Trump Is Using Old-School Imperial Bullying to Remake the Global Order

Trump is reshaping the global order into the rule of the bullies. He has a ​“quasi-19^th-century worldview that global affairs should be directed not by multilateral institutions but by a handful of large powers and their strongman leaders, each with their sphere of influence,” the editorial board of the London-based Financial Times wrote shortly after the Zelenskyy meeting. 

In the imperialist system of the late 19^th century through the early 20^th century, a handful of imperial powers (Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Italy and later the United States and Japan) carved up most of the rest of the world, each claiming a ​“sphere of influence” that could include colonial possessions on the other side of the planet and imposing their will within that sphere. 

Each imperial power was expected to defer to the authority of the other powers within their respective spheres of influence. In this way, the imperial powers sought to avoid military conflict with each other — an idea that worked fairly well until it failed catastrophically with World War I. 

In similar fashion, Trump appears willing to allow Russian President Vladimir Putin to claim his sphere of influence, which includes Ukraine and presumably most of the rest of the former Eastern Bloc. Trump claims this is key to avoiding World War III. 

This posture is entirely consistent with Trump’s current foreign policy. Since December 2024, he has escalated the discourse around annexing Greenland as he fixates on his own expansionist agenda and goal of establishing an exclusive sphere of influence for the United States, claiming he wants to annex a growing list of territories that now includes Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal and, most recently, Gaza. Aside from Gaza, this wish list recalls the Monroe Doctrine, a tradition from the 19^th century that claims the Western Hemisphere as the U.S. sphere of influence. Trump has so far made offers to purchase territory, threatened tariffs if territory isn’t ceded, and not-so-subtly entertained the possibility of invasion. 

Trump’s expansionism promises to return the United States to a more virile role in the world, which has helped win over some key MAGA supporters.

“I think we take Canada, and then we go right into Mexico,” top podcast host Joe Rogan said to guest Theo Von, who seemed to have a visceral response, exclaiming, ​“Let’s fucking go,” then doing a little happy dance in his chair. 

The New York Post’s January 8 cover celebrated the plans, showing a smiling Trump next to a redrawn map of the Western Hemisphere — with renamed territories including the ​“Gulf of America,” ​“Our Land” instead of ​“Greenland” and ​“Pana-MAGA” instead of the ​“Panama Canal.” 

Supposedly sober-minded conservative commentators, like Bret Stephens of the New York Times and British historian Niall Ferguson, have also responded positively to this revival of the Monroe Doctrine. One of their key rationales is the strategic need to respond to the perceived threat of China. 

“I’m for it. Not by force, of course,” Stephens wrote about Greenland. ​“But Greenland is strategically important, minerally wealthy and economically underdeveloped — which is why the Chinese have taken an unwholesome interest in it.” Some Democrats have also expressed interest in the new imperial project, including Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) and Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.), who also raised concerns about Chinese influence in Panama and affirmed that ​“the United States reasserting its history in the Panama Canal is actually a good, important, strategic issue.” 

Anxieties among U.S. policymakers and pundits about perceived Chinese incursions into Greenland and the Panama Canal are not new. 

Chinese companies already own ports and other infrastructure along the canal, and in 2023 the commander of the U.S. Southern Command hyperbolically warned that China might ​“flip it around and use it for military application.” A Politico article from 2022 warning of China’s growing influence around the world described a former U.S. ambassador to Panama who felt ​“frustrated and powerless” in 2017 in the face of the growing competitiveness of Chinese capital and the inability of U.S. diplomats to stop local Panamanian leaders from cutting deals with China. 

In Greenland, Chinese companies do not yet have a substantial presence, but they have attempted to make investments in infrastructure and mining. The White House has pressured both Danish and Greenlandic officials, during both the Biden and the first Trump administrations, to stop these deals.

Since the escalation of U.S.-China tensions under Trump’s first term, U.S. policymakers have come to view Chinese companies as a national security threat. This concern about the presence of these companies is particularly heightened in geographies seen as strategically important, as is the case for the Panama Canal — critical for U.S. shipping interests and the Navy — and Greenland — the site of the northernmost U.S. military base, providing increasingly important access to arctic seas. Greenland may also become increasingly important for mining as retreating glaciers reveal new sites for so-called critical minerals, such as zinc and graphite, which are needed for clean energy technology, like electric vehicle batteries. 

In January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, saying Chinese companies are ​“all over Panama,” claimed concerns about China drove Trump to seek annexation of the canal and Greenland. 

“If the government in China in a conflict tells them to shut down the Panama Canal, they will have to,” Rubio said. ​“I have zero doubt that they have contingency planning to do, so that is a direct threat.” 

It is notable that anxiety over China would likely not explain Trump’s desire to annex Canada or Gaza. What may be happening, however, is that Trump has acquired such a habit of imperial bullying that he sees annexation as the best solution to difficult foreign policy problems. Trump’s issues with Canada, for example, seem linked to his idiosyncratic obsession with trade deficits, which would indeed be abolished if the United States could just swallow Canada up.

