Trumpism’s Global Governance Playbook: Coherent Strategy, Not Contradiction, New Study Argues

When the Trump administration withdrew from the Paris Agreement, defunded the World Health Organization, and paralyzed the World Trade Organization’s dispute settlement system, many observers saw a chaotic, contradictory retreat from the world stage. Yet a new open-access study published in the journal Global Public Policy and Governance argues the opposite: that the administration’s seemingly erratic posture toward international institutions was in fact a coherent, internally consistent strategy. Researchers Jin Sun of The Chinese University of Hong Kong and Hanzhi Yu of Zhejiang University contend that Trumpism represents a deliberate recalibration of American power for what they call a post-neoliberal competitive global order, an era in which great-power rivalry has replaced the cooperative multilateralism that defined the post-Cold War decades.

The core of the argument is that the United States has shifted its strategic ambition from sustaining global governance to advancing national goals within a competitive system. Where the neoliberal unipolar order of the 1990s and 2000s rested on the premise that a benevolent hegemon would underwrite institutions such as the WTO, the UN framework, and the liberal trading system, the emerging order is one in which a declining hegemon and rising powers vie to promote norms that serve their respective national interests. In this environment, the authors argue, the Trumpist mix of unilateral enforcement, bilateral coercion, and selective multilateralism is not a contradiction but a toolkit, with each instrument deployed according to a ruthless cost-benefit calculus aimed at maximizing American leverage against strategic competitors such as China and Russia.

The theoretical framework the authors develop, which they term the post-neoliberal competitive global order, builds on scholarship about transnational legal orders, the processes by which global norms are constructed, contested, and institutionalized across national boundaries. Halliday and Carruthers’s classic model of recursive lawmaking described global norm-making as a negotiation between international standard-setters and national lawmakers. Sun and Yu argue that this model must be augmented to capture contemporary dynamics, because norm-making has shifted from multilateral consensus-building toward overt coercion and geopolitical bargaining. They identify three interconnected processes defining the new order: agenda-setting for global norms has become a contested arena rather than a cooperative endeavor; norm-making itself is increasingly characterized by coercion rather than persuasion; and enforcement now spans a spectrum from unilateral sanctions to selective multilateral mechanisms, with great powers strategically choosing among them.

The first pillar of the Trumpist strategy, unilateral enforcement, is illustrated most vividly by trade policy. The calculated paralysis of the WTO’s Appellate Body, achieved by blocking the appointment of judges, was not simply an exit from a dispute mechanism but a coercive act that dismantled a binding legal constraint perceived as no longer serving US interests. What followed was an unprecedented global tariff war. According to the study, the imposition of high, across-the-board levies caused a dramatic drop in global exports to the United States, with EU exports falling 21 percent and Chinese exports falling 36 percent in a single quarter of 2025. China retaliated against a 54 percent US tariff with 34 percent tariffs on all American imports, and in a striking reversal of alignments, the European Union and China issued a rare joint statement condemning the widespread disruption caused by the US tariffs and stressing their shared responsibility to support a strong, reformed trading system.

Unilateral enforcement extended well beyond trade. The withdrawal from the Paris Agreement signaled that the United States would no longer be bound by collective climate targets it deemed economically disadvantageous, challenging the existing agenda of global environmental governance. In the security domain, airstrikes against Iranian facilities were conducted outside the framework of the UN Security Council, an assertion that non-proliferation norms would be enforced through unilateral force when multilateral institutions were judged too slow or politically constrained. The authors emphasize that these moves should not be read as isolationist retreat. Rather, they represent a hegemon selectively abandoning its role as steward of multilateral governance in order to wield raw power in a manner it believes maximizes advantage, even at the cost of weakening the very system it once shaped.

The second pillar, bilateral coercion, operates through one-on-one pressure where American power advantages are most pronounced. The renegotiation of NAFTA into the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement is the paradigmatic case. By negotiating directly with Canada and Mexico, the United States imposed new model clauses that would have been impossible to secure in a multilateral forum, including the elimination or narrowing of investor-state dispute mechanisms and restrictions on partners’ trade agreements with so-called non-market economies, a clear reference to China. The study describes this as a deliberate act of bilateral coercion designed to promote US-centric rules for international trade while isolating strategic competitors and avoiding collective resistance from emerging powers in venues such as the WTO.

The same coercive logic was applied to alliance management. Rather than working through the North Atlantic Council, where collective pressure could be exerted back on Washington, the administration opted for direct, public bilateral criticism of individual European allies, as well as Asian partners including Japan and South Korea, demanding significant increases in defense spending. The objective, according to the authors, was to shatter the collective free-rider problem in collective security by replacing collaborative consensus with asymmetric bilateral pressure, compelling allies to internalize costs the United States had previously borne and freeing American financial and military resources for strategic competition elsewhere. Alliance relationships were thus restructured on purely transactional terms.

The third pillar, selective multilateralism, completes the strategic triad and explains the puzzle of why an administration hostile to broad institutions simultaneously deepened engagement in others. The strengthening of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue with Japan, Australia, and India exemplifies a limited coalitional effort aimed at establishing a norm of a free and open Indo-Pacific as a direct counter to China’s expanding influence, without subjecting the United States to the institutional constraints of bodies like the UN or NATO. In global health, the study notes, the administration withdrew funding from the WHO while engaging with and funding the Global Fund, a limited, voluntary mechanism where US pharmaceutical interests held disproportionate sway; the US State Department’s own America First Global Health Strategy records that the Global Fund has procured 3.5 billion dollars in goods and services from US corporations since 2010. Similarly, the administration maintained influence in the IMF and used the UN Security Council’s snapback procedure to restore sanctions on Iran, favoring institutions where it holds veto power while disengaging from those led by competitors.

The implications, the authors conclude, are profound. The strategic selectivity of Trumpism has accelerated the fragmentation of global governance into a contested regime complexity, creating governance vacuums and a precarious gap in the supply of global norms and public goods at precisely the moment when challenges such as climate change and pandemics demand collective action. Theoretically, the framework suggests that hegemonic dominance generates a recursive response from competing powers: China is developing corresponding governance initiatives, including the Belt and Road Initiative and newly founded multilateral institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which paradoxically embrace multilateralism even as the declining hegemon turns unilateral. The authors draw a historical parallel to the rivalry between a declining British Empire and an emerging United States after World War I, when the declining power favored coercive measures while the rising power championed Wilsonian multilateralism. If that pattern holds, the cost-benefit calculus articulated by Trumpism is likely to persist across administrations, compelling a lasting reshaping of multilateralism and the very structure of the global governance order in the twenty-first century.

Subject of Research: The Trumpist strategy of selective engagement with global governance institutions in a post-neoliberal competitive global order

Article Title: The trumpist rationale of global governance in post-neoliberal competitive global order

Article References: Sun, J., & Yu, H. (2025). The trumpist rationale of global governance in post-neoliberal competitive global order. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 316-328. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00132-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00132-w

Keywords: global governance, Trumpism, unilateralism, selective multilateralism, bilateral coercion, post-neoliberal order, US-China rivalry, WTO, tariff war, Paris Agreement, hegemonic stability, international relations