During U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term, he billed his foreign policy as one of “America first,” an agenda that prioritized U.S. security and economic interests over international cooperation. If leading scholars waved warning flags over the impending death of the liberal international order (LIO) eight years ago, that demise appears all but certain today. Fifteen months into Trump’s second term, it has become apparent that Trump’s foreign policy is not merely an extension of this America-first agenda, but something quite different: something defined by devastating cuts to foreign aid, widespread corruption, punitive tariffs, repudiation of international organizations, aggressive rhetoric towards allies like Greenland and Canada, the extrajudicial killing of civilians aboard fishing boats, the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro and his wife, and a war of aggression in Iran that granted Iran newly realized leverage over the Strait of Hormuz and only recently ceased with the signing of a shaky memorandum of understanding that could fall apart at any moment.
Given the centrality of multilateral governance and international law to the LIO, it is hard not to see the present moment as sounding a death knell for the era of sovereignty, cooperation, and relatively open cross-border markets. But if we want to understand how we got here, we need to take a more critical look at both parts of this story: the idea that the pre-Trump era was indeed an era of LIO and the idea that Trump’s foreign policy represents a coherent theory of the U.S. national interest. In response to these claims, I offer two provocations: first, that what we refer to as the “liberal international order” was itself an America-first agenda and second, that Trump’s foreign policy is better understood not as “America First” but “Trump First.”
What we refer to as the “liberal international order” was itself an America-first agenda, and Trump’s foreign policy is better understood not as “America First” but “Trump First.”
Postwar Liberalism as America First
In Voltaire’s 1773 Essais sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations, he wrote that, “This body which was called and still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” Voltaire’s quip underscores his (admittedly superficial) interpretation of 12th-century popes as power-hungry tyrants concerned with the expansion of earthly control, pointing to the manifold ways an international system fails to live up to its name. When we interpret our own recent past as neither liberal nor international nor an order, we begin to see a system riven with tensions long before Trump was sworn in, and which was, therefore, vulnerable to disruption.
When we interpret our own recent past as neither liberal nor international nor an order, we begin to see a system riven with tensions long before Trump was sworn in, and which was, therefore, vulnerable to disruption.
The LIO is so-called because it was premised on economic liberalism both domestically and abroad. In the postwar era, cognizant of the economic devastation of both the Second World War and the interwar era, a combination of international norms, pressure from concessional multilateral lending, and membership criteria in international organizations pushed states to liberalize first their trade policy and later their capital accounts. This commitment to economic liberalism was paired with a somewhat weaker commitment to political liberalism at home, in the form of an expanded welfare state in recognition of democratic demands to compensate groups harmed by economic liberalization—John Ruggie’s famous “embedded liberalism,” which itself was already critiqued.
Liberalism presumes a measure of equality at the level of political participation and representation. But despite being anchored in the promise of the sovereign equality of states, at the international level, this commitment to liberalism was thin. In key decision-making bodies of global governance—including those at the forefront of pushing for liberal domestic policy reforms—states were not equally free to choose the rules by which they would be governed. In founding the United Nations, a body in which every member state enjoys formal de jure equality, the postwar powers (the U.S., the U.K., France, Russia, and China) were careful to enshrine for themselves unilateral authority over matters of peace and security in the form of veto power in the UN Security Council, the body empowered to authorize the use of force and multilateral sanctions in international relations. Similarly, the International Monetary Fund, the postwar economic institution initially developed to manage payment imbalances under the Bretton Woods system and the concessional lender of last resort to distressed economies in the post-Bretton Woods era, is marked by a voting system that ensures that the United States effectively retains a veto power, as long as they control more than 15% of the vote shares. (Reallocating vote shares is itself subject to this same constraint.) Trading rules under the World Trade Organization—itself withering in the backwaters of the Doha Round for fifteen years before the Trump presidency—demanded a level of market liberalization in capital-intensive goods among developing states that was too often paired with special privileges for agricultural protectionism in the global North.
The imperfect liberalism of the LIO was matched with limited international participation. The post-war great powers and the institutions they built in their image pushed for economic and political liberalization globally, deploying a range of tools from socialization and persuasion to conditional lending and coercion to induce states to adopt liberal economic policies and participate in the provision of international public goods, like collective defense and cooperative management of common resources. But this internationalization was never universal. From the beginning, it faced organized resistance both from groups within states who did not benefit from liberalized trade and capital account policy and from groups of states which saw themselves as excluded from the promised benefits of the hierarchical order they were being dragged into. Movements like the New International Economic Order and protests against the IMF and World Bank on grounds of environmental justice, indigenous rights, and anti-austerity existed alongside the LIO’s claim to internationalism.
