Thread by @ruth_deyermond

Term 2 Trump foreign policy - from tariffs to NATO to soft power to China and Russia - is an epic mess. One reason seems to be that the administration is operating with two conflicting, equally flawed, views of the world and the US's place in it. 🧵

Trump administration policy is partly grounded in a worldview in which the US is one of several great powers, each with its own sphere of influence, but also in a view of the US as the unconstrained unipole.

The Trump administration talks about seeing the world as if it's 1892 while trying to party like it's 1992 - or 2002.

The 19th century great powers model assumes that only great powers matter and only they have either agency or sovereignty. The rest of the world is there to be carved up between them.

This attitude is reflected in, for example, suggestions that the US is happy to leave Europe to Russia, while the US carves out its own sphere of influence in the Americas.

The great power model assumes a world organised via pragmatic bargaining grounded in realpolitik, and where the mutual capacity to inflict damage constrains expansionist impulses.

At the same time, though, and despite Rubio's (correct) observation that unipolarity was an anomaly of the post-Cold War period, the Trump administration seems to be replaying George W. Bush's approach to world affairs, in which the US is the unconstrained global hegemon.

But it's a much cruder and more stupid version than Bush43's - one that, unlike the original version, entirely discounts soft power and alliances. Instead it tries to coerce and extort allies and trading partners.

The Trump message is: give us what we want, buy more of our goods, hand over assets/money/territory or we raise tariffs/abandon NATO commitments/invade.

It's based on the assumption that other states have no choice but to comply because they're so dependent on US trade or the US security umbrella.

Instead, the Trump administration is finding out that - because the US isn't actually a neo-imperial unipole - other states can and will push back, and take steps to decouple from the US - which, of course, leaves the US weaker and less influential.

Bush 43's foreign policy was on itself damaged by false assumptions about the lack of limits to US power. But it was operating in a world in which it was still just about possible to kid yourself that the unipolar moment had extended into the 21st century.

There's no excuse for an administration making this mistake in 2025, when the costs of GWOT-era flawed thinking about limitless US power have been visible for 20 years.

Unless, of course, you take someone who has paid no attention to the way the world has changed in the last quarter century and put him in the Oval Office.

As in so many other areas, Trump's grasp of the world and the US'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.

Of course, the multipolar great power model is also hopelessly outdated, as I've said before. There's no world of great power spheres of influence if one alleged great power (Russia) has no serious sphere of influence and another (the US) has just trashed the one it used to have.

You also don't have a world dominated by three great powers - Russia, China, and the US - if Russia is dependent on China and the US appears to be politically subordinate to Russia.

And, 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 thinks).

Both the multipolar great power and neo-imperial uniopolar 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 number, speed, and depth of the unforced foreign policy errors made by the Trump 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.