The path to the Trump doctrine

Even prior to its attack on Iran, the United States under the Trump administration had dramatically altered the geopolitical landscape with a combination of brute force, blunt threat and bulldozing action. Reflecting both continuity and rupture with past US policy, this stance relies on coercion without consent, and influence without legitimacy, contend Asli Ü. Bâli and Aziz Rana in this piece written before the Iran conflict.

This article was first published in Boston Review (Winter 2026).

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IN late 2024, the world watched with a mix of hope and disbelief as opposition forces in Syria finally toppled Bashar al-Assad, ending more than 50 years of rule by the Assad family. Images of rebel fighters throwing open the gates of the notorious Sednaya prison, where thousands had been detained, tortured and killed under the old government, symbolised a break from a past defined by repression and mass killing. Opposition leader Ahmed al-Sharaa declared the beginning of ‘a new chapter in the history of the region’, and in the months that followed, it seemed like that old hope might finally be realised. Several countries – including the United States – eased sanctions to support Syria’s fragile democratic transition. And by November 2025 al-Sharaa was standing in the Oval Office, where even US President Donald Trump expressed something like cautious optimism. ‘We want to see Syria become a country that’s very successful,’ he said. ‘We have all had rough pasts.’

In theory, the fall of Assad created a moment for reconstruction and renewed sovereignty. In reality, Syria’s transition would fall swiftly under American supervision. The Trump administration spent the second half of 2025 forging new arrangements for managing Syria in partnership with Israel, drawing up a security pact in which Syrian forces would withdraw from the border region and allow for the opening of an air corridor for Israel to strike Iran. Negotiations remain ongoing to finalise the details, but the core elements underscore the double edge of the opportunity presented by Assad’s toppling: while the new Syrian leadership seeks to end regional isolation, the proposed agreements risk turning Damascus into a client state.

If 2025 opened with the hope – albeit quickly dashed – that the United States might encourage local sovereignty, the first days of 2026 witnessed that hope’s stark opposite: the sudden, forcible removal of a sitting head of state. After an abduction operation that apparently involved the killing of over a hundred people on Venezuelan soil, US officials declared Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was in American custody, a fact quickly confirmed by a photo of a blindfolded Maduro in a US Navy ship. A gloating Trump proclaimed the United States would now ‘run Venezuela’ and take control of the country’s oil.

It was a stunning action, but not necessarily a surprising one. A month earlier, the Trump administration had hinted at its future plans in its National Security Strategy, a 33-page manifesto-like statement of its foreign policy priorities. The document frankly describes the world in terms of ‘global and regional balances of power’, highlighting the need for the United States to redefine its economic relationship with China while framing the challenge in Europe as one of managing the continent’s relations with Russia. It largely abandons the post–Cold War language of multilateralism and liberal internationalism, replacing that language with a blunt, transactional vision of national interest and hemispheric dominance. And it presents the Western Hemisphere as a region to be dominated under the ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine – or as he calls it, the Donroe Doctrine.

Unlike earlier American framings, Trump’s embrace of conditional sovereignty suggests an approach where the United States stands first in a multipolar world of authoritarian hegemons and operates independent of longstanding American self-understanding with respect to democracy or the rule of law. This approach sees the globe as divided among ‘civilisationally’ distinct ethno-national communities. And the explicitness of its embrace of quid pro quo arrangements and hard power alone renders quaint the long-familiar talk of international law. US action now depends on raw threat rather than the classic combination of hard and soft power, where force proceeded alongside legitimating narratives and consensus-building. Under the Trump doctrine, ‘America First’ suggests two claims: a domestic ethno-racial identity that asserts a fortress wall against immigrants, and continued global dominance where the strongest stick presides over a lawless order.

Today, Trump and those around him openly talk about annexing Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal, gloat over extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean and the Pacific, threaten to seize rare-earth minerals in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and oil in Venezuela, abduct foreign heads of state, and suggest similar actions – along with potential regime change – across the Americas and the world, from Iran to Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia and even Mexico. All the while, they muse over the benefits of Palestinian ethnic cleansing, impose sanctions on jurists – foreign and international – that seek accountability for war crimes or gross human rights abuses, use tariff threats to extract global resources, and treat white South Africans as the world’s only worthy refugees. What brought us to this point?

