By Robert Kagan
Sunday, January 18, 2026
The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy
made it official: The American-dominated liberal world order is over. This is
not because the United States proved materially incapable of sustaining it.
Rather, the American order is over because the United States has decided that
it no longer wishes to play its historically unprecedented role of providing
global security. The American might that upheld the world order of the past 80
years will now be used instead to destroy it.
Americans are entering the most dangerous world they have
known since World War II, one that will make the Cold War look like child’s
play and the post–Cold War world like paradise. In fact, this new world will
look a lot like the world prior to 1945, with multiple great powers and
metastasizing competition and conflict. The U.S. will have no reliable friends
or allies and will have to depend entirely on its own strength to survive and
prosper. This will require more military spending, not less, because the open
access to overseas resources, markets, and strategic bases that Americans have
enjoyed will no longer come as a benefit of the country’s alliances. Instead,
they will have to be contested and defended against other great powers.
Americans are neither materially nor psychologically
ready for this future. For eight decades, they have inhabited a liberal
international order shaped by America’s predominant strength. They have grown
accustomed to the world operating in a certain way: Largely agreeable and
militarily passive European and Asian allies cooperate with the United States
on economic and security issues. Challengers to the order, such as Russia and
China, are constrained by the combined wealth and might of the U.S. and its allies.
Global trade is generally free and unhampered by geopolitical rivalry, oceans
are safe for travel, and nuclear weapons are limited by agreements on their
production and use. Americans are so accustomed to this basically peaceful,
prosperous, and open world that they tend to think it is the normal state of
international affairs, likely to continue indefinitely. They can’t imagine it
unraveling, much less what that unraveling will mean for them.
And who can blame them? According to Francis Fukuyama,
history “ended” in 1989 with the triumph of liberalism—even the primal human
instinct toward violence was “fundamentally transformed.” Who needed a powerful
America to defend what was destined to prevail anyway? Since the end of the
Cold War, influential critics have been telling us that American dominance is
superfluous and costly at best, destructive and dangerous at worst.
Some pundits who welcome a post-American world and the
return of multipolarity suggest that most of the benefits of the American
order for the U.S. can be retained. America just needs to learn to restrain
itself, give up utopian efforts to shape the world, and accommodate “the
reality” that other countries “seek to establish their own international orders governed by
their own rules,” as Harvard’s Graham Allison put it. Indeed, Allison and
others argue, Americans’ insistence on predominance had caused most conflicts
with Russia and China. Americans should embrace multipolarity as more peaceful
and less burdensome. Recently, Trump’s boosters among the foreign-policy elite
have even started pointing to the early-19th-century Concert of Europe as a
model for the future, suggesting that skillful diplomacy among the great powers
can preserve peace more effectively than the U.S.-led system did in the unipolar
world.
As a purely historical matter, this is delusional. Even
the most well-managed multipolar orders were significantly more brutal and
prone to war than the world that Americans have known these past 80 years. To
take one example, during what some call the “long peace” in Europe, from 1815
to 1914, the great powers (including Russia and the Ottoman empire) fought
dozens of wars with one another and with smaller states to defend or acquire
strategic advantage, resources, and spheres of interest. These were not skirmishes
but full-scale conflicts, usually costing tens—sometimes hundreds—of
thousands of lives. Roughly half a million people died in the Crimean War
(1853–56); the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) resulted in about 180,000 military
and up to 250,000 civilian deaths in less than a year of fighting. Almost every
decade from 1815 to 1914 included at least one war involving two or more great
powers.
Today’s equivalent of 19th-century multipolarity would
be a world in which China, Russia, the United States, Germany, Japan, and other
large states fought a major war in some combination at least once a
decade—redrawing national boundaries, displacing populations, disrupting
international commerce, and risking global conflict on a devastating scale.
That was the world as it existed for centuries prior to 1945. To believe that
such a world can never return would seem to be the height of utopianism.
