Dispensable Nation: America in a Post-American World
Kori Schake
Foreign Affairs, July/August 2025
Published on June 24, 2025
KORI SCHAKE is a Senior Fellow and Director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of Safe Passage: The Transition From British to American Hegemony. She served on the National Security Council and in the U.S. State Department during the George W. Bush administration.
President Donald Trump’s rise to power and enduring political appeal have been fueled in part by his depiction of the United States as a failure: exhausted, weak, and ruined. In a characteristic act of self-contradiction, however, his foreign policy is based on a significant overestimation of American power. Trump and his advisers seem to believe that, despite the country’s allegedly parlous condition, unilateral action on Washington’s part can still force others to capitulate and submit to American terms.
But since the end of World War II, American power has been rooted mostly in cooperation, not coercion. The Trump team ignores that history, takes for granted all the benefits that a cooperative approach has yielded, and cannot envision a future in which other countries opt out of the existing U.S.-led international order or construct a new one that would be antagonistic to American interests. Yet those are precisely the outcomes the Trump administration is hastening.
The political scientist Michael Beckley has argued in Foreign Affairs that the United States is becoming “a rogue superpower, neither internationalist nor isolationist but aggressive, powerful, and increasingly out for itself.” That portrait is accurate but incomplete, since it does not fully capture the extent to which American dominance can be undercut or constricted by others. In the Trump era, many have speculated about whether or to what degree the United States will withdraw from its leading role in the world. But a more pressing question might be, what if the rest of the world beats Washington to the punch, withdrawing from the cooperative U.S.-led order that has been the bedrock of American power?
Some may counter that even if U.S. allies and neutral countries don’t like the way Trump exercises American power, they have little choice but to go along with it now and will accommodate themselves to it in the longer term, placating the United States as much as possible and hedging only when absolutely necessary. After all, they might come to loathe and distrust the United States, but not as much as they already loathe and distrust China, Russia, and other American rivals. In this view, the United States that Trump wants to create would be the worst possible hegemon—except for all the other possible candidates. Besides, even if other countries wanted to opt out of the U.S.-led order or work around Washington, they don’t have the ability to do so, individually or collectively. They might yearn for the days when a more internationalist, open, cooperative United States shaped the world order. But they’ll learn to live with a more nationalist, closed, and demanding United States.
That view results from a failure of imagination—a common source of strategic failure, since statecraft requires one to anticipate how other actors in the international system will react and what forces they might set in motion. Lacking the ability to do that, the Trump team has instead taken an approach predicated on a pair of faulty assumptions: that other countries, international organizations, businesses, and civil society organizations have no alternative to capitulation in the face of U.S. demands and that even if alternatives emerged, the United States could remain predominant without its allies. This is solipsism masquerading as strategy. Instead of producing a less constraining order in which American power will flourish, it will instead yield a more hostile order in which American power will fade.
DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’VE GOT TILL IT’S GONE
Despite Trump’s disparagement, the United States is incredibly strong and dynamic. No other advanced country relies so much on its domestic market and so little on trade. Around half of global trade and almost 90 percent of global foreign exchange transactions are conducted in U.S. dollars, an extraordinary repository of value that affords Washington the luxury of deficit spending that would be outrageous anywhere else. Unlike almost every other developed country, the United States has a growing prime-age workforce. The country boasts abundant natural resources, has friendly neighbors, draws the world’s most talented people to its universities and companies, fosters social and economic mobility that reduce ethnic and religious animosities, and is governed by a political system that is well adapted to a diverse society.
But Trump and his team are burning through those advantages at an alarming rate. Since he took office in January, elements of the country’s constitutional democracy have been undercut—or, worse yet, weaponized to serve partisan ends or indulge Trump’s personal vendettas. The White House has aggressively expanded the executive branch’s power by trampling on Congress’s authority, refusing to comply with court orders, and calling into question the independence of vital institutions such as the Federal Reserve. Trump has targeted elite American universities, starving them of the federal funding they use to create innovative technologies and medical advances. He has allowed Elon Musk, a billionaire tech titan who donated massive sums to his campaign, to run roughshod over the federal bureaucracy, forcing out many of the talented career civil servants who make the federal government work and carry out U.S. foreign policy.
