A Multipolar Superpower: How Trump's Foreign Policy is a Confused, Outdated Mess
Trump's America is guided by two conflicting – but equally flawed – views of the world and its place within it, argues Dr Ruth Deyermond
In its first three months in office, on everything from tariffs to NATO to soft power to dealing with China and Russia, Donald Trump’s second administration has created a catastrophic foreign policy mess.
One reason for the chaos is that it appears to be operating with two conflicting – but equally flawed – views of the world and the US's place in it. In one, America is just one of several great powers, each with its own sphere of influence, in an emerging multipolar order. At the same time, though, the White House talks and acts as if the US is the world’s single unconstrained superpower – free to do what it wants without worrying about the reactions of others. Neither makes sense in 2025; together they are doing unprecedented damage to America’s power and credibility as well as to global stability.
Only Great Powers Matter
Many of the comments from and about the Trump administration suggest that the White House thinks of the world as dominated by great powers sitting inside a sphere of influence. This is a view of international relations from before World War I, when European empires divided up Africa and Asia. It assumes that only great powers matter and only they have either agency or sovereignty. The rest of the globe exists simply to be carved up between them.
This attitude is reflected in suggestions that the US is happy to leave Europe to Russia, while the Washington carves out its own sphere of influence in the Americas. The need to protect America’s interests in the Western hemisphere at all costs helps to explain the bizarre White House threats to annex to Greenland as well as Trump’s comments about “reclaiming” the Panama Canal.
This great power model assumes a world organised through pragmatic bargaining grounded in realpolitik, where the mutual capacity to inflict damage constrains expansionist impulses. It’s a worldview shared with Vladimir Putin and those around him. It is, of course, also a model of world affairs that led to two catastrophic world wars.
Trump’s Fever Dream of Unipolarity
At the same time, though, and despite Marco Rubio's correct observation in January that unipolarity was a post-Cold War anomaly, the Trump administration also seems to be repeating George W Bush's approach to world affairs in the early 2000s, acting as if America is the unconstrained global hegemon.
But the Trump administration’s fever dream of unipolarity is a cruder, less intelligent version of Bush's worldview – one that, unlike the original version, entirely discounts soft power and alliances. Instead, the White House is trying to achieve its goals by coercing and extorting allies and trading partners.
The Trump message is give us what we want, buy more of our goods, hand over your assets, your money, or your territory, or else we’ll impose punitive tariffs, abandon NATO commitments, or invade. It's an approach based on the assumption that other states have no choice but to comply because they're so dependent on the US for trade or security or both.
Instead, the Trump administration is finding out that because the US isn't actually the only state with power, other states can and will push back, as the response on tariffs by China and other states shows. Former allies are taking steps to limit security reliance on a bullying and untrustworthy Washington. All that, of course, leaves the US weaker and less influential.
George W Bush’s assumptions about limitless American power were already outdated in the 2000s and did huge damage to the US and the wider world – above all, in the Middle East. But Bush became President less than a decade after the Soviet Union’s collapse, when it was still just possible to imagine that the unipolar moment had extended into the 21st Century.
The Trump administration has no excuse for making the same mistake in 2025, when the costs of the War on Terror-era flawed thinking have been visible for 20 years.
The World Has Changed
Part of the explanation may be that Trump himself seems to have paid no attention to the way the world has changed in the last quarter century. As in so many other areas, Trump's grasp of the world and America's place in it is decades out of date. Others in his administration, and in the think tank and media ecosystem around it, also seem to think the US still has the relative power it lost 20 or 30 years ago.
But the multipolar great power model is just as hopelessly outdated. The world is not shaped by great power spheres of influence if one alleged great power, Russia, has no substantial sphere and another, the US, is in the process of destroying the one it used to have. And there is no international system of great powers – Russia, China, and the US – if Russia is dependent on China and the White House increasingly appears to be under Russian influence.
In addition, of course, the other states of the world in 2025 are nothing like the structures and societies that the 19th Century European great powers carved up and colonised. 21st Century international affairs are not like those of the 19th Century, whatever Putin and some in the White House think.
Both the multipolar great power and neo-imperial unipolar worldviews that we can see in Trump administration thinking are wildly outdated and at odds with each other in the most fundamental ways. Together, they are producing an incoherent and foolish foreign policy that is doing immense harm to the global economy, global stability, European and US security, US influence and US credibility.
The foreign policy of Trump’s first presidency was chaotic and largely unsuccessful but the number, speed, and depth of the unforced errors being made by his second administration is unprecedented. We have never been here before. As long as they frame their policy through outdated, contradictory lenses, things will only get worse, for them and for us all.
Dr Ruth Deyermond is Senior Lecturer in Post-Soviet Security at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, and is Associate Editor of the European Journal of International Security.