FA: The end of the Long American Century – Trump and the sources of U.S. Power

President Donald Trump has tried both to impose the United States on the world and to distance the country from it, ‘Foreign Affairs’ notes.

He began his second term by brandishing American hard power, threatening Denmark over the control of Greenland, and suggesting he would take back the Panama Canal. He successfully wielded threats of punitive tariffs to coerce Canada, Colombia, and Mexico on immigration issues. He withdrew from the Paris climate accords and the World Health Organization. In April, he sent global markets into chaos by announcing sweeping tariffs on countries all over the world. He changed tack not long after, withdrawing most of the additional tariffs, although continuing to press a trade war with China — the central front in his current offensive against Washington’s main rival.

Even as Trump has correctly identified the way in which the United States is strong, he is using that strength in fundamentally counterproductive ways. By assailing interdependence, he undercuts the very foundation of American power. The power associated with trade is hard power, based on material capabilities. But over the past 80 years, the United States has accumulated soft power, based on attraction rather than coercion or the imposition of costs.

Wise American policy would maintain, rather than disrupt, patterns of interdependence that strengthen American power, both the hard power derived from trade relationships and the soft power of attraction. The continuation of Trump’s current foreign policy would weaken the United States and accelerate the erosion of the international order that since World War II has served so many countries well — most of all, the United States.

Order rests on a stable distribution of power among states, norms that influence and legitimize the conduct of states and other actors, and institutions that help underpin it. The Trump administration has rocked all these pillars. The world may be entering a period of disorder, one that settles only after the White House changes course or once a new dispensation takes hold in Washington. But the decline underway may not be a mere temporary dip; it may be a plunge into murky waters. In his erratic and misguided effort to make the United States even more powerful, Trump may bring its period of dominance — what the American publisher Henry Luce first called “the American century” — to an unceremonious end.

Looming over the rise of Western populists such as Trump is the specter of globalization, which they invoke as a demonic force. In reality, the term simply refers to increasing interdependence at intercontinental distances. When Trump threatens tariffs on China, he is trying to reduce the economic aspect of the United States’ global interdependence, which he blames for the loss of industries and jobs. Globalization can certainly have negative and positive effects.

But Trump’s measures are misplaced, since they attack those forms of globalization that are largely good for the United States and the world while failing to counter those that are bad. On balance, globalization has enhanced American power, and Trump’s assault on it only enfeebles the United States.

Studies have shown that the United States has lost (and gained) millions of jobs in the twenty-first century, forcing the costs of adjustment onto workers, who have generally not received adequate compensation from the government. Technological change has also eliminated millions of jobs as machines have replaced people, and it is difficult to untangle the interconnected effects of automation and foreign trade. The usual strains of interdependence have been made much worse by China’s export juggernaut, which is not letting up.

Economic globalization has been reversed in the past. The nineteenth century was marked by a rapid increase in both trade and migration, but it slowed precipitously with the beginning of World War I, in 1914. Trade as a percent of global economic activity did not recover to its 1914 levels until nearly 1970. This could happen again, although it would take some doing. World trade grew extremely rapidly between 1950 and 2008, then more slowly since the 2008-9 financial crisis. Overall, trade grew by 4,400 percent from 1950 to 2023.

Global trade could again lurch into decline. If the U.S. trade measures against China lead to a more committed trade war, it is likely to do a great deal of damage. Trade wars in general can easily morph into enduring and escalating conflict, with the possibility of catastrophic change.

Unfortunately, the myopic focus of the second Trump administration, which is obsessed with coercive hard power linked to trade asymmetries and sanctions, is likely to erode rather than strengthen the U.S.-led international order. Trump has focused so much on the costs of free-riding by allies that he neglects the fact that the United States gets to drive the bus — and thus pick the destination and the route. Trump does not seem to grasp how American strength lies in interdependence. Instead of making America great again, he is making a tragic bet on weakness.

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