Meanwhile, Trump’s erratic trade war, which targets rivals and allies alike, has whipsawed markets, spooked investors, and convinced Washington’s partners that they can no longer trust the United States. Trump has threatened the sovereignty of allies and publicly berated their leaders, all while lavishing praise on the dictators and thugs who threaten them. The administration’s radical and peremptory elimination of U.S. foreign assistance removed a lever of American influence and telegraphed a level of indifference that will not go unnoticed. As the country’s friends have looked on in horror and its rivals have watched with glee, the United States has gone from indispensable to insufferable.
Trump at the White House, Washington, D.C., June 2025Kevin Lamarque / Reuters
The American experience of dominance in the international order is historically anomalous because it has occasioned so little hedging on the part of others. Typically, a rising power creates incentives for other countries to counterbalance its influence: in the fifth century BC, the rise of Athens caused neighboring states to seek protection from Sparta; in the Great Northern War of the early eighteenth century, the ambitions of King Charles XII of Sweden provoked an anti-Swedish coalition; a century or so later, France’s growing power fostered the coalition that eventually defeated Napoleon. But the international order that the United States and its allies created out of the ashes of World War II prevented that seeming inevitability. Its agreed-on rules and consensual participation maximized the influence of small countries and midsize powers that enjoyed the safety provided by American power. The United States voluntarily restrained itself to encourage cooperation. As a result, the American order was remarkably cost-effective, because the rules so seldom had to be enforced. No dominant power has ever had so much assistance from others in maintaining its dominance.
That order is now collapsing. Trump has a deep-seated ideological conviction that allies are a burden. His tactic in negotiations is to use U.S. leverage to wring concessions from all counterparties at all times. But this approach fails to account for how cooperation can act as a force multiplier. Take the case of Iran. The United States has maintained draconian sanctions on the Islamic Republic since 1979. American pressure alone, however, was not enough to get Tehran to come to the negotiating table over its nuclear program. Doing so required China, Russia, and Washington’s European allies to sign on to a sanctions regime.
The war in Ukraine offers another example. To bring an end to the war, the Trump administration may want to relax sanctions on Russia or force Ukraine to capitulate to Moscow’s aggression. But it would take European acquiescence for the Russian economy to recover, and European countries could continue to support Ukraine even without American assistance. Instead of securing the cooperation of European allies in the negotiations, however, Trump has frozen them out. Similarly, the United States wants to restrict China from acquiring certain kinds of advanced technology, such as tools and components critical to manufacturing semiconductors. But without the compliance of countries that manufacture such things, including Japan and the Netherlands, U.S. restrictions won’t work. Threats to exclude countries from the U.S. market or to strip their ability to use the U.S. dollar for transactions won’t be effective if Washington is going to restrict market access no matter what, or if the dollar loses its centrality to the global economy.
Trump’s approach is solipsism masquerading as strategy.
The Trump administration has hardly been alone in abetting the corrosion of an international order advantageous to the United States. Washington has been weaponizing economic interdependence for decades, and in response to a widespread belief among American voters that free trade harmed U.S. manufacturing and hollowed out the American economy, the last three presidential administrations have all been hostile to providing market access, even to preferred trading partners whose inputs are essential to U.S. production.
For many years, U.S. allies—particularly those in Asia, which fear China’s growing power—have pleaded with Washington to pursue an economic strategy that would allow them to reduce their reliance on China. During President Barack Obama’s second term, his administration negotiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which offered a collaborative way forward. The deal would have linked 12 economies, taken advantage of Asia’s economic dynamism, and used the promise of access to American markets to compel higher environmental and labor standards that would, in turn, make U.S. production more competitive. But the Obama administration let the deal languish instead of pushing for congressional ratification. Both major-party presidential candidates disavowed it in 2016, Trump withdrew from the negotiations in 2017, and Joe Biden chose not to join the pact after he became president in 2021.
