Since returning to the White House, Donald Trump has slashed foreign aid and weaponized the United States’ economic power to bully long-standing allies, underscoring his administration’s abandonment of multilateralism. Europe must respond by forging a more inclusive international order, with or without the US.
In a matter of months, both the international role and global standing of the United States have undergone a profound transformation. Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, the country once described by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright as the “indispensable nation” upholding the rules-based multilateral order has rapidly mutated into an extractive superpower.
Rather than protecting the stability and integrity of the global system, US foreign policy now appears to be geared toward extracting resources from adversaries and allies alike through the use – and abuse – of the political, economic, diplomatic, and military tools at the Trump administration’s disposal.
“The strongest is always the best”
In their 2012 book Why Nations Fail, Nobel laureate economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson define extractive institutions as “designed to extract incomes and wealth from one subset of society to benefit a different subset.”
By extension, an extractive superpower seeks to transfer wealth and income from the rest of the world to its own citizens – or, in the case of Trump’s America, to a subset of them, typically the most privileged and politically connected.
To justify its policies, Trump’s administration has weaponized deep-rooted resentments, chief among them the belief that the US has been exploited by other countries for decades and must now correct these perceived injustices. In his recent book The Great Trade Hack, economist Richard Baldwin refers to this tangle of resentments as the “grievance doctrine.”
Trump’s April 2 announcement of his “Liberation Day” tariffs, which marked the launch of his global trade war, offers a striking example:
“For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike. American steelworkers, auto workers, farmers, and skilled craftsmen – we have a lot of them here with us today – they really suffered gravely.
They watched in anguish as foreign leaders have stolen our jobs, foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories, and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once beautiful American dream.”
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