The starting point of the analysis is the scale of the external shock. The United States, historically Europe’s closest ally, is now using its enormous market power as a geoeconomic weapon, imposing tariffs and regulatory pressure on partners and adversaries alike. According to the paper, the Trump administration’s approach is not an aberration but the product of a coherent ideological project, documented in initiatives such as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which seeks to reshape American governance and its relationship with the world. For the EU, this means confronting a dual challenge: an economic assault on its export-driven model and a political assault on the liberal-democratic norms on which the Union itself is founded.

Technically, the EU’s response rests on an expanding arsenal of geoeconomic instruments. The paper highlights the Anti-Coercion Instrument, adopted in December 2023 under Regulation (EU) 2023/2675, which allows the Union to retaliate against third countries that apply economic pressure on member states. Alongside it stand the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, which regulate the power of large technology platforms, and the International Procurement Instrument, which opens third-country public procurement markets reciprocally. The European Economic Security Strategy of 2023 adds a further layer, focusing on the resilience of supply chains, the prevention of technology leakage, and the integration of economic security monitoring into the European External Action Service. Together, these instruments mark what the author describes as a geo-economization of EU policy: the deliberate fusion of economic regulation with strategic objectives.

Yet the empirical record shows how difficult de-risking remains in practice. Despite the EU’s defensive measures, its strategic dependency on China has actually increased, as measured by the Herfindahl-Hirschman index, according to research by the Peterson Institute for International Economics cited in the study. The EU’s own China Strategy of 2019 famously described China as a partner, a competitor and a systemic rival simultaneously, a formulation that captures the Union’s ambivalence. While Washington and Beijing decouple, Brussels and Beijing have deepened trade ties, leaving the EU exposed precisely at the moment it seeks strategic autonomy. This tension between declared policy and measurable dependency is one of the central weaknesses the analysis identifies in the Union’s current approach.

To diversify away from this exposure, the EU has accelerated an ambitious trade agenda. Negotiations on the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement with Indonesia were finalised on 23 September 2025, with entry into force expected by 1 January 2027. The Commission has also proposed the adoption of the long-stalled Mercosur and Mexico agreements, and is developing new instruments such as clean trade and investment partnerships and raw-materials partnerships designed to secure critical inputs for the green and digital transitions. The Global Gateway initiative, the EU’s answer to China’s Belt and Road, channels infrastructure investment into partner countries as a tool of geopolitical influence. The paper treats these moves as evidence that Brussels is rediscovering itself as a geopolitical union, at least in the economic domain.

Security policy shows a similar pattern of pragmatic acceleration. The European Defence Fund, a component of the Common Security and Defence Policy with a budget of nearly 7.3 billion euros for 2021 to 2027, coordinates national investment in defence research and improves interoperability between national armed forces. The European Peace Facility has mobilised 6.1 billion euros to reimburse countries exporting defence equipment to Ukraine, and the EU and its member states had collectively committed 63.2 billion euros in military support for Ukraine as of September 2025. Under the ReArm Europe plan and the NATO summit declaration of The Hague in June 2025, allies committed to reaching defence spending of 5 percent of GDP by 2035, of which 3.5 percent counts as core defence expenditure and 1.5 percent covers defence-related items such as infrastructure. The proposed 2028 to 2034 EU budget further embeds defence as a Union-level funding priority.

What the Union conspicuously has not done, according to the study, is reform its own governance. Treaty change, qualified majority voting in foreign and security policy, and deeper fiscal integration all remain blocked by the lack of political will and consensus among member states. Governments in Hungary and Slovakia, along with much of Europe’s right-wing populist landscape, favour a different course altogether, arguing that Europe should seek a balance with Russia through trade and concessions even as Russia rebuilds an empire on the continent’s eastern frontier. The paper contrasts this position with the view, articulated in Foreign Affairs, that a settlement of the Ukraine war favouring Russia would pose an existential threat to Europe. This fundamental disagreement over strategy is precisely what makes governance reform impossible and policy reform the only feasible path.

The author characterises the focus on policy reform as a pragmatic approach with genuine merits. It allows the Union to act quickly with the instruments it already possesses, avoiding the years of intergovernmental negotiation that treaty change would require. It also preserves the institutional status quo at a moment when the legitimacy of the entire European project is under ideological attack, including from within the United States, as illustrated by Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025, which criticised European democratic norms. In this reading, the EU’s regulatory state, its single market and its trade competence are its strongest cards, and playing them aggressively is a rational adaptation to a hostile environment.

But the strategy carries a structural vulnerability that the paper places at the centre of its conclusion. Policy reform depends on supportive governments in the member states, and those governments are precisely what Trumpism seeks to change. Right-wing populist parties across Europe, emboldened and networked by their American counterparts, could win power in large EU countries and reverse the geoeconomic turn from within, blocking sanctions, diluting the Anti-Coercion Instrument, and steering the Union toward accommodation with Moscow. The analysis, drawing on recent scholarship on the alliance of the new right, warns that the entire edifice of pragmatic reform rests on a political foundation that could erode at the ballot box. Policy instruments, however sophisticated, cannot protect an institution whose member states no longer share its strategic premises.

The study thus answers its own title question with a qualified negative. Policy reform short of governance reform may suffice to manage the economic shock of Trumpism in the short term, and the evidence of the past two years, from defence spending commitments to new trade agreements, shows a Union capable of remarkable tactical adaptation. Yet without eventual governance reform, the EU lacks the resilience to withstand a political shock, namely the capture of major member-state governments by forces hostile to the integration project itself. The paper frames the present moment as a window of opportunity in which the Union can use the external threat as a catalyst for internal renewal, while acknowledging that whether that window remains open is a question that European voters, not Brussels technocrats, will ultimately decide.

Subject of Research: EU policy and governance reform in response to Trumpism and geoeconomic pressure from the United States

Article Title: Trump and the European Union: will policy reform short of governance reform suffice to withstand Trumpism?

Article References: Regenbrecht, J. (2025). Trump and the European Union: will policy reform short of governance reform suffice to withstand Trumpism?. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 422-432. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00126-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00126-8

Keywords: European Union, Trumpism, geoeconomics, governance reform, EU trade policy, economic security, defence policy, right-wing populism, strategic autonomy, Ukraine, China, NATO

The conceptual starting point is that legitimacy in global governance has never rested on sovereign command. International institutions hold authority only insofar as their justificatory claims are recognised, contested or denied by audiences around the world. Zürn’s idea of reflexive legitimation conflict describes a situation in which disputes escalate beyond questions of performance or participation to the meta-criteria of legitimacy itself: not only what counts as an effective basis for legitimation, but who decides this and how the answers get institutionalised. Pegram shows that AI governance, fragmented and weakly institutionalised, is unusually exposed to this kind of conflict, because there is no settled regime whose performance can be evaluated. What is contested instead is the evaluative script of global rule itself.

