The Geopolitical Consequences of President Trump
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President Donald Trump’s tweets have absorbed the attention of all. But lurking beneath the garish aggression of his statements and the outrage of the American and European pundits lies a deeper reality. What if he and his followers in the US government are actually serious about taking over Venezuela, Greenland, Panama and Canada; waging a trade war not just with China but with our European allies and North American neighbours; and coddling Putin’s Russia? What sort of consequences should one expect?
A little more than a hundred years ago, John Maynard Keynes assessed the Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) and warned Europe and wider world that the punitive Peace of Versailles had lit a bomb fuse that would explode over the decades ahead in resentment and unsustainable economic distortions. It is time to treat the geopolitical consequences of President Trump’s grand strategy with equal seriousness.
In Trump’s world, soldiers who risk and lose their lives in battle for their country are “losers.” Countries can be invaded for their oil or minerals or canal, in violation of the most basic of international laws against aggression. If Ukraine wants our military aid, it must pay (with rare earth minerals). Trump has threatened that Greenland will be taken “one way or another.” Gaza can be ethnically cleansed of the Gazans and turned into a lucrative Mediterranean beach resort. Smaller countries should defer to larger. Taking the risk of fighting for self-determination and independence is incomprehensible. Everything is transactional, as in a real estate transaction.
With the release of the National Security Strategy (November, 2025), we have a much clearer conception of what the Trump bureaucracy thinks a Trump Doctrine should be. There are parts of the doctrine that will meet with wide approval in the United States and agreement among many allies. Among them: the US and the allies need to reindustrialise and curb globalisation, protect innovative technologies, diversify essential sources of vital raw materials and encourage re-armament against the threats posed by Chinese power.
But the radical elements in the doctrine are what stand out. It walks away from a post WWII commitment – born in the ashes of war in Europe and the Far East – to international security, the international rule of law and a respect for human rights. The Strategy announces that the “affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests” (p.1). As if reading from Putin’s great power playbook, it urges that all accept one reality: “the outsize influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations is a timeless truth of international relations” (p.10).
The document, however, is curiously silent on the military threats posed by Russia. There is nothing about Russian aggression or about how to secure the self determination of Ukraine or bolster European defences. The Strategy’s most radical departures are with the Americas and Europe. The “take-over” of Venezuela and seizure of President Maduro affirms this. In the Americas, the US will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine (with a freshly branded “Trump Corollary”). It will restore American preeminence, deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to base forces or control the purchase of strategic assets. The Trump Corollary for the Americas resembles nothing as much as it does Putin’s doctrine for Eastern Europe. Both aim at an imperial hegemony that restores authority by excluding other powers (rolling back NATO, for Putin; China for Trump) enforcing military vulnerability (on Ukraine, for Putin; on Venezuela, Colombia and Mexico, for Trump) and restricting economic integration with Western Europe or the wider world.
But the single most radical departure is the treatment of the US’s Western European allies. Once the heart of US engagement with the democratic world, now they need to be made “great again” in the way in which Trump is Making America Great Again (MAGA) by suppressing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in favour of white populist nationalism.
The Strategy warns of international migration producing, over the next decades, a “majority non-European” Europe that will be (somehow) ethnically incompatible with a MAGA America. Trump seeks a return to a Europe of 1949, NATO’s founding year, when Europe indeed was much more homogeneous. It was white, Christian, “free” of many of Europe’s historic minorities (thanks to Hitler’s genocides). Trump’s bureaucrats reject foreign intrusion in the domestic affairs of Middle Eastern autocracies, but they propose “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” (emphasis supplied, p.27).
The incoherence of the Strategy stands out and requires another label. This transnational, cross border, subversion targeted against the EU and the elected democracies of core allies has little to do with the state-to-state realism of the balance of power among sovereign states. Another label for this Strategy is neo-fascism.
Neo-fascism hearkens back to the 1920s and the emergence of revolutionary, right wing fascism under Mussolini in Italy. This was not the racial genocide launched by Hiter’s Nazis when they came to power in 1933. But it was a radically interventionist trans-border, imperialistic and anti-democratic. And the US is not a fascist state; it retains its democratic institutions. But the tropes and ambitions of Mussolini resonate among the Trumpists.
Mussolini sought a revived Roman empire over the Mediterranean, an empire that would vindicate the spiritual elan of a revived Roman state under its new Roman emperor, Mussolini himself. Allied with fascists movements in France and the Nazi followers of Adolf Hitler, Mussolini sought a fascist Europe whose conquests in North Africa and intervention in Spain to prop up Franco would prop up fascism in Italy and overturn the League of Nations with its European international liberal order of the 1920s and 1930s dominated by France and Britain.
What sort of world does this National Strategy produce in Europe today? It unravels the most successful alliance in history, NATO. NATO was a realistic reaction to the perceived (but exaggerated) threat posed to Western Europe by the advance of the Soviet Union into Eastern Europe. It did not collapse when the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact did. It persisted, indeed looking for new peacekeeping missions in the Balkans. The famous Article 5 commitment to come to the assistance of an attacked state was invoked just once, to defend the US following the terrorist attack of 9/11.
If NATO becomes purely transactional as Trump proposes, Article 5 becomes a fiction. If Article 5 does not protect Denmark from Trump’s extortion for Greenland, what does it mean? If Article 5 permits the US to “cultivate resistance” within European democracies, how does it protect them? If the US will not assist in providing security for what is left of Ukraine, will the rest of Eastern Europe be next in Putin’s campaign to restore the Russian empire? Europeans will likely replace NATO solidarity with a similarly material scramble for security and profit. If the US is not an ally, and is indeed a threat, they must ask what does China have to offer?
Trump’s “beautiful” tariffs also provoke division. The immediate problem is that the newly taxed nations will tax the Americans back. Like the “beggar thy neighbour” competitive depreciations of currencies and the Smoot Hawley (1930) and other tariffs of the 1930s, these tariffs will drive up everyone’s prices of goods and inputs. Relatively more will be produced at home. But over all less will be produced and consumed and at higher costs.
These are but a few of the international consequences of Trump’s National Strategy. Democrats and liberals everywhere need better answers to all the legitimate problems the Trumpians have raised. They should build their answers on the basic principles and well-established institutional legacy of NATO, cooperation with the EU, and a commitment to the sovereignty of weaker states (such as Ukraine), negotiated solutions to trade, and multilateral cooperation in the pursuit of a more humane and resilient international order.
Trump is trashing them all in the name of a dog-eat-dog return to a 1930’s style, “beggar thy neighbour” economic policy married to a world subservient to a far-right MAGA vision. It destroyed international order then, and it is making America and the world worse now.
Disclaimer: Views expressed are of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Statecraft Institute.