US President Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to withdraw American troops from almost all of Syria, clearing the way for a Turkish offensive against the Kurds, is an unconscionable betrayal of a strategic ally. One would expect such disloyalty from a fascist or otherwise dictatorial regime. And yet, today, it is the United States—a global leader with supposedly high ideals—that has emerged as the world’s perfidious empire.

Trump’s cavalier abandonment of the Kurds—America’s most loyal and effective allies in the war against the Islamic State, who until last week shared military outposts with US soldiers—is but the latest in a long series of devastating betrayals by his administration. He set the tone for his presidency by withdrawing the US from the Paris climate agreement, shamelessly placing the financial interests of America’s fossil-fuel tycoons above the existential interest of the rest of humanity.

Trump also renounced the Iran nuclear deal and reinstated sanctions, even though Iran had complied with the agreement’s obligations (and continued to do so for another year). Even America’s European allies are not safe: not only has Trump repeatedly lashed out at NATO allies; his administration is now imposing trade sanctions on up to US$7.5 billion worth of European Union goods. The US would, Trump recently boasted, undoubtedly win a trade war with the EU.

Europe also stands to lose from Trump’s abandonment of the Kurds. If, in the ongoing chaos, the thousands of IS prisoners held by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces escape—as some already have—America’s estranged European allies will suffer. Yet Trump is unconcerned. ‘Well, they are going to be escaping to Europe, that’s where they want to go’, he remarked casually at a press conference. ‘They want to go back to their homes.’

America’s unreliability as both a global leader and ally or partner is no longer in doubt—and countries are adjusting accordingly. India, for example, is pursuing closer ties with China and Russia, after a decade of ever-deeper relations with the US. (The Kurds, it’s worth noting, scrambled to make a deal with Russia, further strengthening the Kremlin’s regional influence.)

Meanwhile, America’s East Asian allies are weighing their options for mitigating the North Korean threat, in which Trump has apparently lost interest. He has shrugged off the North’s repeated tests of short-range ballistic missiles—which threaten Seoul and Tokyo, not New York or Washington—declaring that he is not ‘personally’ bothered by them.

Now, South Korea is attempting to reconcile with the North, while Japan is raising its defence budget to record levels. Meanwhile—in yet another vote of no confidence in the US—Taiwan seems increasingly inclined to reconcile with China.

Saudi Arabia, too, is adapting to Trump’s perfidy. Immediately following last month’s attack on Saudi oil installations—claimed by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels, but widely blamed on Iran itself—Trump hinted at military action. But Saudi Arabia knows better than to bet on US loyalty.

In fact, the US withdrawal from Syria came shortly after it moved its air force command and control operations out of the Gulf region, where they had been based for almost four decades, further reinforcing expectations of a more comprehensive US departure from the Middle East. That followed Trump’s refusal to respond with force when Iran downed a US$150 million American drone and impeded navigation in the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz.

Now, in what could be the mother of all diplomatic revolutions in the region, a Saudi-Iranian rapprochement seems to be in the offing. The other Gulf states would most likely join any such agreement.

The US itself is also desperate to get Iran to the negotiating table. Trump would surely laud a new nuclear deal as a major victory, even though it would probably represent little improvement over its predecessor, much like the US–Mexico–Canada Agreement did not improve upon the North American Free Trade Agreement. Trump may proclaim himself a master of the ‘art of the deal’, but, compared to the Iranians, he is an apprentice negotiator.

Iran’s regional posture is strengthened further by the fact that Israel—the US ally that is perhaps least able to handle a betrayal—remains utterly in Trump’s thrall. To be sure, Trump has thrown his support behind Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and has expressed his support for discussions on a formal US–Israel defence treaty. But if Iran decides to retaliate for Israel’s repeated attacks on its military installations in Syria and Iraq, there is no guarantee that the US will stand by its ally. After all, like the Kurds, Israel did not ‘help [the US] in Normandy’—apparently a necessary precondition for US loyalty. (Trump didn’t mention, of course, that his own father did not help the US in World War II, either; he avoided service, just as his sons did during the Vietnam War.)

As for Turkey, Trump has threatened to ‘destroy and obliterate’ its economy if it does anything in its war on the Kurds that he considers ‘off limits’. He then sent a bizarre letter warning Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan not to ‘be a tough guy’.

But why would Erdogan listen? Didn’t he get away with acquiring Russian-made S-400 missiles over Trump’s supposed objections? And has Trump not already handed him the prize of his dreams: a green light to slaughter the Kurds of northern Syria? Not surprisingly, Erdogan reportedly threw the letter straight into the bin.

