The United States is simultaneously daring a radical revision of its regime and a reconfiguration of the international system. The end of deterrence and the legitimization of other powers’ interests, only if compatible with American ones. A limit to the empire to exploit its resources. Brutality calls rivals, not discipline.
Federico PETRONI
«If we try to fight
in every revolution in the world,
we never stop.
Where do we draw the line?»
Hamilton, 2015
1. The truly revolutionary aspect of the second Trump administration is the renunciation of universalism to place limits on the United States. It is an epochal transition. It consists in abandoning the claim of moral superiority with which America has told its story and justified its power in the world since its birth. And on which it has erected the world order since 1945, offering it to all humanity.
Exhausted, America stops offering itself as a guarantee of the international system. To save itself, it attacks the ruling class (called the regime) that has led it astray, exploits the empire to extract resources, redefines its geographical priorities, tries détente with rivals to gain time, and plans to rebuild its military and technological power.
The worldview of the revolutionaries has its own logic and realism, albeit radical. But the unprecedented shift in the exercise of American power, at home and abroad, creates profound contradictions. What is missing is a coherent plan to manage them and reduce their impact.
What follows is a first attempt to immerse ourselves in the gaze of the new leadership. To wear its lenses. With a warning: there is no unitary vision at Trump’s imperial and chaotic court. We can, however, identify common ground, prevailing figures, and truce agreements between currents. This is an unavoidable exercise. This might not be the new America as a whole. Yet, the emperor’s new clothes are here to stay.
2. The Trump administration’s worldview stems from some precise premises.
The world cannot be ruled by a single power. It is too chaotic and plural to be ordered by a single center of power. America cannot be the global government and solve all the problems of the planet. In the words of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, not even a MAGA loyalist: «It’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That (…) was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world. The goal is not hegemony, but defending the status of Number One. America must adapt to a world of empires or powers that opportunistically pursue their own interests. The age of alliances is over; the sun rises over the age of alignments. There are no rigid blocks: you align when your interests coincide or are negotiable with another power’s interests. «Indians (…) and Saudis are talking to the Russians, and they are talking to us», Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby said. «That is the reality of the world system as it is now. America must no longer be the system, it must be in the system.
The international system has failed the U.S. Globalization has impoverished those who were supposed to dominate it (the Americans) and strengthened those who were supposed to be neutralized (the Chinese). It has destroyed the middle class, deindustrialized the country and developed dangerous dependencies on enemies, from pharmaceuticals to raw materials for the defense industrial base. It is unacceptable that allies disarm while demanding America’s protection. The organizations that emerged from the Second World War no longer work because they do not reflect the balance of power anymore. A hundred years of Wilsonian tradition – a foreign policy justified by making the world safe for democracy – have created a system that confuses the interests of the United States with those of humanity.
The danger comes from within, not from the outside. The city upon a hill is on fire. The real enemy is liberal progressivism, not China. The priority is not to save the world but to save America. The quality of life has deteriorated to the point of depressing Americans and eroding trust in institutions. Immigration is out of control. The debt has reached stellar proportions (124% of GDP, 36 trillion dollars), it is not repayable, limits spending capacity, and distorts the economy. The federal government is corrupted by a very expensive and unconstitutional bureaucracy. Technocracy and the primacy of experts have failed because they dictate solutions that are contrary to common sense. The suburban professional and managerial elites want to impose their decadent way of life on the rest of the country, which they hate, along with its history. Wokeism and left-wing radicals have conquered the top of culture and society, from the media to universities, from the executive to corporations. The risk is that in a few years we will no longer have a country.
We cannot wage war. The United States cannot fight against a near-peer power. The odds of not winning with China are too high to risk the destruction of the American military force. The casualties would be worse than the Second World War, intolerable for the population.
It is a material problem: the United States does not have enough ammunition, soldiers, and production capacity for a mass war. It is a temporal problem: having disinvested for thirty years from the defense industrial base, to the point of emptying it, the U.S. cannot resolve the deficiencies in the short term. It is a budgetary problem: for decades successive American administrations have abused force, employing it superficially in conflicts without clear ends, therefore endless and invincible; the popular will to make fiscal sacrifices has consequently eroded. Finally, it is a strategic problem: given that their rivals are increasingly aligned, the Americans are certain that if war breaks out on one front (China), they would also end up fighting on another (Russia or Iran); However, the Pentagon has been repeating since 2018 that it is no longer able to fight on two fronts at the same time. Colby summarizes: the gap between aspirations and what we can actually do is so wide that, if the bluff is called, it is a catastrophe.
