Top international body warns Trump is taking 'wrecking ball' to US-led international order

The Munich Security Conference (MSC), widely regarded as the world’s top independent forum for analyzing foreign policy, issued a report on Monday warning that President Donald Trump’s “wrecking-ball politics” are jeopardizing world peace.

According to the MSC report, Trump and other far-right leaders engage in "wrecking-ball politics" motivated by widespread disillusionment with both democratic institutions and attempts at meaningful socioeconomic reform within Western societies. By contrast, Trump and far-right politicians who follow his model promise a "bulldozer approach" that promises to break gridlock but in the process destabilizes key multilateral relationships. Specifically, Trump has weakened stability in both Europe and the Indo-Pacific, as well as caused economic volatility by abandoning trade rules that America “helped create.”

“While these disruptions pose substantial challenges, actors committed to a rules-based order are organizing to contain the damage,” the authors write. “However, success requires them to invest in their own power, cooperate more closely, and demonstrate that meaningful reform remains viable and superior to widespread destruction.”

They also quote Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who attended the conference despite the controversy surrounding Trump’s policies, to demonstrate the Trump administration’s volatility on the global stage.

“The postwar global order is not just obsolete, it is now a weapon being used against us,” Rubio said in the quote. “Eight decades later, we are once again called to create a free world out of the chaos, and this will not be easy.”

The MSC report also noted that if Trump’s policies ultimately set a precedent for the conduct of world affairs, “transactional deals may well replace principled cooperation, private interests may increasingly trump public ones, and regions may become dominated by great powers rather than governed by international rules and norms.”

Additionally, the report noted that the “wrecking-ball politics” employed by Trump leads to humanitarian crises in impoverished regions that rely on foreign aid, such as resurgent pandemics in Africa caused by the abrupt withdrawal of medical assistance.

“This is not merely a funding gap," said Ghanaian President John Mahama. "It is a crisis of imagination, a vacuum of solidarity, and a deep failure of shared responsibility.”

Against the backdrop of the MSC’s report, the German government is struggling with a far right movement of its own. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party, which is widely viewed as neo-Nazi in ideology and ethos, has strengthened its ties with Trump, with Vice President JD Vance explicitly lecturing Germany last year that it should normalize far right parties like AfD. Their efforts may have worked, as the Trump/Vance support for Germany’s far right and demand that the AfD be normalized — coupled with their own aggressive actions toward the MSC — resulted in the MSC inviting three AfD parliamentarians to the 2026 conference.