The U.S. military operation to arrest Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in early January was tactically impressive and strategically revealing. American forces acted with overwhelming speed and precision to successfully seize and exfiltrate Maduro, but the most important signal was not the operation’s outcome. It was its justification, based on domestic criminal indictments of Maduro, with no serious effort to persuade a global audience, let alone seek authorizations from multilateral institutions. Power spoke plainly; explanation was an afterthought.
To some, this was simply the latest example of a familiar American habit, one similarly on display in the U.S. decision to wage a war against Iran that has no basis in international law. In fact, both represent a new kind of unrestrained behavior.
The animating sentiment behind President Donald Trump’s foreign policy is one of purported realism. As Trump’s top adviser, Stephen Miller, put it in remarks about a potential U.S. annexation of Greenland, “We live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”
Variants of Miller’s comments by Trump administration officials and allies are often delivered with a shrug, as if outcomes alone matter and methods are mere decoration. But this ignores the fact that great powers do not merely “possess” power; they deploy it through networks of institutions and alliances consolidated by shared norms and narratives. Those networks are not ideological niceties; they are force multipliers.
In a world characterized by complex interconnection and interdependency, or what we call “compound security,” methods are outcomes in and of themselves: How power is exercised shapes whether it is seen as legitimate, which in turn will determine whether it will be effective in the future. And when a hegemon undermines and even abandons its own legitimacy, it triggers cascading effects: allies hedge, institutions weaken, narratives fracture and adversaries exploit seams. In such an environment, coercion and force may seem like a cheap substitute for legitimacy, but in fact they raise costs and lower effectiveness.
So, the question is not whether the United States should pursue its interests. Great powers always do. The question is whether legitimacy remains a load-bearing element of American strategy—or whether U.S. leaders now see it as a gilded flourish that can be removed without structural consequence.
The Strategic Function of Legitimacy
One reason debates over legitimacy so often go nowhere is that legitimacy is treated as an ethical argument rather than a strategic one. The moral dimension is real—but it is not the only dimension, and in a traditional security analysis it is rarely the decisive one. Legitimacy is better understood as infrastructure: It reduces the friction of cooperation, improves the fidelity of information flows and stabilizes coalition behavior under stress.
Reducing the Trump administration’s behavior to old-fashioned realism misses what is strategically new and dangerous, especially given its disregard for legitimacy in Venezuela, Greenland and Iran. The danger is not that the United States is behaving like a hegemon, as it has for almost a century, but that it is learning to behave like an empire without caring whether others still believe in the system it leads.
For much of the postwar era, Washington treated legitimacy as a core component of its power. Even when actions were self-interested, U.S. leaders invested in justification, consultation and institutional process to frame America’s interests as aligned with broader system stability. This architecture, based on America’s “enlightened self-interest,” did not eliminate hypocrisy, but it preserved a baseline belief that American power operated within a shared framework.
The Maduro operation signaled a different posture, one that treated persuasion as ornamental and institutions as peripheral. This episode is not an aberration. It sits alongside a pattern of unilateralism since Trump’s return to the White House—from the weaponization of tariffs and abrupt withdrawals from multilateral agreements on climate and health, to the blockade of Cuba and the Iran war—that points toward a structural shift in how Washington understands power.
The central question is no longer whether the United States pursues its interests, but whether legitimacy has become a dispensable accessory. How that question is answered will determine whether U.S. influence remains efficient and durable, or becomes louder, costlier and more brittle with each ostensible success along the way.
The False Debate
Has the United States been a “benign hegemon,” or is the Trump administration simply more honest about how power really works? Both sides of that argument miss the point. The United States has always pursued its interests, from the systematic eradication of Indigenous peoples to the brutal colonization of the Philippines at the end of the 19th century to the occupation of Iraq at the start of the 21st century. There was never a golden age of American altruism.
Yet it is equally mistaken to conclude that past American leaders treated ideals as mere public relations. For most of its history, U.S. presidents were faced with a genuine tension, pursuing the country’s material interests while also holding sincere beliefs about liberal principles.
A hegemon that enjoys high legitimacy can achieve outcomes with less coercion because others align with its positions out of shared interest, not fear.
This tension was not simple hypocrisy; it was a structural constraint that shaped how power was exercised. Presidents routinely justified interventions through a dual register of both threats and laws, and both security and legitimacy. This was the case of then-President William McKinley in 1898, who justified the country’s war with Spain based on trade and security interests, but also humanitarian concerns. In the immediate aftermath of the end of the Cold War, then-President George H.W. Bush articulated his vision of a “new world order” to achieve collective security and rule of law, paired with clear pursuit of U.S. interests. The balance varied, but legitimacy was always strategically relevant.
