What Donald Trump’s Isolationism Means For America—and the World

After the Soviet Union collapsed, the US-anchored international system—the “liberal international order”—had no serious competitors. The Warsaw Pact was gone, and so was the Soviet economic bloc. For the first time since the liberal international order’s creation, its leaders aspired to make the system truly global. No one seriously sought to challenge this international system; almost everyone sought to join it.

Three decades later, this international liberal order is breaking down. Some say it is already dead.

The rise of autocratic Russia and China has challenged this global order. But China and Russia are not the only threats to the international system today. Over the past three decades, changes within the liberal democratic world have weakened the appeal of this system, including for many Americans. President Trump has catalyzed that sentiment to now seriously challenge, if not destroy, the future of this system.

The greatest challenge to America’s commitment to the liberal international order has not come from foreign critics of these military interventions but percolated up from within.

Policy debates in the United States over the utility of multilateral institutions and interdependence have been fierce for a long time, even throughout the Cold War. Rarely in American history have US presidents supported constraints on American sovereignty. However, immediately after the Cold War, a bipartisan consensus did emerge for a while about America’s role in leading this “new world order.” Presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all supported the system, at least rhetorically. In practice, though, these presidents did not always adhere to its rules. Clinton’s decision to bomb Serbia in 1999 without the UNSC’s blessing damaged America’s reputation as a defender of the rules-based international system. George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 delivered an even more significant blow to America’s standing as an advocate for international law and multilateralism. American allies France and Germany sided with Russia and China against the Iraqi invasion, which fueled reputational costs for the US that linger to this day. Tragically, Putin’s blatant disregard for international law when invading and annexing Ukraine in 2022 is frequently compared to the American invasion of Iraq.

When I speak or write about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, I hear this whataboutism all the time, and not only from Russian trolls on X.

Even some successful collective security initiatives produced unexpected adverse effects. Most of the world united in support of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. However, by the time of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, which allowed the Taliban to return to power, the perception of the morality and efficacy of that long war had dwindled in the international community.

The costs of American-led multilateral military interventions have not been only reputational. While the stated aim of UN-endorsed military intervention in Libya in 2011 was well intended and one I supported as a White House official at the time—prevention of civilian slaughter in Benghazi—the result was a collapsed state without a suitable replacement, which plunged the country into prolonged civil war. The lack of sufficient post-conflict planning—about what would happen after Gaddafi’s regime was toppled—curbed enthusiasm for future collective security efforts in Syria and elsewhere. While the United States, Russia, and other UN Security Council members did unite to support UN Security Council Resolution 2118 in September 2013 to authorize the elimination of chemical weapons stockpiles in Syria, the UN Security Council did nothing to stop the brutal civil war there; it continued for over a decade until Bashar al Assad’s barbaric rule came to an end in December 2024.

The greatest challenge to America’s commitment to the liberal international order has not come from foreign critics of these military interventions but percolated up from within. Some US policymakers still believe that the US can advance American power, interests, and values through international institutions. Obama most certainly thought that multilateral institutions such as the United Nations, NATO, the World Bank, and the IMF were force multipliers, reducing the need for the US to act alone and helping to restrain the actions of other states in ways that contravene American interests, be they security, economic, or moral. Different from Bush, Obama used military force only when he had UN Security Council backing, as he obtained before bombing Libya. Other leaders do not have the same perspective regarding the utility of international institutions. A growing share of American policymakers—mainly in the Republican Party, but across the aisle as well—believe that global institutions constrain Washington’s ability to pursue national interests effectively.

President Trump is the most important voice among them. During his first term, Trump told the UN General Assembly, “We will never surrender America’s sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable, global bureaucracy.” Trump championed a return to the American isolationism of the 1930s, echoing a slogan of that era: “America First.” As international relations scholar Kyle Lascurettes observed, “While the Obama team framed international order as a central component of American strength, President Trump’s NSS [national security strategy] doesn’t even mention the term.”

