Trump and the Future of American Power

Stephen Kotkin is a preeminent historian of Russia, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the author of an acclaimed three-volume biography of Joseph Stalin. (The third volume is forthcoming.) Kotkin has also written extensively and insightfully on geopolitics, the sources of American power, and the twists and turns of the Trump era. Executive Editor Justin Vogt spoke with Kotkin on Wednesday, November 6, in the wake of Donald Trump’s decisive victory in the U.S. presidential election.

Interviewer: You’ve written a number of times for Foreign Affairs about the war in Ukraine and what it means for the world and for American foreign policy. So let’s start with an obvious question. It’s impossible to know, of course, but what do you imagine Russian President Vladimir Putin is thinking right now, with Donald Trump poised to return to the White House for a second term?

Stephen Kotkin: I wish I knew. These opaque regimes in Moscow and Beijing don’t want us to know what they think. What we do know from their actions as well as their frequent public pronouncements is that they came to the view that America was in irreversible decline. We had the Iraq War and the shocking incompetence of the follow-up, where Washington lost the peace. And we lost the peace in Afghanistan. We had the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession. We had a lot of episodes that reinforced their view that we were in decline. They were only too happy to latch onto examples of their view that the United States and the collective West, as they call it, is in decline and, therefore, their day is going to come. They are the future; we are the past.

Now, all of that happened before Trump. True, it looks like Trump is potentially a gift to them, because he doesn’t like alliances, or at least that’s what he says: allies are freeloaders. But what happened under Biden? It’s not as if American power vastly increased under Biden, or under Obama, for that matter. So Trump may accelerate what Moscow and Beijing see as that self-weakening trend. But he’s unpredictable. They may get the opposite. And they have revealed a lot of their own weaknesses and poor decision-making, to put it mildly.

On Ukraine, Trump’s unpredictability could cut in many directions. Trump doesn’t believe one thing or the other on Ukraine. And so in a way, anything is possible. It may turn out to be worse for Ukraine, but it may turn out to be better. It’s extremely hard to predict because Trump is hard to predict, even for himself. You could even have Ukraine getting into NATO under Trump, which was never going to happen under Biden. Now, I’m not saying that’s going to happen. I’m not saying there’s even a high probability—nor am I saying it would be a good thing, or a bad thing, if it happened. I’m just saying that the idea that Trump is some special gift to our adversaries doesn’t wash with me. And he may surprise them on alliances and on rebuilding American power. It might well cut in multiple directions at once.

Interviewer: OK, but if you had to give Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky advice right now, what would it be?

Stephen Kotkin: I’d say the same thing I’ve been saying for the past two years or so, which is similar to what Richard Haass wrote so eloquently in Foreign Affairs just this week. [Editor’s Note: Haass wrote, in part, that Washington “should jettison the idea that, to win, Kyiv needs to liberate all its land. So as the United States and its allies continue to arm Ukraine, they must take the uncomfortable step of pushing Kyiv to negotiate with the Kremlin—and laying out a clear sense of how it should do so.”

The main problem is that there’s been insufficient political pressure on the Putin regime. Until he worries that he has to pay a political price for his war, until his regime might be at risk—not his per capita GDP, not his soldiers, his cannon fodder, not his replaceable weapons—he can expend things that he doesn’t care about: the lives of his own people, more and more ammunition, his domestic automobile industry, whatever. So if Trump is unable to bring significant pressure on Putin’s political regime, then the outcome is that Ukraine will be condemned to fight a rear-guard action, a war of attrition against a superior power that can sacrifice lives more easily at a far higher scale. And even if the Ukrainians can be successful in the short term, and keep surviving through continued courage and ingenuity, they still have to figure out some modus vivendi with Russian power, which is adjacent to them and isn’t going anywhere. Ukraine has to win the peace. And the reality is that Russian aggression is hardly the biggest risk Trump faces.

Interviewer: So what is?

