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 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