This distinction becomes clearer when the
administration’s policies are considered in combination rather than in
isolation. The “America First” agenda emphasizes
protectionism and the primacy of national interests, yet Washington has shown
little reluctance to project military power abroad. The
administration has subjected European allies to unprecedented pressure while simultaneously
reaffirming the centrality of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to American security. It has characterized China as the principal strategic
competitor while continuing to pursue direct negotiations over
trade and other areas of mutual interest. And while insisting on the restoration of American primacy, it has
increasingly operated on the assumption that global power is being reorganized
around competing centers of influence. What appears,
from one perspective, to be contradiction may therefore be something more
consequential: the simultaneous pursuit of strategic objectives that conventional
grand-strategy frameworks tend to treat as mutually exclusive.
The temptation is to call this incongruity.
That may be premature.
The emerging literature on Trump 2.0 has already produced a crowded vocabulary for describing the phenomenon. Realists have emphasized power, national interest, burden-sharing and strategic prioritization. Other scholars have focused on transactionalism, economic coercion and the erosion of the liberal international order. Constructivist approaches draw attention to the ideological transformation of America's self-conception under the “Make America Great Again” agenda (MAGA). A separate literature has begun to focus on the uncertainty generated by Trump's foreign policy and the hedging behavior it is provoking among allies.
Beyond Realism, Liberalism and Constructivism
In 1848, amid U.S. territorial enlargement
and the Mexican–American War, Senator John C. Calhoun warned that imperial
expansion threatened the American republic by concentrating federal power and
extending American rule over peoples who were not equal participants in the
political system. His argument captured a recurring tension in
American foreign policy: whether a republic committed to self-government and
constitutional liberty can simultaneously pursue the power and dominance
associated with empire. This unresolved paradox raises a broader question of
particular relevance to Trump 2.0: can a state's republican character coexist
with an external strategy centered on power maximization?
In its classical, structural and offensive
variants, realism treats states as the primary actors in an anarchic
international system, where the absence of a central authority generates a
logic of self-help. Kenneth Waltz's structural realism and John Mearsheimer's offensive realism, in particular, emphasize
the pursuit of security and relative power through material capabilities rather
than institutional trust. From this perspective, a state's domestic political
form need not determine its external behavior: a republic can pursue power,
coercive leverage and even forms of imperial influence without necessarily
ceasing to be a republic. This helps explain the attraction of realism as a
framework for understanding Trump 2.0. The administration's very own 2026
National Defense Strategy itself describes its approach as “flexible
realism,” centered on the prioritization of concrete American interests rather
than attempting to do everything everywhere.
But realism alone leaves residuals. First,
a strategy centered on maximizing national advantage would be expected to avoid
imposing substantial costs on America's own alliances or undermining the
predictability that has historically amplified American power. Second,
conventional realism does not fully explain the coexistence of apparent
retrenchment in some theatres with extraordinary coercive activism in others.
The central question, therefore, is whether the administration's foreign policy
represents a coherent realist strategy or a more selective and politically
contingent form of power projection.
Liberalism sees a different problem. The
second Trump administration has challenged many of the institutional and
normative assumptions associated with the postwar liberal international order,
as evidenced by its disengagement from multilateral institutions,
the erosion of alliance guarantees, the escalation
of tariffs against European partners, and the retreat from democracy-promotion programs such
as those historically channeled through United States Agency for International
Development (USAID). Taken together, these developments have generated serious
concerns about American reliability and have challenged the liberal assumption
that U.S. power should be exercised through enduring institutions, economic
interdependence, alliances, and the promotion of democratic norms. An argument
could hence be made that Liberalism explains institutional continuity, but
struggles with selective institutional disruption.
Constructivism introduces another
consideration. Rather than treating interests and identities as fixed,
constructivism examines how they are constructed through shared meanings, norms
and political discourse. The administration is therefore not merely changing
policy; it is attempting to reshape the narrative through which America
understands its international role. Recent literature on Trump 2.0 has
highlighted the importance of status, identity and nationhood,
particularly the MAGA conception of a United States that has been
diminished by its previous elites and must recover its stature.
This identity shift is visible in the
emerging conception of the United States as a more assertive and explicitly national,
or perhaps even “nationalist”, hegemon. The notion of a “Trump–Monroe Corollary,” or “Donroe Doctrine,” provides a useful
illustration: recent commentary has interpreted the administration's approach
to Panama, Greenland and Venezuela as reflecting a renewed conception of the
United States as the dominant power in the Western Hemisphere. From a constructivist
perspective, this suggests a shift from the postwar image of America as hegemon-as-guarantor
toward a conception of hegemon-as-enforcer, in which
American power is exercised more explicitly on behalf of the American nation.
Yet constructivism also presents gaps. It
can explain how changing identities and discourses reshape the definition of
American interests, but it is less capable of explaining when those identities
produce coercion, retrenchment, negotiation or intervention. It therefore
illuminates the meaning attached to American influence without fully explaining
the strategic selectivity with which that influence is mobilized.
If Realism explains power, Liberalism
explains institutions, and Constructivism explains identity, each may therefore
be capturing a different dimension of a larger configuration that none can
explain alone.
The Case for Super-Realism
We propose the term “Super-Realism”
to understand Trump 2.0.
Super-Realism is not simply realism
applied more aggressively. Nor is it a claim that Trump has developed a fully
coherent grand strategy in which every decision is centrally planned. Rather,
it is a hypothesis about how strategic power can operate when uncertainty
itself becomes an instrument of leverage.