US President Theodore Roosevelt advised foreign-policymakers to ‘speak softly and carry a big stick’. Trump seems to be doing just the opposite. Add to that his ignorance of history and geopolitics, his blind belief in his supposedly ‘great and unmatched wisdom’ and his apparent disregard for the lives of anyone outside his inner circle, and the global danger that America’s 45th president poses can hardly be overstated.

In July, I joined 43 other scholars of international relations in paying for a newspaper advertisement arguing that the US should preserve the current international order. The institutions that make up this order have contributed to ‘unprecedented levels of prosperity and the longest period in modern history without war between major powers’, it said. ‘US leadership helped to create this system, and US leadership has long been critical for its success.’

But some serious scholars declined to sign, not only on grounds of the political futility of such public statements, but because they disagreed with the ‘bipartisan US commitment to “liberal hegemony” and the fetishization of “US leadership” on which it rests’. Critics correctly pointed out that the American order after 1945 was neither global nor always very liberal, while defenders replied that while the order was imperfect, it produced unparalleled economic growth and allowed the spread of democracy.

Such debates are unlikely to have much effect on President Donald Trump, who proclaimed in his inaugural address that, ‘From this day forward, it’s going to be only America First, America First … We will seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world—but we do so with the understanding that it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first.’

But Trump went on to say that ‘we do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example’. And he did have a point. This approach can be called the ‘city on the hill’ tradition, and it has a long pedigree. It is not pure isolationism, but it eschews activism in pursuit of values. American power is, instead, seen as resting on the ‘pillar of inspiration’ rather than the ‘pillar of action’. For example, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams famously proclaimed on Independence Day in 1821 that the United States ‘does goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.’

But the soft power of inspiration is not the only ethical tradition in American foreign policy. There is also an interventionist and crusading tradition. Adams’s speech was an effort to fend off political pressure from those who wanted the US to intervene on behalf of Greek patriots rebelling against Ottoman oppression.

That tradition prevailed in the 20th century, when Woodrow Wilson sought a foreign policy that would make the world safe for democracy. At mid-century, John F. Kennedy called for Americans to make the world safe for diversity, but he also sent 17,000 American military advisers to Vietnam. Since the end of the Cold War, the US has been involved in seven wars and military interventions, and in 2006, after the invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush issued a national security strategy that was almost the opposite of Trump’s, promoting freedom and a global community of democracies.

Americans often see their country as exceptional, and most recently President Barack Obama described himself a strong proponent of American exceptionalism. There are sound analytical reasons to believe that if the largest economy does not take the lead in providing global public goods, such goods—from which all can benefit—will be under-produced. That is one source of American exceptionalism.

Economic size makes the US different, but analysts like Daniel H. Deudney of Johns Hopkins University and Jeffrey W. Meiser of the University of Portland argue that the core reason that the US is widely viewed as exceptional is its intensely liberal character and an ideological vision of a way of life centered on political, economic and social freedom.

Of course, right from the start, America’s liberal ideology had internal contradictions, with slavery written into its constitution. And Americans have always differed over how to promote liberal values in foreign policy. According to Deudney and Meiser:

For some Americans, particularly recent neo-conservatives, intoxicated with power and righteousness, American exceptionalism is a green light, a legitimizing rationale, and an all-purpose excuse for ignoring international law and world public opinion, for invading other countries and imposing governments … For others, American exceptionalism is code for the liberal internationalist aspiration for a world made free and peaceful not through the assertion of unchecked American power and influence, but rather through the erection of a system of international law and organization that protects domestic liberty by moderating international anarchy.

Protected by two oceans, and bordered by weaker neighbours, the US largely focused on westward expansion in the 19th century and tried to avoid entanglement in the struggle for power then taking place in Europe. Otherwise, warned Adams, ‘The frontlet upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power.’

By the beginning of the 20th century, however, America had replaced Britain as the world’s largest economy, and its intervention in World War I tipped the balance of power. And yet by the 1930s, many Americans had come to believe that intervention in Europe had been a mistake and embraced isolationism. After World War II, presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman—and others around the world—drew the lesson that the US could not afford to turn inward again.

Together, they created a system of security alliances, multilateral institutions and relatively open economic policies that comprise Pax Americana or the ‘liberal international order’. Whatever one calls these arrangements, for 70 years it has been US foreign policy to defend them. Today, they are being called into question by the rise of powers such as China and a new wave of populism within the world’s democracies, which Trump tapped in 2016 when he became the first candidate of a major US political party to call into question the post-1945 international order.

