Great powers study each other closely, observing the strategies used, the resistance met, and the outcomes realized. Donald Trump’s strangulation of Cuba thus could become a template for others, beginning with Xi Jinping, who remains committed to achieving “reunification” with Taiwan.
Since returning to office last year, US President Donald Trump has ordered military strikes from the Caribbean and eastern Pacific to Africa and the Middle East, targeting alleged drug-smuggling boats and suspected terrorist groups. He has attacked Venezuela and kidnapped its leader, Nicolás Maduro. And he has joined Israel in a large-scale assault on Iran that amounts to a major escalation from last year’s strikes, which supposedly “obliterated” the country’s nuclear facilities. Meanwhile, he is tightening a noose around Cuba, in the hopes that the resulting humanitarian crisis will open the way for a “friendly takeover” of the island by the United States.
As Trump acts with open contempt for international law, China is taking notes. The Cuba model, in particular, offers a useful blueprint for Chinese President Xi Jinping to apply in pursuing his “historic mission” of “reunification” with Taiwan. This is a live demonstration of how a superpower can strangle a country into submission.
Modern societies depend on a handful of critical systems such as food, water, transportation, and communications. But one system rules them all: energy. Electricity powers water pumps, refrigeration, health care, digital networks, and industrial and agricultural production. Once the grid begins to fail, so do all other critical systems – and social stability. This makes countries that depend heavily on imported fuel to generate electricity fundamentally vulnerable.
For Cuba, which has long depended primarily on oil purchased from Venezuela and Mexico, Trump has exploited that vulnerability by imposing a complete blockade on fuel deliveries. Millions of people have lost access to electricity. Water-pumping stations have shut down. Tractors and delivery trucks sit idle, leading to food-price spikes, food shortages, and rising hunger. Hospitals struggle to function amid intermittent blackouts.
The suffering is the point: it is the lever Trump is using to apply pressure to the regime, whose fall, Trump glibly maintains, is imminent.
For Xi, such a coercive siege of Taiwan might be more appealing than a full-scale amphibious invasion across the Taiwan Strait, which would be fraught with logistical challenges and likely draw in the US and Japan. Instead of firing missiles at Taipei or storming Taiwan’s beaches, China could declare a maritime quarantine or customs-inspection regime around the island, with Chinese coast-guard vessels stopping energy tankers bound for Taiwanese ports for “safety checks” or “anti-smuggling operations.”
Even modest disruptions could quickly create supply bottlenecks. Given that Taiwan imports nearly all of its fuel (mostly liquefied natural gas), and maintains barely two weeks’ worth of reserves, a line of LNG tankers waiting offshore could trigger cascading shortages within weeks. Like Cuba, Taiwan would face blackouts, which would disrupt its water and health-care systems. Industrial production, including the semiconductor plants that power the global digital economy, would grind to a halt. The goal would not be immediate surrender, but rather gradual exhaustion.
This gradualism is essential. A single dramatic act would jolt the international system, forcing others to respond. But a steady rise in “routine” ship inspections, producing increasingly long delays and escalating economic and social pain, offers no such shocking moment. Each step appears insufficient to justify a major military response. This is no Trumpian innovation: Xi is a master of such tactics, which have enabled him to make major strategic gains, such as in the South China Sea and the Himalayas, without firing a single shot.
In Taiwan’s case, China could simply wait until the economic and humanitarian crisis that it created became severe enough to justify moving in to “stabilize the island” and “rescue its people.” As with Trump’s “friendly takeover,” which makes geopolitical coercion sound like corporate restructuring, the logic is that of a protection racket: create the problem, then step in to “solve” it.
All this could unfold under a shroud of legal ambiguity. While a formal naval blockade would be regarded as an act of war under international law, a quarantine or inspection regime could be presented as law enforcement, rather than military action. China’s government – which insists that Taiwan is a Chinese province, not a sovereign state – would likely portray maritime inspections as an internal matter of administrative enforcement.
Would Japan and the US risk war with a major nuclear power and the world’s second-largest military spender over actions portrayed as customs enforcement? Would they want to take responsibility for a crisis-stricken Taiwan? The answer may well be no, especially at a time when the US is hemorrhaging blood and treasure, owing to Trump’s multiplying military adventures abroad.
Other countries would be even less likely to jump to Taiwan’s defense. Just as the US is using tariff threats to prevent third countries, such as Mexico, from providing oil to Cuba, China could leverage its central role in global trade and its chokehold on rare-earth supplies to deter opposition to a siege of Taiwan.
Great powers study each other closely. What works for one becomes a template for others, now and in the future. In this sense, what is happening to Cuba is not a one-off tragedy; it is a rehearsal and a test. If the world sits silently by as Trump strangles Cuba, with its 11 million people, Xi will see little reason not to apply the same strategy against 23 million Taiwanese.
Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.
By any conventional measure of power, the U.S. remains formidable. Its military power is unmatched, and it still possesses the world’s largest national economy. Yet power in the 21st century has never rested on material capabilities alone.
For decades, America’s true strategic advantage lay in something less tangible but more potent: its capacity to attract. Its ideals, openness and professed commitment to universal values conferred a moral authority that made alliances easier, its influence deeper and its leadership more legitimate. That advantage is now being squandered.
The current focus on the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran should not obscure a larger reality: The damage the second Trump presidency is inflicting on U.S. soft power — on the very credibility that made American leadership possible — is profound and likely to outlast the administration itself.
The concept of soft power, a term coined by the late Harvard scholar Joseph Nye, rests on three pillars: an appealing culture, political values that a country actually upholds, and a foreign policy imbued with moral authority. Today, each of those pillars is being eroded.
The most visible fracture is domestic. President Trump’s rhetoric has normalized a form of racialized politics that previous generations of American leaders, from both parties, publicly rejected. His disparaging comments about Somali immigrants, like his circulation of dehumanizing imagery of the Obamas, revives some of the ugliest tropes in the long history of racial oppression. These are not isolated excesses — they signal to the world that the U.S. is retreating from the very values it once claimed as its moral core.
For audiences across Africa, Asia and Latin America — regions whose histories are deeply scarred by European colonialism and extractive rule — such rhetoric is not just offensive. It is revealing. It suggests that the language of equality and human dignity, long invoked by Washington in international forums, may have been less a principled commitment than a convenient instrument of power.
That perception is reinforced by what Trump and his team now say about the world beyond America’s borders.
