitiveness with China.
But Biden stuck with the US’s web of alliances, while Trump sees allies as draining US resources and not paying their own way.
His “America First” approach goes against “multilateral agreements” between the US and many allies. Instead, he wants to focus on bilateral agreements with countries.
The first month of Trump’s presidency reflects the intensification of imperialist competition. That includes between the “big powers”, such as the US and China, and regional players, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Israel.
When Trump said “we’ll get” Greenland, it’s a response to that growing competition. As the polar ice caps melt, the Northwest Passage sea-lane is now open for short periods.
Many states, including China, are now vying for control over what could become a crucial shipping route. And Greenland is also home to crucially important metals for technology.
Trump’s calls to ethnically cleanse Gaza is similarly a bid for imperialist control over the Middle East.
But Trump’s “America First” strategy is full of contradictions. For example, his trade war threatens to divide the US’s ruling class.
In response to Trump’s proposed 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminium, Ford motor company chief Jim Farely said there’s “a lot of cost and a lot of chaos”. Farely is currently lobbying US policymakers to overturn the tariffs.
Even Trump’s own cabinet is divided over the plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza. US Secretary of state Marco Rubio claimed it would only be “temporary”.
Trump is threatening Jordan’s King Abdullah II with withdrawing funding if he refuses to align with the plan. But the Arab regimes accepting the plan could spark revolt in the region against dictatorship, imperialism and Israel.
The rulers of Egypt and Jordan are haunted by the memory of the Arab Spring of 2011. And a return of that revolutionary force would cause more crisis for the US.
Trump has made the world more dangerous—but those contradictions open up opportunities for resistance.
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