The Return of Realpolitik
Some leaders in Europe may resist a new alliance with Trump’s America, but in a world dominated by bullies, sharp elbows and unpredictability may be what the times demand.
If the election of Donald Trump means anything, it marks the end of the liberal world order and its replacement by grim realpolitik, described by one MIT analyst as “the pursuit of vital state interests in a dangerous world that constrains state behavior.” Realpolitik may be ugly but it’s back. It is already being ruthlessly practised by China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, but it has also been central to the Trumpian worldview since his first term. Whereas his predecessors sought engagement with other countries, Trump’s style will be to cut deals narrowly perceived as beneficial to the United States.
Trump will be less like Roosevelt or Reagan, who led crusades against authoritarianism, and more like Lord Palmerston, who famously remarked that his country had “no permanent allies, only permanent interests.” Other icons of realpolitik include Austria’s 19th-century minister of foreign affairs Klemens von Metternich, Wilhelmine Germany’s Otto von Bismarck, or the US’s Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who ditched morality in pursuit of “an equilibrium of forces.”
How the Liberal World Order Failed
The new realpolitik marks the end of an era in which politics was defined largely by ideology and religion. As in the 19th century, world events now revolve around control of markets, resources, technology, and military aptitude. In this new paradigm, institutions like the United Nations and the International Court of Justice are largely irrelevant, as are climate confabs and the high-minded pronunciamentos of the World Economic Forum.
Joe Biden’s foreign policy was informed by Wilsonian notions of global liberalism, an ideology that also permeated US policy during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Although these administrations approached foreign relations very differently, they both embraced the allegedly democratising influence of free trade and the need to protect the “rules-based” postwar order. Yet the legacy of this approach has been involvement in open-ended wars that often resulted in strategic defeats.
The shift to Trumpism is unsurprisingly causing panic among the US’s old allies, particularly France and Britain. Le Monde, a publication not known for its pro-American sympathies, calls Trump’s election a “nail in the coffin” of America’s “democratic model.” Much of the US policy establishment is similarly horrified by the prospect of an administration that promises to prioritise American interests with a doggedness, and even glee, rarely seen since the early republic.
If a European bureaucracy faced with increasingly right-leaning populations and its American allies want to know what has precipitated this change, they ought to look in a mirror. Biden’s early proclamations that “America is back” seem, in retrospect, close to delusional. Rather than firming up the West, Biden’s secretary of state Anthony Blinken—whom Tablet acidly described as “Neville Chamberlain with an iPad”—has been a fevered fireman unable to put out fires.
Blinken’s foreign-policy script has failed to arrest China’s rise, prevent or repel Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, and has seen an equally awful conflict erupt across the Middle East. America may still be a world-leading military and economic power, but it has been unable to cope with assaults on its economy, its communications, and even its elections by Russia, China, and Iran. Trump can claim, with some justification, that he left the White House in an era of relative peace and has returned to a chaotic world in which the West is in retreat.
The Economics of Trumpism
The reasons for the US return to realpolitik lie in the limits of American dominance, and in free trade’s harsh consequences for America’s middle and working classes. The policies of Bush, Obama, and Biden assumed that the US was rich and powerful enough to broker the world order without worrying too much about blowback at home. This assumption reflected the class bias of the educated elites, particularly on Wall Street, who have done very well under the liberal order.
Trump’s re-election was delivered by those who have felt the lash of free trade, notably from China. The left-wing think-tank EPI reports that China’s huge trade surplus destroyed over 3.7 million jobs between 2001 and 2018, and living standards across the de-industrialising West have worsened, particularly for the middle class. Europe has endured a decade of stagnation, while Americans’ life expectancy has fallen for the first time in peace time.
The left-leaning American Prospect notes that, even before Trump’s re-election, economic nationalism had gone “mainstream.” Even Democrats have started to pursue many of Trump’s MAGA themes, proposing legislation aimed at boosting US industrial production and emphasising “buy American” government procurement programs. There is growing support in both parties for something like industrial policy, as shown by the US Innovation and Competitiveness Act. The expansion of “economic statecraft” aimed at China is likely to be central to Trump’s foreign policy.
How to Play with Bad People
In the current global environment, Donald Trump’s erratic and aggressive persona may be more effective than piously trying to shore up the liberal order. The world today increasingly resembles the prevailing situation before the First World War, when the major imperial powers—Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Japan—all sought to wrest control of crucial resources from weaker countries in Africa, China, South Asia, and Latin America. In his 2021 book Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931–1945, British historian Richard Overy argues that the Second World War was essentially an imperial conflict in which countries like Japan, Italy, and Germany sought to secure the resources and markets necessary for their ascendence.
The US harboured its own imperial ambitions, of course, but these were mostly confined to the Americas. Unlike Germany, Japan, Britain, or France, however, America enjoys an enormous resource base and a huge market, making it unnecessary to conquer vast territories to support its economy. The US remains both the world’s largest food exporter and energy producer. In the world of realpolitik, this gives it leverage against its chief adversary, China, the world’s largest agricultural importer and fossil-fuel market.
By necessity, China acts like an imperial power despite its “anti-imperialist” rhetoric. It does so to obtain food, oil, gas, and the raw materials it needs to keep its economy growing. Much of Chinese debate about the future follows “a Darwinian principle of only the strongest survive.” This drives China’s expansion into southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America, particularly Brazil and Mexico. As was the case in 19th-century Europe, China’s goal is to harvest resources like copper, soybeans, and fish, while providing markets for Chinese exporters and builders of major infrastructure like the ports, roads, trains, and airports.
