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January/February 2025
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Trump’s Antiliberal Order

How America First Undercuts America’s Advantage
Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nexon

January/February 2025 Published on January 7, 2025

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Illustration by Tyler Comrie; Photo source: Reuters

Alexander Cooley is Claire Tow Professor of Political Science and Vice Provost for Research and
Academic Centers at Barnard College.

Daniel Nexon is a Professor in the Department of Government and the Edmund A. Walsh School of
Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

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D
uring his campaign for president, Donald Trump promised to deliver a
nationalist “America first” foreign policy. He boasted about how, in his
first term, he had threatened to abandon NATO allies and claimed that
in his second, if European NATO members failed to increase their
defense spending, he would let the Russians “do whatever they want.” His high-profile
nominees and appointments have elevated MAGA loyalists who have long inveighed
against “globalism” and the “liberal international order”; his administration will be staffed
by a large number of contributors to the Heritage Foundation’s policy wish list, Project
2025, which calls for the United States to exit the International Monetary Fund and the
World Bank. Days after Trump tapped the Fox News personality Pete Hegseth for
defense secretary, Hegseth condemned the United Nations as “a fully globalist
organization that aggressively advances an anti-American, anti-Israel, and anti-freedom
agenda.”

It should come as no surprise, then, that Trump’s 2024 victory has generated headlines
such as “America Chooses a New Role in the World” and “Trump Will Deliver the Final
Blow to the Liberal Order.” Trump’s second term will, without a doubt, reorient both
domestic and international politics. He fully intends to push both in illiberal directions.
But his presidency will not end the so-called liberal international order, for the simple
reason that it has already ended.

The liberal international order is shorthand for the international institutions and treaty
arrangements that Washington took the lead in creating during the first decade after
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the United Nations and NATO. These ostensibly, and
sometimes actually did, promote human rights, freer trade, democracy, and multilateral
cooperation. Washington—along with its most powerful allies—expanded and reworked
that order after the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse left the United States the world’s sole
superpower; that expansion saw a wave of democratization, the creation of the World
Trade Organization (WTO), and a worldwide push for unfettered global trade and
financial flows. For more than a decade, however, China and Russia have been engaged
in their own international ordering projects. They have done so directly, such as by
contesting human rights norms at the UN, and indirectly, by offering economic and
security deals that are, at best, indifferent toward defending democratic governance and
combating corruption. Meanwhile, the relative economic decline of the G-7 countries
has enhanced the bargaining leverage of weaker states. For the first time since the
collapse of the Soviet Union, such states now enjoy meaningful alternatives to Western
markets, development assistance, and even military protection. And the rise of
reactionary populism—not just in North America and Europe but also in India and in
parts of Latin America—has shattered the ideological dominance that liberalism enjoyed
for two decades after the end of the Cold War. U.S. President Joe Biden retained key
aspects of Trump’s nationalist economic approach, including Trump’s tariffs, and pushed
forward the first major U.S. industrial policy in decades via the CHIPS Act and the
Inflation Reduction Act.

References to the “liberal international order” discount the growing strength of

illiberalism in global politics. The broad-brush phrase also wrongly implies that many
aspects of contemporary international order—principles and practices such as state
sovereignty, the rule of law, and multilateralism—are inherently or necessarily liberal,
when in fact they are perfectly compatible with some nonliberal and illiberal forms of
politics. Consider the fact that China and Russia—hardly liberal countries—are not
seeking to destroy multilateralism. On the contrary: they are racing to expand their
influence in long-existing multinational institutions and to create their own
counterparts.

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This is in part because they understand the power that such institutions provide to the
United States. Important elements of what is known as the liberal international order
are, in fact, components of the infrastructure of American power: norms, institutions,
and relationships that offer Washington a still unmatched ability to influence other
states, coordinate responses to emerging threats, and secure cooperation on matters it
considers crucial to its national interests. Even a foreign policy solely concerned with
preserving American power would invest in sustaining key elements of this system. With
Trump’s victory, however, self-proclaimed American nationalists now hope to wreck or
upend an unrivaled network of American influence that took more than 50 years to
build.

