In the beginning In his keynote address as president, Harry Truman urged Americans to use their enormous power “to serve, not to dominate.”
The date was April 16, 1945. Adolf Hitler was still alive in his bunker in Berlin. The Americans were preparing a bloody invasion of the Japanese islands. The atomic bomb remained a secret.
However, Truman's thoughts were already turning toward the postwar future. “We must now learn to live with other nations for our common benefit. We must learn to trade more with other nations so that, for our common benefit, there may be increased production, increased employment, and better standards of living throughout the world.”
Truman's vision has inspired American global leadership for the better part of a century. From the Marshall Plan in the 1940s to the Trans-Pacific Partnership in the 2000s, Americans have sought security and prosperity for themselves by sharing security and prosperity with like-minded others. The United States has become the center of a network of international cooperation, not only on trade and defense, but also on environmental concerns, law enforcement, financial regulation, food and drug safety, and countless other issues.
By enriching and empowering sister democracies, Americans have also enriched and empowered themselves. The United States has led and maintained a liberal world order in part because Americans are a generous people—and even more so because a liberal world order is a great thing to Americans.
Open international trade is often mutually beneficial. However, there is more to it than just economics. Trade, mutual protection agreements, and cooperation against corruption and terrorism also make democracies safer against authoritarian adversaries. The other great powers—China, India, and Russia—face questionable and even hostile alliances with powerful enemies. The United States is supported by powerful friends. These friendships strengthen the power of the United States. Working with the European Central Bank, for example, the United States was able to freeze hundreds of billions of dollars in Russian assets after the attack on Kiev in 2022. Russia perceived those assets as being beyond the reach of the Americans; They are not residents of the United States. However, when necessary, the United States can reach them thanks to its friends.
Trump's deepest political grievances are against those foreigners who sell desirable goods at an attractive price to willing American buyers.
Americans who lived through the great turmoil of the Truman era realized that the isolationist slogan “America First” meant America alone. America alone means weakening America. We have learned this lesson through harsh experience: a depression made worse and prolonged by devastating tariff wars, by desperate attempts on the part of each afflicted country to save itself at the expense of its neighbors; A world war was enabled because the democratic forces did not act together in time against a common threat. This lesson was reinforced by the positive postwar experience: the creation of global institutions to expand trade and maintain peace; The defeat of US-led Soviet communism and the victorious end of the Cold War.
But in the years that followed, the harsh experience faded into half-forgotten history; The positive experience turned into regret and doubts.
Donald Trump is The first American president since 1945 to reject the worldview shaped by the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War.
Trump's vision has no place for “common interest” or “mutual benefit.” For him, every trade has a winner and a loser. The success of one party means the defeat of the other party. “We're not beating China on trade,” he complained at the first Republican presidential primary debate in 2015. “We're not beating Japan…and we can't beat Mexico.” His deepest political complaints are directed against those foreigners who sell desirable goods and services at an attractive price to willing American buyers.
Trump often disparages US allies and threatens to abandon them. “We are being exploited by every country around the world, including our allies — and in many cases, our allies are worse than our alleged enemies,” he said at a rally last November. But unlike the “America First” movement before World War II, Trump's “America First” vision is not entirely isolationist. Trump's version of “America First” is predatory.
In an interview in mid-summer, Trump demanded that Taiwan pay the United States directly for defense costs. “I don't think we're any different than an insurance policy,” he said. When host Joe Rogan asked Trump in October about protecting Taiwan, Trump responded more pointedly: “They want us to protect, and they want to protect. They don't pay us for protection, you know? The mob makes you pay, right?” “
Indeed, US allies make significant contributions to collective security. The total aid provided by the European Union to Ukraine almost matches the aid provided by the United States. South Korea pays the costs of building and maintaining American facilities in Korea, and the salaries of Koreans who support American forces. But Trump wants direct cash payments. In a speech to the Economic Club of Chicago in October, he called for an annual tax of $10 billion on South Korea as the price for protection against North Korea.
Trump appears to have his eye on other payments as well; In his first term, he collected benefits for himself and his family members. Countries that wanted preferential treatment knew they had to book a place at his hotel in Washington, D.C., or, apparently, provide commercial services for his children. According to a 2024 report by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, Trump's properties collected at least $7.8 million from foreign sources during his first term.
