Is America Becoming a Rogue State?

Introduction to Identity Theft

0:00You're great at protecting your data, but lots of places could still expose you to identity theft. I thought I was safe. If that happens, LifeLock gives you a U.S.-based restoration agent who will stick by your side from start to finish. Phone calls, filing documentation, preparing insurance claims, your agent handles it all. In fact, we're so confident restoration is guaranteed. Pour your money back. Isn't it nice to have someone like that on your side? Save up to 30% your first year at LifeLock.com slash podcast. Terms apply.

FP Live Introduction

0:30Hi, I'm Ravi Agrawal, Foreign Policy's Editor-in-Chief. This is FP Live.

0:41So the Iran war has become the most serious foreign policy challenge for Donald Trump in his second term. However loyalists justify it, the reality is that the war is unpopular. It breaks several domestic and international laws, and it is very costly. My guest today says the Iran war proves the point he's been making for a while, that the United States is increasingly acting like a rogue state, a predatory hegemon. The question then is what kind of damage this can cause and what countries can do about it.

Hungary Election Analysis

1:16That's coming up, but first, I wanted to share my read on a very important development this past weekend. Hungary had elections. On its own, Hungary is not that significant. It has a population of less than 10 million. It sits outside the top 50 economies in the world. But it is geopolitically significant. It's in the EU, and Hungary's leader of the past 16 years, Viktor Orban, has frequently played spoiler in the EU, for example, by vetoing military aid to Ukraine.

1:49Unlike most European leaders, Orban has also openly aligned himself with Russia's Vladimir Putin, with China's Xi Jinping, and notably with Donald Trump's MAGA movement. So, this was an election we were all watching very closely, especially with news early on that Orban was trailing in the polls. And as it turns out, despite near-total media dominance, despite alleged vote-buying, and despite his extreme gerrymandering, Orban and his Fidesz party crashed to defeat on Sunday.

2:25The winner was Tishzla party leader Peter Madjar, a former Fidesz party insider who has distanced himself from Orban. The results are resonating globally, in part because Orbanism has often been cited as a template for other aspiring autocrats and kleptocrats. And there are indeed lessons to learn from his ouster.

Economics and Governance

2:49Economics matters. You can't govern badly forever and expect people to not notice. Infrastructure matters. You can't ignore basic metrics of how you compare with your neighbors on health care or quality of life and not expect your people to care. And corruption is very unpopular. People hate kleptocracies, and ultimately they do rise up. All of this provides some hope for people in countries that face similar issues.

3:20But I'd also offer two quick words of caution. First, many autocrats or kleptocrats have already decided they don't want Orban's fate, and so they deal with any dissent with an iron fist. Think of Myanmar, North Korea, or even Iran more recently. Orban's ouster will only confirm their instincts. And second, we are all thankful that Orban conceded defeat. But we should also beware. If the basic quality of life doesn't improve significantly and quickly in Hungary,

3:55Orban could easily pave the way for his return in the future. Miss me much? It is a familiar story in politics. We'll leave some further reading in the show notes.

Interview with Stephen Walt

4:07Okay, on to this week's interview. We've long been trying to understand Trump as someone who is transactional. That remains the case. But my guest today argues that Trump has fewer checks and balances in his second term, and is showcasing a misplaced sense of confidence in his grasp of world affairs. So much so that he sees America as becoming a rogue state. What does that do to American power longer term? How can the world respond?

4:38Let's hear it from Stephen Walt. He's a columnist for us at Foreign Policy and a professor of international relations at Harvard University. Let's dive in. Steve, welcome back to FP Live. Nice to be with you, Ravi. It's always great to have you on. So you've called Trump's America predatory, a rogue state. Explain what you mean by that. Well, the predatory part is that the United States has, under Trump in his second term, essentially adopted a zero-sum approach to all of its relations,

5:11not just relations towards adversaries, where all great powers tend to act in a fairly assertive and predatory fashion. But Trump is also acting that way towards some of our closest allies. And you see this in the tariff policy, trying to extract concessions on economic terms by threatening other countries with tariffs, including some of our closest allies, by constantly threatening to withdraw American military protection if he doesn't get what he wants from partners, expecting allies to come to the White House

5:43and show acts of fealty and submission in a variety of different ways. All of this designed to get essentially the lion's share of any deal. So the notion that the United States might have common interests with others and we adopt mutually beneficial relations is largely alien to a predatory hegemon. Their guiding credo is, you know, what's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable. And I'd just add one other example, which would say the coveting of Greenland, which doesn't belong to the United States, but that doesn't matter to Trump.

