[Trump’s World] - One Year Later – with Justin Vaïsse

One year after Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the world appears transformed. Trump II differs profoundly from Trump I, above all because the “adults in the room” once seen as a check on the president’s impulses now appear to be gone.

To offer an initial assessment, we spoke—alongside Soli Özel—with Justin Vaïsse, founder and Director-General of the Paris Peace Forum. An accomplished historian, he is the author of a widely regarded book on neoconservatism (2008) and a biography of President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski (2016). His deep knowledge of the United States, together with his current and former roles, including as Director of the Centre for Analysis, Forecasting, and Strategy at the French Foreign Ministry, and his long engagement with international affairs, make him a particularly well-placed observer of the former 45th, now 47th, president of the United States.

The Death of the Liberal World Order

There is little doubt, in our guest’s view, that Trump II has begun dismantling the international order established by the United States after the Second World War. Before going further, however, it is worth clarifying what such a broad concept actually refers to.

Writing in 1999, the American political scientist Coral Bell captured this dynamic in a memorable phrase, often quoted by Pierre Hassner: "American Ascendancy and the Pretense of Concert." The formulation neatly summed up the postwar order: however multilateral it appeared, it ultimately rested on the preponderance of Washington.

In this system, our guest argues, the balance of power never disappeared. It was instead moderated by multilateral institutions, with the United States acting as the ultimate enforcer in the absence of any form of world government. The 1990-91 Gulf War offered the clearest illustration of this logic: some 500,000 American troops led a coalition of 28 countries into Iraq under the authority of a United Nations Security Council resolution. Yet, as he notes, remaining the ultimate guarantor of this order required the United States to stand partly outside it-both to enforce the rules and, when necessary, to reclaim the upper hand and reaffirm its hegemony. This was precisely what occurred in 1971, when President Nixon suspended the Bretton Woods system after concluding that it no longer served American interests.

It is worth recalling that, in an interview view with Expressions at the end of August, Wes Mitchell advanced a broadly similar rationale for Trumpism: an attempt to rebalance the United States’ relations with allies who, he argued, had taken advantage of American benevolence-at a time when the U.S. economy itself had weakened.

We will, however, suggest that with Trump II, we are in a much more radical situation than the "1971 moment." Justin Vaïsse gives a few illustrations. "The maintenance of hegemonic stability was accompanied by the provision of global goods, ranging from natural disaster warning systems, pandemic alerts to development aid. This resulted in significant burdens for the American Treasury, and thus the taxpayer." By contrast, during his Senate confirmation hearing on January 15, 2025, Marco Rubio stated that: "any spending we make internationally must be justified by answering three questions: does it make America safer? stronger? more prosperous?" He went on to argue that the liberal international order built by Washington no longer served U.S. interests and, in fact, worked against them.

It is also undeniable, Vaïsse notes, that the implementation of a liberal international system enabled the rise of powers beyond the United States itself. This outcome stemmed from multiple factors, including trade liberalization and globalization, with China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 marking a pivotal moment. It was in the 2010s that many Americans began to feel they had been the dupes of that decision.

The Donald Trump Trademark

That said, why does this diagnosis give rise to Trumpism? Obama and Biden had sketched out other possible responses. What, then, are the driving forces behind Trump II?

Justin Vaïsse first reminds us that Donald Trump should not be treated as a theorist. "What drives him," he explains, "is an unholy trinity: ego, money, and the polls. Beyond that, he wants to reindustrialize the Midwest and to strengthen American power in line with the needs of the ‘old economy,’ which, in his view, is far from obsolete and remains based on hydrocarbons. This also helps explain his interest in territorial expansion, not to mention the fact that, like Putin, he wants to inscribe himself in history: territorial conquest appears to him to be the most judicious means of doing so, and he is prepared to go quite far down that path."

It is often argued that this logic leads directly to a world of spheres of influence. Justin Vaïsse disputes that this is an objective for Donald Trump. He certainly proclaims a new Monroe Doctrine, to keep China and Russia out of his "backyard" (the Western Hemisphere, beginning with the Caribbean basin) but nothing indicates that he is ready for concessions to the Russians and Chinese in their own near abroad: "He has certainly reduced, though not halted, military assistance to Ukraine, and has just approved a record-breaking arms sale-worth more than $11 billion-to Taipei.." Similarly, "the destruction of USAID and the shutdown of Radio Free Europe or Radio Free Asia should not be interpreted as concessions to other great powers, such as the recognition of their sphere of influence, but as an ideological questioning of what such entities represent.