Trump saw just the burdens, not the benefits, of playing a leading role in international organizations. He framed interactions with other countries in transactional, zero-sum terms. He withdrew from several international agreements, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris Climate Accords, the Iran nuclear deal, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia, the Open Skies Treaty, and the World Health Organization. Trump debilitated the WTO by not appointing judges responsible for dispute settlements to its appellate body—the WTO’s equivalent of a supreme court. He raised serious doubts about his commitment to NATO and American allies in Asia. As European Union president Donald Tusk pointed out at the time, the rules-based international order was being challenged “not by the usual suspects, but by its main architect and guarantor, the US.”

The Biden administration attempted to renew America’s commitment to multilateralism by rejoining the Paris Climate Accords and the World Health Organization, rhetorically committing to cooperation with the United Nations, and reassuring allies in Europe and Asia of the American commitment to joint security. However, Biden did not rejoin or renegotiate the Iran nuclear deal or revive the Open Skies or INF Treaties. Biden was even less enthusiastic about reviving international economic institutions. As a candidate, Biden sharply criticized Trump’s protectionist policies. Yet, once elected, he did not attempt to rejoin the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). His administration instead launched a new organization for a dozen American partners in Asia—the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF). However, IPEF lacks the comprehensive trade liberalization, market access, and economic benefits that the CPTPP would have provided and may survive a second Trump term.

Biden also did not repeal Trump 1.0-era tariffs against China but instead expanded restrictive economic policies, including a 100 percent tariff on Chinese electric vehicles, far-reaching export controls on the sale of many technologies to China, and subsidies and incentives for producing semiconductors within the United States. While these disruptions to free trade may be necessary for containing China’s economic power, as discussed in detail in later chapters, they also undermined the spirit, if not the laws, of the liberal economic order. Washington was violating its own Washington Consensus then. When WTO officials criticized the Biden administration’s policies for violating the organization’s standards, the administration essentially told the WTO “to take a hike,” as Princeton economist Paul Krugman colorfully put it.

The Biden administration invoked national security to claim that the WTO had no authority to tell the United States what to do. Not everything Biden did to counter China’s growing economic power was antithetical to multilateralism. For instance, Biden, with the other G7 leaders, launched a six-hundred-billion-dollar multilateral effort—the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment—to offer infrastructure financing to developing countries as an alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Even here, though, the focus of most of Biden’s efforts at fostering economic cooperation was regional, not global. Most projects aimed to support countries in Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Latin America.

Biden also tried to renew the American tradition of trying to lead multilateral political institutions to advance human rights. Biden often framed US competition with China and Russia as being between democracy and autocracy. Secretary of State Antony Blinken championed internationalism as well, calling for its revitalization: “We want not just to sustain the international order that made so much of that progress possible, but to modernize it, to make sure that it represents the interests, the values, the hopes of all nations, big and small, from every region.” Biden and his team convened Summits for Democracy, signaling a renewed commitment to democratic governance worldwide, and published the first ever United States Strategy on Countering Corruption with new multilateral streams of work. The Biden administration also initiated efforts for multilateral cooperation on artificial intelligence safety.

But even Biden’s commitment to multilateralism regarding democracy, human rights, and the rule of law was not absolute. Under his administration, Congress passed legislation to sanction officials of the International Criminal Court after the court indicted Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel for war crimes. The United States has never joined the ICC, but seeking sanctions against its leaders was a new step in American anti-multilateralism. Biden’s four years in office did not quell the public debate within American society about the utility of international engagement or participating in international organizations—something the Trump campaign exploited during the 2024 campaign. Candidate Trump was explicitly skeptical of multilateralism and supportive of isolationism. His election victory reflected a growing skepticism about multilateralism and global engagement more generally among Americans.

After decades of wars in the Middle East, many American politicians, civil society organizations, and citizens advocate for pulling back, arguing that the United States can no longer serve as the world’s policeman. Although the US withdrawal from Afghanistan was abrupt and poorly executed, few Americans criticized Biden’s decision to leave. After Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, the United States provided Ukraine with more military assistance than any other country did, accompanied by substantial economic aid, but it did so without the full support of the US Congress or the public. Many American politicians questioned the US’s decision to engage in a so-called proxy war with Russia. Republican voters are more skeptical than Democratic supporters about the value of engagement. But these impulses are growing within the Democratic Party as well.

