Trump collapsed American soft power – the bedrock of American hegemony is gone

The Trump administration followed through on the candidate’s provocative campaign rhetoric and targeted longstanding U.S. global commitments. He questioned the value of NATO and consistently badgered members to pay more to collective defense (Birnbaum and Kim 2018). Trump also attacked East Asian allies Japan and South Korea, even demanding that they pay for the protection they receive from the United States (Flynn 2019). At the same time, coordination with these allies was generally poor as Trump embarked on an idiosyncratic and (at times) erratic policies toward Moscow and Beijing, further straining relations with America’s oldest friends (Blake 2017b). Dismissing the concerns of friends and adversaries alike, he withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on Iran’s nuclear program, undermining years of painstaking diplomacy that had produced an important multilateral agreement during the Obama administration’s second term (Hudson 2018). He also engaged in bouts of highly personal diplomacy with Kim Jong Un seeking an agreement on North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and embraced human rights violators like Crown Prince Muhammad bin-Salman (Dawsey 2018, Nakamura 2018, Gearan 2021). Finally, Trump followed through on campaign rhetoric against free trade and international cooperation more broadly, forcing Canada and Mexico to re-write the North American Free Trade Agreement (Stein 2020a), placing a host of tariffs on Asian and European imports (Gearan and Demirjian 2018) including a high profile contentious trade war with China (Long 2020), and attacked international organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Health Organization (WHO), from which he announced the United States’ withdrawal at the height of the global Covid-19 pandemic (Paletta and Swanson 2017, Lynch and Rauhala 2020).

The logical result of a Trump’s ‘America First’ foreign policy, prioritizing unilateralism, economic nationalism, and sovereignty, implies an international system in which interdependence and cooperation are highly circumscribed (Gallarotti 2022). In such a world, cooperation is entirely transactional, and unipolarity is more likely to give way to multipolarity, as the United States essentially abdicates its leadership position and hegemony (Haass 2020). Competition, and certainly a great power conflict, is not inevitable. But it is extremely difficult to find a historical analogue that would predict a stable and peaceful international system in the long term (Kennedy 1987).

4.1. The nature of U.S. leadership: less common cause, more ‘America First’

While soft power has been depicted as a capability that can be accumulated and deployed by any state or even non-state actors like international organizations, NGOs, multinational corporations, it is perhaps best understood as the ideational cement that binds together the United States with its key allies, partners, and friends in the global community (Kearn 2011). As liberal IR scholars have explained, U.S. leadership has been built on a series of hegemonic bargains between the United States and the secondary powers that have worked with it to construct the global order that influences so much of world politics today (Ikenberry 2011). Critical security and economic arrangements forged in the early days of the Cold War persisted through that struggle and expanded after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Those bargains were supported by the underlying shared values and ideals that bind the United States with its friends (Owen 2001). The postwar, Western hegemonic order may have been built on a foundation of U.S. hard power, but its persistence and capacity to adapt to new realities is predicated on American soft power and its ability to co-opt other states to desire the same outcomes that Washington does (Deudney and Ikenberry 1999, Ikenberry 2011).