Present at the Destruction
The full scope of the destruction the second Trump administration has wreaked on the machinery of U.S. foreign policy and national security is hard to capture. But it is worth cataloging three broad categories of damage that add up to one conclusion: Trump has decimated U.S. diplomacy.
Trump has laid waste to U.S. state capacity. Through the frenetic activity of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, Trump has gutted the federal workforce. The president and DOGE have encouraged firings and layoffs, the bullying of remaining employees, and, in the case of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the dismantling of entire agencies. Some of these actions were unlawful, but by the time the courts could intervene, many were irreversible. The political scientist Daniel Drezner has called the result “the shallow state.” These actions have severely hollowed out the U.S. foreign policy and national security apparatus without making a dent in the federal budget, suggesting that the Trump administration had no clear rationale for these moves besides a disdain for expertise, a quest for retribution, and a desire to remove obstacles to corruption.
After the frustrations of his first term, when many in his inner circle restrained his worst impulses, Trump put unqualified loyalists in top positions—including Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense and Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence—and strong-armed them through the Senate. Some observers breathed a brief sigh of relief when Trump announced Senator Marco Rubio, previously known for his traditionally conservative foreign policy views, as his nominee for secretary of state. But Rubio quickly emerged as a crucial Trump enforcer, abetting DOGE’s rapid dismantling of USAID.
Not until Trump’s second term has a president truly tried to act as an emperor.
Trump has also eroded trust in and goodwill toward the United States—and he has done so on live television. The most egregious examples came when he used Oval Office press availabilities to bully the visiting leaders of friendly countries—first, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s wartime president, and later, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.
Another blow to U.S. diplomacy—also televised—came on April 2, when Trump dropped a tariff bomb on the global economy. Multiple courts have since declared many of his tariffs illegal, suggesting that perhaps there are some remaining checks on presidential foreign policy. But Trump has other routes through which he can pursue tariffs and circumvent the courts. More important, the damage to American credibility has already been done. Trump has rattled existing agreements and long-standing trading relationships, along with more recent trading partnerships that took decades to develop. Given the subsequent gyrations in the administration’s tariff policy—which, as of this writing, has still left large tariff hikes on most countries—world leaders may very well be reluctant to enter into serious trade negotiations with the United States.
Trump also weakened foreign policy institutions in his first term: taking a hostile stance toward the State Department, which suffered significant workforce attrition; consistently undermining the intelligence agencies; and politicizing the military. But even though the instruments of U.S. power—diplomatic, military, and otherwise—endured some damage back then, they remained functional. In some cases, the Biden administration was able to reinvigorate them, as it did with U.S. intelligence during the run-up to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
But there will be no easy way back from Trump’s second-term assault. It is not only that the loss of personnel is far greater in scale and scope, with the excising of expertise in areas that largely escaped the first Trump administration, including in the scientific agencies crucial for American innovation. It is also that this time, the administration is carrying out an ideological vision, as detailed in the right-wing agenda known as Project 2025, to make federal workers suffer so much that they will not want to do their jobs anymore. Rebuilding the expertise and experience of the federal bureaucracy will be the work of a generation, not an administration. When, inevitably, crises come, the United States may no longer have the tools, proficiency, and overall capacity to address them.
Accountability Vacuum
What the first months of Trump’s return to office have really exposed is the accountability vacuum left by the near-complete destruction of checks and balances inside and outside the executive branch. In his second term, Trump has shown just how much power the presidency can still accrue and what happens when a leader with no interest in respecting the limits of this power takes the reins.
This crisis was decades in the making. As the political scientist James Goldgeier and I have written in Foreign Affairs, checks and balances on the president’s role in foreign policy were already badly eroding before Trump won the 2016 election. Two developments stand out as the most relevant for the country’s current predicament: the expansion of presidential power after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and the lack of elite accountability for the twin failures of the Iraq war and the 2008 financial crisis. When Congress granted the president greater leeway for counterterrorism, it came with a self-reinforcing logic that ensured this power would be difficult to claw back. Fearing that it could be seen as getting in the way of fighting terrorism, Congress chose not to repeal these powers or exercise strong oversight of the government’s prosecution of the “war on terror.” After President George W. Bush used these powers to invade Iraq in 2003, Congress remained reluctant to constrain him in wartime, even when the war was clearly failing. In the economic realm, the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program, a response to the financial crisis and the severe economic downturn that followed, contributed to the erosion of restraint. Signed into law by Bush and continued during the Obama administration, the program was necessary to avert an even greater economic disaster. But the bailout of banks that were “too big to fail” fed the perception that the president could make sweeping decisions affecting the entire economy even as the people responsible for the crash continued to profit from its aftermath.
The failure on the part of Congress, in particular, to even attempt to rein in the executive after these crises is puzzling. Reforms often follow major debacles: for example, near the end of the Vietnam War, Congress enacted, over President Richard Nixon’s veto, the War Powers Resolution, which limited how long the president could deploy troops without congressional authorization. Presidents since Nixon have circumvented the resolution by simply not recognizing it or by asserting their power as commander in chief. Nonetheless, the resolution raised the political cost of deploying troops and put the legislative branch on record as wanting to be consulted in future military deployments.