6:16And just to add one more word to this, whenever we talk about transactionalism or being predatory, I tend to add the word nakedly. And the reason why I do that, Steve, is that it's one thing to try and achieve one's ends by being transactional, which, you know, all of us are at some level, or by trying to get a better deal, which all of us want at some level. But this is nakedly so, so much so that everyone is talking about it, countries see it quite clearly. It has a couple of other dimensions to it as well.

6:46I mean, certainly the sort of open, almost gleeful embrace of this has been noticed by everyone. But first of all, it means that people lose confidence in America's willingness to keep its promises. You reach a deal over some particular issue, and that might get changed a few months or a few years later. So other countries are going to be less inclined to cooperate with the United States because they won't be sure any deals will be kept. The second part is that sometimes it's contradictory.

7:17It forces our allies, our partners, into situations that are almost impossible to know what to do. So, for example, on the one hand, we want our allies to spend more on defense, to invest a larger share of their wealth in defense. That makes sense from an American perspective. But at the same time, we're imposing onerous economic tariffs on them, which hurts their economies and therefore makes it harder for them to contribute more to defense. Because what's missing, in short, for a predatory hegemon is the idea that sometimes

7:48you can make yourself better off by working constructively with others as opposed to trying to take advantage of them at every opportunity. So just to take this a step further, is America then what you would call a rogue state? How are you defining rogue state? Because that's a term that I think we usually use for countries like North Korea, right? Right. This was a term of art really in the 1990s, where we labeled countries like Libya, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and some others rogue states.

8:21And the qualities that we associated with that back then was countries that are largely indifferent to international norms and international law, countries that were threats to peace and security in their region, perhaps more broadly, countries that were angry and revisionist and trying to alter the status quo in some fundamental ways. These were all the qualities we associated with them. And of course, we were juxtaposing them to countries like the United States, which were supposedly none of those things. If you think about the Trump administration now, they're showing

8:54all of the qualities. You know, they don't like international law or institutions. They are certainly a threat to international peace and security, starting wars against countries that aren't at war with us. In fact, countries sometimes that are negotiating with us to try and avoid a war as well. And doing it almost in a gleeful fashion. It's not just that we're breaking international norms out of a sense of dire necessity. We don't want to do this, but we really have to. This is an administration that almost seems to take pleasure in showing just how powerful it is and just how

9:30little it cares about the opinions of others. And that, of course, makes the United States look more dangerous to others and also much more like a rogue state. Can you contrast the last couple of years

US Foreign Policy Analysis

9:42of U.S. foreign policy with previous iterations of U.S. foreign policy, which weren't perfect, which you, more than almost any other IR scholar I can think of, has been courageous enough to point out? What are the key differences that explain these points to you? I think the biggest difference, the thing that's really striking and that I didn't expect when Trump came back in, was that the United States has sort of abandoned all efforts to wrap the mailed fist in

10:13the velvet glove. The United States has been a very powerful country for a long time, and we've sometimes played hardball, certainly with our adversaries and sometimes with our allies. But especially with our allies, we tended to do that reluctantly. We listened. We tried to accommodate their concerns whenever possible, and in general tried to present ourselves as a positive force in the world, that we were not just acting out of naked self-interest, but also acting in a broader sense. Again, we didn't always do that perfectly. We made some real mistakes, and at times the United States did some pretty awful

10:47things, but it wasn't done with a sense that this is our normal practice. It was seen as these were exceptions to what the United States stood for. And that overall formula worked remarkably well. It's one of the reasons many countries, many powerful and wealthy countries around the world, preferred to work with the United States as opposed to working with our adversaries. They understood that although we might make mistakes, we usually didn't do that out of a sense of malevolence or out of a sense of trying

11:17to take every advantage from them. And I think the Trump administration in his second term has abandoned that, is trying to take advantage of as many countries as possible, breaking rules without much regard for them, as I said, with a certain glee. And this is gradually going to undermine America's position, I think, quite dramatically. So let me just try to play devil's advocate for a second. Defenders of the Trump administration will say that, for example, in Venezuela, Maduro was a bad guy, you know, essentially a crime boss.

