President Donald Trump has tried both to impose the United States on the world and to distance the country from it. He began his second term by brandishing American hard power, threatening Denmark over the control of Greenland, and suggesting he would take back the Panama Canal. He successfully wielded threats of punitive tariffs to coerce Canada, Colombia, and Mexico on immigration issues. He withdrew from the Paris climate accords and the World Health Organization. In April, he sent global markets into chaos by announcing sweeping tariffs on countries all over the world. He changed tack not long after, withdrawing most of the additional tariffs, although continuing to press a trade war with China—the central front in his current offensive against Washington’s main rival.
In doing all this, Trump can act from a position of strength. His attempts to use tariffs to pressure U.S. trade partners suggest that he believes that contemporary patterns of interdependence enhance U.S. power. Other countries rely on the buying power of the enormous American market and on the certainties of American military might. These advantages give Washington the leeway to strong-arm its partners. His positions are consistent with an argument we made almost 50 years ago: that asymmetric interdependence confers an advantage on the less dependent actor in a relationship. Trump laments the United States’ significant trade deficit with China, but he also seems to understand that this imbalance gives Washington tremendous leverage over Beijing.
Even as Trump has correctly identified the way in which the United States is strong, he is using that strength in fundamentally counterproductive ways. By assailing interdependence, he undercuts the very foundation of American power. The power associated with trade is hard power, based on material capabilities. But over the past 80 years, the United States has accumulated soft power, based on attraction rather than coercion or the imposition of costs. Wise American policy would maintain, rather than disrupt, patterns of interdependence that strengthen American power, both the hard power derived from trade relationships and the soft power of attraction. The continuation of Trump’s current foreign policy would weaken the United States and accelerate the erosion of the international order that since World War II has served so many countries well—most of all, the United States.
Order rests on a stable distribution of power among states, norms that influence and legitimize the conduct of states and other actors, and institutions that help underpin it. The Trump administration has rocked all these pillars. The world may be entering a period of disorder, one that settles only after the White House changes course or once a new dispensation takes hold in Washington. But the decline underway may not be a mere temporary dip; it may be a plunge into murky waters. In his erratic and misguided effort to make the United States even more powerful, Trump may bring its period of dominance—what the American publisher Henry Luce first called “the American century”—to an unceremonious end.
THE DEFICIT ADVANTAGE
When we wrote Power and Interdependence in 1977, we tried to broaden conventional understandings of power. Foreign policy experts typically saw power through the lens of the Cold War military competition. Our research, by contrast, explored how trade affected power, and we argued that asymmetry in an interdependent economic relationship empowers the less dependent actor. The paradox of trade power is that success in a trading relationship—as indicated by one state having a trade surplus with another—is a source of vulnerability. Conversely, and perhaps counterintuitively, running a trade deficit can strengthen a country’s bargaining position. The deficit country, after all, can impose tariffs or other trade barriers on the surplus country. That targeted surplus country will have difficulty retaliating because of its relative lack of imports to sanction.
Threatening to bar or limit imports can successfully exert pressure on trading partners. In terms of asymmetric interdependence and power, the United States is in a favorable bargaining position with all seven of its most important trading partners. Its trade is extremely asymmetric with China, Mexico, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, all of which have an export-import ratio of more than two to one with the United States. For Japan (roughly 1.8 to 1), South Korea (1.4 to 1), and the European Union (1.6 to 1), those ratios are also asymmetric. Canada enjoys a more balanced ratio of around 1.2 to 1.
These ratios, of course, cannot capture the full dimensions of the economic relationships between countries. Countervailing factors, such as domestic interest groups with transnational ties to foreign actors in other markets or personal and group relationships across borders, can complicate matters, sometimes leading to exceptions or limiting the impact of asymmetric interdependence. In Power and Interdependence, we characterized these multiple channels of connections as “complex interdependence,” and in a detailed analysis of U.S.-Canadian relations between 1920 and 1970, we showed that they often strengthened Canada’s hand. For example, the U.S.-Canadian automotive pact of the 1960s resulted from a process of negotiation that began with Canada’s unilateral introduction of an export subsidy for auto parts. In every analysis of asymmetric interdependence and power, it is necessary to look carefully at countervailing factors that might diminish the advantages that would normally accrue to the deficit country.
China appears weakest of all in the trade sector alone, with its three-to-one ratio of exports to imports. It also cannot call on alliance ties or other forms of soft power. But it is able to retaliate by exploiting countervailing factors, punishing important American corporations that operate in China, such as Apple or Boeing, or important American domestic political actors, such as soybean farmers or Hollywood studios. China can also use hard power such as cutting off supplies of rare minerals. As the two sides discover more precisely their mutual vulnerabilities, the focus of trade warfare will shift to reflect this learning process.
