This article is taken from the March 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Imprudent King is historian Geoffrey Parker’s title for his biography of the Habsburg ruler and warlord, Spanish King Philip II. Philip’s disregard for limits left his empire loaded with debt and crises on multiple fronts. It is a decent tag for President Donald Trump.
One year into his second term, the restoration of greatness seems far off. In a state founded as a constitutional republic, Trump’s authoritarian tendency marks the highest stage so far of the imperial presidency. His predecessors and an often-supine Congress bequeathed him expansive powers comparable to monarchs. Trump’s dictatorial personality intersects with a lopsided political order, long in the making.
As for the “imprudent” part, Donald Trump has achieved the opposite of what he promised. He has stretched rather than concentrated American power. He has multiplied antagonisms and aggravated problems rather than creating peace through strength. He has increased, not calmed, domestic disorder.
At least Philip II had a cause. As a devout ruler he thought he was acting on God’s behalf by defending the Roman Catholic faith. By contrast, MAGA traffics on ethno-nationalist resentment, but is ultimately shallow and incoherent. It thrives on chaos, delights in wielding power for its own sake, and in foreign policy it puts vacuous slogans (“peace through strength!”) above substantive means-ends calculation.
The problem with “peace through strength” is that no power can be strong everywhere. Therefore, even great wealth and military capability is never enough, and no substitute for diplomacy. The United States cannot hope to overpower everybody at once. Ronald Reagan also came to office with that slogan, only to end up negotiating arms control agreements with Moscow, withdrawing from Lebanon, and maintaining a triangulating cooperation with China to focus anti-Soviet containment efforts.
As the historian and official A. Wess Mitchell argues in his important new work, Great Power Diplomacy, prudent rulers at times negotiate via compromise in order to rearrange power in space and time — building coalitions, whilst constraining, deflecting or postponing clashes in some theatres — in order to focus the weight of their strength where it is most needed, and avoid trials of strength that they cannot meet.
Before Trump entered the White House for his second term, some smart and conscientious people believed that, for all his foibles, his presidency would serve as a vehicle for a more focused, disciplined, prioritised Realpolitik. Trump, they hoped, would break decisively from a global hegemony that sapped American power.
He would bring attention and resources to bear in Northeast Asia, the primary theatre that hosts its primary rivalry, China, the largest, wealthiest peer competitor since Britain. Europe, he would make a secondary theatre. He would avoid embroilment in the wasteful wars and intrigues of the Greater Middle East. He would also achieve a major burden shift to allies whilst at home, overseeing an industrial renaissance of sorts.
For those who wanted a return of realism in its proper sense, a respect for power and its proper husbanding and use in an unforgiving world of finiteness and limits, Trump turned out to be the wrong horse.
But whilst Trump has some history in voicing sympathy with these priorities, on the whole he represents something altogether more unmeasured, wilful and reckless, a demand for domination but without (or with less) commitment, a drive to humiliate and exploit even loyal allies, and at the same time an instability and an inconstancy around hard policy choices. There are multiple factions in and around Trump’s court. A number of them advance a vision of America not as a more strategically disciplined power, but as a colossus untamed.
In just one year, Trump has imposed punitive tariffs even on erstwhile cooperative states. He has openly coveted Canada. He has revived not the Monroe Doctrine, which his predecessors would also uphold to exclude rivals from the Western Hemisphere, but a crude version of the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary, claiming licence to do as America pleases to its neighbours. In this case, he has behaved like a gangster regardless, kidnapping Venezuela’s president and his wife. Promising to reap a petro harvest, it turns out that Washington inherits a difficult job, co-superintending a profoundly troubled country whose oil industry is very difficult to revive.
He has lurched to and fro between Russia and Ukraine in rolling diplomacy that has not brought the war anywhere near to a settlement. The President leans to whatever the last person said to him on the matter. He has demanded ownership of Greenland, part of a sovereign Denmark’s territory, one of America’s most loyal allies in our time. A superpower and security provider whose reliability was already in doubt now looks like a predator, something that could reduce a rich region’s cooperation down the track. None of this was needed.
Trump’s attack on Iran reportedly landed only limited damage on its nuclear program, contrary to his boasts of obliteration. Neither is Israel as triumphant as Trump claimed. Its stocks of air defence systems are still depleted. Now, Trump boasts of a vast armada heading towards Iran to threaten fresh attacks, demanding a deal. The overall pattern is not an “imperial retreat” or a “spheres of influence” carve-up. It is an extravagant riot.
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None of these issues are easy, of course. Still, that is all the more reason why Washington needs a laser-like focus on what must be addressed and what can be achieved. Instead, Trump accumulates an ever-increasing problem and crisis load in a country that has limited bandwidth (as the Biden era demonstrated in getting almost overwhelmed by Gaza, Ukraine and the US border). All this strain Trump exacerbates with under-trained ICE paramilitaries, heightening domestic strife as a further distraction and demand on the state.
The net results, thus far, are inauspicious. For a presidency that proudly claims it is fortifying America’s dominance of its own sphere, it has repelled Canada into China’s arms. To have a Beijing client on America’s northern border is a large negative. India, an important geopolitical counterweight whose orientation shapes the balance of power in Eurasia, now tilts towards Moscow and China, who are in an ever-tighter partnership. On that trajectory, having all three continental-sized powers of that region in the adversary column is a weighty reversal.
As for Europe, the US could have shifted the security burden in a more cool-headed, negotiated manner, applying coercion but being open to hard-nosed bargaining. Instead, it has needlessly signalled predatory intent by demanding Greenland, an Arctic base it could have surged forces into without altering its current status; the President has ignorantly dismissed NATO states’ sacrifices in Afghanistan; and corrupted a necessary dialogue about the distribution of labour by using Europe to relitigate a culture war about civilisation, Islam and decadence.
The culture war confrontation amounts to little more than the deliberate goading of vacuous MAGA showbiz. Denmark, the latest target, is one of the strictest border enforcers, whilst the same Trump court cheerfully embraces Gulf monarchies with their direct ties to Salafi-jihadist militants.
With this unforced behaviour, Trump incentivises hedging and counterbalancing that hurts America’s overall position. A less cooperative Europe in future may be less forthcoming with base access, with signals intelligence or “backfill” forces in the Middle East during a crisis elsewhere.
As it happens, Keir Starmer’s panicked flight to Beijing was reactive and ill-advised. He returned with no memorandum of understanding, few concrete benefits, in return for a signal of rushed supplication. But it also reflects Trump’s imprudence. China is a state that seizes disputed territory in the South China Sea, suppresses democracy in Hong Kong, threatens Taiwan and helps arm Russia in Ukraine. Yet in short order, in the eyes of nervous allies, partners and neutrals, Trump’s threatening and hostile words and deeds make Xi Jinping’s worse regime look like a force for stability and rectitude.
There is no sign that Trump’s pattern of behaviour abroad will change. Even if it does, neither this president nor his successors can abolish his example. It remains for those dependent on Washington to anchor their calculations in the world as it is, not as they’d prefer it to be.