***
Precisely to escape this cycle of conflict, the
generations of Americans who lived through two world wars laid the foundations
of the American-led liberal world order. They were the true realists, because
they had no illusions about multipolarity. They had lived their entire lives
with its horrific consequences.
After 1945, instead of reestablishing a multipolar
system, they transformed the United States into a global force, with
responsibility for preserving not just its own security but the world’s. Doing
so meant checking the rise of regional hegemons, especially in Europe and East
Asia. They did this not because they wanted to re-create the world in
America’s image, but because they had learned that the modern world was
interconnected in ways that would ultimately draw the United States into the
great-power conflicts of Eurasia anyway.
No country had ever before played the role that the
traditionally aloof United States took on after 1945. That is partly because no
other power had enjoyed America’s unique circumstances—largely invulnerable
to foreign invasion, because of its strength and its distance from the other
great powers, and thus able to deploy force thousands of miles from home
without leaving itself at risk. This combination of geography and reach allowed
the United States after World War II to bring peace and security to Europe and
East Asia. Nations scarred by war poured their energies into becoming economic
powerhouses. That made global prosperity and international cooperation
possible.
Perhaps more extraordinary than America’s ability and
willingness to play the dominant role was the readiness of most other great
powers to embrace and legitimize its dominance—even at the expense of their
own potency. In the decades after 1945, almost all of the countries that had
fought in the world wars gave up their territorial ambitions, their spheres of
interest, and even, to some extent, power itself. Britain, France, Germany, and
Japan not only relinquished centuries of great-power thinking and conduct but
placed their security and the well-being of their people in the hands of the
distant American superpower.
This was truly aberrant behavior and defied all theories
of international relations as well as historical precedent. The normal response
to the rise of a newly predominant power was for others to balance against it.
Coalitions had formed to check Louis XIV, Napoleon, both imperial and Nazi
Germany, and imperial Japan. Yet far from regarding the United States as a
danger to be contained, most of the world’s powers saw it as a partner to be
enlisted. America’s allies made two remarkable wagers: that the United States
could be trusted to defend them whenever needed, and that it would not exploit
its disproportionate might to enrich or strengthen itself at their expense. To
the contrary, it would promote and benefit from its allies’ economic
prosperity.
This was the grand bargain of the American order after
1945. And it was what allowed for the extraordinary peace and stability of the
subsequent decades, even during the Cold War. The American order established
harmony among the great powers within it, and left those outside it, Russia and
China, relatively isolated and insecure—unhappy with the global arrangement but
limited in their ability to change it.
All of that is now ending. Trump has openly celebrated
the end of the grand bargain. His administration has told Europeans to be ready
to take over their own defense by 2027 and suggested that allies and strategic
partners, including Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, should pay the United
States for protection. Trump has launched aggressive tariff wars against
virtually all of America’s allies. He has waged ideological and political
warfare against European governments and explicitly threatened territorial aggression
against two NATO allies, Canada and Denmark.
Meanwhile, the administration’s National Security
Strategy regards Russia and China not as adversaries or even competitors but as
partners in carving up the world. With its significant emphasis on restoring
“American pre-eminence” in the Western Hemisphere, Trump’s strategy embraces a
multipolar world in which Russia, China, and the United States exercise total
dominance in their respective spheres of interest.
***
Trump and his supporters seem to believe that the rest of
the world will simply accommodate this new American approach, and that allies,
in particular, will continue to tag along, subservient to a United States that
cuts them loose strategically, exacts steep economic tribute from them, and
seeks to establish a “concert” with the powers that directly threaten them. But
the radical shift in U.S. strategy must force equally radical shifts among
erstwhile friends and allies.
What does Europe do, for instance, now that it faces
hostile and aggressive great powers on both its eastern and western flanks? Not
only Russia, but now the United States, too, threaten the security and
territorial integrity of European states and work to undermine their liberal
governments. A passive Europe could become a collection of fiefdoms—some under
Russian influence, some under American influence, some perhaps under Chinese
influence—its states’ sovereignty curtailed and its economies plundered by one
or more of the three empires. Will the once-great European nations surrender to
this fate?