New old doctrine

Depending on your vantage point, the Trump doctrine appears either strikingly new or eerily familiar. Beltway commentators rushed to label the National Security Strategy a ‘radical departure’ from the US-led post–World War II era. Others saw its mirror in the 19th-century gunboat diplomacy of US naval coercion from Japan to the Caribbean. And critics to the left were quick to underscore its links to the long trail of US imperialism, from Cold War rivalries in the Global South to the more recent terms of the war on terror. In many ways, the best reading is one that underscores both continuity and rupture. 

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 25 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 legalise extrajudicial executions at the sole discretion of the US 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 US 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 centrepiece 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 organisations like the World Health Organization (WHO), his administration was sceptical of WHO’s new investment round and related funding reforms, both backed by a cross-section of Europe and the Global South.

Neither did Biden slow the decades-long decline of US foreign aid as a percentage of GDP, let alone suggest any real dedication to spreading American largesse – an attitude highlighted by the terms of his much-touted exit from Afghanistan. The United States may have pumped billions of dollars into the country, but often through defence contracting that enriched US companies without materially improving the lives of Afghans or building legitimacy for US-backed institutions. When Biden ordered troops to leave the country, he left behind a record of broken promises and local allies bereft of protection, all of which reduced grand US rhetoric to cheap talk.

At the same time, the Biden administration embraced its own aggressive posturing and rule-breaking. It essentially kept in place the hardline Trump policies towards Cuba, undermining trade and travel and further isolating the country after the Obama-era détente. And despite claims to the contrary, it never recommitted to the signature foreign policy accomplishment of those Obama years, the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, from which Trump had unilaterally withdrawn. Instead, Biden continued to blanket Tehran with harsh sanctions.

‘Pivot to Asia’

But Biden’s most visible continuation of the Trump 1.0 approach came in the so-called ‘pivot to Asia’. When Biden entered office, he sought to complete a project that had eluded his two predecessors: recentring American grand strategy around long-term technological, military and economic competition with China while extricating the United States from its oversight of wars and resource dependencies in the Middle East. China’s rise, the logic went, was the structural challenge of this century. The United States continued to have significant strategic interests in the Middle East: preserving Israel’s military hegemony, containing Iran and maintaining privileged access to the Gulf’s energy resources. But direct presence in the region had real diminishing returns, given the opportunity costs. The Biden administration’s foreign-policy triage – withdraw from Afghanistan, downgrade the region, and redirect attention to the Indo-Pacific – was meant to consolidate American power for a new era of system-level rivalry.

From the start, Biden consciously followed both Obama and Trump’s lead in his adversarial approach to China. His administration re-energised the Quad with Japan, Australia and India; launched the security partnership AUKUS to embed Britain and Australia in the Pacific security architecture; and passed industrial-policy packages – most notably the CHIPS and Inflation Reduction Acts – designed to promote US innovation beyond Beijing while increasingly boxing China out of access to critical technologies. The goal was to contain China without overt confrontation (though Biden’s commitment to Taiwan and military-first approach to the South China Sea did little to turn down the heat).

All of this would soon give way to global overstretch. The first snag was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which led Washington to re-militarise NATO and sustain a massive flow of weapons and intelligence to Europe. Still, by mid-2023, the White House believed it had stabilised the transatlantic front and could finally execute the eastward shift. Its marquee initiative – the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), unveiled at the New Delhi G20 summit – was conceived as the infrastructural complement to the pivot: a US-led alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

IMEC, which aimed to connect South Asia, the Gulf and Europe through Israel’s ports, formed the economic wing of the realignment project Biden inherited from Trump: if successful, it would fulfil the Abraham Accords’ vision of normalising relations between Israel and Arab nations by courting Saudi Arabia. But it was precisely the Accords’ dream of a new, Israel-centred order for the Middle East that foreshadowed the unravelling of Biden’s strategy. October 7 and the invasion of Gaza forced the administration into an all-consuming crisis that upended every premise of the pivot. While Biden administration officials regularly assured global audiences that they were working ‘tirelessly’ to achieve a ceasefire, the United States, once the self-styled indispensable mediator, was bankrolling and facilitating the Israeli military campaign behind the scenes. Instead of downsizing its Middle East footprint, Washington’s ‘ironclad’ commitment to Israel became the defining feature of its foreign policy and global posture.

