Trump’s World And The New Three Emperors’ League
Donald Trump’s America, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and Xi Jinping’s China, a trio which splits the world into sectors of influence.
As his former national security adviser, John Bolton, observes, Trump, “has no overarching national security philosophy,” and, “his decisions are transactional, ad hoc, anecdotal, and episodic.”
Already in his second term, and unrestrained by the adults in the room who checked some of his more visceral impulses in his first term, Trump’s policies exhibit several recurring themes that are marked departures from U.S. foreign policy tradition.
The Dog Is Off The Leash
Several of those themes are the foreign policy counterparts of what Trump is doing domestically. There is, most obviously, his fondness for authoritarianism and disdain for democracy and the rule of law.
Domestically, this has included his attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election and his current disregard of many laws that govern the status of agencies he is destroying or disabling. His corresponding inclinations internationally include his longstanding deference to the authoritarian Russian ruler Vladimir Putin and disregard for international law with such things as his proposed U.S. takeover of the Gaza Strip.
A related inclination is disregard for broader human and political rights. One of the most recent illustrations is Trump’s order removing any connection between U.S. arms exports and respect for human rights by the recipient. This move not only repeals an action by the Biden administration, but also contradicts another U.S. law.
A “might makes right” approach that involves the application of raw power characterizes Trump’s entire law-busting method of ruling during his first month back in office.
In foreign policy, the most shocking manifestation of that approach is his reversal of U.S. policy on the war in Ukraine from opposition to de facto condoning of Russia’s attempt to subjugate Ukraine through armed force.
Ethnonationalism is another prominent theme, exhibited domestically with Trump’s relentless attack on anything hinting at diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. Internationally, the most glaring exhibit is Trump’s support for Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs.
Added to this is a theme that can be found in past U.S. foreign policy tradition but only by going back to the time of William McKinley, whom Trump says he admires. That theme is a return to U.S. imperialism, especially in the Western Hemisphere, as illustrated by Trump’s expansionist statements about Greenland, Canada, and Panama.
Ultimately Destabilizing
Although grand and well-defined visions may not be driving Trump’s foreign policies, collectively those policies are heading toward a world order that can indeed by defined and that is distinctly different from previous global systems that scholars and pundits discuss, such as liberal internationalism, the bipolar Cold War, or a post-Cold War U.S. “unipolar moment”.
This new nascent world order would be one dominated by an authoritarian triumvirate of Donald Trump’s America, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and Xi Jinping’s China.
Such a triumvirate would not be a formal alliance but rather a kind of global power sharing in which the big three would make transactional deals with each other, over the head of everyone else, while respecting each other’s spheres of influence.
The triumvirate would be based on strong similarities, starting with authoritarianism centered on the kind of unfettered personal rule that Putin and Xi have achieved and that Trump is striving to attain.
Other characteristics of the Russian and Chinese regimes resemble in numerous ways the tendencies of Trump’s rule that are described above. These include the rejection of human rights, a might-makes-right approach to issues both foreign and domestic, and ethnonationalism as demonstrated by Putin’s ethnically based appeals and China’s treatment of the Uyghurs.
All three regimes are imperialist, as illustrated by Putin’s efforts to restore Moscow’s rule over some of the former Soviet Union and China’s expansive activities in the South China Sea.
Echos From Time Past
This developing order brings to mind similar three-headed arrangements that European monarchies established in the nineteenth century. The earliest version was the Holy Alliance, in which the absolute monarchies in Austria, Prussia, and Russia found common cause after the Napoleonic Wars in quashing any moves toward democracy or self-determination for subordinate nationalities within their empires.
This trio came back together in the 1870s as a recently-formed Germany, the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, and Russia formed the League of the Three Emperors. This alliance had some of the same motivations as the earlier one in combatting liberalism and keeping nationalities such as the Poles under the imperial boot, although German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck also saw the arrangement as keeping Germany from winding up on the short end of any future reshuffling of European alliances.
The league did not last beyond the 1880s because of clashing Austrian and Russian interests in the Balkans.
One can speculate about whether the developing U.S.-Russia-China version of an emperor’s league will encounter similar frictions at the borderlines of spheres of interest. Trump has all but conceded Europe to the Russian sphere, not only with his reversal of U.S. policy on Ukraine but also his disruption of NATO and his encouragement to the Russians to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO member that did not meet spending guidelines.
Further, no one expects Putin to attempt a Khrushchev-like intrusion into the Western Hemisphere such as putting missiles into Cuba.
Frictions between the Russian and U.S. spheres are more likely elsewhere. The Arctic is one such place. The Middle East is another, because of how the extraordinary U.S. relationship with Israel in effect extends Trump’s version of the U.S. sphere into that region, as underscored by his designs on the Gaza Strip.
Even greater possibilities for sphere-to-sphere friction involve China and the United States. It is too early in Trump’s term to estimate how he might try to draw lines between U.S. and Chinese spheres of influence or to respond to Chinese challenges along the borders of those spheres. But possible clashes may derive from Chinese expansion in the Pacific and Beijing’s inroads in Latin America.
A key event in the breakdown of Bismarck’s European security system that had included the Three Emperor’s League was Kaiser Wilhelm II’s dismissal of the chancellor in 1890. The Kaiser thought that he alone ought to be making the most important decisions, and he had an inflated perception of his ability to manage the complicated European affairs of the day.
With the diplomatic maestro Bismarck no longer engaged, the complex security structure he had designed dissolved a couple of decades later into a ruinous war that ended all three monarchies that had formed the League.
There is a parallel here, too, with the would-be kaiser in the White House turning the U.S. presidency into personal rule, his assault on national security leadership, and his company of yes-men.
Any comfort Trump might feel sitting on top of the world alongside his two fellow authoritarian rulers is false comfort. The risk of mismanagement of a new system of spheres of influence leading to violent breakdowns, as the European system over a century ago did, is high.
Mismanagement might not even be necessary for such breakdowns. Suppressed nationalist aspirations were bound to undermine the European empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries even if greater wisdom had prevailed in Vienna and other capitals, and nationalism-centered tensions provided the trigger for World War I.
In the twenty-first century, Ukrainians, Palestinians, and many other peoples are not going to be satisfied with a world governed by a new Three Emperors’ League.
A dominant authoritarian triumvirate certainly would be bad news for freedom, democracy, self-determination, and the rule of law. It also is likely to be bad news in terms of international stability and issues of war and peace.
Paul R. Pillar retired in 2005 from a twenty-eight-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, in which his last position was as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. Earlier, he served in a variety of analytical and managerial positions, including as chief of analytic units at the CIA, covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. His most recent book is Beyond the Water’s Edge: How Partisanship Corrupts U.S. Foreign Policy. He is also a contributing editor for this publication.
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