Trump, or the arrival of aggressive conservatism in international relations
‘I wonder if we are not entering a new era, perhaps for several decades, where the dominant ideology will be right-wing, conservative populism.’
Pubblicato il 24 ottobre 2025 | Politica Internazionale
When the CNN journalist and geopolitical specialist Fareed Zakaria said this to members of the French American Foundation at the start of 2025, Donald Trump had just been sworn in as President of the USA and was already embarking on what could be described as an ultraliberal and nationalist policy.
Indeed, President Trump has been quick to put in place some of the measures he promised during his campaign, between a unilateral and nationalist foreign policy, the dismantling of his public services and the radicalization of his power.
Unilateralism and exacerbated nationalism in the USA did not wait for Donald Trump to emerge, George W. Bush was already one of its advocates in the 2000s, but Trump's foreign policy seems far more aggressive than previous ones.
In his view, Make America Great Again means first and foremost relieving America of its ‘dead weight’, the ‘ball and chain’ that is bogging the country down in debt, namely public services and immigration, the historical targets of ultraliberal and conservative political thinking.
The spinous question of immigration
In his quest for revenge, Mr. Trump has also used his new power to remove the close protection of several of his aides, including four of those involved in the operations against Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, which led to his assassination in 2020, and Dr Fauci, the scientist in charge of the Covid 19 policy.
Unlike his policy of revenge or his dismantling of public services, immigration is a more complicated problem for Donald Trump to solve.
The man who promised to prevent his allies from ‘picking the pockets’ of the United States has made the deportation of illegal immigrants one of the hobbyhorses of his mandate.
The strategy is simple: play on US hegemony in America to force South American countries to bring all their illegal immigrants to the United States.
Even though the vast majority of Latino immigrants are Mexicans (around 4 million illegal immigrants), Trump has gone to great lengths to put pressure on the entire continent, announcing the application of customs duties of 25% on all Colombian and Mexican exports to the USA in March, as well as other financial sanctions.
Gustavo Petro, the Colombian president, suffering from his unpopularity, is forced to accept these repatriations, having refused an initial repatriation of two military aircraft before D. Trump put pressure on the Colombian economy.
Donald Trump's idea is to make an impact throughout South America with these repatriations. Colombia has only 190,000 illegal immigrants in the United States, far fewer than the 4 million illegal Mexicans on American soil.
For her part, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum refuses forced repatriation and pledges to maintain the country's stability despite these measures.
In the supposed interests of his country, Trump is therefore prepared to put considerable pressure on the political stability of his allies, even if it means provoking diplomatic crises that will take much longer to resolve than his term of office.
However, Latin American countries are not the only ones to face the threat of a major increase in customs duties. Trump also imposed ‘reciprocal’ tariffs on all major US trading partners, including China and Canada, before suspending most of them for 3 months, just a few hours later. For China however, the tariffs were raised to a whopping 145% and Trump’s auto-tariffs imposed on Canada remain in place.
Canada is alleged to be behind the proliferation of fentanyl on American soil.
Canada's leaders were quick to respond to Trump's threat, threatening in turn to impose a 100% tax on Tesla vehicles and on wine, beer and other spirits.
The situation of a potential diplomatic crisis with Canada is all the more contradictory for the Americans because Donald Trump himself is the source of it. In 2020, Trump renegotiated the free trade agreement signed by Bill Clinton and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in the 1990s, which considerably widened the US trade deficit from 25 billion dollars in 2019 to 61 billion in 2024, while the deficit with Mexico over the same period rose from 99 to 170 billion dollars.
For China, this threat of sanctions is part of Trump's aggressive policy, as he intends to remain the world's leading power in the face of the ‘workshop of the world’.
American trade deficits with China are seen as too large to justify this increase in customs duties on China.
China's response to Trump's tariffs was to raise tariffs on U.S. goods from 84% to 125%. At a press conference, He Yadong, Chinese spokesman for the Ministry of Commerce, called on the USA ‘not to brandish the stick of customs duties at every turn, using them everywhere as a tool of coercion’.
Beijing strongly condemns Donald Trump's aggressive strategy, and calls on the US President to deal with his trading partners ‘on an equal footing’.
But this aggressive strategy is not only evident in Trump's domestic policy, it is also evident in his foreign policy, where he makes shocking remarks and shows exaggerated contempt for the complexity of the issues at hand.
Trump’s aggressive foreign policy
Trump's foreign diplomacy: child's play for the ‘genius’?
Over and above his open contempt for the world's complex geopolitics, Donald Trump has set himself up as a great diplomat, capable of resolving any conflict that might be detrimental to good American business.
“I am a calm genius”, he said during his first term, then claimed that the conflict in Ukraine would be resolved in 24 hours during his 2024 campaign before extending his mission to ‘a hundred days’.
The White House has had a tumultuous history with Ukraine in the administration’s first 100 days. Donald Trump started his by term by showering the Ukrainian president with shocking remarks, particularly about the cause of the war itself, claiming that Ukraine “should never have started the war”, making Volodymyr Zelensky look like the dictator who denied the other country any political autonomy and went beyond any international legal basis to invade his neighbor.