The empirical pivot is the rupture between the Biden and Trump approaches to AI. In 2023, Biden’s Executive Order 14110 on safe and trustworthy AI built explicitly on emerging multilateral precedents, including the OECD AI Principles of 2019, UNESCO’s 2021 Recommendation on the Ethics of AI adopted by 193 member states, and the European Commission’s risk-based AI Act. The order committed the United States to allied engagement in multilateral bodies, international technical standards and global AI safety monitoring, and even adopted the OECD’s definition of AI. Washington subsequently joined the 2023 Bletchley Declaration, signed the Council of Europe Framework Convention on AI in 2024, and sponsored a UN General Assembly resolution calling for safe, secure and trustworthy AI systems for sustainable development.

That trajectory reversed abruptly. On his first day back in office, Trump revoked the Biden order, leaving the United States without federal regulatory guidance. Three days later he issued Executive Order 14179, declaring national policy to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance in the name of human flourishing, economic competitiveness and national security. At the Paris AI Action Summit in February 2025, Vice President J.D. Vance warned that excessive regulation could kill a transformative industry, rejected the European model as burdensome, and framed international cooperation chiefly as a defence against authoritarian powers capturing technological infrastructure. The administration declined to sign the summit’s declaration on inclusive and sustainable AI, and in July 2025 withdrew from UNESCO, the body anchoring global AI ethics norms.

Crucially, the study finds, the Trump administration did not abandon international forums altogether. Instead it recast engagement in plurilateral and mercantile terms. America’s AI Action Plan, published in July 2025, promotes plurilateral controls on the AI technology stack while avoiding multilateral treaty bodies, coordinates with allies to extend US export controls against adversaries, and pledges to leverage the US position in standard-setting bodies such as the ITU, OECD, G7 and G20 to counter Chinese influence and ensure AI governance reflects American values. In August 2025, Washington backed a second term for Doreen Bogdan-Martin as ITU Secretary-General, explicitly linking that contest to control over the more than 150 AI standards already set. Trump framed the stakes geopolitically, warning that foreign nations must not make rules and regulations that make it impossible for American firms to do business.

China’s response forms the other half of the analysis, and it is here that the study identifies a striking role reversal. Beijing’s 2017 New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan had already pledged active participation in global AI governance, but Western observers long dismissed Chinese claims as authoritarian and censorial, describing ambitions ranging from the anodyne to the dystopian. Successive initiatives, including a 2022 position paper on ethical AI governance and the Global AI Governance Initiative launched by Xi Jinping at the Third Belt and Road Forum in October 2023, emphasised sovereignty, developing AI for good, greater voice for developing countries and a UN-centred governance body. Yet these claims struggled to gain traction, and China’s inclusion in the Bletchley Declaration was contested so vigorously that UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had to defend it publicly.

Trump’s return marked the inflection point. Confronted with tightened chip sanctions in January 2025, Beijing did not retreat into secrecy as many predicted. Instead, firms such as Alibaba and DeepSeek released advanced models as open source, with Premier Li Qiang declaring that China’s innovation is open and open source and that the country was willing to share indigenous technologies. The strategy served a dual purpose: it mitigated the effect of sanctions by globalising Chinese models, and it recast China’s legitimacy claims, transforming a state once portrayed as censorial into a putative provider of AI as a global public good. At the World AI Conference in Shanghai in July 2025, Li called global AI governance fragmented, warned against technological monopoly, and unveiled a Global AI Governance Action Plan proposing two UN-based mechanisms: an International Scientific Panel on AI and a Global Dialogue on AI Governance.

The juxtaposition of the two strategies reveals what Pegram calls rival scripts of legitimation, each mobilising distinct repertoires conditioned by material power and normative legacy. The American script invokes sovereign discretion, market dynamism and technological nationalism, delegitimising liberal norms of ethical oversight and multilateral coordination while instrumentalising international forums for competitive advantage. The Chinese script invokes sovereign equality, developmental inclusion and UN-centred ethics, aligning open-sourcing practices with discursive claims of ethical multilateralism. By August 2025, Western commentators were warning of America’s AI colonialism, while Trump officials confirmed the United States was explicitly rejecting China’s call for global governance, offering instead customised AI packages tied to American technology. Neither script has achieved uncontested recognition, but their antagonism demonstrates that legitimacy itself has become the object of the contest.

The study’s findings carry implications well beyond AI. Legitimation, it concludes, is processual and precarious, continually reconfigured through cycles of challenge and response, in which delegitimation by one actor creates openings for others to reformulate their claims. Repertoires of legitimation remain structurally conditioned: US claims drew credibility from material dominance and corporate alignment, while China’s gained traction precisely because Washington’s rejection of multilateral norms created space for alternative scripts. Crises act as catalytic junctures, and the advent of generative AI, reframed as systemic risk since ChatGPT’s release in November 2022, combined with Trump’s sovereigntist turn, has consolidated competing visions of global order rather than convergence on shared norms.

AI governance, the article suggests, may serve as a bellwether of a post-hegemonic or multiplex world order. What is at stake is not simply the regulation of a transformative technology but the capacity of global governance to sustain any authority at all in a system fractured by sovereignty claims, geopolitical rivalry and competing visions of justice. As the United States and China advance incompatible legitimacy scripts, one grounded in sovereign voluntarism and competitive dynamism, the other in UN-centred cooperation and developmental equity, the study warns that the field exhibits pluralised and antagonistic legitimation that resists consolidation, offering a preview of how authority itself may be contested across the international system in the decade ahead.

Subject of Research: The crisis of legitimacy in global AI governance under competing US and Chinese legitimation strategies

Article Title: Reflexive legitimation conflict: trumpism and the crisis of legitimacy in global AI governance

Article References: Reflexive legitimation conflict: trumpism and the crisis of legitimacy in global AI governance. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00123-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00123-x

Keywords: AI governance, legitimacy, Trumpism, global governance, China, United States, multilateralism, technological nationalism, UNESCO, open-source AI, sovereignty, post-hegemonic order

Murphy begins from a distinction that structures the entire argument. Some harms from American non-involvement are immediate and measurable, while others unfold over decades and may prove surprisingly modest in the long run. Averting the worst consequences of the climate crisis and preparing for the next pandemic fall squarely into the first category, where the absence of the United States government from global problem solving can have significant consequences. The United States remains one of the largest historical emitters of greenhouse gases and one of the most consequential funders of public health infrastructure, so its disengagement from these domains removes both material capacity and political weight from systems that depend on broad coordination. In these arenas, timing matters: delays in emissions reductions compound physically, and pandemic preparedness is only as strong as the weakest surveillance and response capacity in the chain.