In his Jan. 21 address in Davos, Trump spoke with disarming candor about territorial acquisition and imperial expansion. Voicing nostalgia for colonialism, he said European empires had simply acquired “great vast wealth, great vast lands all over the world,” adding that “there’s nothing wrong with it.” This was a statement of worldview.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s Feb. 14 address at the Munich Security Conference only sharpened the point. He praised Western colonialists for settling “new continents” and building “vast empires extending out across the globe,” lamenting what he called the “terminal decline” of those empires after World War II. The signal was unmistakable: The age of empire was not a moral tragedy but a civilizational achievement.
Different tones, same message: The past they praise rests on racial domination.
No mainstream Western leader has voiced such unvarnished neo-imperial yearning in decades. For European allies who have spent 80 years publicly renouncing colonialism, and for countries across the Global South that fought to escape it, the implications are jarring. When American leaders speak this way, they do more than offend; they delegitimize the very international order the U.S. claims to uphold.
Words are only part of the story. Under Trump, they are increasingly matched by actions that suggest a return to 19th-century imperial precedents. From renewed pressure for U.S. control over Greenland and the Panama Canal to open-ended military intervention in Venezuela and talk of redrawing borders or relocating populations, the administration has revived a logic more familiar to the age of empires than to the post-1945 international system.
The old Monroe Doctrine has been globalized into a claim that American power itself is legal authority. The capture of Venezuela’s president, the tightening of a blockade that has deepened Cuba’s humanitarian crisis, and the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader represent a pattern that erodes major principles of international law.
This worldview may strike its proponents as a restoration of strength. In reality, it is a confession of insecurity. Great powers confident in their legitimacy do not need to glorify conquest or invoke racial hierarchy; they rely instead on the willingness of others to follow their lead. That willingness is precisely what is now eroding.
The consequences are already visible. Allies hedge. Partners question U.S. commitments. Countries across the Global South, long lectured by Washington on democracy and human rights, now hear such rhetoric with growing skepticism. Rivals, from Beijing to Moscow, find it easier to portray the U.S. as hypocritical and self-serving.
None of this means that American decline is inevitable or irreversible. The U.S. has reinvented itself before. Its greatest strength has always been its capacity for self-correction. But renewal begins with recognition.
The tragedy is not merely that America’s image is being tarnished by signals of a retreat into racialized nationalism and nostalgia for empire. It is that the very qualities that once made U.S. leadership attractive are being dismantled by American hands themselves.
Credibility, once lost, is hard to regain. Trust, once broken, is not easily restored.
If the U.S. continues down this path, the Trump presidency will not merely mark a contentious chapter in domestic politics. It will be remembered as the moment when America forfeited the moral authority that sustained its global influence, thereby accelerating a relative decline that no amount of military or economic power can easily arrest.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long been expansionist and contemptuous of international law. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), the CCP regime has become more despotic, coercive and punitive.
As part of its strategy to annex Taiwan, Beijing has sought to erase the island democracy’s international identity by bribing countries to sever diplomatic ties with Taipei. One by one, China has peeled away Taiwan’s remaining diplomatic partners, leaving just 12 countries (mostly small developing states) and the Vatican recognizing Taiwan as a sovereign nation. Taiwan’s formal international space has shrunk dramatically.
Yet even as Beijing has scored diplomatic successes, its overreach is turning it into its own worst enemy. Nowhere is this clearer than in its relationship with Japan, which it has pushed from wary partner to strategic counterweight over the past two decades.
More recently, China’s full-spectrum pressure campaign against Japan — intended to weaken Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi — has instead helped deliver her a landslide victory in the Feb. 8 election. Japanese voters appear to have grown weary of Beijing’s coercion. The resulting supermajority in the Diet gives Takaichi not only political authority, but also strategic latitude to harden Japan’s statecraft against China.
Japan’s election has thus delivered something Taiwan has not heard in a long time: genuinely good news.
For Taipei, Takaichi’s victory is not just another electoral outcome in a neighboring democracy. It marks a strategic inflection point for Taiwan’s security environment. For the first time in decades, Japan is moving decisively from strategic ambiguity toward strategic clarity — and that shift matters enormously for Taiwan’s future.
The first and most consequential change is political. Takaichi has been more explicit than any previous Japanese leader in stating that a Chinese attack on Taiwan would constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan itself. Under Japan’s 2015 security legislation, that language is not rhetorical; it provides the legal basis for the Self-Defense Forces to exercise collective self-defense if an ally is attacked in circumstances that endanger Japan’s survival.
In practical terms, this signals that Japan is politically and legally prepared to stand alongside the US if Taiwan is attacked.
For Taiwan, this reduces the most dangerous form of uncertainty — not whether China might act, but whether others would respond.
It may also explain Beijing’s sharp reaction. At the recent Munich Security Conference, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (王毅) denounced Takaichi’s Taiwan position as a “challenge to China’s sovereignty.”
The second shift is military. Japan’s southwestern island chain, stretching from Kyushu to Yonaguni just 110 kilometers from Taiwan, is rapidly becoming a fortified defensive arc. Japanese missile batteries, air defense systems, electronic warfare units and surveillance networks are being deployed along this chain, transforming it from a symbolic “tripwire” into a credible counterstrike barrier. This significantly complicates any Chinese attempt to blockade Taiwan or project force across the Taiwan Strait.
Geography has always made Japan central to Taiwan’s security. Taiwan, in turn, underpins Japan’s own security as a geographic extension of the Japanese archipelago. Under Takaichi, that geographic reality is finally being translated into operational strategy.
Third, Takaichi’s supermajority opens the door to constitutional reform. For decades, Article 9 has constrained Japan’s ability to act as a normal security provider.
With a two-thirds majority in the Lower House, Takaichi now has the leverage to formalize the status of the Self-Defense Forces and expand their operational latitude, even as she accelerates defense spending toward 2 percent of GDP.
A stronger Japan means a more secure Taiwan. Indeed, a Japan that is legally unshackled becomes a far more credible deterrent against Chinese expansionism — one that Beijing must factor into any calculus over Taiwan.
Japan now appears poised to move from reacting to Chinese military pressure to imposing tangible costs. Nowhere is this clearer than along the southwestern island chain, where Tokyo is building the capacity to deny access, complicate Chinese planning, and ensure that no coercive maritime gambit or fait accompli seizure of territory goes unanswered.
Fourth, and just as important, Tokyo has demonstrated that it will not be intimidated by China’s economic coercion, despite the costs.
Beijing attempted to influence Japan’s election by restricting seafood imports and Chinese tourism, tightening export controls on critical materials, and intensifying military pressure around Japan’s southwestern islands. The effort backfired. Japanese voters interpreted the pressure as bullying and responded by strengthening Takaichi’s mandate.