The question for a post-Trump president is whether the US can successfully address both aspects of its exceptional role. Can the next president promote democratic values without military intervention and crusades, and at the same time take a non-hegemonic lead in establishing and maintaining the institutions needed for a world of interdependence?

US President Donald Trump’s Helsinki press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin casts in stark relief his striking regard for authoritarian leaders. It is consistent with his systematic downgrading of the promotion of human rights and democracy, in a major departure from previous US presidents, both Republican and Democrat.

 Since Jimmy Carter, successive administrations have struck some balance between pursuing US security and economic interests and promoting human rights. Generations of officials have promoted human rights not only for short-term strategic payoff but also for intrinsic reasons, with long-term strategic gains such as legitimising American power. During the Cold War, administrations recognised the soft-power value of human rights/democracy promotion in differentiating the US brand from that of communist regimes. Likewise, there was an awareness that silence on human rights abuses could damage long-term US interests.

From his inaugural speech onwards, Trump has deprioritised human rights concerns, as part of his ‘America first’ transactionalism and sovereignty focus. While human rights issues have occasionally broken through—Trump has sporadically responded to television footage of events such as the chemical weapons attacks in Syria—these are exceptions to his inclination against involvement in other states’ internal affairs.

Trump’s national security cabinet has so far paid scant attention to human rights, apart from US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley’s rhetorical focus. While Haley has spoken out on human rights violations in states such as Syria, Myanmar and Venezuela, there has been little policy follow-through, and she has recently withdrawn the US from the UN Human Rights Council, citing its failure to reform and anti-Israel bias. Administration officials have reversed Obama-era human rights decisions, often for strategic reasons, including embarking on fuller engagement with Thailand and dropping human rights conditions attached to arms sales to Bahrain.

It remains to be seen whether Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will view human rights through the prism of the values-based competition with China and Russia described in the US national security strategy and national defence strategy. There are some early signs that Pompeo might focus on human rights more than his predecessor did. Pompeo stressed the importance of human rights/democracy promotion at his confirmation hearing, for example, and released a statement critical of China on the 29th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. But even if Trump’s national security team were to move in this direction, it’s highly possible that Trump’s disregard for human rights would continue, accentuating an incoherent posture.

The administration’s tumult has enabled some human rights and democracy concerns to be driven by lower-level State Department activity, including at the embassy level and through legislated programs. American diplomats have spoken out about extra-judicial killing associated with President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug policy in the Philippines, for example, and about Cambodian government legislation constraining the opposition and freedom of expression.

There has also been some congressional activism in pushing a human rights agenda. For instance, 15 senators (seven Republicans and eight Democrats) signed an open bipartisan letter urging Trump to prioritise human rights and democracy, and Republican senators Marco Rubio, John McCain and Lindsey Graham have protested Egypt’s NGO-restricting legislation and called for the administration to withhold aid to Egypt.

But congressional pushback has been limited, and congressional Republicans have been reluctant to take on a mercurial president as they pursue big-ticket items such as tax cuts and increased defence spending.

At the same time as the administration has pulled back from human rights/ democracy promotion and multilateral engagement, China and Russia and other states have grown more assertive in challenging democratic norms, both at home and globally. Earlier this year, China and Russia thwarted US efforts to have a Security Council briefing on Syrian human rights violations, and China was joined by other states on the Human Rights Council to pass a motion framing human rights as state-centric rather than universal.

For Australia, there’s the potential for greater policy divergence with the US if the Trump administration continues to disengage from the multilateral architecture Canberra supports. Australia, a current Human Rights Council member, had supported American efforts to reform the council. But Canberra had also encouraged Washington to maintain influence by remaining on the council, and has continued to support reforming the council from within.

Australia’s regional human rights approach has been driven by the sensitivities of not wanting to be seen to preach to Asian states and not wanting to push the region towards China. Australia has made a pragmatic assessment of the security and economic benefits of diplomatic engagement with Southeast Asian states such as Myanmar and Thailand.

Canberra should continue to encourage the Trump foreign-policy team to flesh out its ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ strategy—which appears to have a human rights/democracy dimension—and continue to look for ways to contribute to that strategy, especially in infrastructure, energy and economic governance promotion. There’s also scope for Australia to strengthen its own promotion of human rights and governance in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. If it’s carefully designed to take account of geopolitical considerations and regional sensitivities, such an initiative could enhance Australia’s soft power and help support the rules-based regional order.

