By Michael Beckley
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has largely been expected to follow one of two foreign policy paths: preserve the country’s position as the leader of the liberal international order or withdraw and adjust to a post-American, multipolar world. But as I argued in Foreign Affairs in 2020, the most likely trajectory was always a third: become a rogue superpower, neither internationalist nor isolationist but aggressive, powerful, and increasingly out for itself.
U.S. President Donald Trump has given this vision sharp definition by raising tariffs to levels that echo the infamous Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930, slashing foreign aid, snubbing allies, and proposing to seize foreign territory, including Greenland and the Panama Canal. Yet Trump is more accelerant than architect, channeling long-simmering frustrations with global leadership and deeper structural forces pulling U.S. strategy inward. The real question now is not whether the United States will continue to go its own way but how—and to what end.
Understanding the drivers of this shift is no longer a matter of academic debate. It’s essential for shaping what comes next. Left unchecked, Washington’s unilateral turn could destabilize the world and undermine its own long-term power. But if recognized and redirected, these forces could form the foundation of a more focused and sustainable strategy; one that sheds the overreach of liberal hegemony without surrendering the core strengths of a liberal order.
WHY NOT GO IT ALONE?
One reason the United States is going rogue is because it can. Despite decades of declinist warnings, American power remains formidable. The country’s consumer market rivals the combined size of the markets in China and the eurozone. Half of global trade and nearly 90 percent of international financial transactions are conducted in dollars, funneled through U.S.-linked banks—giving Washington the power to impose crippling sanctions. Yet the United States has one of the least trade-dependent economies in the world: exports account for just 11 percent of GDP (a third of which go to Canada and Mexico) compared with the global average of 30 percent. U.S. firms supply half of global venture capital, dominate the production of life necessities such as energy and food, and generate more than half of global profits in high-tech industries, including semiconductors, aerospace, and biotechnology—nearly ten times China’s share. The United States relies on China for high-volume industrial inputs—base chemicals, generic drugs, rare earths, and low-end chips—but China is far more dependent on the United States and its allies for high-end technologies and food and energy security. Both sides would suffer in a rupture, but China’s losses would be harder to replace.
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
Militarily, the United States is the only country that can fight major wars thousands of miles from its shores. Roughly 70 countries—accounting for a fifth of the world’s population and a third of its economic output—depend on U.S. protection through defense pacts and require U.S. intelligence and logistics to move their own forces beyond their borders. In a world so deeply dependent on the U.S. market and military, Washington has immense leverage to revise the rules—or abandon them altogether.
The United States has not only the means to strike out alone but also, increasingly, the motive. The American-led liberal order has outlived its original purpose, growing into a maze of burdens and vulnerabilities. It didn’t fail, but it triumphed over threats that no longer exist: the devastation of World War II and the spread of communism. By the early 1950s, the Soviet Union controlled nearly half of Eurasia and fielded double the military power of Western Europe. Communist parties, committed to abolishing private property, controlled a third of global industrial output and won up to 40 percent of the vote in major Western democracies. Under these circumstances, the threat to the American way of life was clear, as was the need to defend a capitalist order. That strategy worked. The West became prosperous and democratic, and the Soviet bloc collapsed. But success created new problems the old order couldn’t solve.
Many of the U.S. allies Washington helped protect, for instance, are today incapable of bearing major burdens. Sheltered by U.S. security guarantees, countries across western Europe—as well as Canada and Japan—have slashed defense spending, expanded welfare states, and grown deeply entangled with Chinese markets and Russian energy. Many U.S. allies struggle to secure their own peripheries, let alone uphold global stability. And when crises erupt, they still turn to Washington—to enforce freedom of navigation in the South China Sea in the face of Chinese aggression, to arm Ukraine against Russia, or to protect shipping from Houthi attacks in the Red Sea. Countries that once anchored the liberal order have become dependents—draining U.S. power instead of reinforcing it.
Washington has immense leverage to revise the rules—or abandon them altogether.
Worse, by facilitating the integration of Russia and China into the liberal order, the United States empowered its most dangerous adversaries. Both regimes benefited from a U.S.-led alliance system that pacified their historical rivals in Germany and Japan, curbed nuclear proliferation, and secured global trade routes. With their flanks and supply lines relatively secure, they began redrawing the map of Eurasia by force: Russia through invasions of Georgia and Ukraine; China through militarized island building in the South China Sea, encroachments on India’s territory, and escalating threats against Taiwan.