11:50He needed to be removed, and his removal could potentially now, even though he's been replaced by his former deputy, his removal could spark some changes in Venezuela that would be good for the Venezuelan people. And Trump supporters would also argue that Iran was this absolutely malign force in the Middle East, and the United States needed to do something. Iran getting a nuclear weapon was unacceptable. And that some of the negotiations now may lead to, for example, Iran agreeing to

12:21not enrich uranium for 20 years, which could even be more than the JCPOA. What's your sense of how to respond to those defenses to make the case that you're making, that America is not acting really in just its interests, but is exhibiting some special roguish predatory qualities now? I'd say a couple of things. First of all, the Venezuela and Iran situation strike me as not all that similar. One was essentially a surgical special forces operation aimed at a particular

12:53individual, not a war conducted against the entire society, which, among other things, has involved widespread assassination of civilian leaders in Iran. Again, an international norm that the United States has now, I think, largely erased. And remains to be seen what this will ultimately mean for Venezuela. We can all hope that it improves the situation, and it's hard to make it worse, given the condition they were in. But that's, I think, very different than the circumstances we're facing with Iran. I'm very skeptical that we're going to get an arrangement from Iran

13:27that's better than the JCPOA was. The Iranians have offered five years suspension of enrichment, not 20. And I don't see any hope that will convince them to adopt something like 20 years as well. So those two situations, I think, are fundamentally different. And then finally, it's not just the Trump administration going after particularly unpopular governments like the Maduro regime or the Iranian regime. They're going after countries that used to be some of America's closest friends. When you go

13:59after Denmark and say, we want to take Greenland, and notice that Trump mentioned Greenland again in a press conference he gave that was on Iran. That's how he ended it, that this problem with NATO ultimately comes down to Greenland. He's not forgotten that he wants to take that away from what was probably the most pro-American country in Europe. There's nothing for us to gain by doing things like that. And alienating countries like Denmark or Canada or others is not something that

14:31advances American interests at all. We're going to come to solutions in a little bit, or at least what other countries need to do now, how they should look to navigate this new era we're in. But I want to linger on one more thing, international law, Steve. America's broken international law in the past as well, maybe not to this degree. But what is different right now? And talk to us a little bit about how lasting you imagine the damage would be both to international law frameworks, as we know them,

15:08but also American standing. I think that's an important question. So yes, international law is a relatively weak source of restraint, certainly among great powers. Great powers do break international law when they feel it's absolutely necessary. The Bush administration famously went to war against Iraq in 2003 without authorization from the UN Security Council. I think most experts would have regarded that as a violation of international law and a pretty fundamental one, and we went ahead and did it. So there are limits to

15:41what international law can do. Nonetheless, it's important because the lines that countries have drawn, the constraints they have voluntarily agreed to, do give indications of what their overall reliability and intentions are. And there's a difference between occasionally and reluctantly violating international law because you think you really have to, and doing so rather willfully, and especially doing so for purely selfish reasons where there isn't dire necessity and without much regard for the interests of

16:13others. This is why what we've done in Iran, I think, is so egregious and likely to have such dramatic effects. Let me just say a couple of things. First of all, we went ahead and did this even while negotiations were underway, and we did it without consulting any of our allies, without preparing the American people. It was a willful decision, you know, by the president as well. And that indicates the opposite of a decent respect for the opinions of mankind. Also, we did it without thinking through what the implications of this were going to be, not just for the United States, but the implications for

16:47our allies in Europe, who are more dependent upon external oil and gas, especially for our allies in Asia, who are now hurting very badly as the price of oil and gas goes up. And of course, for partners in the Gulf region who have suffered directly from the war as well. So we broke international law and we did it in a way that showed we didn't care very much about others. And finally, the more often and the more gleefully you're willing to violate international law, the more you're giving

17:17an indication of your overall intentions. Are you someone who follows the rules or are you someone who routinely breaks the rules? And if the United States gets the reputation of being a country that routinely breaks the rules without thinking very much about what the consequences are, this is going to alter the way many countries around the world view the United States, their willingness to cooperate with us and their willingness to start making other arrangements that bypass the United States and in some cases may

17:49even try to contain the United States. How much of all of this is down to Trump's personality in particular? And the reason why I asked that question is because you could also make the case that at least some of this is structural. Some of it is a trend line. Well, it's clearly the president's personality has a lot to do with this and it's not just his instincts. It's also in his second term, he's appointed people who are either loyalists on his wavelength or people who aren't willing to stand up to him for their