In other cases, Trump is in effect providing a solution to the supposed China threat: Simply take over these territories, then exclude China by fiat, and, if necessary, expropriate existing Chinese investments. 

MAGA thought leaders like Elbridge Colby and Tucker Carlson have also argued that the United States cannot both support the defense of Ukraine and compete properly with China. Trump’s embrace of spheres of influence provides a solution to this dilemma. ​“We are not gaining in Asia by spending in Ukraine,” said Colby, Trump’s nominee for under secretary of defense for policy. Meanwhile, Carlson asserts that ​“the biggest threat to this country is not Vladimir Putin — that’s ludicrous. The biggest threat, obviously, is China.”

The world of spheres of influence that appears to be the aim of the Trump administration is radically different from the system that the United States established and led following the Cold War. 

That was a form of global hegemony that was based in neoliberal globalization and the overwhelming economic power of U.S. capital. U.S. multinational corporations controlled globe-spanning supply chains that exploited an enormous international workforce. Firms in the United States like Microsoft, Apple and Pfizer controlled the world’s most important and profitable intellectual property, and the U.S. dollar dominated global commerce. 

U.S. capital stood at the top of a global economic hierarchy, and it consistently found opportunities for profiting off countries lower down in that hierarchy. In the eyes of U.S. elites, what was good for the neoliberal global economy was good for U.S. corporate profits, which was good for the U.S. economy, good for U.S. power, and good for the United States, period. This justified constructing an immensely expensive globe-spanning system of military power to prevent ​“rogue actors” from disrupting the system. It was critical to keep the world safe and open for business. 

In exchange for joining the U.S.-led system and integrating themselves into the neoliberal global order, other countries — most notably China — were promised opportunities for economic growth, prosperity and job creation. There is no shortage of examples of the United States using coercion to maintain the system, but the promises of joining this neoliberal globalization won enough legitimacy that, for the most part, the United States could rely on most countries to consent and willingly join the effort. (This is, of course, what ​“hegemony” means: the exercise of power in which the leader can usually rely on consent.) 

In order to maintain this hegemonic system, two conditions needed to be met: U.S. capital had to remain at the top of the global economic hierarchy, and the global economy had to be strong and dynamic enough that most countries could imagine there was space for them to grow. 

These conditions fell apart in the years following the 2008 financial crash. The recovery from the Great Recession was poor and gave way to weak long-term global economic growth. It fostered a sense of zero-sum competition among national economies, which became the basis for the rise of nationalist and authoritarian politics in the 2010s, including Trump in the United States and President Xi Jinping in China. 

During this same period, China’s global position began to change rapidly, posing the most obvious challenge to U.S. hegemony and fostering an inevitable crisis in U.S.-China relations. China’s leaders implemented a massive economic stimulus program in response to the 2008 financial crisis, which included the rapid construction of world-class infrastructure, such as the world’s most extensive high-speed rail network. This transition triggered discussions of China overtaking the United States as the world’s top economy.

Soon, top Chinese companies would begin to outcompete Western multinational corporations, first within China and then globally, such as the construction machine manufacturer Sany, which competed against U.S. companies like Caterpillar and John Deere in global markets. The Chinese government supported these global firms through its industrial policy and powerful state interventions into the economy (demonized by U.S. elites as violations of neoliberal free market rules, but justified by Chinese elites as necessary for economic development). 

It should be no surprise that the nationalist political trend of the 2010s took the form of anti-China nationalism in the United States. 

In the summer of 2015, HuffPost released a compilation of Trump saying ​“China” in his very distinctive way for three minutes straight. It was a major fixation of his first campaign. During his subsequent first term, Trump embraced a new national security strategy that set aside the War on Terror in favor of ​“inter-state strategic competition,” in particular with China, and in 2018, Trump launched a bruising trade war. 

After Chinese telecommunications company Huawei became a world leader in 5G wireless technology and, according to a market analysis from the firm Counterpoint, in 2018, surpassed Apple to become the second-biggest smartphone brand, Trump launched a series of legal and diplomatic attacks culminating in restrictions on Huawei’s ability to purchase U.S. technology. They were so severe that a former Obama official called it ​“the trade equivalent of a nuclear bomb,” but justified it on the grounds that Huawei was a national security threat because the Chinese government might use Huawei technology for espionage or even sabotage (even though there was no evidence this ever occurred). 

Trump’s anti-China agenda struck a chord as it addressed growing tensions in the preceding status quo, and it caught on in Washington, D.C.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), one of the few generally dissenting voices in Congress, called it ​“distressing and dangerous” that ​“a fast-growing consensus is emerging in Washington that views the U.S.-Chinese relationship as a zero-sum economic and military struggle.”

But this new consensus around the China threat was taken up in the Biden administration, and in his 2021 confirmation hearing, Biden’s nominee for secretary of state, Antony Blinken, affirmed that ​“President Trump was right in taking a tougher approach to China.” 

