For much of the 20th century, the answer was: a glimpse of humanity’s political future. Long before the body’s creation, H. G. Wells imagined the eventual emergence of a world state, arguing that technological interdependence and the destructiveness of modern war would ultimately make the old system of competing sovereign states untenable. 

The advent of nuclear weapons made such predictions appear urgent. Albert Einstein became one of the most prominent postwar advocates of world government, warning that “there is no [other] possibility of control of the atomic bomb.” In his 1961 Inaugural Address, delivered a decade and a half after the United Nations was established, JFK described it as “our last best hope.” New Yorkers of a certain vintage will remember the UN flag flying next to Old Glory at their public schools.

The expectations made their way into midcentury popular culture: a powerful United Nations, with its own army, oversees interplanetary colonization in many of sci-fi master Philip K. Dick’s novels of the 1960s and ’70s; Star Trek likewise took it for granted that future politics would belong to a planetary federation.   

Whether utopia or nightmare, world government seemed inevitable, and the United Nations looked like its beginning. How things change. Today, the United Nations looks very different from the 20th century’s imagined world state. The annual General Assembly still draws world leaders, but midcentury-style “world government” seems like a distant dream.

But that’s not such a bad thing. When the United Nations tries to reach deep inside how individual sovereign states are governed — what’s implied by true “world government,” as imagined by barmy midcentury visionaries — resistance to its authority waxes, and the real-world outcomes are often disastrous. The better path is for the United Nations to embrace its current, more limited role as a symbolic forum for sovereign states.

The theater, in short, is precisely the point. While many once saw within the UN Charter an opportunity to transcend the nation-state, the body produces its best results when affirming the sovereignty of its member states, not superseding them.

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The Boomer-uncle war

By Heather Penatzer

For years, the United Nations has been the subject of critiques from both ends of the political spectrum. On the Left, the core critique is that the organization is nothing more than a veil for American imperialism. As Noam Chomsky says, “the UN is considered favorably to the extent that it follows US orders.” From the Right, the United Nations is disparaged for being either all-powerful or politically impotent. After serving as Ronald Reagan’s UN ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, writing for the Heritage Foundation, claimed that the UN was “too bureaucratic, too remote, and too difficult to hold accountable, too involved in issues unrelated to our interests.”  

More recently, a February 2025 executive order from President Trump claimed that UN agencies have been “infiltrated by members of groups long designated … as foreign terrorist organizations,” and that UN employees “were involved in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel,” building upon a 2024 Israeli accusation (for which scant evidence has been provided).

So does the organization have a purpose in the year 2026, or should it be sent to join its short-lived predecessor, the League of Nations, in the graveyard of failed international projects?

Like the league, founded in the wake of the Great War, the United Nations was born from the devastation of a world war. The original wartime conception of the United Nations enshrined the four great Allied powers of World War II — Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China — as permanent members of what would become the UN Security Council, with France added postwar. With these five states holding veto power over the council’s resolutions, the United Nations was constrained by the rivalry of the Cold War.

As historian Mark Mazower notes, the United Nations did not emerge “like Aphrodite … from the Second World War, pure and uncontaminated by any significant association with that prewar failure, the League of Nations.” Those responsible for creating the body were not only heavily influenced by the league’s structure and mission, but also carried forward many of its institutional practices. The league’s mandates system, for example, provided an important precedent for the UN trusteeship system, which assumed responsibility for territories transferred from the defeated German and Ottoman empires. Indeed, many of the institutional arrangements through which the league had sought to manage and legitimize empire survived into the United Nations.

These imperial links create an interesting duality around these institutions. The United Nations was initially designed in ways that accommodated, and often protected, the interests of the existing colonial powers. Over the following decades, however, the same institutional machinery became an important vehicle through which anticolonial states challenged imperial rule and advanced the principle of national self-determination. The history of the UN trusteeship system thus illustrates a broader paradox: an organization built in significant part upon the institutional inheritance of empire became, over time, an important instrument in dismantling it.

Particularly striking is that the United Nations’ first armed peacekeeping force was created in an effort to uphold national sovereignty, not undermine it. After Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company in 1956, Israel invaded Egypt, and Britain and France quickly followed the Jewish state. The British government was the Canal Company’s largest single shareholder, while French investors held most of the remaining shares. Both governments regarded Nasser’s nationalization as a direct challenge to their economic and strategic position in the region. Their objectives went considerably beyond restoring access to the canal: British and French leaders hoped that military intervention would also bring about Nasser’s downfall.

Soviet supreme leader Nikolai Bulganin quickly threatened to join the fray on the side of Egypt, warning that the Soviets were “full of determination to crush the aggressor and re-establish peace in the East by using force,” while also making a pointed comment about Britain’s inability to defend itself from “modern weapons.” The Americans also objected to the invasion. Then-Vice President Richard Nixon later summarized the contradiction facing Washington: “We couldn’t, on one hand, complain about the Soviets intervening in Hungary and, on the other hand, approve of the British and the French picking that particular time to intervene against Nasser.”

London and Paris both vetoed a Security Council resolution demanding that Israel withdraw its military on Oct. 30, then joined the invasion the following day. An emergency session of the General Assembly quickly convened and established the UN Emergency Force, composed of soldiers from countries outside the permanent members of the Security Council, which deployed to the Sinai with Egypt’s consent. 

Britain and France agreed to withdraw within weeks, while Israel took longer. The danger that Soviet intervention might transform the crisis into a much wider war was averted, and Egypt’s sovereignty over its territory was restored. When Nasser demanded the departure of UN forces in 1967, they left — as the consent-based character of the mission required. The episode was ultimately consistent with the principle articulated in Article 2 of the UN Charter: that the organization rested upon the “sovereign equality” of its members and that it wasn’t authorized to intervene in matters “essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.”

In the following decades, however, something shifted. Rather than treating state sovereignty simply as a foundational principle of international order to be defended, the United Nations increasingly developed institutions and practices that allowed international authority to reach inside states. Sovereignty became conditional: only states who met the standards of “good government,” as enumerated by the United Nations, could expect territorial exclusivity. 

Governments that failed to meet emerging international standards of governance, human rights, or civilian protection could find their domestic authority challenged by international intervention. UN personnel were no longer just establishing ceasefires between states, but also administered elections, supervised police, rewrote institutions, governed territory, and used military force within states’ sovereign bounds. Steadily, the United Nations began to assume those functions that earlier advocates of supranational government had imagined would eventually migrate upward from states to international institutions.