But internationalists who oppose these nationalists should also reconsider the way they
talk and think about the stakes. Trump’s contempt for institutionalism is the mirror
image of how the Biden administration, and liberal internationalists more broadly, have
justified their own foreign policy preferences, including U.S. commitments to NATO
and support for Ukraine. Each of those policies, they contend, is necessary to defend
immutable principles: not just support for democracies but the preservation of a liberal
order worldwide. Yet this argument is increasingly out of touch with the complex
realities of contemporary international politics. The Biden administration’s framing of
the Ukraine crisis failed to sway countries of the global South, which often associate
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rules-based international order with Western efforts to dictate
their economic policies, meddle in their politics, and disrespect their sovereign autonomy.
It also exacerbated the backlash against the United States over its unwavering support of
Israel’s invasion of Gaza.

It is well past time to retire the understanding of international politics encapsulated by

the term “liberal international order.” It has become less lodestar than lodestone,
saddling foreign policy debates with a surfeit of ideological, often Manichaean, baggage.
It mires internationalists in nostalgia for an idealized past. And worst of all, it is now
driving reactionary populists and postliberals to mistakenly support policies that weaken
the United States.

MISTAKEN IDENTITY
NATO was indeed founded as a defense pact among liberal democracies, one rooted in
the internationalist principles that U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime
Minister Winston Churchill laid out in the 1941 Atlantic Charter. After the end of the
Cold War, the organization rebranded itself as the anchor of a liberal democratic security
community rather than a defensive alliance aimed more narrowly at deterring external
threats. But the rationale for the United States to sustain its commitment to NATO—as
well as to support Ukraine—cannot be reduced to a principled wish to protect liberalism
worldwide. NATO also owes its existence to two fundamental tenets of postwar U.S.
grand strategy: that the United States cannot afford to see a rival power establish
dominance over Europe and that preventing such an outcome requires a standing U.S.
military presence on the continent.

These strategic precepts first failed to prevent, and then prolonged, World War II. The
United States and the rest of the world paid an unacceptable price in blood and treasure
after Washington attempted to wash its hands of European power politics in the wake of
World War I. NATO, by contrast, achieved key U.S. strategic goals not merely by
deterring the Soviet Union but also, as its first secretary-general, Hastings Ismay, put it,
by “keeping Germany down.” NATO did not merely end the threat of German
aggression against its neighbors. It greatly reduced the risk that any of its member states
would engage in significant and sustained military conflict. The arrangement proved so
successful that a war among France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom now seems
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inconceivable. The American architects of NATO worried about a rival power achieving
dominance in Europe; instead, the United States became the dominant player in
European security.

Many “America first” foreign policy hands and self-described realists believe that the
United States can drastically scale back its commitments to NATO without jeopardizing
its long-standing strategic goals in western Eurasia. They point to post–Cold War
developments such as the apparent ease of deterring Russia from invading Europe, the
lack of military friction between European nations, and the existence of a functional
European Union. The problem here is straightforward: the U.S. commitment to NATO
made all of these developments possible in the first place. Advocates of a U.S. drawdown
claim that current trends would persist in the absence of a strong American presence.
Perhaps they are right. But if they are wrong, the costs will far outweigh any possible
gains the United States could win by freeing up some forces for use in the Asia-Pacific.

The United States does not uphold its obligations to NATO out of some kind of
misguided altruism. The alliance is a crucial instrument of U.S. power: NATO ensures
that competition between the United States and Europe remains restricted to the
economic sphere. And within that sphere, the alliance helps keep the European market
—one of the world’s largest, accounting for 15 percent of global trade—especially
friendly toward the United States and aligned with American economic interests. If the
world is entering a new, more chaotic era of great-power competition, the existence of
NATO dramatically reduces the number of serious geopolitical competitors that the
United States faces. Policymakers who believe that the United States can simply “pivot
to Asia” must understand that Washington will need the support of all its existing allies
if it intends to compete with China. Already, NATO’s activities in support of Ukraine
have boosted allied countries’ willingness to act in concert with Washington against
Beijing.

