How the World Is Reading US Power

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Leslie Vinjamuri: It's been just more than one year since Donald Trump was inaugurated as the president of the United States of America, beginning his second term, and we've all been watching to see what grand strategy under President Trump's second administration would emerge.

In December, Donald Trump released the National Security Strategy, which articulated a desire for US preeminence in the Western Hemisphere and discussed economic competition with China, but adopted a less ideological approach.

One year on, what can we make of US grand strategy to Europe, the Western Hemisphere, and also the Indo-Pacific? Is there a coherent vision? And how is the rest of the world responding?

To make sense of this, I spoke with Ryan Hass of the Brookings Institution and Emma Ashford of the Stimson Center. 

I'm Leslie Vinjamuri, president and CEO of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and welcome to Deep Dish.

A year ago, when Donald Trump was elected, there were a lot of rumors that there would be a grand bargain: Donald Trump would give Taiwan to China in exchange for... not really sure what; fill in the blanks. 

Certainly, people were wondering whether America's position would change. I'll start with you, Emma. How would you assess US policy towards Taiwan? Has it changed? 

Emma Ashford: I'll preface this by saying that I am not a China specialist. I'm mostly following this as an interested observer of foreign affairs. But if we were to look at Donald Trump's foreign policy in general and say where we thought it would be one year ago, and where we are today, the two big surprises were, first, the return to the Western Hemisphere.

I think we all knew there was an inclination to return to Latin America. There were concerns about drugs, migration, and all of these things. But I don't think anyone would've thought we would do regime change in Venezuela a year ago. Then the other big surprise is the China question.

Count me among those surprised that the Trump administration did not take a more antagonistic approach towards China. There's been some minimal saber-rattling, but other than the sort of trade-war piece of it—and even that now seems to have been, if not resolved, at least both parties have sort of swept it to the side—if anything, we're talking about a working relationship with China that seems better than it has been in years, or maybe even a decade. So again, to me, this was a huge surprise. I was fully expecting Trump's retrenchment or disinterest in some other regions to be complemented with a turn towards Asia in a more antagonistic way, but that just didn't happen.

LV: Ryan, let me ask you a question to follow up on this. First, do you agree? And secondly, if that is the assessment of where President Trump is on China, is that because he had a vision? To moderate this relationship, or is that just because China's played its hand very well and it has lots of cards to bring to the table?

Ryan Hass: I'm more inclined to the latter of those two options. I think that when President Trump entered office, as Emma described, he intended to impose his will on the Chinese leadership. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent famously said that China holds a pair of twos in relation to trade negotiations with the United States.

That was simply not correct. The Trump administration misdiagnosed its relative leverage and China's ability to inflict pain on the United States if it tried to escalate its way to victory in a trade war. And what we've watched instead is a period of adjustment. President Trump has realized that he cannot impose his will on China. Instead, it's a period of relative, strategic calm. We haven't had a breakout of warm feelings across the Pacific, between the United States and China. Instead, both countries have realized that they each, for their own reason, need to buy time and build insulation from each other. So the question then is which side will use this period of strategic column to greater effect to put itself in a stronger position over time and compete going forward?

LV: China's played its hand well, and it's not necessarily where Donald Trump thought he would begin.

Emma, let me come back to something you said about the Western Hemisphere. He is arguably playing pretty tough with China when it comes to what America expects to own and control in the Western Hemisphere. Correct? Or how do you interpret the role that getting China out of the Western Hemisphere plays in Donald Trump's thinking?

EA: We could compare it, in contrast, to the Biden administration. They were very focused on China and its role in global technology networks, trying to build partnerships and lateral links to counter Chinese influence in various places. But in many ways, they were completely unconcerned about Chinese trade and investment in Latin America and South America. That just didn't seem to register as a significant threat to them. The Trump administration really seems to have flipped that. They're much happier on the world stage, not letting the Chinese run the table, but competing. US technology is competing with Chinese technology and doing so in a much more open way. Then in Latin America and the Western Hemisphere, saying no, this is our space, and even trade is off the table. 

In the first month or two, just after the inauguration, Marco Rubio went down to Latin America. They put significant pressure on the government in Panama to resist Chinese companies and their involvement in the Panama Canal. Then, as we've seen, obviously in Venezuela, but in Colombia and elsewhere, pressure to kick out Chinese companies. So it feels like a very real policy to me. This is something they genuinely care about, and I think they'll probably continue with it.

LV: Ryan, what do you make of this? Does it make sense? Has China been doing so much in Latin America that it presents a genuine threat to US interests? Is there a market share that China has taken over that the United States needs to regain, and is it a national security risk?