If history is any guide, they will choose rearmament instead. The task will be monumental. To
mount a plausible defense against further Russian territorial aggression while
also deterring American aggression will require not just marginal increases in
defense spending but a full-scale strategic and economic reorientation toward
self-reliance—a restructuring of European industries, economies, and societies.
But if Germany, Britain, France, and Poland all armed themselves to the full
extent of their capacity, including with nuclear weapons, and decided to
forcefully defend their economic independence, they would collectively wield
sufficient power to both deter Russia and cause an American president to think
twice before bullying them. If the alternative is subjugation, Europeans could
well rise to such a challenge.
Asian partners of the United States will face a similar
choice. Japanese leaders have been questioning American reliability for some
time, but Trump’s posture forces the issue. He has imposed tariffs on America’s
Asian allies and repeatedly suggested that they should pay the United States
for their protection (“no different than an insurance company”). Trump’s
National Security Strategy focuses intensely on the Western Hemisphere, at the
expense of Asia, and the administration ardently desires a trade deal and
strategic coordination with Beijing. Japan may need to choose between accepting
subservience to China and building up the military capacity necessary for
independent deterrence.
The recent election of a right-wing-nationalist prime
minister, Sanae Takaichi, suggests which of these courses the
Japanese intend to take. Trump and his advisers may imagine that they see
fellow travelers seeking to “Make Japan Great Again,” but the upsurge of
Japanese nationalism is a direct response to legitimate fears that Japan can no
longer rely on the United States for its defense. South Korea and Australia,
too, are reconsidering their defense and economic policies as they
wake up to challenges from both East and West.
The consequence of a newly unreliable and even hostile
United States, therefore, will likely be significant military buildups by
former allies. This will not mean sharing the burden of collective security,
because these rearmed nations will no longer be American allies. They will be
independent great powers pursuing their own strategic interests in a multipolar
world. They will owe nothing to the United States; on the contrary, they will
view it with the same antagonism and fear that they direct toward Russia and
China. Indeed, having been strategically abandoned by the U.S. while suffering
from American economic predation and possibly territorial aggression, they are
likely to become hotbeds of anti-Americanism. At the very least, they will not
be the same countries Americans know today.
Consider Germany. The democratic and peace-loving
Germany of today grew up in the U.S.-dominated liberal international order.
That order helped make possible West Germany’s export-driven economic miracle
of the 1950s, which in turn made the country an engine of global economic
growth and an anchor of prosperity and democratic stability in Europe.
Temptations to pursue a normal, independent great-power foreign policy were
blunted both by economic interest and by the relatively benign environment in
which Germans could live their lives, so different from what they had known in
the past. How long Germany would be willing to remain an abnormal nation—denying
itself geopolitical ambitions, selfish interests, and nationalist pride—was a
question even before the present liberal world order began to unravel. Now,
thanks to the American strategic shift, Germany has no choice but to become
normal again, and quickly.
And just as American strategy forces the Germans to
rearm, it is ensuring that they do so in an ever more nationalistic, divided
Europe. The founders of the American order worked in the postwar years to
dampen European nationalism, in part by supporting pan-European institutions.
The Cold War–era American diplomat George Kennan believed that European unification was the “only conceivable solution” for
the German problem. Yet today those institutions are under pressure, and if
the Trump administration has its way, they will disappear altogether. At the
same time, the administration is trying to inflame European nationalism,
especially in Germany, where it may well succeed. The right-wing nationalist
Alternative for Germany is the second-largest party in Germany’s Parliament,
just as the Nazi Party was in 1930.
