Multilateral world under threat as Trump takes aim

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If, at the start of the year, anyone still hoped Donald Trump and his Maga movement’s dismissal of the rules-based multilateral order was more bark than bite, they will have been disabused by the US raid on Venezuela. It showed that the revived Monroe Doctrine and great power competition concerns set out in December’s National Security Strategy are meant seriously.

The abduction of a foreign leader is about as unilateral as you can get. But the second Trump administration had already made its disdain for traditional multilateralism amply clear.

In 2025 the US pulled out of the Paris Agreement on climate change (again) and the World Health Organization, followed by another 66 groups and conventions earlier this month.

The US remains in the World Trade Organization but has doubled down on its long-standing antagonism, most recently by formally disavowing the “most favoured nation” principle. This foundation stone of the postwar trading system, requires a country to grant the lowest tariff offered to its “most favoured” trading partner to all others with MFN status. (In practice, the so-called “reciprocal tariffs” announced in April made MFN a dead letter as far as the US was concerned.)

The US has always been selective in its approach to multilateralism. If, postwar, it promoted structures of formal equality between nations such as the UN, it reserved its freedom to act outside or against the rules it set up. But for three-quarters of a century, Washington saw the existence of a rules-based multilateral system as in its interest.

[The National Security Strategy] would issue instead from a dense network of personal relationships that supersede any alliances or any division of countries along the lines of democracy or authoritarianism

That is no longer true. So what remains of multilateralism today? What prospects may its supporters still hope for — and what exactly is the Trump administration trying to replace it with? 

Optimists may point to its willingness to work with groups of countries that accept its redefined interest. The “pax silica” compact, for example, aligns a handful of countries, including Japan, Israel, Singapore, the UK, and Australia, with US economic security priorities for the AI supply chain. In the WTO, the US calls for coalitions of the willing to follow its lead on trade policy. If not quite multilateralism, it is at least a plurilateralism of convenience that seeks to rally countries behind the US and against China in particular. 

Conversely, other countries can pursue a reverse plurilateralism on a “world minus one” basis. WHO members passed a pandemic treaty last spring, without the US. At the COP30 climate talks in Brazil in November, a large group of countries vowed to form a coalition of those willing to work towards phasing out fossil fuels — a goal notably absent in the consensus declaration. Immediately afterwards, leaders at the G20 summit hosted by South Africa signed a joint statement against the wishes of the US — whose president did not turn up.

These are all signs that the multilateral institutions set up in the 80 years since the second world war, under the aegis of the US itself, may be robust enough to keep functioning even after the withdrawal of their principal sponsor. While their influence may be curtailed, they may still usefully serve those who still find them valuable — which probably means most countries.

But will the US let them? Far from being isolationist, “America First” has turned out to be less than indifferent to how the rest of the world arranges its affairs.

The US has made several efforts at sabotaging multilateral initiatives. It has sanctioned top officials of the International Criminal Court. In October, it managed to help overturn a vote in the International Maritime Organization to impose levies on carbon emissions from shipping, by strong-arming enough delegates, including through threats of personal repercussions. It has even threatened to seize Greenland, a fellow Nato country’s territory.

What the Trump administration wants to replace multilateralism with, however, can be hard to pin down — those shaping the White House’s foreign policy come in many factions. The Venezuela raid, for instance, brought together the Monroe Doctrine, neoconservative interventionism, traditional promotion of US corporate interests (in this case oil) and Maga’s obsession with immigrants and narcotics. 

As a result, experts highlight different aspects of Washington’s new approach to international relations. Nathalie Tocci, director of Italy’s Instituto Affari Internazionale, reads the US National Security Strategy as a declaration of “imperial collusion with both Russia and China”. 

For history professor Michael Kimmage, the NSS presents “an aspirational world order” which would not be “the function of great-power competition or of civilisational clashes . . . It would issue instead from a dense network of personal relationships that supersede any alliances or any division of countries along the lines of democracy or authoritarianism.”

In the same vein, politics scholars Stacie Goddard and Abraham Newman have identified the emergence of a “neo-royalist international order” shaped by “cliques” of “hyper-elites” rather than conventional national or international structured authorities. 

Atop it all sits Donald Trump, a leader seeming to prefer chaos over predictability. So whatever follows the postwar multilateral order, the transition is liable to be scary. When an old world is dying and the new one struggling to be born, Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci wrote before the second world war, it is a “time of monsters”.