The evidence for immediate, quantifiable harm comes in part from modelling studies published in the medical literature, which Murphy draws on to ground his argument. A mathematical modelling study of seven countries in sub-Saharan Africa, published in EClinicalMedicine, examined the impact of the freeze in funding for PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, and projected increases in HIV deaths and infections as a direct result. A separate retrospective evaluation and forecasting analysis published in The Lancet assessed two decades of USAID interventions and projected the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030, finding that the programs slated for cuts had been associated with millions of averted deaths. These are not abstract governance questions. They are estimates of human lives, calculated with the standard tools of epidemiological modelling, and they illustrate precisely what Murphy means by dire immediate consequences even where the long-run architecture of global problem solving may endure.

Climate policy presents a parallel case with its own technical texture. Murphy cites the Rhodium Group’s Taking Stock 2025 analysis of United States energy and climate trends, which tracks how federal policy shifts alter the emissions trajectory of the world’s second-largest current emitter. When the American federal government relaxes domestic climate policy and steps back from international climate finance, the global emissions budget, a finite quantity of carbon that can be released before warming thresholds are crossed, absorbs the difference. Unlike some areas of governance, climate physics offers no institutional workaround: the atmosphere integrates emissions from all sources regardless of who is in office. This is why Murphy classifies climate among the domains where American non-involvement may have significant consequences rather than merely symbolic ones, and why parallel scholarship in the same journal examines whether global climate governance nonetheless remains resilient under the current administration.

Yet the article’s most counterintuitive claim concerns the domains where American withdrawal matters less than headlines suggest. Murphy argues that the long-run impact on global problem solving may be small in certain cases, even when immediate consequences are dire, and he offers economic inequality across countries as a likely example. Drawing on Branko Milanovic’s analysis of the three eras of global inequality from 1820 to 2020, Murphy situates present turbulence within long structural trends. The convergence of incomes between countries that defined the past three decades has been driven principally by economic growth in Asia, particularly China and India, rather than by American policy choices. A US government that turns inward may slow or complicate specific redistributive mechanisms, but it neither creates nor controls the deep forces reshaping the global income distribution. The immediate harms of cuts to development assistance are real, as the Lancet modelling demonstrates, but the underlying trajectory of between-country inequality is shaped by forces far larger than any single administration.

This leads to the article’s deeper historical claim, and the one Murphy identifies as the most important lesson for practitioners. Even if the US government becomes unimportant or an impediment to solving global and planetary problems for many years, the basic politics of their solution is likely to remain similar to what it has been since the mid-nineteenth century. Global governance, in Murphy’s telling, was never primarily the creature of great-power governments. From the international public unions of the 1800s through the technical standard-setting bodies documented in his earlier work on engineering rules since 1880, the machinery of global problem solving has been built and maintained by international epistemic communities, networks of scientists and experts, social movements, and civil servants at every level. Susan Strange’s famous critique of the Westfailure system, and the scholarship on non-hegemonic regimes collected under the title Cooperating Without America, both support the proposition that cooperation among other actors can proceed even when the hegemon abstains.

The historical record Murphy invokes is richer than the current moment might suggest. His references span the scholarship on how governments have repeatedly lost control over the proliferating structures of global governance, the role of emerging powers in disrupting and reshaping the World Trade Organization, and the work of what Thomas Weiss and colleagues have called the Third United Nations, the civil society organizations and advocacy networks that operate alongside and often in tension with member states. Recent historical scholarship on Pan-Africanism, including Howard French’s account of Kwame Nkrumah and the high tide of global Black solidarity, reminds readers that transformative global projects have often been driven by movements with no great-power sponsorship at all. Linda Gordon’s study of seven social movements that changed America makes the complementary domestic point: American politics itself has repeatedly been redirected from below rather than from the White House.

What does this mean concretely for the scientists, officials, and advocates now confronting an American government hostile to their work? Murphy’s answer, though framed in careful academic language, is essentially a call for persistence grounded in structural analysis. Members of international epistemic communities, social movements, and civil servants at all levels should remember that their work in global problem solving has always been just as important as that of the elected or self-appointed governments of even the most powerful countries. The technical standard-setters who keep the internet, aviation, and global trade interoperable do not require American federal participation to continue meeting. The epidemiologists who maintain disease surveillance networks, the climate scientists whose models inform every national assessment, and the statisticians who track global inequality all operate within institutions whose legitimacy and funding derive from far broader coalitions than Washington’s current disposition.

Murphy is careful not to minimize the danger. The article acknowledges commentary, including Paul Krugman’s argument that Trump is a symptom rather than the cause of declining American democracy, and it engages with assessments of how much damage a determined administration can inflict on institutions at home and abroad. The modelling studies on PEPFAR and USAID stand as evidence that the immediate human costs of withdrawal are severe and quantifiable. A widely discussed recent book on the collapse of large-scale societies, reviewed under the grim headline of a one-in-three chance of apocalypse, reflects the mood of existential concern that Murphy’s measured prose deliberately works against. His point is not that the situation is benign, but that despair is analytically unwarranted: the system of global problem solving has survived hostile hegemons, world wars, and the withdrawal of major powers before, and its resilience resides in actors that no single election can dismantle.

The article thus closes the loop between diagnosis and prescription. The differentiation of harms is the analytical core: climate and pandemic preparedness suffer significantly from American absence, inequality between countries follows its own long trajectory, and the politics of global problem solving remains fundamentally continuous with its nineteenth-century origins. For a readership of researchers and practitioners, the practical implication is to direct scarce attention toward the domains where American withdrawal does structural damage, while refusing the temptation to treat every global institution as hostage to Washington. The lesson Murphy draws from nearly two centuries of global governance is that the work has never depended on the goodwill of the powerful alone, and that the experts, movements, and public servants who built it retain, even now, the capacity to keep building.

Subject of Research: The impact of the Trump administration's policies on global governance and the resolution of planetary problems

Article Title: Global problems and Trump’s Republican Party government

Article References: Murphy, C. N. (2025). Global problems and Trump’s Republican Party government. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 393-400. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00127-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00127-7

Keywords: global governance, Trumpism, planetary crises, climate policy, pandemic preparedness, PEPFAR, USAID, economic inequality, epistemic communities, social movements, international institutions, US foreign policy

The study, authored by Benjamin Faude of the University of Glasgow and Tim Heinkelmann-Wild of the European University Institute and LMU Munich, takes aim at the prevailing pessimism in international relations scholarship. Some prominent theorists had warned that an American exit from hegemony would trigger a collapse of the liberal international order, while others had predicted that global institutions would prove resilient without U.S. leadership. The authors position themselves between these poles. They contend that although the challenge posed by Trump’s second term is more severe than his first, the continued decline of global governance and a resurgence of unrestrained great-power politics are not inevitable. Everything, they argue, depends on how the major powers that still support international institutions choose to respond.