Mexico has fewer sources of counterinfluence, and it remains highly vulnerable to the whims of the United States. Europe can exercise some counterinfluence in the trade sector because it has more balanced trade with the United States than do China and Mexico, but it still depends on NATO, so Trump’s threats not to support the alliance could be an effective bargaining tool. Canada has more balanced trade with the United States and a web of transnational ties with American interest groups that make it less vulnerable, but it is probably playing a losing hand on trade alone because its economy is more reliant on the U.S. economy than the other way around. In Asia, the asymmetry in U.S. trade relations with Japan, South Korea, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations is somewhat compensated for by the U.S. policy of rivalry with China. As long as this rivalry continues, the United States needs its East Asian and Southeast Asian allies and partners, and it cannot take full advantage of its trade-derived leverage. The relative influence of U.S. trade policy therefore varies depending on the geopolitical context and on patterns of asymmetric interdependence.
REAL POWER
The Trump administration misses a major dimension of power. Power is the ability to get others to do what you want. This goal can be accomplished by coercion, payment, or attraction. The first two are hard power; the third is soft power. In the short term, hard power usually trumps soft power, but over the long term, soft power often prevails. Joseph Stalin is thought to have once mockingly asked, “How many divisions does the Pope have?” But the Soviet Union is long gone, and the papacy lives on.
The president seems inordinately committed to coercion and the exercise of American hard power, but he does not seem to understand soft power or its role in foreign policy. Coercing democratic allies such as Canada or Denmark more broadly weakens trust in U.S. alliances; threatening Panama reawakens fears of imperialism throughout Latin America; crippling the U.S. Agency for International Development undercuts the United States’ reputation for benevolence. Silencing the Voice of America mutes the country’s message.
Skeptics say, So what? International politics is hardball, not softball. And Trump’s coercive and transactional approach is already producing concessions with the promise of more to come. As Machiavelli once wrote about power, it is better for a prince to be feared than loved. But it is better yet to be both feared and loved. Power has three dimensions, and by ignoring attraction, Trump is neglecting a key source of American strength. In the long run, it is a losing strategy.
America’s decline may not be a mere dip but a plunge.
And soft power matters even in the short run. If a country is attractive, it won’t need to rely as much on incentives and penalties to shape the behavior of others. If allies see it as benign and trustworthy, they are more persuadable and likely to follow that country’s lead, although admittedly they may maneuver to take advantage of a benign stance by the more powerful state. Faced with bullying, they may comply, but if they see their trading partner as an unreliable bully, they are more likely to drag their feet and reduce their long-term interdependence when they can. Cold War Europe offers a good example of this dynamic. In 1986, the Norwegian analyst Geir Lundestad described the world as divided into a Soviet and an American empire. Whereas the Soviets had used force to build their European satrapies, the American side was “an empire by invitation.” The Soviets had to send troops into Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968 to keep the governments there subordinate to Moscow. By contrast, NATO remained strong throughout the Cold War.
In Asia, China has been increasing its hard military and economic investments, but it has also been cultivating its powers of attraction. In 2007, President Hu Jintao told the 17th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party that China needed to increase its soft power. The Chinese government has spent tens of billions of dollars to that end. Admittedly, it has achieved mixed results at best, owing to two major obstacles: it has stoked rancorous territorial disputes with a number of its neighbors, and the CCP maintains tight control over all organizations and opinions in civil society. China generates resentments when it ignores internationally recognized borders. And it comes across poorly to people in many countries when it jails human rights lawyers and compels nonconformists, such as the brilliant artist Ai Weiwei, into exile.
At least before Trump’s second term began, China lagged far behind the United States in the court of global public opinion. Pew surveyed 24 countries in 2023 and reported that a majority of respondents in most of them found the United States more attractive than China, with Africa the only continent where the results were even close. More recently, in May 2024, Gallup found that in 133 countries it surveyed, the United States had the advantage in 81 and China in 52. If Trump keeps undercutting American soft power, however, these numbers may change markedly.
To be sure, American soft power has had its ups and downs over the years. The United States was unpopular in many countries during the Vietnam War and the Iraq war. But soft power derives from a country’s society and culture, not just the actions of its government. Even during the Vietnam War, when crowds marched through streets around the world to protest American policies, they did not sing the communist “Internationale” but the American civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” An open civil society that allows protest and accommodates dissent can be an asset. But the soft power derived from American culture will not survive the excesses of the U.S. government during the next four years if American democracy continues to erode and the country acts as a bully abroad.
For its part, China is striving to fill any gaps that Trump creates. It sees itself as the leader of the so-called global South. It aims to displace the American order of international alliances and institutions. Its Belt and Road infrastructure investment program is designed not only to attract other countries but also to provide hard economic power. More countries have China as their largest trading partner than have the United States as such. If Trump thinks he can compete with China while weakening trust among American allies, asserting imperial aspirations, destroying the U.S. Agency for International Development, challenging the rule of law at home, and withdrawing from UN agencies, he is likely to be disappointed.
