President Donald Trump’s transactional approach has made it hard to see beyond the lexicon of geopolitical “deals” to identify lasting patterns or an overarching vision in his foreign policy. However, taking a structural approach that allows for the comparison of historical contexts provides a framework to see Trump’s foreign policy as a reaction to—and an attempt to form—a new global geopolitical world order. From this perspective, the current context is seen as a transition from the post-World War II geopolitical world order towards something yet to be determined.
Are We Pivoting?
The central feature of the previous geopolitical transition from British to U.S. dominance was the need for the declining hegemonic power to alter its strategic stance and focus on an emerging challenger to its position. A similar set of geopolitical choices may be considered as a guide to interpret the decisions and stance of the Trump administration. Hence, the expectation of a continuation of the pivot to Asia, as voiced by Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby. Such a “pivot” has been a broad policy goal since the presidency of Barack Obama. The biggest surprise in Trump’s second administration is that to date—and that may well be an important caveat—countering China’s growing power has not been a significant policy focus. In fact, the western Pacific is the region where the U.S. seems the most disengaged and unable to present a coherent policy.
This is, perhaps, because the United States is not in a position of either economic or military strength relative to China. In fact, the liberal institutions that were the basis of what Western countries like to call a “rule-based order” have been vilified by or even attacked President Trump, for example, through his aggressive sanctions towards the International Criminal Court. This is a bold statement, given the relative size of the U.S. military, the array of allies in the region, the strengths of the U.S. economy, and the signs of fragility of the Chinese economy, but there is an argument to be made to support it.
The liberal institutions that were the basis of what Western countries like to call a “rule-based order” have been vilified by or even attacked President Trump.
The United States projected its power across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans over the course of World War II in a process I have described as moving from its own near waters into far waters through the geopolitics of sea power. The United States requires allies to sustain its projection of power across the Pacific: its “island chain” strategy of containment is a network of bases within the territory of other countries. Maintaining those bases, and ensuring some military cooperation to ease the burden on individual allies, requires keeping them happy. In this strategy, Taiwan and Japan are two essential allies.
The policy of island-chain containment was a key strategic commitment in the post-war geopolitical order, but this commitment can be—and has been—questioned. The question of the United States’ commitment to the defense of Taiwan has always been ambiguous; now it is murkier than ever. Is Taiwan an essential link in the chain of islands that would hinder Chinese naval operations? The administration sends mixed signals: yes, or maybe it doesn’t matter. Should the US save further diplomatic bother and economic support and just acquiesce to China’s invasion and/or incorporation of Taiwan? That certainly seems to be the strongest signal being sent by the current US administration.
The country most vocal in its claim to fight by Taiwan’s side is a country whose constitution was written by the United States to prevent it from going to war and to spread liberal democracy. Japan’s need to “step up” is evidence of the collapse of the post-World War II geopolitical order that the United States constructed. Japan was to be weak so that the United States could be strong in the western Pacific. Now Japan must be strong as the United States is weak.
Furthermore, the United States has wavered over its decision to sell submarines to states in the island-chain. In a related development, the Trump administration seems to be cooling on its commitment to the Quad—the strategic cooperation between India, Japan, Australia and the United States. These developments suggest a wobble rather than a pivot.
This policy incoherence raises the question: is the United States still “pivoting”? What does the process of a pivot look like? If we start with President Obama’s proclamation and follow Colby’s continuation, then the process is understandably long-term. It takes time to alter and cohere institutional arrangements and military strategy to change a superpower’s hemispheric focus.
However, one could argue that the incompleteness of the pivot is actually the expression of a new “Europe first” strategy—one that inverts that which was the basis for U.S. military strategy during the previous geopolitical transition through which it emerged as the hegemonic power. In contrast to World War II, the goal is not victory over Germany and then Japan. Instead, the United States hopes to leave NATO in the lurch and challenge European liberalism – and then see if it is not too late to contain China.
Whither the Trans-Atlantic Strategic Partnership?
A strategic pivot involves turning one’s attention towards a particular region and thus may require turning away from areas of the world now seen as less strategically important, in this case, Europe. In fact, though the United States’ turn towards Asia is not evident, the turn away from liberal Europe is clearer. Trade tariffs remain a contentious issue. While the threat of troop reductions in Germany and postponed deployments in Poland suggests, at best, a petulant response to the criticisms of politicians questioning the US-Israel war on Iran, or at worst the fracturing of trans-Atlantic security frameworks that were established to defend a region of liberalism against the threat of Communism. NATO, the keystone of U.S. post-World War II hegemony, is fractured. President Trump and members of his administration have insulted and belittled NATO members and made strong suggestions that the country could withdraw from the alliance. U.S. withdrawal would be the key act in the dismantling of the U.S.-created liberal world order and a catalyst for geopolitical transition.