Such interventions have led to a wide range of adverse outcomes, the costs of which have largely been borne by local populations rather than by the United Nations itself. The 1992-1993 UN Transitional Administration in Cambodia, which endowed its high commissioner with the extreme status of “final arbiter of Cambodian law,” has been linked to the spread of HIV in the wartorn country through peacekeepers’ exploitation of Cambodian women and the enormous expansion of the local sex industry that accompanied their arrival. Similarly, the United Nations has admitted its role in the 2010 outbreak of cholera in Haiti, introduced by peacekeepers and ultimately responsible for the deaths of thousands of Haitians and the infection of hundreds of thousands more. 

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MAGA’s samurai justice in Venezuela

By Michael Lind

When critics, Left and Right, assail the United Nations, it’s these “global-governance” failures — and many others of the kind — that they have in mind. There is another side of the United Nations, however, that is easy to dismiss because it can look unserious: its role as a stage. This seemingly superficial side is precisely where the institution shines.

Some of the most famous moments in the organization’s history are acts of political theater. Khrushchev banging the desk at the General Assembly and, according to the famous account, brandishing his shoe; Adlai Stevenson confronting Soviet Ambassador Valerian Zorin during the Cuban Missile Crisis; and the like. While such episodes may provoke a chuckle, the spectacle is itself part of diplomacy. The General Assembly and Security Council give states a forum in which to make claims, present evidence, denounce adversaries, rally coalitions, and communicate before a global audience. 

Stevenson’s confrontation with Zorin didn’t resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it did give Washington a venue in which to publicly establish its case against the Kremlin, while the actual resolution of the crisis remained a matter of negotiation between sovereign governments. What looks like the United Nations’ weakness — its dependence on argument, rather than enforcement — is also one of the things it was built to provide.

The United Nations is at its best when acting as a forum for states, rather than as a higher authority over them. Some of its most consequential achievements have come not from governing states, but from helping them negotiate rules governing their relations with one another. Nuclear nonproliferation provides an especially important example. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty created an international framework in which nuclear-weapon states and non-nuclear-weapon states accepted reciprocal obligations concerning proliferation, peaceful nuclear technology, and disarmament. The International Atomic Energy Agency, meanwhile, provided a mechanism through which states could submit to inspections and demonstrate compliance with safeguards. These arrangements didn’t eliminate sovereignty or place nuclear policy under a world government. They instead allowed sovereign states to make bargains that would have been considerably harder to sustain without common rules, monitoring, and institutions.

This more modest role is less dramatic than the world government imagined by Wells or Einstein. However, an institution needn’t govern the world to serve a purpose within it. The United Nations provides states with a place to negotiate, to establish common rules, to monitor agreements, to publicize violations, and to take appeals to the world public. Suez demonstrated what the organization could accomplish when international action reinforced, rather than supplanted, sovereign authority. Arms-control and nonproliferation agreements demonstrate the value of institutions that help states make and monitor bargains without pretending to replace them.

The United Nations may not be the beginning of the world state that Wells and Einstein and Dick imagined. Its more durable achievement may be precisely the opposite: making a world of sovereign states somewhat more capable of living with itself.

Speaking not to the American people, but to the Saudi Future Investment Initiative Conference in Miami Beach, Trump went on to show officials from the Persian Gulf region a video clip proclaiming his “100% approval rating” — without noting that it came from a single poll gauging the views of self-described “MAGA Republicans” — before declaring that “Cuba’s next, by the way, but pretend I didn’t say that please.” 

Welcome to the Boomer-uncle war, launched with calamitously vague objectives not mainly because the president fell in thrall to Israeli influence — but because he embodies a broken American gerontocracy: an aging generation of leaders whose perceptions of America’s relative power are stuck in the halcyon 1980s and ’90s; and whose yearning for the war spectacles of old is now fulfilled by short online clips, long-term strategic considerations be damned.

Trump’s wartime command closely resembles the Boomer uncle who can’t help himself from scrolling through social-media reels at the Easter dinner table. His briefings as commander in chief now reportedly consist of two-minute-long highlight reels that show “stuff getting blown up,” as NBC News recently reported. His attention can only be permeated by ever-escalating spectacle, chasing the high of a more intense “fire, boom, fire, boom.” An anonymous White House official has told the media that the president’s efforts to end the conflict are likewise driven by the fact that he’s “bored and wants to move on.” 

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Netanyahu’s attack on US diplomacy

By Heather Penatzer

The trouble is that this time, someone else besides MAGA Boomers gets a vote: namely, the Tehran regime. The Iranians, of course, are good at spectacle and even social-media “dunking” — witness Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf’s post trolling CENTCOM over the destruction of an AWACS command-and-control aircraft (“caused by a clogged kitchen pipe”). But for the Islamic Republic, the trolling and spectacle serve a larger strategic imperative: to impose high enough costs on Washington and Jerusalem to prevent a third “excursion,” even if this means Iran taking a bad beating, too.

The same cannot be said for the Boomer uncle in charge in Washington. Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote that “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” He meant that war itself isn’t an outcome, but rather the means to achieve some political end or range of ends. So what has been the political end pursued by the American military “excursion” in Iran? Trump himself doesn’t seem to know.  

Since the initial American attack on Feb. 28, Trump and his administration have continually moved the goalposts. First it was to support regime change — empowering the Iranian people to control their own “destiny,” as Trump put it in his early-morning speech announcing the war. Then we were told that this was actually an exercise in Venezuelan-style coercive decapitation, in which we would keep the regime in place and continue to assassinate successors to Ayatollah Khameinei until we “find another Delcy [Rodriguez],” in reference to the Maduro deputy tapped to lead that country as an American cat’s paw. 

Later, the objective was to destroy Iranian long-range missile capabilities and to destroy the Iranian nuclear program that we were told had been “obliterated” last June in the course of the 12-Day War. Still later, the war became about reopening the Strait of Hormuz — a problem that didn’t exist prior to American military action. “The objective of the war has become undoing the consequence of the war,” as one online wit put it, adding: “the stupidest war in history.” Most recently, the State Department struck reopening Hormuz from the list of objectives, reprising instead the destruction of capability, which is a tactic not a political objective.

This inability to articulate strategic goals is mirrored by the administration’s failure to consider the consequences of action. While the early pro-war motto of “you can just do things” may be true, it risks obscuring an important countervailing fact: namely, that others can do things, too. Iran’s closure of the strait and the resulting disruption of the global economy weren’t unexpected to anyone paying attention; the IRGC had been preparing for decades to close that chokepoint in response to an invasion. The 2023-2024 Houthi attacks on a similar bottleneck in the Red Sea demonstrated the asymmetry in costs for this type of conflict, showing how relatively cheap projectiles can become overwhelming for expensive and high-tech American weaponry.  

