As President Ronald Reagan bid our nation farewell in 1989, he recalled an amusing anecdote from the South China Sea. The USS Midway aircraft carrier had spotted a small, ramshackle boat of Indonesian refugees, and as one of its sailors approached to assist them, he received a joyous greeting: “Hello, American sailor! Hello, freedom man!”
No phrase better encapsulates the essence of American soft power or its paramount importance. Our strength derives not only from our military might, but also from the simple fact that those abroad see us as an exceptional nation worth following, with a political, legal, and economic system worth emulating—a country of freedom men and women. After all, soft power was largely responsible for our victory in the Cold War: deterred by mutually assured destruction, NATO forces could do little against a nuclear-armed Soviet Union. Nevertheless, millions of Central and Eastern Europeans were inspired and galvanized by the promises of the Helsinki Accords, while the reliable reporting of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe successfully challenged Communist Party narratives. Revolutionaries behind the Iron Curtain risked their lives opposing autocracy because they glimpsed a world worth fighting for.
Henry Kissinger explained any stable world order requires a unifying and mutually acceptable concept of legitimacy—not simply a balance of hard power. The classic example stems from the nineteenth-century “Concert of Europe”: seeking to avert a second French Revolution, the continent’s great powers collaborated to uphold monarchic values. This Concert preserved peace for four decades but failed to prevent the Crimean War once its anti-revolutionary consensus frayed. The need for unity is ironically even greater amongst the democracies that the Concert’s members so feared, as their policies are largely dictated by impressionable electorates: voters generally resonate with lofty rhetoric, not cold and abstract raison d’état. Consequently, the United States can best suppress geopolitical upheavals by supplying appealing norms and institutions.
As America’s unipolar moment gives way to an era of renewed great power competition, soft power is once again sorely needed. We are no longer the sole nation advancing claims of primacy and an attractive vision of world order. If America fails to sway other countries to its cause and demonstrate the continued relevance of its ideals, its leadership will inevitably be supplanted by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Unfortunately, the Trump administration has methodically stripped Sino-American competition of all ideological content, dealing our soft power a near-fatal blow. President Trump’s most radical foreign policy decision to date has been to foreground an updated version of America’s “Manifest Destiny,” a justification for American territorial aggrandizement first coined two centuries ago. Expansionist ambitions are entirely divorced from the values that our diplomats have grown accustomed to espousing, as America has not enlarged its borders since acquiring various Pacific islands in 1947. Nevertheless, the president promised that “the United States will once again consider itself a growing nation” in his second inaugural address, before indicating strong interest in incorporating Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, and even the Gaza Strip.
Political scientist Francis Fukuyama and other Foreign Affairs commentators have argued that such an expansionist program has no place in the twenty-first century: territorial conquest is illegitimate within our liberal international order, and Trump’s underlying objectives are far better achieved through peaceful dialogue and diplomatic avenues. Even so, foreign policy thinkers must confront the reality that Donald Trump’s ideas are here to stay. Trump’s new doctrine threatens to shatter long-standing alliances and norms, but it can still be modulated, amended, or at least mitigated. If we fail to reconcile his annexationist approach with palatable principles of international relations and to undergird diplomatic demands with legitimating ideals, it is only a matter of time before our international coalitions crumble and the PRC ascends uncontested.
Where Are You, Freedom Man?
What is the ultimate goal of Sino-American competition? The Biden administration’s professed answer was simple and explicit: the triumph of democracy over autocracy. President Trump, however, has deprioritized Biden’s pro-democracy rhetoric. This is nowhere more apparent than his eagerness to engage with autocrats including Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Hungary’s rule-of-law-defying premier Viktor Orbán. Furthermore, his expressed desire for territorial enlargement has already strained American relations with numerous democratic countries including Denmark, Canada, and Panama. Trump’s 2017 national security strategy explicitly rejected the notion of exporting democracy abroad, affirming that “the American way of life cannot be imposed upon others” and professing faith solely in “outcomes, not ideology.”