To understand why the stakes are so high, the researchers dissect the Trumpian challenge along two dimensions: material and ideational. The material challenge is straightforwardly fiscal and organizational. American disengagement strips institutions of resources and, given the country’s predominant power, curtails their ability to influence international affairs, potentially rippling outward as other states follow Washington’s example. The first Trump administration had already stopped funding for UNRWA and the UN Population Fund and exited a long list of agreements and bodies, from the Trans-Pacific Partnership to the Arms Trade Treaty and the Iran nuclear deal. Rather than relying on multilateral arrangements, it favored bilateral negotiations and hub-and-spoke frameworks that placed the United States at the center, such as the Artemis Accords for space exploration and the Abraham Accords in the Middle East.

The ideational challenge, the authors suggest, is in some ways more corrosive. Trump has paired withdrawals with nationalist rhetoric and an ideological critique that questions the very legitimacy of international cooperation. He dismissed climate change as mythical and an expensive hoax, accused the WHO of being a puppet of China, and called the WTO broken and a disaster for the country. Such public attacks, the paper warns, can erode the perceived value of adhering to institutional norms and rules, potentially producing what scholars term compliance pessimism or even cascades of norm violations that spread skepticism across the international system.

Crucially, the researchers place Trumpism in historical context and find both continuity and rupture. The United States has always had an ambivalent relationship with the institutions it helped found. Before Trump, Washington had withdrawn material support from international organizations and agreements more than 140 times, making it the most frequent quitter of such bodies. Republican administrations have withheld funding from the UN Population Fund for decades, and the Reagan administration cut contributions to the UN, the IMF, and the World Bank while seeking greater influence over them. What distinguishes Trump is the peak of this pattern and the fundamental nature of the critique. Previous administrations justified nonparticipation by citing an asymmetrical distribution of costs, as George W. Bush did with the Kyoto Protocol. Trump’s allies, by contrast, attack the foundational mission itself. Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared at his confirmation hearing that the post-war global order is not just obsolete but is now a weapon being used against the United States.

The paper then examines how defenders of global governance responded during the first Trump term, and the record is instructive. Western powers, often working in concert with international bureaucracies, deployed two broad strategies: appeasement and defense. NATO members increased defense spending toward two percent of GDP to address Trump’s complaints, while the World Bank tempered criticism through the creation of a fund for female entrepreneurs, reduced lending to China, and efforts to mobilize private capital. The Universal Postal Union even persuaded the administration to reverse its planned exit by allowing high-volume countries to set their own postal rates. Where appeasement was inappropriate, defenders reaffirmed the value of contested institutions publicly, shamed the United States, and mobilized alternative funding. When American contributions to the UN Population Fund stopped, other states increased theirs, and the European Union doubled down on climate commitments after the U.S. left the Paris Agreement, enlisting China as the largest emitter.

The failures are equally revealing. When the U.S. cut UNRWA funding in 2018, European states were divided and some followed the American example, forcing the agency to sharply reduce services for Palestinians. The Arms Trade Treaty came to be regarded as a failed initiative after the U.S. withdrawal, and European attempts to preserve the Iran nuclear deal proved half-hearted, with governments unwilling to shield their companies from secondary sanctions. The lesson, according to the authors, is that Trumpism can be effectively countered, but only when powerful states act decisively and in concert.

That condition is now in doubt. The response of Western governments to the second Trump administration has been noticeably weaker, with public defenses of the Paris Agreement, the WHO, and UNESCO more restrained, and the UN’s severe budget crisis left unaddressed. NATO members have agreed to raise defense spending to five percent of GDP by 2035 largely to keep the United States committed to the alliance, and the European Union concluded a tariff arrangement with Washington that openly contravenes key WTO rules. The authors attribute this timidity to the changed geopolitical context: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made European states far more dependent on American security guarantees, making them hesitant to provoke retaliation by openly defending contested institutions.

What future, then, awaits the rules-based order? The paper sketches two scenarios. In the darker one, global governance decays into a nineteenth-century-style concert of great powers, in which Washington, Beijing, and Moscow collude to divide the world into spheres of influence free from institutional constraint. The authors regard this as realistic, noting that international orders tend to expire through gradual deterioration rather than sudden collapse. But they also identify a more hopeful pathway: creative destruction, in which legacy institutions are transformed or supplemented by innovative forms of governance better suited to current conditions. They point to the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement, adopted by 52 members as a workaround to the paralyzed WTO dispute settlement system, and to the proliferation of low-cost institutions such as informal intergovernmental organizations, transgovernmental networks, and public-private partnerships. These flexible bodies can be layered atop formal organizations, filling governance gaps while drawing on the resources and legitimacy of the older institutions, producing hybrid structures with both substantive and political fit for complex problems.

Which scenario materializes hinges on political choices that remain unresolved. If European states cannot overcome their geopolitical constraints and rising populist nationalism, non-Western powers will shape the future of global governance instead. China has announced its own Global Governance Initiative and has shown both reformist and revisionist tendencies, supporting Western defenses of the Paris Agreement, the WHO, and the WTO during Trump’s first term while promoting illiberal policies in the UN Human Rights Council and UNESCO. European reluctance, the authors caution, risks hollowed-out multilateralism. Their prescription is clear: liberal states must actively promote the innovative adaptation of global governance to a political, economic, and technological environment radically different from the one in which the post-war institutions were created. Decline, in their view, is a choice, and so is renewal.

Subject of Research: The impact of Trumpism on the material and ideational foundations of global governance institutions

Article Title: Destruction or renewal? Trumpism and the future of global governance

Article References: Faude, B., & Heinkelmann-Wild, T. (2025). Destruction or renewal? Trumpism and the future of global governance. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 305-315. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00130-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00130-y

Keywords: global governance, Trumpism, international organizations, liberal international order, great-power politics, World Trade Organization, Paris Agreement, World Health Organization, institutional resilience, low-cost institutions, China, European Union

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

The starting point of the analysis is the sheer unpredictability of the new American posture. Political positions, the paper observes, now change like daily specials on a menu, and a flood of true and false information makes fact-based political discourse increasingly difficult. The United States under Trump 2.0 still wants to be a hegemonic power, but no longer a hegemon in the sense of the liberal, rules-based world order that it largely built itself. Secretary of State Marco Rubio made this explicit in his confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, describing the post-Cold War belief that all nations would join a democratic, Western-led community as a dangerous delusion rather than a fantasy. For a political community like the EU, which is founded on rules- and values-based reliability, this is more than uncomfortable news; it is the counter-concept to everything the supranational project was designed to represent.