We knew these things before Feb. 28, just as we knew that the Islamic Republic would be preparing for another attack after last June’s incursion. The economic fallout from both the closure of the strait and the destruction of petrochemical infrastructure isn’t yet clear, but one thing is certain: despite the weak attempts to spin this in Trump’s favor, no one benefits more from this disruption than China and Russia. The former, China, is seeing a boost to its renewables industry (Trump scrapped US investments in America’s analog); the latter, Russia, is making a mint from oil sales since Team Trump un-sanctioned its exports (and some of Tehran’s oil exports, as well).

Speaking of China and Russia, both are likely celebrating America’s fumbling pivot back to the Middle East. Apart from the asymmetric impact of the energy crisis, the depletion of US missile stockpiles and relocation of materiel from East Asia have underscored the brittleness of American hegemony. Notably, THAAD air-defense systems are being removed from South Korea (a state with whom America has a formal defense alliance) for use in Israel (with whom Washington has no such alliance). 

More than 25% of America’s THAAD stockpile was used last summer to defend the Jewish state following Benjamin Netanyahu’s attack on Iran in June. Such depletion harms the US ability to project power and defend allies in other regions. Plus, the rapid exhaustion of long-range interceptors and air defense should be alarming for anyone who genuinely believes that there is a threat to the American homeland. While America may not “run out of bombs,” it is running short on the expensive, sophisticated weaponry and radar that enable US air-defense systems.  Replacing these stockpiles will take years, and is also dependent on rare-earth minerals, of which China controls a significant portion of the global supply (98%, in the case of gallium).

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Bibi’s ‘existential’ obsession

By Amir Tibon

So what have these expenditures won? No faction on the American Right should be content. For the America First populists: skyrocketing prices and a pivot away from domestic issues such as immigration, poverty, and addiction. For the defenders of Western Civilization: a degradation of those distinctive values the West claims to represent, as the US increasingly takes up Israel’s Gaza-style methods and rhetoric (“maximum lethality, not legality,” to quote Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s edifying hip-hop rhyme glorying in a new disregard for the laws of war). For the congressional Republicans who have largely ceded legislative power to the executive: a newly energized Democratic Party likely to capitalize on these blunders come November. And even for the neoconservatives and pro-Israel hawks: no regime change, no democracy, and collapsing primacy. 

None of these groups should trust that Trump will advance their policy aims, for he has no ideology but spectacle. For a man whose life has been so defined by pageantry and performance, the crowning achievement of his presidency is shattering the illusion of American invincibility.  Like a dying animal lashing out, this paroxysm is more pathetic than powerful. 

Yes, those who influenced Trump bear some blame: from the ultra-hawkish Sen. Lindsey Graham (who used childish word-association games to persuade Trump that he’d clinch a Lincolnian or Rooseveltian legacy by invading Iran); to overconfident Israeli intelligence that recently prompted Vice President JD Vance to dress down Bibi (for overselling an Iranian uprising). Yet the buck stops at the Oval Office and the Resolute Desk: susceptibility to such pressures demonstrates just how unsuited to lead Trump has become.  

Anyone who can be manipulated by Graham belongs in a care facility rather than the Oval Office, and those who continue to enable such embarrassment deserve to answer for the damage they’ve done. As long as Trump continues to seek the next “boom,” the next war, too, will have no political purpose beyond perverse spectacle.

Yet the deal also provides Ukraine with a security guarantee modeled after NATO’s Article 5. It doesn’t recognize Moscow’s territorial claims as a legal matter. And it stipulates Russian withdrawal from several territories that it claims to control. Under the plan, some $100 billion in expropriated Russian assets will be used to fund Ukraine’s postwar reconstruction. President Trump has given Ukraine a week to accept this deal; it is unclear which of its 28 points can be negotiated, if any.

Capitals in Western and Northern Europe are irate, feeling cut out of the process and confused by an apparently dovish turn in Washington’s approach after a few weeks during which Trump had ratcheted up pressure on the Kremlin. They shouldn’t be surprised: The Ukraine settlement is part of Trump’s broader effort to free America from its strategic entanglements in Europe (and the Middle East) to focus on more strategically crucial — and politically rewarding — regions.

The hawks and Atlanticists still operate on the assumption that America’s and Europe’s strategic interests are deeply aligned. Trump, like many ordinary Americans and Europeans, understands that the age of alignment is over, and that a fundamental break with the 20th-century arrangements was long overdue.

Since the end of World War II, the pursuit of three core interests has defined American grand strategy. First was the security of postwar Western Europe. Through military alliances like NATO and economic programs such as the Marshall Plan, Washington provided an effective bulwark against both the forward expansion of the Soviet Union and the threat of revolution within the war-shattered European societies. 

Second, the United States has maintained a considerable presence in the Persian Gulf region, assuming Britain’s former role as the principal outside power to ensure continued Western access to the region’s oil. Third, America has viewed the East Asia-Pacific region as a core strategic interest, ever since the seizure of the Philippines by President William McKinley during the Spanish-American War in 1898, which protected US commercial entry into Asia and signaled Washington’s ambitions as a global power.

The three regions of interests formed a hierarchy of sorts: Europe first, the Middle East second, and Asia third. And despite runaway globalization, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the rise of China, this hierarchy of priorities has largely remained consistent. The past several US administrations doubled down on toppling regimes in the Middle East while acting as though Western Europe requires the same amount of US assistance that was needed to remedy the destruction of WWII and fend off Communism.

Despite President Barack Obama’s promises to “pivot to Asia” in response to China’s rise, Washington launched interventions in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, while expanding military aid to support the actions of other states in Mozambique, Ukraine, and Gaza, among others. President Joe Biden likewise maintained the priority of Europe and the Middle East, notwithstanding his withdrawal from Afghanistan. 

Now, a quarter century into the new century and an additional decade since the end of the Cold War, the second Trump administration is finally giving shape to a new, post-Cold War framework of American grand strategy.

This Trump Doctrine appears to be a reorientation of American strategic interests for the 21st century. While media critics initially framed Trump as an “isolationist,” his record has unambiguously disproved that allegation. This doctrine is best understood not through universal principles, but by examining how Trump is diverging from America’s traditional priorities and interests. 