THE SPECTER OF GLOBALISM
Looming over the rise of Western populists such as Trump is the specter of globalization, which they invoke as a demonic force. In reality, the term simply refers to increasing interdependence at intercontinental distances. When Trump threatens tariffs on China, he is trying to reduce the economic aspect of the United States’ global interdependence, which he blames for the loss of industries and jobs. Globalization can certainly have negative and positive effects. But Trump’s measures are misplaced, since they attack those forms of globalization that are largely good for the United States and the world while failing to counter those that are bad. On balance, globalization has enhanced American power, and Trump’s assault on it only enfeebles the United States.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the British economist and statesman David Ricardo established the widely accepted fact that global trade can create value through comparative advantage. When they are open to trade, countries can specialize in what they do best. Trade generates what the German economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction”: jobs are lost in the process, and national economies are subject to shocks from abroad, sometimes as a result of deliberate policy by foreign governments. But that disruption can help economies become more productive and efficient. On balance, during the last 75 years, creative destruction has augmented American power. As the largest economic player, the United States has benefited most from the innovation that generates growth and the spillover effects that growth has had around the world.
At the same time, growth can be painful. Studies have shown that the United States has lost (and gained) millions of jobs in the twenty-first century, forcing the costs of adjustment onto workers, who have generally not received adequate compensation from the government. Technological change has also eliminated millions of jobs as machines have replaced people, and it is difficult to untangle the interconnected effects of automation and foreign trade. The usual strains of interdependence have been made much worse by China’s export juggernaut, which is not letting up.
Even as economic globalization enhances the productivity of the world economy, these changes may be unwelcome for many individuals and families. People in many communities are reluctant to move to places where they might more easily find work. Others, of course, are willing to move halfway around the world to find more opportunities. The last several decades of globalization have been characterized by massive movements of people across national borders, another major type of interdependence. Migration is culturally enriching and offers major economic benefits for countries that receive migrants by bringing people with skills to places where they can use those skills more productively. Countries from which people migrate may benefit from the relief of population pressure and from emigrants sending remittances. In any event, migration tends to engender further movement. In the absence of high barriers constructed by states, migration in the contemporary world is often a self-perpetuating process.
Trump blames immigrants for causing disruptive change. Although at least some forms of immigration are clearly good for the economy in the long term, critics can easily characterize them as harmful in the near term, and they may stir strong political opposition among some people. Sudden spikes in immigration provoke strong political reactions, with migrants often cast as responsible for various economic and social changes, even when they are demonstrably not to blame. Immigration has become the dominant populist political issue used against incumbent governments in nearly all democracies in recent years. It fueled Trump’s election in 2016—and again in 2024.
It is much easier for populist leaders to blame foreigners for economic upheaval than to accept the far more determinative roles of technological change and capital. Globalization has presented challenges to incumbents in many recent elections in many countries. The politician’s temptation in the face of these stresses is to seek to reverse globalization by imposing tariffs and other barriers to international exchange, as Trump is doing.
Trump’s assault on globalization enfeebles the United States.
Economic globalization has been reversed in the past. The nineteenth century was marked by a rapid increase in both trade and migration, but it slowed precipitously with the beginning of World War I, in 1914. Trade as a percent of global economic activity did not recover to its 1914 levels until nearly 1970. This could happen again, although it would take some doing. World trade grew extremely rapidly between 1950 and 2008, then more slowly since the 2008–9 financial crisis. Overall, trade grew by 4,400 percent from 1950 to 2023. Global trade could again lurch into decline. If the U.S. trade measures against China lead to a more committed trade war, it is likely to do a great deal of damage. Trade wars in general can easily morph into enduring and escalating conflict, with the possibility of catastrophic change.
On the other side of the ledger, the costs of undoing more than half a trillion dollars of trade are likely to limit the willingness of countries to engage in trade wars and may generate some incentives for compromise. And although other countries may act reciprocally toward the United States, they will not necessarily limit trade with one another. Geopolitical factors could also speed the unwinding of trade flows. A war over Taiwan, for example, could bring trade between the United States and China to a screeching halt.
Some analysts blame the wave of nationalist populist reactions in nearly all democracies on the increased spread and speed of globalization. Trade and migration accelerated in tandem after the end of the Cold War, as political change and improved communications technology reduced the costs of crossing borders and long distances. Now, tariffs and border controls may slow down those flows. That would be bad news for American power, which has been enhanced by the energy and productivity of immigrants throughout its history, including during the last several decades.
