Donroe in Action

The superlative military action to capture and arrest Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro has unleashed an avalanche of punditry about the end of the rules-based world order created by the United States and the victorious  allies at the end of the Second World War. That rules-based world order had delivered many decades of relative peace and prosperity but was showing its age as we entered the twenty-first century.

At the end of the Second World War the United States dominated the world militarily and economically. Many nations would have used that dominance to rule the world, to create a new American Empire that would have put the Roman Empire to shame. But that’s not what America did. The first order of business was to rebuild a devastated Europe and to protect those vulnerable countries from the encroachment of the Soviet empire. The Marshall Plan helped to rebuild Europe and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) protected those countries from the Red Army.

In anticipation of final victory, the United States and its allies created the United Nations and a slew of other multilateral institutions (including the Bretton Woods institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank) to preserve peace and help create prosperity for all nations. The debilitated European powers could no longer maintain their colonial empires so many of the former colonies became independent during this period. These poor and generally undeveloped countries also needed the support of the post-war multilateral institutions. These multilateral organizations, supported by the United States, created the rules-based world order that replaced the multipolar order of the great powers that had led to two world wars.

The Cold War between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and the countries behind the Iron Curtain (you really couldn’t call them allies) led to a stalemate between the great powers but did allow numerous conflicts in the developing world as the US and the USSR struggled for influence with the newly independent developing countries. Those countries had ideological, religious, and cultural differences from the Western rules-based order that remained even as the countries prospered from that order. As those developing countries prospered they moved from being merely recipients of the foreign aid and development assistance of the West to participants in the Western multilateral institutions and competitors in international trade. The multilateral institutions assumed all the participating nations shared (or would grow to share) the Western values on which the multilateral institutions were created and were intended to operate. But this naivete blinded them to the fact that many of these countries did not share in our Western values and had no intention of following them. As a result those multilateral institutions have now been captured by forces not in line with Western values distorting their missions and working against the very values on which they are based.

In his first term, President Trump made it clear that he was no fan of multilateral institutions. He rejected participating in the Trans-Pacific Partnership and only reluctantly renewed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as the USMCA (the US, Mexico, Canada Agreement). He also withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement in 2017 and, after the Biden Administration rejoined, withdrew again on the first day of his second term.

Donald Trump views the world very differently than previous US administrations and maintains his animus against multilateral institutions. He recently announced that the US is withdrawing from participation in 66 multilateral organizations many of which were UN institutions. The recently announced National Security Strategy (NSS 2025) makes it clear that the US is reverting to a foreign policy based on great power spheres of influence backed by mercantilist economic policies. The military action to capture and arrest Venezuelan president Maduro along with his insistence on acquiring Greenland are consistent with this new policy. As Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said in a CNN interview, “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” In a recent New York Times interview, President Trump was asked if there was anything that could stop him. “My own morality, my own mind,” he said. “That's the only thing that can stop international law. And that's very good. I don't need international law.”

Alexander Stubb, the President of Finland, wrote in an  article in Foreign Affairs Magazine that our old rules-based world order was founded on what he calls “values-based idealism.” This idealism was based on the belief that, once other countries experienced the benefits of this rules-based system, they would adopt those Western values. This did not work out as planned and Mr. Stubb now proposes that we shift the basis of our system from idealism to realism, but it would be a “values-based realism.” The realism espoused by Stephen Miller and expressed by President Trump in his speeches, is realism devoid of Western values.

The world of the great powers’ spheres of influence and their mercantilist economic policies is not a great place for small countries like Finland. Mr. Stubb recommends reforming multilateral institutions to rebalance the global shifts in power since the end of the Second World War, giving greater weight to non-Western countries and dividing the world into the global West, the global East and the global South. But this proposal does not account for the differing values of the countries within these blocs which will play havoc with the multilateral institutions. As Scott Page wrote in his book, The Difference, a diversity of opinions can be a good thing, but without shared goals the result will be chaos. Plus you have an additional problem of countries with different values within the blocs such as democratic Japan and Korea within the East bloc with Russia and China.

As I proposed in my book, In Defence of Principle, the West needs to create multilateral institutions that serve us best and reflect our Western values. We already have some institutions that reflect these values. NATO is a good example. We would set high standards for membership. Democracy would, of course, be a requirement but there could be other standards as well. Financial support of the institution would also be required – no free riders. Countries that did not meet the standards could participate as non-voting associates or as applicants. Foreign trade outside the bloc would be subject to tariffs and certain strategic supply lines would be off-limits. Global institutions, such as the United Nations, could remain for communications and discussion of global issues but any actions or recommendations would not be binding on members of the Western Alliance.

President Trump would probably hate this idea. He views global relations as a zero sum game. The Western bloc would view relations among bloc members as a win-win situation. Trade among members would be subject to zero or very low tariffs and friendshoring would be encouraged. But some tough love would also be required to make sure that trading partners don’t use non-tariff barriers or other mechanisms to trade unfairly with other members.

A Western Alliance so formulated would be economically successful, probably much more so than that of countries outside the bloc. It would also be militarily strong without sacrificing huge portions of GDP to defense. And, united through a core of shared values, the bloc would be culturally cohesive while allowing variation of cultures among members. Such an alliance would be immensely stronger and more prosperous than any single great power attempting to dominate countries within its sphere of influence. This was one of the reasons the multipolar world of great powers and their mercantilist economic systems were abandoned. The other reason was the propensity of great powers to go to war with other powers to gain advantage over them because ,as Mr. Miller stated, in such a world only strength, force and power mattered.

Such an alliance will not be possible while Donald Trump is president of the United States. But it is unknown if his successor or successors will be so dominant at home and abroad. Our adversaries would prefer the continuance of the great power spheres of influence, which they believe works in their favor. But the friends and allies that lived within the American-led rules-based world order would greatly prefer a values-based order over great power domination, even if it was a more limited but sustainable values-based realism instead of wider but unsustainable values-based idealism. I also believe that most of the American people would prefer such a values-based order over MAGA based authoritarianism or leftist socialist authoritarianism. We just have to figure how to get there.