At the heart of the president’s vision is a desire to devolve European security back to European states and to disengage from the sands of the Middle East. Reducing American commitments in those two regions is paired with an activist approach to the Western Hemisphere, while playing hardball economic statecraft with Beijing. While the execution of this reorientation has been mixed and, in several cases, dangerously flawed, the Trump Doctrine is a much needed update to last century’s strategic status quo.

Start with Europe. American presence in Europe has been consistent since World War I. After assisting the European allies in two world wars, Washington turned its attention to the long-term containment, and later “rollback,” of Soviet Communism. The United States stationed troops throughout Europe, and granted institutionalized security guarantees to NATO allies, all under the shadow of nuclear war.  

America paired this projection of military power with the largest foreign-aid program in global history: the Marshall Plan. Between 1948 and 1952, the United States supplied more than $13 billion in economic assistance to Western Europe, equivalent to approximately $160 billion today. The Marshall Plan acted as a mass subsidy for postwar social and Christian democracy, thus staving off revolution and realignment with the Communist sphere.

While the Soviet threat is no more, and the Continent has long since recovered from the destruction of World War II, Europe has continued to stay at the forefront of American foreign policy. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Biden administration sounded Cold War-era civilizational rhetoric. “If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine,” Biden claimed in his 2024 State of the Union Address, “I assure you he will not.” 

Vladimir Putin’s Russia came to serve as a substitute for Stalin’s USSR in the minds of hawks in Brussels, London, and Washington. This, despite contemporary Russia’s weakness relative to a Soviet Union that had just defeated the Nazi war machine, occupied most of Central Europe, and installed puppet governments in multiple states. While Soviets steamrolled through half the Continent, today’s Russia has gotten stuck in an embarrassing war of attrition with one of the poorest countries in Europe, experiencing casualties that dwarf those of the Soviet-Afghan War. Despite Cold Warrior fantasies to the contrary, the conquest of Europe is not on the agenda for a country that can’t manage the conquest of eastern Ukraine.

That said, Russia’s resolve in Ukraine shouldn’t be underestimated, either. Putin has stated that he considers Ukrainian accession to be an existential threat to Russia: whether or not you believe him, it is clear that the Russians are not about to retreat empty-handed. Despite a massive Western sanctions regime, considerable aid to Ukraine, and a coup attempt, there has been little evidence that Russian military efforts are on the brink of collapse.

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A Ukraine deal is still possible

By Heather Penatzer

Having borne high costs, Putin’s behavior reveals his belief that the costs of surrender are still higher. The last three and a half years have shown that Putin is committed to this conflict for the long haul, and that Moscow will continue expending the resources necessary to pursue its objectives in Donbas. Biden’s strategy was to lean into that resolve, running down Russian resources in the hopes that Putin would withdraw from Ukraine or lose domestic support at home. Neither outcome came to pass, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives were destroyed in the bargain.

Trump, by contrast, has long disdained — and now explicitly broken with — the postwar status quo in Europe. Yet rather than abandoning Ukraine, his approach has involved consistent efforts to pressure both Volodymyr Zelensky and Putin to the bargaining table, while passing responsibility for European security to the likes of Germany, France, and Poland.  

Trump hasn’t been soft on Russia — he has continued to provide considerable aid to Ukraine, granted permission to use Western weapons on targets within Russian territory, and imposed a new set of extremely harsh sanctions on Russian oil following the cancellation of peace talks in Budapest this autumn. However, these actions aren’t instruments of attrition, but rather intended to pressure Putin to negotiate. Biden’s policies were intended to extend the war by keeping Ukraine in the fight. Trump’s approach, in contrast, has been focused on ending the conflict altogether.

The new 28-point peace plan comes at a moment when the United States has started deporting Ukrainian refugees so that they can be drafted into the Ukrainian military, with Zelensky saying of the deportees, “We’ll find good use for them.” If this is what Ukraine’s defense now relies on, a deal is best approved sooner rather than later. The plan’s core features are consistent with what smarter analysts have been saying for multiple years now. Ukraine is denied NATO accession but is granted a non-NATO security guarantee and a pathway to EU membership, while Russia keeps the territory it has held behind a line of conflict that continues to creep westward. While it remains to be seen if the proposal will be adopted, it offers the opportunity to stop Ukraine’s continued bleeding. Zelensky would be wise to accept it and focus on his country’s recovery and opportunities as a member of the European Union.

In the meantime, the administration has maintained a consistent message that the days of European “dependency” on Washington are coming to a close. While this initially sparked a panic that Trump was about to withdraw from NATO, this has not happened. Instead, European leaders have now agreed to a new distribution of burden-sharing by committing to invest 5% of GDP annually on their own security by 2035. Eighty years after the end of World War II, the responsibility for European security is being handed back to Europe in a fraught but measured transition.

Which brings us to the Middle East. American strategy in that region has also largely been determined by the postwar status quo, with a considerably more imperial bent than in Europe.  US involvement began with treaties ensuring American access to oil in 1928 and 1944, coinciding with the handoff of Western hegemony from the declining British Empire to the rising American imperium. 

The struggle to control access to the region’s natural resources persisted throughout the Cold War, with ambiguous CIA involvement in the 1949 Syrian coup d’état followed by the CIA-led operation to overthrow the government of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran after he nationalized Iranian oil. Efforts to prevent Soviet capture of the Persian Gulf region led to numerous interventions, proxy wars, and covert operations, a habit that wasn’t broken when the Soviet Union fell.

Here, too, Trump has departed from the status quo. Beginning in the 2016 Republican primary, when he described the Iraq War as a “big fat mistake,” Trump has consistently expressed a desire to get the United States out of the Middle East. The result has been a significant shift in both policy and public discourse. While Trump received some criticism for negotiating with the Taliban, his goal of ending the American occupation of Afghanistan after 20 years of continuous and counterproductive military presence has been one of his chief achievements — even if it was Biden who pulled the final Bandaid.

Trump’s second term has involved new challenges, above all the war in Gaza. While Trump has followed an approach similar to the policy pursued in Ukraine — supplying significant aid to Israel while pressuring both sides to reach a negotiated settlement — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has consistently derailed American attempts at diplomacy. The Israeli attack on Iran scuttled US efforts to negotiate a new treaty governing the Iranian nuclear program and ultimately pulled America into military action, albeit in a manner designed to limit escalation.