The war’s timing was catastrophic for Biden’s grand design. On 6 October – the day before the Hamas attack – US officials were meeting Saudi diplomats to finalise what they believed could be a historic bargain: normalisation between Israel and Riyadh. The entire enterprise rested on the Abraham Accords’ illusion that the Palestinian question could be managed and sidelined, not resolved. Hamas’s assault shattered the premise of a stable region anchored in Gulf-Israel cooperation: in its wake, the Saudi-Israeli deal collapsed, the Abraham Accords lost momentum, and IMEC – dependent on an ‘integrated Middle East’ – became politically untenable. The ‘pivot to China’ lay in ruins.

Middle East muddle

If Gaza derailed the pivot, it also revealed – again – how much the Biden team had followed Trump’s lead in the Middle East. Biden entered office promising to recalibrate relations with Saudi Arabia after American journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in their Turkish embassy, to revive the Iran nuclear deal, and to ‘put human rights at the centre’ of US foreign policy. By 2024 none of these goals were remotely on the agenda. Biden never engaged in meaningful nuclear negotiations; Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who allegedly called for Khashoggi’s killing, was rehabilitated; and Washington underwrote what international organisations, human rights groups including in Israel, and legal and historical experts would broadly conclude was a genocide that left tens of thousands of Palestinians dead.

In the Middle East, Biden’s only genuine commitment seemed to be to Israel, and so by extension the Abraham Accords. But the very states whose partnership in the Abraham Accords he had spent three years cultivating – the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco – faced domestic backlash over Israel’s war on Gaza; Saudi Arabia suspended talks; and Jordan and Egypt, longtime US clients, publicly condemned Israeli actions. China, by contrast, used the moment to advertise itself as a mediator, hosting Arab delegations and amplifying calls for a Gaza ceasefire. Beijing’s earlier success in brokering Saudi-Iranian rapprochement demonstrated its growing diplomatic reach. Now, it was leading an ‘Asia pivot’ of its own. 

By the time Biden shuffled off the campaign trail in July 2024, it was clear that every part of his elaborate plan had imploded. Israel’s campaign in Gaza accelerated the drawdown of US munitions stocks already depleted by Ukraine, forcing the Pentagon to stretch production lines meant for deterrence in the Pacific. Domestically, a Democratic base increasingly hostile to Israel eroded the political consensus needed for sustained competition with Beijing. And abroad, Gaza collapsed the moral clarity Biden had sought in framing a global contest between American democracy and Chinese autocracy. If anything, the images from Rafah and Khan Yunis seemed to invert just this legal and moral calculus for global audiences.

In his second term, Trump abandoned the Biden-era framing of US power still in service of liberal internationalism. But Biden’s actual practices in the Middle East – hard power, with few efforts at consensus-building, local legitimacy or multilateral constraint – already demonstrated the extent to which Pax Americana was disintegrating. Trump 2.0 has now intensified these dynamics while doing away with surface narratives of democracy promotion, human rights and the rule of law. In his recent speech at Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney made just this point: the rules-based order has become little more than a fiction, and any stable multilateral order going forward cannot survive on grounds of the primacy of any single superpower – including the United States.

Managed instability

Even before Trump’s second term, Washington’s approach to Syria and Lebanon already exemplified what might best be described as primacy shorn of legitimacy. In late 2024, when the Syrian conflict turned in favour of domestic forces opposed to Assad’s rule, Biden responded not by supporting reconstruction, but by encouraging Israeli attacks on post-Assad Syrian assets and sustaining sanctions that paralysed the new government’s economic recovery. The 2019 Caesar Act and related restrictions blocked access to banking systems and foreign investment, making it nearly impossible for Syrian institutions to rebuild even civilian infrastructure. Presented as leverage to promote ‘accountability’, it left hospitals without fuel, municipalities without budgets, and refugees without prospects of return.