That outcome carries a powerful message for Taiwan: China’s economic leverage is not irresistible, and democratic societies can push back when they choose to do so.
Taken together, these developments amount to something Taiwan has long needed but rarely enjoyed: strategic clarity from its most important neighbor.
The benefits for Taipei are concrete. A Taiwan contingency is now explicitly linked to Japan’s own security. Intelligence-sharing is likely to deepen as Tokyo centralizes its intelligence apparatus. Economic ties may expand through a potential Taiwan-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement, embedding Taiwan more firmly in trusted supply chains. And Japan’s easing of defense-export restrictions opens the door to quiet but meaningful industrial cooperation.
None of this means Taiwan’s challenges are over. Beijing will continue to apply pressure — diplomatic, economic and military. Japan’s constitutional reforms will likely face hurdles in the Upper House and in a national referendum. Ultimately, Taiwan’s own resilience remains the decisive factor in its future.
But geopolitics is rarely about perfect security; it is about relative advantage. Compared with a year ago, Taiwan’s strategic position is stronger. It now has a Japan that is more willing, more capable and more politically authorized to contribute to its defense. And the US has approved a record US$11.1 billion arms package to strengthen Taiwan’s deterrence against Chinese coercion.
In a region where bad news has become routine, that alone marks a meaningful shift.
For Taiwan, Japan’s election result is a reminder that the balance of power in Asia is not static and that democratic solidarity, when backed by political will, can still reshape the strategic landscape.
Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).
Trump has already etched his name into the history books—not as a strategic innovator, but as a leader who turned American foreign policy into a vehicle for spectacle and coercion, mistaking shock for strategy. Rather than ‘Make America Great Again’, he is steadily diminishing his country’s power, leaving the US less trusted and less credible than at any point since the end of the Second World War.
Donald Trump’s second presidency marks a decisive shift in US statecraft: foreign policy as personal theatre, multilateralism displaced by a doctrine of calculated disruption, and the institutional order recast through a narrowly transactional ‘America First’ realism.
Moving beyond the improvisation of his first term, Trump’s second term is deliberately revisionist. His administration has upended foundational norms, including withdrawing the US from scores of international organisations and the Paris Climate Agreement. Nowhere is this “disruption as doctrine” approach clearer than in his treatment of sovereignty and territoriality—evident in recurring annexation threats towards Greenland and Canada, and in the articulation of a personalised “Donroe Doctrine”, an idiosyncratic evolution of the Monroe Doctrine.
On the economic front, Trump has weaponised trade as a tool of primary national power, with his tariffs spurring significant international volatility. Even after the US Supreme Court struck down many of those tariffs as illegal, Trump immediately responded by imposing a 15 per cent global import duty under a different national law.
His policies and actions in the security realm have triggered increasing international volatility and instability, including widening divisions within the Western bloc.
By mistaking disruption for strategy and bullying for leadership, Trump has made America appear more erratic and less dependable than at any time since 1945. The US can still project overwhelming force, but its ability to shape stable outcomes, build coalitions and lead by example is steadily eroding.
The Myth
Trump’s self-proclamation as a global peacemaker sits uneasily—indeed irreconcilably—with his record in office. Such is his reliance on militarised statecraft that he ordered more military strikes on countries in just the first year of his second presidency than the entire four-year term of his predecessor, Joe Biden.
In speeches, social-media posts and ceremonial initiatives, Trump has cast himself as the man who ended eight “unendable wars”, deserved the Nobel Peace Prize and restored American strength while avoiding costly “forever wars”. Yet the empirical record of his second presidency reveals something quite different: a sustained dependence on high-intensity military force across multiple theatres, a dramatic expansion of nuclear-weapons capabilities, and a foreign policy increasingly personalised, transactional and erratic.
This disjunction reflects a deeper doctrinal shift: Trump’s redefinition of peace itself. In his formulation, peace is not the product of diplomacy, compromise or durable political settlements; it is the abrupt cessation of violence through overwhelming, unilateral force—what his advisers describe as “peace through shock”.
The result is a foreign policy that claims the mantle of non-interventionism while normalising frequent, destructive military action. The long-term effect is to weaken American strategic credibility, erode international norms, and leave America less secure in a world already defined by sharpening great-power rivalry.
There is a growing gap between Trump’s words and actions. Take his National Security Strategy (NSS) that he released a little over three months ago.
At first glance, the NSS promises a restrained and pragmatic approach to US foreign policy. It criticises previous administrations for defining American interests so broadly that “almost no issue or endeavour is considered outside its scope,” and instead pledges a more focused conception of national interest. The document outlines four core principles: a narrowed definition of national interest, “Peace through Strength,” a “Predisposition to Non-Interventionism”, and “Flexible Realism”.
The language of non-interventionism is especially striking. Rooted rhetorically in the Declaration of Independence, the NSS asserts that all nations possess a “separate and equal station”, implying respect for sovereignty of other states and a high threshold for military action. It disavows ideological crusades and promises “peaceful commercial relations” without imposing social or political systems on others.
This is how that section reads in full: “Predisposition to Non-Interventionism—In the Declaration of Independence, America’s founders laid down a clear preference for non-interventionism in the affairs of other nations and made clear the basis: just as all human beings possess God-given equal natural rights, all nations are entitled by ‘the laws of nature and nature’s God’ to a ‘separate and equal station’ with respect to one another. For a country whose interests are as numerous and diverse as ours, rigid adherence to non-interventionism is not possible. Yet this predisposition should set a high bar for what constitutes a justified intervention.”
On paper, this suggests a break with the interventionist US habits of the post-Cold War era. In practice, however, the NSS embeds a paradox.
While professing a predisposition against intervention, it simultaneously calls for maintaining the world’s most powerful military, accelerating technological dominance and undertaking a sweeping nuclear modernisation programme. The document thus creates conceptual space for a foreign policy that claims restraint while preserving—and expanding—the capacity for aggressive action.
The operational reality of Trump’s second presidency exposes how hollow the claimed predisposition to non-interventionism has become. Rather than reducing the use of force, the administration has shifted towards a “shock and awe” model—favouring short, high-intensity operations instead of long-term operations that usually result in a military quagmire.
In Yemen, Trump’s Operation Rough Rider (March-May 2025) involved hundreds of strikes over a 53-day period, the most intense US bombing campaign in that country’s history.
In Iran, Operation Midnight Hammer deployed more than 100 aircraft and massive bunker-buster bombs against nuclear facilities, with the White House declaring the Iranian nuclear programme “obliterated”. On June 25, 2025, the White House posted on its website: “Iran’s nuclear facilities have been obliterated—and suggestions otherwise are fake news.” Yet, just months later, Trump is threatening to launch war on Iran if it does not abandon its nuclear programme.