The Jewish state’s strike on Iran — and similar attacks on targets within the sovereign borders of Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia, Qatar, and Yemen — severely undermine the strategic interests of the United States, both in the region and globally. At a moment when Trump is attempting to turn the ship of American policy around, Israel continues to sow chaos among its neighbors. While “mowing the lawn” in the region may (or may not) be in the best interests of Israel’s security, it is destabilizing, and impels Washington to deploy back to a region Americans across the political spectrum are resolved to leave behind.

Furthermore, Israel’s incommensurate response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack has been a disaster for American legitimacy abroad in increasingly multipolar times. Israeli impunity has fueled claims of Western hypocrisy, pushing states out of reach of American influence as its material supremacy is increasingly eroded. The peace plan currently in place for Gaza — potentially the crowning achievement of Trump’s presidency and recently adopted by the United Nations — rests on an extremely fragile ceasefire which has already been violated a number of times.  

If Trump wants to pacify and deprioritize the Gulf region, he will need to ensure that Netanyahu does not derail his strategy to extricate America from the Middle East. He has, so far, failed on that count.

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By Arta Moeini

Then there is the Asia-Pacific region.  Here, Trump has maintained the greatest strategic continuity with his predecessors. Biden’s national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, advocated for what he called “a foreign policy for the middle class,” focusing on industrial renewal at home and measured economic competition with China, undergirded by stable security commitments to allies in the Indo-Pacific. 

At the macro level, Trump’s approach to Asia has emphasized the same points: self-sufficiency in the tech domain, coercive economic statecraft, and secure trans-Pacific commerce, while attempting to revive American industry. While avoiding the previous administration’s direct provocations of China and apocalyptic rhetoric concerning global democracy, Trump has again made some missteps in execution that have undermined America’s position in the Pacific.

Trump’s affinity for tariffs has been the distinguishing characteristic of his foreign policy. As an instrument of statecraft, tariffs have a few different logics. First, a regime of broad, long-term tariffs on imports are designed to protect domestic industry from being undercut by foreign producers, a key concern among Trump’s base. 

Second, tariffs can be used in a way similar to sanctions, as an instrument of economic coercion, imposing costs on a specific state until it cedes to American demands. This use of tariffs involves sanctions targeted at a specific country, with clear conditions for their removal. Finally, tariffs have historically been used as a revenue source, requiring a broad, continuous application while maintaining significant trade relationships to keep the revenue flowing.

The issue is that the Trump administration has claimed all three of these logics at one time or another, despite that they are mutually exclusive. Protectionist policies would not involve the on-again, off-again application of coercive tariffs, which should not be broadly applied to loyal trading partners; and tariffs as a source of revenue boost consumer prices in the long run, without the revitalization of domestic industry. For tariffs to be an effective instrument of policy, there needs to be a clear strategic objective guiding their use. Trump’s tariff policy has been strategically incoherent.

While the tariffs levied against stalwart American allies such as Japan, South Korea, and Thailand have allowed Trump to extract some marginal concessions on trade policy, raising trade barriers against these countries is deleterious to American interests for two reasons. First, it renders trade with the United States more difficult, costly, and unpredictable, goading allies to find more dependable trading partners (hint: like China). If these policies are meant to help America compete economically with Beijing through cutting better deals, they have been counterproductive. The long-run effects of playing economic hardball will be a decreased reliance on trade with America.

Second, tariffs on military allies undercut their ability to invest in their own security. Trump’s demands of Asian allies have been similar to the demands he has made of Europe — America will help those who help themselves. Encouraging allies to raise their own defense spending has been a core component of Trump’s approach to foreign relations. Such demands are difficult to fulfill, however, when facing a punitive tariff regime imposed by the global hegemon. 

Antagonizing allies in the Pacific undermines the American security architecture, drives Asian states into closer economic ties with China, and places the costs of these missteps on American consumers. While macro-level strategy in the Pacific has been conventional, its execution requires a reevaluation.

Finally, there is Latin America. The true revisionism in Trump’s strategic orientation is taking place here, much closer to home. American engagement in the Western Hemisphere has historically oscillated between neglect and heavy-handed intervention. From the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 to Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 corollary, which endorsed US intervention into unstable or uncooperative South American countries, successive administrations justified US dominance over Latin America as a means to protect its own backyard. 

Today, Trump’s foreign policy marks a return to that logic after decades of relative neglect during the post-Cold War focus on the Middle East. Trump, it seems, is staging something of a sequel to the Roosevelt Corollary. His administration has revived a muscular and interventionist approach to the Americas — justified in the language of law enforcement and border control, rather than the old rhetoric of hemispheric solidarity. 

Washington has used coercive diplomacy, sanctions, and military threats, including moving an aircraft carrier group to waters just off Venezuela’s shores, under the pretext of deterring narco-traffickers. Trump’s turn to South America suggests an updated form of gunboat diplomacy aimed at maintaining dominance of the hemisphere and curbing the influence of rivals like China.

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America’s invasion of Mexico

By Ian Birrell

Yet the pursuit of regime change and coercive diplomacy in Latin America risks deepening the very crises it purports to solve. In countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua, US pressure has hardened authoritarian resolve, without producing stable alternatives. Interventions framed as humanitarian or anti-narcotics operations will create disorder in Latin America, destabilize local economies, empower non-state armed groups (primarily the established cartels), and push displaced populations northward, fueling the very migration surges that Trump has pledged to stop.  

The expansion of US involvement in regional politics has also provided new openings for Chinese influence. As Washington relies on sanctions and pressure, Beijing offers a menu of loans, infrastructure, and trade that pulls Latin American states further into its economic orbit. The outcome is a paradoxical weakening of US influence in its own hemisphere.

Trump’s Western Hemisphere strategy, then, reflects both regression and innovation: a reassertion of American primacy through coercion, but couched in the language of sovereignty and border control. Whether this revived “gunboat diplomacy” can secure American interests without repeating the errors of past interventions remains an open question. What is clear is that the Western Hemisphere, once peripheral to US grand strategy, has again become a central concern of foreign policy.

Taken together, these regional realignments suggest not a retreat of American power, but its reorganization. The Trump Doctrine doesn’t mark an abdication of global leadership so much as a recalibration of it — an attempt to convert sprawling, open-ended commitments into a more contained and transactional system of influence. Europe and the Middle East are being nudged toward self-sufficiency, the Pacific remains the primary arena of great-power competition, and the Western Hemisphere has reemerged as a laboratory for coercive diplomacy and border-focused security politics. 

The underlying logic is one of consolidation: a recognition that America’s resources, attention, and legitimacy are finite, and that sustaining primacy requires pruning rather than perpetual expansion.