Growing skepticism in American society about the value of multilateralism extends to economic issues. A vigorous chorus of critics now contends that free trade, global investment, and interdependence supported by economic multilateral organizations have done more harm than good to American economic interests. Today, almost no American politician, Democrat or Republican, defends the World Trade Organization. The debate about the utility of interdependence with China is fierce. If a few decades ago, most US leaders championed the benefits of trade and investment with China, the opposite is true today. The new conventional wisdom in Washington is that trade and investment with China enriched and empowered the Communist Party of China at the expense of American workers. Many now say it was a mistake to have let China join the WTO, and some have even argued that China’s permanent normal trade relations status should be revoked. Even with other democratic countries, Biden and his team devoted little attention to expanding free trade agreements and fueled economic tensions with allies, especially South Korea and Japan.

Over the next four years, Trump’s United States could easily emerge as a greater threat to liberal internationalism than Putin’s Russia or Xi’s China.

This growing isolationist sentiment in American society is in part what helped Trump win reelection in 2024. Almost immediately after returning to the White House in 2025, Trump accelerated America’s disengagement with multilateral institutions and global engagement. Trump quickly pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords, the World Health Organization, and the UN Human Rights Council, underscoring his commitment to isolationism. Trump and his team want to act alone, unconstrained by allies, multilateral organizations, and international norms. As Trump’s senior adviser, Elon Musk, declared emphatically in December 2024, “We should not have any international treaties that restrict the freedom of Americans.”

Trump levied his greatest assault against the international economic order, announcing the most expansive set of tariffs in American history on both autocratic adversaries and America’s closest democratic allies in April 2025 (Russia was strikingly excluded). In doing so, Trump signaled his disdain for the World Trade Organization and previously signed trade agreements, including one—the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA)—that he himself negotiated during his first term. Stock market crashes and bond market volatility compelled Trump to retreat, first regarding the tariffs on allies and then on high-tech Chinese imports. But as this book goes to press, Trump’s universal tariff of 10 percent on every country worldwide is still in place, new major tariffs on Chinese goods also remain, and general uncertainty and anxiety about Trump’s future actions in trade is still acute. Most disruptively, Trump imposed these new tariffs in the name of national security without consulting US Congress, making this moment, according to economic historian Douglas Irwin, a “big break with history.” The liberal economic order established after World War II has never been under more serious stress, and the main revisionist is not Putin or Xi, but Trump.

In the first weeks of his second term, Trump also challenged America’s commitment to international security organizations. Soon after being sworn into office, his new secretary of defense, Peter Hegseth, warned NATO to prepare for American troop withdrawals from Europe. Vice President J. D. Vance exacerbated tensions within NATO by scolding European allies in a speech at the Munich Security Conference for allegedly practicing censorship and allowing dangerous immigration. I attended that conference and watched Europeans feel deeply insulted by his remarks. They immediately began discussing a future of European defense disconnected from the United States. Trump’s embrace of Putin also alienated many democratic allies in Europe, especially those most threatened by Russia.

Most unexpectedly, Trump even threatened the sovereignty of several American allies and partners, undermining one of the core norms of the international system established after World War II. He repeatedly referred to Canada as the fifty-first US state, claimed that US security interests required the United States take back the Panama Canal, and, most aggressively, emphasized the need to annex Greenland. In March 2025, Vice President Vance even led a high-profile US delegation to the American military base in Greenland to advocate for annexation, despite polling data indicating that a large majority of Greenlanders have expressed no enthusiasm for an American takeover. In June 2025, Trump bombed Iran without seeking, let alone obtaining, support from the UN Security Council or NATO.

Today, Trump seems eager to exit, if not dismantle, many of the multilateral organizations that undergirded the liberal international order. The US president, however, does not wield complete control over American foreign policy. Members of Congress, business groups, investors, the media, civil society, and professors (like me!) will resist Trump’s pivot to greater isolationism and unilateralism. It is too early to tell whether Trump’s preferences today represent an enduring trajectory in American foreign policy, or a short-term departure from nearly a hundred years of American commitment to internationalism. Perhaps a deep American and global recession, triggered by Trump’s irrational and unpredictable tariff policies, could revive support for rules-based international economic policies of the past. But over the next four years, Trump’s United States could easily emerge as a greater threat to liberal internationalism than Putin’s Russia or Xi’s China.

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Excerpted from the book Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder by Michael McFaul. Copyright © 2025 by Michael McFaul. From Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.