President Donald Trump's foreign policy is such a disaster, it is returning the international community back to the conditions that existed before World War II — at least, according to one foreign policy expert.
As Trump meets with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, threatens Iran with annihilation and fails to counter both China and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, he is upending a world order that created stability for more than eighty years, argued Thomas Wright, Brookings Institution senior fellow and former senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council for President Joe Biden, for The Atlantic on Wednesday.
"In his first book, 'A World Restored,' Henry Kissinger argued that a stable and legitimate order rests on a limited consensus: an understanding among the major powers about what he called the permissible aims and methods of foreign policy," Wright wrote. "Governments can compete intensely and violate rules without seeking to overturn the system itself. The danger arises when a major power becomes so dissatisfied with the limits imposed upon it that it adopts a revolutionary foreign policy."
He added, "Under the old international order, major powers did not, as a general rule, conquer and annex the territory of their neighbors. The global trading system was based on reciprocity, tariffs were historically low, and markets were relatively open. And, although it was the world’s strongest country, the United States exercised enough self-discipline to allow its allies to grow into genuine partners, not vassals to be constantly squeezed for concessions."
Wright then described how Russia and China have violated that world order, in the former case by invading Ukraine and in the latter by engaging in unfair trade practices.
"Since taking office for a second term, in 2025, Trump has turned American power against U.S. allies and partners," Wright said. "He imposed the highest tariffs in nearly a century on Canada, Japan, South Korea, India, and the European Union and used the threat of more to extract hundreds of billions of dollars in investment pledges. He mused about making Canada the 51st state and seizing Greenland. He pushed Ukraine to sign over a share of its mineral wealth in the middle of a war for its national survival. Under Trump, the United States sees itself not as the guarantor of an alliance system of like-minded democracies, but as a dominant power that wields its influence for singular, transactional gain."
He continued, "Trump has broken the restraint that made American primacy tolerable to most of the rest of the world. Reports suggest that he may meet Xi and Putin for a 'big three' trilateral on the margins of the Asia Pacific Economic Summit in Shenzhen in November, which could mark the formal end of the old order."
Ultimately, Wright said that a future American president will need to resign themselves to the fact that the old international order is over.
"The international order has come to an end," Wright wrote. "The next president will inherit one of the most unforgiving international environments since 1945. Their task will be to stop the deterioration, inject some stability into world affairs, and begin to lay the foundation for a better future, even if that is not achievable in the short term."
Speaking with AlterNet earlier in September, University of Massachusetts — Amherst professor Dr. Richard Wolff broke down the larger pattern in Trump's disintegration of the world order.
"The United States helped allied countries recover from the war with the Marshall Plan and things like that," Wolff told AlterNet. "But those, the beneficiary countries, including Western Europe and Japan, were markedly contrasted with the countries that got no help at all, Russia and China being the number one examples, because of communist control in Russia, and then after 1949 also in China. And so those countries had to make it, if you like, on their own. They had to recover from horrific war-related damage. I mean, Russia and China probably ranked one and two in the amount of damage done during and by World War II, before, during, and after it, as any countries on earth."
Also speaking with AlterNet in September, Dr. Ed Gresser, a trade expert at the Progressive Policy Institute, described Trump's fixation on Canada as "weird."
"He seems to have some real animus against Canada for reasons I don't understand," Gresser told AlterNet. "And that goes well beyond tariffs, although tariffs are kind of the main policy thing, but he's always sort of belittling Canada and calling it the 51st state and things like that. And it's just very — there must be — there seems to be something really personal involved in this, which I don't feel I have any insight into. It's just, it's weird."