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Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

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March 7, 2025

Fareed: Trump Is Ushering In the Post-American World

“Singapore plays its geopolitical cards carefully as it tries to maintain good relations with the United States in a region dominated by China,” Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column. “So it’s worth paying attention when its defense minister says that the image of the United States ‘has changed from liberator to great disrupter to a landlord seeking rent.’ Its senior minister, Lee Hsien Loong, summed up the challenge the world faces: ‘The U.S. is no longer prepared to underwrite the global order. This makes the international environment far less orderly and predictable.’”
 
One and a half months into President Donald Trump’s second turn in the White House, drastic changes to US foreign policy are almost too many to count. Trump has sought to pause and reconsider all foreign aid. He has moved to withdraw the US from the World Health Organization. He has threatened, and in some cases imposed, steep tariffs on allies and adversaries alike. He has stopped US military support for Ukraine, and Germany’s prospective new chancellor has warned that Europe must seek “independence” from the US.

“All these changes are gifts to Russia and China, whose goal has been to weaken America’s power and presence in the world,” Fareed writes. “To those who think it’s high time that we changed an international system that was so dependent on the United States—have you weighed the costs and benefits? The United States spent eight decades building an international system of rules, norms and values that has produced the longest period of great power peace and global prosperity in human history. Its alliances are the greatest force multiplier for its influence around the world. The United States has been the greatest beneficiary of this system, even now, decades later, still setting the agenda and dominating the world economically, technologically and militarily. As that world unravels, America’s privileged position will also decline, creating a more dangerous and impoverished world—and a more isolated, mistrusted and insecure America. The Post-American World is now in plain sight.”

Unreliable America? A French Senator’s Scathing Critique

For an unvarnished, jaded vision of Trump’s America, we can turn to a viral floor speech in the French Senate delivered by Claude Malhuret, president of the Senate’s center-right Independents group.
 
Washington has become the “court of Nero,” a tragedy for both the US and the world, Malhuret said. “This is not an illiberal drift. It is the beginning of the seizure of democracy.”

An Alternative View: Trump as Nixon

Not everyone sees Trump that way. In an essay for The National Interest, Nadia Schadlow of the right-leaning Hudson Institute compares Trump’s disruptiveness to that of Richard Nixon, who prized the constant balancing of global power for the purpose of securing US interests—and who confronted a world at a similar crossroads.
 
“Nixon entered the White House as the world was undergoing a fundamental reordering,” Schadlow writes. “In his first report to Congress, he observed that the pattern of international politics was changing. As he saw it, the challenge of statesmanship was to understand the nature of that change, define America’s goals as it unfolded, and set policies to achieve them.” Among the changes: Europe and Japan were recovering from the devastation of World War II, the USSR had acquired a formidable nuclear arsenal, West Germany was seeking balance between the USSR and the West, and cracks were emerging between the USSR and communist China.
 
Not unlike Trump, Nixon’s answer to these challenges involved “sharing responsibility,” Schadlow writes. Nixon “observed that America’s quintessentially ‘do it yourself’ spirit and ‘healthy impatience’ could lead to the tendency of ‘doing it all’ in our foreign policy.”
 
For all the criticism generated by Trump’s disruptiveness, the current US president seems to be onto something, Schadlow argues. During his first presidency, Trump “advanced policies intended to shift the country away from the interdependencies of globalization, particularly reliance on China,” Schadlow writes. “Beijing’s unfair trade practices and control over critical supply chains had resulted in negative economic conditions for the American people and degraded their security. Open borders empowered drug cartels and abetted the flow of narcotics into the United States, killing tens of thousands of Americans each year. Radical Islam continued to pose a threat at home and abroad. Today, these efforts remain unfinished. Trump won reelection in 2024 partly because Americans believed that the shifts that Trump had started to address and manage needed to be completed.”

How Trump Could Pressure Russia

Trump has turned away from Ukraine in recent weeks, berating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office and then halting US military support for Kyiv. The US also has paused some intelligence sharing with Ukraine, and Trump’s Defense Department has suspended offensive US cyber operations against Russia.

