There are many things that U.S. President Donald Trump doesn’t understand about world politics—which is astonishing given that he’s in his second term at the White House—and one of them is the importance of international institutions. Institutions are rules, and Trump’s contempt for rules predates his entry into politics. He has long seen norms, laws, and rules as pesky constraints that sometimes prevent him from taking whatever he wants, and he’s brought that attitude to foreign policy. Whether he’s accepting lucrative emoluments from foreign governments, threatening to seize Greenland and annex Canada, or bullying foreign visitors in the Oval Office, Trump sees no norm as beyond challenge, no agreement as sacrosanct, and no global institution as worth investing in or defending.
You might think a realist like me would nod in approval. Don’t realists think that power is all that matters and that norms, rules, and institutions have little impact on what states—and especially major powers—do? If that’s what you were taught in your introduction to international relations class, go back to your instructor and request a refund. Yes, realism does view power as the most important factor in world politics, and it maintains that powerful states have the greatest impact on the institutions that prevail at any given point in time. Realists also stress that because there is no central authority to enforce compliance, states can defy the rules if they wish. But sophisticated realists like Hans Morgenthau, Robert Gilpin, Henry Kissinger, Stephen Krasner, and even John Mearsheimer also emphasize that any system of interdependent states cannot function without a set of rules and that even powerful states will pay a price if they defy existing rules too often or too egregiously.
States pay close attention to international rules because they have little choice. If a country wants commercial airlines to fly to and from its territory, for example, it must follow the guidelines set by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), such as the use of English for air traffic control. A sovereign state is free to reject the ICAO’s rules, but air traffic to its territory would cease overnight.
The same principle applies to a vast array of global activities—trade, investment, foreign travel, the protection of endangered species, allocation of the telecommunications spectrum, regulation of fishing, allocation of water rights, etc. Because modern states, corporations, nongovernmental organizations, churches, and other important groups interact with each other in several ways—in some cases, during every single hour of every single day—they need rules to manage how those activities will be conducted.
Imagine how difficult it would be if every firm that wanted to export or import goods had to independently negotiate how that exchange would be performed, or if every state had to devise a separate set of rules to handle currency transactions with each of the 193 members of the United Nations. Then imagine they had to repeat the process anew each day. It is far easier to develop general principles to manage such activities, even though exceptions sometimes arise and states or firms sometimes renege. By reducing uncertainty, norms and institutions reinforce stable patterns of behavior and allow states, firms, and other actors to plan.
Moreover, as Robert Keohane and others established decades ago, institutions help states achieve better outcomes in situations where there are clear benefits from cooperating but also incentives to cheat. In addition to reducing uncertainty and transaction costs, institutions typically contain verification procedures that enable others to detect and respond to violations. By ensuring that cheating is able to be detected, a well-crafted set of rules reduces the incentive to cheat in the first place. Properly designed, they can also address situations where some states are gaining more than others, which may discourage some potential partners from participating at all and leave everyone worse off. Multilateral institutions magnify these benefits by eliminating the need to negotiate separate arrangements with many different countries.
Lastly, states use institutions to gauge each other’s intentions. States that are generally willing to “follow the rules” are less threatening to others and will be regarded as more reliable partners; by contrast, states that repeatedly flout existing norms will likely be seen as dangerous and will find it hard to convince others to trust them. Among other things, this is why all states try to convince others that they are following the rules even when they are not and why states routinely accuse adversaries of violating existing norms and agreements. As author Ian Hurd emphasizes, “governments use international law to explain and justify their choices … international law makes it easier for states to do some things (those that can be presented as lawful) and harder to do others (those that appear to be unlawful).”
To be sure, the rules that states create to manage their relations are not neutral. Powerful states back arrangements that favor their interests or values and impose them on weaker states when they can. They are also able to violate the rules without suffering significant penalties, as the United States did when it left the gold standard in 1971 or when it invaded Iraq in 2003. Nonetheless, even the strongest states benefit from a world where existing institutions command regular obedience; a world with few rules would be much poorer and far more dangerous.
Given the proven benefits that institutions provide, one might think that all world leaders would recognize their value. Most of the time, most of them do. Nonetheless, national leaders can still make one of three critical mistakes. The first is to exaggerate what international institutions can do, an error that some idealists make when they assume that international institutions are sufficient to stop states from fighting, polluting, competing for power, or violating human rights. The second error is the opposite of the first: Leaders can also underestimate the benefits that institutions bring and mistakenly conclude they are better off going it alone. For example, it is now obvious that British voters failed to appreciate the benefits of membership in the European Union when they opted for Brexit in 2016, just as Trump failed to recognize the value of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran or the abortive Trans-Pacific Partnership. Third, states may underestimate the reputational costs of repeated violations and discover that their own actions have caused others to view them more negatively and distance themselves in various ways.