Stephen Kotkin: The nontrivial chance of a great-power war breaking out in the Pacific theatre in East Asia—a war that the United States could lose, which is something we as a nation haven’t talked about in a long time. I’m not defeatist by any means; I’m not suggesting we would lose. But the mere fact that it’s thinkable is a big change.

Interviewer: It’s also been a long time since Americans have thought about mobilising for such a war.

Stephen Kotkin: Right. And to put it bluntly, we don’t have the people to die in a war at that scale. Everyone talks about the demographic problem the Chinese face. But they have 50 million 18-to-24-year-old men. [Editor’s Note: There are around 12 million American men between 20 and 24 years old.] So even if a lot of young Chinese men go down to the bottom of the Taiwan Strait, a lot more can be sent into action.

The United States is used to renting a land army. That’s how U.S. military power works. It’s a lend-lease approach to war. In World War II, we sent the Studebakers and the Jeeps and the radios and the Spam, and the Soviets sent 27 million people to die in defeating Hitler’s land army. In the Pacific theatre, we sent Chiang Kai-shek some planes and weapons, and he provided the soldiers. And he lost at least 13 million. So we rented the Soviet land army in one theatre and the Chinese land army in another theatre, and we sent materiel and finances, and we won in both theatres as a result. But who are we going to rent now? Who’s available to rent?

Yes, in the first Gulf War, we used superior technology. That keeps casualties low, even in a land war, which is usually very deadly for soldiers and civilians. But that degree of technological superiority is gone now, vis-à-vis China, in too many ways.

Interviewer: Earlier this year, you wrote this in Foreign Affairs: “The supreme irony of American grand strategy for the past 70 years is that it worked, fostering an integrated world of impressive and shared prosperity, and yet is now being abandoned. The United States was open for business to its adversaries, without reciprocation. Today, however, so-called industrial policy and protectionism are partially closing the country not just to rivals but also to U.S. allies, partners, friends, and potential friends. American policy has come to resemble China’s—right when the latter has hit a wall.”

How does Trump fit into that story?

Stephen Kotkin: Well, we weren’t ready for our success. The goal was to create this open global system that everyone could join and prosper from: a liberal international order. And it was going to be amazing for everybody. And they could join on a voluntary basis, not through some coercive “spheres of influence” approach. And they were going to get wealthy; they were going to go from poor to middle income. Win-win.

And it worked. It happened. It’s stunning how many people around the world benefited from this U.S.-led order, including in America. And we’re not just talking about China; we’re also talking about India. It’s our neighbours, too, in Mexico. And it’s the developed world, as well, to a certain extent: Japan and Germany, the two enemies of World War II, became our closest allies and the second- and third-largest economies. There’s never been a geopolitical turnabout bigger than that.

So it worked, but we’re not ready for this success. It turns out that well, geez, you know, these other countries, they want a voice. They’re not just going to become middle-income countries and continue to be told what to do. They want international institutions that reflect their achievements, their hard work, their entrepreneurialism, their creation of middle classes, their place in the world. They’re justifiably proud countries. And we don’t know how to accommodate their aspirations. The conventional argument is seductive: the liberal order is supremely flexible and can accommodate everybody, and so therefore it’s going to survive. But it doesn’t work in the Iranian case, it doesn’t work in the Russian case, and it doesn’t work in the Chinese case. What are the terms of the accommodation? They see themselves, in several cases, as rooted in ancient civilisations that predate the U.S.-led order. What if they don’t accept our terms, even if they’re the beneficiaries?

Beyond the Eurasian land powers, what about the rising powers, whose rise the open order facilitated and who don’t see the existing U.S.-led order as a threat to their regime’s survival? What’s the opportunity set for them? Where do they fit in? How are their voices heard?

