Trump’s Error: The Importance of Idealism in American Power
Trump’s rejection of the liberal international order will undermine American hard power in the long run.
This is an op-ed. All opinions expressed are the author’s own.
In 1947, President Truman set out what would later become known as the ‘Truman Doctrine’. He argued that “The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world. And we shall surely endanger the welfare of our own nation”.
Seventy years later, President Trump insisted that “We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs. Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength”. In the past six weeks, President Trump and Vice-President J.D. Vance doubled down on this hard-edged, inward-understanding view of American power — selling out allies and bringing smirks to their foes.
On the surface, this looks like the weak, woolly idealism of Truman and the postwar order versus the realist recognition of international anarchy and national self-interest under Trump. Or as Sir Alex Younger, former head of MI6, puts it, we have swung back from the multilateral world of Helsinki to the strongman world of Yalta - the 1945 conference where Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill decided the fate of the war-stricken West.
But the Trump-Vance presumption that realism and idealism — the latter, foreign policy based on self-interest, the former on values — are mutually exclusive is mistaken. For idealism is the linchpin, or at least the window shop, of American hard power.
The Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 marked the beginning of a liberal international order underpinned by the belief that economic interdependence would reduce the incentive for conflict and imperialistic expansion.
Yet the ideological view that trade between democratic allies increased the likelihood of peace (or ‘democratic peace theory’) also served a pragmatic purpose. After the Second World War, driven by the economics but also the ideal of globalisation, power diffused into a more informal, economic, viscous state. The dollar became the reserve currency and oil prices were pegged to it in the 1970s (known as the petrodollar system). This allowed the United States to deter enemies — as in the case of the Iran nuclear programme — purely through economic measures.
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In the decades after the Cold War, US dominance was consolidated further. Creeping American private sector dominance over global supply chains provided the state with the power to squeeze choke points across an increasingly interconnected world - from bank transfers to subsea cables and (today) cloud servers and NVIDIA chips.
Take the example of the international payment system, SWIFT, which dominates financial transactions. At its peak, 90% of global international payments went through SWIFT. Originally driven by the US private sector’s demand for market efficiency in the 1970s, SWIFT came to be viewed as a tool of economic warfare that could be used by the state. In 2012, SWIFT was used to isolate Iranian banks and enforce sanctions against the Iranian nuclear program. A decade earlier, SWIFT had been used to track illicit financial activity by terrorists post-9/11. And, of course, in 2022 SWIFT was leveraged to lock out Russian banks after the re-invasion of Ukraine.
Therefore, by driving free trade, buttressed by the international rules-based order, the United States locked its allies and adversaries alike into a system of interdependence, which has until now allowed it to “balance power without weapons”. The idealistic argument for a “world safe for democracy” thus played an indispensable role in securing modern American hard power.
In other words, the liberal international order was 'dual use': both a commercial driver of profit and a toolbox of influence.
Trump and Vance appear to no longer believe that values are of importance in American foreign policy. Pundits have highlighted the administration’s swing to realism — rejecting ‘woke’ foreign policy that fails to prioritise America’s interests. This view has resulted in everything from pulling $43bn in USAID programs to putting tariffs on long-time allies.
But this fallacy of ‘realism' is not simply morally shallow; it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of American power.
As Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, authors of Underground Empire, foresaw in 2019, American allies have been willing to accept its dominance over digital and financial networks because of their hitherto “shared democratic values and…economic interests”. But this acquiescence can only exist as long as America’s allies benefit more than they suffer from America’s “network hegemony”. By selling out Ukraine and weaponising its economic network, Trump will undermine American power in the long run.
The problem with economic chokepoints is that by overusing them, you compel other states (allies and foes alike) to 'de-risk'. Putting up tariffs on Canada or building up moats around critical technology diffusion abroad will only encourage others to fill in supply chain gaps and build their own network empires. China is already doing this with the digital technology stack in Southeast Asia, for example, by building out its own cloud servers (the essential data infrastructure underlying modern digital economies).
Ironically, it was Putin himself back in 2014 who made a point that is now a truism for Europe that America is “cutting the branch they are sitting on”.
Guy Ward Jackson is a Science & Tech Policy Analyst and holds an MA in intelligence & international security from King's College London: Check out his Linkedin here.
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