This apparent contradiction reflects a fundamental shift in U.S. foreign policy thinking that is consistent with Trump’s preference for dominating what is easy to dominate and appeasing or ignoring what is impossible to dominate, yet independent of him. While Trump was clearly the one who made the decision to overthrow Maduro, the plan was devised by the State Department, Pentagon and CIA, indicating a consensus within an administration committed to hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. “We will not allow competitors from outside the Western Hemisphere to station troops or other threatening forces, or to own or control strategically important assets in our hemisphere,” proclaims the new National Security Strategy U.S.
To understand the meaning of this hemispheric show of force, one must take into account Trump’s apparent enthusiasm for ceding one-fifth of Ukraine to Russia and his indifference to China’s threats to to invade Taiwan. But there is a common denominator: powerful players in the U.S. political establishment seek to compensate for their refusal to engage in intractable foreign conflicts with a simultaneous show of force closer to home. This goal finds symbolic expression in admiration Trump for another 19th-century president, James Polk, whose 1846 war against Mexico expanded United States territory more than any other president. A portrait of Polk now hangs in the Oval Office.
Far from being evidence of Trump’s political schizophrenia, recent events reflect the administration’s desire to restore the pre-World War I world order, when America’s global ambitions were more restrained and its neighbors more secure.
Although two world wars greatly expanded the scope of America’s global interests, the early warnings of George Washington and John Quincy Adams to avoid foreign conflicts never faded from the national consciousness. Given concerns of today’s voters about the uncontrolled immigration of people and the emigration of jobs, it should be less shocking, though not necessarily less disturbing, for cosmopolitan elites to see foreign policy revert to nineteenth-century form.
In sum, there are two diametrically opposed models for understanding the evolution of the international order since the late 1940s. The first is the thesis of Francis Fukuyama about the “end of history.” As the Cold War came to an end, Fukuyama argued that the great ideological struggle of modernity – liberal democracy versus communist authoritarianism – had been finally resolved. Liberal democracy had won, and what remained of “history” in the philosophical sense consisted largely of managing the inevitable but ultimately marginal resistance of the surviving authoritarian regimes.
The second model is less well known in the West, but has gained enormous influence among Chinese political theorists. It derives from the writings of German legal philosopher Carl Schmitt, who rejected liberalism as an empty ideology that fetishizes debate and aspires to a dangerous universalism.
Schmitt denied that history could culminate in any single, globally valid political form. For him, the postwar liberal order was not the end point of political evolution but an accidental product of World War II. He believed that this order was doomed to collapse as rising illiberal powers asserted control over their regional spheres of influence, or, as he called them, Großräume.
For Schmitt, who joined the Nazi Party in 1933, the natural state of world order is one in which the leading power in each region organizes the political space there. The regions then counterbalance each other, each respecting the legitimacy of the others based solely on a recognized balance of power.
Order is reflected and maintained by recognizing pluralism in all regions. International law is not necessary for global order and is even detrimental to it. It only provokes economic and military conflicts because of inevitable disagreements over its content, interpretation and applicability. The creation of post-war institutions such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and, especially, NATO, in the view of Schmitt, represented a transparent attempt by the US to impose its will on the world: victor’s justice masquerading as a universal principle.
But Schmitt also predicted that the new rising powers would exploit liberal openness while remaining politically closed, ultimately undermining American universalism and liberal democracy itself. Although he did not live to see the advent of the World Trade Organization in 1995, Schmitt would certainly have predicted its collapse as a mercantilist, modernizing China pushed the U.S. to emulate its rival and ignore WTO rules on import barriers and export subsidies. He also undoubtedly foresaw the emergence of someone like Trump: a leader who would capitalize on a growing sense of economic, political, and military encroachment by asserting the need for unlimited executive discretion.
Not surprisingly, Schmitt considered the Monroe Doctrine to be the earliest modern example of Großraum thinking, since it envisioned an international order based on spatial dominance rather than on abstract, universal law. Because he saw liberal democratic universalism as an inherently unstable basis for world order, he would have viewed America’s “perpetual wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq as the inevitable result of U.S. efforts to maintain and dominate that order. And he would expect these doomed efforts to cause a retreat to a Monrovian posture that would protect the Western Hemisphere from economic and military invasion by China and Russia.
The cost of restoring the Monrovian order, if it occurs, will no doubt be enormous. It would likely portend the collapse of NATO, the expansion of East-West armed conflict in Europe, and China’s revanchist militarism toward Taiwan and the South China Sea.
Perhaps Trump will back down, leaving Cuba, Colombia, Mexico and Greenland to govern themselves independently – albeit under U.S. armed guard. Perhaps NATO will continue to exist. Perhaps Russian President Vladimir Putin will be happy with Donbass and Crimea. And perhaps Chinese President Xi Jinping will put economic growth ahead of expanding his own Großraum. Nevertheless, I suspect that the liberal world order has experienced its last dawn.
Benn Steil,
director of international economics at the Council
on international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of the recent book
“The World That Wasn’t: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century”
(Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 2024).
© Project Syndicate, 2026.
www.project-syndicate.org