This paradox also performed real strategic work, by forcing American leaders to justify actions to Congress, allies and international audiences, thereby creating friction that impeded impulsive decisions and raised the political cost of unilateralism. That friction was a feature, not a bug. The United States has always acted in its own national interest, but it historically treated legitimacy as part of that national interest.
The distinction is critical. A great power that views legitimacy as integral to its strategy behaves differently from one that sees it as cosmetic. The former invests in persuasion and institutional processes even when they are slower. The latter prioritizes speed and leverage, assuming raw capability is sufficient. This is why the Trump administration’s embrace of realism is descriptively true—though even here there is room for debate— but strategically hollow. How a hegemon acts determines whether its influence endures or decays. Leadership mobilizes consent; domination compels compliance. Both can achieve short-term results, but only one sustains a system.
The change today is not that America has become more self-interested. It is the quiet abandonment of legitimacy as a strategic input. Power is increasingly its own justification, and explanation becomes optional. This shift alters not only how American power performs, but how others perceive and interpret it, forcing Washington to reapply force at a rising cost.
American interests matter, but when leaders in Washington adopt a strongman view of a world governed by force, it reveals a lack of understanding that legitimacy is a force multiplier in pursuing those interests.
Legitimacy as Infrastructure
Legitimacy is often dismissed as a moral nicety, a matter of reputation or soft power. Strategically, that framing is misguided. Instead, it is more useful to think of legitimacy as the hidden architecture that allows power to travel efficiently through alliances, institutions and markets. It lowers the transaction costs of cooperation, speeds the formation of coalitions and improves the credibility of signals in crises. A hegemon that enjoys high legitimacy can achieve outcomes with less coercion because others align with its positions out of shared interest, not fear.
When that infrastructure erodes, so does efficiency: cooperation slows; bargaining becomes harder; and signals are interpreted through suspicion rather than trust. At that point, coercion must do more work. This is the core substitution problem now confronting American power: As legitimacy declines, force and leverage must compensate. Sanctions replace persuasion; tariffs replace trust; threats replace reassurance.
Such tools can be effective in the short term, but they are costly in other ways. Each success requires more effort to replicate. Each unilateral action teaches partners to hedge and adversaries to wait. Power exercised without the consent of others eventually becomes power exercised without leverage.
This dynamic produces a distinctive pattern of strategic underperformance. A hegemon can remain materially dominant while becoming less effective at turning capability into durable influence. It can gain tactical victories while eroding the system that makes strategic victory more achievable. The symptoms are subtle at first: Allies grow more cautious; coalitions become narrower; and institutions lose credibility as coordination hubs. Adversaries find more seams to exploit through narrative competition and economic pressure. This does not require the collapse of alliances, only a steady shift from voluntary alignment toward reluctant compliance.
That shift changes everything. It means that American power must be reapplied with greater force to achieve outcomes that once came more cheaply. Every crisis consumes more political capital and diplomatic bandwidth. Leadership quietly gives way to domination.
The United States still possesses extraordinary military and economic capacity. What is at risk is not the capability itself, but the architecture that once allowed it to scale efficiently. Absent that architecture, power can become louder, but not stronger.
The Marshall Plan and the Architecture of Leadership
To understand what is being lost, one must remember how American leadership was built after World War II. The Marshall Plan is often recalled as an act of generosity or as a tool in America’s ideological competition with the Soviet Union, but it was more than either of those. American leaders understood that Europe’s economic collapse threatened political legitimacy, democratic governance and long-term security. Scarcity bred instability, which in turn created openings for Soviet influence. Reconstruction aid was therefore not charity, but strategic necessity.
What made the Marshall Plan distinctive was how it aligned American advantage with European recovery. The United States framed its interests in system-wide terms, arguing that reviving European economies would strengthen democratic governments and create stable alliances. That logic invited European participation rather than resistance. The framing mattered as much as the resources.
The United States under Trump is not abandoning its interests. It is abandoning the architecture that once allowed it to pursue those interests efficiently.
In his 1947 speech announcing the plan, then-Secretary of State George Marshall declared, “Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos.” This was not sentimental rhetoric; it was strategic architecture. It defined U.S. leadership as a response to systemic breakdown rather than a bid for domination. This narrative forced America’s adversaries to contest its legitimacy, not just its material power. Soviet disinformation campaigns targeted the Marshall Plan precisely because its legitimacy threatened Moscow’s ability to frame American leadership as imperial exploitation.