Interviewer: Let’s talk about Trump himself a little bit. In 2019, you wrote an essay for Foreign Affairs about the investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign and its links to Russia. As I watched the returns last night, I kept thinking about one passage from that piece: “Showmanship, a buccaneering spirit, and go-for-broke instincts are [among] the traits that made America what it is. ... Trump is a phenomenon. Only a genuinely formidable personality could withstand such intense, unremitting investigative pressure and hostility, even if he has brought no small degree of it on himself. Trump lacks the facility to govern effectively, but he knows how to command the attention of the highly educated and dominate the news cycle. There is a reason he proved able, in a single election cycle, to vanquish both the entrenched Bush and Clinton dynasties.”

“Trump,” you wrote, “is as American as apple pie.”

The results of this election seem to confirm the idea that, far from the aberration or fluke that many observers have portrayed him as being, Trump captures and reflects the American spirit, at this moment in history, far more accurately than his meritocratic, elite, Establishment foes.

Stephen Kotkin: I get impatient when I read or hear people say about Trump, “That’s not who we are.” Because who’s the “we?” I don’t mean when Trump is called a racist and people insist “we” are not racists. Or when Trump is called misogynist and people say “we” are better than that. I just mean that Trump is quintessentially American.

Trump is not an alien who landed from some other planet. This is not somebody who got implanted in power by Russian special operations, obviously. This is somebody that the American people voted for who reflects something deep and abiding about American culture. Think of all the worlds that he has inhabited and that lifted him up. Pro wrestling. Reality TV. Casinos and gambling, which are no longer just in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, but everywhere, embedded in daily life. Celebrity culture. Social media. All of that looks to me like America. And yes, so does fraud, and brazen lying, and the P. T. Barnum, carnival barker stuff. But there is an audience, and not a small one, for where Trump came from and who he is.

The system proved incapable of punishing Trump personally for his concerted, multifaceted refusal to accept his defeat and accept a peaceful transfer of power in 2020. Paradoxically, the efforts to punish him, legally, ended up propelling him back from political irrelevance to the top of the Republican ticket. At the same time, this election saw massive turnout, extraordinary levels of voter commitment, by American standards.

And it happened in a great year for democracy, for all the efforts in multiple countries to deny or overturn the voters’ will. Globally, half the adult population participated in or will participate in elections this year, and around the world, voters by and large threw out or incumbents when they could. Even in stolid Japan!

In America, no incumbent party with presidential approval ratings as low as Biden’s has ever retained power. Voters in democracies cannot always get what they want, but they can punish those in power. The Democrats overreached. Biden eked out an electoral college victory, having campaigned as a moderate, a stabiliser. He proceeded to govern as if he had won in a landslide, and often from the hard left, on a whole range of things: the border, climate and energy, gender, race, crime and policing, and so on.

And, as I wrote, Trump is a phenomenon. In addition to the Clinton dynasty and the Bush dynasty, he has now vanquished the Cheney dynasty. And he co-opted the Kennedy dynasty, of course, in what many would regard as a degraded form—although some people would regard the current incarnation of the Kennedy dynasty as reflecting, in some ways, the trajectory of America.

And Trump vanquished the military and national security establishment that served him and came out against his re-election. He vanquished the scientific establishment. Wow.

You know, they made fun of [Soviet leader] Nikita Khrushchev when he denounced Stalin in 1956, in the “secret speech” at the 20th Party Congress. In that speech, Khrushchev condemned the cult of the personality that Stalin had developed. But Khrushchev, he wasn’t known for his commanding presence, and behind his back, people said, “It’s true, there was a cult—but there was also a personality!”

Interviewer: Speaking of Stalin: one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you today is that you’ve spent decades closely studying him and his regime, and few people know more than you do about authoritarianism. Trump’s critics often accuse him of being or aspiring to be a strongman, or an autocrat, or even a fascist dictator. What do you think of that critique?

Stephen Kotkin: Not much. Trump no doubt has a lot of desires. He would no doubt like to have the kind of control over the American political system that Xi Jinping has in China or Putin has in Russia. He’s said so. I’m not sure Trump’s personality would be conducive to wielding that kind of power and control. And that’s not the system that we have. Stalin was effective in his system. But what if you put a personality like Stalin in our system? What do you get? Someone who is supremely skilled at despotism maybe finds himself bereft in a system with innumerable checks and balances and a free press and open society, doesn’t know how to manage. You have to consider the larger system, the set of institutions, the political culture, not just the personality, not just the fantasies of the individual person.

