The international security and financial system built and led by the United States after World War II has weathered the Cold War, regional wars, economic crises, and even a global pandemic. But according to one of President Donald Trump's former advisers -- now one of his most prominent critics -- it may not survive his four-year term.
"This is the end of the international system as we know it," said Fiona Hill, Trump's former Russia adviser and now an expert at the Brookings Institution, in a recent interview with RFE/RL as part of a three-part series called America's Foreign Policy Shifts. "Frankly, it's been crumbling for quite a long time."
"President Trump no longer wants to either pay for this [international order] or support it, even in terms of political leadership, and that goes for domestic institutions that are also related to that projection of US influence and power on the outside," she said.
America's Foreign Policy Shift: A 3-Part Interview Series
This is a three-part series of interviews RFE/RL is conducting with global thinkers offering different perspectives on what we have learned from the first 100 days of Trump's second term. The aim is to provide insight into how the administration of US President Donald Trump is approaching some of the most challenging issues for Europe and the wider region since the end of World War II: Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a heightened confrontation between Russia and the West, and rising tides of disinformation.
The so-called rules-based international order -- Washington's term for the postwar global framework -- rests on principles such as territorial integrity, collective security, human rights, and free trade. Institutions such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the International Criminal Court, of which the United States is not a member, were established to uphold and enforce those values.
But since returning to the White House, Trump says the system is no longer working for the United States and the American worker, pointing in particular to the loss of manufacturing jobs to China and other emerging market countries that he says has hollowed out cities and towns around the country and led to a massive trade deficit.
For all its faults, some experts argue the current US-led international system has ushered in an unprecedented period of global peace and prosperity. If that is to survive in some form, it will be up to Europe and Asia, Hill said.
"This is a moment of truth" for the countries in those regions, including China, she said. "What do they really value? How much do they value these institutions? If they do, by necessity, they're going to have to be the countries that step up to support them."
Hill is a leading scholar on Russia and a biographer of Russian President Vladimir Putin. She has observed the Kremlin leader in international engagements firsthand and accompanied Trump to his 2018 summit in Helsinki with Putin, a meeting crowned by a press conference that Hill later described as "mortifying and humiliating" for the United States.
Hill also testified before Congress during Trump's first impeachment hearing in 2019. She has been a vocal and prominent critic of Trump since leaving government, and the Trump administration revoked Hill's security clearances and access to classified information in March.
In conversation with RFE/RL, Hill said the United States appears to be following the trajectory of Russia under Putin and Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orban as Trump tries to sideline institutions like Congress and the courts that have provided checks and balances to executive power -- a charge leveled by other prominent critics of Trump.
"I never thought that I would see the United States converge with Russia in quite the way that it has. There's quite a lot of convergence, but it's not the direction that people thought it might be after 1989," she said, referring to the democratic revolutions that overthrew authoritarian leaders in Communist Eastern Europe.
While Hill said the grievances over inequality in the United States that helped propel Trump to power twice are real and legitimate, she said most Americans didn't vote for a hyper-personalized presidency and erosion of institutions.
Fortress USA And Ukraine Peace
As Trump pushes a multilayered missile and air defense initiative dubbed the "Golden Dome" and moves to reshore American manufacturing, Hill sees a broader strategic shift: a retreat from global engagement behind a "fortress United States."
Central to that vision is resolving the war in Ukraine as part of a broader deal with nuclear-armed Russia, a great power rival that is also seeking to change the US-led international order. Since returning to office, Trump has made ending the conflict -- now in its fourth year -- a top priority, calling in March for an immediate 30-day cease-fire.
Kyiv has agreed to the US-brokered proposal. But Russian President Vladimir Putin has stalled, his troops maintaining the upper hand grinding forward momentum on the battlefield. The delay, Hill said, is putting Trump in a difficult position.
"He's going to look for someone to blame. He won't want to blame Putin," she said.
Trump, she added, regards only Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping as true peers and has little tolerance for what he sees as disrespect or disinterest from leaders he considers equals.
"It could well be as he gets more and more angry with Putin that he gets more and more interested in lashing out against Ukraine because he doesn't want to appear weak," she said.
That tension was on full display during a February meeting at the White House, where Trump accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of lacking a genuine interest in peace, according to sources briefed on the discussion.
Hill said the war is unlikely to end unless Putin comes to believe further battlefield gains are out of reach. That, she argues, will require sustained Western support -- military, financial, and political—for Ukraine, regardless of US involvement.
In the long term, she said, Ukraine must be integrated into whatever European security architecture emerges after the war. What role the United States will play in that future, however, remains uncertain as Trump continues his policy of strategic retrenchment.
In the meantime, Hill warned, Trump's escalating attacks on global institutions and domestic checks and balances are fraying alliances and eroding the image of Washington on the world stage.
"The United States has lost its credibility globally," she said. "A lot of this is irrevocable. It'll take a very long time for the US to rebuild what it has lost."
The lesson, she added, is stark: "What you build over a century can be dismantled in 100 days."
This is the first in a three-part series on America’s foreign policy shift. Next interview on Friday, May 16: A conversation with Clifford D. May, the founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