DUAL USE
In their antipathy to all things “liberal,” many Trump advisers are playing into the hands
of America’s rivals. The irony is that the United States’ authoritarian adversaries have no
difficulty distinguishing between multilateralism and liberalism. Indeed, they are
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building out their own infrastructure of international institutions and multilateral
forums. China has already made significant progress on this front, having founded or
taken the lead in a large number of new institutions, including the BRICS, in which
Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa were the first members; the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization, with other Asian states, including Russia; the Asian
Infrastructure Investment Bank; the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation; the China-
CELAC forum, a set of summits in which it meets with Latin American and Caribbean
governments; and the newly established China–Central Asia mechanism. Beijing is
leveraging these to promote its goals—many of them profoundly illiberal—and to
explicitly counter the United States. The Astana Declaration, for example, which the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization adopted in July 2024, opposed protectionist
measures and “unilateral missile defense systems,” thinly veiled references to the United
States.

Neither China nor Russia is focusing exclusively on building its own institutional
capacity. Both also seek to undermine the United States’ existing influence in the
international order. Rather than attacking incumbent institutions such as the UN, China
and Russia have focused on expanding their sway over the organizations’ staffing and
policy priorities. And capitalizing on the tendency of American leaders to look at world
politics through the lens of ideological shibboleths, Beijing and Moscow are playing U.S.
conservatives for suckers. Consider Russia: to some degree, the American right’s turn
away from backing Ukraine reflects Trump’s own idiosyncratic obsessions. If Trump were
less enamored of Russian President Vladimir Putin—or if his worldview were less
informed by the burden-sharing debates of the late 1980s, when trade tensions between
the United States and Germany and Japan were at their peak—more American
conservatives would likely back aid to Kyiv. The Kremlin has also conducted a long-term
effort to cultivate the U.S. right by using the same techniques that Russian intelligence
used to build ties with European far-right parties, including junkets, financial support,
and propaganda.

Moscow knows that its often superficial commitment to cultural conservatism gives it
soft power with the American right. It uses that appeal to sell an anti-NATO, ostensibly
antiglobalist
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so happens to serve Russia’s interests. Moscow does not want to weaken NATO because
the alliance is “liberal” or “globalist.” It wants to weaken NATO because doing so will
enhance Russian power at the expense of the United States. And like China, it seeks to
increase its influence in the kind of institutions that Trump’s camp dismisses. In July,
when Russia hosted the 2024 BRICS summit, it was eager to present the organization as
a counterweight to Western-led multinational financial institutions and touted the
attendance of the UN secretary-general, António Guterres.

China and Russia are furiously seeking new forms of multilateral engagement because
they believe that doing so will only become more important. Unlike during the Cold
War, when many countries chose or were coerced to align with one of two patrons,
today’s states want to hedge risk and maximize their leverage by establishing a diverse
portfolio of security commitments, political support, and aid from rival powers. Even
governments closely aligned with the United States are becoming more independent and
entrepreneurial in their geopolitical allegiances. Any anxiety that India, for instance,
might have initially felt about its neutrality on Ukraine quickly gave way to a confident
defense of its right to strategic autonomy and to maintain dialogue with Moscow. Turkey
remains part of NATO. But it has refused to join the anti-Russian sanctions regime, has
applied to join the BRICS, and continues to promote its own interests in the Middle
East. The United Arab Emirates’ position as a major U.S. security partner has not
prevented it from establishing itself as a hub for Russians who want to evade U.S.
sanctions.

POWER STRIP
In the short term, if Trump withdraws from alliances and multilateral institutions, his
purely transactional foreign policy may succeed in extracting greater concessions from
countries that depend on U.S. security guarantees or cannot afford to lose access to
American markets. But great-power competition will give many of those countries exit
options. They can shift toward other export markets, find alternative sources of
development assistance, or seek military protection from a rival great power.

