America built the global order. Now it's tearing it down

Ian Bremmer, President of Eurasia Group
    
2026 is a tipping point year. The biggest source of global instability won’t be China, Russia, Iran, or the ~60 conflicts burning across the planet – the most since World War II. It will be the United States. That’s the throughline of Eurasia Group’s Top Risks 2026 report: the world’s most powerful country, the same one that built and led the postwar global order, is now itself actively unwinding it, led by a president more committed to and more capable of reshaping America’s role in the world than any in modern history.

Last weekend offered a preview. After months of escalating pressure – sanctions, a massive naval deployment, a full oil blockade – US special forces captured Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro in Caracas and flew him to New York City to face criminal charges. A dictator removed and brought to justice with no American casualties, it was President Donald Trump’s cleanest military win on the global stage.

Trump has already branded his approach to the Western Hemisphere the “Donroe Doctrine.” It’s his version of President James Monroe's 19th-century assertion of American primacy in the Americas – except where Monroe warned European powers to stay out of America’s neighborhood, Trump is using military pressure, economic coercion, and personal score-settling to bend the region to his will. And he’s just getting started.

“America First” isolationism, this is not. The United States is simultaneously growing more, not less, entangled with Israel and Gulf states. Trump’s willingness to strike Iran last year and meddle in European politics doesn’t exactly scream retrenchment. The “spheres of influence” frame doesn’t fit either. Trump isn’t carving up the world with rival powers, each staying in their lane. Washington just sent Taiwan its largest-ever arms package, and the administration’s Indo-Pacific posture does not evince a desire to cede Asia to China.

Trump’s foreign policy doesn’t run on traditional axes – allies versus adversaries, democracies versus autocracies, strategic competition versus cooperation. It runs on a simpler calculus: Can you hit back hard enough to hurt him? If the answer is no, and you have something he wants, you’re a target. If it’s yes, he’ll cut a deal.

Trump wanted Maduro gone, and there was nothing Maduro could do to stop him. He had no allies willing to act, no military capable of retaliating, no leverage over anything Trump cared about. So he was removed. Never mind that Venezuela’s entire regime structure remains intact, and any transition to a stable democratic government will be messy, contested, and largely Venezuela’s to manage (or mismanage).

Trump is personally content with Venezuela continuing to be run by the same repressive regime, as long as it agrees to do his bidding (indeed, he chose this arrangement over an opposition-led government). The threat of the “or else” appears to be working already, with Trump announcing that Venezuela’s new authorities will hand over 30-50 million barrels of oil to the United States, with the proceeds – his words – “controlled by me, as President.” Continued success in Venezuela, however narrowly defined, will embolden the president to double down on this approach and push further – whether in Cuba, Colombia, Nicaragua, Mexico, or Greenland.

On the other end of the spectrum is China. When Trump escalated tariffs last year, Beijing retaliated with export restrictions on rare earths and critical minerals – essential ingredients for a broad range of 21st-century consumer and military products. The vulnerability exposed, Trump was forced to back down. Now he’s intent on keeping the détente and securing a deal at all costs.

This is the law of the jungle, not grand strategy: unilateral power exercised wherever Trump thinks he can get away with it, uncoupled from the norms, bureaucratic processes, alliance structures, and multilateral institutions that once gave it legitimacy. As constraints tighten elsewhere – voters angry about affordability, midterm losses looming, trade leverage shrinking – and his urgency to cement his legacy sharpens, the president’s willingness to take risks on the security side, where he remains largely unconstrained, will grow. The Western Hemisphere just so happens to be an especially prey-rich habitat, where the United States has asymmetric leverage no one can counter and Trump can score easy wins with minimal pushback and costs. But America’s immediate neighborhood is not the limit of Trump’s approach.

If it wasn’t already clear, the administration’s threats to Greenland clarify that Europe is now part of America’s target set. The UK, France, and Germany, the continent’s three largest economies, all enter the year with weak, unpopular governments besieged by populists, Russia at their doorstep, and an American administration openly backing the far right that would further fragment the continent. Unless Europeans find ways to gain leverage and credibly impose costs Trump cares about – and soon – they will face the same squeeze he’s applying across the hemisphere.

For most countries, responding to an unpredictable, unreliable, and dangerous United States is now an urgent geopolitical endeavor. Some will fail; Europe may be too late to adapt. Some will succeed; China is already in a stronger position, content to let its chief rival undermine itself and win by default. Xi Jinping can afford to play the long game. He will be in power long after Trump’s term ends in 2029.

The damage to American power itself will persist past this administration. Alliances, partnerships, and credibility aren’t just nice to have – they are force multipliers, giving Washington leverage that raw military and economic power alone couldn’t have sustained. Trump is burning through that inheritance, treating it as constraint rather than asset, governing as though American power operates outside of time and he can reshape the world by force without lasting consequence. But the alliances he's shredding won't snap back when the next president takes office. The credibility takes a generation to rebuild – if it can be rebuilt at all.

So yes, 2026 is a tipping point year. Not because we’ll know how this ends, but because we’ll start to see what happens when the country that wrote the rules decides it no longer wants to play by them.