In Venezuela, the US conducted a regime-change military operation early this year, abducting President Nicolás Maduro and gaining control of the world’s largest proven oil reserves. This operation, however, was framed not as war, but as a law-enforcement operation.
These headline operations were accompanied by intensified drone and air campaigns in Somalia, Nigeria, Syria, and the Caribbean, alongside the militarisation of the US southern border under a memorandum treating migration as an “invasion”. Data from conflict-monitoring organisations indicate that the US under Trump carried out more than 600 airstrikes in 2025 alone.
In ordering the Christmas Day strikes in Nigeria, Trump portrayed the bombings as necessary to protect Christians from ISIS attacks. Yet Sokoto state, where the US conducted the airstrikes, is largely Muslim, and the local Catholic bishop explicitly denied that Christians there were being systematically targeted. Nor is there any clear evidence that the insurgents operating in Sokoto are linked to ISIS.
The key innovation under Trump is not restraint but reconfiguration. Trump has replaced prolonged US occupations with repeated, high-tempo kinetic actions justified as counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics or protection of religious freedom.
Just the form of intervention has changed. The frequency, geographic reach and normalisation of intervention have only increased.
Manufacturing a Persona
Against the backdrop of expanded military activity, Trump has constructed an elaborate narrative of peace-making. At the United Nations (UN) in September 2025, he claimed to have ended seven “unendable wars”, later revising the number to eight. He practically crowned himself a global peacemaker at the UN, claiming “everyone” says he should win the Nobel Peace Prize. The boast was vintage Trump: detached from reality and delivered with a straight face.
He has created a personalised ‘Board of Peace’, launched at Davos earlier this year, over which he exercises unilateral control. The board is effectively a one-man show—Trump alone can veto decisions, set the agenda, invite or expel members and even anoint his own successor. Trump has even renamed the US Institute of Peace building after himself.
The cases he cites as evidence of his peace-making often collapse under scrutiny. Some of the alleged wars—such as tensions between Egypt and Ethiopia or Kosovo and Serbia—were not wars at all. Others, such as the Cambodia-Thailand dispute or the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict, were addressed primarily through regional diplomacy or remain unresolved despite ceremonial agreements.
In still others—most notably Israel and Iran—Trump did not end a conflict but actively escalated it, joining hostilities through direct US military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
The pattern is consistent: inflate the scale of a conflict, insert the US—and Trump personally—as the indispensable mediator, deploy coercive force and then declare victory regardless of the underlying political reality. Peace, in this narrative, becomes a branding exercise rather than a substantive outcome.
The human consequences of this doctrine are visible in Yemen and Gaza.
In Yemen, “Operation Rough Rider” achieved its immediate objective of halting Houthi attacks on shipping lanes but at significant humanitarian cost. Independent monitors estimate hundreds of civilian deaths in just 53 days, including strikes on critical infrastructure such as the Ras Isa port, a lifeline for humanitarian aid, and a migrant detention centre in Sa’ada that killed dozens of African migrants.
The Trump administration’s response has been to dismiss or deflect such reports, blaming “human shielding” by adversaries and measuring success solely by restored maritime security. The NSS’ supposed “high bar” for intervention thus becomes, in practice, a high tolerance for civilian harm.
In Gaza, Trump’s approach has been equally stark. His early proposal to “take over” and redevelop the enclave into a “Riviera of the Middle East”, initially tied to the displacement of millions of Palestinians, has evolved into a heavily securitised but still vague reconstruction plan overseen by his Board of Peace. Plans for a permanent US military presence in Gaza underscore the extent to which “peace” is conceived as managed pacification backed by force, rather than a political settlement grounded in rights and sovereignty.
The Nuclear Paradox
Perhaps the clearest illustration of the gap between rhetoric and reality lies in Trump’s nuclear policy. While presenting Iran’s nuclear ambitions as an existential threat justifying military strikes and coercive diplomacy, the US under Trump has allowed the last remaining US-Russia nuclear arms control treaty, New START, to lapse. At the same time, the US is expanding and modernising its own nuclear arsenal.
The Trump administration boldly frames this not as contradiction but as doctrine: “Peace through strength” in its purest form.
American nuclear weapons are portrayed as stabilising instruments wielded by a responsible democracy, while the same weapons in the hands of adversaries are deemed inherently illegitimate. The result is a shift away from the Cold War logic of mutual restraint towards a model of unilateral primacy.
This is reflected in America’s 2026 “nuclear modernization” budget, a cornerstone of the Trump administration’s “peace through strength” doctrine. The budget, which represents a historic financial commitment to the already-formidable US nuclear triad, totals approximately up to $90 billion in authorised spending—a 26 per cent increase over the Biden administration’s final request.
The consequences are predictable. By abandoning treaty constraints and investing tens of billions of dollars in new delivery systems, warhead and missile defences, the US encourages rival powers to expand their own arsenals.
Iran, meanwhile, has responded to last summer’s US strikes on its nuclear facilities by seeking to rebuild its programme in more hardened and secretive configurations, illustrating how tactical victories can generate long-term strategic instability.
Strategic Consequences
Beyond military actions and nuclear policy, Trump’s approach has reshaped the very process of American foreign policy. Diplomacy has become an extension of his personal brand, marked by spectacle, unpredictability and a preference for dramatic gestures over sustained engagement.
Major decisions—from bombing Iranian nuclear sites to proposing regime change—are often announced impulsively, with allies and even cabinet officials learning of them through social media.
Professional diplomats and intelligence officials are sidelined, eroding institutional expertise and continuity. Where foreign governments once relied on their intelligence services to understand American policy, they now simply monitor presidential social-media posts.
Trump’s excessive personalisation of policy breeds confusion and mistrust. Allies cannot be certain whether statements reflect official policy or personal impulse, while adversaries struggle to interpret whether threats are credible or performative.
The blurring of public policy and private gain, including the influence of Trump’s booming business ventures, further undermines the credibility of US decision-making. Trump’s personal wealth has risen on the back of cryptocurrency ventures and other deals, with mounting evidence that his family’s business empire is influencing decision‑making on sanctions, financial regulations, travel restrictions, and even choices of partner states.
The cumulative effect of these patterns is deeply corrosive for US foreign policy and long-term American strategic interests.
First, Trump’s redefinition of peace as “shock and awe without occupation” normalises frequent, highly destructive uses of force while devaluing diplomacy. This weakens international norms governing the use of force and exposes as hollow US claims to uphold international law and civilian protection.