Result: we must avoid ending up in war at all costs. It is the failure of deterrence: you cannot credibly threaten enemies with force. You cannot honor all commitments at once. Overextension forces difficult choices: defense of the North American perimeter and priority to the Indo-Pacific. Military preponderance has vanished. You cannot ignore the reaction of other powers any longer.
Coexisting with adversaries is possible and necessary. The American hegemonic mentality considers an existential enemy anyone who does not conform to the liberal international order. It considers the American way of life incompatible with other forms of empire. Therefore, it convinces rivals that Washington will accept them only after a regime change or a surrender. This arrogance risks dragging the U.S. into war at a time when it cannot wage one. Instead, no regime is inherently illegitimate. Adversaries are threats because of their capabilities, not because of their existence. We must talk to everyone to reduce the risk of a direct confrontation and gain time to equip us. A notorious formula in America says that diplomacy is the art of saying “nice doggie” while you look for a rock.
The real stake, even with China, is artificial intelligence. Beijing remains the number one rival. It cannot be defeated: it is not within the power of the United States to trigger a regime change or fuel an insurrection against the Communist Party. Military and technological containment is not enough: we must accept that «they’re going to be a global power, but it can’t come at our expense» (Rubio). China must not surpass the U.S.: it would upset the American way of life in an unacceptable fashion. The only way it can do so, if America does not commit suicide, is on the technological front. The AI industrial revolution will redistribute the cards of world power. The best machines will win wars, Nobel Prizes and production relations. The United States must take advantage of not having to face a Soviet Union to solve the domestic crisis and relaunch its now threatened technological primacy. Not having a peer enemy was the problem, it must be the opportunity.
3. From the premises comes a list of necessities.
Regime change. It is the battle cry of the new right. Its intellectual reference, Patrick J. Deneen, defines it as follows: «A peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class and the creation of a postliberal order in which existing political forms can remain the same, as long as a fundamentally different ethos informs those institutions and the personnel who populate key offices and positions».9 In short, re-moralize America. Give it new mores. It «almost never happens with the same society or the same regime», wrote Michael Anton, now director of the Policy Planning Staff at State. Here is the dual subversive intent: cultural revolution and purges in the bureaucracies. Eliminate progressivism as a political project and the left-wing radicals in the apparatuses, including the military, recruited by academies that train activists instead of scholars. Along with this comes the traditional skepticism towards the administrative state, the plethora of unelected federal agencies. They need to be cut, not only in the name of “efficiency,” but also to change the balance of constitutional powers to the advantage of the president and the states, if necessary challenging the authority of the courts and Congress.
It is a war for the control of the schools-universities-bureaucracies trifecta. It will last at least thirty years. It will not succeed entirely. Unum castigabis, centum emendabis. This dynamic is at play with the agencies responsible for spreading America’s universalist mission, from USAID to Voice of America. It is the focus of J.D. Vance, the head of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, and the vast network of the Claremont Institute. Plus Elon Musk’s chainsaw. All in competition with each other.
Reindustrialize and definancialize. America must be once again a nation that produces, not just based on consumption. It is impossible to truly relaunch the defense industrial base without reshoring the broader manufacture system. To do this, tariffs are needed to changes the incentives for foreign investments, now all (95%) channeled into financial assets to the detriment of productive activities (5%). The overvaluation of the dollar, also the result of its role as a reserve currency in a world with many more rich economies, further discourages the sale of American goods. This must be corrected, even at the cost of a recession – better now than during an election cycle, say many Trump economic advisers, from Stephen Miran to Scott Bessent.
Winning the race for AI. Not all production activities will be repatriated, the priority is high tech and related supply chains, to be made autarchic. This requires two extraordinary adjustments. First, tech moguls want direct power, because they alone understand national security needs, not an inept State – true oligarchs of a «technological republic». Second, AI needs enormous quantities of natural resources, which are up from grab: water (300 billion liters consumed in 2023 alone), energy (drill baby drill, also to triple electrical capacity), minerals (to reduce 90% dependence on Chinese supplies). Consequence: land counts again. Controlling territories returns as a strategic imperative. China already does it, why can’t America? To legitimize all this, two traits rooted in the deep identity of America: the spirit of the frontier and the construction/invention of new things. In his two most important speeches, Trump closely linked the 19th century as an age of territorial expansion and the construction of «modern wonders sculpted out of iron, glass, and steel.