Though the United States’ turn towards Asia is not evident, the turn away from liberal Europe is clearer.
European leaders are not only having to shore up their joint military capability to face the threat from Russia. They must also consider that an attack may come from across the Atlantic, with a U.S. seizure of Greenland. Is the idea of the United States seizing Greenland through military action just the rhetoric of a political showman? Something we should ignore and let it sit only within the minds of the MAGA faithful? Are commentators discussing the question just for their own hyperbolic and partisan ends? I think the threat must be taken seriously, though I strongly suspect it will not happen: just the suggestion is a geopolitical looking glass moment. A cooperative transatlantic relationship to face a threat from the east is now an antagonistic relationship that could lead to invasion from the west.
Having said that, such a decoupling will still take time. The claim for a European army of some sort has been with us for some time, from the older hopes and frailties of the fledgling Eurocorps to the current fumbling towards conventional and nuclear cooperation. Can the EU unite to have a single foreign policy, including the means of military action? Even if the governments of Hungary and Slovakia become more Euro-friendly and less sympathetic to Putin, barriers will remain. But we are a few steps further down—especially following Viktor Orban’s recent ouster—the path and at a quicker rate than we would have been without the insults thrown towards European leaders for being, quite frankly, too liberal and not racist and Islamophobic enough in the minds within the Trump administration.
The most likely effect of [Trump’s] “Europe-first” strategy will be to turn European countries into key actors in a worldwide move towards nuclear proliferation.
Nevertheless, the most likely effect of this “Europe-first” strategy will be to turn European countries into key actors in a worldwide move towards nuclear proliferation. The erasure of the value of Article 5 is coupled with a long-awaited realization that the U.S. nuclear deterrent was fiction. It is hard to think of a U.S. President that would have been willing to provoke a mass nuclear attack on the United States in reaction to a conventional Soviet or Russian attack on Europe by launching a nuclear attack on Moscow and other Russian cities. European countries will now further militarize, as will other states. The United States hoped to degrade Iranian nuclear and conventional capability by attacking it but preventing nuclear proliferation through bombing will not be an option if countries such as Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia follow suit.
Nuclear proliferation is just one aspect of a process of militarization that is to be expected in a geopolitical transition, as old certainties fade and new threats and uncertainties emerge; unsurprisingly, militarization has already become a popular strategy across the political spectrum in many countries. This push, alongside the inter-state integration of technologies, will slowly but surely ramp up regional cooperation. This process is clear in Europe but may also appear in east Asia, as Japan and South Korea see an imperative to ditch their traditional rivalry. The necessity of creating new systems of command and control that are integrated across countries and do not require U.S. involvement will take time and money. But it is hard to see an alternative process.
What Time is It?
Foreign policy, in practice and in rhetoric, is often biased towards the short and mid-term. For a hegemon in decline, decisions are likely to be reactive to the actions of other countries. However, there are aspects of the second Trump administration’s policies that suggest a discernable long-term vision that may play a formative role in the process of geopolitical transition.
One example is their extraordinary territorial claim on Greenland. Two geopolitical justifications have been given for seizing the territory of a NATO ally: access to resources and the imperative of being able to counter Russian and/or Chinese entry into the North Atlantic. However, these are not imminent concerns: mining and refining minerals would require years of investment, and the naval threat is not imminent.
The second example of long-termism is the economy. President Trump has disrupted the dominant line of thought that began with Reaganist and Thatcherist expressions of liberalism: it is no longer assumed that wealth can be generated through a domestic economy focused on services with manufacturing outsourced. Trump’s thinking aligns with structural academic frameworks that identify manufacturing prowess as the basis for national strength and global power. Access to minerals and energy is needed to support new high-tech industries (such as AI). The economic vision requires the restructuring of manufacturing in a national economy to make a country “great again”. But this is not a four-year project of a soon to be lame-duck President. It would be a strategy for the next 25 to 50 years that would extend beyond the inconsistencies and contradictions of current policies through subsequent administrations. The short-term cost of tariffs is something that most administrations would be worried about. Instead, for MAGA leaders, tariffs are represented as part of a long game, despite frequent policy changes.
President Trump has disrupted the dominant line of thought that began with Reaganist and Thatcherist expressions of liberalism.