Second, his militarised statecraft accelerates arms races, great-power rivalries and regional instability. The lapse of the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty, combined with expansive US nuclear modernisation and missile defence initiatives, incentivises rivals to expand their own weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities. The cycle of action and reaction increases the risk of miscalculation and escalation.
Third, Trump’s transactional and personalised diplomacy weakens alliances and partnerships as well as the US-led international order, which has traditionally helped amplify American power. Allies and strategic partners confronted with America’s unilateral actions and unpredictable policy shifts are more likely to hedge, pursue strategic autonomy or seek alternative partnerships. This is exactly what India is doing.
Fourth, the fusion of foreign policy with domestic political theatrics erodes the credibility of US commitments. When actions appear driven by personal branding or electoral considerations, both friends and adversaries are likely to discount American assurances and threats.
Finally, by mistaking disruption for strategy and coercion for leadership, Trump has made the US appear less reliable and less trustworthy.
Trump’s peacemaker narrative is not merely a matter of personal exaggeration. It reflects a deeper transformation in how American power is conceived and exercised. By redefining peace as the product of overwhelming force, he has blurred the line between war and diplomacy and normalised the routine use of violence.
The costs are already visible: destabilised regions, renewed arms races, strained alliances, and a global perception of the US as erratic and self-interested. In the long run, these trends threaten to leave America weaker, lonelier and less capable of shaping the new global order in ways that serve its interests.
Trump has already etched his name into the history books—not as a strategic innovator, but as a leader who turned American foreign policy into a vehicle for spectacle and coercion, mistaking shock for strategy. Rather than ‘Make America Great Again’, he is steadily diminishing his country’s power, leaving the US less trusted and less credible than at any point since the end of World War II.
Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, right, shakes hands with Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, during a news conference at Hyderabad House in New Delhi, India, on March 2, 2026. Photo: Bloomberg
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s visit to India is intended to close one of the most acrimonious diplomatic chapters between two major democracies in recent memory and inaugurate a more pragmatic, interest-driven partnership for an age of geopolitical uncertainty.
Rarely have Canada and India found themselves so publicly at odds as they did in 2023-24, when the relationship sank to its lowest point ever. Then-prime minister Justin Trudeau’s allegation of a potential link between the Indian government and the killing of a Sikh-Canadian on Canadian soil triggered a spiral of recriminations, expulsions, visa suspensions and nationalist outrage.
The dispute also exposed a deeper structural fault line: Canada’s permissive approach toward Sikh separatist activism versus India’s zero-tolerance view of Khalistan militancy. For New Delhi, the issue has not been merely diaspora politics but national security, shaped by the memory of the deadly 1985 Air India bombing by Canada-based Sikh terrorists. For Ottawa, the challenge has been to balance civil liberties with public safety in a diverse democracy.
Mr. Carney’s visit signals that both governments have decided the costs of continued estrangement are too high.
The visit’s strategic logic is rooted in a shared reassessment of the global order. Both Canada and India are hedging against the volatility of great-power rivalry. Mr. Carney’s emerging “middle-power” doctrine emphasizes building networks of trusted relationships beyond Washington’s orbit. India, for its part, has long sought diversified partnerships to avoid overdependence on any single pole.
In this sense, the visit is not just a bilateral reset but part of a broader pattern: a quiet consolidation among middle powers seeking resilience in a fragmenting world. Both Canada and India, though, are walking a tightrope. They want to diversify away from an unpredictable U.S. without triggering further retaliation from Washington.
At the heart of the visit lies a concrete economic agenda. The most eye-catching initiative is a 10-year, US$2.8-billion uranium supply agreement, which could be signed during Mr. Carney’s visit. For India, Canadian fuel offers a pathway to reduce reliance on both Russian imports and coal. For Canada, it secures a long-term market at a moment when Western demand is uncertain.
Canada, which sees more than 90per cent of its energy exports go to the U.S., is seeking to become a major oil and liquefied natural gas supplier to India, the world’s fastest-growing major energy consumer, with demand expected to double by 2045. India is already the world’s third-largestenergy consumer.
Alongside energy, the two sides are accelerating negotiations on a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), with a target of doubling bilateral trade to $70-billion in four years. The scope extends well beyond tariffs: services trade, digital commerce, labour mobility, agriculture and critical minerals are all on the table. A CEPA would anchor a supply-chain corridor linking Canada’s resource base with India’s manufacturing and technological capacity.
This economic agenda reflects a shared desire to “derisk” from China-centric supply chains without embracing full decoupling, and to hedge against shifting currents of U.S. policy.
Yet the economic reset cannot stand without a parallel security understanding. Both governments recognize that another crisis over extremism or sovereignty could derail the entire project.
In Canada, Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, would, if passed, criminalize the public display of terrorist symbols. It could signal to New Delhi that Canada is taking more seriously the issue of Sikh militancy.
At the same time, both countries are expected to revive and upgrade their Joint Working Group on Counter-Terrorism, shifting toward real-time intelligence sharing and more streamlined extradition processes. India, for its part, is reaffirming respect for Canadian sovereignty after the controversies of 2023-24.
The aim is to create institutional “guardrails”: mechanisms that allow co-operation to continue even when sensitive issues arise.
Mr. Carney’s challenge, however, is as much domestic as diplomatic. Bill C-9 faces strong resistance from civil-liberties advocates, and parliamentary delays have already stalled its progress. Mr. Carney thus faces a delicate balancing act – demonstrating to India that Ottawa will act against extremist activity, while convincing Canadians he will not dilute constitutional freedoms or bow to external pressure.
More fundamentally, Mr. Carney’s India visit marks a transition from an emotionally charged relationship to a transactional one. The bitterness of the Trudeau era is being set aside in favour of a sober recognition of mutual interests.
If the uranium and hydrocarbon deals advance and CEPA negotiations stay on track, February, 2026, may be remembered as the moment Canada-India ties matured into a modern strategic partnership. For two pluralistic democracies navigating an uncertain century, this may prove to be the most sustainable foundation of all.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground.
The election marks the arrival of a Japan that will be more assertive, more strategically self-confident and less inclined to subordinate its interests to shifting currents of U.S. policy.
Japan’s Feb. 8 election was not merely an electoral landslide. It was a geopolitical turning point.
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s Liberal Democratic Party secured a two-thirds supermajority — an outcome that finally gives Tokyo something it has lacked for decades: a political mandate to redefine its postwar identity and act as a proactive security power.
For Washington, this is both a gift and a challenge. The U.S. can now deepen collaboration with its most important and capable ally in Asia. Japan hosts the largest concentration of U.S. forces anywhere in the world. Its geographic position is uniquely strategic, and its naval and air capabilities are the most sophisticated among U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific, with interoperability unmatched by any regional partner.