Trump’s style has suggested a desire to cut America’s losses in peripheral regions and an experimental exercise of alternative modes of power in Asia and South America. For all its inconsistencies and failures of execution, the Trump Doctrine represents an effort to realign America’s commitments with its interests. The resulting strategy is untidy, often improvised, and occasionally self-defeating, yet it gestures toward a long-delayed reckoning with the limits of American reach.  

After decades spent expanding a liberal order now fraying at its edges, Washington is beginning to ask what can — and what should — be preserved. The answer, imperfect as it may be, is the outline of a humbler but more deliberate kind of primacy: a United States that still seeks to shape the world, but finally on terms it can sustain.

The timing of the summit was as important as its outcome. In recent days, Russian forces have advanced near Pokrovsk, forcing Ukrainian defenders from several fortified positions and threatening key industrial and logistical sites. While far from a decisive breakthrough, these gains have given Moscow a measure of battlefield momentum and reinforced the perception that time, for now, is on the Kremlin’s side. Against that backdrop, any willingness to discuss a settlement is notable. Putin was unlikely to agree to any form of ceasefire without reciprocal concessions from Zelensky. This will, as Trump noted, require more coordination between both Russia and Ukraine to ensure that any ceasefire is mutually agreeable and, therefore, sustainable.

Trump has taken a central role in the peace process, meeting with Zelensky in late February and now meeting with Putin for the first time in Trump’s second term. While consistently eager to draw down US commitments abroad, Trump’s attitude toward the Russia-Ukraine conflict has seemingly pivoted, with the American president cracking down on states avoiding the sanctions regime against Moscow and dispatching nuclear submarines to the “appropriate regions” in response to a trollish tweet from former Russian President and notable poaster Dmitry Medvedev. That said, Trump’s legacy as a peacemaker is clearly important to him, and he has consistently advocated for an end to the bloodshed in Ukraine.

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With Ukraine, Trump’s most potent tool is the ability to curtail or cut off American aid. While his recent approach has involved compelling European governments shoulder the cost of purchasing US-made weapons for Ukraine, the underlying reality is that Washington remains the indispensable supplier of advanced arms, intelligence, and logistical support. A complete withdrawal of American assistance, whether immediate or phased, would place enormous strain on Ukraine’s military capacity, especially given Europe’s limited ability to fill the gap.

With Russia, Trump’s leverage is different. He can offer to ease or lift US sanctions in return for concrete steps toward a settlement. For Moscow, even partial relief from restrictions on finance, technology, and energy exports could provide meaningful economic breathing room. Conversely, Trump could boost aid to Ukraine if Russia resists, turning additional Western support into a penalty for obstruction. This dual ability to reward compliance or punish defiance gives him a flexible negotiating position, though one that must be calibrated carefully to avoid alienating either party.

What, then, is on the table for negotiation? It is likely that at the top of Russia’s list of demands is assurance that Ukraine will not join Nato. Since the Soviet collapse, the Western Alliance’s expansion into former Soviet republics has fueled Moscow’s suspicion that Nato’s purpose extends beyond the defense of its members. Putin has repeatedly described Ukrainian accession as a red line, viewing it as a direct threat to Russian security. Trump appears to recognize the delicacy of this issue, saying before the summit that a US security guarantee for Ukraine might be possible “but not in the form of NATO.”

Meanwhile, Zelensky’s best chance at salvaging a diplomatic win may lie in securing Ukraine’s path to EU membership. Closer integration with Western Europe has long been at the heart of Ukraine’s foreign-policy ambitions. While Russian accounts of the conflict often trace its origins to Mikhail Gorbachev’s mishandling of the Soviet collapse or to Lenin’s creation of Ukraine’s borders after the October Revolution and collapse of the Russian Empire, Ukrainians point instead to the Kremlin’s reaction to the 2014 Euromaidan uprising as the true starting point. In Kiev’s view, Russia’s aggression in 2014 was a direct attempt to block Ukraine’s turn toward Europe. If Moscow accepts the EU expansion that Kiev sought more than a decade ago, it would mark a genuine Ukrainian achievement — one rooted in the very struggle that, in both Ukrainian and Western narratives, set this war in motion.

A settlement would give Ukraine the breathing room to focus on the internal reforms required to meet the European Union’s standards of democracy, corruption, and minority rights that all aspiring members must satisfy. Ukraine holds official “candidate” status, but former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has warned that the country’s notorious graft problem will require “massive internal reform processes” before meeting Kiev can meet codified EU requirements. Recent protests over Zelensky’s suspension of certain anti-corruption measures have compounded these concerns.

If EU accession is indeed central to Ukraine’s future, ending the war through a negotiated settlement would allow Kiev to restore the democratic and anti-corruption institutions that were suspended as a wartime necessity and to concentrate fully on meeting the requirements for EU membership.

That said, more work must be done to provide a sufficient security guarantee to Ukraine to assuage concerns that Russia will invade again in the near future. Putin seems to agree, stating that the “security of Ukraine should be ensured as well.” The Kiev government often evokes the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, in which Ukraine agreed to give up its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal in return for Russian, American, and British promises to “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.” As Russia’s actions in the past decade have demonstrated, that agreement had little binding power. While NATO accession likely remains a red line for Putin, a more limited European or American guarantee of Ukrainian security may be necessary to get the Ukrainians on board.

Territorial transfers are also likely up for negotiation. Despite concerns that Trump and Putin had plans to carve up Ukrainian territory without Zelensky at the table, Trump has repeatedly stated that he has no such intentions. “I’m not here to negotiate for Ukraine,” the president stated aboard Air Force One while traveling to Alaska, adding “I’ve got to let Ukraine make that decision.” No territorial concessions were mentioned by the leaders following their discussion, but a redrawing of national borders seems inevitable, given the state of the conflict.

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While Zelensky has repeatedly stated that Ukrainian territory is not on the negotiating table, such statements are likely posturing as to drive a better bargain for his country. Russia has held Crimea since 2014, and is steadily consolidating control in significant portions of southeastern Ukraine. Although Putin is likely to make significant territorial demands, Zelensky may be able to meet him halfway by accepting new effective boundaries without formally recognizing Russian sovereignty over those Ukrainian regions.

Should the Ukrainians agree to ceding Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia to Russian control, Moscow should likewise agree to withdrawing its forces from Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and Sumy oblasts in central and northern Ukraine. While this is not the most desirable outcome for Zelensky, it does offer a way for him to stop the slaughter of the Ukrainian people outside of those territories which Ukraine is unlikely to reclaim by force. When all is said and done, this is a World War II-style industrial war that Ukraine is structurally incapable of winning.