Kotzur grounds the debate in etymology and political philosophy. Autonomy, from the ancient Greek autos and nomos, means the ability to live under one’s own laws, to make informed and uncoerced decisions. Strategy derives from the art of leading an army. Combining the two, the EU implicitly makes a dual claim: the capacity to decide independently, and the capacity to do so in light of its own interests and values. Strategic autonomy therefore fuses factuality and normativity. It demands a pragmatic view of what is realistically possible and a self-confident view of what ought ideally to be done. Crucially, the paper identifies two preconditions that apply across all dimensions of the concept. Autonomy does not mean total self-sufficiency; it means not being overly reliant on any single other actor, and it means possessing genuine influence, understood not as coercion but as the ability to build sustainable partnerships.

French President Emmanuel Macron articulated the vision of strategic autonomy, or even strategic sovereignty, in 2017, partly in response to internal crises and partly to Trump’s first-term attacks on NATO. For too long, the analysis notes, other member states including Germany ignored the ambition. Macron was not proposing a new political theory of integration or a radical rebalancing of powers between Brussels and the capitals. He was calling for a concrete power to act, above all the potential to become a serious but more independent global player in security and defence. The second Trump term, with its more elaborate version of Trumpism, has given that call renewed urgency and taught Europeans, rather the hard way, that their honeymoon with history is over.

That honeymoon had deep roots. From the founding of the Coal and Steel Community in 1951, the EU saw itself as a pure force for peace, a normative power that could afford to neglect hard military capability because it believed it could rely completely on American protection. Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine exposed this self-conception as short-sighted, and Trump’s tariff politics have done the same for the EU’s role as a global economic player. An impactful peacekeeping actor, the paper argues, must be ready to defend itself and capable of military action if it wants to be taken seriously as a global peacemaker. The geopolitical awakening triggered by the war and by shifting American priorities now demands innovative readjustment in all three dimensions of the Union’s claimed abilities to act.

On the geopolitical dimension, the analysis traces the pressure back to the Helsinki Final Act, the mid-1970s foundation of European security that Russia shattered with its invasion of Ukraine and its attempt to unilaterally reshape the continent’s security architecture. This breach creates military as well as political pressure and serves as a litmus test for the Common Foreign and Security Policy and its integral defence component. The Union’s legal competence is comprehensive, extending to all areas of foreign policy and all matters of security, including conflict prevention, conflict management and post-conflict rehabilitation. Trumpism has intensified the strain, through demands for fairer burden-sharing within NATO, nonchalant attacks on the territorial sovereignty of Greenland, and contradictory remarks on alliance obligations, while simultaneously seeking to isolate EU member states from one another. Paradoxically, the paper suggests, Trump acts as a catalyst for EU governance.

Reform options are on the table. One would be to communitise foreign, security and defence policy, replacing intergovernmental unanimity with qualified majority voting and gradually building a Security and Defence Union. Another, less likely scenario would remove these competences from EU structures altogether. Neither appears probable. More plausible, in keeping with the piecemeal engineering that has shaped integration since its beginnings, are incremental steps of the kind outlined in the Strategic Compass of 2022: joint risk analysis and a gradual shift of competences to the EU level. Twenty-five member states have already established Permanent Structured Cooperation under the Lisbon Treaty, a framework that seeks to balance national sovereignty with credible collective defence. Such coordination, the paper stresses, requires a shared strategic culture and, above all, money. Strategic autonomy does not come for free. Early in March 2025, ahead of the EU crisis summit on Ukraine, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen presented a plan to rearm Europe, including greater flexibility in debt rules, which the Commission says could mobilise almost 800 billion euros. Without Trump’s pressure, the paper notes, it would never have reached the Commission’s agenda. Discussions of a French nuclear umbrella and Franco-British cooperation on a coalition of the willing for Ukraine point in the same direction.

The economic dimension is equally turbulent. At the 2025 Davos World Economic Forum, von der Leyen declared that the cooperative world order imagined twenty-five years ago had not materialised, and that the world had entered an era of fierce geostrategic competition in which sanctions, export controls and tariffs are used routinely. Trumpism has adopted an aggressive tariff policy that disregards international trade norms, yet the Union still seeks to stand for rules-based multilateral trade, the lowering of barriers, a revival of World Trade Organization principles, and goals such as the European Green Deal and carbon neutrality by 2050. At the same time, the paper highlights an uncomfortable concession: the European Commission has admitted that its own trade deal with the United States most likely does not meet WTO standards, and the promise of purchasing American weapon systems after a meeting at Trump’s private golf club can be read as surrendering a degree of autonomy. The author warns of a neo-feudal style of politics in which strategic accommodation replaces strategic autonomy. Even so, he argues, transatlantic cooperation is not over; its parameters have simply changed fundamentally. Europe must now confront the United States as a strong actor with its own agenda, relying on its economic strength, innovation capacity and proven ability to generate new integration dynamics, as shown by recent trade agreements with Indonesia and New Zealand and the opportunities presented by MERCOSUR.

The third dimension is normative. Article 3(5) of the Treaty on European Union commits the Union to upholding and promoting its values, contributing to peace, sustainable development, free and fair trade, the eradication of poverty, human rights and the strict observance of international law. Trumpism stands in stark contrast: drastic cuts to foreign aid, defiance of international norms such as unlawful attacks on smuggling boats in the Caribbean, and broad threats to rules-based multilateralism. Yet the paper recalls that the EU’s self-image as a legal community, a creation of law in the words of the first Commission President Walter Hallstein, has always been more than functional. Law, conceived as an antidote to force and a carrier of a new spirit of cooperation, can become the cement holding divergent forces together. The EU should therefore continue to act as a mediator for democracy, the rule of law and universal human rights, fill the gaps Trumpism has opened in multilateralism, and pursue genuine dialogue on an equal footing, especially with the countries of the Global South.

The deeper lesson, Kotzur concludes, is that the old transatlantic normality was always partly an illusion. Even before Trump, America’s advocacy of law-based multilateralism was driven to some extent by an America First mentality, and scepticism toward multilateral institutions has grown as China, Russia and Global South states assert their own right to shape international norms. After the first Trump presidency, European leaders erred in dismissing him as a temporary phenomenon. The new normality demands pragmatism, conceptual clarity and self-assurance: the capacity to defend itself as a geopolitical actor, new trade partners and free trade agreements as an economic actor, and honest alliances built on mutual understanding as a norm-setter. Values and interests, realism and idealism, should not be played off against each other in dichotomous thinking. Trump 2.0, the analysis suggests, is keeping Europe on its toes, which may not be such a bad thing if old Europe wants to reinvent itself as a better version of what it has been so far.

