America’s new rules: Old order rocked – can it respond?
Trump’s first term saw chaos in his cabinet, a wall on the southern border that was never built, and an ‘infrastructure week’ that never arrived. This time, Trump’s administration is loyal, prepared and executing. The momentum behind Trump’s policy agenda has taken almost everyone by surprise.
With the president’s blessing, the Department of Government Efficiency has shaken the foundations of the executive branch. America’s commitment to foreign assistance vanished as DOGE shut down USAID. Elon Musk’s teams are now hard at work in the Pentagon, the State Department and the intelligence agencies.
This is sending a signal to the world that the United States’ eight decades of commitment to defence and diplomacy may soon be upended, and its spending on international development is all but over. The US also appears to have lost its moral compass. Trump has attacked allies and befriended autocrats. He has disrupted the foundations of the liberal international order. The US commitment to multilateralism, the transatlantic partnership and even the norm of sovereignty have been broken. In so doing, Trump has rejected a gradual US retreat and attempted to force a radical reordering of international relations.
Trump’s first geopolitical target was the Western Hemisphere. He threatened to ride roughshod over the sovereignty of Greenland, Canada and Panama to extend US dominance. (In his inaugural speech, the president revealed his admiration for the expansionist President McKinley.)
Ending the two big international wars and resetting great power relations are also central to this reordering. Trump has excluded Ukraine and Europe, and pursued peace talks directly with Russia. He has strengthened the US’s relationship with Israel and proposed to clear Gaza of Palestinians.
Whether these gambits are designed to reorder Europe and the Middle East or to force local partners to step up is unclear. The answer may be both. Egypt moved quickly to put forward a Gaza peace plan of its own. In the aftermath of the falling out between Trump and President Zelenskyy, Prime Minister Keir Starmer convened European leaders in London to agree measures to support a peace plan and ensure US commitment to Europe. The new order is being forged in the ashes of the Munich Security Conference where Vice-President JD Vance betrayed the liberal values that are as sacrosanct to many Europeans as territorial sovereignty. Trump’s disregard for the values that underpin the liberal international order is forcing Europe to meet the moment.
Leslie Vinjamuri, director, US and the Americas Programme
Europe stirs: NATO without US leadership?
Trump has only been in office seven weeks and has already upended the transatlantic security order.
The US president first threatened to take control of Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark and a Nato ally, warning that he could seize the territory by military force. Just weeks later, his defence secretary Pete Hegseth told Europeans during a summit in Brussels that they need to take full responsibility for European security and shoulder the ‘overwhelming’ share of funding for Ukrainian defence.
Then came Vice-President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in which he accused European leaders of threatening democracy itself. Add to that the Oval Office row between Trump and Zelenskyy, and its fallout, and it has become clear the transatlantic alliance is under more strain than ever.
These threats have provoked mixed reactions. Some have criticized European governments for complacency during the Biden years, while others argue that the suggestion of ‘freeloading’ is undermined by a decade-long US demand for Europeans to buy American weapons.
The European Commission is stepping up its efforts: in early March it presented its rearmament plan, and the white paper on defence will soon follow. Diplomatically, European countries and Canada have rallied around Ukraine and Zelenskyy through a series of summits, joint statements and shared positions vis-à-vis the US.
The challenge is that countries with a more transatlantic outlook, particularly the Nordic and Baltic states, want to keep the US engaged in European security and containing Russian aggression. Countries such as France, however, which have long called for more European self-reliance in defence, see this as an opportunity for European strategic autonomy.
The cumulative effect is to further undermine Nato and faith in Article 5, its collective defence guarantee. For an alliance built on trust, this is problematic. While Nato has faced internal challenges before, the Trump administration’s recent denunciations of transatlantic security relations are different, because the US is the backstop of the alliance.
Its military heft has given the US a natural leadership role within the organization for decades, as evidenced by the 100,000 US military personnel deployed in Europe and higher levels of defence spending than any other ally. A Nato without US leadership and its collective defence guarantee will be left rudderless in the short term in the face of mounting Russian aggression. The continent must put aside internal differences and rapidly build up a European pillar of the alliance.