18:22own political reasons. So I do think in this case, American foreign policy is being very heavily driven by the president himself. That said, the structural part is that the United States is still extraordinarily powerful. It gives it enormous latitude. It has this very powerful military, which is good at blowing things up, particularly against relatively weak countries, and that has tempted other presidents to overuse that particular instrument. So if the United States were weaker or were in a more delicate

18:55economic condition, you might see even President Trump acting with greater restraint. I think also we have the problem of him playing for the history books, if you will. I think part of the reason the Iran war happened was Trump's desire to, let's call it, go out in a blaze of glory. He was going to solve a whole series of big problems, first Venezuela, maybe Cuba along the way, and then the really serious problem, this country we've been at odds with for 40 years. And he was unfortunately convinced that

19:26this would be easy and didn't think through the implications. So I think a lot of it is him, but some of it is clearly structural. And maybe I'd add one other point. I think that within the administration, there is a belief that, yes, there's going to be some countries that are upset by this, don't like what's happening, but nobody's actually going to do anything to stop us. That Europe is too divided, too weak, too spineless. Our Asian allies are too dependent on us. So at the end of the day, we can do whatever we want, and we really aren't going to face much

19:58opposition. I think that's short-sighted. We're already seeing some of the consequences of that. But I think that worldview has animated some of the rather enthusiastic employment of American power.

Navigating US Power

20:11And we'll be back in a minute with more of Foreign Policy Live. Remember, you can catch these conversations live and on video on foreignpolicy.com. Subscribers get to send us questions in advance, in addition to a range of other benefits, including our magazine. Sign up. I want to talk about how the rest of the world needs to navigate this world. And in some cases,

20:46we've seen countries adopt various strategies. In some cases, not yet, but they might. You wrote a column recently that laid out six ways that other countries are strategizing about this moment. And I'll just quickly name some of the points you raised. Balancing, bandwagoning, political manipulation, diversifying, de-risking, saying no, making the U.S. look bad. I won't make you go through each one, but maybe we could just start with balancing. How are countries that are looking to

21:23balance American power versus their own or other collections of power, how is that working out? Well, first of all, we've seen this even before Trump's second term with the growing collaboration between Russia and China. That's a form of balancing to try and negate or counter American power. The assistance that Russia has received from North Korea and the growing ties between North Korea and Russia, again, are another indication of this. The support that Russia has provided to Iran

21:53and that Iran provided to Russia in Ukraine is all evidence of efforts of other countries who do not want the United States to be able to run the world unilaterally to constrain American power. Now, put those countries together, they still are not a match for the United States and its allies in most circumstances, but it is an indication of the kind of collaboration you see from countries who are opposed to what the United States is doing. And you could even add now this sort of tacit

22:23collaboration between Iran, the Houthi movement in Yemen, possibly Hezbollah still in Lebanon as well, all efforts, again, to complicate or make more difficult what the United States is trying to accomplish. And in the case of Iran and the Houthis, this is proving to be remarkably successful. If you look at what closing the Straits of Hormuz and possibly the Red Sea is doing to global energy markets. So even relatively weak actors sometimes have cards they can play and they can strengthen their hand by

22:56working together. Another option you raised was for countries to just say no or to fight back. And there are certain electoral dividends from that. I mean, Mark Carney in Canada saw a dramatic turnaround in his electoral fortunes after standing up to Trump. The NATO allies recently refused to help the United States open the Strait of Hormuz. Talk a little bit about how countries are thinking about standing up

23:26to Trump and also what kind of country can afford to do that? Presumably you would have to be wealthy, relatively insulated, and able to face some pain were it to come your way. Right. Also having other potential partners is a real help. So the Trump administration's ability to pressure a country like Saudi Arabia is more limited than their ability to pressure a relatively weak country in Latin America, for example. The thing about balking, about sort of just saying no is

24:01nobody really wants to pick a fight with the United States if they can avoid it. So one of the things you can do is eventually agree to whatever Trump is asking you to do and then don't actually deliver it. You know, think of the way that children often resist what their parents are trying to get them to do. They pretend to do it, but they don't really. So you can promise to invest in the American economy, say you'll do it over five or ten years, and then a couple of years in you say, well, gee, we're having some problems over here. We're going to have to slow things down. Or the official who was responsible