It is the latter two errors that should concern people today. There is little danger that Trump (or most of the autocrats he admires) will exaggerate what institutions can do; the more likely danger is that they will underestimate the value of stable, well-crafted institutions and fail to understand that breaking the rules can do considerable damage to one’s reputation and leave a country worse off in the long run.
Trump’s approach to international trade negotiations illustrates both errors. He has long seen the World Trade Organization as a flawed institution that hurts the United States, but instead of pushing for reforms that might address legitimate U.S. concerns, he is using tariff threats to force dozens of countries to negotiate new bilateral arrangements with the United States. This approach is inherently inefficient because meaningful trade deals require a lot of hard bargaining, and the devil is in the details. Trying to conduct serious negotiations with dozens of countries simultaneously is not going to work, and Trump’s claim that Americans will soon benefit from hundreds of new trade deals is simply typical Trumpian nonsense.
To make matters worse, Trump’s capriciousness, indecision, and basic untrustworthiness will make states more reluctant to offer serious concessions, because they don’t trust Trump to stick to the terms of a deal. In 2020, Trump said the trade pact that his administration negotiated with Mexico and Canada was “the fairest, most balanced, and beneficial trade agreement we have ever signed into law. It’s the best agreement we’ve ever made.” If so, then why did he tear it up as soon as his second term began? He slapped 145 percent tariffs on China, but then backed off to just 30 percent temporarily, and his tariffs threats on the EU keep bouncing around like a monkey on drugs. This capricious approach to international negotiations tells other countries not to adjust their own behavior with the expectation that the United States will keep its end of the bargain, and sensible countries are already looking for more reliable trade and investment partners.
This same problem now hangs over Trump’s attempt to reach a new agreement with Iran on its nuclear program. After tearing up the nuclear deal that former President Barack Obama negotiated even though it was working, it is now much harder for Trump to convince Iran to take any pledge he might make seriously. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made this abundantly clear in February, warning Iranians that while it’s still possible the two states will find sufficient common ground to ink a new agreement, the United States’s history of acting as a fickle partner has made that difficult task harder to achieve.
A final example of Trump’s running roughshod over traditional rules of behavior has been his boorish treatment of world leaders in the Oval Office, beginning with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and most recently with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. I don’t often agree with John Bolton, but after Trump greeted Ramaphosa’s friendly overtures with an utterly fictitious diatribe about alleged white genocide, Bolton pointed out that Trump’s comments “were just not true” and called the attack on Ramaphosa “counterproductive.” Why? Because “it doesn’t exactly encourage people to want to come and sit down with Trump—who knows how they’re going to be treated?”
Trump is not the only world leader who underestimates the reputational consequences of repeatedly breaking rules. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine in 2022 fundamentally altered European views of Russia and led Sweden and Finland to join NATO. Israel’s repeated violations of international law and its genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza have squandered the sympathy it received after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks and done enormous damage to its image around the world. Hungarian President Viktor Orban’s repeated flouting of EU principles has left Hungary isolated within Europe and jeopardized the EU subsidies on which its prosperity depends.
The reputational consequences of violating norms will vary according to the nature of the transgression and the circumstances in which it occurs. A deliberate and large-scale violation—such as an unprovoked and destructive attack on another state—is harder to overlook than a minor or inadvertent slip. Violations are also easier to forgive if a state is in desperate circumstances and must do whatever it takes to survive; they are more objectionable if the violator is not facing existential danger and is merely seeking additional selfish advantages. As the U.S. economy was doing well before Trump reentered the White House and there’s little economic justification for the actions he has taken, his assault on the global order is especially damaging to the United States’ reputation. Similarly, because there is no compelling strategic or economic rationale for seizing Greenland from an ally or incorporating Canada, Trump’s willingness to countenance such ambitions is harder for others to overlook or dismiss.
Because states cannot function without a reasonably stable and accepted set of norms and institutions, the Trump administration’s disregard for rules may allow other powerful states to define what those rules should be and persuade others to follow their lead. China and Russia have made no secret of their desire to rewrite some of the principles of the present world order, and they are openly trying to persuade others that they are a more reliable and predictable partner than the United States. Their track record in this regard is far from perfect and other states should not take Russian or Chinese claims at face value, but Trump’s disinterest in norms and penchant for rule-breaking could make that argument more convincing to some. Americans may one day wake up and discover that much of the world is adhering to norms, institutions, and rules that are made in Beijing, instead of the mostly U.S.-centric institutions that have shaped much of world politics for decades.