Trump, Iran, and a Rogue America

Is the United States acting like a rogue state? Stephen Walt, a Harvard University professor and FP columnist, has been making the case in these pages that the Trump administration is showing all the qualities that we once associated with Iran or North Korea. How damaging will this prove to be for Washington’s reputation, and what can countries do to navigate a United States that has abandoned the pursuit of soft power?

On the latest episode of FP Live, Walt joined me to discuss his recent essay on this topic. Subscribers can watch the full conversation on the video box atop this page or download the free FP Live podcast. What follows here is a condensed and lightly edited transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: You’ve called Trump’s America predatory, or even a rogue state. Explain what you mean by that.

Stephen M. Walt: The predatory part is that, during (President Donald) Trump’s second term, the United States has essentially adopted a zero-sum approach to all of its relations—not just toward adversaries, with whom all great powers tend to act in a fairly assertive and predatory fashion, but toward some of our closest allies. You see this in the tariff policy, trying to extract concessions on economic terms by threatening other countries with tariffs; in constantly threatening to withdraw American military protection if he doesn’t get what he wants from partners; in expecting allies to come to the White House and show acts of fealty and submission. All of this is designed to get the lion’s share of any deal. One other example is the coveting of Greenland, which doesn’t belong to the United States—but that doesn’t matter to Trump.

So the notion that the United States might have common interests with others, and that we adopt mutually beneficial relations, is largely alien to a predatory hegemon. Their guiding credo is, “What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is negotiable.”

RA: Whenever we talk about transactionalism or being predatory, I tend to add the word “nakedly.” Because it’s one thing to try to achieve one’s ends by being transactional, which all of us do at some level, or by trying to get a better deal, which all of us want on some level. But Trump’s way seems to be nakedly so, so much so that everyone is talking about it. Countries see it quite clearly.

SW: It has a couple of other dimensions to it as well. Certainly, the open, almost gleeful embrace of this has been noticed by everyone. But it means that people lose confidence in the U.S.’s willingness to keep its promises. You reach a deal over some particular issue, and that might get changed a few months or years later. So, other countries are going to be less inclined to cooperate with the United States because they won’t be sure any deals will be kept.

The second part is that it’s contradictory. It forces our allies and partners into situations that are almost impossible. For example, on one hand, we want our allies to invest a larger share of their wealth on defense. That makes sense from an American perspective. But at the same time, we’re imposing onerous economic tariffs on them, which hurts their economies and makes it harder for them to contribute more to defense. What’s missing, in short, for a predatory hegemon is the idea that sometimes you can make yourself better off by working constructively with others as opposed to trying to take advantage of them at every opportunity.

RA: But is America really a “rogue state”? How are you defining it, because that’s a term that I think we usually use for countries like North Korea, right?

SW: Right. This was a term of art in the 1990s, when we labeled countries like Libya, North Korea, Iran, and Iraq as rogue states. These were countries that were largely indifferent to international norms and laws; threats to peace and security in their region; angry, revisionist, and trying to alter the status quo in some fundamental ways. These were all the qualities we associated with them. Of course, we were juxtaposing them with countries like the United States, which was supposedly none of those things.

If you think about the Trump administration now, it’s showing all of the qualities. They don’t like international law or institutions. They are certainly a threat to international peace and security, starting wars with countries that aren’t at war with us—in fact, sometimes with countries that are negotiating with us to try to avoid a war. This gets back to your point about nakedness and doing it in a gleeful fashion. It’s not just that we’re breaking international norms out of a sense of dire necessity. This is an administration that takes pleasure in showing how just powerful it is and how little it cares about the opinions of others. That makes the United States look more dangerous to others, and much more like a rogue state.

RA: The United States was hardly perfect before, which you have often pointed out. Can you contrast the last couple of years of U.S. foreign policy with previous iterations of it?

SW: The biggest difference—the thing that’s really striking and that I didn’t expect when Trump came back in—is that the United States has abandoned all efforts to wrap an iron fist in the velvet glove. The United States had been a very powerful country for a long time, and we’ve sometimes played hardball—certainly with our adversaries and sometimes with our allies. But especially with our allies, we tended to do that reluctantly. We listened. We tried to accommodate their concerns whenever possible and present ourselves as a positive force in the world. We didn’t always do that perfectly. We made some real mistakes, and the United States did some awful things. But this wasn’t done with a sense of normalcy; it was seen as an exception to what the United States stood for.

RA: I want to talk about how the rest of the world can navigate a predatory or rogue United States. You wrote a column recently that laid out six ways that other countries are strategizing about this moment: balancing, bandwagoning, political manipulation, diversifying and de-risking, balking (saying “no”), and making the United States look bad. I won’t make you go through each one, but maybe we could just start with balancing. How is that working out?

SW: We saw this even before Trump’s second term started in the growing collaboration between Russia and China. That’s a form of balancing to try to negate or counter American power. The growing ties between North Korea and Russia are another indication; the support that Russia’s provided to Iran, and that Iran provided to Russia in Ukraine, is all evidence of efforts of other countries who do not want the United States to run the world unilaterally to constrain American power.