The Ukrainian President's visit to the White House on 28 February confirmed President Trump’s contempt for the fate of Ukraine, with Donald Trump and his Vice-President J.D. Vance portraying this diplomatic meeting as a form of ‘public humiliation’ of Volodymyr Zelensky.
As with his Mexican, Colombian, Canadian and European counterparts, Donald Trump is playing hardball with Ukraine to put an end to the conflict.
According to the Reuters press agency, President Trump threatened to break off the agreement with Zelensky on Ukrainian army access to the Starlink Internet network, owned by Elon Musk, if he did not accept the new agreement on minerals. This information was later denied by Elon Musk.
European leaders have since rallied behind Zelensky and tried to mend ties between the White House and Ukraine. On the 26th of April, President Trump and President Zelensky met again in the Vatican, which may have proved to have been a more fruitful meeting for President Zelensky, since Donald Trump has since spoken more critically of President Putin.
On the 1st of May, Ukraine and the United States signed a mineral deal that will ensure continued military support from the United States in exchange for Ukrainian minerals and fund investment in Ukraine’s reconstruction, which is certainly a major step in improving Ukraine and US relations.
Israel
In the case of Israel, American support is unconditional. Trump wants to increase arms deliveries, particularly of bombs weighing close to 1,000 kilos, and describes the Gaza Strip as a ‘demolition site’, ready to turn it into a new ‘Riviera of the Middle East’: ‘We're talking about a million and a half people and we're just cleaning this whole thing up’, he said at the beginning of the year.
The American objective is to get the Arab states of the Middle East, which are still reluctant, to recognize the State of Israel. To achieve this, Trump is adopting a strategy similar to those
used in the world of commerce, which is to flatter his customers in order to get them to accept a product that they would never have taken otherwise.
Donald Trump then undertakes to call for the ‘transfer’ of Gaza residents to Jordan and Egypt, to support a potential annexation of the West Bank, as the American ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has stated, or to withdraw the sanctions taken under Biden against Israeli settlers guilty of violence in the occupied territories.
This strategy, which consists of bolstering the Israeli ultra-right and its annexationist ambitions through ultimately non-priority measures, then leads Israel to make major concessions on Gaza. After the very tense exchange with President Zelensky, which demonstrated Donald Trump's desire to make himself indispensable to his allies in order to push through American interests.
Among other things, Trump has put pressure on the Arab states and Israel to continue the agreement reached in January by Biden on extending the release of all hostages, and is pushing for the departure of Israeli troops from Gaza.
While the strategy may lead to an end to the conflict that was not at all envisaged before he took office, the means used to achieve it are an obstacle to any consideration of international law and human values, with Trump using an overabundance of information and problematic, even off-the-cuff, language to succeed.
A whole raft of questions therefore emerges in the wake of these political and diplomatic coups de force. What will be the repercussions of such radicalism within the leading Western power? What does this say about the current state of our democracies?
On his return from the Davos economic forum, Fareed Zakaria, mentioned at the start of this article, noted at a press conference of the French American Foundation that we are facing a “return to the politics of the great powers of the 19th century”.
Donald Trump indirectly justifies the imperialist policies pursued around the world, playing on the ‘prevention’ of a certain threat, and using American coercive power with its allies to push through its international measures.
For example, Sergei Lavrov, Russia's Minister of Foreign Affairs, fully understands American concerns and draws a parallel with the situation in Ukraine, thereby justifying a ‘pre-emptive war’.
So what is stopping Russia from considering an invasion of Finland on the same grounds of pre-emptive war? The Finnish President himself told Le Figaro: "We are no longer at peace, but in a state of “non-peace”, and has positioned armed troops on the country's eastern border.
The promotion of these aggressive trade strategies within international relations also represents a threat to the institutions that organize international trade.
Finally, are the advent of these Trumpist policies not the signal of a more serious situation for the Americans? One that shows that they have simply lost control of their hegemony and that the country is now trying by all means to regain it.
The refusal to provide financial assistance to Mikhail Gorbachev's USSR at the end of the Cold War, the huge American propaganda campaign during the Gulf Wars of 1990-1991 and in Afghanistan in 2003 already showed the victorious face of the USA, telling the whole world: ‘There can only be one vision of the world, ours’.
International relations theorists were also moving in this direction. Francis Fukuyama's ‘The End of History’ illustrates the dominance of the liberal democratic model, led by the United States.
But the end of the USSR also showed that a new world order built on the foundations of collective security and cooperation between all states was nothing but an illusion. The attack of 11 September 2001 sent a message to international relations: hegemony never lasts, and we may be witnessing the collapse of a Western international model corrupted by ultra-liberalism and radical nationalism.
President Donald J. Trump participates in a bilateral meeting with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2019, at the InterContinental New York Barclay in New York City. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
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Di Luan Pigeon, August Salicath, Max Haymann