RH: I think of it as a 20th-century playbook for a 21st-century reality. The situation is that President Trump is very focused on gaining control over natural resources, which are a major input into the US economy. He talks all the time about critical minerals, rare earth oil that he's going to control for the United States. I don't have a sense that too many people in Beijing are losing a ton of sleep over this because they're playing an entirely different game. They are competing to see who will have the leading edge in the industrial revolutions unfolding around us in artificial intelligence, clean energy, and biotechnology. And in that regard, sure, if the United States controls more global oil, it will have greater influence over oil markets. But that's not going to change President Xi's day. Furthermore, Latin America is a pretty distant priority for China in the hierarchy of overall foreign policy priorities.

Their foremost priority is great power relations and trying to stabilize the situation with the United States to make sure that their path remains open for their continued rise. Their secondary priority is stabilizing their periphery. Then you begin to address some of these other issues in the developing world, including Latin America.

But to think as many people in Washington do today, that President Trump has ruined President Xi's grand strategic designs for global domination because of what happened in Venezuela, is just not serious.

EA: Can I just hop in for a moment? I agree. I don't think this is going to be that big of a hurt that's felt in Beijing. But I do think it's worth dwelling for a moment on how interesting the energy implications of US-China relations are at this point. To mention it again, under Biden, there was this assumption that we're all moving towards some green transition, that fossil fuels are becoming less relevant, et cetera. And that's a view that is shared in Beijing. They're rapidly diversifying their portfolio, building up coal, but also building massive amounts of solar. For Biden, it was all about stopping the Chinese from dominating this technological niche. But Trump is just saying, who cares? We're a major fossil fuel exporter now, and if we have control over more in our hemisphere, if we work with the Canadians and the Mexicans, then we can just be dominant in fossil fuels. That is such a U-turn from US policy. Not just under Biden, but for the last couple of decades, and it really contrasts with the Chinese model. I think people are underplaying this shift in US policy.

LV: There's a real question there also about whether a shifting US policy matters in the long term, or whether America just kind of falls behind in the energy sector of the future. But that shift that you've identified is clearly the case.

I'll ask you another question about China, Ryan. You're downplaying the significance of Latin America to China. But isn't it the case that China's infrastructure investments across the global south presumably served some purpose for the Chinese economy? Latin America has these markets. President Biden was backing the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, which would be America's response to China's investments in the Global South. It wasn't going to be nearly as big, but it was an attempt. It didn't really go very far. There were years when we were reading that it mattered who had access and control, even in Latin America; has that just gone?

RH: I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but my recollection is that Latin America accounts for about 13% of the world population and about that much of the global economy. So, does Latin America matter? Yes, of course it does. I think it matters a lot more to the United States than it does to China. Given a choice, of course, China would prefer to have control over ports. They would love to have access to satellite stations in the Southern Hemisphere. If countries are willing to offer them military bases, of course, they would take it. Yes, they import raw materials from Latin America. But is Latin America going to be the hinge point of the US-China competition in the 21st century? I think it would require a lot of imagination to get to that point.

LV: So, Emma, let me ask you this then. Do you see the push by President Trump, as articulated in the National Security Strategy, to have preeminence in the Western Hemisphere? Is this the same as having a commitment to a spheres of influence policy, or is this just a very different thing? How do you see those two things?

EA: One of the key distinctions that a lot of folks are drawing out here is a distinction between saying this is ours, which the White House Twitter account explicitly tweeted out the other day: "This is our hemisphere" in all caps. This is saying America very much asserts a sphere of influence in our backyard. We are going to be here and you are not. It's a different thing to then have this notion that you're going to cede other areas to China or to Russia. My read of the administration's policies, at least thus far, is that they don't appear to be moving in that direction. They're not saying China, you can have Taiwan. They're not saying Russia, you can have the Baltics. What they are saying is preeminence in our hemisphere for us, and then elsewhere a balance of power that serves US interests. I'm very comfortable with that because I think it's quite a classic realist approach to the balance of power in world politics. But it's like saying I should have this because of my preeminence, but I'm also strong enough to balance the power of politics there. That's not the same thing as saying everybody gets a speed of influence.

LV: How does China read that, Ryan? America gets its own backyard. America goes into Venezuela, takes out the leader, and ushers in its era of hegemony over that part of the world, but isn't gonna give the store away to China when it comes to Taiwan. How are the Chinese looking at this, and is that how you read the situation as well?

