How America First Rewrote the Rules of Global Governance

Few political figures have disrupted the architecture of international cooperation as abruptly as Donald Trump. A new editorial published in the journal Global Public Policy and Governance, written by Bert Rockman of Purdue University, Yijia Jing of Fudan University, Tom Pegram of University College London, and Christiane Traniello of Villa Vigoni, examines how two Trump presidencies have reshaped global institutions, cross-border common goods, and the wider international order. The editorial introduces a Special Issue dedicated to analyzing the mechanisms through which a political outsider converted an openly transactional worldview into operational foreign policy. The authors argue that the phenomenon is not merely an American story. It is a stress test of the liberal international order itself, revealing which parts of that order are resilient, which are brittle, and which depend on unwritten norms that a single administration can suspend at will.

The editorial traces an unexpected political trajectory. Unlike right-wing populist politicians in Europe, Trump was not clearly identified by party or political inclination until 2015, the year he announced his candidacy for the U.S. presidency. For much of his career he worked as a marketeer, stamping his name on hotels, condominiums, wine, neckties, steaks, and even what the authors describe as a bogus university. The American political establishment did not take him seriously. Yet a significant element within the evolving core of the Republican Party did. Rockman and his colleagues describe how Trump found a way to channel resentment against prevailing elites, and how a central pillar of his pitch was the claim that America was being taken advantage of by its purported allies and by the rest of the world. That framing, the authors note, was not the whole of his appeal, but it was an essential structural component of it.

The intellectual core of the Trump approach to world affairs is captured in the slogan America First, a phrase previously associated with pre-World War II American isolationists. Some observers, the editorial notes, have defined America First as America Alone. In the authors’ analysis the doctrine has two operational components. The first is transactionalism: American international policy should be based on self-interested advantages in international dealings rather than on ideological differences. The second concerns the instruments of statecraft. Soft power, the capacity to attract and persuade through culture, values, and institutional credibility, should be eliminated, while hard power should be enhanced. This inversion matters technically because soft power is a slow-building asset embedded in alliances, treaties, and reputational capital, whereas hard power is deployed directly. A strategy that liquidates the former to expand the latter changes the cost structure of every future negotiation the United States enters.

The first Trump administration provided a proof of concept. The editorial records that many steps were taken to undo prior international commitments, including the Paris accords on global climate change and the six-power agreement with Iran designed to stem the potential development of nuclear weapons. Both withdrawals illustrate the transactional logic in practice. The Paris agreement rested on diffuse, long-horizon collective action, a structure that yields no immediate bilateral leverage and therefore carries little value under a purely transactional calculus. The Iran accord, by contrast, was a negotiated constraint exchange, verifiable in its terms but revocable by any successor government, which made it vulnerable to a doctrine that weighted immediate advantage over institutional continuity. Climate cooperation and nonproliferation are both classic transboundary common goods, and the editorial frames their erosion as precisely the kind of damage that motivates the Special Issue.

Guardrails, however, were present during the first term. The authors attribute this partly to what they describe as the president’s limited attention span, which worked in some measure to soften the actual policy product. This observation has analytical significance for students of governance. Policy outcomes in presidential systems depend not only on the preferences of the chief executive but on the friction of implementation: career civil servants, legal review, allied pushback, and the sheer bandwidth required to convert intentions into regulations and diplomatic actions. In the first administration, that friction absorbed much of the radical energy. Institutions acted as dampers, and the deviations from international norms, though real, were buffered by the residual authority of the foreign policy establishment.

The second presidency removed those dampers. The editorial states that by the time Trump reappeared as president after losing the 2020 election, preparations for an even more radical departure from international norms were in place, no longer to be disturbed by the existing foreign policy establishment. In a striking formulation, the authors invoke reverse biblical parlance to describe the transformation of American foreign policy power as the capacity to turn alms into arms. The image conveys a substitution of coercion for inducement. Where the traditional postwar toolkit relied on aid, membership benefits, and shared institutions to align other states’ incentives, the renovated toolkit substitutes direct pressure. The technical consequence is a shift from repeated-game cooperation, in which states invest in reputation across many interactions, to one-shot bargaining in which every relationship is priced independently.

The contributions gathered in the Special Issue analyze how these radical plans have come to some measure of fruition and what they have done to the global system. According to the editorial, the articles examine effects on regional alliances, on the production of common goods across national borders, and on the dilution, if not full elimination, of soft power resources. The concept of common goods is central to the analysis. Public goods such as climate stability, pandemic preparedness, and open trade routes suffer from underprovision when the largest contributor withdraws, because no single smaller state can substitute for its scale. When the hegemonic guarantor of an order converts its contributions into bilateral transactions, the collective-good equilibrium of the entire system shifts, and regional powers must decide whether to backfill the gap, hedge, or pursue autonomous provision.

The editorial also directs attention to the demand side of the Trump phenomenon, exploring why it has been successful in gaining power in the United States. The authors connect that domestic success to the international consequences: the same anti-elite, anti-establishment resentment that propelled the candidacy supplies the political energy for dismantling the institutional commitments that elites built. This coupling means that the durability of the transactional turn cannot be assessed by studying diplomacy alone. It requires understanding the constituent coalition within the Republican Party that took Trump seriously when the establishment did not, and the conditions under which that coalition continues to reward the abandonment of multilateral commitments. The Special Issue’s contributors treat this domestic-international linkage as a single analytic problem rather than two separate fields.

The final strand of the editorial concerns reconstruction. The authors write that the contributions consider how global policy and institutions must now be conceived and remade in the aftermath of the Trump disruptions. That question has a technical dimension. Institutions designed in the mid-twentieth century assumed a stable American commitment anchored in ideological alignment and reputational investment. If transactionalism persists across administrations, then effective redesign may require mechanisms that do not depend on the goodwill of a single hegemon: distributed financing, automatic compliance incentives, and coalition structures in which middle powers carry larger shares of provision. The editorial, published as an open-access framing piece in Global Public Policy and Governance in December 2025, positions the Special Issue as an early empirical accounting of what breaks when the rules-based order is run on a strictly self-interested ledger, and as a starting point for thinking about which parts of global governance can be rebuilt to withstand it.

Subject of Research: The impact of the America First doctrine and two Trump presidencies on global governance and the international order

Article Title: Trump and globalism

Article References: Rockman, B., Jing, Y., Pegram, T., & Traniello, C. (2025). Trump and globalism. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 303-304. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00139-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00139-3

Keywords: Donald Trump, globalism, global governance, America First, foreign policy, soft power, hard power, international order, transactionalism, Paris accords, Iran nuclear deal, common goods