Unrestrained, the president is essentially a dictator in his foreign policy.
It could be that the financial crisis consumed the political energy that would otherwise have gone toward a real reckoning with the consequences of the war on terror. In the absence of this reckoning, Americans are still living in the domestic political order fashioned after 9/11, with a highly militarized presidential apparatus that can act with near impunity as long as the president invokes “national security.” Congress has largely sidelined itself on national security matters and has not even been able to repeal the authorizations to use military force in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2002).
Presidents since 9/11, including Trump, have therefore been able to push the limits of their power, stretching the 2001 and 2002 authorizations to use force beyond recognition. For example, Obama undertook a vast program of drone strikes and bombed Yemen and Syria. In his first term, Trump continued what now seem like routine abuses of the authorizations, for instance when he repeatedly bombed Syria. Some of his first-term actions, while highly risky, were different in degree but not in kind, as when he ordered the strike that killed the Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani and tempted a far more serious escalation of conflict with Iran. Others truly pushed the limits of presidential power, such as his use of the military in domestic settings, including during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C.
But during Trump’s first term, some guardrails—notably in the form of his advisers and members of his cabinet, many of whom had the respect of Congress—tempered Trump’s most egregious instincts. Now, those guardrails have vanished. The other branches of government are no longer even attempting to constrain his foreign policy. Congress itself dealt the first of two blows to executive restraint in January 2021, when the Senate failed to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial for fomenting the January 6 insurrection. Too few Republicans were willing to cast a vote against Trump. Criticism and defections from within the president’s own party have always been essential to holding presidents accountable: during Watergate, congressional Republicans ultimately abandoned Nixon, who resigned knowing they would not support him. With Trump’s 2021 acquittal, Republican legislators in Congress made it clear that they were effectively taking themselves out of the business of checking Trump.
Then, in July 2024, the Supreme Court, never inclined to check presidential power in foreign affairs and especially deferential on national security matters, gave Trump a literal get-out-of-jail-free card in ruling that the president enjoyed substantial immunity from prosecution for virtually any action related to his official duties. The ruling not only stopped the federal prosecutions of Trump—for his role in the “Stop the Steal” movement and his actions related to January 6, as well as his alleged mishandling of classified documents—but also made it highly unlikely that Trump will ever be held accountable for violating federal law and the Constitution, which he has arguably done repeatedly in the first few months of his second term.
Personalism in the White House
International relations scholars used to divide the world into democracies and everyone else. The category of nondemocracies included Iraq under President Saddam Hussein and China in the 1990s and 2000s, when its leaders rotated regularly. The last decade of scholarship has made clear, however, the very real differences among authoritarian regimes and the implications for their foreign policy and national security choices. The political scientist Jessica Weeks, for example, has shown that in some autocracies, leaders face real constraints from elites, whether in a political “machine” such as the Politburo in China or in a military junta in which officers can oust the leader because their own political survival does not depend on one person. Other autocracies are truly “personalist” dictatorships in which nothing stops the leader from making erratic decisions, including starting ill-advised wars. These distinctions also reveal shifts in the same autocracy over time. In China, for instance, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has centralized power to such an extent that the regular rotation of leaders no longer occurs.
As the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have argued in Foreign Affairs, the United States is sliding into competitive authoritarianism—a system in which elections, however unfair, still take place and dissent, however throttled, still exists. Today, U.S. courts are still exerting some checks on the president, especially in the domestic realm. The fate of those challenges, however, remains uncertain, since many cases will ultimately land at the Supreme Court, whose composition favors Trump.
In matters of foreign policy and national security, the presidency now has the characteristics of a personalist dictatorship. The courts’ traditional deference to the president in foreign affairs is unlikely to change. The second Trump administration, well aware of this deference, is using foreign policy as a pretext for its legally dubious actions. For example, Rubio’s enthusiastic attempts to detain and deport foreign students involved in 2023 campus protests rely on a 1952 law that allows for the removal of noncitizens if the secretary of state deems their “presence or activities . . . would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” In 1990, Congress strictly limited the use of the law to very specific circumstances, and in 1996, U.S. District Judge Maryanne Trump Barry—the president’s late sister—struck down the law (the opinion was later overturned on a technicality). In the current cases, courts have rebuked the administration, and several of the students have been released pending further proceedings. But their fates remain uncertain, and Rubio has moved on to broader visa revocation efforts, including against Chinese students.
The administration is complying in only the most minimal way with court orders and in many cases trampling on basic due process so fast that courts cannot stop great harm to individuals and institutions. The fact that administration officials have repeatedly used foreign policy to justify their overreach shows they well understand the freedom of action they have in this sphere. A real national security emergency, such as a terrorist attack, would allow the president to even further extend executive power into the domestic arena. Trump’s cutting of the last threads of presidential accountability leaves it up to the next president to decide whether to respect the law and uphold the Constitution.
