- Trump, his supporters, and his enablers have never displayed any strong or deep understanding of how the postwar international system served American interests. That system is only a superficial diversion for them.
The author is an American scholar.
ISTANBUL
"There really was, it seemed, a nation on this earth prepared to fight for the freedom of other men, and to fight at her own expense, and at the cost of hardship and peril to herself; a nation prepared to do this service not just for her near neighbours… but even prepared to cross the sea in order to prevent the establishment of an unjust dominion in any quarter of the globe, and to ensure that right and justice, and the rule of law, should everywhere be supreme." [1]
That’s how it once was. In the 20th century, the US intervened in two global conflicts and, especially in the second, provided the economic productivity and military strength needed to achieve victory. The Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine were concrete proof of the US's goodwill and determination. As a result, the US has been seen as the world’s primary defender of freedom and liberty for the past 80 years.
However, Livy’s quote above refers to a moment when, for tactical reasons during their larger struggle with Carthage for Central Mediterranean dominance, Rome granted freedom to the Greek city states. That choice was, in reality, not a statement of ideological conviction, but rather a short-term preference that would keep those cities, their militaries, and their resources out of the possession of Carthage and its potential allies. Better to win the Greek city states’ loyalty by giving them liberty than to have Philip V of Macedon wielding the Greek city states’ resources for Carthage’s benefit. 50 years later, Rome then took the Greek city states under direct political control as they cemented their ascendancy over the Eastern Mediterranean. Greek liberty was extinguished [2].
Will future historians explain the US's creation of NATO — and the many other international institutions that enabled the US to dominate the world’s economic and political systems after WWII — in a similar manner? In 100 years, will the US's post-WWII largesse be understood as a short-term political tactic to keep Europe’s industrial infrastructure, natural resources, and technical capacity out of the hands of Great Power rivals? US officials understood containing the Soviet Union in similar terms: make sure that the industrial infrastructure and natural resources of Eurasia did not fall into Moscow’s hands [3]. 2000 years ago, how many Greeks truly believed that Rome had crossed the Adriatic in order to liberate them?
- The American leviathan rears its head
Since WWII, much evidence has existed for those who doubted the US's motivations, or who did not turn a blind eye to the US's activities. In addition to America’s direct military interventions, CIA-sponsored coups d’état, assassinations, guerilla organizations, rigged elections, and popular uprisings made clear that the US maintained no established foreign policy values other than its own economic and political interests. Liberty and democracy were for US citizens to enjoy; others might receive such conditions from American preferences at certain junctures, but anyone who observed the US's activities objectively should not have been deceived or fallen into complacency.
The US's willingness to underwrite the institutions that comprise the international system as we know it served US interests. Even though most global societies benefitted in some manner from the system that was created, the US was always the primary beneficiary, and US politicians, Democrat and Republican, certainly understood that situation during the Cold War.
After the Cold War’s conclusion, American triumphalism and unipolar global dominance caused US politicians to progressively lose sight of how the US profited from global institutional arrangements. Even though the US had always displayed such behaviors in a limited or veiled manner, US politicians began to take unilateral actions more often and aggressively. No long-term plan or vision existed while Washington decision makers, whether Democrat or Republican, embraced revisionism [4], and hobbled attempts to create international legal norms applicable to all sovereign states, and flagrantly wielded the dollar — and the international financial system based on it — to punish opponents and allies alike.
- Those who cannot remember the past…
Today, the general alarm that gripped Europe as US President Donald Trump threatened them with tariffs, sanctions, the destruction of NATO, Greenland’s annexation, and throwing them all under the Russian bus is understandable. For five generations the US provided economic stability, political weight, and military deterrence, but nothing lasts forever. Someday the US will not, or will not be able to provide those things for Europe.
Trump, his supporters, and his enablers have never displayed any strong or deep understanding of how the postwar international system served American interests. That system is only a superficial diversion for them [5], so those who expect Trump’s administration to recognize that historical reality are engaging in a type of magical thinking.
For instance, the Council of Europe’s Secretary General Alain Berset recently penned a somewhat stunned commentary for the NYT [6]. Berset complains that if “… a major power central to the creation of the postwar legal order openly questions the necessity of international law, it shakes the foundations we’ve worked for decades to reinforce.” Frankly, that seems naive. By 1953 at the latest, the US was already brazenly violating the international order when Eisenhower’s administration sponsored the coup against Iran’s democratically-elected Prime Minister. Türkiye learned through the 1964 Johnson Letter [7] that Washington’s fealty to international agreements was always contingent on the US's mood.
Berset later tries to emphasize principles by warning that, "if international law can be set aside when it becomes inconvenient, trust is gone," and that "international law is either universal or meaningless." Unfortunately, Berset's sentiments seem hollow when multiple US administrations as well as many Council of Europe members have, for the past decade, supported a designated terrorist organization in Syria with weapons, financial aid, and resources because it was convenient. When European states egregiously violate the international law they promote as a guiding ideal, can others trust that it is universal and has meaning?
- … are condemned to repeat it
Thus, can outside observers feel genuine sympathy for Europe when Washington’s conduct over the past 75 years should have warned them to prepare their own path into the future? Following, as he terms it, his "instincts," Trump has openly embraced imperial activities that the US usually pursued in a subdued manner since WWII. Believing that the US was permanently committed to the construction of an international order that could, one day, limit its own power and prerogatives always meant ignoring the US's actual behaviors.
Many historians, such as Livy, strive to explain what drives political and military decisions. Politicians rarely have long-term plans or visions, and successive generations of politicians, even in the same society, are confronted with different conditions. Maybe some Roman Senators truly believed they were granting permanent freedom to the Greeks, similar to how many US politicians supported the effort to preserve the world’s freedom at the Cold War’s advent. Within 50 years, though, circumstances, attitudes, and decisions shifted, and Rome took a different approach.
Can we be so confident that US officials are different from Roman Senators?
[1] Livy, The History of Rome from Its Foundation, Book XXXIII, Section 33. Henry Bettenson, translator.
[2] Also see Chapter 5 of Mary Beard’s SPQR, where she explains the Roman Republic’s style of empire in the subsection titled "An empire of obedience."
[3] See Melvyn Leffler’s A Preponderance of Power, pp. 15-19.
[4] https://www.aa.com.tr/en/analysis/comparing-junctures-in-turkey-us-relations-august-1946-and-october-2019/1663453
[5] https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/trump-orders-us-withdrawal-from-66-international-organizations/3792954
[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/19/opinion/greenland-trump-europe.html
[7] https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v16/d54
*Opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Anadolu.