Whether or not it succumbs to the far right, a rearmed
Germany without an American security guarantee will necessarily take a more
nationalist view of its interests. All of its neighbors will too. Poland,
squeezed between a powerful Germany on one border and a powerful Russia on the
other, has over the centuries been repeatedly partitioned, occupied, and at
times eliminated as a sovereign entity. With no distant superpower to protect
them, the Poles are likely to decide to build up their own military capability,
including nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, France is but one election away from a nationalist victory that will hit
Europe like an earthquake. French leaders have already told the country to
prepare for war against Russia. But imagine a rearming, nationalist France
facing a rearmed, nationalist Germany. The two nations might find common ground
against mounting threats from the United States and Russia, but they also have
a complex history, having fought three major wars against each other in the 70
years before the United States helped establish a durable peace between them.
Japanese rearmament will have similar ramifications. It
will heighten the nervousness among Japan’s neighbors, including South Korea,
another ally now unsure of Washington’s commitment to its defense. How long
before the Koreans decide that they, too, need to rearm, including with nuclear
weapons, as they face a hostile and nuclear-armed North Korea and a rearmed,
possibly nuclear Japan, which has invaded and occupied Korea three times in the
past?
***
In a multipolar world, everything is up for grabs, and
the flash points for potential conflict proliferate. The American order for
eight decades provided not only security commitments to allies and partners but
also common access to vital resources, military bases, waterways, and
airspace—what theorists call “public goods.” In the absence of the United
States playing that role, all of these once again become targets of a multisided
competition.
That competition won’t be limited to Europe and East
Asia. Until now, Germany and Japan have been content to rely on the United
States to preserve naval access to Persian Gulf oil, for example. Now they and
other rearming powers, including India, Britain, and France, will need to find
new ways to take care of themselves. China has shown how this can be done. It
had no navy to speak of two decades ago and no bases in the Persian Gulf. Today
it has the largest navy in the world, a base in Djibouti, and cooperative
arrangements with the United Arab Emirates and Oman to build facilities for
China’s use.
In a multipolar world, spheres of interest become
important again. For centuries, the ability to maintain and protect a sphere of
interest was part of what it meant to be a great power. It was also among the
most common sources of war, as the spheres often overlapped. The seemingly
endless three-way struggle among Russia, Austria, and the Ottoman empire for
control of the Balkans was the source of numerous conflicts, including World
War I. The desire to regain or create spheres of interest was a leading motive
of the three “have not” powers that helped produce World War II: Germany,
Japan, and Italy.
The conclusion of that war led to a global shedding of
spheres of interest. Part of what made the liberal world order liberal was the
principle of self-determination enshrined in the Atlantic Charter and United
Nations Charter. This principle was sometimes violated, including by the United
States. But in past multipolar orders, great powers never even had to consider
the rights of small nations, and they didn’t. By contrast, the liberalism of
the American order pressured powerful countries to cede sovereignty and
independence to smaller ones in their orbits.
The British gradually dismantled their empire, as did the
French. Germany was compelled to give up its dreams of Mitteleuropa,
just as Japan accepted the end of its sphere of interest on the Asian mainland,
for which it had fought numerous wars from 1895 to 1945. Under the American-led
order, these powers never attempted to regain those spheres. China after World
War II was so bereft of a sphere of interest that it could not even lay claim
to Taiwan, a nearby island filled with people who were once its citizens. The
only remaining sphere, other than America’s, was the one the Soviet Union won
at Yalta in Eastern and Central Europe. But that, too, was under pressure from
the beginning, and the effort required to retain it ultimately exceeded the
Soviet Union’s capacities, leading to its collapse.
The mere existence of the United States and the liberal
order it supported offered small and medium powers an opportunity denied them
by centuries of multipolarity. Moscow’s satellite states in Eastern and
Central Europe would not have been so bent on escape had there been nothing to
escape to. The American order promised a higher standard of living, national
sovereignty, and legal and institutional equality. This gave nations living
under the shadow of the Soviet Union an option other than accommodation, and
when given the chance to leave Moscow’s control, they took it.