Using the empire to extract, not redistribute, resources. It is a Copernican revolution. The United States opened its market for strategic purposes to rebuild countries and make them satellites. Now it uses them to extract the resources needed to save America from financial, military, and technological bankruptcy. Raw materials (Greenland, Canada, Ukraine), security guarantees (Europeans, we’ll protect those who pay), investments (Taiwan, Japan, South Korea), purchase of American goods, currency agreements/purchase of long-term Treasury bonds. The point is not to give up the exorbitant privilege of the dollar – those who try to replace it (the BRICS) are threatened – but to exploit the still dominant position to renegotiate the overall bilateral relation.
Fortress North America. The core of the strategic posture must pivot from the protection of the Eurasian perimeter to the defense of hemispheric control. This is not isolationism, but a redefinition of priorities, even for intimidation purposes. The North American perimeter goes from the Arctic to the Rio Grande (with the exclave of Panama), from Hawaii to Western Europe, from cislunar space to cyber (via AI). China must be scaled down in Latin America, from the bases in Cuba to the space station in Argentina, passing through the port of Chancay in Peru. The spending priorities of the administration are clear: cuts to the European and Central Commands to invest in the North America and Indo-Pacific Command, in a space-based antimissile shield, in border control and in submarines, drones, munitions and nuclear triad.14 Congress is discussing if and how to increase the Defense budget to the detriment of social spending. Forget solving fiscal deficit – Musk & Co. cut to make room for rearmament.
De-Taiwanizing the relationship with China. Contrary to Kissinger’s warning, Taiwan has become the focus of Sino-American relations. Losing it would be tragic, losing a war even more so. How to get out of the impasse? First, maintain and adapt the military deployment in the Western Pacific. Second, urge Taipei to spend, build a massive army, and adopt the porcupine model, to become unassailable – in the event of war the Americans would only support remotely. Third, make it clear that the U.S. is against independence, if necessary reiterating the initial spirit of the One China policy. Taiwan is expendable, not at any cost, as part of a broader agreement with China. Beijing will struggle to dominate an Indo-Pacific in which many powers want to resist it and can complicate its life on several fronts. No Asian NATO, it is enough to strengthen existing relations with Japan, India, Australia, the Philippines, Vietnam, South Korea, in that order. The relationship with Delhi can create geographical distractions for Beijing.
Détente with Russia. The simultaneous pressure of the United States has created the strange couple Moscow-Beijing. They must be distanced, giving Russia a way out of its fate as vassal of China. Even without a divorce, the interest is to avoid a military alliance. The point is to legitimize Russia as a major world power entitled to discuss international equilibria. First test: ending the war in Ukraine. Now it’s possible because Russia has not won and because the neocon theory (you can talk to Russia only after its defeat and after Putin) has lost. Second test: forcing Iran to make nuclear concessions to prevent Israel from widening the war (double containment). Joint ventures in the Arctic and a three-way cartel agreement with the Saudis on oil will facilitate. The rehabilitation of Russia counterbalances Turkey from Syria to the Caucasus.
Defuse NATO. If Russia cannot conquer Kyiv, it cannot conquer Europe, so it is no longer the enemy and America no longer has an interest in defending the European continent. The U.S. will always have an interest in avoiding that a single power dominates Europe, so it can reduce its military presence without ending it. Specifically, tt can consider a partial withdrawal from the East, especially from the Baltics, considered indefensible and parasitic. The U.S. should force European countries to reverse their worldview: they need to militarily rearm and to ideologically disarm. The Euro-Atlantic democratic sphere must not be expanded, a message brutally transmitted by J.D. Vance in Munich. Finally, the U.S. has interest in the fragmentation of the European Union to deregulate it, better use the remaining techno-scientific niches and make the continent less politically homogeneous.
4. Although realistic about America’s limits, premises and necessities are not enough to make a strategy. Everything happens at the same time. Without sequencing the moves. Without graduality. Without seeking allies, in contempt of divide et impera. Trump and his people against everyone.
Let’s look at some of the new contradictions.
Excess of personalism. Everything revolves around Trump, without consultation and mutual support between the various souls of the government, e.g. the economic and the national security teams. Deals replace deterrence. The leader’s guarantees replace security guarantees. The unpredictability of the leader and the recourse to brutality mask the moment of strategic weakness.
America cannot be trusted. If everything is negotiable, how long can agreements last? For example, how long can one on Ukraine last, if it arises from the U.S. intent to sneak off? And can the U.S. really reduce its exposure on Taiwan without suffering humiliation? Trump has America behind him, but an America in crisis: after him, what form will the revolution take? Détente without guarantees cedes the initiative to rivals. The paradox is that the latter may find it very convenient. Beijing, for example, may not have all that interest in humiliating the United States because the consequences would damage China’s very stability. All of America’s rivals also face domestic crises: the window offered by Trump could give them time to address them.