Subject of Research: European Union strategic autonomy in response to Trumpism and the erosion of multilateralism

Article Title: Europe’s quest for strategic autonomy in response to Trumpism

Article References: Kotzur, M. (2025). Europe’s quest for strategic autonomy in response to Trumpism. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 457-466. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00133-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00133-9

Keywords: strategic autonomy, European Union, Trumpism, multilateralism, Common Security and Defence Policy, NATO, trade policy, normative power, Global South, Ursula von der Leyen, Emmanuel Macron, World Trade Organization

The paradox that motivates the analysis is stark. During the first Trump campaign, public attention focused on low-income families hit by de-industrialization and on middle-income households anxious about their status. Today the movement is openly endorsed by figures such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose company Meta donated one million dollars to Trump’s inauguration fund despite earlier personal disputes. PayPal founder Peter Thiel backed Trump from the start, and his association with J.D. Vance helped secure Vance’s path to the vice presidency. Elon Musk’s brief tenure at the head of the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency signaled that the agenda of some technology leaders extends beyond lower corporate taxes and deregulation. It reflects a conviction that the established administrative structures of the federal government should be dismantled to make room for radical innovation.

Yet the fiscal record cuts directly against the interests of the movement’s poorest supporters. The legislation nicknamed the Big Beautiful Bill cuts spending on Medicaid and the food assistance program SNAP by roughly 900 billion dollars through 2034, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates. The CBO’s distributional analysis shows that the bill’s tax cuts most benefit the highest income groups while the combined effect of tax and benefit changes is most damaging to the lowest deciles. Rural areas, where Medicaid dependence is high, will bear a disproportionate share of the losses, and rural voters form one of Trump’s most reliable constituencies. In counties where at least a quarter of voters’ personal income comes from government transfers, 63 percent cast their ballots for Trump in 2024. How can a movement simultaneously reward its wealthiest backers and strip benefits from the people who vote for it most loyally?

The demographic evidence deepens the puzzle rather than resolving it. Trump won those with a high school diploma or less by twenty points, and voters who attend religious services monthly or more often by thirty points, yet no single master variable explains the pattern. Gender, ethnicity, religion, education and place all interact: majorities of Black and Asian men backed Harris while most white and Hispanic men backed Trump; 63 percent of rural women voted for him, a 28-point margin. Income categories alone have limited explanatory power, with the lowest income tier split almost evenly, but the shift from 2020 is striking, as Biden’s 19-point advantage among the lowest earners collapsed to roughly one point for Harris. Glassmann’s conclusion is that rational-choice models of voting simply cannot account for behavior this resistant to material self-interest, and that ideology must be doing the work.

The intellectual core of the new ideology is a rejection of the economic theory that underpinned globalization. Classical trade theory, resting on David Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage, holds that all nations gain when each specializes where it is relatively efficient, and that technologically leading economies would keep the high-end of the value chain while others supplied cheap labor. J.D. Vance, in a keynote at the a16z American Dynamism Summit, called this one of two great conceits of the globalization era. Because of network effects, he argued, partner economies inevitably climb into innovative, high-end production, turning economic collaboration into geopolitical rivalry. China, once dismissed as confined to labor-intensive sectors, expanded its share of world manufacturing value added sixfold between 1991 and 2012, from 4.1 to 24 percent, and now contests American technological leadership outright.

Vance’s second conceit is what he calls the hunger of Western economies for cheap labor. In this telling, Western firms were drugged by the promise that offshoring and low-wage competition would secure their competitiveness, so they stopped innovating and moved factories abroad instead. The empirical anchor here is the research on the China shock by David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson, which overturned the comfortable assumption that the aggregate labor-market effects of trade are negligible. Their work showed that competition from an unequally developed trading partner can impose severe, concentrated and persistent harm on specific regions and on the least educated workers, effectively creating enclaves of opposition to the global system inside democracies themselves. The steady growth of the American trade deficit since the 1970s, and its sharp acceleration after 2000, became the emblem of this failure, even though the United States retains a surplus in services trade and still leads the world in GDP.

What makes the doctrine genuinely unifying is its answer to the question of what should replace redistribution. Vance accuses Democrats of offering nothing but welfare substitutes to communities hollowed out by de-industrialization, a compassion, in his words, devoid of any expectation that reeked of giving up. Labor-market research supports the intuition behind this critique: psychological studies find that low-paid workers often fare better than the unemployed, suggesting that a sense of purpose, not just income, is decisive for well-being. The MAGA movement addresses this deficit existentially and even religiously, promising that radical reindustrialization and a national mission will restore meaning to lives that welfare checks could not. This is why, in Glassmann’s account, the ideology can override short-term material interests: it offers fulfillment of those interests the way a religious narrative offers paradise, deferred and conditional on collective struggle.

The religious register is not metaphorical. In a 2020 essay in the Catholic journal The Lamp, Vance described his conversion from atheist Yale law student to conservative Catholic, criticizing an elite culture obsessed with achievement but silent about the ultimate purpose of education. The pivotal encounter was a 2011 lecture by Peter Thiel, who linked the hyper-competitive misery of elite professionals to the technological stagnation of society at large. Thiel’s famous claim that America has stopped innovating sits oddly beside scholarship celebrating the knowledge economy, but it performs crucial ideological work: it tells both the displaced factory worker and the overworked engineer that they are losers of the same failed order. From this view, questions such as sustainable energy supply are not distributional problems but questions of civilizational survival, and therefore beyond the reach of ordinary redistributive politics.

That framing carries radical institutional consequences. If the existing state structures have blocked the necessary transformation, the argument runs, they are illegitimate and must be swept away; if multilateral institutions constrain national supremacy, they must be abandoned. Glassmann traces the philosophical machinery to Thiel’s adoption, through René Girard’s lectures at Stanford, of the concept of mimetic desire, the unconscious imitation of others’ wants, which Girard believed breeds envy and violence in groups. On this reading, liberal democracy’s promise of equality fuels destructive competition, so liberalism itself must give way to a techno-nationalist ideology wrapped in religious fervor. The result, Glassmann warns, is a strategy of conformity, or Gleichschaltung, extending through media, universities and courts, a drift toward competitive authoritarianism, withdrawal from international organizations, and unilateralism in a multipolar world, with the separation of powers itself under strain.

The article closes with an explicitly historical warning, invoking Hannah Arendt’s observation that the intellectuals who engaged with Nazi ideology were dangerous because they really believed in it, and Leo Strauss’s definition of nihilism as the desire to destroy modern civilization. Glassmann calls the present a Weimar moment, not because dictatorship is inevitable, but because the current administration has both the will and, increasingly, the capacity to overturn the constitutional order. Whether the coalition holds is an open question: inflation and growth problems caused by tariffs and investor uncertainty will test whether welfare-dependent voters continue to endorse policies that enrich tech billionaires. But the central lesson for scholars and for international actors is clear. Trumpism is not an incoherent tantrum of globalization’s losers. It is a coherent, thick, nationalist ideology, engineered to reconcile the interests of the very rich and the very poor around a global technology race, and it must be understood on those terms before its assumptions can be effectively contested.

