Chaos as Doctrine: How Trump Is Dismantling the World He Inherited

Is Washington building a new world, or simply burning down the old one? This is the question that now haunts every state leader, multilateral secretariat, and strategic planning cell from Brussels to Beijing. For eight decades, the international system rested on an uneasy but functioning bargain—the US backed rules-based order—in exchange for legitimacy and leadership. That bargain is now over. What has replaced it is not a rival architecture but an absence of order altogether: a deliberate, almost theatrical, embrace of disorder as a policy instrument. The past eighteen months, from the US withdrawal from dozens of international bodies to the war it prosecuted against Iran, suggests that chaos is no longer an unfortunate by-product of US power. It is the doctrine itself.

Within the first weeks of the year, the administration announced the withdrawal from sixty-six international organizations, including the World Health Organization and the Paris climate framework. The US Agency for International Development was shuttered outright, and funding to numerous United Nations agencies was slashed. Trade policy, once governed by negotiated rules, was explicitly subordinated to a logic of coercive bargaining, with tariffs deployed as instruments of political leverage rather than economic strategy. It is the systematic dismantling of the very scaffolding that allowed smaller and middle powers to operate with a measure of predictability. Trump’s foreign policy in 2025 alone was disruptive enough; analysts described it as having injected a historic degree of uncertainty into the international system before the year was even half over.

Why does this matter beyond the symbolism of exit? Because predictability is the currency of order—not power alone. A system in which one of the strongest actors treats institutions as disposable is a system in which every other actor must now hedge, arm, and improvise. Uncertainty has become the most successfully exported US product of this decade.

The old, deeply unequal order had its own injustices, and a more genuinely multipolar world could be a more just one. Yet justice built on the ruins of institutional collapse is not guaranteed; it must be constructed, deliberately, by those states and institutions still willing to invest in rules rather than rubble. The Munich report itself put the choice starkly: passivity is not a neutral position, and those who merely stand by risk finding themselves, in due course, at the mercy of great-power politics rather than participants in shaping it. The lesson of the Trump era is therefore not that order is unnecessary, but that order does not defend itself. It must be rebuilt, consciously and collectively, by precisely those emerging powers now watching the demolition from the side-lines. The wrecking ball has already swung. What remains to be decided—by Moscow, Beijing, and every capital debating its place in this unsettled century—is what, if anything, will be built upon the rubble.

Is Washington building a new world, or simply burning down the old one? This is the question that now haunts every state leader, multilateral secretariat, and strategic planning cell from Brussels to Beijing. For eight decades, the international system rested on an uneasy but functioning bargain—the US backed rules-based order—in exchange for legitimacy and leadership. That bargain is now over. What has replaced it is not a rival architecture but an absence of order altogether: a deliberate, almost theatrical, embrace of disorder as a policy instrument. The past eighteen months, from the US withdrawal from dozens of international bodies to the war it prosecuted against Iran, suggests that chaos is no longer an unfortunate by-product of US power. It is the doctrine itself.

Scholars of history would recognize the pattern even if they are startled by its hustle. Fareed Zakaria has argued that eras of rapid globalization and technological change tend to generate an equally forceful backlash against the elites and institutions seen to have engineered them. What distinguishes 2026 is that this backlash is no longer confined to angry electorates; it has been absorbed into the machinery of the very state that once anchored the global order under attack. The question, then, is not whether disruption was coming. It plainly was, and it had been building for two decades. The question is whether what follows will be rebuilt through negotiation or simply seized through improvisation by whichever power moves fastest.

Natalia Burlinova:
U.S. Soft Power: The End of an Era

The Wrecking-Ball Presidency

Call it what its own authors call it: the Munich Security Report 2026, pointedly titled “Under Destruction,” concluded that the world has entered an era of “wrecking-ball politics,” in which sweeping demolition has replaced careful reform as the default mode of statecraft. The report did not hedge about who leads this demolition. More than eighty years after the US began constructing the post-1945 order, it argued, that same country’s president has become one of its most conspicuous “demolition men.” This is not a partisan verdict from a marginal think tank; it is the consensus judgment of the trans-Atlantic security establishment that the order itself was built to serve.

Within the first weeks of the year, the administration announced the withdrawal from sixty-six international organizations, including the World Health Organization and the Paris climate framework. The US Agency for International Development was shuttered outright, and funding to numerous United Nations agencies was slashed. Trade policy, once governed by negotiated rules, was explicitly subordinated to a logic of coercive bargaining, with tariffs deployed as instruments of political leverage rather than economic strategy. It is the systematic dismantling of the very scaffolding that allowed smaller and middle powers to operate with a measure of predictability. Trump’s foreign policy in 2025 alone was disruptive enough; analysts described it as having injected a historic degree of uncertainty into the international system before the year was even half over.

Why does this matter beyond the symbolism of exit? Because predictability is the currency of order—not power alone. A system in which one of the strongest actors treats institutions as disposable is a system in which every other actor must now hedge, arm, and improvise. Uncertainty has become the most successfully exported US product of this decade.

