Since President Trump’s return to the White House last year, leaders and people around the world have been scratching their heads, asking themselves: ‘Just what does America want?’ From Beijing to London, it’s a question that’s perplexed the world over.
As an American who’s worked for President Trump, run campaigns across America, and has international relations experience, let me try to explain.
Ever since President Trump resumed office, many around the world have decried that the liberal world order is over. Repeatedly, we’ve heard breaking news stories saying that the current Administration in DC is single-handedly destroying the alliances it once worked so hard to create and is ripping international norms to shreds. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In short, what the majority of the world has perceived as the United States trying to do away with the status quo is, in reality, the US’s attempt to preserve it. Trump and the American people aren’t destroying the liberal world order that the United States created. They are desperately trying to save it.
We are in a new age of great power competition. Challengers have risen to challenge and upend the status quo and do away with the liberal world order that the United States has worked to create and preserve since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. And there is more than one challenger.
‘Trump and the American people aren’t destroying the liberal world order that the United States created. They are desperately trying to save it’
Just as in the Cold War, where the United States carefully crafted alliances to cause the Soviet Union to overextend itself and collapse, we see the emergence today of anti-US coalitions sprouting across the world, specifically designed to do the same to the United States. From the consistent joint summit meetings between China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, to their systematic moves to cause conflict across the Middle East, the Indo-Pacific, and Europe, from the American perspective, its clear that leaders from Pyongyang to Moscow are hoping that history will repeat itself.
And the question that everyone around the world should be asking: what will happen to them if it does, and the United States collapses?
This is a question Americans have been asking for over 30 years, and it is one of the primary reasons President Trump has received the mandate from the American people. With Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea working together to raise pressure on the US throughout the world, the United States has been urging its allies to bring their defense capabilities back to what they were during the first Cold War before it’s too late.
The US needs larger countries like Germany, Poland, and the UK to rapidly increase the size of their traditional forces and financial contributions to the alliance, but that doesn’t mean that is the only thing America is looking for when it says it needs its allies to shoulder more of the burden. Beyond traditional contributions, it is seeking ‘strategic complementarity’ from its allies. Or in layman’s terms, specialized, capability-driven relationships that better secure the alliance.
‘Strategic complementarity’ doesn’t mean just increased financial contributions and more troops. It also means there are niches and needs that the global alliance structure, which the US helped create, needs to be filled in. These niches include scaling industrial capacity, regional leadership, and specialization. That specialization includes examples like Estonia, which at first suffered as the primary victim and test subject for Russia’s developing cyber warfare tactics in the early 2000s, which led it to become the alliance-wide leader in cyber defense today.
The current policies from Washington aren’t a threat to the alliance or the global order it helped build—it’s the attempts to save it, and most importantly, it is an opportunity for member states of the alliance to increase their standing and influence. The mandate that ‘MAGA’ and the American people have given President Trump is to preserve the world order and adapt to the new era of great-power competition.
To better understand this ‘MAGA Effect’ on America’s alliances and just what ‘strategic complementarity’ means in practice, you can read further at the latest study published by the Danube Institute, ‘The MAGA Effect’.
The liberal world order isn’t over—but liberal democracies need to adapt to save it.
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