The interim Syrian government that formed early in the Trump administration pursued talks with Israel to end attacks, but was met with renewed coercion. Ongoing Israeli drone and missile strikes on southern Lebanon under the pretext of countering Hezbollah were extended eastward into southern Syria. Israel’s conduct has been described as a ‘silent war’ in the border provinces: targeted assassinations, precision strikes on infrastructure, and incursions into the 1974 demilitarised zone. By preventing Syria and Lebanon from restoring basic governance in their southern regions, Israel ensures a permanent security vacuum along its borders – a buffer not of peace, but of instability. Despite repealing the Caesar Act, Trump reinforced this logic through his own policies of coercive containment.

Likewise, the near-daily Israeli bombardments in southern Lebanon since 2024 – sanctioned indirectly by Washington despite a purported more-than-year-old ceasefire – have devastated the area’s infrastructure. Reports from the region chronicle how entire villages were razed under the rubric of ‘security operations’, echoing campaigns in Gaza. The US response has been to blame Hezbollah for the state’s dysfunction, despite the fact that it has been effectively demobilised after Israel decapitated its leadership. In effect, Washington has abandoned Lebanese civil institutions while endorsing Israel’s accelerating cross-border militarisation. Instead of supporting reconstruction or political mediation, US policy treats Lebanon as an extension of Israel’s northern front – a territory to be disciplined rather than rebuilt.

This approach undermines not only Lebanon’s sovereignty but also its fragile pluralism. By equating the Lebanese state with Hezbollah, US officials conflate a confessional political system with a largely defeated militant movement, collapsing distinctions critical to Lebanese civilian governance. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy: a ‘failed state’, as US envoy Thomas Barrack called it, whose fate has been ensured in part through external pressure. For Washington, the breakdown of Lebanese authority justifies giving Israel licence for continued incursions – a licence Israel then employs at will, even beyond these border regions. Following fears that the United States might intervene in Iran during Tehran’s repression of mass popular protests, there is now speculation in the Israeli media that Tel Aviv might engage in such strikes, coordinated with the United States. The cycle of coercion sustains itself.

Combined, these policies perpetuate a zone of managed instability along and beyond Israel’s northern and eastern borders. In Syria, the postwar transition becomes an externally managed process of containment, with ‘sovereignty’ bounded by the interests of others. Worse still, the local experiment with self-determination in Syria’s Kurdish region is now being extinguished. As part of its new security framework, the Trump administration is engaging in discretionary strikes on Syrian soil, purportedly against ISIS, but it has withdrawn support for the only force on the ground that had contained the Islamic State. In the process, the United States has licensed Damascus and Ankara to dismantle Kurdish self-governance in Rojava.

If Trump’s foreign policy represents a rupture with Biden’s, then the difference has hardly been felt by Syrians and Lebanese. Both administrations oversaw a bipartisan foreign policy consensus that authorised Israel to engage in constant military action. Both administrations refused to recognise the independent agency of communities in Lebanon and Syria. And both administrations have treated the region’s recovery as a variable in their own strategic calculus: establishing a coercive architecture linking the Abraham Accords to the suppression of Iranian influence and the bolstering of Israeli regional military supremacy. Regardless of who governs in DC, American and Israeli preferences systematically override the sovereignty of local populations in the Middle East.

The Gaza plan

Trump’s 20-point Gaza ceasefire plan pursues this approach to its purest form: maximalist demands imposed through threats and incentives, bypassing local agency and real global buy-in alike. No Palestinian representatives of any kind, whether from Hamas or any other group across the political spectrum, were consulted in defining the ‘deal’. The content of the proposal was more or less what Biden had previously proposed to Israel: a deal, he hoped, that would resuscitate the Abraham Accords while quieting domestic discontent about an ongoing genocide. Tel Aviv summarily rejected Biden’s overtures, but under Trump, its posture has changed. Now, the Trump administration can revive those Accords and enable potential Saudi participation in the United States’ preferred regional architecture.

