Trump Can’t Bully the Entire World

Loudly making threats doesn’t amount to a foreign policy.

By Stephen M. Walt, a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.

December 30, 2024

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/12/30/trump-bully-world-america-foreign-policy/

In books and movies, it’s easy to predict what will happen to a bully. They will torment the hero for a while, but eventually someone will stand up to them, expose their weaknesses, and deliver their comeuppance. You’ve seen it repeatedly: Harry Potter humiliates Draco Malfoy and defeats Voldemort; Marty McFly bests Biff not once but thrice; Cinderella gets the handsome Prince Charming and her mean stepsisters get nothing; Tom Brown triumphs over Flashman, Elizabeth Bennet defies Lady Catherine de Bourgh and wins Mr. Darcy’s love. This familiar plotline is a comforting reminder that good eventually triumphs over evil.

The problem is, alas, that real life isn’t a book or a Hollywood movie. Indeed, 2024 has been a damn good year for bullies. Russian President Vladimir Putin is winning in Ukraine, albeit at a frightful cost. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s illiberal brand of populism is on a roll in Europe. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is still in power in Israel, despite exposing his country to Hamas’s attack in October 2023, presiding over a genocidal campaign that has taken tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian lives, and an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court. And U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is returning to the White House, with the world’s richest bully—Elon Musk—at his side (for now).

Trump, Musk, and their minions appear to be convinced that they can bully the entire world. He hasn’t even been sworn in, and he’s already threatening foreign countries with tariffs and other sanctions if they don’t give him whatever he demands. He’s threatening to sue newspapers who criticize him and punish corporate leaders who don’t fall into line. Trump’s nominee to head the FBI and some Republican lawmakers seem eager to go after his political opponents. This approach goes well beyond quid-pro-quo transactionalism; it’s a blatant attempt to blackmail, bully, and cow others into preemptive concessions, based on their fear of what Trump might do to hurt them.

It’s not surprising that Trump thinks this approach will work. The Republican Party to which I once belonged has been exposed as a sorry collection of unprincipled opportunists with the collective backbone of a bowl of Jello. Wealthy corporate leaders are tripping over themselves to curry favor with Trump, once-distinguished news organizations like ABC and the Los Angeles Times are running up white flags, and spineless pundits with their fingers in the wind are pivoting to complicity. I expect universities and other sources of independent thinking to start hunkering down and trimming their sails, too.

The stars in the global firmament seem to be lining up behind them, too. Europe is economically stagnant and politically divided. The Trudeau government in Canada is on life support. Russia is overstretched. China’s economy is flirting with deflation and more vulnerable to pressure. The Axis of Resistance in the Middle East is in disarray, with the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as merely the latest blow to its efforts to challenge U.S.-Israeli dominance. Not surprisingly, the incoming U.S. administration thinks that now’s the time for the United States to impose maximum pressure on anyone and everyone who isn’t willing to give Trump what he wants. And, at first glance, this approach seems to be working: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has already made the trek to Mar-a-Lago; NATO members are now talking about a 3 percent of GDP target for defense spending; and Iran’s president keeps saying he wants lower tensions with the outside world. The United States—and by implication, Trump—seems to be on a roll.

Is the United States now poised to remake world politics in accordance with Trump or Musk’s whims? Are we witnessing a return to the unipolar moment, minus the naive liberal idealism that got the United States into trouble the first time around? Can Trump really bully the whole world?

I doubt it.

One reason I’m skeptical is that I’ve seen this movie before. Back in the 1990s, politicians and pundits in the United States assumed that history was running the United States’ way and that country after country would bow before the awesome might of U.S. power and the irresistible appeal of liberal democratic capitalism. The only holdouts would be a handful of “rogue states,” whose leaders hadn’t got the memo, and they would be contained and eventually compelled to go along. If that didn’t work, there was always the option of regime change. Things didn’t quite go as the optimists predicted, however, which is one of the reasons we ended up with someone like Trump in the first place.

Second, unchecked power makes others nervous, and overt bullying makes people angry and resentful. The typical reaction is to balance against U.S. pressure, either overtly (as Russia, China, and Iran have done), or by “soft balancing,” as U.S. allies did during the last unipolar moment. Leaders who bend the knee repeatedly will face domestic pressures to resist, and especially so if acceding to Trump’s demands imposes heavy costs on their own publics.