Various self-described realists in recent years have
called on the U.S. to accept a return to spheres of interest as an alternative
to unipolarity. But they have mostly acknowledged only Russian and Chinese
spheres. These are problematic enough. Do we know how far China’s perception of
its rightful sphere extends? Does it include Vietnam? All of Southeast Asia?
Korea? How about what China calls the First Island Chain, which includes Japan?
Russia’s traditional sphere of interest from the time of Peter the Great always
included the Baltic states and at least part of Poland. Vladimir Putin is
openly emulating Peter and is frank about his desire to restore the Soviet
empire as it existed during the Cold War.
To recognize Russia’s and China’s spheres of interest
would mean accepting their hegemony over a swath of nations that currently
enjoy sovereign independence. And in this emerging new world, Russia and China
will not be the only ones seeking to expand their spheres. If Germany and Japan
need to become great powers again, they will have spheres of interest too,
which will inevitably overlap with China’s and Russia’s, leading to numerous
conflicts in the multipolar future just as in the multipolar past.
Which brings us to the much-trumpeted idea of a new
accord among the United States, China, and Russia, equivalent to the 19th
century’s Concert of Europe. A successful arrangement would have to settle on
boundaries for their relative spheres of interest. Is such an agreement possible?
The answer is no, because the new multipolar world will
not have the same qualities as the one that prevailed two centuries ago.
Metternich’s Austria was a status quo power, interested only in protecting a
conservative order against its liberal challengers. Bismarck regarded his newly
unified Germany in the late 19th century as “satiated.” They both sought an
equilibrium to hold on to what they had, not to get more.
But China and Russia are not at all satiated, status quo
powers. They are dissatisfied, have-not powers. Since the end of the Cold War,
they have been chronically unhappy with American global supremacy and sought to
restore what they regard as their natural and traditional regional dominance.
Even today, China exercises only partial mastery over Southeast Asia, and it
doesn’t control Taiwan, much less enjoy what it would deem the proper
subservience from Japan and South Korea. Russia, too, is only in the early
stages of rebuilding its traditional sphere in Eastern and Central Europe.
Ukraine is not the end but the beginning of Putin’s envisioned order.
What kind of arrangement with the United States could
satisfy these ambitions? Not one that simply codifies the status quo, as the
Concert of Europe attempted to do. It would have to accommodate the radical
geopolitical transformation of Europe and Asia that Russia and China each view
as essential, and for which Russia, at least, has been willing to go to war.
Such a transformation will not be a pleasant process for the small and medium
powers forced to give up their independence and accept domination by Beijing,
Moscow, or Washington—and perhaps eventually by Berlin, Tokyo, or who knows
who else. If the first four decades of the 20th century taught us anything, it
is that achieving a stable peace with have-not powers is hard. Every nation or
territory conceded to them strengthens and emboldens them for the next demand.
In fact, Beijing and Moscow have neither the desire nor
the need for any restraining accord with the United States. On the contrary,
they have every reason to believe that this is the moment to press on. Xi
Jinping has spoken of “great changes unseen in a century,” which offer China a
“period of strategic opportunity.” For Putin, Trump’s destruction of the transatlantic
alliance is such a “great change.” Why shouldn’t he seize this opportunity? He
can’t know how long the Trump phase will last in the United States, and if the
Europeans rearm, the Kremlin’s window of opportunity may close. Until now,
Putin has moved slowly, waiting six years between invading Georgia and annexing
Crimea, and then another eight years before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine,
which was severely hampered by America and its allies. The Americans have now
shattered that solidarity, and Putin could well believe that this is the moment
to speed up his plans for conquest.
This means that the first years of the new multipolar
era will not be marked by adroit, mutually accommodating diplomacy, but by
intense competition and confrontation. The world will look more like the brutal
multipolar era of the early 20th century than like the more orderly, if still
brutal, world of the 19th.