But the election also signals Japan’s strategic reawakening. It marks the arrival of a Japan that will be more assertive, more strategically self-confident and less inclined to subordinate its interests to shifting currents of U.S. policy. Tokyo is no longer content to be a U.S.-protected power. It intends to be a shaping power.
For almost eight decades, Japan operated within self-imposed limits — constitutional pacifism, restrained defense budgets and a preference for economic statecraft over hard power. Takaichi’s mandate alters that trajectory. With a supermajority, she can pursue constitutional revision, formalize the status of the Self-Defense Forces and accelerate defense spending to 2 percent of gross domestic product.
Japan is set to shift from merely reacting to Chinese military pressure to imposing costs for it. Nowhere is this clearer than in the southwestern island chain stretching toward Taiwan. Tokyo is building the capacity to deny access, complicate Chinese planning and ensure that no “fait accompli” seizure of territory or coercive maritime gambit goes unanswered.
For American strategists concerned about U.S. overreach, this is a structural upgrade to the regional balance. A Japan capable of defending its southwestern approaches will reduce the burden on U.S. forces while disrupting Chinese war-planning.
Beijing’s pressure campaign was meant to deter Japan’s rightward drift. Instead, it helped bring about Takaichi’s landslide. Chinese economic restrictions, maritime incursions and thinly veiled threats did not fracture Japanese politics; they consolidated it. Voters concluded that dependence invites coercion and that resilience requires strength.
Japan’s push to rewire supply chains toward India, Southeast Asia and trusted partners is not just industrial policy — it is counter-coercion doctrine.
Takaichi has described a Taiwan contingency as an “existential threat” to Japan. That language would once have been politically radioactive. Now it carries electoral legitimacy and, if sustained, will alter the military geometry of the Taiwan Strait. In a crisis, Japanese bases, surveillance networks and maritime forces would become integral to a U.S. response.
For the U.S., this reinforces a broader trend: Chinese pressure is accelerating, not halting, the formation of balancing coalitions. A stronger Japan becomes the anchor of that process in East Asia.
Takaichi’s strategy also involves alliance diversification. She is building stronger economic and defense links with Australia, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines and especially India, alongside the U.S. treaty alliance — insurance against volatility in American politics.
Japanese policymakers have drawn a sober conclusion: that resilience requires options. Fluctuating U.S. trade policy, tariff threats, periodic talk of retrenchment and transactional approaches to alliances have convinced many in Tokyo that Japan must insure itself against strategic volatility in Washington.
For the U.S., this is not a loss of influence but a redistribution of responsibility. A Japan that leads within the Quad, shapes regional trade architecture and invests in defense industrial cooperation strengthens a stable Indo-Pacific order — provided Washington treats Tokyo as a strategic partner rather than a junior ally.
Takaichi’s economic program — “Sanaenomics” — fuses industrial policy with national defense. Supply-chain resilience, semiconductor co-development, critical-mineral stockpiles and shipyard revitalization are designed to reduce Japan’s vulnerability to “weaponized interdependence.”
This aligns with Washington’s emphasis on economic security but also introduces potential friction. A more nationalist “Japan First” posture could collide with U.S. tariff policies or technology controls if not coordinated. The opportunity lies in building a shared defense-industrial ecosystem.
For years, American policymakers urged Japan to do more for its own defense. Takaichi’s victory answers that call.
But greater capability brings greater autonomy. Tokyo will expect a more important voice in alliance strategy — from Taiwan contingencies to regional trade architecture — and will not accept policies that expose it to coercion without consultation.
Alliances endure not because one side dominates, but because both sides see them as vehicles for advancing national strategy. A stronger Japan will strengthen the alliance if Washington treats Tokyo as a co-architect rather than a subordinate.
The most consequential implication of Japan’s election is regional. Across the Indo-Pacific, middle powers increasingly see a stronger Japan as a stabilizing “strategic ballast” amid uncertainty about both China’s trajectory and America’s staying power. Japan is reentering history as a security actor, not merely an economic one.
Washington should recognize what just happened. Japan did not simply elect a new government. It chose strategic normalization — deterrence over hesitation — and signaled that the era of passive alliance management is over.
For Washington, the message is clear: The most important geopolitical shift in Asia is not China’s rise alone, but Japan’s return. The alliance must evolve accordingly.
After 18 months of turmoil, lawlessness and Islamist violence, Bangladesh’s national election has produced a government with a commanding parliamentary supermajority. On paper, that should be a recipe for stability. In practice, it may instead entrench a new and potentially more dangerous form of instability.
The central question is no longer who holds power in Bangladesh, but whether the world’s most densely-populated large country can still function as an inclusive, rules-based state at all.
Bangladesh stands today at a perilous crossroads. Without political reconciliation and economic revival, it risks sliding toward the kind of Islamist dysfunction that has long plagued Pakistan, the country from which it seceded in a bloody war of liberation in 1971.
For half a century, Bangladesh’s politics has been dominated by two dynastic forces: the Awami League, established by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country’s charismatic founding leader who was killed in a 1975 army coup, and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), launched in 1978 by military ruler Ziaur Rahman, whose son Tarique Rahman now heads the new government. These parties have alternated between power and persecution, each using the state against the other.
Sheikh Hasina, Mujibur Rahman’s daughter, once symbolized democratic resilience and kept both the military and Islamist militancy in check. But her increasingly undemocratic rule triggered a violent, student-led, Islamist-backed uprising in 2024 that forced her into exile after she lost the military’s support. What followed was not a democratic transition but a dangerous vacuum.
The interim regime led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus presided over widespread repression, institutional purges and a resurgence of Islamist vigilantism. Armed mobs attacked minorities with impunity, journalists were silenced and thousands were imprisoned. Even more alarmingly, the regime rehabilitated extremist groups previously linked to terrorism, including releasing convicted terrorists, and allowed radical Islamists to enter the political mainstream.
The result is that Bangladesh now risks shifting from a secular-authoritarian order to an Islamist-majoritarian one.
Against that backdrop, this month’s election was less a democratic reset than a managed transition. The secular Awami League, historically the country’s largest political force, was arbitrarily outlawed last year and thousands of its members remain in jail without trial. As much as 30% to 40% of the electorate was effectively excluded from the election.
In that vacuum, the BNP emerged as the dominant electoral force. But it faced a new challenger in its former ally Jamaat-e-Islami, a hardline Islamist party. The election thus pitted an Islamist-leaning bloc against a coalition led by a hardline Islamist group, rather than offering a pluralistic national choice. Unsurprisingly, many Awami League supporters boycotted the vote and turnout fell sharply in minority-heavy constituencies, where intimidation and violence created a climate of fear.