Even those countries put together are still not a match for the United States and its allies in most circumstances, but it is an indication of the kind of collaboration you see from countries who are opposed to what the United States is doing. You could even add the tacit collaboration between Iran, the Houthis in Yemen, and possibly Hezbollah in Lebanon—all efforts to complicate what the United States is trying to accomplish. In the case of Iran and the Houthis, this is proving to be remarkably successful, if you look at what closing the Strait of Hormuz and possibly the Red Sea is doing to global energy markets. Even relatively weak actors sometimes have cards to play, and they can strengthen their hand by working together.

RA: Another option you raised was for countries to just say no or to fight back. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney saw a dramatic turnaround in his electoral fortunes after standing up to Trump. NATO recently refused to help the United States open the Strait of Hormuz.

SW: Also, having other potential partners is a real help. The Trump administration’s ability to pressure a country like Saudi Arabia is more limited than its ability to pressure a relatively weak country in Latin America, for example. The thing about “just saying no” is that nobody really wants to pick a fight with the United States if they can avoid it.

One of the things you can do is agree to whatever Trump is asking you to do and then don’t actually deliver it. Think of the way that children often resist what their parents are trying to get them to do. They pretend to do it, but they don’t really. You can promise to invest in the American economy, say you’ll do it over five or 10 years, and then a couple of years in, you say, “Gee, we’re having some problems over here. We’re going to have to slow things down.” Or: “The official who was responsible for that just took family leave. He’ll get back to it in a couple of weeks.” You simply drag things out. There are 190-plus countries in the world, and it’s impossible for the United States to keep track of what every single one of them is doing to deliver its promises.

The other thing states will do to improve their position is diversify. This is what Mark Carney has emphasized and pioneered. You don’t want to be as economically dependent on the United States because that gives the United States lots of leverage. You want to diversify your trade ties. In the case of NATO members, maybe you don’t want to be as reliant on American weapons. Don’t buy F-35s because that means the United States has another piece of leverage. Maybe you want to develop your own aircraft. This is a long-term strategy. It takes a while to bring to fruition, but it’s the sensible thing to do when you’re dealing with a rogue state whose promises you can’t trust and occasionally acts in a malevolent fashion. You have to try and reduce your vulnerability by partnering with others.

RA: There is another strategy for navigating a predatory United States, and that is to align yourself with it, or to do whatever it takes to curry favor. There are many examples of countries and leaders who’ve done this. There’s Javier Milei in Argentina, who got a bailout from the United States. Pakistan, I would argue, has been very canny in how it has appealed to the things Trump wants, whether it’s crypto or critical minerals or nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Flattery clearly is a strategy that many countries have adopted. I’m curious how durable you think those strategies are. Perhaps this is a moment to bring in Viktor Orban, who after 16 years in power lost elections over the weekend. Many people expected him to do badly, but I’m not sure all of us expected him to concede in the way that he did.

SW: What happened in Hungary is quite significant, more significant than Hungary’s sheer size might suggest. Certainly, for some countries—particularly isolated countries that are very heavily dependent on the United States who don’t have a lot of options—they may have no real choice but to collaborate with the United States, to accept whatever it dictates. That’ll be encouraged, of course, if they’re led by people who are on Trump’s wavelength. Milei in Argentina is probably the best example right now. For the Gulf states, which have been dependent on American protection, they’re now facing a very awkward choice. They clearly don’t want to lose American support and protection, but they have to be concerned with where the United States has put them, not on purpose, but inadvertently.

The willingness to bandwagon with the United States gets undermined by two things. One is the possibility that even if you do this, it’s not going to work. You can try to accommodate, appease, and align yourself with the Trump administration—and they’ll come after you anyway. This is the experience that some European leaders have had. They’ve tried to flatter them, they’ve tried to be nice, and they still get hammered down the road. Eventually, you say there’s no point doing this.

The second thing is that this depends on a certain degree of confidence in American judgment. You’re willing to subordinate yourself and align yourself with a powerful country if you really trust its judgment, that it knows what it’s doing, that it has a good sense of what the opportunities and risks are. The problem is that the Trump administration is now showing its judgment is not good. The war with Iran is the most obvious example of that. You can’t trust an America that makes mistakes like this. This is not an administration that is exuding the aura of competence on which a lot of influence depends. That’s a problem.

One final thing about Orban. Orban’s fate shows you the risks of an autocratic regime where the leader is increasingly surrounded by sycophants, doesn’t necessarily have an accurate sense of what’s going on in the country, has lost whatever touch they once had that got them into power and kept them in power. They no longer understand exactly how unpopular they’ve become. I think Orban was surprised by the outcome here, and part of that was because he was trapped in a sycophantic bubble. I worry that’s actually what’s happened to President Trump. He’s no longer got grown-ups in the room who will tell him when he’s making a mistake. He’s mostly got people who will tell him he’s a genius or will disagree in the most gentle possible way. And that’s usually a recipe for disaster.