Brutality creates enemies, not discipline. The shock imparted to Canadians and Europeans serves to convince them that bilateral pacts must be renegotiated from scratch. This stems from America’s crisis of consensus. It is an acknowledgement of the impossibility of convincing countries to align their interests with America’s interests. It legitimizes blackmail. It hardens Theodore Roosevelt’s motto: «Speak brutally and carry a big stick.» Take Greenland for example. The United States has an interest in deepening integration with the island through rights to bases, mines, investments, and settlements.15 Over time, this graduality could have laid the foundations for annexation or association. Trump has sped up the process, inevitably longer than his four-year term, to link it to his name. The subsequent fear could have complicated the game. The same with Canada and Mexico: what does hemispheric domination mean? Extract resources from neighbors or expel the Chinese? You must dose the first to get the second. Together they don’t go together. A degree of collaboration from others is needed.
How to stay in Europe after NATO? The meaning of NATO is over. Something else will be born. The U.S. will remain in a reduced form in countries deemed strategically important, also to influence crucial sea lanes (the Arctic and the Mediterranean). But it is now attacking European countries on the military, commercial and ideological front at the same time. The shock therapy risks going beyond the desired effects. How will America avoid unwanted effects if countries begin to consider it a threat? How to push back against the penetration of Chinese technologies or nuclear proliferation in Poland or Germany? The bet seems to be that Europeans will never be fully able to defend themselves alone and will continue to need capital, intelligence, satellites, nuclear shield, procurement (60% comes from the U.S.), supplied by America at negotiable prices.
Where is the American limes in Europe? Where does America draw the line in Europe? Its clear interest is that no threat should appear on the Atlantic shore. Less clear is which countries America would fight for or considers essential for its own security. Only the British Isles with the Arctic-Scandinavian shore? Or, as some theorize, the productive and financial heart of north-western Europe? Or the former Western Europe of the Cold War? Certainly the East, Rumsfeld’s “New Europe”, counts much less and the projects of making Poland and Romania the forward anchors of containment have disappeared. Italy can maintain a dual relevance due to the manufacturing North integrated into the Western European circuit and its centrality in the Mediterranean, an essential route for supplying Israel.16 It can build sectoral collaborations with France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and Turkey. Provided that it assumes direct responsibilities in specific geographical areas, starting from the Balkans, North Africa and the Red Sea.17 Here shall our excellence reveal herself, as Dante would have said.
Can a strategic revolution take root with the bureaucrats against it? Never before has America changed its foreign policy and domestic institutions at the same time. This is what makes the moment truly revolutionary. The international shift requires the participation of a large class of officials. The government has introduced them in record number, well above the first term. But they are virgins, as every revolution demands. Instead of cunning and making allies, Musk’s speed and ways alienate even the theoretically favorable bureaucrats. And a frontal challenge to the judges could erode one of the most important but least appreciated pillars of American grandeur: institutional and legal certainty, the linchpin of financial certainty.
The risk of exceeding the popular mandate. Trump has the majority because the old political, economic and cultural system no longer works. It must be changed, even violently. But voters clearly say: someone must fix our problems. They not only ask for more houses (private companies can do this), but also for secure borders, infrastructure, better governed cities, less crime, fewer opioids. They know that all this depends on better public actors. More effectiveness, not just more efficiency. Musk’s DOGE promises only less government. The same goes for tariffs: while Trump uses them for short-term concessions which trigger market volatility, voters would approve someone who explains the purpose of rebalancing the economy from debt and consumption to manufacturing, even at the cost of some sacrifice to get back on track.18 The same goes with immigration too: voters know that America needs more people and ask to control it, not to stop it. The new right instead creates a climate that discourages Chinese scientific talents from doing business in the United States. Without Asian brains, the technological primacy is over.19 These would be the basis on which to build an opposition, if the Democrats were not useless servants of power.
Every power is based on contradictions. America more than others. Indeed, one could say that its history is a continuous alternation of old and new incoherences. From Washington to Jackson, from Lincoln to McKinley, from Wilson to F.D. Roosevelt, and on, every new phase creates its own contradictions, until a new one dissolves them in a renewal of American power. Here, however, an existential contradiction opens up. Without restoring the glory of the American dream, the revolution will remain a permanent revolt. How long can you be at war with yourself?
This essay appears in the new volume of Limes, Rivista Italiana di Geopolitica, n. 3/2025, out on April 12th.