RH: I don't think we should expect any logical coherence to guide President Trump's approach to the world. I think he just views the Western Hemisphere as America's sphere of influence. That doesn't mean he's willing to cede other regions to other powers. China's viewing this the way you would expect, as America being hypocritical, a bully, and a hegemon—a destroyer of the international system. But China is just doing its best, as they would say, to try to uphold, preserve, and protect it.

LV: Is that how you see it?

RH: No. China takes great power exemptions when rules hinder the pursuit of its own interests. But that doesn't mean that China's going to give the United States a pass. They're going to try to exact as high a reputational cost upon the United States as possible. In the region, in the developing world, and more broadly, for what they describe as America being just hypocritical in the way it talks about the world and the way it acts in the world.

LV: So, Greenland's complicated. It's in the Western Hemisphere, it's part of Denmark, and therefore in NATO. The Europeans claim it. But Trump's now claiming it because it's the Western Hemisphere. So it's sort of a fuzzy gray zone. How do you see this playing out? What do you make of Trump's ambitions to take over another sovereign territory from America's friends? Do you think he's going to do it, and does it matter? What are the Europeans going to do?

EA: I would put the odds of US troops landing on Greenland approaching zero. But I do think that the Trump administration very clearly engaged in bullying the Danes to try to get them to cede more rights to Greenland.

From a broader perspective, there are a number of issues in the Trump administration that could have fallen into this category, where there is a genuine hard-power justification for what they're doing. Greenland is strategically important to the United States. When the Nazis took Denmark during World War II, the US invaded Greenland so that we would keep and hold it, and it would not fall to Nazi Germany. Some of those geographical considerations still matter since nuclear weaponsand the advent of strategic bombing of various kinds.

Greenland remains important. That's why we have so many military bases there. But it's also why we have an agreement with Denmark to allow us to maintain and even build new bases there. So, as with a lot of things in the Trump administration, there is this very logical rationale for it, and then they are taking that rationale and running either just way too far or in a completely crazy direction. For a rational administration, the correct approach would be to negotiate with Copenhagen to increase the US's ability to do what it needs to do. But Trump appears to like the idea of owning it and making it part of the United States. 

A lot of us, myself included, find that very hard to parse and very hard to accept, because if nothing else, I think we're all taught that naked imperialism is not supposed to be okay anymore.

LV: What makes you think that the United States, sometime in the next three years, won't just take it? President Trump has done many of the things that he said he would do. Do you think he really won't do this?

EA: Forgive me for being quite cynical about it, but part of the reason why I don't think military action is likely is that I think all those other things are pretty likely to work.

LV: That he will make a deal, and Europeans will basically see the ground.

EA: The prospects of Greenland having an independence referendum are relatively high. The prospects of them voting for it are pretty high. Then, I believe, the administration's assumption is that the Greenlanders would seek an association with the United States. My sense, and again, this is a little cynical, but based on what we've seen from the last year, European states have largely folded when President Trump ups the ante and basically says, give me more military spending and give me trade concessions. Whatever it is, they have largely folded rather than actually push back. The odds are that Greenland may well change status at some point in the next three years. I just don't think we're going to be taking it with paratroopers.

LV: Do you think that's the end of NATO? Or do you think that the members of NATO recognize it's still better to be in NATO and to make the best of a difficult situation?

EA: It is beginning to reach the point where European leaders really should be asking themselves why they're not building up military capabilities faster. Why are they not more worried about being hitched to the United States in this way, and why do they keep appeasing the man in the White House? But thus far, European leaders have shown no real inclination to do that. They seem very happy to just take NATO as a given and accept all of these other negative externalities.

LV: Ryan, how are the Chinese and those in Taiwan watching this debate over Greenland? What in the world do they make of it over there? Or is it just too far away to be significant? 

RH: Our friends in Beijing and Taipei are trying to make sense of what we're doing. What are we debating? Why do we have such a lust for Greenland in the United States? This will be a space to watch. I think it would be very concerning for people in Taiwan if the United States were to take action, whether military or otherwise, to seize Greenland against its will. That said, I think the Chinese have a clear long-term strategy that they're pretty committed to. They're bloody-minded in their determination to try to gain control of Taiwan. But I think they would still prefer to do it without having to fight if they could. They have some reason to believe their strategy is making inroads.

The political situation in Taiwan is very fraught. There are deep, deep divisions polarizing society in Taiwan right now, and 2028 is the next presidential election. There's a reasonable chance that the opposition KMT party will have a candidate who could succeed in the 2028 election, at which point Beijing could have a counterpart with whom to begin discussions about the type of relationship that could develop across the Taiwan Strait. A lot of people in Washington like to talk about 2027 as a big inflection point because it's a date on which President Xi reportedly challenged his military to be prepared for operations in the Taiwan Strait. I actually think that 2028 will prove to be a more consequential year in cross-strait relations.