Armida van Rij, senior research fellow, Europe Programme
Flurry in the Middle East: Gaza proposal prompts a plan
Trump’s first weeks in office have outlined the broad brush strokes of his three objectives in the Middle East: ending the war in Gaza; transferring the burden of conflict management and security to partners in the Arabian Gulf; and using maximum pressure on Iran to force negotiations on its nuclear programme.
But Trump will not achieve these objectives quickly – in part, that’s because
government purges have left him with a limited team and approvals from Congress will be required. For the time being, he is using off-the-cuff announcements, executive orders, and regional and geopolitical diplomacy to make progress.
Despite inflammatory statements suggesting that Palestinians should be forced out of Gaza so the US can create a ‘Riviera of the Middle East’, Trump remains committed to delivering the release of hostages held by Hamas. He has dispatched his special envoy Steve Witkoff to maintain the fragile ceasefire and push the parties forward into the second, more difficult phase of negotiations that aims to deliver a permanent end to the conflict.
These discussions will be demanding, and arriving at an agreement for further hostage releases and Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza will take longer than originally anticipated. Yet, Trump remains committed to ending the war. Moreover, his flippant comments on Gaza have driven Arab States into action.
Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf Cooperation Council states who convened in Riyadh at the end of February have categorically rejected the displacement of Palestinians, regarding it as ethnic cleansing. Instead, they have put forward an alternative proposal for reconstruction and redevelopment of Gaza within five years. They are also working on a post-war Palestinian Authority-led governance structure that would need Israel’s approval. This is just the flurry of diplomatic activity Trump is looking for.
Trump’s diplomatic outreach to Russia to end the war in Ukraine also has a Middle Eastern dimension. He sees Moscow as influential in restricting Iran’s nuclear weapons programme. To that end he has thus far restrained Israel’s desire to strike Iranian nuclear sites and issued executive orders to reduce Iranian oil sales and target Tehran’s sanction circumvention. But the new administration will soon test Tehran’s appetite for new negotiations down the line.
Sanam Vakil, director, Middle East and North Africa Programme
Multi-purpose tariffs: Time to protect global trade
Weeks into Donald Trump’s second presidency, he has imposed additional 20 per cent tariffs on goods from China, and threatened, then backtracked on his planned 25 per cent tariff on goods imports from Canada and Mexico. These are the United States’ three largest trading partners, accounting for more than 40 per cent of US total trade in goods. Trump has also announced plans to impose 25 per cent tariffs on all imports of steel and aluminium and on imports from the European Union.
None of these actions takes account of World Trade Organization rules, nor do they distinguish between close allies and strategic competitors. Future tariffs may be ‘reciprocal’, targeting particular sectors or policies where Trump believes the US has been unfairly disadvantaged.
Trump clearly sees tariffs as a multi-purpose tool. He has threatened to deploy them to persuade allies to increase defence spending and to force Denmark and Panama to cede sovereign territory to the US. He also appears to believe that a significant permanent rise in the average US tariff on goods will benefit the US economy, arguing that it will raise revenue from foreigners allowing cuts in domestic taxes, encourage more investment and jobs in the US and reduce the US trade deficit, which he sees as a source of vulnerability.
In reality, however, Trump’s tariff policy will damage rather than benefit the US economy. Domestic consumers pay the bulk of tariff costs rather than foreigners. In the short term, domestic inflation will rise, particularly when tariffs are combined with the planned fiscal stimulus and crackdown on undocumented workers. In the longer term, the tariff policy will make the US an unreliable location for global supply chain investments.
Countries faced with Trump’s tactics have typically responded both by enacting targeted retaliation and by showing a readiness to negotiate on the issues Trump has cited as a rationale – although these are often unjustified or peripheral. Global equity markets have seen a sell off, while there are some signs of a political backlash among affected US consumers and producers.
The short-term outcome of Trump’s strategy is unclear, but it is hard to see how trust in the US and its approach to global trade can be restored. Other countries urgently need to develop a collective response to preserve a global trading system that has served everyone well, whether or not the US chooses to participate.
Creon Butler, director, Global Economy and Finance Programme