Trump gave Hamas what he called ‘three or four days’ to comply with his plan, after which he promised to give Israel his ‘full backing to finish the job’. The message was not subtle: accept the American-devised terms or face annihilation. This is diplomacy as a continuation of war by other means. The 20-point plan imposes a technocratic administration – in no way chosen by Palestinians – under international supervision, with Trump allies reportedly responsible for oversight. The plan’s terms in practice mean that the US and Israel have sole discretion over whether civilians will be allowed access to real aid flows for relief and reconstruction – despite the clear human rights entitlements to these goods. And it makes that discretion dependent on whether Hamas capitulates by disarming and dissolving. In effect, Palestinians are presented with a form of ceasefire in which the experience of not being at imminent risk of death by bombardment is likely replaced by slow-motion killing via famine, disease and exposure. At worst, ceasefire is twisted to mean merely a reduction (not a cessation) of ongoing Israeli bombardment.

Trump’s demands may appear superficially reasonable to Western decision-makers, who have long seen the rights of Gaza’s Palestinians to the humanitarian prerequisites of their subsistence as conditional. In a world where Palestinians’ human rights have become a bargaining chip, linking access to food, water and shelter to ultimatums is not new. But like so many Trump initiatives, the Gaza plan doubles down on American presumptions that force can substitute for legitimacy and that the weak will suffer what they must.

Of course, the plan’s reliance on coercion is also its central weakness: it commands no genuine consent from those whose compliance it requires. The ‘stabilisation’ of Gaza is something to be enforced from without by ‘an international stabilisation force’, which third states have – no surprise – proven unwilling to join. By excluding Hamas, minimising the role of the Palestinian Authority and placing Gaza under foreign ‘trusteeship’, the plan effectively and indefinitely blocks Palestinian self-determination. Palestinians are treated not as a community with legitimate political claims but as a problem to be managed and policed. There should be little shock, then, when this plan – like so many other diktats that preceded it – inevitably fails to generate either durable peace or stability: again, it refuses to address the enduring questions of occupation and self-determination driving the conflict.

Internationally, the proposal undercuts the very norms that confer legitimacy on peacemaking. It was advanced without consultation with Palestinians but also by excluding the United Nations. The absence of a multilateral process was deliberate: Washington regards international institutions as obstacles rather than sources of authority. Under consistent criticism regionally and globally, the UN was eventually brought into the deal, but the belated imprimatur of the Security Council cannot legitimate it. The Gaza plan makes plain that the United Nations itself no longer serves as a forum to defend its founding commitments. Indeed, Trump’s new ‘Board of Peace’ is framed as a substitute for the United Nations, recasting the Gaza plan as a pilot for bypassing multilateral institutions he sees as constraining American leverage. More broadly, the Board institutionalises his transactional worldview, built around ad hoc bargaining forums calibrated to power, pressure and dealmaking.

The familiar transactionalism of the Trump doctrine extends to the plan’s economic proposals, which envision massive reconstruction projects and foreign investment once Gaza is ‘stabilised’. The beneficiaries are conceived as America’s allies in the region, awarded massive contracts and a captive territory in which to build experimental new projects. Leaked blueprints suggest that the Palestinians of Gaza will be pushed into makeshift dwellings on one half of the territory while the other half, depopulated and destroyed, will be the site for a bonanza of reconstruction grift stamped in the image of Trump’s Gaza Riviera fantasy and possibly new Israeli settlements. Comments by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) chief Eyal Zamir that the ‘yellow line’ now dividing Gaza will constitute a ‘new border’ for Israel make clear that the partition is simply another vehicle for annexation. This is no Marshall Plan for Palestinians, to say the least, but effectively a firesale of their land and resources.

Dealing in domination

In Trump’s broader conception of global order, alliances are valued only insofar as they deliver immediate, tangible benefits. In this sense, the Gaza proposal mirrors his approach to NATO, trade policy, and negotiations with North Korea and Iran – high-stakes bargaining conducted through threats or extortion. What matters is not the infrastructure of peace and stability, let alone institutional legitimacy, but the optics of a ‘deal’ struck by the world’s strongest power complete with the promise of lucrative contracts.

Supporters of Trump’s method argue that it produces results: hostages returned, rockets silenced, enemies cowed. Yet agreements reached under duress rarely survive the waning of coercive leverage. Already, ‘peace deals’ Trump has touted in 2025, between Thailand and Cambodia, between Rwanda and the DRC, have begun to unravel as American attention has shifted elsewhere. Moreover, even the US’ capacity to achieve ends through coercion alone has limits, as indicated by Trump’s climbdown from demands to colonise Greenland.

