If there was a break from the past, it began long before January 2025. For one thing, the post-1945 liberal international order has always been marked by legal restraint and self-interested defection, the creation of human rights bodies and the embrace of coups, assassinations and armed overthrows. In the last twenty-five years, those defections have swallowed the rule. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States rendered sovereignty negotiable and transformed the universal premises of the postwar order into something far narrower: a reconfigured world subject to American prerogatives, conditions, and tutelage. Trump has now pushed this logic past its breaking point, by directly attacking even the institutions that would sustain international law for other states. Today, the country is not simply defecting from the rules—expanding the zone of exception for itself—but acting to make those rules fundamentally inoperable.
The path to the Trump doctrine is long and winding, but to understand its most proximate influences we need only look back a couple of presidents—especially to their actions in the Middle East. Barack Obama may have been celebrated for his commitment to liberal internationalism, and in many ways, he did embody its last gasp. Even so, his administration designed a system of targeted killing through drone strikes in the Muslim world that purported to legalize extrajudicial executions at the sole discretion of the U.S. president. Trump’s killings at sea take such Obama-era lawlessness as their clear precedent.
After Trump’s first term, the Biden presidency was billed a return to normalcy with respect to international law and global responsibility. Yet instead of resurrecting the old order, Biden cemented its end, exemplified by his refusal to apply either U.S. or international law to Gaza—even in the face of a drumbeat of official resignations.
In 2021, he came into office declaring that “America is back” and “ready to lead the world,” asserting a “values-based” approach to foreign policy that evoked the days of postwar internationalism. As it turned out, the change was more one of tone than substance. In press conferences and statements, Biden liked to invoke a nostalgic image of Cold War American multilateralism (one that conveniently omitted all those interventions and coups). Yet the centerpiece of “winning hearts and minds” during the Cold War had been massive material investments to woo potential allies, embodied through projects such as the Marshall Plan. And while Biden did reestablish some funding for organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO), his administration was skeptical of the WHO’s new investment round and related funding reforms, both backed by a cross-section of Europe and the Global South.