Present at the Destruction: A 2030 Damage Assessment

What hath Trump wrought? How does one separate the signal from the noise? The revolution unleashed on January 20 has unsettled eighty years of economic, political, and security order in a few months.

Editor’s Note: The Red Cell series is published in collaboration with the Stimson Center. Drawing upon the legacy of the CIA’s Red Cell—established following the September 11 attacks to avoid similar analytic failures in the future—the project works to challenge assumptions, misperceptions, and groupthink with a view to encouraging alternative approaches to America’s foreign and national security policy challenges. For more information about the Stimson Center’s Red Cell Project, see here.

Red Cell

“From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.”

– Will Durant

Past civilizations have decayed from within. However, looking back over the past 3,000 years, it is difficult to find any other civilization that self-consciously dismantled itself and the world order it fashioned with such nihilistic aplomb. The United States’ situation today appears to be a trajectory of self-marginalization from an otherwise still globalizing (albeit in new patterns), interconnected world.

A complete inventory of the destruction of U.S. state capacity and the dismantling of the post-World War II order is premature. However, in his confirmation hearing, Secretary of State Marco Rubio previewed the administration’s worldview, which guides its policies. He argued that “The postwar global order is not just obsolete, it is a weapon being used against us.”

In effect, Trump’s goal appears to be to turn the United States into a giant gated community buffered by two oceans, a big, beautiful wall to the south, with a Golden Dome of missile defense hanging over it. It is a fantasy of absolute security. How else can one understand Trump’s arbitrary tariffs? Even as he confronts reality and tempers their effects, they still amount to an assault on the global trade system that the United States created and has been undermining for some time.

The recent pauses on his “reciprocal” tariffs still put Trump’s own bilateral and multilateral trade agreements—the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the US-Republic of Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS), and the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA)—at risk. Some excessive tariffs are likely to be reduced in bilateral deals. However, with 10% tariffs across the board, as well as steel, aluminum, and auto tariffs, in addition to promised tariffs on pharmaceuticals, they will still be hugely disruptive. Recent polls show the public’s concern about Trump’s tariffs undermining free trade, which they largely oppose even if they back many of his other objectives.

Similarly, the United States is retreating from the World Health Organization, and various UN agencies are highly unpopular within the administration. The world’s largest historic emitter of greenhouse gases is also spurning international climate cooperation, withdrawing for a second time from the Paris Agreement on climate change.

This all begs the question of what the future holds for the world system following a U.S. retreat from its role as guarantor and enforcer. The two scenarios below show what the world might look like by 2029 in the face of increasing multipolarity, strained multilateral cooperation, and diminished U.S. capacity.

Scenario One: Yalta 2.0

This scenario projects a twenty-first-century zero-sum world divided into major power spheres of influence where power supersedes rules, and the United States, in pursuing a neo-Monroe Doctrine, becomes a shrunken power in the Northern Hemisphere. The United States normalizes ties with Russia, giving Moscow a sphere of influence over former Soviet republics and Eastern Europe.

Washington similarly does not contest a Chinese neo-tributary system in East Asia and its geoeconomic influence over West Asia. Key regional powers—Brazil, India, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey—increasingly align with each other on an issue-specific basis while playing off the major powers to their advantage. Trade grows more region-centric. As in the past 500 years, spheres of influence contain the seeds of conflict in imperial expansion, overlapping ambitions, and miscalculation of each other’s strengths.

The United States’ influence in the Northern Hemisphere is limited to Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. For its part, China has leveraged some $450 billion in trade and $600 billion in foreign direct investment, much of it in natural resources and critical infrastructure, to construct “strategic partnerships” with South American countries. These partnerships will deepen by 2028, as Beijing’s dominance in electric vehicles (EVs), batteries, and solar tech facilities helps Latin nations transition to clean energy.

U.S.-China strategic competition in the Pacific region grows despite Washington’s having conceded China’s geopolitical influence in East Asia, concluding that Taiwan is not an existential issue for the United States. Washington forces an us-or-China choice on East Asian states for value chains and technologies. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations tilts toward China on digital tech. South Korea and Japan tilt toward the United States, but Seoul and Tokyo retain some production networks with China. The U.S. innovation edge corrodes during Trump’s term, slowed by techno-nationalism, shrinking basic research funding, and skills shortages amplified by anti-immigration policies.

