There is little doubt that U.S. President Donald Trump is willing to upend traditional American foreign policy. But how much will it eventually destabilize the international system? In less than two months in office, Trump has fractured the United States’ relationship with Europe, called into question Washington’s commitment to NATO, blamed Ukraine for Russia’s aggression, frozen military aid to Kyiv, withdrawn from key United Nations institutions, initiated a global tariff war, interrupted the global delivery of American aid and humanitarian assistance, and signaled that the United States could break the central tenet of the postwar global order—the prohibition against territorial expansion at the expense of other sovereign entities—by threatening to take control of Canada, Panama, Greenland, and Gaza.
As the world’s preeminent economic, military, and technological power, the United States certainly has the option of pursuing its interests at the expense of weaker powers or other actors that are dependent on its security guarantees and market access. It can also decide to revisit its relationship with other major powers if doing so better serves its national security interest, even if the byproduct of these choices is the breakdown of customary diplomatic norms and much greater entropy in the international system.
But the question remains: To what end? If the United States turns away from its two traditional sources of power—its stewardship of a postwar international system and its role as the leader and protector of the world’s most economically advanced democracies—what new strengths will compensate for the diminished role and influence these policies will inflict? How can the White House’s strategic retreat justify the openings it creates for geopolitical rivals such as Russia and China to expand their global influence?
The puzzling nature of Trump’s policies may seem inexplicable through the lens of geopolitical analysis and competition over the world order. This is because both traditional geopolitics and the realist school of international relations overlook a crucial dimension of state behavior in the international system: regime competition. While realism focuses primarily on power balances, territorial interests, and security concerns, it often neglects how the ideological nature of regimes—whether democratic or autocratic—profoundly shapes their strategic choices and interactions. It is within the framework of regime competition that Trump’s seemingly self-defeating policies can be understood as part of a deeper struggle between competing political systems. As Trump autocratizes elements of the American political system, his foreign policy increasingly espouses the characteristics of autocratic regimes. Whether deliberately or unwittingly, Trump’s policies so far are mostly in service of countering democratic restraints at home and abroad, reflecting his self-avowed preference for strongman rule over democratic oversight.
A soldier talks on a phone in front of a mural depicting the face of the Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin against a blue sky.
A Russian soldier speaks on his phone next to a wall bearing an image of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin at a polling station during local elections organized by the Russian-installed authorities in Donetsk, Ukraine, on Sept. 8, 2023. AFP via Getty Images
We intuitively understand regime competition at the level of individual states. The primary threat to the survival of autocratic regimes is democratization. They guard against it by systematically restricting political freedoms, keeping the judiciary subservient, curtailing media freedom, restricting civil society, and suppressing social demands for democratization. Similarly, democratic decline is essentially a process of autocratization. The erosion of institutional checks and balances, the politicization of the judiciary, the decline of media freedom, and the capture of public institutions by special interests are all challenges that democracies must meet on an ongoing basis if they are to endure. It follows that a key feature of regime competition between democracy and autocracy is its zero-sum nature: Any democratic gain comes at the expense of an autocratic regime and vice versa.
This logic also plays out on the international stage. Autocratic countries have good reason to see liberal democracies as an ever-present threat to their survival, even when they are nominally allied. This is because democracies have an inherent organizational advantage in that they tend to coalesce naturally into a broadly unified democratic camp and tend to seize opportunities to support democratization when autocratic regimes fail. The Tiananmen protests of 1989, the color revolutions of the 1990s, and the Arab Spring of the early 2010s may not have been the handiwork of Western governments but once set in motion received considerable support from the West as a whole.
When a country turns into a democracy, it is accepted almost mechanically by a fairly homogeneous community of democratic states. This stems from the highly specific values that democratic regimes have in common, such as periodically elected governments, respect for the rule of law, the open character of their societies, and their proven tendency not to go to war with each other—a phenomenon known in political science as democratic peace theory. This cohesion is a distinct advantage in a competitive international system as well as a permanent pull for domestic political opposition in autocracies.
