The analytical core of the paper rests on a distinction between disruption and catalysis. Where much commentary has treated Trump’s approach to alliances as an anomaly to be waited out, Scotto contends that the phenomenon functions instead as an accelerant for dynamics that were already latent in the European project. The European Union has long possessed economic weight and regulatory power, often described through the notion of the Brussels Effect, in which EU standards shape global markets, but it has historically lacked the capacity for collective action in the domains of hard security and high politics. Scholars have described the EU as a regulatory polity, strong at setting rules for trade and product standards yet weak at integrating what are called core state powers: defense, policing, taxation, and the other instruments through which states ultimately guarantee their own survival. Trump’s return to the presidency, the paper argues, has exposed this asymmetry with unusual force.

The first of three interrelated dynamics identified in the study concerns the rebalancing of the transatlantic relationship itself. Since the founding decades of the Cold War, European security has rested on what the historian Geir Lundestad famously described as an empire by invitation, in which Western European states welcomed an American security umbrella in exchange for alignment. That bargain assumed a durable American commitment to European territorial integrity. Trump’s public skepticism toward NATO, his demands that European allies dramatically increase defense spending, and his framing of alliances as transactions in which the United States pays and everybody else benefits have converted that assumption into a conditional one. The paper traces this rhetorical lineage from Trump’s 2016 campaign statements, when he called NATO obsolete and suggested the alliance might be allowed to break up, through his 2024 Republican National Convention speech, showing how the conditional character of American protection has become an explicit feature of the strategic environment rather than a background assumption.

This conditionality has spurred a cascade of EU-level and national initiatives. The study points to the Strategic Compass adopted by the Council of the European Union in 2022, which set out an ambitious framework for the Union to act as a security provider, and to the 2016 EU Global Strategy, which had already urged the Union to learn what the then High Representative Josep Borrell later called the language of power. More concretely, the European Council established the Security Action for Europe, known as SAFE, in May 2025, reinforcing the European Defence Industry Instrument in order to expand joint procurement and strengthen the continent’s defense industrial base. These measures, the paper suggests, represent more than incremental policy adjustments. They signal an emerging recognition that the governance architecture of the EU, historically optimized for market integration and regulation, must now extend into domains that member states have jealously guarded as symbols of sovereignty.

The second dynamic examined in the study concerns Germany’s evolving role in European defense, a topic the author treats as one of the most consequential and most ambivalent dimensions of the current transformation. For decades, Germany was characterized in the scholarly literature as the EU’s reluctant hegemon, an economic giant whose political culture, historical memory, and constitutional constraints made it unwilling to translate its economic strength into military leadership. The Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 prompted Chancellor Olaf Scholz to declare a Zeitenwende, a historic turning point, announcing a fundamental reorientation of German security policy and a special fund for rearmament. Yet the paper highlights the dilemmas that persist beneath this rhetorical shift. German rearmament raises difficult questions about burden-sharing within the EU, about the appropriate relationship between national capabilities and collective European instruments, and about how a militarily stronger Germany would be embedded in European institutions so as to reassure rather than alarm its neighbors.

The third dynamic identified in the analysis is the emergence of a political nucleus for European defense and foreign policy through intergovernmental and minilateral cooperation. Rather than a grand treaty-based leap toward a federal European army, the paper observes that the most significant developments are occurring in smaller, flexible formats. The Weimar Triangle, bringing together France, Germany, and Poland, is cited as one such grouping with the potential to lead on both security and industrial policy. The Franco-German embedded bilateralism that scholars Ulrich Krotz and Joachim Schild have documented as the historical engine of European integration is being supplemented by wider coalitions of the willing and able. This minilateral pattern reflects what the author, drawing on his earlier work on intergovernmentalism in EU crises, sees as a recurring feature of European integration: progress tends to occur through improvised, crisis-driven arrangements negotiated among a small set of pivotal states, which may later be generalized to the Union as a whole.

The paper situates these contemporary developments within a longer intellectual history of transatlantic asymmetry. Robert Kagan’s influential formulation of Americans being from Mars and Europeans from Venus captured a period in which Europe, sheltered under American protection, could afford to invest in civilian and normative power while the United States exercised hard power. The paper also invokes Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of the end of history, the post-Cold War expectation that liberal democracy and American-led order would face no fundamental challenger, and notes how that expectation has given way to a multipolar international system in which Europe must define its own position. Even Renaissance political thought, the author suggests in a historical aside drawing on Guicciardini’s account of Italy’s state system, offers precedents for how middle powers navigate between larger protectors and their own security imperatives. The point of these references is to underline that the current moment is not without historical parallel, even though its specific configuration is unprecedented.

