Modern-Day's Ideological Conflicts

World leaders increasingly treat the management of Trump's emotions as a strategic priority. The NATO Secretary-General has referred to Trump as "daddy," while Qatar gifted him a $400 million plane. This is less traditional diplomacy and more akin to paying tribute. Populism, as political theorist Cas Mudde defines it, is a thin-centered ideology that divides society into "the pure people" versus "the corrupt elite," positioning the populist leader as the sole interpreter of the popular will. However, Trump's 2025–2026 foreign policy transcends classic populism. It embodies what Jan-Werner Müller calls "populism plus"—the fusion of anti-pluralism with transactional authoritarianism. While traditional populists weaponize rhetoric domestically, Trump weaponizes state power globally. The November 2025 National Security Strategy declares that the United States "will no longer tolerate, and can no longer afford, free-riding, trade imbalances, predatory economic practices, and other impositions." This frames diplomacy not as a partnership, but as a ledger-balancing exercise: every treaty is a transaction, and every alliance is measured against a debt.

Behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman's prospect theory illuminates why other nations submit to this pressure. Prospect theory demonstrates that humans are loss-averse: the pain of losing $100 far outweighs the pleasure of gaining $100. Applied to geopolitics, Trump exploits this asymmetry. He has deployed tariff threats to shape the behavior of India, Pakistan, Canada, Europe, and the U.K. In February 2026, the Supreme Court ruled the IEEPA (International Emergency Economic Powers Act) tariffs illegal, finding that the government had collected $166 billion from more than 330,000 businesses in unconstitutional tariffs. Yet, the mere threat worked. Nations calculate the immediate economic pain of resisting (tariffs, sanctions, exclusion), while compliance offers uncertain future costs. Loss aversion tips the scales toward submission. The threat itself becomes the policy. Trump does not need legal authority; instead, he relies on credible volatility.

Since 2025, the Trump administration has sought to annex Greenland, escalating in early 2026 after Trump refused to rule out military force and threatened a 25% import tax on EU goods unless Denmark ceded the territory. On January 17, 2026, Trump announced an extra 10% tariff on Denmark, the UK, and six other European countries. By January 21, however, Trump reversed his position at the Davos conference, pledging not to use force or tariffs to annex Greenland. This reversal reveals the underlying mechanism: Europe mobilized troops, and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte negotiated. Observers describe this foreign policy as imperialist and expansionist in the Americas, yet isolationist in Europe—an expansive Monroe Doctrine that Trump himself dubbed the "Donroe Doctrine." Denmark did not cede its sovereignty, but it negotiated under duress.

Defenders argue that Trump's approach restores American primacy after decades of asymmetric burdens. As Stephen Miller explained: "We're a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower." Realists might applaud this candor, noting that great powers have always used coercion. From this perspective, the liberal order was never truly liberal, but merely an American hegemony that contained other ideologies and nations within its own liberal framework. Yet, attributing Trump's unchecked aggression solely to ideological fusion and behavioral economics risks overstating American power and understating structural constraints. Washington's relative weight in the global economy is set to decline regardless, driven not just by China's rise but by steady catch-up growth across middle powers and emerging economies. Indeed, in 2025, China overtook the United States as Germany's top trading partner, which hardly depicts a tariff-weakened Beijing. The absence of global opposition may reflect strategic patience rather than mere acquiescence: countries are not resisting because they are waiting for Trump's overreach to accelerate American decline. As Middle East analyst Aaron David Miller notes, "You don't build a coalition after you go to war. You build a coalition with weeks and months of diplomacy before you go to war." Trump's ideological fusion produces short-term dominance but risks long-term isolation, as allies conclude that American unreliability is a rapidly depreciating asset.

Trump's aggression persists not because it is ideologically coherent or strategically sound, but because it exploits a specific moment when American military dominance still exceeds its steadily declining economic and diplomatic capital. The fusion of authoritarian populism, neoconservative interventionism, and transactional realism creates a foreign policy that is simultaneously brutal and fragile—making it capable of invading Venezuela, but incapable of securing the Strait of Hormuz without pleading for European assistance. Countries are not opposing Trump because doing so would require believing in either his permanence or American indispensability. They believe in neither. The real question is not why no country opposes him; it is what happens when they stop calculating losses and start calculating his irrelevance.

REFERENCES

• Müller, Jan-Werner, “What Is Populism?”, 2016 — Definitive analysis of how populist leaders claim exclusive representation of "the people" to justify dismantling institutional constraints.

• Kahneman, Daniel & Tversky, Amos, "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk," Econometrica, 1979 — Foundational behavioral economics demonstrating loss aversion shapes political and economic decision-making under uncertainty.

• Walt, Stephen M., The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy, 2018 — Incisive critique of how American foreign policy consensus—liberal interventionism and neoconservatism—produced endless failures and eroded U.S. global standing.