Autocracies, on the other hand, tend to be highly particularistic, each built on a fixed power structure that is highly contingent on historical, ethnic, social, or religious factors. Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Eritrea have almost nothing in common. Knowledge of China’s political system provides almost no insight into the functioning of the Russian state. Autocracies have fewer shared characteristics than democracies, face higher transaction costs in dealing with one another due to the closed nature of their societies, and, since “autocratic peace theory” has yet to be discovered, can never fully trust the others’ intentions. As a result, the coherence of the autocratic camp is always more tenuous than the more natural grouping of liberal democracies.
A protester is seen with their hands up in a reflection on a mirrored shield held by police officers wearing combat gear.
A protester is reflected in the shield of a police officer during a crackdown on a demonstration near the White House in Washington, D.C., on June 1, 2020. Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images
A protester kneels as they are brought down by police officers in uniform on a city street.
Police officers arrest activists during a protest in New York City on March 11. Protesters demanded the release of Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate, after his detention by the Department of Homeland Security. Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
Authoritarian countries have developed a large repertoire of offensive countermeasures to guard themselves from what they correctly see as the corrosive effect that regime competition has on them. At home, they treat political dissent as national security threats. Abroad, they use the openness of democratic regimes to undermine them from the inside, engineering disinformation campaigns, mounting influence operations, recruiting lobbyists, vying to organize respectability-conferring international events, and often resorting to extralegal means to silence their critics abroad. Autocracies also learn from each other and often mutually shield one another in international fora. Long overlooked by democracies emboldened by the collapse of the socialist bloc at the end of the Cold War, these destabilizing tactics have recently regained prominence in the strategic considerations of democracies worldwide. Yet they are often seen as the actions of specific actors rather than an inescapable feature of the competition between autocracies and democracies.
Democracies are no strangers to trying to undermine autocracies, either, although security and economic considerations tend to dominate. The fact that democracies operate within the logic of regime competition does not necessarily mean that their foreign policies are more principled—or even more respectful of democratic norms—than those of autocracies. In fact, the pressures of competition may drive democracies to adopt policies that consolidate power, regardless of their alignment with democratic values.
However, democracy-promotion programs, support for human rights, the imposition of politically motivated sanctions, the protection of dissidents, and even the reporting of independent international media and international nongovernmental organizations are perceived by authoritarian regimes as threats that must be countered, lest they contribute to the erosion of the regimes’ legitimacy. Western democracies may be supporters of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or Thailand, but each of these countries faces its own domestic pressures in favor of democratization, which often take advantage of this foreign pro-democracy support.
Russia and China are prime examples of how the deep logic of regime competition is shaping their behavior and how the international order is currently evolving. The paramount factor in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to seize Crimea, invade Ukraine, prop up the autocratic regime in Belarus, and now attempt to derail European aspirations in Moldova and Georgia is the fear that what he perceives as democratic contagion in neighboring countries would threaten the survival of his highly autocratic and personalist regime. It would be inaccurate to suggest that traditional strategic considerations had no role whatsoever, but in the absence of a plausible scenario involving Western military aggression against Russia at the time, regime competition is a far more compelling explanation.
Similarly, the fundamental motives for China’s increasingly adversarial relationship with the United States and the West over the past quarter-century—despite having achieved its great-power status largely thanks to Pax Americana, Western-led international institutions, U.S.-backed economic globalization, and Western investment and technology—are to be found in the imperatives of regime competition rather than in pure geopolitical calculations.
As an autocracy, China faces insurmountable obstacles to exercising international influence commensurate with its economic and military power. This is due to the liberal encoding of postwar international institutions, which gives greater legitimacy to democratic states than to autocratic ones, and to the disadvantage that China as an autocracy faces in forging alliances as deep as those enjoyed by democracies. Beijing’s alignment with Moscow—which predates the invasion of Ukraine but has now become indispensable to Russia’s war effort—also responds to the logic of regime competition: to prevent a shift in the balance of power between autocracies and democracies should Russia be defeated. Beijing’s opposition to democracy is also dictated by the need to permanently fend off any democratic challenge to the Chinese Communist Party’s monopoly on power.