They also gained access to Western markets, institutions, and networks—then exploited that access to hack, bully, and loot the system. Russia launders oligarchic wealth through Western banks, spreads disinformation, and weaponizes energy to fracture Europe. China shields its domestic market while flooding others with subsidized exports, spending ten times as much on industrial policy as the average for countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. China now dominates strategic manufacturing sectors such as shipbuilding, drones, electronics, and pharmaceuticals—and is weaponizing that dominance to coerce the United States and its allies by cutting rare-earth exports, threatening drug supply chains, swarming Taiwan with drones, and flooding Europe with underpriced electric vehicles. At home, Beijing censors foreign ideas; abroad, it exploits the open Internet to steal intellectual property, plant malware in Western infrastructure, and spread propaganda. It assumes leadership roles in institutions such as the UN Human Rights Council only to subvert the liberal norms they were built to uphold. What was once a cornerstone of U.S. strategy—openness—has become a Trojan horse.
Moreover, the liberal order has become harder to control. After World War II, Washington supported decolonization and integrated new countries into global markets and institutions, fueling globalization and the “rise of the rest” and doubling the number of sovereign states. But success came at a cost. As new players proliferated, authority fractured and veto points multiplied. Institutions that once amplified U.S. influence—including the UN, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank—have devolved into arenas of gridlock and anti-American posturing.
At home, the consequences have been equally corrosive. Globalization fueled growth but hollowed out American industries and concentrated the gains. Between 2000 and 2020, U.S. industrial output (excluding semiconductors) fell nearly ten percent, and one in three factory jobs disappeared. Nearly all net job growth went to the richest 20 percent of zip codes, leaving much of the country behind. The social fallout has been staggering: rising disability claims, drug overdoses, and prime-age workers dropping out of the labor force at Great Depression–level numbers. Many wounded communities retain political clout thanks to an electoral system that amplifies rural voices over urban majorities. The result: a hard pivot away from liberal internationalism and toward protectionism and border controls.
THE GATHERING STORM
As I argued in 2020, two powerful trends—demographic change and burgeoning automation—are remaking the global landscape and reinforcing the drift toward American unilateralism. Rapid demographic change is weakening great powers in Eurasia and destabilizing swaths of the developing world. Meanwhile, new technologies are reducing the United States’ need for foreign labor, energy, and large military bases. The result is a growing asymmetry: mounting disorder and weakening allies on one side and rising U.S. self-sufficiency and strike-from-a-distance capabilities on the other. As that gap widens, Washington will face stronger temptations to go it alone.
Beginning with demography, the United States is the only great power whose prime-age workforce is projected to grow throughout this century. By 2050, the workforces of the major economies of Eurasia will lose around 200 million adults aged 25 to 49—the cohort that drives productivity, military recruitment, and economic growth—with declines of 25 to 40 percent in many countries. By 2100, the figure will exceed 300 million, with China alone projected to shed 74 percent of its prime-age workforce. The share of seniors will more than double in most countries by midcentury, pushing support ratios (the number of workers per retiree) to ruinous levels; China’s, for example, will fall from ten to one in 2000 to under two to one by 2050. Demographic decline is already shaving more than a percentage point in annual growth from major Eurasian economies, and debt-to-GDP ratios have ballooned above 250 percent on average. As other economies shrink and strain, the U.S. economy will become more central to global growth and its fiscal base and military manpower more robust in relative terms.
Yet the United States is unlikely to turn its demographic edge into a new era of liberal hegemony. Instead, demographic disruption is raising the risks to allied defenses by fueling a dangerous imbalance: autocratic rivals are militarizing despite population declines, while democratic allies are rearming slowly, constrained by aging electorates and mounting welfare obligations. As the Eurasian balance tilts toward the autocracies, the risks to U.S. defense commitments continue to rise.
This pattern is already visible. Russia, China, and North Korea are doing what struggling autocracies have long done: turning to the military to secure their regimes. When growth slows and unrest threatens, dictators funnel resources to the armed forces to suppress dissent, deter rivals, and ensure loyalty within the ranks. The Soviet Union followed this path in the 1970s and 1980s, doubling defense spending even as its economy and population stagnated. Today, Russia is doing the same—devoting eight percent of GDP to defense, slashing civilian budgets, and replacing battlefield losses in Ukraine at a rate of 25,000 to 30,000 troops per month. China, despite a collapsing workforce, is carrying out the largest peacetime military buildup since that of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. North Korea, although impoverished and aging, continues to pour resources into weapons and war.
Trump is tearing down the very system that has kept the peace for generations.
Meanwhile, democratic allies are struggling to keep pace. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and countries in Europe are rearming slowly, held back by shrinking tax bases and aging electorates that prioritize social spending over defense. Taiwan’s conscription pool is projected to halve by 2050. Japan, South Korea, and Ukraine are struggling to meet recruitment goals. British, French, and German forces have stagnated or declined. The result is a gathering storm: autocracies gearing up for conflict; democracies responding with too little, too late; and a United States increasingly unsure of whether defending distant allies is worth the mounting risks.
