Soft power is out. Hard power is in. Since returning to the White House, President Trump has demonstrated that he prefers to bludgeon, not bargain, his way to foreign policy goals.
With counterparts from Asia, the Middle East and North and South America, Mr. Trump has shown a willingness to use American power in a way that most of his modern predecessors have not. His favorite blunt instrument is not military force but economic coercion, like the tariffs he ordered on Saturday on goods from Canada, Mexico and China.
The tariffs, set to take effect Tuesday, amount to a declaration of economic war against America’s three largest trading partners, which have threatened to retaliate in a tit for tat that could escalate beyond any such conflict in generations. Mr. Trump’s decision to follow through on his tariff threat raises the stakes in his hard-edged America First approach to the rest of the world, with potentially profound consequences.
If he makes the targeted countries back down quickly in response to his demand to do more to stop drug trafficking, Mr. Trump will take it as a validation of his strategy. If not, and the tariffs take force and remain in place for a prolonged period, American consumers could pay a price through higher costs on many goods.
Even as he opts for strong-arm tactics, Mr. Trump is dispensing with other traditional tools of American foreign policy. He has suspended much of the international aid provided by the United States and may try to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, whose website went offline on Saturday. Such aid, while a tiny fraction of the overall federal budget, has for generations been seen as a way to build good will and influence around the world.
“President Trump’s confrontational style has resulted in foreign policy gains and can result in more — provided he is careful about the targets of his pressure and the specific implied or actual threats,” said Evelyn N. Farkas, executive director of the McCain Institute at Arizona State University and a former Pentagon official.
The objective, she said, “should be to pressure China and Russia,” not “bullying our allies and partners” or seeking to claim the territory of other countries.
“The cost of taking any punitive actions against our allies and partners,” she added, “will likely be shared by U.S. citizens and interests, and would thereby erode U.S. power and influence.”
A brief flare-up with Colombia a week ago demonstrated just how quickly Mr. Trump is ready to climb the escalatory ladder. The dispute was the kind of minor wrinkle usually handled by diplomats: Colombia refused to accept U.S. military flights of deported migrants unless they were treated with more “dignity.”
Even though Colombia has been an important U.S. ally, Mr. Trump did not bother with traditional diplomacy and went instantly to his version of DEFCON 1 by threatening a trade war. It worked. Colombia backed down.
Similarly, Mr. Trump’s warning even before his inauguration that “all hell will break out” in the Middle East if Israel and Hamas did not reach a cease-fire agreement in Gaza that would free hostages helped push negotiators across the finish line.
“One thing we’re going to be demanding is, we’re going to be demanding respect from other nations,” Mr. Trump declared via a teleconference with the global financial and political titans attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a few days after taking office.
His has relished his early victories and warned other nations to pay attention. “We may have tough talk from others, but it’s not going to mean anything,” Mr. Trump said a few days after forcing Colombia to back down on accepting migrants. “They’re going to all take them back,” he continued, then added with tough-guy bravado, “and they’re going to like it, too.”
The quick turnaround with Colombia cheered Republicans who argued that President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had been perceived as weak, undercutting American ability to assert its national interests on the world stage.
“This sends a clear message to all the leaders: Don’t mess with the United States right now, that we have a new sheriff in charge,” Senator Roger Marshall, Republican of Kansas, said on Fox Business after the Colombia face-off.
Mr. Trump sought to promote that idea, posting an illustration of himself in a gangster-like image wearing a pinstripe suit and fedora hat with “FAFO” written on a sign next to him. (F.A.F.O. stands for “Fool Around, Find Out,” except the first word is actually a cruder four-letter term.)
But veterans of foreign affairs and international trade said that quick and easy wins may do long-term damage. By basing relations with other countries on brute economic force and naked self-interest rather than shared values and mutual goals, they said, Mr. Trump may push some away from the U.S. orbit and toward the likes of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia or President Xi Jinping of China.
“Our allies struggle to differentiate Trump from Putin or Xi,” said Daniel M. Price, a managing director at Rock Creek Global Advisors and a former trade adviser to President George W. Bush. “They feel not like allies but like vassals. U.S. coercion and bellicosity create incentives for increased alignment with, or at least accommodation, of our geopolitical rivals.”
For the most part, Mr. Trump seems inclined to use economic power rather than military force to achieve his aims. During his campaign last year, he boasted of not having started any wars while he was president and talked in his Inaugural Address of the importance of avoiding them.
But as he raises the temperature on Denmark to cede Greenland to the United States or on Panama to give back the Panama Canal, Mr. Trump pointedly did not disavow using force when asked by reporters. Asked this past week by his former colleagues on Fox News whether Mr. Trump would use military force against drug cartels in Mexico, Pete Hegseth, the newly sworn-in defense secretary, said “all options will be on the table.”
Mr. Trump has used threats so far to leverage concessions, but the tariffs ordered this weekend on Canada, Mexico and China may test how far he is willing to go and how much pain he is willing to absorb to get his way.
“At some point, to keep those threats credible, he will need to kill a chicken to scare the monkeys — take down an enemy or a recalcitrant ally in order to frighten others that he is serious,” said Mark Dubowitz, the chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focused on strengthening national security.
“He’s counting on the hope that no one wants to be that first chicken,” Mr. Dubowitz added. “But at some point, someone will challenge him. The monkeys are watching.”
Moreover, there are some nations that are not likely to be at all swayed by tariff threats. Looking for a way to keep his promise to end the war in Ukraine, Mr. Trump has vowed to impose sanctions and tariffs on Russia if it does not come to the negotiating table. But U.S.-Russian trade has already fallen by 90 percent since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The United States now imports less than $3 billion a year in Russian goods, leaving almost nothing to apply tariffs to.
Hard power has long been an instrument of influence for American presidents, going back to the days of gunboat diplomacy through more than two decades of war after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But the United States has also employed what is called soft power, a term and concept popularized in the 1990s by Joseph S. Nye Jr., former dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who served in President Bill Clinton’s administration.
Soft power is noncoercive and includes foreign aid to fight disease and poverty while encouraging development, which beyond altruism has been viewed as beneficial to the United States. Among other things, experts say, it can discourage illegal immigration to the United States — a Trump priority — by helping improve living conditions in other parts of the world.
Soft power also encompasses products as diverse Hollywood movies and denim jeans that fuel America’s popularity around the world and thus its influence. The United States could sometimes get what it wanted, the theory went, because other countries aspired to be like the United States or to be its friend.
“Trump does not understand soft power — the ability to get what you want by using attraction rather than coercion or payment,” Mr. Nye said last week. “In the short term, hard power usually trumps soft power, but the long-run effects may be the opposite.”
“And even in the short run,” he added, “while you may have to use hard power, if you also have soft power, you can economize on the costs of sticks and carrots. Trump is squandering this resource. It may work in the short run, but will cost the U.S. in the long term.”
To Mr. Trump, though, the old ways did not work. Rather than the key to American dominance of the world, all the quiet diplomacy over the course of generations in his view just led to the country being shafted by friends and foes alike. In his America First school of thought, threats and toughness are the best way to handle a world that wants to take advantage of the United States. And if the rest of the world does not like it, Mr. Trump has made clear he does not really care.