The result is a 300-member parliament that may be numerically stable but socially brittle. It includes just seven women and only four members from religious and ethnic minority communities, though these groups make up about 10% of the population.
Even before the new government settles in, its legitimacy is already under challenge.
For years, the BNP and Jamaat-e-Islami accused the Awami League of rigging elections. Now, with the banned Awami League gone, the accusers have turned on each other. Jamaat — once the BNP’s indispensable ally, providing street muscle — has charged the BNP with rigging the the latest election, alleging widespread ballot fraud and irregularities.
This rupture reflects a deeper contest over who represents the spirit of the 2024 uprising, which Islamist groups helped organize and sustain. If the Islamist-led opposition believes it has been cheated of its “revolution,” Bangladesh may soon see renewed unrest.
Compounding this fragility is the near collapse of judicial credibility. Bangladesh’s Supreme Court has repeatedly reinterpreted the constitution to suit those in power, legitimizing coups, overturning its own precedents and even invoking a “revolutionary mandate” to justify continuance of an unelected interim regime.
In such a system, law becomes an instrument of power rather than a constraint on it. This is hardly a foundation for stability or investor confidence.
The new government, in fact, inherits an economy in distress. Growth has slowed sharply, inflation has surged, investor confidence has collapsed and foreign debt has risen. The BNP has indicated it will continue with the IMF bailout package negotiated by the interim regime, but austerity, subsidy cuts and banking reforms will impose real social costs, especially on a restless youth population.
The government must restore macroeconomic stability while delivering visible improvements in jobs and governance. Failure on either front could quickly translate into renewed street anger.
Bangladesh’s trajectory will have consequences beyond its borders. For India, instability raises immediate security concerns, including the risk of militant infiltration across a porous border. Bangladesh’s direction will also shape the regional balance between China, a major infrastructure investor, and Western partners seeking greater market access.
A parliamentary supermajority gives the BNP-led government enormous formal power. But political dominance is not legitimacy. Bangladesh’s cycles of instability have historically been driven not by weak governments but by exclusive ones — regimes that rule for one party while suppressing rival political forces. This election risks reproducing that pattern in a new ideological form.
True stability will require something Bangladesh has rarely sustained: national reconciliation. Countries emerging from deep trauma, from Rwanda to South Africa, recognized that durable peace depends on bringing former adversaries into a shared political framework. Bangladesh will need to do the same, to create a pathway for the Awami League and its supporters to reenter politics, protect minorities and dissenting voices, restore judicial independence and revive civil society.
Otherwise, the country risks replacing one form of autocracy with another: trading secular illiberalism for majoritarian Islamism, and stability for a cycle of confrontation and lawlessness.
The election has produced a government, but not a political settlement. Unless the new leadership uses its supermajority to widen inclusion, rebuild institutions and rein in extremist forces, the promise of stability and economic revival will remain elusive. The real test of this election will not be whether it delivered power, but whether it can deliver peace.
Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the independent New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research and fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground,” which won the Bernard Schwartz Book Award.
Trump might have done India a favor. By exposing the raw transactionalism at the core of his foreign policy, he has left no doubt that, under his leadership, the US is not a reliable strategic partner.
For over two decades, the United States has regarded India as a “natural partner” – a rising power whose geography, military capabilities, and democratic credentials made it indispensable to America’s strategy in the Indo-Pacific. Five successive US administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, invested heavily in strengthening that partnership, treating India not just as a market, but as a long-term strategic bet.
But the goodwill that the US built up with India over that period has been rapidly eroded since Donald Trump’s return to the presidency last year. Trump’s second presidency has brought repeated public insults and a bruising trade war, with the US using tariffs as tools of geopolitical coercion. The interim trade deal announced on February 2 may have halted the economic confrontation, but trust – the essential currency of any strategic partnership – is unlikely to be restored any time soon.
By reducing the effective US tariff burden on Indian goods from 50% to 18%, the newly announced deal will deliver short-term relief for India. But it comes with plenty of strings attached, including the requirement that India move toward near-zero tariffs on US industrial products and a wide range of agricultural goods. India’s decision to open its sensitive agricultural sector – the country’s largest employer – to a flood of imports from the US is already sparking a domestic backlash.
But that is not all. India has also agreed to purchase a whopping $500 billion worth of American goods over the next five years, and to replace discounted Russian oil with US energy at market prices, which also implies additional transport costs. Meanwhile, the US offered no binding commitments to India. This lopsided bargain looks nothing like a stable, reciprocal, rules-based trade partnership, and underscores how far US trade policy has drifted from World Trade Organization norms. It is probably best understood as a tactical de-escalation, not a strategic reconciliation.
The way the deal was announced reinforces this interpretation. Typically, bilateral agreements or joint statements are announced simultaneously in both capitals to signal equal partnership. The free-trade agreement India recently concluded with the European Union, which created a trade corridor encompassing roughly 25% of global GDP and one-third of world trade, was touted by both sides as the “mother of all deals.”
The US-India agreement, by contrast, was announced first by Trump, who portrayed it on his social-media platform as a favor to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose “request” for an agreement Trump had granted “out of friendship and respect.” Days later, the White House released a “joint statement” outlining the terms of the agreement at 5:00 a.m. Indian Standard Time.
The Trump administration then added injury to insult, announcing a presidential executive order authorizing reimposition of punitive tariffs if the US deems India to have violated its commitment to halt all direct and indirect imports of Russian oil. By framing Indian energy imports as a US national-security issue, the administration has turned economic engagement into a compliance test. The message to India is unmistakable: autonomy will be tolerated only within US-approved limits.
India’s leaders have framed the agreement as a win, noting that India now faces lower tariffs than China or Vietnam. But this is a low bar for a relationship that successive US administrations described as “defining.” And they are probably well aware that Trump could still pull the rug out from under them. The arrangement’s details have not yet been finalized, and Trump has a long history of changing his mind, scrapping deals, and layering on new demands.
Whatever happens next, India will not quickly forget Trump’s past betrayals. Nor will it overlook his slights, such as branding India, whose GDP growth outpaces all other major economies, as a “dead economy” last July.
In a sense, Trump might have done India a favor. By exposing the raw transactionalism at the core of his foreign policy, he has left no doubt that, under his leadership, the US is not a reliable strategic partner. As a result, India’s government is committed to diversifying India’s economic relationships away from the US, as underscored by its FTAs with the EU and the United Kingdom – an effort that will likely continue, regardless of the new trade agreement with the US.