Among the most sensitive questions the paper surveys is the nuclear dimension of European autonomy. A forum in the journal Survival in 2024 debated the prospects for a European nuclear deterrent, and a subsequent 2025 analysis by Lawrence Freedman examined the here and now of Europe’s nuclear options. The paper treats these debates as emblematic of the deeper transformation underway: if American extended deterrence becomes unreliable, European states must at least consider what strategic autonomy would mean at the highest level of escalation. The author does not present a European bomb as an imminent or settled prospect, but the very fact that such discussions have moved from the margins to the mainstream of strategic commentary illustrates how far the terms of the debate have shifted under the pressure of American retrenchment. Similarly, tensions over technology policy, including American criticism of European digital regulation described by the EU Institute for Security Studies as deepening the EU-US rift, show that the rebalancing extends well beyond defense into economic and regulatory affairs.

The paper’s conclusion is deliberately measured. Europe, Scotto argues, may be entering a post-American phase, but this phase is not defined by rupture with Washington. Rather, it is defined by the potential, still unfulfilled, for a rebalanced partnership with the United States and for a more autonomous European role in a multipolar order. The distinction matters: the analysis does not predict a clean break, nor does it claim that European strategic autonomy is already achieved. Instead, it identifies the institutional, industrial, and political building blocks that are being laid, from SAFE procurement instruments to German rearmament to minilateral defense coalitions, and asks whether they can cohere into durable governance. The answer, the paper suggests, will depend on whether Europe can convert crisis-driven improvisation into permanent capability, a challenge that has defeated earlier generations of European strategists but that the current conjuncture makes unusually urgent.

For observers of European politics, the study offers a framework for interpreting the accelerating stream of defense announcements, procurement deals, and diplomatic realignments emerging from Brussels and national capitals. Its central claim, that Trump operates less as a cause than as a catalyst of European governance change, implies that the transformation will not reverse with a change of administration in Washington. The unresolved questions of European defense, foreign policy coordination, and political integration that the American presidency has thrust into the open are, on this account, structural rather than episodic. Whether Europe seizes the moment to build governance commensurate with its economic weight, or continues to rely on an increasingly conditional American guarantee, remains the defining question of the continent’s security policy for the decade ahead.

Subject of Research: The impact of US repositioning under Trump on European Union defense and governance integration

Article Title: Toward a post-American Europe? Trump as a catalyst for EU governance

Article References: Scotto, M. (2025). Toward a post-American Europe? Trump as a catalyst for EU governance. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 433-443. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00128-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00128-6

Keywords: Donald Trump, European Union, EU governance, European defense, NATO, strategic autonomy, transatlantic relations, Germany, intergovernmentalism, multipolarity, foreign policy, defense industry

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

The study adopts a qualitative approach that combines document analysis with a case study method, conceptualizing Vietnam as a representative middle power. Middle powers occupy an awkward middle ground in international politics: too large and capable to simply bandwagon with a stronger state, yet too small to shape the international system on their own. For such states, hedging offers an alternative to the binary choices of balancing against one power or aligning with another. Instead of committing, a hedging state keeps its options open, spreading its dependencies so that no single great power can dictate its foreign policy.

What makes Vietnam’s version of hedging distinctive is its ideological framing. The country’s leadership has articulated the approach through the metaphor of bamboo diplomacy, first systematically laid out by General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong at the National Conference on Foreign Affairs in December 2021. Trong described a distinctive school of foreign affairs rooted in the image of the Vietnamese bamboo, characterized by firm roots, a solid trunk, and flexible branches. The metaphor captures the technical logic of the strategy: principles remain fixed while tactics bend with circumstances. The bamboo sways in the storm but does not break, and it does not uproot itself to escape the wind.