And yet, Trump posted today to his Truth Social network that because Russia is “pounding” Ukraine on the battlefield, he is considering stronger sanctions (and tariffs) against Russia. Trump urged Moscow and Kyiv to negotiate for peace quickly.
 
Former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, a critic of Trump, tweeted that strengthening Western sanctions would be a welcome development—and one that could be done effectively. After Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the West rolled out an unprecedented sanctions campaign against Russia’s economy and financial system, but McFaul sees holes that can be plugged.
 
McFaul nodded to a May 2024 paper on strengthening sanctions against Russia, authored by a Stanford Ukraine-policy working group of which McFaul is a member. The group called for confiscating some $300 billion of frozen Russian assets to fund Ukraine’s defenses and bolster its economy; imposing new sanctions on Russian exports like LNG and fertilizer; enacting a full embargo on Russian uranium, steel, and aluminum products; placing tariffs on all other Russian exports; further restricting the flow of technology to Russia; sanctioning more Russian companies and people; preventing Western lawyers from helping Russian firms work around sanctions; designating Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism; forbidding any Western company from doing business in Russia; and more.

Abandon Ukraine?

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens identifies a case (fallacious, in his view) for abandoning Ukraine: supporting Kyiv is costly and not in America’s vital national interest, hostility toward Russia has gotten us nowhere, and it’s a fine idea to warm to Moscow to counterbalance a rising China.
 
Like other supporters of Ukraine, Stephens sees notable flaws in this argument. Ceding ground to Russian President Vladimir Putin will only give a green light to Chinese leader Xi Jinping to become more aggressive, Stephens argues. Abandoning Ukraine and European allies will spell the end of NATO while doing “nothing to detach Moscow from Beijing,” he writes.
 
At the British foreign-affairs think tank Chatham House, Judith Gough adds more reasons: a poorly crafted ceasefire will not “deter Putin from his long-term goals. He wants to destroy Ukraine’s sovereignty and ability to defend itself, sow disunity and split the US from Europe, and ensure he is back at the top table as a global leader. … Any acceptance that a country can change its borders by force is a challenge to the rules based international system and therefore, global security.”
 
Still, if Trump abandons Ukraine fully—by declining to resume US military support and pushing for a ceasefire that leaves Ukraine vulnerable—Alessandro Marrone’s late-February commentary for the Italian think tank Istituto Affari Internazionali sums up what the consequences might be for the US and Europe.

Marrone wrote: “The US can disengage from Ukraine with a limited and indirect, but still significant, impact on its national interests, starting with the message it sends to China about how long American military support for Taiwan would last if Beijing were to try to retake the Island by force. But for Europe, the impact … has very direct, broad and long-lasting effects that are worth reflecting upon. Especially in light of the other lessons of the three-year war in Ukraine: that Putin’s Russia is currently prepared to bear enormous and prolonged costs to invade a neighbouring country; that Russian armed forces can be stopped but at a very high price; and that Europe must urgently work on the readiness of its own armed forces and defence industry to deter a Russian attack. … The bottom line is that Europeans must invest in their own collective defence and security more than in the last three decades—probably up to Cold War levels—and accept tough economic choices. Three generations after World War II, the war in Ukraine and the way it may end in favour of Russia have proven what tremendously worse sacrifices are required once conventional conflict returns to Europe.”

A Small-Country Survival Guide

The world has become a scarier place for small and middle-sized countries, as the superpowers do as they please. Trump has talked of acquiring Greenland, Panama, and Canada; Russia has invaded Ukraine; and China pursues its own territorial claims in the Western Pacific. In a short video, Bloomberg columnist Karishma Vaswani offers advice to small and medium-sized countries as to how they can cope: Banding together can help ensure “safety in numbers,” Vaswani says. Calling out bad superpower behavior can be effective. And new alliances can be built to wield power and counter specific threats, Vaswani notes.