Markets, too, are unlikely to put too much faith in the US. News of the trade deal did trigger a stock-market rally in India, but the gains are likely to be short-lived.
Strategic partnerships are sustained not by tariffs and threats, but by predictability, mutual respect, and restraint – qualities that have been conspicuously absent from Trump’s presidency. The US should beware. Whatever short-term concessions Trump secures through bullying and coercion will be dwarfed by the long-term costs of destabilizing a partnership that, as previous administrations recognized, is vital to American interests in the Indo-Pacific and beyond.
Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.
The “rules-based international order” was never a set of neutral rules. It was a story the U.S. told — about itself, its power and its right to bend norms when convenient.
In January, that story finally collapsed when Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called that order what many governments have long known it to be: a useful “fiction,” sustained less by universal law than by American power and selective enforcement.
For decades, when U.S. officials invoked a “rules-based international order,” they were not describing universal principles, but defending a flexible set of rules largely devised in Washington and adjusted whenever American interests required it. Now, as President Trump openly revives territorial expansion and economic coercion as tools of U.S. statecraft, that phrase no longer commands belief, even among America’s closest allies.
Carney, speaking in Davos, did what no major Western leader had previously dared to do: He called the bluff. The “rules-based order,” Carney said, was a convenient illusion — one the West itself knew was only partially true, tolerated for as long as U.S. hegemony delivered enough public goods to make the hypocrisy worthwhile. That bargain, he concluded, no longer works.
Carney’s candor marks a watershed. By naming the fiction out loud, he validated a critique long voiced by the Global South and quietly acknowledged across Western capitals. More importantly, he signaled that the era of polite silence surrounding American exceptionalism has ended.
Any international order must, by definition, rest on rules. Modern global life — trade, finance, aviation, maritime navigation — cannot function without shared norms and procedures. The real question has never been whether rules matter, but which rules matter most, and to whom they apply.
For many Western governments, the core norm underpinning the international order is the prohibition on territorial conquest. That is why Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was framed as a civilizational rupture. As then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken put it, the war challenged the principle that borders cannot be changed by force.
International law is indeed clear on this point: the U.N. Charter prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity of states, and the Geneva Conventions forbid the demographic transformation of occupied territories.
Yet the selective invocation of this norm has gradually eroded its credibility. The U.S. has repeatedly violated the territorial integrity of other states — not by annexing land, but by overthrowing governments and installing new ones that remain formally sovereign while substantively dependent on Washington. This maneuver allows Washington to deny conquest while achieving many of its effects.
Nor is Ukraine’s defense best understood as a pure defense of the norm against conquest. Great powers rarely act primarily to uphold norms. They intervene to prevent adverse shifts in the balance of power. The rallying of NATO behind Ukraine may have aligned with international law, but it was driven at least as much by strategic calculation as by legal fidelity.
The fiction of moral clarity was further strained by the rhetoric that cast the conflict as a battle between democracy and autocracy. Under Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine has lurched toward authoritarianism. As in past U.S. interventions, “fighting for freedom” has remained a narrative convenience rather than a consistent standard.
If the Biden administration strained the fiction, Trump has shattered it. Trump has openly re-embraced territorial expansion as a legitimate tool of statecraft. His second term has featured military intervention in Venezuela, renewed demands for U.S. control over Greenland and the Panama Canal, and an unapologetic revival of “Manifest Destiny.” Unlike his predecessors, Trump does not bother cloaking ambition in the language of universalism. He says the quiet part out loud.
Trump is not unique in expanding American power; because of his predecessors’ global expansion, there are about 750 U.S. military bases today in at least 80 countries. What is new is the abandonment of euphemism. By openly praising 19th-century imperial precedents and refusing to rule out coercion even against allies, Trump has made it impossible to pretend that the U.S. is merely the custodian of a rules-based order.
Norms survive not on consistency alone but on credibility. When enforcement is asymmetric, rules become tools rather than constraints. The same applies to the norm of non-interference, which has never prevented cyber operations, sanctions, covert actions or targeted killings. No major power — whether the U.S., Russia or China — fully abides by it. What differs is how honestly that reality is acknowledged.
Carney’s comments matter precisely because they strip away the last vestiges of moral theater. By admitting that Western allies knowingly participated in a ritualized fiction, he reframed the present moment not as a transition, but as a “rupture.” The old bargain — accept U.S. primacy in exchange for stability and public goods — is unraveling. What replaces it will be messier and more transactional.
The “rules-based order” endured not because it was universally respected, but because it was useful — and because American power made it impolite to ask questions. With that politeness gone, what remains is not the collapse of order, but the collapse of pretense. This may allow for a more honest reckoning with power, interest and responsibility.
The upcoming election is shaping up to be one of the most consequential political contests Japan has faced in decades, largely because it will determine whether Japan decisively locks in a new strategic orientation at home and abroad. The vote will effectively function as a referendum on whether Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s more assertive approach to economic security, global engagement and China receives a democratic mandate or stalls amid political fragmentation.
The election outcome will also signal whether China’s model of economic coercion is effective against a major U.S. ally. Beijing has deployed a full-spectrum pressure campaign against Takaichi’s four-month administration — punitive measures designed to hurt Japanese business interests and undermine domestic support for her government.
A Takaichi victory would represent a significant setback for China, signaling that Japanese voters are prepared to absorb real economic pain in exchange for greater strategic autonomy. Reducing exposure to Chinese economic pressure is also essential for navigating a more coercive global order, one in which U.S. President Donald Trump has shown little hesitation in pressuring even close allies.
Equally important is how the election intersects with Japan’s international role, especially in the Global South. Under Takaichi, engagement with key developing countries has become a core pillar of economic resilience. The campaign has elevated “Sanaenomics,” a strategy that emphasizes supply-chain diversification, technological co-creation and reduced dependence on China. Countries such as India, Vietnam and the Philippines are positioned not only as alternative manufacturing hubs under a “China-plus-one” strategy, but also as long-term partners in energy, AI governance and critical infrastructure.
The election thus has implications far beyond Japan. A clear mandate would accelerate Japan’s shift toward a more forward-leaning, technology-driven diplomacy, aimed at out-competing — rather than accommodating — Chinese influence. Conversely, a weaker or divided outcome would slow this transition, as Japan enters an era of fragmented, coalition-based bargaining.
In short, the vote will help determine whether Japan emerges as a more autonomous strategic actor or remains vulnerable to external pressure in an era of weaponized interdependence.
Brahma Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at the independent New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research and fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin.
Stagecraft and Statecraft 
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