When it comes to burning bridges, however, nothing matches the speed and destructiveness of Trump’s policies in the past few months. According to a recent survey conducted by the opinion-research firm Cluster 17 and the journal Le Grand Continent, 51 percent of Europeans “consider Trump to be an enemy of Europe.” And this sentiment is strongest in countries that had previously been most supportive of the United States, such as Denmark and Germany. “Americans—at least this part of the Americans, this administration—are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe,” said Friedrich Merz, now Germany’s chancellor, after his center-right party prevailed in elections in February. As a result, he said, “my absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the United States.” His words captured what would have been a fringe belief a decade ago but has become conventional wisdom in Europe today.
AMERICA ALONE
In recent years, U.S. adversaries including China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia have stepped up their cooperation in the face of Washington’s efforts to isolate them, helping one another skirt sanctions, arm their militaries, and carry out various acts of aggression. This hardly comes as a surprise, and American policymakers have plenty of experience in dealing with such machinations. What they lack, however, is any experience of a world in which traditional American allies and more neutral countries also start working together—but against the United States.
The first signs of this process might look like little more than symbolic protests, as countries and institutions seek ways to strip Washington of its traditional convening power. Heads of state might avoid Oval Office meetings, foreign officials might be unavailable for phone calls to coordinate policy with their American counterparts, and the heads of international organizations might not schedule the kinds of summits that grant U.S. officials stature and allow them to set the agenda and meet with many world leaders at once. Fearing that Washington plans to withdraw U.S. troops stationed in Europe, the NATO secretary-general might cancel the alliance’s annual summit to avoid giving the American president a platform to announce the move; the UN secretary-general could choose not to accommodate U.S. scheduling requests for Security Council meetings or decline to give U.S. representatives the floor for arguments. Although such acts might seem trivial, they would erode Washington’s ability to make sure that its policy proposals form the basis of international debate and action.
A global retreat from Washington would quickly begin to have far more palpable effects by taking a toll on the American economy. Countries might choose not to invest in U.S. Treasuries or might buy them only at higher interest rates, imposing higher costs on Washington for servicing the national debt. The United States can sustain the eye-popping profligacy of its national debt only because investors consider the U.S. dollar to be a safe haven. But Trump and his Republican allies in Congress are destroying that hard-earned privilege with tariffs and a budget that will push debt levels to unprecedented heights. (It should have come as no surprise when, in May, Moody’s downgraded the United States’ credit rating.) Over time, the United States might suffer an exodus of investors, who cherish not only the growth they have come to expect from U.S. markets but also the stability, rule of law, and regulatory independence that undergird the American economy. Meanwhile, foreign governments might begin to use subsidies and regulations to create supply chains that avoid American-made components.
If Washington continues to erect significant barriers to foreign goods, its trading partners will seek out other markets, increasing their integration with one another at the expense of American companies. In March, Japan and South Korea, the two Asian U.S. allies most dependent on the United States, held a trade summit with China, after which the three countries jointly announced a plan to pursue a new trilateral free trade agreement and pledged to work together to develop “a predictable trade and investment environment” in the region. Washington needs Tokyo and Seoul on its side to create economies of scale and circumvent Chinese supply chains. Japan and South Korea are the two anchors of Asian economic dynamism; without them, American efforts to marginalize China cannot succeed.
Trump’s disdain for multilateralism is also imperiling the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. For decades, they have helped shape the global economy to Washington’s advantage. But the Trump administration has accused them of “falling short” and has demanded they align their agendas with the president’s, creating concern that Washington might withdraw from them—or starve them, as it has the World Trade Organization.
WATCH YOUR BACK
U.S. national security would also suffer if countries started to decouple from Washington. Consider intelligence sharing, another area in which Washington can expect less cooperation. That practice requires U.S. partners to trust that any information they share with Washington won’t be used to disadvantage them and that the sources and methods for acquiring that intelligence will remain secret. In Trump’s first term, U.S. allies quickly learned that the president was cavalier about classified information. In May 2017, The New York Times reported, Trump casually discussed classified information about a terrorist plot, which Israel had provided to the United States, with Russian officials visiting the White House. The cause for concern has only grown in his second term. In March, a number of Trump’s cabinet officials used Signal, an unclassified commercial mobile app, to share and discuss classified details about an imminent U.S. strike on Houthi militants in Yemen. Such laxity might cause other countries to become more cautious about what they share with Washington, as well as how and when they share it.