The security dimension of this doctrine is codified in Vietnam’s 2019 National Defence White Paper, which commits the country to what analysts describe as a set of explicit refusals. Vietnam will not join military alliances, will not align with one country against another, will not allow foreign states to establish military bases on its territory or use Vietnamese soil for military activities against other nations, and will not use force or threaten its use in international relations. This stands in deliberate contrast to, for example, NATO members bound by Article 5, which treats an attack on one ally as an attack on all and obligates collective response. Hanoi’s four noes are designed precisely to avoid such binding entanglements that would collapse its maneuvering space into a single bloc.

Economically, the hedging strategy manifests as simultaneous deepening of ties with both rivals. Vietnam and China have recorded unprecedented expansion in bilateral trade, with China remaining deeply embedded in Vietnamese supply chains as a source of inputs and machinery. At the same time, the United States has become one of Vietnam’s most important export markets and a growing source of multi-sectoral investment trending toward higher value chains. The study notes that this dual dependence functions almost as a form of mutual deterrence: each superpower has substantial economic stakes in Vietnam, giving both reasons to compete for Hanoi’s goodwill rather than coerce it. Researchers have described this dynamic as economic mutual assured dependence, a strategic tool that middle powers can wield against far larger rivals.

The return of President Donald Trump and the America First agenda has injected new stress into this equilibrium. The study documents how Washington’s tariff decisions have directly tested Vietnamese resilience, prompting high-level engagement from Hanoi, including discussions between General Secretary To Lam and President Trump aimed at reducing import tariffs, with Vietnam signaling readiness to negotiate tariff levels down to zero percent. The authors frame these episodes as evidence that hedging is not passive. It requires constant active management, as Vietnamese officials pursue economic and trade policy dialogues with the United States while simultaneously cultivating stable foundations for relations with China.

The diplomatic record of 2025 and early 2026 illustrates the balancing act in fine grain. Vietnam has consistently described the United States as a leading strategic partner, upgrading the relationship to a comprehensive strategic partnership, the highest tier in its diplomatic hierarchy. Yet in the same period, Vietnam conducted its first joint army drill with China, an episode analysts at the Carnegie Endowment interpreted as a signal that Hanoi remains neither comrade nor ally to either power. The study reads these seemingly contradictory moves as coherent within the hedging framework: each gesture toward one power is counterweighted by a gesture toward the other, preventing either from claiming exclusive influence.

The analytical core of the paper lies in its assessment of conditions. The authors find that hedging has enabled Vietnam to maintain strategic maneuvering space and derive short to medium term benefits from engagement with both Washington and Beijing. But they emphasize that the strategy is conditional rather than permanent. Hedging can be sustained only so long as strategic polarization between the United States and China does not cross the threshold that compels states to align explicitly. In other words, hedging works while the great powers compete but do not demand commitments. Its inherent limitations, the study argues, are likely to become increasingly pronounced as competition escalates, echoing earlier scholarship warning of the structural dangers of a Thucydides trap dynamic between an established and a rising power.

The research also situates Vietnam within a broader global pattern. Companion studies in the same journal examine how Europe pursues strategic autonomy in response to Trumpism and how Trump-era policies are reshaping China’s global strategies, suggesting a worldwide reassessment of how states dependent on American security guarantees and Chinese economic integration should position themselves. For Southeast Asian states watching Vietnam’s experience, the findings carry practical weight: hedging is viable and rewarding, but it is a strategy for an intermediate phase of rivalry, not a permanent shield.

Funded by Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City, the study ultimately offers a sober assessment rather than a celebration. Vietnam’s bamboo diplomacy has proven remarkably effective at keeping options open in a polarizing world, allowing a middle power to talk trade with Washington one week and drill with the People’s Liberation Army the next. But the authors’ central conclusion is that flexibility has structural limits. If the US-China contest intensifies to the point where both capitals demand that smaller states choose, the bamboo may bend as far as it can, and Vietnam, like other middle powers, will face the unenviable arithmetic of alignment.

Subject of Research: Vietnam's hedging strategy toward US-China great power competition

Article Title: Vietnam’s hedging strategies amid intensified US-China competition

Article References: Nghi, N. T., & Tu, N. C. (2026). Vietnam’s hedging strategies amid intensified US-China competition. Global Public Policy and Governance, 6(1), 82-97. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-026-00141-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-026-00141-3

Keywords: Vietnam, hedging strategy, US-China competition, bamboo diplomacy, middle power, strategic autonomy, Trump tariffs, South China Sea, foreign policy, Southeast Asia, comprehensive strategic partnership, economic dependence