Some Thoughts about Power
Military and economic strength matters in international relations. But wielding that strength thoughtlessly or recklessly is sure to engender resistance.
A recent episode of the Net Assessment podcast focused on Stephen Walt’s Foreign Affairs essay, “The Predatory Hegemon.” According to Walt, the Trump administration’s “central aim is to use Washington’s privileged position to extract concessions, tribute, and displays of deference from both allies and adversaries, pursuing short-term gains in what it sees as a purely zero-sum world.”
“Given the United States’ still considerable assets and geographic advantages, predatory hegemony may work for a time,” Walt concedes. “In the long run, however, it is doomed to fail. It is ill suited for a world of several competing great powers—especially one in which China is an economic and military peer—because multipolarity gives other states ways to reduce their dependence on the United States.”
To be clear, power matters. Walt is a realist. He has spent his career arguing that states pursue interests, that hard power is the currency of international politics, and that the idealistic scaffolding of the rules-based international order rests, ultimately, on the willingness of powerful states to enforce it – or at least go along with it. But, in the end, as Thucydides recorded, “The strong do what they will; the weak suffer what they must.”
Or, in the immortal words of Tywin Lannister in “Game of Thrones”: “a lion doesn’t concern itself with the opinions of sheep.”
Where Walt’s analysis cuts deepest is not in its diagnosis of American behavior – calling the current approach predatory hegemony is accurate, but hardly novel – but in its systematic dismantling of the strategy’s internal logic. The Trump administration imagines a world in which American leverage is essentially unlimited, in which extracting short-term concessions from allies and adversaries alike is costless, and in which the measure of a successful foreign policy is the size of the tribute paid. The administration does not care if this strategy stops working after 2029, because that is precisely how short-term their thinking runs.
That is, ultimately, the most damning thing one can say about predatory hegemony as a strategy. It is not wrong about the nature of power. It is wrong about the time horizon over which power operates, and about the mechanisms through which it gets converted into actual influence. That last part is key. Power is the ability to produce a desirable effect. But wielding power thoughtlessly or foolishly often has unintended consequences. And repeatedly wielding it that way can weaken its effect over time. That, I fear, is exactly what Trump is doing to U.S. power.
Consider, for example, the notion that the United States has unmatched leverage over others. The Trump administration has made much of America’s privileged position as the world’s largest consumer market, its role as security guarantor for dozens of allies, and its capacity to impose economic pain through sanctions and tariffs. All of this is real. But Walt observes – and the evidence is accumulating rapidly – that that leverage is eroding. China’s economy now rivals America’s in scale. In anticipation of Trump’s threatened tariffs, Japanese, South Korean, and Chinese officials met in March 2025, their first such trilateral meeting in five years, to discuss their common economic interests. European governments publicly discuss reducing dependence on American weapons, American intelligence, and American security commitments.
The administration has mostly dismissed these developments. They believe that, at the end of the day, American allies are too dependent, too risk-averse, and too accustomed to sheltering under the American security umbrella, to actually follow through on their stated intentions to diversify.
There is something to this. Dependency is sticky. Defense procurement timelines are long. Trade relationships are not easily unwound. But Trump’s team misreads what is actually happening. Countries are not just threatening to reduce dependence on the United States. They are beginning to do it – slowly and imperfectly, but genuinely – and the Trump administration’s behavior is accelerating the process with every fresh humiliation it inflicts.
The humiliation is a critical point. Trump’s negotiating style as a businessman focused on the bankers, developers, and realtors sitting across the table from him. And, after the deal was concluded, he invariably would brag about getting the better of them – often cheating them in the process. Indeed, as I wrote back in 2016, he really seemed to revel in crushing others; so often, indeed, that I wonder if that was the whole point. Maybe it wasn’t the deal so much as the appearance of victory? [This is a running theme in the book that I wrote with John Glaser and Trevor Thrall back in 2019.]
Whatever the case, I doubted at the time that Trump would prove to be the master diplomat that he claimed, in part because others would see how he had jilted his past negotiating partners.
But, more to the point, routine humiliation is a terrible model for managing relationships with sovereign states whose leaders must answer to millions of citizens watching the negotiations in real time.
When leaders queue up to endorse Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, or when senior European officials accuse Trump of blackmail in private conversations with administration counterparts, something is happening that The Art of the Deal does not account for. Leaders who are publicly humiliated face domestic constituencies that share that humiliation. Mark Carney turned a roughly twenty-point deficit into an election victory by running against American condescension. Denmark didn’t hand over Greenland. And, more recently, the UK hasn’t bowed to Trump’s pressure to support the ill-fated war against Iran. Embattled British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has to answer to his own constituents, 66 percent of whom oppose the war; just 5 percent want Britain to join the U.S. and Israel in attacking targets in Iran.
And others are hedging their bets. Poland’s Donald Tusk is publicly questioning the reliability of U.S. security guarantees and urging the EU to bolster its mutual defense capabilities and commitments. The Poles are also buying more weapons from South Korea. These are not anomalies. They are the predictable consequences of a strategy that treats allies as vassals and their leaders as supplicants.
Walt’s framing of the leverage trap vis-à-vis U.S. allies is also particularly useful. The Trump administration has repeatedly threatened to withdraw American military protection if allies do not comply with its demands. But this threat is structurally self-defeating. If the threats are never carried out, they lose their coercive power. If the threats are carried out, the leverage disappears along with the commitment. Either way, using the promise of protection to extract an ever-expanding series of concessions is not a sustainable strategy. You lose either way.
The administration seems to believe that European and Asian allies will not actually develop the autonomous capabilities they are promising. Unwilling to spend what is necessary to create distance from Washington, they will remain dependent, and mend fences after major policy disagreements. It happened after Vietnam. It happened after Iraq.
But there are ways to foster strategic autonomy without systematically humiliating allies in the process. If these governments actually develop indigenous defense industries, and even form alternative security arrangements, these need not be a threat to the United States. In the best case, they will be a shared asset for advancing common security interests – of which there are many. But the ill will created by Donald Trump’s bullying will be difficult to expunge. Today’s allies might even become tomorrow’s adversaries.
Walt’s prescription for the near future – a wish that Trump should stop acting like a predatory hegemon and adopt a more modest and restrained approach to world affairs – is unsatisfying. Trump will not follow this advice, and Walt almost certainly knows it.
The more durable insight, however, is worth remembering for when Trump passes from the scene. Predatory hegemony fails not because power does not matter, but because power exercised without restraint, without reciprocity, and without a time horizon longer than the next deal, corrodes the very relationships through which power gets translated into lasting influence.
Walt closes with an image I find persuasive: the mailed fist of American power, he notes, was always there. What made it effective was the velvet glove. By “treating weaker states with respect and not trying to squeeze every possible advantage out of others,” Walt explains, “the United States was able to convince the world’s most consequential states that aligning with its foreign policy was preferable to partnering with its main rivals.”
Now, that is all up for grabs. It turns out that removing the glove does not increase the power of the fist. It just makes everyone look for ways to avoid getting punched.
Author’s note: this post was created using Claude’s Anthropic (Sonnet 4.6), adapting from my comments during the Net Assessment episode of May 8, 2026. Claude extracted the content from the transcript, and created a first draft. I edited and rewrote some sections, and added others, as well as links.