The LIO did provide order, in the form of stability and predictability, to the great powers. This order facilitated international commerce, tamed foreign relations by raising the cost of conflict through increased economic ties and security guarantees, and made possible great strides in cooperation. But the benefits of that stability were too often limited to the great powers themselves. The U.S. frequently violated the stabilizing norm of non-intervention when it served its interests (in Latin America, Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond) and failed to intervene in cases of crimes against humanity (for example, in Rwanda and Myanmar) that threatened international peace and security. Capital market liberalization spurred waves of cross-border investment and lending that entrenched the domination of the U.S. dollar even as it provoked devastating banking and currency crises in countries whose capital accounts were at the mercy of international investors’ speculative whims. Entrenched indebtedness, endless rounds of restructuring, and enforced austerity did not feel like “order” in any beneficial sense to countries outside the sphere of hard currencies on which the market had bestowed its blessing.
This was a fragile bargain, vulnerable to rupture at the point where middle powers no longer perceived their subordination to U.S. power as serving their long-term interests.
These contradictions in the LIO, while present from the beginning, were not inherently destabilizing. Indeed, they allowed the system to endure for a time despite its shortcomings, as long as both great and middle powers performed their roles, the former benefiting disproportionately and the latter benefiting enough to tolerate their subordinate position in a U.S.-led hierarchy. But this was a fragile bargain, vulnerable to rupture at the point where middle powers no longer perceived their subordination to U.S. power as serving their long-term interests.
Post-liberalism as Trump First
Into that fragile order crashed Trump’s America First agenda, which repudiated the international institutions and law that the U.S. had, since 1945, understood to serve its long-term interests, replacing these with authoritarianism at home, mercantilism abroad, and a transactionalist approach to politics everywhere. Despite the branding of “America First,” what distinguishes Trump’s foreign policy from the U.S.-led LIO is that there is no coherent concept of “the national interest” behind it. The interests that count are Trump’s, not the nation’s. The war in Iran, for example, lacks a clear strategic objective (regime change? nuclear disarmament? regional power projection?) and has rapidly degraded the U.S. long-range missile and interceptor stockpiles, disrupted global supply chains, and sent the price of oil skyrocketing, none of which serves the economic or security interests of the United States. Meanwhile, Trump has enriched himself and his family to the tune of $4 billion during his first year in office through a range of corrupt deals that channel funds from state and non-state actors seeking to curry favor with the administration into Trump’s various cryptocurrency, investment, and real estate ventures.
Gone are the familiar, important arguments over what the U.S. national interest is (long-run vs. short-run interests, security vs. civil liberties, promoting human rights abroad vs. respecting self-determination), replaced with the will of one individual who has reduced “the national interest” to his own. As a result, instead of a coherent foreign policy, we have a collection of adjectives that can be useful to dislodge our familiar paradigms while illuminating how Trump’s foreign policy often resembles that of political actors predating the LIO as well as those that never fully embraced it in the first place.
Gone are the familiar, important arguments over what the U.S. national interest, replaced with the will of one individual who has reduced “the national interest” to his own.
Stacie Goddard and Abraham Newman’s labeling of the current moment as an era as (at least emergently) neo-royalist equips us with one such adjective, drawing our attention beyond the official heads of state to the tight cliques of authoritarian leaders and tech billionaires who are motivated less by the realist pursuit of relative power or the liberal goal of freedom than by the extraction of wealth and status. Trump’s foreign policy is intensely patrimonial and personalist. Despite his thorough repudiation of liberalism, his is not a realist foreign policy. There is no dominance of a logic of security; as noted above, Trump’s actions in Iran and the depletion of U.S. missiles and interceptors have arguably made the U.S. less safe. Nor, despite occasional appeals to manufacturing workers, is Trump’s foreign policy populist. It is, in point of fact, deeply unpopular, virtually certain to raise prices, and explicitly intended to concentrate wealth at the top of the distribution.
Under Trump’s foreign policy, the logic of mutual gains—from trade, from cooperation, from security alliances—has been replaced with zero-sum thinking. But in contrast to a realist foreign policy, in which national interests are conceived in zero-sum terms, the interests at the heart of Trump’s foreign policy are Trump’s alone, and the tools for achieving them are spot transactions in which he is often the lead negotiator and principal beneficiary. Just months after the Trump Organization brokered a deal to build a resort and golf course in Qatar, Trump accepted a $400 million luxury jet from the Qatari royal family. Months after that, he issued an executive order guaranteeing Qatar’s security.