24:35for that just took family leave. He'll get back to it in a couple of weeks, etc. You simply drag things out. And there are 190 countries in the world, and it's impossible for the United States to keep track on what every single one of them is doing to deliver its promises. So in some cases, saying yes now and then doing no later is a very effective strategy, particularly when dealing with the administration that tends to have a rather short attention span. I think we're going to see a lot of that in the future. The other thing states will do to improve their position, of course, is diversify. And I think

25:11this is what, you know, Mark Carney has emphasized and pioneered, that you don't want to be as economically dependent on the United States because that gives the United States lots of leverage. So you want to diversify your trade ties. In the case of both NATO members and Canada, maybe you don't want to be as reliant on American weapons. You know, don't buy F-35s because that means the United States has another piece of leverage. Maybe you want to develop your own aircraft as well. This is a long-term strategy.

25:41It takes a while to bring to fruition. But it's the sensible thing to do when you're dealing with a rogue state whose promises you can't trust and is occasionally acting in a malevolent fashion. You have to try and reduce your vulnerability by partnering with others. And that's precisely what Carney and others were recommending. You know, one of the things Carney sort of got a lot of fame for this year was his call for middle powers to band together. This was earlier this year at Davos. I'm curious

26:13what you made of that because what he left out was how smaller countries don't have that luxury and they more than any other countries need to rely on banding together, as you pointed out. But also they need international law. They need a system of free trade. They relied on globalization. And when those things are weakened, they're the ones who are suffering the most as they are right now with the energy crisis. That's absolutely right. And the Carney speech was a remarkable performance.

26:43And it was remarkable to me in two senses. One is he was calling for medium powers to work together, not so much to contain the United States. So it wasn't really balancing, but to simply reduce their own vulnerability and to defend key norms, rules and institutions that facilitate cooperation. If the United States was abandoning its commitment to those institutions, the slack could be taken up if enough other countries understood their common interest in preserving those institutions. And I

27:14think in the short term, there's been a positive response to that initiative. Second thing that was interesting about the speech, of course, was it was delivered in a very calm matter of fact, we're not angry at America tone. It was very much, we have to do this out of our own self-interest. We wish we didn't have to. We actually liked the old arrangement. But since that arrangement no longer seems to be viable, we're going to have to do something else. And I think one of the reasons it was such an appealing speech to many others is it charted a course for them to take that didn't

27:49involve direct confrontation with the United States, just involved taking an alternative path since the United States was no longer willing to play ball. There is another strategy for navigating a predatory United States, and that is to align yourself with it or to do whatever it takes to curry favor. And there are many examples of countries and leaders who've done this. There's Javier Millet in Argentina who got a bailout from the United States. Pakistan, I would argue, has been very canny in how it has appealed to the things Trump wants, whether it's crypto or critical minerals or

28:26nominating him for the peace prize. Flattery clearly is a strategy that many countries have adopted. But I'm curious how durable you think those strategies are. And perhaps, Steve, this is a moment to bring in Viktor Orban, who after 16 years lost elections over the weekend. Many people expected him to do badly, but I'm not sure all of us expected him to concede in the way that he did. Yeah. So what happened in Hungary is obviously, I think, quite significant, more significant than

28:59Hungary's sheer size might suggest. Certainly for some countries, particularly isolated countries that are very heavily dependent on the United States who don't have a lot of options, they may have no real choice but to collaborate with the United States, to accept whatever the United States dictates. And that'll be encouraged, of course, if they're led by people who are on Trump's wavelength. And Malay and Argentina is probably the best example right now. So you're going to see some of that. I think for

29:29countries, the Gulf states that have been dependent on American protection, they're now facing a very awkward choice. They clearly don't want to lose American support and protection, but they have to be concerned with where the United States has put them, not on purpose, but inadvertently. I think the willingness to bandwagon with the United States gets undermined by two things. One is the possibility that even if you do this, it's not going to work. You can try to accommodate, you can try to appease, you can try to align yourself with the Trump administration, and they'll come after

30:03you anyway. I think this is the experience that some European leaders have had. They've tried to flatter them, they've tried to be nice, and they still get hammered down the road. Eventually, you say, well, there's no point in doing this as well. Second thing is that this depends on a certain degree of confidence in American judgment. You're willing to subordinate yourself and align yourself with a powerful country, maybe to take advantage of the things that it does, benefit from its various initiatives, if you really trust their judgment, that they know what they're doing, they have a good