This problem is exacerbated by Trump’s purely transactional approach to politics. The United States has frequently used its superior power to pressure allies to do what it wanted, but it did so while emphasizing a set of shared values and insisting that the country was acting not only in its own self-interest but also in the interest of a broader community of mostly like-minded countries. The mailed fist was there, but so was the velvet glove. U.S. willingness to operate within a set of multilateral institutions that placed certain limits on its power made its position of primacy less threatening and its leadership more acceptable to others. Trump doesn’t care about any of these things, and even longtime U.S. partners will be wary of complying too readily and thereby inviting new demands.

Moreover, although issuing bombastic threats doesn’t cost Trump anything in the short term, actually carrying them out would. Because the United States is bigger and stronger than everyone else, imposing tariffs or other sanctions may hurt others more than it hurts the United States. But imposing tariffs or other coercive measures is not cost-free, especially when dealing with larger countries such as China or states on which U.S. industry depends for key inputs or goods. And even far weaker states are sometimes willing to pay a large price when their vital interests are at stake, as Serbia did over Kosovo and as Iran has done for decades. There are limits, in short, to how much Trump can demand of anyone.

Fourth, a bully like Trump wants to deal with his targets one-on-one, because that maximizes his leverage. He won’t want to deal directly with the European Union (which he once described as one of the United States’ “foes”); he’d prefer to deal directly with separate European countries and strike deals with each of them independently. But that approach is inefficient and time-consuming, and my guess is that a lot of these new deals simply won’t get done.

Fifth, states facing a bully have lots of ways to pretend to go along without actually complying. As we are already seeing, some astute foreign leaders will flatter Trump’s ego and say they are willing to discuss whatever’s on his mind, while offering only minor or purely symbolic concessions. Canada has said it’s perfectly willing to tighten the border and control shipments of fentanyl precursors to the United States, but this is a meaningless pledge because Canada is not a major source of illegal immigrants or precursor chemicals. Other countries will adopt a similar approach: telling Trump they will do what he wants and then dragging their feet, as China did successfully during his first term. This is another way that a purely transactional and mostly bilateral approach breaks down: When you’re dealing with the whole world one-on-one, monitoring who is delivering on their promises and who is shirking becomes an onerous task.

Sixth, remember that Trump cares more about appearances than he does about actual accomplishments. He thinks those reality-show summit meetings with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un were a great success: The entire world was watching, and the ratings were boffo. Nothing came of all the hoopla, however, and it was Kim, not Trump, who was the big winner. He got the prestige and legitimacy that accrues from a direct meeting with a U.S. president and Trump left empty-handed.

Nor is the United States all-powerful. The bond market has a mind of its own, for example, and Trump may discover just how powerful it can be if the U.S. deficit explodes or inflation comes back in a major way. Trump’s grip on domestic politics is anything but firm: The GOP’s margins in the House and Senate are razor-thin, and his election was nowhere near the landslide he claims it was. A few stumbles, and every member of Congress who is up for reelection in 2026 will start looking for ways to distance themselves. The willingness of several dozen Republicans to defy Trump over the recent government funding bill is another sign of the constraints he will face. And all the bluster and social media hype in the world can’t change the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology: The environment pays no attention to whatever Trump spouts on Truth Social, and viruses will keep evolving no matter what his nominee for secretary of the Department for Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., believes, or what the talking heads on Fox News say.

Finally, every U.S. president faces some nasty surprises—problems or crises that they didn’t expect or plan for. For George W. Bush, it was Sept. 11; for Barack Obama, it was the Arab Spring and the Russian seizure of Crimea; for Joe Biden, it was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the carnage in Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank. In Trump’s first term, it was the COVID-19 pandemic, and his mishandling of that unexpected crisis is one of the main reasons he lost the 2020 election. Having assembled a clown show of an administration, with incompetent oddballs in some key areas, Trump 2.0 may be ill-prepared for whatever unexpected problem lands on the Resolute Desk.

To be clear: I’m not saying Trump can’t brandish the big stick and get some countries to give him some of what he wants. If you threaten enough people, a few of your targets will undoubtedly comply. He’ll take full credit whenever this happens (even if the actual benefits are modest) and hope that everyone overlooks the threats that backfired or fizzled. Given his proven ability to convince people of many things that simply aren’t true, and our news media’s equally well-proven inability to hold him accountable, this approach may even convince Americans he’s doing a great job. But what it won’t do is produce a steady series of genuine foreign-policy accomplishments. It might even lead to the kind of comeuppance that novelists and scriptwriters adore. That’s a movie I’d like to watch.