In his second term, the flow of payments may rise to a torrent. Trump owes more than half a billion dollars in civil fines for defamation and fraud. How will he pay? Who will help him pay? Trump's need for money may influence US foreign policy more than any strategic consideration. One of the largest donors in 2024, Elon Musk, is expected to benefit greatly from US assistance with government regulators in China and the European Union. Musk is also a major government contractor and has strong views on US foreign policy. Over the past few years, he has emerged as one of the harshest critics of US support for Ukraine. On November 6, Musk joined Trump's first post-election phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. And those who invest in Trump — whether foreign agents or mercurial billionaires — may, over the next four years, enlist the power of the United States to reshape the world to their liking and their profits.
In 2019, Trump He gave a Fourth of July speech on the National Mall. The speech exulted in the frightening lethality of the US military, but Trump had little to say about American ideals or democratic institutions. Trump has never accepted that the United States would be strengthened by its values and principles, and by its reputation for trustworthiness and fair dealing. For him, the United States should be respected because it is the biggest and most powerful bully in the region. When his friend Bill O'Reilly asked him in a 2017 interview about Vladimir Putin, Trump scoffed at the idea that there might be any moral difference between the United States and Russia. “Do you think our country is so innocent?”
Open trade and defense alliances were already running into internal resistance even before Trump declared himself a presidential candidate for the first time. The United States has not entered into any new trade liberalization agreement since the free trade agreements with Colombia and Panama that were negotiated by the George W. Bush administration and signed by President Barack Obama. The TPP was rejected by the Republican Senate during Obama's final year in office. The Biden administration maintained most of the protectionist measures it inherited from Trump, then added more measures of its own.
But Trump has uniquely accelerated America's withdrawal from global markets, and he will continue to do so. His review of NAFTA during his first term preserved existing access to the US markets of Canada and Mexico in exchange for raising higher barriers around the three North American economies. Jamison Greer, who said he “played a key role during my first term in imposing tariffs on China and others,” was nominated as US Trade Representative. The tariffs Trump desires, the protection money he seeks, and his blatant rapprochement with Putin and other global predators would weaken America's standing with traditional allies and new partners. How will the United States attract its partners in the Asia-Pacific to support US security policy against China if they are treated as a threat and competitors by US trade policymakers?
Under Trump, America will act more proudly, but it has nothing to be proud of. Its leaders will receive corrupt rewards; The nation will shrink behind tariff walls, demanding tribute rather than gaining partnership.
Trump supporters tell a story about Trump's leadership. They describe him as a forceful figure who will maintain world peace through the strength of his personality. Potential aggressors will be intimidated by his unpredictability.
This story is fiction. Trump was no more successful than his predecessors in preventing China from converting atolls and sandbars in the South China Sea into military bases. Chinese warships have threatened their maritime neighbors under Trump. In September 2018, one of them passed within 45 yards of a US destroyer in international waters. In January 2020, Iran fired a missile barrage at US forces in Iraq, resulting in 109 traumatic brain injuries. During Trump's first presidency, the United States continued to fight two wars, one in Afghanistan and the other against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Over the same four years, Russian forces that invaded Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014 inflicted more than 500 civilian casualties.
Each president puts a face to the abstract image that is the American nation, and gives words to the American creed. Few spoke more eloquently than Ronald Reagan, who likened the United States to a “shining city on a hill.” In his farewell speech, Reagan asked: “What does the city look like on this winter night?” Reagan could have answered his question in a way that would have made his country proud.
The image of the “city on a mountain” ultimately goes back to the New Testament: “A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden.” The visible hilltop location imposed an additional moral responsibility on the city's residents. Now the hilltop would serve as an elevation from which to exercise arrogant control over those occupying the lower slopes and valleys, the domination that Truman had warned about. Under Trump, America will act more proudly, but it has nothing to be proud of. Its leaders will receive corrupt rewards; The nation will shrink behind tariff walls, demanding tribute rather than gaining partnership. Some of its citizens will delude themselves that the country is great again, when in fact it will become more isolated and less secure.
Americans have tried these narrow and selfish methods before. They ended in disaster. History does not repeat itself: the same mistakes do not always lead to the same consequences. But the shift from a protector state to a predator state would have bad enough consequences.
This article appears in the January 2025 print edition under the title “The Raider Nation.” It has been updated to reflect the fact that after the article went to print, Donald Trump nominated Jamison Greer as United States Trade Representative.