Interviewer: But surely you would agree that Trump represents something different from the kind of leadership that has guided American government in the postwar era, right? The constant overt lying, the demand for loyalty to him above loyalty to the Constitution or the country—and especially the “big lie” about winning the 2020 election and his efforts to undermine the results and stay in office. Those things don’t have much precedent in U.S. history or in the U.S. system. And he’s threatened things that have been unimaginable in this country for decades: using military force against critics he calls “the enemy within,” jailing opponents, purging people who won’t pledge loyalty, mass deportations. Should we not worry that some of those things could do permanent damage to American democracy and the U.S. system?

Stephen Kotkin: I don’t like any of that. I don’t like it at all. But is it American fascism? OK, you’re going to mass deport ten million people. Where is your Gestapo? Sure, you have ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. You have some police forces. But how are you going to round up that many people and forcibly evict them from the country and keep them out? So I don’t like the idea of mass deportation—and by the way, the Obama administration conducted a high number of deportations. But this is just nothing at all like the kind of stuff that I study and write about. And yes, it’s worrisome to hear rhetoric that is expressly antidemocratic, but some of that rhetoric is about stirring the pot, driving the other side into a frenzy, and whipping up your side, especially in this social media age.

Stephen Kotkin: When radio was introduced on a mass scale, many elites panicked: “This is the end of democracy, the end of civilisation, what are we going to do? They can just broadcast anything and everything right into the living rooms of people, unfiltered, we cannot control what they say.” The establishment couldn’t censor it, and over the radio someone could just say anything and could just make stuff up. And Mussolini was great at radio, and Goebbels was amazing at radio. And lo and behold, we got Franklin Roosevelt, who mastered the medium and was a transformative president; whether one approves or disapproves of what he did, it was significant and enduring.

And so we’ve been through this before, with radio. It was very destabilising, and yet we managed to assimilate it. And then we got the TV version of that story, which was even worse because it was images, not just audio. And again, they could just broadcast anything and everything right into people’s living rooms. They could just say anything they wanted to, and the establishment, the self-assigned filters, couldn’t censor it. And we got Kennedy, as opposed to his opponent, Richard Nixon, who sweated on TV and was mopping his brow while Kennedy shined and beamed.

And now we have social media, which is potentially even more destabilising for an open society. Everyone’s their own National Enquirer, and everyone is connected. And everyone can broadcast these previously fringe conspiracy theories that are now mainstream. Not because everybody believes them. I don’t know whether more people believe them now than did before. But everybody can see them, hear them, propagate them, forward them.

We always disagree on what the truth is. But now we have a problem with the truth regime. The truth regime is how we determine the truth: evidence, argument, proof. But that truth regime has been destabilised. No one has the truth alone, and we should argue about the truth. But we used to have a consensus on how we got to the truth and how we recognised truth. Not anymore. So how are we going to manage this, to assimilate this new technology and media?

Strong, successful countries have competent and compassionate leadership and social solidarity and trust. It’s been a long time since we had both competence and compassion at the top. And the loss of social solidarity and trust is debilitating for our institutions. We are an open society and must remain so. But how?

Interviewer: Earlier this year, in trying to sketch out a way forward for the United States, you wrote this in Foreign Affairs: “The government and philanthropists should redirect significant higher education funding to community colleges that meet or exceed performance metrics. States should launch an ambitious rollout of vocational schools and training, whether reintroducing them in existing high schools or opening new self-standing ones in partnership with employers at the ground level. Beyond human capital, the United States needs to spark a housing construction boom by drastically reducing environmental regulations and to eliminate subsidies for builders, letting the market work. The country also needs to institute national service for young people, perhaps with an intergenerational component, to rekindle broad civic consciousness and a sense of everyone being in this together.”

