From the series Chronicles of the new American nationalism
With the slogan America First
, Donald Trump evokes the past of American imperialism, more or less consciously recalling both the forces that, in the 1930s, advocated a foreign policy of hemispheric restraint and the era of undisputed American global primacy. He does so while bargaining with partners and adversaries alike over the degree of trade openness that the United States is willing to maintain, and while negotiating security guarantees with allies in Europe and Asia, without renouncing unilateral demonstrations of force in all directions. This aggressive posturing ranges from renaming the Pentagon the Department of War, to military operations against Iran and in Latin America, to increasing a military budget that is already by far the largest in the world.
Kurt Campbell, co-founder of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), inspirer of the pivot towards the Indo-Pacific under Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s chief adviser on Asian policy, appreciates the immediate gains in concessions unexpectedly wrested from allies by Trump, but believes that ultimately the results of his unilateralism will harm Washington. In order for China to lose the next century
, the former diplomat believes a more prudent deal with allies is necessary.
War ministry times
We won World War II, we won everything before that
, said Trump as he signed the executive order renaming the Department of Defense to its pre-1949 name, the Department of War. Last month, he declared: We want to be defensive, but we also want to be offensive if we have to be
.
The establishment newspapers expressed conditional support for the rebranding of the ministry. According to The Washington Post, by stripping away the euphemism, the name change bluntly highlights for the citizenry the power that these troops represent: they are not police officers
to be deployed on national territory, but the most lethal and vigilant fighting force ever assembled
, improving the debate about how to use it
.
For David Sanger, international affairs correspondent for The New York Times, Trump is continuing a revolution
that celebrates hard power
, increasing the Pentagon's budget to a trillion dollars
, while dismissing soft power as unsustainable waste, cutting funds to agencies involved in the business of promoting democracy
and to those, such as USAID, which have created an image of benevolent power by subsidising development.
The Pentagon's task does not change
, but the message
, in addition to nostalgia
for American primacy, contains Trump's answer
to a moment when deterrence is more critical than ever
.
Assertion in the hemisphere
For Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, the new name emphasises that the department's mission is to pursue maximum lethality, not tepid legality
.
In the days that followed, after the deployment of naval forces in the Caribbean, Trump shared on social media an image of the explosion of a boat accused of drug trafficking from Venezuela. From Caracas, President Nicolás Maduro ordered a demonstrative response from the air force.
The New York Times voiced legal doubts about the American military action, which was justified by criminal law, but without a trial. Strongly defending the attack, Secretary of State Marco Rubio travelled to Mexico and Ecuador to reassure Presidents Claudia Sheinbaum and Daniel Noboa that they need not fear offensive measures, and agreed on security cooperation against drug trafficking.
With attacks in the Caribbean, pressure on Mexico and threats at the beginning of his term to Canada, Greenland, and Panama, Trump is asserting US superiority in its hemisphere in the wake of the Monroe Doctrine, which since 1823 has opposed any form of interference in the Americas by extra-continental powers.
Surprisingly, there has been no significant debate in Washington so far on the EU-Mercosur agreement.
Criticism of Trump’s Sonderweg
Campbell and Ely Ratner, a former researcher at CNAS and the Council on Foreign Relations, and an official in the Biden administration, have expressed their views on Trump's unilateralism both in the CFR magazine Foreign Affairs and in The New York Times, a newspaper opposed to Trump.
Starting from a realistic assessment, they write that the rise and fall of great powers has often turned on scale — the size, resources and capacity that make a nation formidable
. The United States outproduced and out-innovated
Germany, Japan, and the USSR, but for the first time
today the US faces a rival — China — that has greater scale in most of the critical dimensions of power
.
China's economy, at purchasing power parity, is 30% larger
than that of the United States; it has twice the manufacturing capacity, producing vastly more cars, ships, steel and solar panels than the United States and more than 70% of the world’s batteries, electric vehicles, and critical minerals. In science and technology, China produces more active patents and top-cited publications than the United States. And militarily, it has the world’s largest naval fleet, has a shipbuilding capacity estimated to be more than 230 times as great as America’s and is fast establishing itself as a leader in hypersonic weapons, drones, and quantum communications
.
Faced with this daunting sense of scale
, America alone
may not be enough. We are entering an era in which the true measure of American primacy will be whether Washington can build allied scale: the power to compete globally in tandem with other countries across economic, technological, and military domains
.
America’s hope
lies in maximising its strength through alliances. That means no longer treating allies as dependents under our protection, but as partners in building power jointly by pooling markets, technology, military capabilities, and industrial capacity
.
Trump is going in the opposite direction. His go-it-alone, tariff-centric diplomacy has alienated allies and left openings for Beijing to build its own coalitions
.
Return to the hegemonic coalition
The United States has spent three decades courting India as a geopolitical counterweight to China
. Trump, on the other hand, is playing with fire
by imposing tariffs on Delhi, so much so that Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Beijing for the first time in seven years, where he and President Xi Jinping agreed to move past a recent history of tense relations and work as partners, not rivals
.
Alone, the United States will be smaller compared with China by many important metrics. But together with economies such as Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia, India, Mexico, and Taiwan, there is no competition. This coalition would be more than twice China’s GDP when adjusted for purchasing power; more than double its military spending; be the top trading partner of most countries in the world; and would account for half of global manufacturing, to China’s one-third
.
The aim is not to contain China – but to balance it
. The Biden administration favoured persuasion in winning over other countries. It helped create the Trade and Technology Council with Europe, elevated the so-called Quad grouping, which combines the United States, India, Japan, and Australia, to balance China's growing influence; reached a nuclear submarine deal with Australia and Britain; and struck new export and trade arrangements
.
Wasted coercion
Trump, in his first term, pursued initiatives such as the Abraham Accords in the Middle East and signed the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, and it was he who initially revived a previously dormant Quad
. But a Trumpian path to achieving allied scale, if it exists, is likely to lean on more coercion
, which alienated allies
in his first term, as in his second. Today, it targets the very economies that the United States should be courting
. US allies have publicly likened his approach to a landlord chasing rents. America’s global popularity has plummeted, even falling behind China’s in many countries
.
Campbell acknowledges that, fearing abandonment
, many partners are prepared to accommodate Mr Trump in ways few would have expected
: South Korea, with major investments in shipbuilding; Vietnam, by removing all tariffs on American goods; Europe, by increasing its military budget. But the price of short-term concessions from desperate partners
will be to deplete trust over the long term
.
What won't work is punishing our friends while courting Beijing
, because it will yield fleeting benefits but permanent damage to America's position. It could alienate potential partners and lead them to embrace China, as India appears to be doing
.
For the former diplomat, Trump is not wrong to seek more from allies. But he is squandering America’s precious leverage on the wrong objectives
. His trade agreements with Japan, South Korea, and Europe focus narrowly on reducing bilateral trade deficits, raising tariff revenue, and securing vague investment pledges rather than balancing China
.
Trump focuses on trivial
trade disputes instead of pushing partners for significant and specific long-term investment in sectors that would spark American re-industrialisation
and pressing them to commit to building a multilateral tariff and regulatory wall that protects the industrial bases of the countries behind it from being hollowed out by China’s mercantilism
.
Campbell recommends preserving the legacy of his Asian pivot. Trump's Asian tour, which began at time of writing, will include stops in Malaysia, Japan, and Korea, where the tycoon will meet Xi Jinping. Campbell writes in The Wall Street Journal that Asian allies prefer it when relations between the US and China are neither too warm nor too cold
; they fear both that Washington and Beijing will drag them into a confrontation, and that they will strike deals without consulting them.