Washington’s “reverse-Kissinger” rapprochement with Russia backfires. Concluding that ending the Ukraine War is too difficult, Trump walks away, proclaiming the war to be “Europe’s problem.” A frozen conflict ensues. U.S.-Russia relations are normalized into a business-like arrangement. In early 2027, the New START nuclear agreement is extended for five years while the United States withdraws troops and weapons systems from former Warsaw Pact nations.

Moscow is less dependent on China, but it is still strategically aligned with Beijing. U.S. nuclear modernization and China’s quest for parity with the United States slows as modest arms control and risk-reduction measures mitigate the nuclear rivalry.

NATO is gradually superseded by a more autonomous Europen-UK defense arrangement, with a shared nuclear deterrent agreement in 2027. The euro begins to compete with the dollar, curtailing its dominance as the world’s global reserve currency by 2029.

The Global Commons Falls Victim to a Zero-Sum World

In scenario one, the United States withdraws from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. After two years of negotiations, China, the European Union (EU), and India divide up Washington’s 16.8 percent voting shares and commitments. The IMF and World Bank Headquarters move to Shanghai. Reduced foreign holdings of U.S. financial assets create a U.S. budget crisis over funding the $36-trillion deficit. Cooperation on climate change, global health, oceans, and global finance is greatly diminished.

The North-South economic gap widens as capital flows concentrate among major and middle powers. Aid and investment shrink, and less developed, fragile states’ debt crises deepen, causing heightened civil wars, terrorism, and mass migration. Competition for resources spurs great power intervention in local wars. The world careens toward an environmental catastrophe. U.S. deregulation and a dearth of global rules and standards create new security risks. Unfettered emerging technologies, such as synthetic biology and artificial intelligence (AI), spin out of control. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is attained in 2030, creating a whole new set of threats to humans.

Scenario Two: A World Without the United States

Unlike Yalta 2.0, in which the great powers compete against each other, in this scenario, the new non-U.S. world is driven by the growing cooperation between the EU and China, which share interests but remain divided on values. As a goodwill measure, China agrees to stem the flow of exports, seeing in Europe a long-term growth market for Chinese goods in light of the economic turmoil in the United States.

The EU and China set minimum prices for Chinese-made EVs instead of the tariffs that Brussels enacted in 2024. In addition, European companies are increasingly forging deals with their Chinese rivals—licensing EVs, batteries, and solar tech and entering into joint ventures to bolster their competitiveness—reversing what had been a Chinese dependency on European manufacturers, especially automakers.

An equally important driver for more amicable relations is the U.S. exit from the various multilateral institutions protecting the global commons. The decimation of the State Department and the Agency for International Development (USAID)—along with the United States’ exit from the Bretton Woods institutions and the Paris Climate Agreement—as well as Trump’s defunding of most UN humanitarian and development agencies, means that the United States no longer has any interest in helping poor countries. This leaves the EU and China as the only large assistance providers. Moreover, on climate change, instead of Washington and Beijing driving the battle against climate change, as happened under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, fighting this battle is now up to the EU and China.

The increase in international responsibilities helps fuel EU economic reforms and a growing defense independence. The tariffs led to a near recession in the United States and a growing exit of international investors. Trump is forced to make further cuts to social welfare programs and even curtail defense spending to try to avoid a yawning budget deficit and pass his tax cuts. Part of the defense savings comes from repeated reductions in U.S. forces in Europe.

As in the Yalta 2.0 scenario, Trump tells Europe to end the Ukraine War any way it can; it tries to do so but fails to work with Moscow, causing the war to devolve into a frozen conflict. France, Britain, and other countries send peacekeepers to deter any fresh outbreaks of Russian aggression. China also pushes Russian president Vladimir Putin to cease the fighting. Europe and China started to rebuild the Ukrainian territory not occupied by Russian forces.