This disappearance of limitations on the president bodes ill for U.S. foreign policy and the world. Scholarship on personalism paints a dark picture. Without constraints, even from elites in the leader’s inner circle, personalist dictators are prone to military misadventures, erratic decisions, and self-defeating policies.
The presidency now has the characteristics of a personalist dictatorship.
Start with international aggression. Many scholars have found that personalist dictators tend to be more militarily aggressive. They also tend to want more from the world, taking “revisionist” positions that enhance their own domestic and international standing. Trump mused about buying Greenland during his first term; in his second, he has openly discussed using military force against Denmark, a NATO ally, to acquire it.
The politicization of the military, a process that also predates Trump but that he has supercharged, is also a serious concern. Personalist dictators fear the military and prioritize minimizing threats to their rule over battlefield performance, as the political scientist Caitlin Talmadge has shown in her book The Dictator’s Army. Although the United States military is still far from that point, Trump is abusing his position as commander in chief. For example, in response to protests this month against his immigration policies, Trump has deployed the National Guard and the Marines to Los Angeles, over the objections of local civilian authorities.
The erosion of checks and balances at home has enormous implications for the world. The United States has, for better and for worse, dominated global order as an imperfect democracy for 80 years. As the political scientist John Ikenberry has written, the post-1945 order took shape because the United States, the overwhelmingly dominant power, accepted limitations on its power by binding itself to new international institutions. The country’s democratic institutions allowed the United States to credibly enter into and stay in these arrangements. The United States wrote the rules of that order—which were, of course, highly beneficial to the United States—at a time when the president still looked to Congress for approval of a long-term vision for U.S. foreign policy and national security. President Harry Truman worked to secure that approval through grinding political processes, giving up some of his own domestic priorities, such as his Fair Deal economic and social program, to ensure bipartisan commitment to the postwar competition with the Soviet Union.
The second Trump administration has done far more than withdraw from international agreements and organizations. The very nature of the new U.S. government—unaccountable, unlawful, opaque, corrupt, arbitrary, and erratic—makes it a poor partner for cooperation. It is difficult to imagine Washington returning to any kind of pre-Trump normal. Trump has not simply reduced the United States’ international commitments. He has hollowed out the country’s ability to play a significant and trusted role in the world. These effects will be extremely difficult to reverse because, unlike after Trump’s first term, there will be few experienced professionals to rebuild the institutions and relationships that make foreign policy work on a day-to-day basis.
Foreign governments, including those of allies, will not be complacent once Trump leaves office. A United States that can change policy daily, treat those who serve its government with cruelty, and take reckless actions that compromise its basic systems and leave shared secrets and assets vulnerable is not one to be trusted. Moreover, if American institutions, especially Congress, are not functional—if they cannot pass important laws to commit to and fund foreign policy institutions and priorities, ensure that legislative spending power is appropriately carried out by the executive, and serve as a check on presidential power—then U.S. foreign policy is fully at the mercy of the whims of each newly elected president.
THE RECKONING
If American citizens, politicians, and those that staff national institutions hope to achieve a real reckoning with this wreckage after Trump leaves office, they will have to do two things. First, they must take on the difficult but essential task of confronting past breaches of laws and of norms. Officials in this administration, including members of the cabinet, must answer for their actions: through courts if they committed crimes and through hearings that assess their actions and allow elected officials and the public to judge if they violated their oaths. But it will be crucial to draw a line between those who engaged in unlawful, unethical, or unconstitutional conduct and those who merely served the Trump administration’s regular policy goals. Without drawing this line, future politicians would risk criminalizing policy differences and make debate over difficult policy problems impossible.
Second, they must revive and replenish the institutions and mechanisms of accountability. Presidents must want to guarantee checks on their power—leaders must think about how they would feel if a president from another party could operate without constraint. Congress can and must play a role in checking the executive. But in an era of extreme polarization, lost expertise, and legislative cowardice, Congress will likely continue to shirk its responsibility to curb the excesses of presidential power.
That is why the legislature must develop some automatic forms of oversight and accountability and thus render moot the political choice of whether Congress should work to constrain the executive. For example, Congress could expand its use of the long-standing mechanism of congressional reporting requirements. Most of these are written reports that Congress requires of the executive branch, but Congress could institutionalize high-level hearings that force top national security officials to appear regularly before the legislature. Members of Congress could also invite the president to give more than one annual address to Congress or to answer questions directly. For the legislature’s power to reach the White House once again, Congress must revive the political expectation that it will ask policy questions—and that the president must answer them or face political costs.
The consequences of the second Trump administration for future American foreign policy—under either party—are already grave. If there is no serious reckoning that attempts to rebuild presidential accountability for foreign policy, then Americans should expect not only more military parades but also more military misadventures, unpredictable trade relations, and fitful foreign-policy making in a very uncertain future.