30:37sense of what the opportunities and risks are, and therefore, you can trust their leadership. I think the problem that the Trump administration is now showing is that their judgment is not good, and the war with Iran is the most obvious example of that. So you can't trust an America that makes mistakes like this, and this is not an administration that is exuding the aura of competence on which a lot of influence depends right now. So I think that's a problem. Then one final thing about Orban,

31:09I mean, I think Orban's fate shows you the risks of a autocratic regime where increasingly the leader is surrounded by sycophants, doesn't necessarily have an accurate sense of what's going on in the country, has lost whatever touch they once had that got them into power and kept them in power, so they no longer understand exactly how unpopular they've become. I think Orban was surprised by the outcome here. And part of that was because he was now trapped in a sycophantic bubble. And I worry

31:43that that's actually what's happened to President Trump. He's no longer got grownups in the room who will tell him when he's making a mistake. He's mostly got people who will tell him he's a genius, or will disagree in the most gentle possible way. And that's usually a recipe for disaster. And of course, one other response for countries is to make the United States look bad, or as you write of China's strategy, stay out of the way and let the United States keep stumbling. What in your mind are the broader, longer term consequences if this trend line continues,

32:19and if US soft power is dramatically diminished? I'm glad you mentioned soft power, because that's really what we're talking about here. And I'd view it primarily in the context of what is still the major competition that the United States needs to worry about. And that's the rivalry with China. China has gone to enormous lengths over the last decade or more to represent itself as a stable, tranquil, reliable partner, that it's the defender of world order. It believes in international law. It wants to defend state sovereignty. It's not

32:53interested in trying to change other countries' regimes. It's someone you can do business with and is not starting wars, not fighting all the time. That's a very seductive package. Now, I don't think it's entirely correct. I think China is more of a revisionist power than that image suggests. But that's the model they're trying to present. And of course, they want to contrast that as much as possible with the image that the United States presents, a country that's impulsive, a country that attacks other countries in a pretty wide-ranging fashion, a country that is blowing

33:27up the world economy in a variety of ways, that is undermining international institutions, that's leaving over 60 international institutions, tearing up USAID, etc., etc., etc. This makes China's diplomatic task of selling itself as a more attractive partner much, much, much easier. What can the United States offer you? The United States can offer you some weaponry, perhaps maybe some protection, and a lot of economic pain. What can China offer you? China can offer you solar cells. China can offer you wind

34:02power. China can offer you batteries. China can build roads and bridges and train lines for you. Again, I don't want to overstate the accuracy of that picture, but it's a very appealing picture, and we are making it much easier for China to sell that. The Pew survey organization last summer did a very interesting survey of global opinion and found that if you look around the world, it was roughly evenly divided between countries that had a more favorable view of the United States and those that had a

34:33more favorable view of China. So it's roughly 50-50. But they noted quite explicitly that the trend line was in China's favor. China's becoming more popular around the world. We are becoming less popular. And I think that ultimately matters because that makes it harder for leaders who might want to deal closely with the United States to do so if the United States has an unsavory image in the minds of their populations. And that's exactly what's happening now. And while this is about soft power,

35:04it also has hard power consequences because just to bring it back to Iran, it's been so striking how in the last few weeks, Iranian media and companies aligned with Iran have put out these memes and videos that mock the United States, that make fun of its standing, its loss of soft power, that explicitly make fun of Trump. And in a sense, everything you've just said, there seems to be a broader global understanding of that and how it can be deployed to play public sentiment at wartime.

35:39As a general rule, it's not a good thing when your leader is easily made fun of. That's true. You know, all presidents get a certain amount of satirical abuse. But I think in this case that Trump has made it easier for people to make fun of him, cast doubt of him, and question his sanity. It seems to me when you're, you know, going after the Pope, when you're putting out things on Truth Social that sound just like raving genocidal rhetoric, you got to expect that others are going to take advantage of this,

36:11and you've given them all sorts of ammunition to use. It's probably better for us to be seen as progressive and hip in the world as a positive force in world affairs. And right now we're looking like an angry, vengeful, regressive force. And that's ultimately not good for American influence. Let me put some subscriber questions to you, Steve. Here's one from Katrina Vanden Heuvel, who I think you know. And she asks, how does a rogue state decline? And when that happens, what kinds of geopolitical