As Trump continues to coordinate Ukraine and Western governments, the first step toward a settlement must be a ceasefire. As the president stated to the press, his main priority is to “stop thousands of people a week from being killed.” Given the high spirits of both leaders following their conversation, this step seems to be on the horizon, if Trump is able to convince the Ukrainians to give negotiations a chance. Had Trump found Putin’s demands to be unreasonable, it seems unlikely that the two men would be in such good humor shortly after speaking.

This bilateral US-Russia exchange, then, marks a step toward a broader negotiation. Whether it leads to a sustainable peace will depend on the willingness of all parties to turn Alaska’s cautious opening into a lasting settlement.

This is a defining moment for President Trump and his legacy. He has to decide if he’s prepared to allow Washington to be dragged into yet another unwanted war in the Middle East.

The Israeli operation, codenamed “Rising Lion,” comes fewer than 48 hours before Iranian and US negotiators led by special envoy Steve Witkoff were set to meet for a sixth round of nuclear talks. Moreover, Jerusalem’s action follows repeated statements from Trump, both public and (reportedly) in private conversations with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in which the President warned against an Israeli intervention that might “blow up” his deal.

Now, with America’s chief regional ally and client deliberately undermining US-led diplomacy and all but coercing Washington into war, American policy in the Middle East is in a fragile state. For Trump, who a decade ago took control of the GOP by opposing America’s “forever wars” in the Middle East, all this must be exasperating.

It’s notable that the Israeli attack comes on the heels of Netanyahu narrowly surviving a vote to dissolve the Israeli parliament, the Knesset. Netanyahu’s efforts to include ultra-Orthodox Israelis in the military draft had alienated the conservative religious wing of his governing coalition, forcing the prime minister to scramble to find a compromise before Thursday morning’s vote. While the agreement is unlikely to solve Netanyahu’s political problems, it did buy him time — and fewer than 24 hours later, he launched an aggressive war on Iran.

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By Poppy Sowerby

The stated purpose behind Israel’s Friday morning attack is to destroy the Iranian nuclear program, with Israel Defense Forces Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin claiming that “we have no choice” and that Iran’s achieving nuclear capabilities is a danger “to the entire world.” But that clearly hasn’t been Washington’s view of the matter, since successive US administrations of both parties have sought to resolve the dispute diplomatically.

Following the International Atomic Energy Agency’s vote to censure Iran for failing to comply with nonproliferation standards, Trump restated his commitment to a diplomatic solution: “Look, it’s very simple, not complicated,” the president said. “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. Other than that, I want them to be successful. I want them to be tremendous. We’ll help them be successful. We’ll trade with them. We’ll do whatever is necessary.” Mere hours before the attack, Trump stated: “I want to have an agreement with Iran. We’re fairly close to an agreement.”

Israel’s unilateral and aggressive actions have not only undermined American diplomacy, but have now directly put American lives at risk. There are approximately 40,000 US personnel based in the Persian Gulf region. Iran will retaliate against the Jewish state — that is not in question. The danger is that when the Iranians do retaliate, they will probably, inadvertently or not, hit American troops or other direct US interests, which would trigger a response from Washington.

Secretary of State and acting National Security Adviser Marco Rubio seems savvy to this danger, stating clearly that the United States is “not involved in strikes against Iran, and our top priority is protecting American forces in the region.” Rubio warned: “Iran should not target US interests or personnel.” Likewise, Trump noted before the attack was launched that the State Department had begun evacuations of its staff from Baghdad, while the US military was evacuating nonessential personnel from bases in the Middle East.

While American leaders seem to understand how this conflict could harm American lives and interests in the region, they haven’t yet commented on how such harm appears to be what Netanyahu is counting on. It is a brazen move of a kind that GOP realists of an earlier age — the likes of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and advisers like James Baker and Brent Scowcroft — would never tolerate. An alliance partner of the United States has launched a unilateral attack on another state, apparently with the aim of scuttling diplomatic negotiations.

Not only has Israel sabotaged US efforts at diplomacy, but these actions are endangering American lives in the hopes that the US will be forced to retaliate against Iran. That is, Netanyahu is hoping that an escalation will drag America into the fray to force America into a regional conflagration just when a bipartisan consensus has emerged in favor of redeployment away from the Middle East toward more strategically pertinent areas like the Pacific.

In response, American leaders need to take control of the situation as quickly as possible, and to do so they must condemn Israel’s aggression, thus putting distance between Washington and what took place on Friday.

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Allowing Israel to continue down this path without clear rebuke not only risks another forever war in the Middle East with an unthinkable cost in human life. It will, additionally, turn America into a laughing stock on the international stage. While some internet commentators have hypothesized that the United States covertly supports this attack, that would be a terrible strategic miscalculation: either Netanyahu has made America look the fool and is trying to strong-arm Trump into supporting a war that is against America’s interests, or Trump has supported Netanyahu’s actions for the same reputational cost.

Without condemning Israel’s actions, Trump is sending a clear message: he doesn’t make American policy, Benjamin Netanyahu does.

While the fog of war is as bedeviling as ever, the political options facing the United States are fairly clear: support for Netanyahu, whether actively or passively, will signal that the American government is weak, lacks autonomy, and is servile to the interests of a foreign government, even when that government intentionally endangers American lives and interests.

Alternatively, the United States can say “no more” to Israelis — they created this mess, and the consequences are theirs alone to deal with. This would not only avoid another pointless conflict in the Middle East and spare countless lives, but would also be a tremendous win for Donald Trump.

Joe Biden allowed Netanyahu to derail his presidency by going along with ever bloodier escalation in Gaza. Trump would be wise to avoid the same fate. If he truly wants to be the America First president, then Trump must remind Israel, once and for all, which is the client state — and which the patron.

While the two candidates’ respective vice-presidential selections signal a divergence between the parties on domestic policy, the foreign policy distinctions are more opaque. Democrats maintain that a second Trump presidency would shepherd in an era of American isolationism, leading to anarchy around the globe. Trump and company have fired back with claims that “there will be no future under Comrade Kamala Harris, because she will take us into a Nuclear World War III”.

Trump’s rhetoric here is relatively straightforward: a Harris presidency would be “something straight out of Venezuela or the Soviet Union”, a claim he illustrated by sharing an AI-generated image of Kamala Harris speaking at a Soviet-style assembly. As political aesthetics go, invoking America’s Cold War anxiety may seem mildly entertaining. But as Trump could soon find out, the political advantages end there.