Iran: Chaos as Case Study

If any single episode captures chaos as method rather than accident, it is the war the US and Israel launched against Iran. On 28 February 2026, US and Israeli forces struck Iranian nuclear and military sites in an operation aimed at regime change; the strikes killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. What followed was not the swift, contained victory that precision-strike doctrine promises. Iran retaliated against US bases, closed the Strait of Hormuz, and drew Lebanon and Hezbollah into a widening regional war, disrupting a corridor through which a substantial share of the world’s seaborne oil trade passes. Fuel shortages rippled across Asia; global markets absorbed the shock of a war few had authorized through any recognizable deliberative process.

Dmitriy Trenin:
Trump’s Iran Truce Marks a Defeat for American Power

More than five weeks of fighting later, a ceasefire was brokered not by Washington’s traditional allies but by Pakistan. It has proven fragile ever since, with both sides trading violation accusations and the underlying disputes over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, its proxy networks, and Lebanon’s status left entirely unresolved. Military analysts have noted an irony the administration did not anticipate: Iran proved considerably more resilient than expected, while the closure of Hormuz demonstrated that even a badly weakened adversary can impose disproportionate costs on global commerce. Legal scholars, meanwhile, continue to dispute whether the war was authorized under the US domestic law at all, a debate the administration has waved away by pointing to precedents of unilateral presidential action rather than by seeking congressional sanction.

The Iran war is instructive precisely because it was not fought to restore a status quo or defend an ally from invasion. It was fought as an assertion of will, an experiment in coercive maximalism, with victory defined less by a negotiated settlement than by the humiliation of an adversary. That the result has been a smoldering, unresolved conflagration rather than a decisive peace should trouble anyone still inclined to treat US military chaos as strategically purposeful. As one veteran Middle East analyst observed, the metrics that matter now are not the daily fluctuations of oil prices or shipping lanes, but the far more consequential question of what kind of regional order, if any, survives the rubble.

Institutions Hollowed from Within

Destruction abroad has been matched by defunding at home of the machinery that once projected US soft power. The expanded “global gag rule,” announced in January 2026, now governs nearly forty billion dollars in non-military foreign assistance, conditioning aid on ideological compliance rather than developmental need. Analysts have noted that the president regards the entire concept of an international order as an abstraction unworthy of serious defense, a “cloud-castle” with no binding claim on US conduct. This is not merely indifference; it is an explicit philosophical rejection of the premise that undergirded the US grand strategy since 1945—that self-interest and rule-bound cooperation could be reconciled.

The consequence is a widening credibility gap. When institutions built to manage pandemics, finance development, and mediate trade disputes are treated as optional accessories to be discarded at will, the states that once relied on them are forced to conclude that no future US commitment can be trusted to outlast a single electoral cycle. That is a corrosive lesson, and it will outlive this presidency.

Public opinion data collected across the G7 for the Munich Security Index 2026 reinforces the point: only a small minority of respondents in the surveyed countries believed their own governments’ current policies would leave future generations better off. This is not simply a US phenomenon, but Washington’s example has normalized it, exporting a template in which demolition is treated as evidence of strength and patient institution-building as a symptom of decline. A system of governance that no longer believes in its own durability cannot credibly ask others to invest in it.

Mikhail Margelov:
The Greater Middle East: The Party is Over

The Multipolar Vacuum

Every vacuum invites new occupants. The US’s own secretary of state has conceded the point, describing unipolarity itself as a “historical anomaly” whose end was always foreseeable. Whether or not this is candor or rationalization, the practical effect is the same: China, India, Russia, and a widening cast of middle powers now treat multipolarity not as a distant theoretical possibility but as the operating reality of 2026. Some of this redistribution of agency is arguably healthy for a world too long organized around a single center of gravity. But an order improvised amid demolition is not the same as an order deliberately architected for shared governance. The difference matters enormously for whether the emerging multipolarity is managed through renewed rules or simply through raw, unmediated power competition among a handful of capitals.

Commentators sympathetic to Washington’s retrenchment have pointed to an unintended silver lining: the vacuum created by US unpredictability has allowed midsized powers—some constructive, others considerably less so—to assume larger roles on the world stage. That may be true, however a system that distributes agency through chaos rather than through negotiated reform is not a stable multipolarity; it is a multipolarity of anxiety, in which every state’s capital must now calculate not only its rivals’ intentions but the unpredictable and shifting intentions of the very power that once anchored the system.

Conclusion

None of this is an argument for nostalgia toward the old, deeply unequal order that the US itself is now dismantling. That order had its own injustices, and a more genuinely multipolar world could be a more just one. Yet justice built on the ruins of institutional collapse is not guaranteed; it must be constructed, deliberately, by those states and institutions still willing to invest in rules rather than rubble. The Munich report itself put the choice starkly: passivity is not a neutral position, and those who merely stand by risk finding themselves, in due course, at the mercy of great-power politics rather than participants in shaping it. The lesson of the Trump era is therefore not that order is unnecessary, but that order does not defend itself. It must be rebuilt, consciously and collectively, by precisely those emerging powers now watching the demolition from the side-lines. The wrecking ball has already swung. What remains to be decided—by Moscow, Beijing, and every capital debating its place in this unsettled century—is what, if anything, will be built upon the rubble.