Trump’s approach to managing the U.S. military could also contribute to a flight from American leadership. Some of the military’s most highly trained units are now being diverted from high-intensity combat preparations at the army’s National Training Center in order to assist with immigration enforcement at the border with Mexico. In pursuit of such presidential priorities, the country’s armed forces will lose operational proficiency, making them a less valuable partner and a less available one, as well. Allies may choose to avoid acquiring U.S.-made weaponry for fear that Washington or an American company might deny them permission to use it in a crisis—just as Musk denied Ukraine the ability to use his Starlink communications network to carry out an attack on Russian forces in Crimea in 2022. That avoidance, in turn, may pose problems for interoperability. Getting militaries to work intimately together is difficult enough when they’re using compatible equipment; increasing the degree of difficulty will chip away at one of the central advantages Washington and its allies enjoy over potential adversaries.
A banner depicting the Russian pro-war symbol “Z,” Moscow, March 2025Yulia Morozova / Reuters
The U.S. military’s ability to project power across the globe relies on partners and allies. The Pentagon cannot provide a surge of forces to the Middle East without using ports in Belgium and Germany, or dispatch forces across the Pacific (much less sustain combat operations against China) without using bases in Japan and the Philippines. The United States cannot carry out airstrikes on terrorists in Afghanistan without permission to transit Pakistani airspace, and many more American service members would have died in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had the U.S. military not maintained access to its Ramstein Air Base and Landstuhl hospital in Germany. Washington would not be able to carry out war plans with the requisite speed without preferential passage through the Panama and Suez Canals. American military power isn’t autarkic; it’s dependent on others. But growing antipathy to U.S. policies will alienate publics in other countries and make it more difficult for their governments to provide support to American military operations, much less participate in them. Imagine if terrorists carried out a massive attack on the United States and allies didn’t rush to help, as they did after the 9/11 attacks, in part by supporting U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
The United States’ dense web of alliances and partnerships also enables the “extended deterrence” that protects Washington’s friends from their enemies. But Trump has already weakened that pillar of the post–Cold War order. In 2019, for example, after Iranian proxies attacked major oil processing facilities in Saudi Arabia, American allies took note that Trump chose not to retaliate.
The Trump administration seems to believe that if Washington forces its allies to stand on their own, they will make choices that would benefit the United States. That is unlikely to be true. Although most American allies have militaries superior to those of their potential adversaries, they generally lack the confidence to use them. Washington’s European allies could unquestionably defeat the Russian military in a conventional, nonnuclear war. Finland alone could probably defeat Russia in such a fight if backed by security guarantees from at least one of its nuclear-armed allies, France or the United Kingdom.
Trump has hardly been alone in abetting the corrosion of the U.S.-led order.
But U.S. allies in Europe have too little confidence in their own strength. And if the United States walks away from them, they are likely to make compromises with aggressors that would harm their interests and Washington’s, as well. That is what France and Germany did after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, and the Obama administration barely reacted. The European powers pressured Ukraine into accepting the so-called Minsk agreements, which formalized a buffer zone of Russian occupation on Ukrainian territory. But that didn’t stop the fighting: Russia reinforced its positions, violated the accords, and invaded again in 2022.
In the years to come, a Russian encroachment onto the territory of a Baltic member of NATO, coupled with threats to use nuclear weapons if NATO resisted, could fracture the West. The Trump administration might be unwilling to trade New York for Tallinn—and France, Germany, and the United Kingdom might fold, too. A Europe consumed with such insecurity wouldn’t be particularly keen to help Washington deal with Chinese military and commercial aggression or to help constrain the Iranian nuclear program.
Trump routinely calls into question the reliability of U.S. security guarantees by demonstrating his indifference to the security of treaty allies that do not spend what he considers to be the proper amount on defense. And the shameful way that he equates Russia’s aggression against Ukraine with that country’s heroic defense of its sovereignty has eroded the sense of basic American morality—imperfect and inconsistent though it might be—that attracts cooperation from like-minded countries. If U.S. policies are overtly amoral and thus indistinguishable from those of China and Russia, other countries might opt to side with those powers, betting that at least their behavior will be more predictable.