And if the United States abandons, explicitly or implicitly, even a minimal commitment
to some of the foreign policy principles it has long espoused—such as human rights,
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democracy, and good governance—little will set it apart from its great-power
competitors. To be sure, the country has never lived up to the loftiest articulation of its
values in either its domestic politics or its international behavior. When it comes to
naked power politics, the United States can give any great power a run for its money. But
despite that history, the United States has also won allegiance from other countries
because it has stood for ideals with widespread international appeal. It is vulnerable to
charges of hypocrisy because its support for those principles is inconsistent, not
nonexistent. If Trump’s most transactional impulses become U.S. policy, however, the
United States will lose a tarnished but nontrivial asset in its power-politics toolkit.
When other governments ask themselves why they should partner with the United
States instead of, say, China, the only answer will be “better compensation.” That means
the United States will have to spend more to get less.

There are other ways that the abandonment of liberal values—or values often coded as
“liberal,” such as an opposition to corruption—could damage the United States’ security,
impinge on its economic interests, and diminish its power, putting it at the mercy of
competitors. The post–Cold War unipolar moment allowed the United States to build a
huge toolbox of policy mechanisms by which it influences countries, companies, and
individuals around the world. Like some of the kleptocratic regimes he mistakenly
admires, Trump could easily repurpose these instruments to enrich himself and his
friends. A politicized Justice Department and Treasury Department could deploy the
anticorruption measures found in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the Foreign
Extortion Prevention Act, and the Magnitsky Sanctions Program to persecute foreign
officials who offend Trump or target foreign leaders’ opponents with time-consuming
corruption investigations in return for payments or favors. An illiberal American leader
could selectively and arbitrarily use such tools to punish governments that refuse to
transact with his cronies.

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Trump at the G-20 leaders summit in Osaka, Japan, June 2019 Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Such behavior would pose obvious dangers to U.S. national security. But it would also
destroy important instruments of American power. Consider the United States’ ability to
impose targeted sanctions, enforce broader sanctions regimes, investigate corruption in
other countries, and target terrorist groups’ finances. It is able to do these things
effectively in part because of the ways in which it dominates the global financial system,
such as prohibiting sanctioned actors from transacting in U.S. dollars in the United
States and across the international financial system. Many foreign governments tolerate
their vulnerability because the United States uses these instruments in relatively
predictable ways. But if an American president started deploying them for corrupt
purposes, other countries would become much less willing to accept how vulnerable they
are to U.S. financial pressure. And finding ways to limit the United States’ influence over
the global financial system—by increasing nondollar reserve holdings, including digital
assets and cryptocurrency, and their use in international transactions—would become
much more appealing. Although a single credible alternative to the U.S. dollar, such as a
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BRICS currency, is still a long way off, sanctioned countries including Iran, North Korea,
and Russia are making international de-dollarization a priority.

Trump and his acolytes are poised to commit a string of unforced foreign policy errors
driven by ideological opposition to a system—the liberal order—whose nature and value
they clearly do not understand. The nature of this order is already shifting because of
forces well outside the United States’ control. To cope with urgent challenges such as
interstate conflict and large-scale migration, U.S. policymakers will need a keen, nuanced
sense of which powers and advantages their country possesses. Sweeping disruption is
not the means to promote American power and stability. Yet to assert his vision of
primacy, Trump would unilaterally destroy the very infrastructure that has helped the
United States advance its core interests through previous eras of turbulent political
change.

Internationalists must spotlight the real costs of such an ideologically driven project. If
they cannot preserve the bureaucracies tasked with managing America’s global
commitments and if pragmatists in Trump’s administration cannot moderate his
“America first” foreign policy, the incoming president will voluntarily relinquish powerful
tools that almost any interpretation of American interests would counsel him to
preserve.

Topics & Regions: United States China Russia International Institutions NATO Politics

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