PROBLEMS WITHOUT PASSPORTS
No crisis highlights the inescapability of interdependence better than climate change. Scientists predict that climate change will have huge costs as global icecaps melt, coastal cities flood, heat waves intensify, and weather patterns shift chaotically later in the century. Even in the near term, the intensity of hurricanes and wildfires is exacerbated by climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been an important voice articulating the dangers of climate change, sharing scientific information, and encouraging joint transnational work. Yet Trump has eliminated support for international and national action to counter climate change. Ironically, while his administration is seeking to limit types of globalization that have benefits, it is also deliberately undermining Washington’s ability to address types of ecological globalization, such as climate change and pandemics, whose costs are potentially gargantuan. The COVID-19 pandemic in the United States killed over 1.2 million people; The Lancet has placed the worldwide death toll at about 18 million. COVID-19 circulated the world rapidly and was certainly a global phenomenon, fostered by travel that is an integral part of globalization.
In other areas, interdependence remains a key source of American strength. Networks of professional interaction among scientists, for instance, have had tremendous positive effects in speeding discoveries and innovation. Until the Trump administration came into power, the expansion of scientific activity and networks had engendered little negative political reaction. Any catalog of the pluses and minuses of globalization for human welfare must include it on the positive side of the scale. For example, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan in 2020, Chinese scientists shared their genetic decoding of the novel coronavirus with international counterparts before they were stopped from doing so by Beijing.
That is why one of the strangest aspects of Trump’s new term has been his administration’s gutting of federal support for scientific research, including in fields that have yielded great returns on investment, are largely responsible for the pace of innovation in the modern world, and have enhanced the prestige and power of the United States. Although American research universities lead the world, the administration has sought to stifle them by canceling funding, seeking to curtail their independence, and making it harder to attract the brightest students from around the world. This attack is hard to understand except as a salvo in a culture war against putative elites who do not share the ideology of right-wing populism. It amounts to a massive, self-inflicted wound.
The Trump administration is also unwinding another key tool of American soft power: the country’s espousal of liberal democratic values. Especially during the last half century, the idea of human rights as a value has diffused around the world. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991, democratic institutions and norms spread to much of eastern Europe (including, briefly, to Russia), as well as to other parts of the world, notably Latin America, and gained some foothold in Africa. The proportion of countries in the world that were either liberal or electoral democracies reached slightly over 50 percent at its high point around 2000, and has fallen a little bit since, remaining near 50 percent. Even though the post–Cold War “democratic wave” has subsided, it has still left an abiding mark.
The wide appeal of democratic norms, and of human rights, has certainly contributed to the soft power of the United States. Autocratic governments resist what they see as interference in their sovereign autonomy by groups supporting human rights—groups that are often based in the United States and backed by nongovernmental and governmental resources in the United States. For a while, autocracies were fighting a defensive, rearguard battle. Not surprisingly, some authoritarian governments that have chafed under U.S. criticism or sanctions have applauded the Trump administration’s renunciation of support for human rights abroad, such as closing the State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice, its Office of Global Women’s Issues, and its Bureau of Conflict and Stability Operations. Trump administration policy will inhibit the further spread of democracy and deplete American soft power.
A BET ON WEAKNESS
There is no undoing global interdependence. It will continue as long as humans are mobile and invent new technologies of communication and transportation. After all, globalization spans centuries, with roots extending back to the Silk Road and beyond. In the fifteenth century, innovations in oceangoing transport spurred the age of exploration, which was followed by European colonization that shaped today’s national boundaries. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, steamships and telegraphs accelerated the process as the Industrial Revolution transformed agrarian economies. Now, the information revolution is transforming service-oriented economies. Billions of people carry a computer in their pocket packed with an amount of information that would have filled a skyscraper 50 years ago.
World wars temporarily reversed economic globalization and disrupted migration, but in the absence of global warfare, and as long as technology continues its rapid advance, economic globalization will continue, as well. Ecological globalization and global scientific activity are also likely to persist, and norms and information will continue to travel across borders. The effects of some forms of globalization may be malign: climate change is a prominent example of a crisis that knows no borders. To rechannel and reshape globalization for the common good, states will have to coordinate. For such coordination to be effective, leaders will have to construct and maintain networks of connection, norms, and institutions. Those networks will in turn benefit their central node, the United States—still the economically, militarily, technologically, and culturally most powerful country in the world—providing Washington with soft power. Unfortunately, the myopic focus of the second Trump administration, which is obsessed with coercive hard power linked to trade asymmetries and sanctions, is likely to erode rather than strengthen the U.S.-led international order. Trump has focused so much on the costs of free-riding by allies that he neglects the fact that the United States gets to drive the bus—and thus pick the destination and the route. Trump does not seem to grasp how American strength lies in interdependence. Instead of making America great again, he is making a tragic bet on weakness.