Trump's Revisionism and the Liberal Economic Order: Disruptive Coercion, Roving Banditry, and International Disorder From Within

Abstract

Scholars have paid limited attention to exploring international disorder emanating from the disorderly conduct of the dominant power. The United States, under Donald Trump, is actively undermining the essential elements of the American-led liberal economic order—commercial openness, a network of institutions and regimes, and nondiscriminatory provision of essential public goods—that the United States created after the Second World War. How can we conceptualize and explain such a situation in which the dominant power actively undermines (from within) the very order that it helped establish in the first place? While employing Olson's conceptual frame of “roving banditry”—also characterized by “coercive leadership” and “international disorder”—this study argues that Trump's international conduct, especially in his second term, should be conceptualized as roving banditry because Trump coercively extracts private profits and contributes little to the system's overall functioning due to his minimal stakes in the long-term sustenance of the system. This is demonstrated by Trump's practice of rent seeking and private extraction through discriminatory protectionism, economic retaliation, and transactional trade deals that bypass traditional multilateral bodies. While taking Trump's 5 years in office as an empirical reference point, the study further argues that Trump, like a roving bandit who practices coercion, weaponizes interdependence, bypasses systemic rules, and denies any contribution to public goods while coercively undermining and abandoning the system's essential components at will.

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