36:43impacts will we see? Oh, well, I'm, I can't resist saying a rogue state declines gradually, then suddenly. The United States has built up. Explain that reference for those who don't know. Yeah, no, that's from Hemingway's famous definition of, you know, how did I go bankrupt gradually, then suddenly. The United States built up an enormous network of influence over the last 75 years, really extraordinary influence in both military and economic spheres, financial spheres. We did that by building cooperative relations with

37:18much of the world, and including some of the world's most prosperous and stable countries. And in a sense, the Trump administration's ability to act like a predator is based on exploiting all of those relationships that other countries value and don't want to break. So that gives the United States a certain amount of leverage. But the more we exploit them, of course, the more others began to see the downside. And they begin to hedge, they begin to diversify, they begin to look for ways to reduce their vulnerability. The United States becomes less popular with their societies, and therefore

37:52politicians have to start backing away, don't want to look too close to Trump. And some of them actually do better if they stand up to him, as we've already talked about. So American influence around the world doesn't drop, doesn't disappear immediately. But it gradually erodes to the point that where you could suddenly imagine kind of a diplomatic run on the bank, where suddenly the United States goes around to the countries that it expects to get support from, and finds that no one's answering the phone, no one's answering the door. Now, we've already seen a little bit of that in the Iran war, where Trump,

38:28once he realized that the Straits of Hormuz was closed, went to the Europeans and said, well, you need the thing open, why don't you fix this problem? And the answer from Europe was, we didn't start this war, we didn't create this problem, we're not going to bail you out for this one. And again, countries like Spain, you know, refused to let the United States use their airspace. Italy has backed away from the United States, despite the close relationship between Trump and Prime Minister Maloney. So, again, these are all signs of erosion, not a sudden collapse,

38:59sudden diplomatic bankruptcy, but it is the kind of thing you worry about, that a rogue state declines, not immediately, but over time, and it may be very difficult for the next president to restore those ties once people decide that the United States really can't be counted on in the way it once was. One more subscriber question. This one's from Costas Michelides, and it is a question that comes up often on this show. Zooming out, what kind of international order do you expect will emerge,

39:34given the United States' behavior as you're describing it?

Future International Order

39:37I still believe that there are a lot of structural forces leading towards a reasonably predictable order down the road. I think it will remain a highly competitive order among the major powers. So, the United States, China, Russia, possibly some others will continue to eye each other warily. They will cooperate occasionally, but not very much. There will be a little bit more cooperation between the United States and China on economic matters because they still need each other,

40:10but it's going to be a pretty competitive, pretty thin global order. China will have increasing a China-centered sphere of some Asian countries, not many, but some, and perhaps countries in Africa that it has worked very hard to build closer ties with. And it will continue to make inroads in some other places, largely through economic tools as well. Its success in doing that will depend a lot on whether the United States continues in its current course. I would then also anticipate the United

40:42States will continue to have a sphere around it of mostly its familiar partners of assuming we don't do too much to alienate them. So, you know, a military operation to seize Denmark might really rupture transatlantic relations on a pretty permanent basis. You could imagine more of a permanent divorce between the United States and Canada. We won't become enemies, but we will no longer be as integrated and as close as we once were. And finally, the thing that worries me perhaps the most is given the importance

41:15of the competition with China. At some point, our Asian partners on whom we depend as much as they depend on us because we are not an Asian power. We need allies in Asia to have influence and a presence there. They will eventually decide that the United States is not a reliable guarantor of their security any longer and will start to make other arrangements, including possibly distancing themselves from the United States and beginning to do more to accommodate China. I think that is an unlikely outcome, but it's

41:49not impossible if we play our hand as badly as we have been. Wow. Well, either way, you and I will be there to analyze it once again. We'll have to leave it there. Steve, thank you so much. Great talking with you, Ravi. And that was Stephen Walt, our regular columnist and a Harvard University professor. Lots more coming up on FP Live. Next week, Kareem Sajidpour on the latest on the war in Iran. Remember, you can watch that live and on video at foreignpolicy.com slash live.

42:23FP Live, the podcast is produced by Rosie Julin. The executive producer of the show is Dana Schoen, and I'm Ravi Agrawal. I'll see you next time.