The plan’s compounding effects were decisive. Economic recovery restored productivity, and as Europe’s democratic governments delivered tangible improvements, their political legitimacy grew. And all the while, the cohesion of the trans-Atlantic alliance deepened as trust accumulated. Deterrence was also strengthened because the system the U.S. pledged to defend was increasingly worth defending. This was enlightened self-interest in action: Washington gained advantage over the Soviet Union by improving the performance of its allies’ liberal democratic political economies.
This architecture of leadership created a durable expectation that American power would be exercised within a shared framework of rules, norms and collective purpose. That expectation became strategic capital, lowering the cost of coalition formation and increasing tolerance for America’s mistakes.
This is what the Trump administration is now quietly dismantling.
The United States under Trump is not abandoning its interests. It is abandoning the architecture that once allowed it to pursue those interests efficiently through consent, cooperation and institutionalized legitimacy.
From Constraint to Transactional Power
For much of U.S. history, American power was constrained, not only by rivals, but by Congress, allies, institutions and its own rhetoric. These constraints often frustrated executive branch officials by slowing decisions and limiting freedom of action. But they also put a premium on judgment. Constraint did not weaken American power; it disciplined it.
U.S. presidents had to justify their actions to skeptical audiences, build coalitions and frame interventions around acceptable normative narratives. Institutional routines and consultation with allies generated friction in decision-making. That friction mattered. It slowed impulsive action, forced deliberation and preserved habits of cooperation that routinized how smaller states could interact with a hegemon like the United States. In complex international systems, friction is a necessary feature for stability and balance. It reduces the likelihood of catastrophic error.
This architecture of constraint is now thinning in favor of a transactional model of U.S. statecraft under Trump. The pattern is visible across multiple domains: unilateral military operations, casual withdrawals from international agreements and tariffs used as leverage. Transactional power prioritizes episodic advantage over systemic stewardship. It seeks compliance over alignment and values speed over legitimacy.
While this approach can produce tactical successes, it cannot sustain low-cost leadership. The danger is not that America is becoming weaker, but that its power is becoming more expensive to use. Each self-induced crisis now consumes more political capital and coercive leverage to achieve outcomes that once came more cheaply through trust and institutional consultation. Transactional dominance looks efficient in the moment; over time, it degrades the very system that amplifies American power.
The Shape of American Decline
History’s canonical warning about legitimacy’s importance as a lever of power is Athens after Pericles.
The Athenian empire did not fall because it lost ships, wealth or military capability. It fell because its judgment decayed while its confidence remained high. Democratic deliberation regressed into demagoguery; strategic caution eroded into hubris; and persuasion was replaced by coercion. Athens no longer treated its allies as partners but as instruments, while punishing dissent, often in ways that violated longstanding Hellenic norms. The Sicilian Expedition was a catastrophe not because Athens lacked power, but because it had forgotten how to use it wisely. Athens fell because it abandoned restraint.
This is the relevant parallel for the United States, because continuing to adopt a degraded form of realism with a shrug will be America’s own undoing. Such a posture mistakes the possession of power for a license to ignore how it is used. As Athens learned, great powers are not judged merely on their strength, but on their wisdom.
The United States still possesses extraordinary capacity. It fields an unmatched military, anchors the world’s financial markets and leads in technology and innovation. What is at risk is not this raw capability, but its performance in the long term. In today’s world, power does not operate in a vacuum; it moves through alliances, institutions and narratives. When those channels are maintained, American power scales efficiently. When they degrade, it must be reapplied again and again at rising cost.
The choice Washington now faces is therefore not between idealism and realism. It is between systemic stewardship and transactional dominance. Stewardship treats legitimacy as infrastructure, institutions as force multipliers and constraint as the discipline that preserves judgment. Transactional dominance treats them as décor, irritants and obstacles. The first model produces durable leadership; the second, episodic control at rising cost.
Great powers rarely fall the moment they abandon legitimacy. They fall much later, when they discover that no one trusts them anymore. When that moment arrives, capability and confidence remain, but the architecture that once made it possible to project power cheaply does not.
Decline does not announce itself with a golden trumpet. It accumulates quietly, then arrives all at once.
Isaiah “Ike” Wilson III, Ph.D., is a strategist, scholar, and founder of Wilson W.i.S.E. Consulting LLC, specializing in compound security and system-level approaches to global competition. He is a professor of practice at Arizona State University, as well as a retired U.S. Army colonel and former senior defense executive.
Lt. Col. Jahara “Franky” Matisek, Ph.D., is a U.S. Air Force command pilot, nonresident research fellow at the U.S. Naval War College, senior fellow at the Payne Institute for Public Policy, and a visiting scholar at Northwestern University. He is the most published U.S. military officer currently serving, with over 200 articles on foreign policy, strategy and warfare.
The views expressed here are the authors’ own and not those of their current or former employers.