***
This is the new world that America is entering,
voluntarily shorn of its greatest assets. The influential Chinese strategic
thinker Yan Xuetong once observed that the most important gap between the United States and China was
not military or economic power, both of which China could amass. It was
America’s global system of alliances and partnerships.
When Russia or China went to war, it went alone. When the
United States went to war, even in an unpopular conflict like Iraq, it had the
support of dozens of allies. American military-power projection has depended on
bases all around the world, provided by nations that trusted the United States
as a partner and have been willing to overlook the inconveniences of hosting
American soldiers. But they may reconsider if the U.S. no longer guarantees
those nations’ security and instead wages economic warfare against them and
makes political and ideological demands that they find offensive. Trump
officials seem to expect European and Asian countries to join the United States
whenever Washington needs or wants them—to put pressure on China, for
instance—even as the U.S. offers them nothing in return. But can you ditch your
allies and have them too?
It would be one thing if the United States really was
retreating within its hemisphere, reverting to its 19th-century isolation and
indifference to global affairs. But among the most remarkable things about this
administration’s foreign policy is that, for all the talk of “America First,”
Trump evinces seemingly unlimited global ambition. He enjoys wielding American
power even as he depletes it. In his first year back in office, he launched
strikes against Iran and Syria; threatened to seize Canada and Greenland;
decapitated Venezuela’s government and promised to “run” the country; meddled
ineffectually in wars in Southeast Asia, Central Africa, and the Middle East;
and even proposed construction projects in the Gaza Strip that would have to be
defended by American forces.
Is this what “restraint” looks like? Trump’s intellectual
cheerleaders extol him for abandoning the “nonsensical utopian goals” of
“clueless elites,” but in the next breath praise him for seeking nothing less
than to “reshape” the entire world. Reshape it to what end? To line Trump’s
pockets and bring him glory?
Trump’s megalomania is transforming the United States
from international leader into international pariah, and the American people
will suffer the consequences for years to come. Germany’s chancellor in 1916,
Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, worried that his nation’s behavior risked making
it “the mad dog among nations” and would provoke “the condemnation of the
entire civilized world.” He was right. German leaders were proud of their
unflinching “realism,” and believed that the frank and brutal pursuit of self-interest
was simply what nations did. But as the historian Paul Kennedy noted, Germany’s
constant appeal “to the code of naked Machtpolitik ” helped unite the world’s
great powers in bringing about Germany’s defeat.
The Trump administration revels in the pursuit of
self-interest and the exercise of strength for its own sake, with gleeful
disregard for the interests of others. As Trump’s first-term national security
adviser H. R. McMaster put it in an essay co-written with the economist Gary Cohn, the world
is not a “global community,” but “an arena where nations, nongovernmental
actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage,” and in this world of Machtpolitik,
the United States enjoys “unmatched” power. But for how long? McMaster’s
formulation, like Trump’s exaltation of selfishness, rests on profound
ignorance of the true sources of American strength. So much of America’s
influence in the world has derived from treating others as part of a community
of democratic nations or of strategic partners.
Others see this, even if many Americans don’t. Yan, the
Chinese thinker, observed that one of the elements holding the American order
together was America’s reputation for morality and respect for international
norms. Theodore Roosevelt, often regarded as the quintessential American
realist and no slouch in the wielding of power, believed that great nations
ultimately had to be guided by an “international social consciousness” that
considered not just their own interests but also “the interests of others.” A
successful great power, he observed, could not act “without regard to the
essentials of genuine morality.”
For decades, much of the world supported a United States
that acted on these principles and accepted America’s power, despite its flaws
and errors, precisely because it did not act solely out of narrow
self-interest—much less in the narrow, selfish interest of a single ruler.
That era is over. Trump has managed in just one year to
destroy the American order that was, and he has weakened America’s ability to
protect its interests in the world that will be. If Americans thought defending
the liberal world order was too expensive, wait until they start paying for
what comes next.
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