A BAD BET
The Trump administration may be relying on the antipathy that U.S. allies feel toward the ideologies that guide American rivals such as China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. In this view, even if U.S. partners don’t like certain things Washington does, they’re ultimately going to stick with the United States out of a sense of democratic solidarity. But U.S. allies easily overcame whatever ideological objections they may have had and continued trading with Russia after the 2014 invasion of Ukraine, and with China despite its repression of Uyghurs and its crackdown in Hong Kong in recent years. Besides, the Trump administration itself hardly considers ideological differences to be an obstacle to cooperation. A mismatch between American and Russian values has not prevented Trump from taking Moscow’s side in the Ukraine war. Under his administration, Washington won’t be “giving you lectures on how to live or how to govern your own affairs,” Trump assured a gathering of investors and Saudi leaders in May. If Washington doesn’t act as if ideology matters, it shouldn’t expect that others will.
Trump and his team may also believe that the convergence of Chinese, Iranian, North Korean, and Russian power is of such magnitude that European resistance would prove futile without American heft. Better, in this view, to revive the nineteenth-century practice of the great powers dividing up the world. Doing so, however, would concede Europe to Russia and Asia to China, which would constitute a colossal loss. Moreover, there is no reason to assume that such concessions would slake Chinese and Russian ambitions: consider, for example, what Beijing’s massive investments in Latin America and attempts to corrupt the Canadian political system suggest about Chinese intentions.
Another potential explanation for the Trump administration’s approach is that it sees most forms of alliance management as at best a distraction from and generally an impediment to winning the contest with China. Trump administration officials would hate the comparison, but that position is a continuation of the Biden administration’s argument that the most important thing for the United States is to strengthen itself at home: to have the best economy, the most innovative technology, and the strongest military.
According to this logic, winning in those dimensions will draw global support because people like to be on the side of a winner. But that won’t be the case if others don’t have access to the American market or if they consider American technology dangerous to them or believe the U.S. military offers them no genuine protection. The United States should, of course, strengthen itself. But when it does so without benefiting others, they will try to shield themselves and limit their exposure to American power.
And if Trump is truly aiming to make the country stronger abroad by making it stronger at home, he is doing so in a curious way. The administration’s ill-conceived tariffs are increasing market volatility and making business planning practically impossible. Republican legislation advocated by Trump is likely to explode the deficit and increase inflation. The association of U.S. technology titans with the administration’s assault on government agencies and the rule of law is damaging their brands and imperiling their market values and adoption rates. And according to the defense analyst Todd Harrison, the budget proposal Trump has championed would result in a $31.5 billion reduction in defense spending in 2026 compared with what the Biden administration had projected for that year, which was itself inadequate to the security challenges the country faces. This is an agenda for weakness, not strength.
NEITHER FEARED NOR LOVED
Trump and his team are destroying everything that makes the United States an attractive partner because they fail to imagine just how bad an order antagonistic to American interests would be. The United States’ indispensability was not inevitable. In the post–Cold War world, the country became indispensable by taking responsibility for the security and prosperity of countries that agreed to play by rules that Washington established and enforced. If the United States itself abandons those rules and the system they created, it will become wholly expendable.
The self-destruction of American power in the Trump years is likely to puzzle future historians. During the post–Cold War era, the United States achieved unprecedented dominance, and maintaining it was relatively easy and inexpensive. All of Trump’s predecessors in that period made errors, some of which significantly reduced U.S. influence, aided the country’s adversaries, and limited Washington’s ability to induce cooperation or compliance on the part of other countries. But none of those predecessors intended such outcomes. Trump, on the other hand, wants a world in which the United States, although still rich and powerful, no longer actively shapes the global order to its advantage. He would prefer to lead a country that is feared rather than loved. But his approach is unlikely to foster either emotion. If it stays on the path Trump has started down, the United States risks becoming too brutal to love but too irrelevant to fear.
In the years to come, the alliances it took decades to foster will begin to wither, and U.S. rivals will waste no time in leaping to exploit the resulting vacuum. Some of Washington’s partners may wait for a while, hoping that their American friends will come to their senses and try to reestablish something akin to the traditional U.S. leadership role. But there is no going all the way back; their faith and trust have been irreparably damaged. And they won’t wait long, even for an American return to form that would amount to less than a full restoration. Soon, they will move on—and so will the rest of the world.