In line with Chinese tradition, there’s no attempt to create “colonies.” Instead, China wants to recreate a tributary network of docile vassal states ruled by dutiful, well-funded satraps who serve its interests. Beijing will never be London filled with former colonial subjects. That would require a degree of tolerance for differing views and races sadly out of fashion under the CCP’s increasingly repressive and nationalistic regime. Nationalism is the prime motivator today, not Marxist class struggle. In 2018, ministry official Zhao Lijian called efforts to slow China’s dominion “as stupid as Don Quixote versus the windmills.” China’s victory, he tweeted, “is unstoppable.”
John Lloyd
Is This the Time for American-Led Realpolitik?
Since his first campaign in 2016, Trump has described America as “weak” in the competition with other powers, especially China. Nevertheless, he has inherited an economy that, notwithstanding its growing inequality, is much stronger than that of its European allies or that of slowly depopulating Japan. The US has leapt ahead on account of its preeminence in both energy and technology.
According to International Monetary Fund data, over the past fifteen years, the eurozone economy grew by about six percent (measured in dollars) while the US economy grew by 82 percent. The biggest gap is in tech: the top fifty tech firms are dominated by the United States and China—only four are located on the European continent. The most powerful economy in Europe is barely the size of California’s.
Most critical has been the decline of Germany, Europe’s last serious economic player. Burdened by high energy prices, the country has been losing much of its industrial base, notably in chemicals and auto manufacturing, including its vaunted Mittelstand, in large part due to a diminishing workforce. Deloitte reports that two-thirds of Germany’s industrial companies have moved some or all of their operations abroad.
Declining manufacturing remains a major challenge for the US as well. China already enjoys a market share in manufactured exports roughly equal to that of the US, Germany, and Japan combined. American dependence on foreign manufacturers was starkly exposed during the pandemic, when the US could not even provide enough masks for its people and lacked key chemicals for drugs. The American military has even been forced to source military components from China, the same country that is determined to topple the US from its position of global leadership.
The West’s drive for renewable energy and net zero plays into China’s strategic focus on dominating what the New Yorker calls “climate leadership.” China continues to spew more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere than all developed countries combined, but it uses efficient and cheap fossil fuels to boost its solar-panel industry, building its battery capacity to roughly four times that of the US while exercising effective control of rare-earth minerals and technology, much of which is sourced from aligned developing countries.
Trump’s controversial tariff policy is designed to force US production to return home and away from China. Widely thought to be ill-conceived by economists on the Right and the Left, this approach is intended to hit China where it hurts, as companies return on-shore or find new places to manufacture imports. This is particularly critical at a time when China has returned to seeing manufacturing as its saviour as it confronts an enormous property bubble and a looming demographic decline. By 2050, China is expected to have sixty million fewer people under the age of fifteen, a loss approximately the size of Italy’s total population. It is also suffering from rising unemployment and emigration by its young and educated citizens.
China hopes to overcome its current crises by investing in technology. As even China booster Martin Jacques admits, the problem is that, until now, China has largely relied on borrowed (or stolen) technology to boost its economy. But China’s authoritarian structures are likely to stunt the growth of new technology firms. The Communist Party’s assault on property rights and the rule of law is also driving foreign companies to reconsider their tech investments. Once-common projections that China would surpass the US in aggregate economic output as soon as 2028 are being readjusted to 2036 and may never occur at all.
How Should Our Allies Respond?
Europe’s liberal establishment is unlikely to greet the return of Trump with enthusiasm, unlike in Israel, eastern Europe, Argentina, and India. European leaders have grown comfortable within a multilateral system that allowed them to hide behind American skirts while pursuing their own economic, environmental, and social-engineering goals. The US spends roughly 3.5 percent of GDP on defence and has a military budget roughly six times the size of the combined militaries of the UK, France, and Germany.
That approach is finished. Despite some recent improvements, most European governments fail to spend even two percent of GDP on defence and have, until now, depended largely on the US to keep the Ukrainian cause alive. Once again, they are asking the US to protect their critical shipping lanes in the Red Sea, and they seem powerless to stop their own internet cables from being cut. It is likely that Trump will tell them that, if they don’t step up, they will be left on their own.
To the dismay of US hawks but to the relief of some European allies, Trump has pledged to end the Ukrainian war, most likely by forcing Ukraine into submission. He is also likely to be more supportive of Israel, which will no doubt upset the increasingly anti-Zionist, and even antisemitic, upsurge in Europe. Yet under the current circumstances, European leaders, as well as the Japanese and South Koreans, really have little choice but to try to realign with Trump’s America. The American empire may be creaking, and Trump may be extraordinarily unattractive, but an alliance with his new administration is still surely preferable to being dependent on Russian energy, Middle East oil producers, or the cadres in China.
Of course, some progressives like the idea of leaders like Britain’s Keir Starmer cozying up to China as a long-term strategy. They talk about trying to “Trump proof” their countries, as if enlisting as Beijing’s vassals offers a brighter future. European leaders also seem to have missed that many of their own citizens—in the Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, France, and Germany—were getting Trumpy even before the 2024 US election, voting for anti-migrant, nationalist, and culturally conservative candidates like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, who already have good ties to Trump.
At least one UK politician, the short-lived prime minister Liz Truss, sees the new US president as stirring Europeans to ditch their current climate and regulatory regimes and force the beleaguered continent to reform itself. This requires a common strategy, an alliance based on self-interest, to push back against the leading authoritarian powers. Even under Trump, America needs allies and trading partners.
Some leaders in Europe may resist a new alliance with Trump’s America, but in a world dominated by bullies, sharp elbows and unpredictability may be what the times demand. The US remains the West’s only superpower, and only a strong America can prevent the collapse of liberal capitalism. This is true even if salvation comes from embracing enlightened “values” in the exercise of the brute politics of wealth and power that has shaped the world for almost all of human history.