The basic proposition is simple. A state
can increase its bargaining power by preserving multiple credible strategic
options simultaneously, forcing other actors to prepare for more than one
version of its future behavior. This distinguishes Super-Realism from ordinary
unpredictability in that the relevant question is not whether a state is
unpredictable, but whether the preservation of multiple strategic options
forces other actors to hedge. If a counterparty knows exactly what an actor
will do, it can optimize its response. If it does not, it must hedge.
Super-Realism treats institutions,
alliances, economic relationships and even norms not as constraints on power,
but as instruments whose value is continuously reassessed according to their
contribution to American interests.
This produces what might be called the
cost of anticipation. Beijing must consider whether Washington will negotiate,
sanction, escalate or accommodate. Moscow must calculate whether the United
States will prioritize Europe, seek a settlement or shift resources elsewhere.
European governments must simultaneously preserve the transatlantic
relationship and prepare for a world in which American security guarantees are
less dependable. In each case, uncertainty imposes costs before Washington has
even chosen a definitive course of action: governments must allocate resources,
revise contingency plans and maintain relationships across competing possible
futures.
Five Scripts, One Strategic
Environment
The Trump 2.0 literature increasingly
describes five broad strategic tendencies. The first is unipolar dominance: the continued insistence
that America should remain the pre-eminent global power, even under the banner
of America First. The second is tripolarity: an implicit recognition that the
strategic environment is increasingly organized around Washington,
Beijing and Moscow, requiring the United States to manage several great-power
relationships and carve out spheres of influence. The third is strategic
debilitation: the use of tariffs, sanctions, export controls and other economic
instruments to impose costs on rivals and, increasingly, to extract concessions from partners. The fourth is
selective continuity: the preservation of relationships that remain
strategically valuable, including NATO and the security partnerships with Israel and Taiwan, despite the administration's hostility
toward aspects of the inherited order. The fifth is the Indian exception: the
cultivation of India as an increasingly important strategic partner without fitting neatly into either a
traditional alliance structure or a straightforward sphere-of-influence model.
These are not necessarily five separate
grand strategies. They can instead be understood as five scripts that
Washington can activate according to circumstance. That possibility changes how
we interpret the apparent contradictions. What if the simultaneous availability
of several strategies is itself the strategy?
Three Tests in 2026
The events of 2026 provide an unusually
revealing test. On January 3, US forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás
Maduro in a major military operation after months of preparation. The
operation represented an extraordinary demonstration of American coercive
capacity in the Western Hemisphere. Whatever one's judgement of the operation,
it demonstrated that an administration often described as isolationist was
prepared to use direct military force to impose its will in its own perceived
strategic neighborhood.
Four months later, Trump travelled to Beijing to meet Xi Jinping. The
May 14–15 summit did not resolve the fundamental disputes between the two
powers, but it demonstrated the other side of the Trump approach: intense
strategic rivalry could coexist with direct bargaining over trade, economic
relations and other areas of mutual interest.
Then came NATO's Ankara summit in July. Rather than abandoning the
alliance, Washington continued to operate inside it while pressing allies to
assume greater responsibility for European security. NATO subsequently
reaffirmed its commitment to Article 5 and highlighted rising defense
expenditure among European allies and Canada.
Viewed separately, these episodes belong
to different conceptual categories. Venezuela looks like coercive hemispheric
revisionism. Beijing looks like transactional diplomacy between strategic
competitors. NATO looks like alliance management through pressure.
But that is precisely the point. Under a
Super-Realist interpretation, they do not need to look alike. Their common
feature is that Washington preserves strategic optionality while compelling
other actors to factor in multiple possible American responses.
The Ultimate Test
The question facing Trump 2.0, therefore,
is not whether its foreign policy is coherent according to the standards of
traditional grand strategy. It is whether unpredictability can be converted
into durable power.
Super-Realism offers one possible answer:
by keeping multiple strategic scripts alive simultaneously, Washington can
force friend and foe alike to prepare for possibilities rather than
certainties, increasing the costs of anticipation and increasing American
bargaining power.
But the theory carries its own warning.
The United States may discover that the same uncertainty that makes others
hesitate before challenging American power also teaches them how to live with
less of it.
That is the unresolved question at the
heart of Trump 2.0: whether Super-Realism is a new form of strategic power — or
the mechanism by which the world insures itself against an America it can no
longer depend on.
David F. J. CampbellFounder & Director
David is an Associate Professor for Comparative Political Science at the University of Vienna. His thematic core focuses are quality of democracy in a global perspective, knowledge and innovation in a knowledge economy and knowledge democracy, where David co-created (together with Elias G. Carayannis) the concept and theory of the Quadruple and Quintuple Helix Innovation Systems. Additional themes of his are interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research in the sciences and arts.
Jun Kajee
Contributor
Jun is a Lecturer at Southern Utah University and holds research positions at
the Korea Institute for Maritime Strategy, the Indo-Pacific Studies Center, and
the SeaLight maritime transparency initiative at Stanford University’s Gordian
Knot Center for National Security Innovation. He also serves as an Editor at
the Journal of Management and Business and a Columnist at Business Day. His
work has been featured extensively in the media—garnering acclaim from outlets
such as Newsweek, The Economic Times, Nationwide News Australia, CommonWealth
Magazine and The Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. His research has
received funding and support from the United Nations, the European Commission
and the United States Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, amongst
others.