Viktor Orban in a suit and tie speaks behind a lectern in front of a CPAC backdrop that says "Awake, not woke"
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, Texas, on Aug. 4, 2022.Brandon Bell/Getty Images
The logic of regime competition offers a potential explanation for why Trump is willing to impose enormous costs on long-standing U.S. geopolitical interests through unprecedented foreign and domestic initiatives. He is following the very strategy expected of an autocratic state by prioritizing the imperative to counter democratic forces both at home and abroad. It is autocratic regime consolidation—not the pursuit of national interest—that drives the U.S. administration’s seemingly chaotic and contradictory policies. Trump’s ambition to emulate strongman rule—evident in his frequent admiration for authoritarian leaders—puts him at odds with democratically elected leaders while earning him, at least rhetorically, the support of autocratic regimes. This backing, in turn, can be leveraged to further weaken democratic checks and balances at home.
The most consequential move of the new administration has been its decision to abandon the role of security guarantor for European democracies, destabilizing the continent’s balance of power and potentially rewarding Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. In line with the behavior expected of an autocratic power, the Trump administration has also backed illiberal forces working to undermine European democracy. This includes Vice President J.D. Vance’s recent speech at the Munich Security Conference denouncing democratic safeguards against disinformation and hate speech; his high-profile meeting immediately afterward with the leader of Germany’s far-right AfD party; Trump’s open support for illiberal European leaders like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán; and his claim that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was a “dictator” lacking both democratic legitimacy and public support.
At home, Trump and his administration are leading an unprecedented assault on the democratic institutions of the United States, with the stated intention of concentrating power in the hands of the president. A key feature of autocratic regimes is the politicization of the judiciary and the substitution of regime security for national security as the primary mission of intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Trump’s appointment of grossly underqualified but politically loyal personnel to key security positions must be seen in this light. So must the startling fact that senior U.S. officials as well as Trump himself are now voicing arguments directly drawn from the political propaganda of U.S. adversaries: autocratic solidarity trumps national security.
To be sure, the United States is not yet fully autocratic. It is even possible that many of its policies will be blocked or reversed, including through the electoral process. Nevertheless, far from being purely chaotic, irrational, or misguided, as they are often described, Trump’s domestic and foreign policies are in fact fully consistent with the logic of regime competition and providing a boost to the global forces of autocracy. For Trump, the less power democracies wield in the international order, the easier it will be to dismantle institutional safeguards at home.
What are the broader implications of this phenomenon for the international system at large? A major driver behind the rise in global conflicts and tensions in recent years lies in the growing discrepancy between postwar international institutions—designed to reflect the mid-20th-century distribution of power—and today’s geopolitical realities. Not only are China, along with India, Brazil, Turkey, the Gulf monarchies, and other regional powers, underrepresented in global governance institutions, but efforts to reform these structures to reflect the current balance of power remain effectively stillborn.
Whether intended or not, Trump’s decision to break with the camp of liberal Western democracies may bring about the sudden acceleration of a long-overdue process of readjusting the international order to reflect the real distribution of power in today’s world. Democracies such as those in Europe—whose economic weight has significantly declined relative to other powers and which remain unable to guarantee their own security—have long been shielded from these vulnerabilities by the United States’ commitment to democratic solidarity. Now, they risk slipping further down the global hierarchy and may be forced to accommodate the demands of more powerful actors.
Non-democratic countries whose influence has been artificially constrained by a rules-based order that inherently favored Western liberal democracies stand to gain much greater power in both regional and global affairs. Paradoxically, this shift could reduce current tensions and conflicts made intractable by the outdated nature of the postwar system. It would be illusory, however, to expect autocracies to be content with this more favorable balance of power. Democratic and autocratic regimes are not just distinct ideologies or political orders—they are rival systems locked in a contest where one’s gain is the other’s loss. The most consequential factor for the future of the international order may be determined by where the United States ultimately ends across this divide.