Alliances, by contrast, are viewed with skepticism, if not outright contempt. His only criterion for asserting his country's dominance lies in force, with the only displayed limit, as he declared on January 8 to the New-York Times "his own morality, his sole conscience.". At the same time, mindful of his base’s rejection of foreign interventions, he seeks to employ force selectively and surgically, as in Iran in June 2025 or more recently in Caracas.

More broadly, he clearly fails to grasp that his behavior "profoundly undermines the trust of his partners, whether South Korea, Australia, or France. Did Canada not just sign a strategic partnership with China on January 16?" More generally still, Donald Trump has no intention of "putting in place a new international diplomatic architecture; he does not think in terms of institutional formats, even though it is clear that he is toying with the idea of replacing the United Nations with a mechanism centered on himself, such as the ‘Board of Peace’ in Gaza, which lays claim to universal reach."

The International Consequences of Trumpism

Isn't it strange that he does not understand that his choices, particularly by antagonizing his allies, weaken America in the face of China? We have already alluded to the reaction of the United States' partners. For Justin Vaïsse, one of the effects of Trump II is to "convince weaker powers to move from bandwagoning (alignment) towards Washington, which prevailed since 1945, to a strategy of balancing (counterweight)." If we understand our interviewee correctly, this can result in unexpected crossovers: the critique of the liberal world order now heard in Washington joins the traditional questioning of the same order by the Global South; except that "the resentment against the double standards of the West notwithstanding, the countries of the Global South need the stability provided by international institutions and rules, and therefore there can be, at least on certain issues, convergences between the Global South, China, and Europe: no one wants an anarchic world, China itself needing an open and organized world to export."

Focusing on the specific case of Europe, Justin Vaïsse raises two questions. In the immediate future, how can Europeans dissuade Donald Trump from carrying out his annexation plans for Greenland? According to him, the strategy they are outlining-military presence on the ground, implicit threats of commercial or other retaliation, warning about the end of NATO in case of an American coup de force-all this represents the optimal setting, banking on the checks and balances that still exist in the United States (the philo-Atlanticism of Congress, in particular). Second question, regarding Greenland but also Ukraine, the focal point of this whole debate: "Will Trump push the envelope far enough to truly force the Europeans to unite, or will he soften, leading them to return to their attitude of submission and waiting for a hypothetical return to normalcy in Washington?"

Our guest identifies a second set of consequences of Trumpism: "the primary victim of Trump II at this stage is democracy, with a striking continuity between its domestic and international dimensions." American democracy, he argues, is under severe strain - whether through "pressure on the press, the transformation of ICE into a secret police force, the use of state institutions to prosecute political opponents, the erosion of Congress’s prerogatives, or numerous other challenges to rules that were previously taken for granted." The situation has deteriorated to the point where doubts are now being raised about the regular conduct of the midterm elections scheduled for November of this year.

On the international stage, the Venezuela episode offered a clear illustration of this disregard for democracy. "Trump vassalized an authoritarian system," Vaïsse argues, "rather than facilitating the accession to power of the forces that had won the 2024 elections." More broadly, he suggests that Trump "holds authoritarian regimes in higher regard than democracy, which he sees primarily as a constraint on his own will to power." Vaïsse concludes with a classic point of political science: "the democratic peace theory - the idea that democratic regimes do not go to war with one another - is about to be put to the test. If Trump were to seize Greenland by force, would that invalidate the theory, or would it instead mean that the United States is no longer democratic?"

Taken as a whole, Vaïsse argues, the weakening of global governance under Trump II carries a substantial cost that has so far remained largely invisible. It risks paralysing the mechanisms for the collective management of shared threats such as climate change, pandemics and humanitarian emergencies, while also increasing the likelihood of war. Addressing these challenges lies at the core of the Paris Peace Forum’s mission.

Copyright ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP
Donald Trump in front of Air Force One at Palm Beach airport, January 16, 2026.