Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office have brought about a seismic shift in US foreign policy. Decades-long strategic assumptions and commitments have been undone in weeks. Staunch Atlanticists have been turned into sceptics. And the project of multilateralism has been placed under frontal assault – not only its institutions but, more crucially, its fundamental norms.
Nowhere is this shift more apparent than in the White House’s readiness to barter with the Kremlin over the occupied Ukrainian territories, as made plain by statements from top officials and the latest US peace proposal. Although an eventual ceasefire and frozen frontline may leave the territories outside Ukraine’s de facto control, US recognition of Russian rule would constitute both a diplomatic blunder and a violation of the norms of national sovereignty and territorial integrity. It would also disown a long record of US commitments to Ukraine’s sovereignty and security, from the Budapest Memorandum to the ill-fated assurances at the 2008 NATO Bucharest Summit.
Nods towards such concessions have crippled Kyiv’s limited leverage even before the outset of serious negotiations. More broadly, they have signalled that territorial integrity is now, along with everything else, a tradeable card.
Normalising revisionism
Trump’s appetite for territorial revisionism is neither new nor limited to Ukraine. His first term set precedents with the recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights and Morocco’s over Western Sahara. But the current administration has already normalised it far more brazenly, advancing its own set of expansionist claims in the Western Hemisphere. Only the thinnest veil of rationalisation has covered such claims, whose bluntness would have made the most radical apostles of the Monroe Doctrine blush.
Citing its mineral wealth and strategic value in countering Chinese and Russian activity in the Arctic, Trump has sought to strip Greenland of its status as a self-governing territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, portraying it instead as an asset to be taken by economic or military means. Following the same playbook and invoking the trope of abused American generosity, he has falsely framed the Panama Canal as gifted US real estate, pressuring American capital to bid for its main ports and planning to forcefully oust Chinese traffic from it.
Canada, closest of US allies, has not been spared – quite the opposite. Reducing the US–Canada border to an “artificially drawn line” and spinning the trade deficit with Ottawa as a US “subsidy,” Trump has made clear his wish to bring the independent country into the Union’s fold. To that end, although constrained by the Canada-US-Mexico agreement, he has sought to coerce Canadians through punitive tariffs, which will nevertheless be felt first and foremost by US consumers.
Most egregiously, Trump’s proposal to empty and “take over” Gaza – which he deems a favour to its population – has signalled the administration’s willingness not only to violate territorial integrity but also to commit a crime against humanity as defined by the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit forced population transfers and deportations.
A self-defeating gamble
The principles of national sovereignty and territorial integrity – trampled in the clashes between European empires in the 19th century and eviscerated by the totalitarian forces of the 20th – were reaffirmed after WWII and enshrined in the UN Charter. They became the foundation of the post-war international system, but had already been a feature of US foreign policy since the 1932 Stimson Doctrine, which, by establishing the non-recognition of territorial changes achieved through force, closed the door on earlier, abortive US experiments at empire in Cuba and the Philippines. Ever since, American grand strategy has oscillated between isolationism and interventionism, but outright territorial expansion has remained off the menu.
By bringing it back, Trump is not only crossing a moral boundary but also renouncing the bargain that underpinned US hegemony for decades – a bargain whereby nations entrusted their security to the White House and confined their ambitions to economic races run on dollars. Through this demolition, Trump seems to believe he can restore US pre-eminence and more freely manoeuvre great power competition with China while also positioning himself as a peacemaker. He will achieve neither.
Firstly, the putative rationale for Trump’s actions vis-à-vis Russia – a pivot to the Indo-Pacific premised on splitting Russia from China – flies in the face of the deepening military cooperation between the two countries, which is unlikely to be reversed regardless of any détente between the White House and the Kremlin.
Secondly, by forgoing legal norms, Washington risks losing the trust of the very region it is trying to pivot to. Indo-Pacific states that have long relied on US security guarantees and a predictable, rules-based environment may seek alternative arrangements or pursue security individually, thereby fuelling a conventional and, potentially, nuclear arms race.
Lastly, even if détente with the Kremlin were to bear its fruits, and the US were to consolidate a larger sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere, it would likely emerge as a relatively weaker global power. Whatever absolute material and strategic gains such expansion could attain would be outweighed by the end of America’s bargain with the world and of the world with America – including the loss of the dollar’s exorbitant privilege.
Europe’s choice
Where nationalism once fuelled the collapse of empires, a new breed of great-power imperialism now seeks to erase the norms on which modern nation-states and their coexistence rest. Its calculations may defy strategic logic and have more to do – for the Trump administration – with the desire of complicit elites to dismantle institutions that constrain their grab for greater financial, digital, and executive power.
Whatever the root causes, should this trend endure, the international order for which an open and democratic EU was built may cease to be, displaced by a 21st-century global Concert of Powers – where smaller states face annexation or clientelism, and sovereignty and territorial integrity are subordinated to spheres of influence.
Beyond the setback this would deal to democracy and civil liberty worldwide, maintaining a balance of power within the Concert may prove too tall an order for its architects. With populists and terminally online tech oligarchs in lieu of Metternich and Talleyrand, there is little hope for diplomatic finesse. And with nuclear proliferation on the rise and mutually assured destruction ever looming in the background, any tipping of the balance may not just result in regional strife but in outright catastrophe.
Confronting this trend, Europe must demonstrate both autonomy and boldness: by placing greater emphasis on the resilience of its democracies, forging coalitions to uphold multilateral institutions, devising concrete security guarantees for Ukraine, anticipating hotspots wherever latent territorial grievances may be stirred by Trump’s example, and ending its overreliance on US weapon systems while seeking a formula for continued nuclear deterrence that avoids further proliferation.
As importantly, Europe must demonstrate coherence in upholding the international order and its norms. Rejection of Russia’s land grab in Ukraine and Trump’s expansionist rhetoric must be accompanied by the same red lines on Gaza. Failure to consistently hold a mirror to territorial revisionism has already tarnished the credibility of a Europe that cannot afford to hold the line alone – but it is not too late to correct course.
The price of inaction is clear: a return to a world of unchecked expansionism, where power dictates borders and the EU’s multilateral nature is pushed into irrelevance. Trump has set the stage for this reality. Europe must resist it.
Raul Villegas is a Policy Analyst at the Executive Office of the European Policy Centre.
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