How would you rate the Trump administration’s chances of grasping this challenge and taking those kinds of steps?

Stephen Kotkin: Well, he’ll be a lame duck immediately after the inauguration, and second term presidencies generally don’t get a lot done. And he has a lot of grievances that he might pursue that have nothing to do with that agenda I was describing. I think the Justice Department is going to be in his cross hairs, potentially the Federal Reserve, maybe the CIA. Trump is passionate about retribution and those he perceives as having wronged him, gone after him, and some of these grievances are legitimate, even if retribution does not bode well for a successful presidency.

But there are some things he’d be well positioned to do that would be significant contributions to American revitalisation. Fund AI-inflected vocational training to reward the people who helped sweep him back into office, are not going to college, yet need pathways forward, opportunities. Invest in community colleges, where a gigantic proportion of American students are but where a lack of resources often thwarts their ambitions.

Trump is a builder, and Trump is a deregulator. So he could lift environmental regulations when it comes to housing, which have very little to do with environmental protection and more to do with a not-in-my-backyard blockage. Build housing, which would increase supply and therefore lower rents and real-estate prices. There is an entire package of things that could make for effective policy and effective politics. He’d need people in an administration to implement it all, and he’d need the Senate and the House to pass legislation where necessary. And he’d have to want to do it. But it’s there for the taking.

Trump’s re-election, even before his inauguration, has dealt a blow to American soft power. This is a critical component of our strength, our security, our prosperity. Trump might be unaware of this or indifferent to it. Part of the challenge is not his fault: sometimes foreigners, even our allies and partners, do not understand America as well as they think. What [the novelist] Philip Roth called the “indigenous American berserk”—which was always there but which social media has revealed and to an extent enhanced—frightens many of them. Many, though not all, see Trump as a breakdown, as a turn away from the America they know and hope to see again. So Trump’s administration will have some work to do in this regard, as many of his officials did in his first term. There’s an opening here: he wants America, and himself, to be perceived as strong.

Maybe the biggest weakness of the liberal international order is that the whole world feels the consequences of U.S. elections but has no say in them. We Americans elect what is often called “the leader of the free world.” And our allies and friends, to say nothing of our enemies, have to suck it up: the person we choose is now in charge of the U.S.-led international order. Most foreign governments have become adept over the years at managing Washington, the multilayered and federal U.S. political system. And most have experience from Trump’s first term. Still, the return of Trump has already affected what they think of America’s commitments, political stability, long-term trajectory. I think those who feel confirmed in their pessimism are mistaken, for a host of reasons. But their impressions are a reality that affects U.S. soft power.

As a historian, my tendency is to focus less on the cut and thrust of politics of the moment and more on the longer term, the structural directions and the big drivers of change. The deepest structural trend for the U.S. is, in some ways, the gulf that opened up between our commitments and our capabilities. We have been talking about taking on more commitments—whether it’s bringing Ukraine into NATO or signing a treaty alliance with Saudi Arabia—even as there are doubts at home and abroad about whether we have the will and the capabilities to meet our current commitments. Whether our defence industrial base is up to the task of defending all our current treaty allies. And doubts about our fiscal situation, which has been very severely eroded and will likely erode still more under Trump 2.0, as it did under Biden and Trump 1.0.

Obama tried to enact retrenchment, but he kept getting buffeted by demands for more applications of American power—and we saw the results. Trump also wanted to wind down commitments abroad yet ended up, rightly, shifting to a more confrontational approach vis-à-vis China, and that requires vast new resources that need to come from somewhere. Like Trump, Biden wanted out of Afghanistan, come what may, and found he had to react to the war in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war with significant additional commitments. How can America manage all the commitments it has? How can it increase its capabilities?

So that is at the top of Trump’s inbox. His approach, rhetorically, looks night-and-day different from Obama’s and Biden’s. And he faces the same dilemma, and it’s been building, and I’m not sure his critics had answers. Still, he needs an answer. Because America needs an answer.