China’s greater diplomatic muscle – from brokering Saudi-Iranian rapprochement to backing ceasefire resolutions at the UN – and its deals struck with a range of counterparts, from Canada to the UAE, suggest that other actors understand rationally that they have to diversify their own portfolio of alliances. Likewise, the growing role of multilateral institutions under the auspices of alternative powers – whether the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation or the increasing reliance on regional networks like Mercosur or ASEAN – may be less a consequence of other hegemons’ ambitions than of how the American assault on its own post–World War II institutional order has left that order deeply compromised.

In this context, Trump has tended to punch down not up, avoiding direct confrontations with the United States’ near-equivalent power players in China and Russia. Venezuela is a case in point: a far weaker adversary brought to heel through coercion. In the run-up to regime change in Caracas, the administration ratcheted up the pressure by carrying out extrajudicial killings, sanctioning and seizing oil tankers, and imposing a naval blockade – effectively trumpeting its pursuit of control from above in a bid to capture assets and establish a new client state.

Such a strategy closely mirrors the administration’s longstanding playbook for the Middle East. In both cases, the Trump administration openly defends coercive intervention as a legitimate tool of statecraft, signals its intention to open post-transition economies to US firms through lucrative reconstruction and extraction contracts, and frames military power as a means of securing reliable access to strategic resources – oil in particular, but also critical minerals. The administration’s unwillingness to disengage from the Middle East is not only about security commitments or alliance politics, but also about treating the region as within the US orbit and indispensable to global resource dominance. What emerges is a model of influence without legitimacy: power exercised through coercion, sanctions and proxy governance rather than consent, law or durable institutional buy-in. It’s a worldview organised around regional spheres of influence and material control, in which the small players are subject to the whims of the powerful.

Of course, the United States has long leveraged its power to dominate weaker players and pursued Cold War objectives through extreme violence. But that violence was nonetheless in service of ideological ends that required it to actively build new multilateral institutions and invest significant material resources to ‘win hearts and minds’. Now, however, documents like the National Security Strategy, along with gunboat diplomacy and annexation threats, appear in service of little beyond domination on grounds of ‘civilisational’ superiority and might-makes-right asset expropriation. This fact is further driven home by the administration’s series of travel bans, which embody its profound contempt for the idea of community with a world that is overwhelmingly Black and brown. 

Under the Trump doctrine, the world is meant to be organised through regional hegemons that dictate the terms for their sphere of influence while maintaining their fortress walls. It speaks to the longstanding comfort Trump has had with dictators, including his openness to Saudi and Gulf influence (not to mention their money). In this way, the Trump doctrine depends on maintaining instrumental partnerships that are more stable in some ways (no grand conflagrations between the United States and Russia or China, except maybe at the periphery), but pointedly less so in many others – especially for communities on the ground subject to extreme repression or arbitrary, capricious violence.

The limits of coercion

Yet Gaza and Venezuela also demonstrate – perhaps unintentionally – the intrinsic instability of such a coercive order. The Trump doctrine seeks control in a world that resists domination. By substituting coercion for consent, it multiplies the very crises it ostensibly aims to end. Not only does it underscore the degree to which the United States’ global credibility has eroded; it demonstrates how pure coercion, in a context of real multipolar competition, is inevitably costlier and less effective at pursuing strategic ends.

In all the variations of American power since World War II, there is one approach that remains genuinely untested: multipolarity on inclusive terms, rather than through imperial rivalry. Such an approach would ground itself in the concerns of local publics and their own aspirations for self-determination. And it would link the domestic and foreign – from the Middle East to the streets of Minneapolis – through a vision of a world organised around mutual self-constraint, collective decision-making and a shared global commons. Such meaningful self-determination, at home and abroad, has always been the only plausible pathway to a more just and stable future. But for now, Palestine, Venezuela, Lebanon and Syria stand as stark embodiments of that pathway’s continued foreclosure.

Asli Ü. Bâli is the Howard M. Holtzmann Professor of Law at Yale Law School and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Aziz Rana is Professor of Law and Government at Boston College and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His latest book is The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them.

*Third World Resurgence No. 366, 2026/1, pp 11-17