By Kori Schake
8 minutes
The most consequential development of the 21st century is the destruction by the most powerful state in the international order of its own primacy. No dominant power in history has had as many advantages as the United States created for itself in the past 80 years. And no dominant power in history has so quickly destroyed the wellsprings of its own security and prosperity as has the United States.
I have always been concerned with how the United States could maintain its position of leadership in the global system. In 2009 I offered suggestions as to changes the United States might make to reduce the cost to the United States of managing the system and warned against the dangers of being profligate with our power.[1] In the pages of Orbis 12 years ago, I worried about the possibility of overstretching and concluded, “Our country urgently needs a more cost-efficient strategy.”[2]
Today, however, the challenge is not just management and fiscal prudence, the issues that concerned me over the past decade and a half. Instead, it is the actions taken by the United States, starting with the steps enacted in the first year of the second Trump administration, which seems to be a suicidal rejection of the United States’ leadership role and a disengagement from responsible global action. When close partners and allies of the United States—who saw themselves as collaborators with Washington in maintaining a stable international order—now lament the active role of the US government in dismantling and destroying what it had spent decades creating, something fundamental has indeed changed in the world. It is a “malicious abandonment,” or, as I put it, “hegemonic suicide.”[3]
A Choice, Not an Accident
Donald Trump did not burst onto the scene and initiate the destruction; there are important antecedents. Even before the catalyst of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the US government had become itchy at the degree of constraint other countries—principally American allies—wanted to foster. President Bill Clinton balked at committing the United States to the Rome Statute creating the International Criminal Court, even though that judicial body was designed to intervene only where countries lacked legal processes of accountability.[4] President George W. Bush withdrew from the anti-ballistic missile treaty. [5]
But Trump’s behavior is a difference in kind, not just a difference in magnitude, from previous American presidents. He is not simply opting out of denser webbing of international order as Clinton did, or seeking to balance American dominance with advancing cooperation as Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden did. Trump is an arsonist of the existing order, which he seems to genuinely believe is destructive to American interests.
As Daniel Drezner and Elizabeth Saunders characterize it, Trump has pioneered hegemonic instability, collapsing the post-1945 international order by making the dominant power an agent of chaos and destruction.[6] The difference can be illustrated by attitudes toward the International Criminal Court: Clinton declined to submit the treaty for ratification, and subsequent presidents declined to be bound by it, but Trump issued an executive order imposing sanctions on Court staff and banning their travel to the United States.[7] In response, 79 countries, including America’s closest allies, issued a statement of support for the Court.[8] The United States has transformed from being an architect and enforcer of international order to its antagonist.
The destruction was enabled by three important developments: technological breakthroughs creating unmoderated instantaneous global communication, the triumph of partisan politics, and the social displacement of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Unleashing
The United States is unique even among free and prosperous societies for its risk tolerance. The American government tends not to regulate in advance of harm, businesses are fostered by Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and the American public is willing to accept incredibly high social costs in gun deaths, something that occurs in no other advanced country.[9] US risk tolerance also has positive consequences, including faster economic growth and more business innovation. So, it is unsurprising that communications breakthroughs, both technological and commercial, occurred first at scale in the United States. One of those breakthroughs was social media, which democratized the media landscape by making information accessible, removing elite gatekeepers, and upending for-profit media. As a consequence, the media landscape fractured, information became unreliable, abusive and criminal behavior became rampant. Trump thrives in this new milieu, creating his own information platform and his own narrative. By doing so he stormed the castle of politics in the age of social media, outpacing fact checkers and fostering a personal connection with supporters that the vastness of the country and population would otherwise make impossible.
Bounced Check
The American political system was designed by geniuses to be run by idiots.[10] It has endured bad leaders, waves of dangerous populism, and dramatically damaging policy decisions. Its central element was famously described by James Madison in Federalist 51: “Its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places… Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”[11] The genius of the structure imposes checks on power among the branches of the federal government and between the federal and state governments. But the founders did not anticipate the emergence of political parties becoming more important than institutional prerogatives. The failure of especially Congress as an institution to foreclose presidential authority has destabilized the American political system, enabling executive overreach.[12] Partisanship is now the defining element of American political activity, visible in the swings of public attitude toward the same policies when presidents of the different parties enact them.[13]
Pandemonium
The terror and mortal consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic will cast a long shadow across the lives of those who experienced either the disease itself or the economic and social policies governments enacted to manage the global outbreak. Government uncertainty about the science of an emergent novelty—and dishonesty about some policies being enacted—left swathes of the public distrustful of government even while significantly reliant on it for safety. Students had both the educational and social experiences disrupted in trajectory-shifting ways. While most elements of the pandemic are not unique to the United States, it is nonetheless striking that in a country innovative enough to produce three different life-saving vaccines and prosperous enough to provide them without cost to its entire 340 million population, a full third of Americans would refuse a free, life-saving vaccine.
A Republic, If You Can Keep It
What the Trump presidency has destroyed cannot be reconstructed. Allies will never again consider an American security guarantee sacrosanct. Approval has collapsed for the United States in the public opinion of allied countries, as they perceive us as predatory. Countries are negotiating trade agreements and securing supply chains to circumvent American ability to weaponize any reliance on either components or payment mechanisms. The network effects of American power are faltering as states begin to opt out.[14] Insurmountable damage has been and continues to be done.
Yet both the domestic and international orders are modifying. The military maxim that the enemy gets a vote also applies in politics. Many Trump policies are likely to be repudiated by subsequent presidents, court rulings, and legislation at the state and federal level. Executive orders are eminently reversible. Congress has already restored most of the draconian 2025 spending cuts and is forcing withdrawal of a historically significant number of political appointees.[15] Elections in November 2026 are likely to presage acceleration of reversals and perhaps impeachments. The “primitive anarchy” the Trumpian years has unleashed could well be repudiated as the checks built into the American political system and the adaptation of international actors find ways to address the challenges.[16]
The most optimistic case would be that the executive over-reach of the Trump years ushers in legislative and judicial actions that constrain future presidents, eliminating the room to manoeuvre that the Trump administration has capitalized on. Becoming trustworthy internationally again will rebuild international trust over time, especially as allies so desperately need us to be deserving of their trust. After all, even if the current mess is the most destructive, this is not the first time the United States has been unworthy. One model would be the way that Congress advanced legislative supremacy after Watergate. While not impossible, that would require enormous public pressure on Republican legislators that the partisan coherence of current voting districts militate against. The more likely outcome is a messy contentiousness domestically for the United States, marginal advances for malign actors internationally, and struggling cooperation among prosperous democracies to shield themselves from the stronger powers.
Another path to constructing a more robust domestic and international order could emerge as the trauma and dislocation of Covid-19 wears off. The red in tooth and claw trend in US politics does appear to be waning, as evidenced by the president’s falling ratings and the repudiation of such tactics by two of the right’s most vociferous practitioners, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Vivek Ramaswamy.[17] The most important beginning to repair of both the domestic and international order is political repudiation of the Trump agenda and practices. This would be especially likely if social media obsession proves a passing fad or gets restrained by regulation, dampening the enervating acceleration of information and the platform for incendiary falsehoods and their purveyors.
At the end of the day, Americans will have to either accept that we’ve chosen to live in a different kind of country and bequeathed a different kind of international order that is less secure and makes us less prosperous, or we will have to convince ourselves that what we had before was more beneficial and undertake the hard work of strengthening the foundations of American power and behaving internationally in ways that foster cooperation.