That growing U.S. aversion to foreign entanglements will deepen as the developing world slides further into demographic turmoil. Whereas rich countries are aging and shrinking, much of the global South is exploding in size. Africa alone will add over a billion people by 2050—mostly in countries already grappling with poverty, weak governance, and climate stress. Youth unemployment exceeds 30 percent in many of these states, and education systems are collapsing. Roughly half the countries in Africa are in debt distress, and one-quarter are in active conflict, with similar trends unfolding in the Middle East and South Asia. Surges in the youth population—hitting in states where capacity is weakest—are driving instability, extremism, and mass migration. As migrants flee for the Americas and Europe, they are fueling populist backlash and reinforcing the United States’ instinct to wall itself off.
Meanwhile, new technologies are making that instinct not just plausible but seductive. Drones, long-range bombers, cyberweapons, submarines, and precision missiles potentially allow the United States to strike targets across the globe while relying less on large, permanent overseas bases—which are increasingly vulnerable to adversaries armed with similar technologies. As a result, the U.S. military is shifting from a force geared to protect allies to one focused on punishing enemies by launching strikes from U.S. territory, deploying automated kill zones of drones and mines near adversaries’ borders, and sending nimble expeditionary units to hit high-value targets and slip away before taking casualties. The goal is no longer deterrence through presence—it’s destruction from a distance.
This same logic is reshaping the U.S. economy. Automation and AI are shrinking the demand for foreign labor. Additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, and smart logistics are compressing supply chains and enabling reshoring. AI is replacing foreign call centers. With increasingly automated factories, cheap energy, and the world’s biggest consumer market, U.S. firms are coming home—not just for security but because it makes business sense. The United States’ reliance on the global economy won’t vanish, but it’s becoming narrower, more selective—and easier to sever when the next global crisis hits. A fortress economy is rising to match a fortress military. And together, they are making disengagement feel both safer and smarter.
This is why a rogue superpower is not a hypothetical—it’s the path of least resistance. The question is no longer whether the United States will go rogue but what kind of rogue it will become. Will it be a reckless, hypernationalist power that lashes out, cuts ties, and pursues limited gain at great long-term cost? Or can it channel its strength into a more strategic posture—one that sheds overreach but preserves the core of the liberal order among a tighter group of capable partners?
A FREE WORLD THAT WORKS
If life were just about money and the goal of foreign policy were to grab it as fast as possible, then Trump might be an ideal leader. By slapping tariffs on friends and foes alike, slashing foreign aid, proposing to seize strategic territory, and telling allies to fend for themselves, Trump’s approach might wring out some extra cash, at least for a while.
But economics isn’t the only game in town. There is also geopolitics. And by treating global affairs like a transactional hustle, the United States risks tearing down the very system that has kept the peace for generations. Trade wars don’t just raise prices. They unravel alliances and push rivals toward confrontation. That’s how the world fell apart in the 1930s: protectionism, fear, and rising powers with no way to grow but through force. Trump officials like to compare China to Japan in the 1980s—a trade partner that can eventually be coerced into making concessions. But China is not a democratic ally under U.S. protection. It is a revanchist, nuclear-armed autocracy that, like the great powers of old, sees economics and security as two sides of the same coin. Its civil-military fusion doctrine more accurately echoes the “rich nation, strong army” ideology of imperial Japan. From Beijing’s perspective, the trade wars Washington is stoking are not mere economic spats. They are an assault on China’s comprehensive national power—and a potential prelude to a shooting war.
And much like Japan before Pearl Harbor, Beijing sees itself facing an economically hostile but militarily vulnerable United States. The U.S. military has just two major bases within 500 miles of Taiwan—both now targeted by Chinese missiles. U.S. ammunition stockpiles would run dry within weeks of a major war. Meanwhile, 77 percent of young Americans are unfit to serve in the military, largely because of obesity, drug use, and lack of education. Trump plans to unveil a $1 trillion defense budget, but rebuilding the U.S. defense industrial base could take years. By hiking tariffs before fixing its military shortfalls, the United States may be picking a fight that it’s not fully prepared to win.
The question is no longer whether the United States will go rogue but what kind of rogue it will become.
Some argue the United States should simply sidestep conflict by sacrificing Taiwan and Ukraine and accepting a world divided into great-power spheres: China in Asia, Russia in eastern Europe, and the United States in the Western Hemisphere. They point to the Cold War, when Washington grudgingly tolerated Soviet domination of eastern Europe, as proof that such arrangements can preserve peace. But the analogy is dangerously flawed. Unlike the Soviet Union after World War II, Russia and China are not defending borders of victory—they’re trying to overturn what they see as borders of defeat. Their territorial claims don’t end with Ukraine and Taiwan; they begin there. Moscow seeks to restore a “Russian world” stretching across eastern Europe and Central Asia. Beijing lays claim to most of the South China and East China Seas and large parts of India. Chinese military officials and propagandists have even floated threats to U.S. territories such as Guam and Hawaii, portraying them as relics of Western imperialism.