Rebuilding Globalization Without the United States

India, Brazil, and other emerging powers benefit from a loss of trust in Washington’s economic leadership, drawing investors away from sinking all their capital into the United States. After Japan ends its opposition to Beijing’s joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), China, along with the UK and EU, is invited to become a member of the group, ensuring that free trade remains the global norm. Canada seeks to rewire its trade dependence on the United States and joins the European Economic Area (EEA) with Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein, giving it access to EU markets.

Europe, China, and emerging market countries come together to rewrite the WTO rulebook. Trump freezes the United States’ membership in the WTO, which accelerates the reform process: With its membership suspended, Washington cannot veto any of the reforms. The dispute settlement process is revised so that no single power can hold up the appointment of appellate judges; the consensus rule is amended to help speed global trade agreements. In a few years, global trade starts to increase after a downturn following Trump’s tariffs.

The United States’ Slow Recovery

Despite the new Democratic president’s vow in 2028 to rebuild Washington’s prestige, U.S. primacy in the global order has been lost. The value of U.S. assets —from houses to 401(k)s —has diminished; inflation is not under control. The new president finds it hard to reduce all of Trump’s tariffs for fear of an inundation of cheap Chinese goods and backlash from close to 40 percent of the electorate, who remain Trumpists. Detroit is not prepared to compete globally on EVs, which have taken over international markets. Growth remains below 2 percent despite the Fed’s decision to begin lowering interest rates to counter growing unemployment. Decreased revenues from anemic growth make it hard to contain the mounting deficit and debt.

For the new Democratic president, the priority is economic stabilization and the rehabilitation of government and private sector institutions that had been ravaged by Trump. With Trump’s expulsion of non-American researchers, in addition to the U.S. scientists who left voluntarily, the United States loses its technology edge. USAID is reconstructed, along with the State Department.

The new president muses over the little time it took Trump to destroy key ingredients of U.S. success: world-class universities, a high level of basic R&D, and a talent pool containing the world’s best and brightest. The number of Chinese and other international students studying in the United States has dropped, and cuts to the National Institutes of Health, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and federal support for university R&D have damaged U.S. innovation.

De-Dollarization and Multipolar Cooperation

As in the Yalta scenario, the euro begins to compete with the dollar as the world’s dominant reserve currency. Instead of Europe’s savings going to Wall Street, they stay at home and invest in eurobonds, which are funding Europe’s economic resurgence.

Elsewhere, as worries persist about Washington’s dollar weaponization with sanctions, the digital renminbi (RMB) is close to rivaling the dollar as the medium for global transactions, particularly after Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states agree to sell oil in RMB. Without the rule of law and an end to all capital and currency controls, however, the RMB cannot aspire to become the global reserve currency. The decline in dollar usage also means that U.S. sanctions have far less leverage.

Multipolar governance is now in better shape, with the middle powers gaining more representation and leadership in the reshaped institutions. Poor countries receive more help in battling climate change, with China, Europe, and the rising middle powers coordinating their assistance efforts.

Yet, the number of small conflicts that neither China nor Europe nor any other player can solve keeps growing. The Middle East is a difficult region to manage without Washington’s influencing Israel to lower tensions. Many Americans continue to blame China for the United States’ economic decline. The new U.S. president seeks to lower tensions, but the risks of a U.S. conflict over Taiwan grow in reaction to Beijing’s attempts to force unification on Taipei.

A New Vienna?

The lens of history is a helpful tool in pondering possible worlds after the dismantling of our current global framework. A world order based solely on power —of narrow nationalist spheres of influence—over the past millennium has led to competition, often resulting in war. Examples such as the 1815 Congress of Vienna after the defeat of Napoleon that led to the “long peace” of the nineteenth century suggests that self-interest coupled with a practice of maintaining a “balance of power” and multilateralist diplomacy can lead to a modicum of restraint and cooperation absent a hegemon.

By:  Mathew Burrows and Robert Manning

Mathew Burrows serves as Counselor in the Executive Office at the Stimson Center and is co-author of the recent book World to Come: Return of Trump and End of the Old Order.

Robert A. Manning is a Distinguished Fellow at the Stimson Center working on Strategic Foresight, China, and great power competition.