Traditionally, American diplomats have also appealed to self-determination, a value that we have championed since Woodrow Wilson published his Fourteen Points at the height of the First World War. Self-determination framed our denunciations of German and Japanese imperialism in World War II, and of Soviet domination thereafter. Until recently, we spoke forcefully in defense of Ukraine and Taiwan’s rights to govern themselves free of foreign coercion or interference. Nevertheless, President Trump has reversed course by blaming Ukraine for the present war, characterizing Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a “dictator,” and demanding $500 billion worth of Ukrainian rare earth metals in exchange for only lackluster security guarantees. Moreover, Trump’s annexationist rhetoric sidelines the historic principle of self-determination entirely. How could he ever condemn Putin’s illegal invasion while advocating a unilateral seizure of the Panama Canal, an action indistinguishable under international law? “We’re going to take it back, or something very powerful is going to happen” is an even more bellicose statement than any Putin dared to pen in his 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.”
Other potential ideological justifications for Sino-American rivalry have similarly suffered. On human rights, America has a weaker platform for criticizing PRC abuses in Tibet and Xinjiang after withdrawing from the United Nations Human Rights Council. Nor can we ground our objections to China’s unfair economic practices upon free trade norms while imposing tariffs against historic friends and foes alike. America could still theoretically build soft power by assisting other nations with their developmental needs and positioning itself as a benevolent sponsor, as it did with the Marshall Plan to counter Soviet influence in 1948. Regrettably, President Trump’s recent freezes on foreign aid and policy leanings render this idea implausible, at least under the current administration.
During the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s, war-weary nationalists employed the very same “America First” slogan that Donald Trump revived, similarly abandoning international projects such as Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations. At first, our leadership was unhindered: the Washington Naval Conference promised concrete disarmament, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact condemned war as an instrument of foreign policy. Nevertheless, the Naval Conference engendered long-term Japanese anxieties which culminated in the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact’s ineffective declarations failed to stall German aggression in Poland or Czechoslovakia. World War II was partly the result of our hubris, and we must now avoid repeating one of history’s worst chapters.
These strategies are more difficult to apply in the context of Gaza, where anti-American sentiment is rife and intractable. Fortunately, another potential avenue for harmonizing empire and self-determination lies with the United Nations Trusteeship Council, an international body that has remained dormant since 1994. The Trusteeship Council was created in the aftermath of the Second World War to oversee former League of Nations mandates and newly-conquered Axis colonies, whose peoples were deemed unprepared for complete self-governance. Each territory was assigned an “administering authority” charged with preserving peace, encouraging respect for human rights, and promoting its political, social, and economic development toward eventual independence. In the interim, the Trusteeship Council reviewed yearly reports, accepted local petitions, and conducted occasional investigative visits, ensuring that trust territories were not mismanaged or annexed outright by their administrators.
Assuming a UN trusteeship agreement for Gaza would render any American administration temporary, but long-term Middle Eastern entanglement would be ill-advised regardless. More importantly, acceding to certain basic safeguards and international law principles would demonstrate that the US is not purely self-interested, and it would assuage concerns regarding the incalculable humanitarian toll that certain Trump proposals—like the mass displacement of all Palestinians, possibly a war crime or crime against humanity—might exact. America’s principled freedom of action would not be significantly constrained by any such commitment: our rivals possess no veto powers in the Trusteeship Council, and our like-minded partners enjoy a numerical majority.
Proposals for a Palestinian trusteeship agreement have been discussed twice in the pages of Foreign Affairs, advanced by former ambassador Martin Indyk in 2003 and by three Canadian statesmen in May 2024. Until recently, these articles have read as mere thought experiments, given the undesirability of assuming such a costly commitment for a profoundly war-torn region, as well as the international community’s overwhelming support for Palestinian statehood (recognized by 146 of 193 UN member states). But Trump’s policies have since overturned this calculus: America has expressed its willingness to intervene, and neighboring Arab countries would almost certainly prefer an international UN arrangement to a unilateral American fait accompli. The US could leverage the uncertainty of the present moment to attain an outcome that was otherwise inconceivable.