LV: To bring it to the US policy conversation, how do you read President Trump's assessment of America's interests with Taiwan? Whether he would be willing to cede Taiwan? All of those rumors circulating in the first 100 days about a grand bargain sort of receded. How do you make sense of this?

RH: I expect we'll see another wave of that as we get near President Trump's planned visit to Beijing in April. There will be another cycle of conversations about whether or not President Trump will or should pursue a grand bargain with China that involves concessions on Taiwan. It's a fool's errand to predict what words or actions President Trump will take on any given day. I don't pretend to have perfect foresight into it, but my general sense, just looking at the body of work of his administration in the second term, is that President Trump has been pretty consistent. He has challenges around the world, and he has challenges at home. He's not looking to add to those with further challenges in the Taiwan Strait. I think he's mostly a status quo leader on cross-strait issues, even though he speaks in his own way, which is different from previous leaders.

But he basically says the same thing every time he's asked. He says, "I have a good relationship with President Xi. I don't think that President Xi's going to want to do anything. I think that this will be fine as long as I'm president." What he's trying to say, in his own words, is that he doesn't want this to be a head-on confrontation. He would prefer for it not to be. And if you look at his actions, his administration just approved an $11 billion arms deal to Taiwan in December. They are not taking radical departures from longstanding policy, even as President Trump is using more personalistic language for talking about the cross-strait relationship.

LV: Emma, how did you read the National Security Strategy? With reference to the US position on Taiwan.

EA: It's less about Taiwan, for me, and more about the way in which the National Security Strategy almost took different approaches to different regions. I found that really fascinating. Not necessarily a bad approach, but in the Middle East, it was fairly simple and mostly about retrenchment. In Europe, it was this combination of burden shifting and some very strange civilizational stuff. But then in Asia, the focus is on economics. Which sounds much more like something out of the Biden or Obama administration, where the notion is that the US is in a competition that is less about territory and deterrence and more about the non-military aspects of this competition.

I found that surprising. But if we actually look at what the administration has done over the last year, if anything, that might be the section of the document that bears the most resemblance to actual policy.

LV: Ryan, you and I did a trip through Asia together. We went to Singapore, Seoul, and then Tokyo. We were really trying to understand how others were looking at the possibility of a Trump administration. How are other states in the region, especially South Korea and Japan, reading this moment? The National Security Strategy, the US moves with respect to China, the signaling or not on Taiwan; how are they reading it?

RH: It's a great question. I'm always modest about speaking on behalf of other countries, but just to try to be responsive to your question, I feel like Tokyo and Seoul have moved in opposite directions. Tokyo has basically tied itself to the mast of the US ship, and it will go where the US goes. It will sink if the US sinks. South Korea's leader, President Lee, just traveled to Beijing and said effectively that as the world changes, South Korea needs to change too.

There are no permanent allies or friends in this rugged international system, and we need to adapt to the changing reality. I interpreted that as meaning South Korea needs to find a way to coexist with China even as it preserves, or works to preserve, its alliance with a mercurial Trump administration.

LV: The other leader who's on his way to China is Mark Carney. Have you followed that Emma?

EA: Not closely, but I do think it's worth pointing out President Trump's threats against Canada earlier this year.

And I do think, again, those are mostly empty bullying threats rather than anything else. But particularly as we're engaged in renegotiating parts of the USMCA, which replaced NAFTA, the Canadians do have reason to worry that the US can exert leverage. Now they can exert leverage back; we import a lot of our oil from them. But looking for alternatives at this time makes a lot of sense. This is, again, a similar reason why we see Europeans debating the Mercosur agreement with Latin America.

LV: One of the big questions right now is how different states are seeking to diversify their partnerships and build internal resilience. Can they do it fast enough? In the case of Europe, will they do it collectively? Not obvious that's gonna happen. Emma, you've written extensively on US foreign relations and restraint. 

Could just say a few words on exactly what you think of when you say "policy of restraint?" Did you anticipate that Trump would be there? Have you been surprised? Do any of his policies fit there?

EA: How I understand this administration is that, like many administrations, it is a coalition. It has different segments inside it. There are definitely parts of this MAGA coalition that align with what I would call a more restrained foreign policy approach.

