Image: watson/getty/keystone
analysis
So-called realists claim: With the current president, the USA is showing its true face.
April 14, 2026, 5:18 p.mApril 14, 2026, 5:18 p.m
Donald Trump doesn’t care about Congress, the UN or the International Court of Justice. He despises parliamentarians and is in constant conflict with judges. He compares himself to Jesus Christ, takes on the Pope and blackmails enemies and allies alike. In short: Trump is the antithesis of what is considered a rules-based world order.
It was the USA that created this rules-based world order after the Second World War. The idea behind it is: No longer military power, but rather internationally accepted rules and laws should enable peaceful coexistence between sovereign nations, and thanks to free trade, prosperity should be promoted around the globe.
Founded the rules-based world order: Franklin Roosevelt.Image: keystone
In this world, morality, politics and economics ideally go hand in hand. The times in which “the strong take what they can and the weak suffer what they must” – as the Greek historian Thucydides put it in antiquity – should finally be overcome.
It’s all just lazy magic and hypocrisy, declare those who like to call themselves realists and try to distinguish themselves from the idealists. The USA in particular never followed the rules and always used them as an excuse to assert its own interests. They refer to Vietnam, Chile or Indonesia and cite a legendary quote from US President Franklin Roosevelt. He had already said in 1939 about Anastasio Somoza Garcia, the then President of Nicaragua and a morally more than dubious man: “He’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”
Roosevelt, of all people, is considered the founder of the rules-based world order. After the Second World War, the American president wanted to create an alternative to the naked colonialism of the British and French. Fareed Zakaria, a leading American journalist, explains in a podcast with Ezra Klein in the New York Times that is well worth listening to:
“He (Roosevelt) once went to Casablanca and met with Moroccans there. He then explained that he realized how brutally the French had treated these people. He continued: ‘We did not fight in the Second World War to ensure that the French could continue to do what they had done for centuries, and we are not allowing the British to do so either. If we want to save the West from ruin with this war, we have to create other values.”
Influential American publicist: Fareed Zakaria.Image: keystone
No one would seriously argue that Americans are idealistic Sunday school students who always want the best for everyone. For example, cynical power politics was the order of the day in the Nixon/Kissinger era, and the second campaign against Iraq under George W. Bush cannot be reconciled with international law. Is Trump’s ruthless and selfish foreign policy just the logical continuation of this policy? Is the USA finally letting go of its moral mask?
Not so fast. In the magazine “Foreign Affairs,” political scientist Stephen Walt describes Trump’s foreign policy as predatory hegemony. He formulates what he means by this as follows: “A predatory hegemon is a dominant great power that structures its transactions according to the zero-sum principle in such a way that it always benefits from them.”
The predatory hegemon is clearly different from a benevolent one. This “welcomes a partnership in which both states benefit, for example in order to get rid of a common enemy and in which the other partner can even benefit disproportionately if everyone feels better afterwards,” says Walt.
Mafia-style foreign policy
Trump, on the other hand, pursues a mafia-style foreign policy. He is always interested in profiting at the expense of others and he behaves like a boor thanks to his power. Walt cites as an example a meeting of the International Maritime Organization last October. The American delegation behaved like gangsters, as one participant reported.
To describe the behavior of the Trump people as “honest” and that of their predecessors as “hypocritical” is primarily and above all simply wrong. Zakaria rightly explains: “Let’s think about the last 300 and 400 years. Is the USA qualitatively different from the great powers, such as the Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany, the Kaiser’s Germany, imperialist France, imperialist Great Britain and imperialist Holland? Sure – they were all predatory colonial powers, and the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany even more so.”
Zakaria also doesn’t want to close his eyes to the atrocities of the USA. “I understand the argument of American hypocrisy, because we have done a lot of bad things,” he says. “However, if we look at all of this in a historical context, there is much that the United States can be proud of.”
This certainly includes building an open global economy. “Washington helped its allies get back on their feet after World War II, largely following rules that benefited everyone,” Walt said.
Unequal distribution of wealth
The USA itself has benefited enormously from this open global economy. Their gross domestic product (GDP) has developed much better compared to Europe. Trump’s thesis that the USA is being ripped off by the rest of the world has no economic basis whatsoever. The problem lies not with foreign parasites, but with an extremely unequal distribution of wealth.
Trump, on the other hand, uses his economically absurd tariff policy to enrich himself and his family. His corruption is limitless, his compatriots are left empty-handed. From an economic perspective, Trump’s performance is manageable. While he promised a new golden age for America, GDP grew by a measly 0.5 percent in 2025, and the idiotic war against Iran could cause economic growth to be even worse this year.
The political record of the predatory hegemon Trump is even more devastating. Even the right-wing populists in Europe are turning away from him, and Viktor Orban’s crushing defeat last Sunday shows that nothing is currently more damaging for a politician than a recommendation from the US President – or his deputy.
Meanwhile, Xi Jinping can laugh up his sleeve. A global poll by the Gallup Institute has found that China has now overtaken the US in terms of approval of its policies. Specifically, the result is: 36 percent for China versus 31 percent for the USA.
Laughing third party: Xi Jinping.Image: keystone
Trump’s actions, driven by fantasies of omnipotence, cannot therefore be viewed as a continuation of previous American foreign policy. In fact, the president is not only harming the rest of the world, but also his own country. The USA will become “poorer, less secure and less influential than most Americans have ever experienced,” predicts Stephen Walt.
The chatter about the supposed mask that America has finally dropped under Trump is exactly that: chatter. Fareed Zakaria rightly states: “The more you imagine a world without American leadership, the more you want it back.”