Trump’s new messaging marks an interesting role reversal for the two campaigns. Joe Biden, before his retreat from the contest, had repeatedly characterised Trump as a dictator-in-waiting. Democracy, he warned, was on the ballot. The Republicans, meanwhile, focused on more accessible matters, in particular the rising prices in Joe Biden’s America. Yet now, the script is flipped: Trump is the one peddling apocalyptic visions of dictatorship, while the Harris campaign has dropped the fascism rhetoric in favour of the more meme-friendly allegations of “weirdness”.

At its heart, this resurrection of the red-scare boogeyman augurs a departure from the populist principles that guided Trump to victory in 2016. For someone who won an election on the catchphrase of “drain the swamp” and the promise of pragmatic dealings abroad, Trump’s new McCarthyist message — combined with his disavowal of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and embrace of Elon Musk — is a step backwards towards Manichean neoconservatism. In other words, his populist instincts have been smothered by a red menace — and this will be a losing strategy.

Most American voters do not believe that their government will fall to communism anytime soon, and the few who do can hardly be considered swing voters. More than three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, red-scare rhetoric does not hold the existential resonance that it had at the peak of the Cold War. While the Chinese Communist Party acts as the greatest international rival to American supremacy, modern China is incomparable to the Soviet Union on multiple dimensions. Most obviously, the US is not drafting soldiers to fight against the forward march of communism, and 100,000 Americans have not died in a 21st-century Korea or Vietnam. We are not teaching school children to duck and cover under their desks in fear of imminent nuclear strikes. The CCP, at this time, is not advocating for a global socialist revolution.

This is not to say that the rise of an authoritarian adversary poses no threat to American interests, nor to argue that the threat of these events is impossible after the fall of Soviet communism. It is clear, however, that Americans are not experiencing such existential fears in their everyday lives.

In 2016, Trump seemed to have distinct strategies for addressing the rise of China and the deeply entrenched liberal establishment. Ordinary Americans were not voting based on their allegiance to market capitalism. China was not an ideological rival, but an economic one. In response, faced with the deindustrialisation of the American heartland, Trump managed to channel the frustration of the working class into a straightforward message: the US was getting cheated, and American jobs were being replaced with foreign workers. With the establishment of both parties maintaining their commitment to free trade, Trump’s promise to get a “better deal” for American industry resonated with those who felt abandoned by elites. And crucially, when Trump did attack the “Radical Left Agenda”, it was on those issues that affected voters’ daily lives: immigration, crime, and threats to free speech. Now that populism appears to have been lost, and recent polls reflect Trump’s failure to connect with the interests of ordinary Americans.

But, you might say, talk is cheap. Does this apparent shift in campaign strategy to an apocalyptic narrative say anything about the policies of a potential second Trump administration? Yes and no.

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As we saw following his election in 2016, the shapeshifting nature of Trump’s rhetoric allowed his supporters to project their desired foreign policies onto him, giving him appeal to hawks and restrainers alike. In the same vein, the personnel of the first Trump administration experienced chaotic turnover as the president attempted to purge the disloyal. This instability led to different factions within the administration gaining influence over policy, only for their desired policies to be discarded the next week. Even if Trump had a grand strategy, then, internal dysfunction would have likely prevented its implementation.

However, this does not mean the foreign policy of a second Trump term will emerge at random. While figures advocating for a “realist” reappraisal of American interests abroad had gained a foothold in the previous Republican administration, Trump’s recent rhetoric is illustrative of the people he has surrounded himself with. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has remained in Trump’s good graces, has consistently called for escalation in Ukraine. Likewise, former national security advisor Robert O’Brien recently wrote promised in Foreign Affairs that a second Trump term will “thwart and deter the new Beijing-Moscow-Tehran axis” and that “doing so will also require strong alliances among the free countries of the world”. O’Brien went on to claim that “a second Trump term would see stepped-up presidential-level attention to dissidents and political forces that can challenge U.S. adversaries”, making an exception for “open and liberal” Arab monarchies such as Saudi Arabia, with whom O’Brien would continue to engage.

This strategy of “conservative primacy” espoused by Trump’s presumptive cabinet selections portends a dangerous and disappointing return to interventionist conventions. O’Brien’s suggestion that China, Russia, and Iran have formed an axis of evil which must be opposed by a united “free world” exemplifies the simplistic Cold Warrior talking points that now flow from Trump’s mouth. If anything, a second Trump administration appears to be trending towards a return to form for the Republican Party, threatening more crusading abroad against the phantom threat of all-or-nothing ideological conflict. Rather than draining the swamp, Trump is being consumed by it.

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What, then, is the alternative? More of the same, it seems. At the recent Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Kamala Harris’s speech was preceded by a surprise appearance by former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, the Democratic darling of Bush-era neocons. And when the vice president did finally speak, she promised to “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world”, before adding that her administration would “strengthen, not abdicate, our global leadership”. While Harris herself has yet to articulate any specific proposals on foreign policy, she affirmed the ongoing support for both Ukraine and Israel. Meanwhile, the Democrats’ 2020 vow to “end forever wars” has seemingly been erased from its national platform.

For many, this was only a matter of time. Much has been written about the vice president’s current national security advisor, Phil Gordon, who is likely to be central to a future Harris administration. Having served in the Obama administration — first as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, and then as the White House’s point man on the Syrian Civil War — Gordon is frequently described as an “Atlanticist” or “Europeanist”. And indeed, American and European statesmen alike laud his prioritisation of Europe. While Gordon has been occasionally characterised as being a “restrainer” due to his reluctance to deploy military force, he appears to share very little with the actual grand strategy of restraint, as articulated by academic realists. Instead, he seems to endorse continuing or even increasing support to Europe, and has affirmed Harris’s opposition to an arms embargo on Israel, while saying little about China.

The candidates of both major parties, then, appear to have similar visions for America’s role in the world. Although a Trump presidency may lean more hawkish on China and a Harris administration might be more committed to Ukraine, both seem committed to continued military engagement around the world without any plans to substantially change American grand strategy.

Of course, of the two, this is least surprising with the Democrats, whose fondness for foreign intervention in recent decades has filled entire books. But the turn of the Republicans is more pronounced. After a brief flirtation, the party appears to have been recaptured by its neoconservative core, with foreign policy reverting to its post-Cold War monoculture. The red menace has returned, and nothing good can come from it. Expect continued engagement overseas for years to come.