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By casting ourselves as the defenders of self-determination—the essence of freedom in the international order—we can remain worthy of the beautiful epithet granted to us by Reagan’s Indonesian refugee four decades ago. Approaching territorial enlargement in a more tactful and patient manner, while adhering to international law and upholding pivotal partnerships, is a very small price to pay for robust and continued leadership. As the South China Sea becomes increasingly turbulent, let us hope that our aircraft carriers will be escorted by enduring soft power and the competitive advantages of ideological appeal.
Consent Over Conquest
Which of the aforementioned values, if any, can be salvaged? Self-determination is perhaps the easiest to reconcile with the Trump administration’s foreign policy, as it prescribes no specific “way of life” and protects our autonomy from any unwanted international commitments. At a time when many developing nations have come to resent America’s focus on democratization, adopting an alternate basis for challenging the PRC is, in fact, strategic. Perhaps most interestingly, revitalizing self-determination could also help to legitimize the president’s expansionist program under international law.
Contrary to popular belief, history indicates that empire and self-determination are compatible. The traditional story of modern nation-states’ genesis goes back to the 1648 Treaties of Westphalia, which were signed after the conclusion of the bloody Thirty Years’ War. Following a war sparked by religious conflicts between Catholics and Protestants within the Holy Roman Empire, the Treaties’ signatories were anxious to establish safeguards for religious freedoms and domestic non-interference: the concept of state sovereignty was thereby born. This standard retelling is entirely mythological, as historian Andreas Osiander demonstrated in a seminal 2001 article. Habsburg imperial governance was weak and decentralized prior to the war, and the overarching framework of the Holy Roman Empire remained intact thereafter: nobles’ newly-acquired diplomatic powers could not overturn “the Oath by which every one is bound to the Emperor,” for example. The Treaties’ signatories were not sovereign (as defined in the “Vattelian” sense of excluding external authority), but they were nonetheless empowered to establish their own internal identities within a nonrestrictive imperial setting.
The Holy Roman Empire was succeeded by Austria-Hungary, which similarly united peoples of diverse ethnicities, languages, and religious beliefs under a single ruler. Its emperor Franz Joseph I enjoyed genuine and widespread support until his realm’s dissolution became inevitable during the First World War. Although Hungarian nationalists revolted against the Habsburg government in 1848, they quickly encountered armed opposition from Croat, Serb, and Romanian minorities who remained deeply loyal to the empire. These groups were motivated largely by fear of Hungarian or Russian domination: enlightened Austria presented a bulwark against Hungarian policies of cultural assimilation or the “immense and indescribable disaster” of a universal Russian monarchy (per Czech politician František Palacký). One can surmise that empire may be perceived as legitimate—and even desirable—if it shields its subjects from even greater impositions upon their autonomy.
Modern-day referenda further indicate that economic incentives can also persuade dependent peoples to maintain imperial, quasi-imperial, or federal ties. Scotland voted for continued union with Britain in 2014 for much the same reason that Greenland remains part of Denmark to this day: London and Copenhagen provide these regions with indispensable subsidies and prosperity. Elsewhere, the nations of the Eurozone willingly sacrifice their sovereign monetary policies and supreme regulatory authority in exchange for freer and more stable trade relations.
Applying these lessons to Greenland, President Trump’s options become clear. He could appeal to locals’ interests by courting them with assurances of greater autonomy, self-governance, and security, or by promising greater economic support and flourishing than Denmark is capable of providing. Notably absent from this enumeration are current administration strategies of gratuitous military threats and intimidation. Consent, not conquest, is necessary to legitimize empire, and to differentiate the US’s desired expansion from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Hitler’s entry into Czechoslovakia, or the PRC’s intended annexation of Taiwan
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