JD Vance is probably the most obvious person here, but there are a number of other folks on the new right. It's very prevalent among younger staffers to see America's role in the world as sort of overextended. We've pursued too many liberal adventures in the last couple of decades. It's time for America to come home, to some extent. 

There's a parallel camp that's probably more realistic, with a lot of overlap in policy prescriptions. I've heard "prioritizer" used to describe this as well, and that's folks who think America should come home from some places, like Europe or the Middle East, in order to focus more on Asia. If you'd asked me a year ago, I would've said that's the camp that's probably going to carry the day. But they have not, thus far. 

Then we have the holdovers of the republican neoconservative heritage of the W. Bush administration. The people who are very ideological, very focused on democracy, and very hawkish to boot. The interesting thing is that there are all these parties within this coalition, within the administration, but the president himself is basically the swing vote. He's the decider, he's the person who chooses. 

Maybe more so than in any other administration, these parties are directly lobbying him, and then he makes his decision on a specific issue. So we have seen him pursue some fundamentally restrained foreign policies. When it comes to European defense spending, we've seen him thread the needle between these groups a number of times.

Bombing Iran's nuclear program but not going for full regime change was a thread-the-needle moment. Then we've seen him engage in Venezuela with pretty classic neoconservative behavior. With this administration, we will see whether it settles into one of these grooves over the remaining three years, but for now, the president seems very willing to switch sides as he pleases.

LV: It's confusing for those of us trying to make sense of the world. But it must be even more confusing for those folks in sovereign countries on the other side of the US trying to work out how to think strategically about not only a short-term response, but a longer-term position. Ryan, your overall interpretation?

RH: I very much agree with what you just said, and I think it's particularly pronounced in countries like India, which are accustomed to working through government channels to achieve results and sort out problems. That just isn't the way this administration works. It's a very personalistic administration where the president has people outside of government, like his son-in-law and others, whom he has faith and trust in. It's going to take a while for the rest of the world to adapt.

LV: Emma, I can see you have something here.

EA: I'm surprised that the lesson other countries are taking is that they're still trying to figure out what US policy will be. I think the lesson should instead be that policy will be extremely changeable and mercurial. Definitely for the next three years, but potentially longer. Don't think about the US as a very reliable, consistent actor. Think about the US as potentially very changeable.

LV: I have to follow up on one question about Europe. So the restraint position, in part, is that Europe should do more. It should spend more, do more to provide for its own defense. But do you really think Europe can afford to try and go it alone without the United States? Can Europe really just do it alone by investing in its own defense?

EA: I don't think Europe should do it on its own. My strong preference would be for a more equal US-European partnership in defense, one in which Europeans can do much of what the US currently does for them, where they're more capable actors. But that doesn't mean I want to end NATO and sever that relationship entirely.

The real problem, though, is that it's taken a decade or more since Donald Trump was first elected to get us to the point where European states are even seriously talking about substantial increases in defense spending. The capabilities just aren't there yet. What I've seen over the last year is that a Europe that continues to pin all its hopes on the United States is one that can't even defend its own interests. We see European leaders caving again and again to Donald Trump on issues like trade that really shouldn't be about security at all. 

For European leaders, I really do think they have to ask themselves how much longer they want to use this time to sustain the relationship with the US while building up the capabilities that might mean, in 10 years, they don't have to be as subservient. That seems to me a pretty good policy approach. Or do they just wanna try and kick the can down the road?

Maybe they don't have to make difficult spending choices, but in 10 years, they'll still have the same problem. For European leaders, the choice is actually pretty simple if they're thinking about national and even bloc-wide interests.

LV: Ryan, same question on Japan and South Korea. Should they be seeking to diversify somewhere else across the region, working with Europe, getting away from America's long arm of protection, extended deterrence, et cetera? Or should they just kind of hunker down and wait it out?

RH: I think they'll do an all-of-the-above approach. They will try to play a long game with the United States. They will hope the United States returns to what they've grown accustomed to over the past 70-plus years of being an impartial umpire, or at least aspiring to be. One that tries to uphold rules and norms and ensure a certain degree of predictability in the international system. But hope is not a strategy, and of course, they know that. We've already seen the Korea-Japan relationship improve, and we will see more intra-Asian coordination with the Philippines, Australia, India, and others, which is just sort of a natural reaction as the United States becomes less predictable and less principled in its approach to the world.

LV: This has been a fascinating conversation. Emma Ashford, Ryan Hass, thank you so much for joining us on Deep Dish. 

LV: Thank you for listening to this episode of Deep Dish on Global Affairs. I'm your host, Leslie Vinjamuri. Talk to you next week.

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