We can also understand Trump’s foreign policy as imperialist, driven by a hyper-masculinized vision of might makes right.
We can also understand Trump’s foreign policy as imperialist, driven by a hyper-masculinized vision of might makes right. But it is an imperialism of a highly personalist kind, driven as much by personalist slights and whims as by a neo-Monrovian claim to the Western hemisphere. The New York Times reported that Maduro’s mocking dance moves goaded Trump into following through on its threats to strike Caracas and kidnap the Venezuelan president. Often, these whims are driven by Trump’s obsession with status. The LIO assured the U.S. of a position atop an international hierarchy, but Trump’s foreign policy is less about the U.S.’s status than his own, conferred by an odd mix of traditional authorities, authoritarian foreign leaders, and billionaires, as vividly demonstrated in his fixation on failing to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Finally, Trump’s foreign policy is anchored in white supremacy, which accounts for the demonization and violence against brown and Black populations in the U.S., the axes of support with racist far-right European parties, and the utter disregard for the lives lost to USAID cuts and illegal bombings. Trump’s embrace of white supremacist rhetoric and policy is evident in his explicitly racist descriptions of Somali immigrants, his advocacy of the myth of “white genocide” in South Africa, the inclusion of references to a racially coded vision of European civilization in the National Security Strategy, and his denigration, demotion, and firing of high-ranking non-white military leaders and civil servants.
What’s the Difference?
Of course, imperialist overtones, entrenched racism, and self-serving deals were part of the liberal international order as well. It is worth asking whether Trump’s white supremacist, imperialist, zero-sum, hierarchical, status-obsessed foreign policy is meaningfully different from a hierarchical system that was only ever liberal when it suited U.S. interests, resented by many, and which only provided order to the great powers themselves. How different, in other words, is a “Trump First” foreign policy from the U.S.-led LIO, if the LIO was itself always a fiction?
We should be cautious about romanticizing an international system that did a tremendous amount of violence to the global South and those who fell outside its sovereign margins: stateless people, indigenous people, refugees, the environment, and non-humans. Unevenly liberal, internationalized under duress, and providing an order grounded in a U.S-dominated hierarchy that forestalled great power conflict via proxy wars and economic domination of the global South, the LIO was hardly an instrument of universal peace and security.
Nonetheless, the LIO provided weak states with discursive resources to turn against the hegemon, and it has given those who wish to oppose the power of patrimonial elites today decades of theory and practice to draw on in their attempts to respond to Trump’s attempts at reordering.
For all its flaws—and they were many—the LIO imposed real (albeit very limited) constraints on great power behavior as long as great powers continued to express support for the system. Think how unimaginable a U.S. invasion of Greenland—a NATO ally that already hosts U.S. bases—would have been at any point between 1945 and 2025.
The LIO has always been something of a polite fiction that provided cover for US empire in a post-imperial age. However, the end of that fiction does not necessarily mean an era of naked US power, unfettered by moral commitments, but something stranger and less predictable if no less destructive
Is a Trump-first foreign policy different from an America-first order? How you answer this question depends on whether you think that a world where the U.S. shoehorns the illegal invasion of Iraq and torture of combatants into the language of international law is substantively different from a world where it feels no imperative to do so. While I am sympathetic to the argument that these worlds are not meaningfully different, I fear we are finding out that they actually are. The LIO has always been something of a polite fiction that provided cover for the US empire in a post-imperial age. However, the end of that fiction does not necessarily mean an era of naked US power, unfettered by moral commitments, but something stranger and less predictable if no less destructive: a foreign policy driven not by the straightforward strategic projection of US power abroad, but by one man’s personal compulsions, grievances, and desire for status and profit. It is a form of empire that, in some ways, more closely resembles Voltaire’s world of power-hungry monarchs than the early 20th-century era of great power competition the LIO was designed to tame.
Erin Lockwood is an assistant professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. Her research and teaching focus on financial regulation, global economic inequality, and the global governance of risk and uncertainty. Her forthcoming book in Routledge’s RIPE Series in Global Political Economy examines how the market for financial derivatives developed and resisted public regulation prior to the 2008 global financial crisis and the consequences of that development for the post-crisis financial system.