The Biden administration went on to maintain Trump’s tariffs on China and not only kept the restrictions on Huawei but raised similar national security concerns about other technology manufactured by Chinese companies, such as electric vehicles. Gina Raimondo, Biden’s secretary of commerce, articulated the panic over China when she asked the country to ​“imagine if there were thousands or hundreds of thousands of Chinese connected vehicles on American roads that could be immediately and simultaneously disabled by somebody in Beijing.” The Biden administration also launched an effort to cut off China’s access to the world’s top semiconductors and to kneecap China’s ability to manufacture them itself. 

The new anti-China consensus brought far greater attention to a wide variety of criticisms — many of them legitimate — such as the Chinese government’s increasingly authoritarian abuses of rights, threats to Taiwan and other neighbors, and the contribution of Chinese manufacturing to deindustrialization in the United States. The growing Chinese threat to U.S. hegemony underlies the increasing salience these issues have acquired in U.S. politics, most often used to paint a veneer of moral principle over what is fundamentally a struggle for geopolitical power. 

This decline of neoliberal hegemony helped produce Trump and his recent seismic shifts in foreign policy. And now his threats to abandon Ukraine, his demands for annexation and threats of invasion, and his other major shifts in foreign policy now unfolding — such as the attack on the U.S. Agency for International Development (a key form of soft power that also saves countless lives around the world) — are damaging the foundations of U.S. hegemony beyond repair. Project 2025 even calls for the United States to leave the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Trump may well believe that, by replacing U.S. hegemony with a world divided into spheres of influence, he will avoid conflict between the great powers. But historical precedent suggests we should not be so optimistic. While Trump may be able to secure an immediate cease-fire (if not a just peace) in Ukraine, any attempt to establish a system of spheres of influence will prove to be volatile, as indeed the attempt of the late 19^th and early 20^th century turned out to be. 

The central problem is how to define and maintain the boundaries of these spheres of influence. This would be difficult enough in Eastern Europe, but even more so in Asia. Trump may actually be willing to grant China a sphere of influence in Asia — there are even rumors that, in the event of a Chinese assault on Taiwan, ​“Trump won’t come to Taiwan’s support,” according to Paul Nadeau of Tokyo Review. If this is what Trump has in mind, it is highly idiosyncratic. 

This region is just too important for future economic growth, and few U.S. policymakers will be able to resign themselves to forsaking competition with China in Asia. If Trump attempts to cede a sphere of influence to China now, it would likely trigger a severe reaction from the rest of the U.S. foreign policy elite (in Congress, in think tanks and even in Trump’s own White House). The alternative might be for the United States to claim a sphere of influence for itself while denying one to China, which China’s leaders would surely be unable to tolerate. In any case, the stage is set for greater confrontation between the United States and China, as well as the United States and the large number of countries Trump believes he can buy or bully. 

This is one of the reasons that Trump’s professed expansionism is also a threat to peace. So far, it appears his preferred strategy is to use tariffs in an effort to force foreign governments to cede territory to the United States, but this economic coercion is unlikely to achieve his goals of annexation; in January, he refused to rule out military force in the cases of Greenland and the Panama Canal. 

Trump’s approach to foreign policy is deepening the crisis of U.S. hegemony, and that may erode his ability to exercise noncoercive forms of power within his intended sphere of influence. Over time, this is likely to make escalating forms of coercion seem all the more necessary — to himself, to others in his administration and to other policymakers. When it becomes clear that tariffs aren’t getting the intended results, Trump may indeed turn to military force— and he will be able to build political support on the grounds that there are few ways left to protect remaining U.S. power on the global stage.

Any steps Trump takes toward territorial expansion could make China’s leaders feel it necessary to respond in kind to protect China’s access to foreign markets and existing overseas investments. Trump’s expressed openness to military force is likely triggering concerns in Beijing that they may need to consider the further projection of China’s military power, which equates to furthering the long-term risks of conflict between the great powers. 

Attempts to establish separate spheres of influence for the United States and China could also have dire consequences for the other major global challenge we face aside from the risk of war: climate change. 

China is by far the leader across a wide range of clean energy industries, particularly in solar power, electric vehicles and batteries, along with the advanced electrical transmission lines necessary for clean energy electrification. U.S. efforts to exclude China from doing business in other countries threaten the ability of those countries to work with Chinese companies to decarbonize their economies. 

In addition, escalating military competition between the United States and China could provoke China’s leaders to do something drastic, like commandeer Chinese manufacturing for military purposes, as the U.S. government did during its industrial mobilization in World War II. In addition to producing an arsenal that would grow at a dizzying rate, this would mean cannibalizing the enormous mass of factories and labor now devoted to clean tech manufacturing, on which the future of the global energy transition currently depends — as does our planet and life on earth. 

Trump clearly appears not to understand the dangerous forces he is setting into motion. Neither did an earlier generation of world leaders. 

Despite growing tensions between the great powers over the boundaries of their spheres of influence, the outbreak of World War I ​“was not really expected,” writes the historian Eric Hobsbawm. 

“Even during the last desperate days of the international crisis in July 1914,” Hobsbawm wrote, ​“statesmen, taking fatal steps, did not really believe they were starting a world war. Surely a formula would be found, as so often in the past.”