Fewer than 60 days into his second term, President Donald Trump is determined to expand U.S. dominance across the Americas. His targets are not limited to Canada and Mexico. And while Trump 2.0 is already bending some countries to his will, his presidency also risks triggering dangerous escalation while alienating allies, empowering rivals and unravelling decades of hemispheric stability.
The President envisions a zero-sum world divided between the strong and the weak. He channels the Athenian historian and general Thucydides’s maxim that the “strong will do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must.” In seeking to operate free of institutional constraints and without regard for partners, he is upending the post-Second World War order founded on positive sum rules, trade and alliances.