Granting China or Russia parts of these spheres would not satisfy them—it would empower them to go for more. And wherever their boots tread, violence and repression will follow. In Ukraine, Russia has bombed maternity wards, tortured civilians, kidnapped children, and looted cultural treasures. In Georgia, Syria, and Chechnya, it leveled cities and propped up brutal regimes. China has crushed Hong Kong’s freedoms, imposed martial law in Tibet, built concentration camps in Xinjiang, and militarized the South China Sea with artificial island fortresses and swarms of maritime militias. An expanded Russian or Chinese sphere would not bring order or prosperity—it would spread the machinery of state terror.
Nor would the expansion stop there. History shows that great powers rarely halt their advance unless stopped by force or geography. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the United States expanded until it dominated the Western Hemisphere and its surrounding seas. Germany and Japan had to be crushed in World War II to end their imperial ambitions. Britain and France, though ravaged by that war, clung to their empires until anti-colonial revolts and U.S. pressure pried them loose. The Soviet Union pressed outward too—arming insurgencies across the developing world, repressing reform movements in Eastern Europe with tanks, and placing nuclear missiles in Cuba. Only sustained Western resistance contained its advance. There is no reason to believe Putin and Xi will prove exceptions to this historical rule.
Even setting aside the security risks, the case for spheres of influence collapses on economic grounds. Outsize wealth has never come from fortress economies. It comes from open, maritime commercial orders that enable sustained, compound economic growth. If the United States were to retreat into continentalism and cede spheres to Beijing and Moscow, it may remain safer and richer than most. But it would be far poorer than it could be and far more likely to face the fires of conflict down the road.
OPPORTUNITY OUT OF CRISIS
A better strategy would not carve up the world with China and Russia but contain them with a consolidated free-world bloc. That project would begin at home. North America already forms the world’s largest free-trade zone. Canada, Mexico, and the United States collectively possess 500 million people, vast energy reserves, and a broad spectrum of industrial capabilities. Deepening this continental core—with shared infrastructure, secure supply chains, and labor mobility—would give the United States a flourishing base from which to compete globally without relying on adversaries.
Overseas, the United States should anchor a layered defense against the axis of autocracies: China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Frontline democracies including Poland, South Korea, Taiwan, and Ukraine should be heavily armed with short-range missiles and rocket launchers, mobile air defenses, loitering drones, and mines to repel invasions. Behind them, core allies including Australia, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom would reinforce the front with longer-range missiles and mobile ground, air, and naval forces designed to strike across the theater and support frontline defense. The United States would serve as the ultimate backstop and enabler, providing satellite intelligence, heavy lift and logistics, nuclear deterrence, and massive air and missile strikes delivered by carriers, stealth bombers, and submarines.
The goal isn’t just to win a great-power contest. It’s to channel it.
This same military alliance also would form an economic bloc. The United States would offer market access in exchange for tangible commitments that allies spend more on defense; decouple from Russia and China in critical sectors such as semiconductors, telecommunications, energy, and advanced manufacturing; and grant U.S. firms reciprocal access to their markets. Trade deals would include joint rules on investment screening, export controls, and industrial subsidies, and would support the co-production of advanced technologies. The aim would not be to resurrect a universal liberal order, but to consolidate a tight economic alliance—one that defends its members, isolates adversaries, and wields collective bargaining power.
If there is a silver lining in today’s grim outlook, it is that crisis creates opportunity. Durable international orders—the Westphalian system of sovereign states, the European peace that emerged from the 1814–15 Congress of Vienna, the post–World War II liberal order—were forged in the heat of great-power rivalry, when fear, not idealism, compelled countries to band together. The same goes for American renewal: throughout its history, the United States has invested at scale only when national survival was on the line. It was the Civil War that drove the rapid expansion of the Northern railroad network, laying the groundwork for later transcontinental lines. Cold War fears, not peacetime consensus, sparked the creation of the interstate highway system and the National Defense Education Act. Military R & D funded the breakthroughs that gave rise to the semiconductor industry, GPS technology, and the Internet. For better or worse, national security concerns have been America’s most consistent engine of public investment.
Today’s rivalry with China and Russia can serve that galvanizing role again, driving action to rebuild infrastructure and industry, harden supply chains, revive the defense industrial base, attract top global talent, and restore civic trust. The goal isn’t just to win a great-power contest. It’s to channel it; to fix what’s broken at home and shape a world that reflects American interests and values. A free world that works—for the United States and for those willing and able to stand with it.