Should we be encouraged or fearful of Trump’s long termism? On the one hand, if identified and executed well, the strategy could establish goals and practices that would provide a stability in foreign policy that has been absent since the relative certainty of Cold War geopolitics. Such stability should, in theory, produce more efficient and coherent American foreign policy. On the other hand, this strategy is not a result of consensus among practitioners. The degree of Trump’s democratic backsliding has been highly concerning, meaning that any long-term strategic decisions may just be subject to the whims of Trump and his allies, rather than part of a worldview that can be held accountable at the ballot box.
What is a Critical Scholar to do These Days?
Today’s geopolitical transition is also destabilizing academic paradigms and perspectives. Nearly all political geographers declare themselves to be “critical,” whether they adopt a structuralist, discursive, or feminist approach. U.S. power projection, and its vision and practice of liberalism, was often the focus of their criticisms. But now, we are rejecting the policies of President Trump because he is seemingly giving up on the forms of power projection we were once critical of. NATO was criticized as a militaristic form of extra-territorial power projection, an expression of U.S. “imperialisms”—often barely defined. And now many voices want that same extra-territorial geopolitical arrangement to remain. What expressions of power projection are to be criticized and which are not?
U.S. power projection, and its vision and practice of liberalism, was often the focus of [critical theorists’] criticisms. But now, we are rejecting the policies of President Trump because he is seemingly giving up on the forms of power projection we were once critical of.
The only way to avoid an Orwellian statement of “some power projections are more equal than others” is to say that none of them are. The structuralist approach leads to just one conclusion—power projection is a constant geopolitical practice in a system that consists of one unequal global economy and many competing countries. History shows that once a hegemonic power loses its ability to lead a relatively peaceful world order, there is a trend towards a global war. Whether it is Britain and Germany in the twentieth century or the United States and China today, geopolitical competition is driven by the imperative for pursuing economic profits. In the past, that has led to competition in the periphery and war between the more powerful countries.
But structural trends do not produce determined outcomes, and structural imperatives do not negate the possibilities of agency. There is value in a structural approach, as it can organize historical comparisons like a set of dashboard warning lights. We are in a structural context, like many in the past five centuries in which, a lot of warning lights were flashing and were not addressed in a way that prevented a process towards war. That is not to say the world is the same as it was in 1926; much can be learned from studying the differences. However, the drift towards World War II was accompanied by the decreased popularity of liberal political parties. The complementing value of a structural approach is to identify the deeper “bone structure” of global politics and how structural imperatives can lead to similar historical outcomes.
Perhaps the solution is to try to abandon the current geopolitical structure and build a new one, not just fight to see who is in the driving seat, as hopelessly utopian as that sounds. But if you are a realist of some form or another, wanting to inform U.S. policy, then you assume the role of a boxing coach pondering whether your fighter in the ring has the right fitness and repertoire to defeat their opponent: you are OK with the fight happening, you are simply rooting for one fighter over another.
Liberal institutionalists need to go beyond the recognition that institutions have a shelf-life and see the bias within them. For example, the establishment of the World Bank and the IMF promoted policies of unequal trade relations that favored the United States and other industrialized countries. In response, China has been actively creating new global institutions, like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, to compete with these. China rhetorically promotes these as forms of benevolence, claiming they facilitate peace and economic growth to poorer countries or those previously excluded from Western-led engagement, such as Central Asia. However, institutions built by the powerful set agendas for the benefit of the powerful. Any “peace” or “stability” they create has winners and losers. Are we ready for a world in which new institutions are built by countries that have, over the course of history, been the victims of western built and led institutions?
Hence, structuralists have a moment here, not just to explain global politics but to re-think why global wars are periodic and whether we have the will and desire to stop that cycle. A structural approach allows us to identify the need and opportunity for a major rethink of the processes and imperatives of global politics. That is an approach that identifies agency within structures. But then again, perhaps structure remains determinative, and, if so, we are heading for a global—and possibly nuclear—war.
Colin Flint, a geographer by training, is Distinguished Professor in the Political Science Program at Utah State University. His research interests include geopolitics and peacebuilding. He is the author of Near and Far Waters: The Geopolitics of Seapower (Stanford University Press, 2024), Introduction to Geopolitics (Routledge, 4th ed., 2022), Geopolitical Constructs: The Mulberry Harbours, World War Two, and the Making of a Militarized Transatlantic (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), and co-author, with Peter Taylor of Political Geography: World-Economy, Nation-State and Locality Routledge, 8th ed., 2025). He is editor emeritus of the journal Geopolitics. His books have been translated into Spanish, Polish, Korean, Mandarin, Japanese and Farsi.
Image made by John Chrobak. All assets used are in the public domain.