Subject of Research: The ideological and economic foundations uniting low-income and elite supporters of the MAGA movement in the United States

Article Title: Understanding the political and economic thought of Trumpism: why have impoverished workers and wealthy technological elites in the U.S. adopted a shared ideology?

Article References: Glassmann, U. (2025). Understanding the political and economic thought of Trumpism: why have impoverished workers and wealthy technological elites in the U.S. adopted a shared ideology?. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 367-379. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00137-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00137-5

Keywords: Trumpism, populism, political ideology, globalization, China shock, comparative advantage, J.D. Vance, Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley, welfare policy, competitive authoritarianism, reindustrialization

The timing of the analysis is significant. In 2025, China became unprecedentedly tough in the trade war launched by the Trump administration, with mutually announced retaliatory tariffs spiraling to 145 percent in April, a level that, if implemented, would have meant complete economic decoupling between the world’s two largest economies. The technology war intensified in parallel: while the United States continued to tighten its chip trade embargo, China responded with export controls on rare earths, a sector where it holds dominant global processing capacity. In early September, China put forward a Global Governance Initiative at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit, held a grand military parade marking the 80th anniversary of the victory in the anti-fascist war, and announced that it would no longer seek the special and differential treatments reserved for developing countries in future World Trade Organization negotiations. Taken together, these actions appeared to signal a firm belief in Beijing that the world is moving inexorably toward multipolarization.

Yet the historical record that Jing traces suggests continuity rather than rupture. Since the post-1978 reform and opening up, China’s global strategies have been formed and carried out under a global framework dominated by the United States. China was, on the whole, a user, defender and reformer of the post-war order, experiencing gradual learning, integration and innovation that made it a deep stakeholder in the system. The phrase balance of financial terror was coined to describe the irreversible interdependence formed between the two countries, even though China was clearly the weaker party. Under that power asymmetry, Beijing typically adopted what the paper describes as a swallow anger and keep quiet attitude toward American provocations and sanctions, including the 1999 bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia by five American precision-guided missiles. Deng Xiaoping’s dictum to keep a low profile and never take the lead governed Chinese diplomacy for decades, even as successive leaders from Jiang Zemin’s peaceful rise to Hu Jintao’s harmonious world signaled growing awareness of China’s global role.

The shift in the relationship came in stages. China’s entry into the WTO in 2001 embedded it in existing governance structures, and its cooperation with the United States at the first G20 summit in Washington in 2008 helped stabilize the global financial order. But as China’s GDP surpassed Japan’s in 2010 and incremental development within the existing trade framework ran into limits, Beijing proposed the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013 and led the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the New Development Bank. These China-led mechanisms, which the United States declined to join and warned its allies against joining, augmented American tension. During Trump’s first term, containment of China became a basic consensus of both American political parties and the elite, forging what the paper, citing Graham Allison, frames as a Thucydides trap, manifested not only in the trade war but also in the small yard and high fence technology restrictions of the Biden administration. American pressure in turn fortified China’s determination to strengthen autonomy and reduce dependence on the United States, economically and technically.

The first dimension of Jing’s framework, comprehensive national strength, provides the material foundation for this strategic posture. Between 2000 and 2021, China’s total economic output measured by GDP rose from approximately 11.8 percent of the US level to 76 percent, according to World Bank data cited in the study, and although the ratio fell back to 64.7 percent in 2023, China’s growth rate remains significantly higher. In purchasing power parity terms, IMF figures show China’s economy surpassed that of the United States in 2014. China is the world’s largest trading country, the primary manufacturing base, the second largest foreign investor, and the only competitor of the United States in artificial intelligence, with the China-based DeepSeek large language model appearing just one year after ChatGPT. Ironically, the paper notes, China’s success within the existing system, particularly the WTO, has been a source of Trumpism’s antipathy toward the very institutions the United States built after World War II.

China’s tough but restrained responses to the tariff and tech wars, Jing argues, can be explained by three pragmatic concerns. First, Trumpism challenges fundamental interests of China’s national development: the trade war could raise the costs of Chinese manufacturing across the board, while sanctions on high-tech enterprises, including the 2018 detention of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou in Canada and steadily tightening chip export controls, could seriously damage China’s development in advanced fields at a time of sluggish real estate growth, tight employment, mounting local debt and aging pressures. Second, the two economies remain deeply interdependent, in a way fundamentally different from the mutually divided systems of the Cold War. When China announced strict rare earth export controls on October 9, Trump immediately threatened an additional 100 percent tariff effective November 1, illustrating how quickly each side is made aware of its exposure. Third, maintaining the existing international economic system is beneficial to China, which must continue reorganizing its industrial, supply and value chains on a global scale and therefore has an interest in countering trade protectionism and safeguarding multilateral trade.

The second dimension, institutional learning and innovation, shows how China’s engagement has deepened over four decades. China restored its membership in the World Bank and IMF in 1980 and gradually expanded its influence and voting rights, then established the New Development Bank in Shanghai in 2014 with an equal-investment governance structure, and the AIIB in Beijing in 2015, modeled on the World Bank. The AIIB now counts 110 members, including every permanent member of the Security Council except the United States and 16 G20 countries. In climate governance, the 2015 Paris Agreement rested substantially on Sino-American cooperation, and after Trump first exited the accord, China reconfirmed its commitments and held cooperative dialogues with the European Union, later pledging at the 75th UN General Assembly to peak carbon emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. The paper observes an irony: China has become a defender of the current international system while the United States has become a dismantler.

The third dimension concerns crisis-induced windows of opportunity. Past global shocks have repeatedly strengthened China’s position: the 1997 Southeast Asian Financial Crisis and the 2007 Global Financial Crisis both improved China’s standing in global economic governance. Trumpism itself, with its American centrism, transactional approach and disregard of rules, constitutes a crisis of global governance that aggravates governance deficits and raises world expectations for Chinese responsibility. Global impressions of the two countries have shifted in opposite directions, and Trump’s second-term win contributed to negative votes against pro-Trump candidates in Canadian and Australian elections. When the Trump administration withdrew from international organizations and agreements, China consolidated its position within the United Nations system and affirmed its commitments, with its four major global initiatives since 2021 each carrying distinct Chinese values and norms.

The conclusion Jing draws is that China’s responses to Trumpism will continue to promote gradual reforms of the global governance system, while relations with the United States move toward mutual assurance on an equal footing. The meeting between Presidents Xi and Trump in Busan on October 30, 2025, and a follow-up call on November 24, indicated a strategic compromise born of Trump’s informed awareness of China’s will and capability, with a provisional one-year ceasefire suggesting a higher chance of a grand bargain and reviving speculation about a G2-based global order. Yet the paper warns that the shift of global power will not be smooth or even peaceful, and that reckless pursuit of unrealistic goals by either side could bring unforeseen crisis moments. Jing further suggests that China’s incremental domestic reform philosophy, which starts from local experiments and seeks Pareto improvements rather than zero-sum outcomes, has been naturally extended to its global strategies, making China’s engagement continuous, adaptive and irreversible. Achieving effective mutual understanding and coordination between the rising and the established power, the analysis concludes, will be the biggest variable in the future of global governance.

