Amid all this week’s other news, the Trump administration announced Wednesday that the United States will withdraw from dozens of international organizations. These included 31 entities associated with the United Nations, such as the U.N. Population Fund, which supports worldwide reproductive health and rights, as well as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the most prominent gathering of expertise and authority on the science behind climate change. The White House said these exits were an expression of President Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda, withholding U.S. funding and participation from organizations that “operate contrary to U.S. national interests, security, economic prosperity, or sovereignty.”
Critics see these withdrawals as another blow to the United States’ role in the existing international order, a retreat from forums where critical issues such as trade, climate policy, public health and much more are discussed and arbitrated. But the move is consistent with Trump’s long-standing view that the global status quo authored for decades by the U.S. is antithetical to American interests and in need of breaking.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared Wednesday that many international organizations served a “globalist project rooted in the discredited fantasy of the ‘End of History’” — a reference to an earlier post-Cold War certainty in the worldwide spread of liberal democracy and globalization — and that their real aim was to “constrain American sovereignty.”
For years, Trump and his supporters have framed their project as a rejection of this globalism. They dispensed with the old Republican orthodoxies around free trade in favor of a sharp turn toward tariffs and protectionism. And, in speeches and social media posts, Trump reiterated his distaste for his predecessors’ liberal internationalism, U.S.-led nation-building projects and the lengthy military entanglements in the Middle East that often accompanied them.
The events of the past week have made clear the other side of this “anti-globalism.” The White House’s gambit in Venezuela and its sharpening intent to claim the territory of Greenland have offered the most concrete signs yet of Trump’s unvarnished imperialistic streak. It’s an impulse that stems from his and his allies’ belief in the U.S.’s primacy in the Western Hemisphere, regardless of treaties or laws.
After removing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who now languishes in a New York City jail after he was captured by U.S. Special Forces in a Jan. 3 raid, the Trump administration has prioritized a U.S. takeover of Venezuelan oil assets over advancing a democratic transition. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Wednesday that the U.S. will allow Venezuelan oil under U.S. sanctions to flow again, but only to U.S. refineries, and the sales will be “done by the U.S. government and deposited into accounts controlled by the U.S. government.”
In an interview with the New York Times, Trump said he didn’t see himself bound by international law. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,” he told the paper. He also explained that ownership of Greenland was “very important” from his perspective, “because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success.” He said he could be willing to sacrifice the NATO alliance for the sake of his expansionist desires.
For decades, many leftists in the Americas and elsewhere saw the United States as a plundering hegemon — a country that, in their view, wielded its peerless military might and diplomatic clout in the service of cynical political interests, undermining governments it didn’t favor while boosting the access of U.S. corporations. The specter of “imperialismo yanqui” long loomed over Latin American politics, steeped in histories of U.S. coup plots, interventions and domineering gunboat diplomacy. It was weaponized by Maduro’s regime and has animated criticism of U.S. foreign policy in all corners of the globe.
With its latest moves, “the U.S. administration of the wildest imagination of Latin American leftists has come to life,” Filipe Campante, a professor of international economics at Johns Hopkins University, told me. The White House is confronting its hemispheric neighbors with a world where “all bets are off” and where U.S. policy is “very hard to predict because it’s very personalistic and unconstrained,” he said.
Political scientists have a term for what’s emerging, and it’s not flattering. “In matters of foreign policy and national security, the [Trump] presidency now has the characteristics of a personalist dictatorship,” Elizabeth Saunders wrote in Foreign Affairs last summer. Checks on presidential authority — be they judicial or legislative — have eroded or wholly failed. Trump has also overtly politicized the U.S. military while dismantling prominent institutions of U.S. soft power.
“Trump has not simply reduced the United States’ international commitments,” wrote Saunders, a political scientist at Columbia University. “He has hollowed out the country’s ability to play a significant and trusted role in the world.”
Long-standing U.S. allies now fear they have become, at best, Washington’s frenemies. Trump’s threats to neighboring Canada, which he has referred to as the United States’ prospective 51st state, have even prompted military planners in Ottawa to start thinking about how to hedge against a U.S. invasion.
“We are evolving in a world of great powers, where there’s a real temptation to carve up the world,” French President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday, warning against a descent into a geopolitics where “might makes right.”
But that’s precisely the direction in which Trump is pulling, a development probably welcomed in Moscow and Beijing.
“Beijing is captivated by Trump’s interest in spheres of influence of major powers,” Tong Zhao, a senior fellow at Carnegie China, told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s interested in exploring whether the U.S. is willing to make major compromises in the Western Pacific, including on the issue of Taiwan and the South China Sea” — that is, if China opts to cede some of its influence in Latin America.
“What happened is to some degree a confirmation of the Russian view that the liberal order is ending and in its place a global order based on spheres of influence is emerging,” a Russian academic close to senior Russian diplomats told my colleagues. “We can’t support this, of course, but we must deal with the reality,” the academic added. “And, of course, in this case we will have even more basis to lay claim to our own sphere of influence close to our borders.”
“I have a sense that Trump probably has an opportunistic imperialism, and so the whole world should be worried about it,” he said.
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