Subject of Research: China's global governance strategies under US Trumpist foreign policy pressures

Article Title: Trumpism and China’s global strategies: a tipping point?

Article References: Jing, Y. (2025). Trumpism and China’s global strategies: a tipping point?. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 401-410. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00138-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00138-4

Keywords: Trumpism, China, United States, global governance, trade war, tariffs, US-China relations, Belt and Road Initiative, AIIB, multilateralism, Thucydides trap, incremental reform

Arrighi, who taught at the State University of New York at Binghamton’s Fernand Braudel Center and later at Johns Hopkins University, built his theory in dialogue with the founders of dependency theory and world-systems analysis, including Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein. The starting point of that tradition is deceptively simple: states cannot be understood in isolation. The world is a single, unified system in which economic actors, above all corporations, have become political actors in their own right, often more powerful than the nation-states that host them. Within this system, some nations occupy the core while others are pushed to the periphery, and the relationship between the two is not accidental but structural.

Frank’s version of dependency theory, developed in the 1960s, described the mechanism in starkly extractive terms. Core powers draw raw materials and cheap labor from peripheral nations, process them into finished goods, and sell those goods back at high prices, flooding local markets and preventing indigenous industry from developing. Underdevelopment in the periphery, in this account, is not a failure to modernize but the very condition that makes development in the core possible. Colonial monocultures, such as tea cultivation in India, and later mechanisms like production relocation and international loans, all served to lock peripheral economies into dependency. Latin American critics of the theory, from Ruy Mauro Marini to Theotonio dos Santos, went on to identify escape routes: building domestic industry behind protective walls, detaching from a weakening hegemon, or pursuing revolutionary rupture.

Wallerstein took these insights and scaled them up. In his four-volume The Modern World-System, he replaced the dyadic core-periphery model with a tripartite structure that included semi-peripheral countries such as Brazil, India and China, states that aspire to core status and progressively move closer to it. Drawing on Marx’s analysis of capitalism and Fernand Braudel’s attention to long-term processes, Wallerstein distinguished centralized world-empires, which extract taxes from their peripheries, from the decentralized capitalist world-system that emerged in the sixteenth century, in which the periphery supplies cheap raw materials and labor while the core monopolizes high-value production. It was within this intellectual milieu that Arrighi developed his own distinctive contribution.

Arrighi’s masterwork, The Long Twentieth Century, first published in 1994, proposed that the history of capitalism unfolds in a series of systemic cycles of accumulation stretching back to the fifteenth century. Each cycle begins with the productive expansion of capital, money invested in commodity production, described by the Marxian formula M-C, and ends when overaccumulation sets in and a signal crisis marks the turning point. At that moment capital retreats from production into finance, the C-M’ phase, and the accumulated wealth is lent out to finance the next cycle, typically under new leadership. Arrighi identified four such long centuries: the Genoese cycle from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth century, the Dutch cycle through the mid-eighteenth century, the British cycle through the late nineteenth century, and the American cycle, whose signal crisis arrived in the 1970s amid the Vietnam War and the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary order.

The pattern behind these cycles is remarkably regular. Each hegemonic power operates on a progressively larger state scale, from the city-state of Genoa to the Dutch Republic, the British Empire and the American world system. Some cycles, notably the Genoese and British, are characterized by extensive development, while the Dutch and American cycles show intensive development. Over time, hegemonic powers internalize more functions: Genoa remained a purely commercial republic, while later powers secured their own protection, production and transaction costs. Crucially, in each transition the declining hegemon becomes a creditor to its successor, financing with its accumulated capital the very power that will displace it. Arrighi saw exactly this dynamic in the relationship between the United States and China: after China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, its export-led industrial expansion generated financial power sufficient to help finance American external debt.

In Adam Smith in Beijing, published in 2007, Arrighi turned to the shift in the epicenter of capital accumulation toward East Asia. China’s rise, in his reading, was the result of deliberate policies that moved the country from semi-peripheral status toward an economic model capable of challenging American primacy, based on industrial production for export at precisely the moment when Western economies were deindustrializing and offshoring. Trumpism, in Imbriano’s analysis, is best understood as an attempt to interrupt this process: a repositioning of American military and commercial power in the Western hemisphere, an authoritarian shift within the liberal system, and a concerted effort to curb the economic and military ascent of China. Its two key instruments are disengagement from distant conflicts and an intensification of pressure, through NATO’s eastern expansion in Europe and through the trade war against Beijing.

Yet the study finds that this response appears insufficient. The threat of tariffs has not redirected the economic strategies of American competitors, and the attempt to revive industrialization on American soil faces formidable obstacles. The evidence from Latin America illustrates the difficulty: trade between the region and China has grown substantially in recent decades, and China’s Belt and Road Initiative has supported infrastructural development that reduced Latin American dependency on the United States, even if the relationship still reproduces a pattern of raw material exports and manufactured imports that has not always fostered local industry. Meanwhile, European allies bound to Washington find themselves pressured to curtail economic ties with Asian partners and Russia, a course that conflicts with their own development interests.

Arrighi identified two anomalies in the current transition that make it unlike any previous one. First, the economic power of the emerging hegemon is separated from the military power of the declining one, a configuration without precedent in earlier cycles. Second, the new leading power may develop its accumulation in a form that is not capitalist in the conventional sense, opening the possibility, in Arrighi’s optimistic reading, of a system based on mutual respect between civilizations and a genuinely multipolar world order. But this outcome presupposes that the United States accepts its transition peacefully. In Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System, written with Beverly Silver in 1999, Arrighi warned that transitions can stall, degenerate into prolonged systemic chaos, or be governed through war. The study concludes that Trumpism, as a product of hegemonic crisis, leaves both paths open: a negotiated multipolar order of peace, or a new systemic chaos of financial and military tension among competing regional powers. Which of these futures prevails, the analysis insists, is not mechanically determined, and that open question is precisely what makes Arrighi’s long view of capitalism so illuminating for the present.

Subject of Research: Applying Giovanni Arrighi's world-systems theory of hegemonic transitions to Trumpism and the crisis of United States global hegemony

Article Title: Trumpism, the world system and multipolarism: a perspective from Giovanni Arrighi’s thought

Article References: Imbriano, G. (2025). Trumpism, the world system and multipolarism: a perspective from Giovanni Arrighi’s thought. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 329-339. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00135-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00135-7

Keywords: Giovanni Arrighi, Trumpism, world-systems theory, hegemonic transition, multipolarism, United States, China, dependency theory, Immanuel Wallerstein, global governance, systemic cycles of accumulation, American decline