In 1965, Henry Kissinger wrote a book called The troubled partnership, in which he examined the tensions affecting the transatlantic alliance during the Cold War. A stable international order, he argued, demanded the leadership of the United States—a powerful model for democracy in the world—supported by strong ties with Europe. Kissinger probably never would have imagined that, less than six decades later, the US would be playing precisely the opposite role, as a new, darker version of the transatlantic alliance emerges.

Consider last week’s convention of France’s far-right National Front. Upon being re-elected leader of the party, Marine Le Pen announced that it was to be renamed Rassemblement National (National Rally). The guest of honour at this consequential event was none other than Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, Stephen Bannon.

‘All great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice,’ Karl Marx famously wrote, ‘the first time as tragedy, second as farce.’ It would be easy to place the convention in Lille in the ‘farce’ category. After all, Le Pen and Bannon are both political rejects.

Le Pen lost last year’s French presidential election to Emmanuel Macron in a landslide. Moreover, she is now being challenged within her own party by her much younger and more intellectually impressive niece, Marion Maréchal‑Le Pen, who spoke just ahead of US Vice President Mike Pence at February’s Conservative Political Action Committee gathering in Washington, DC.

As for Bannon, he was fired unceremoniously by Trump in August 2017. To add insult to injury, Trump released a statement declaring that Bannon ‘had very little to do’ with Trump’s victory in the presidential election, and had lost not just his job, but also ‘his mind’ when fired.

Bannon’s presence at the Lille event was paradoxical. After all, his firing was rooted partly in his extremism, while Le Pen is currently attempting to widen her party’s support by softening its image. Yet, in another sense, his participation made perfect sense, as it reflected the ongoing development of a transatlantic populist alliance, a bleak variation on the ‘geography of values’ upon which the Cold War alliance was based.

Despite Bannon’s own political setbacks, he maintains that the ‘tide of history’ is irresistibly moving toward the populists. From his perspective, with Trump having secured the US presidency—a development that has destabilised the world order that Bannon and his ilk so badly want to burn down—it is only a matter of time before Europe follows in America’s footsteps.

It would be dangerous to dismiss Bannon’s vision as mere bluster. Macron may have won the day in France, but Trump’s electoral victory was no accident. Nor was the strong showing by populist parties in this month’s election in Italy, where the anti-immigration League party and the anti-establishment Five Star Movement together secured some 50% of the vote.

Even Germany has, to some extent, fallen victim to populist forces. To be sure, a new grand coalition government—comprising Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, and the Social Democratic Party—has been formed. But it took more than five months for the parties to agree, and the largest opposition party is now the far-right Alternative for Germany. In a country that seemed to have been vaccinated against populism by its Nazi history, this is a particularly distressing development. Democracy is more fragile than it may seem, and it can never be taken for granted.

So how can we stem the populist tide? For starters, political elites on both sides of the Atlantic who still believe in liberal democracy must recognise that it is they who are responsible for populism’s rise, owing to their failure to respond adequately to the concerns of the electorate. They must work tirelessly to find real solutions to the problems, from inequality to migration, that have fuelled support for populist forces. Those solutions must address not only technical challenges, but also citizens’ feelings—skilfully tapped by populists—of disenfranchisement and loss of identity.

Of course, US Democrats must also find a compelling candidate to run against Trump in the 2020 presidential election. And France and Germany must push forward with further European integration. Here, France has a special responsibility, under Macron’s leadership.

And, make no mistake: contrary to what Bannon said in Lille, it is Macron—not Le Pen and her rebranded party—who holds the key to the future of democracy in France. If he fails to make the system work for more of the electorate, France could well go the way of the US, setting a dangerous precedent for the rest of Europe. In such a scenario, the transatlantic alliance really would be in deep trouble—and so would the world order that it underpins.

The Cold War lasted four decades, in many ways both beginning and ending in Berlin. The good news is that it stayed cold—largely because nuclear weapons introduced a discipline missing from previous great-power rivalries—and that the United States, together with its European and Asian allies, emerged victorious, owing to sustained political, economic, and military effort that a top-heavy Soviet Union ultimately could not match.

A quarter-century after the end of the Cold War, we unexpectedly find ourselves in a second one. It is both different and familiar. Russia is no longer a superpower, but rather a country of some 145 million people with an economy dependent on the price of oil and gas and no political ideology to offer the world. Even so, it remains one of two major nuclear-weapons states, has a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and is willing to use its military, energy and cyber capabilities to support friends and weaken neighbours and adversaries.

This state of affairs was anything but inevitable. The end of the Cold War was expected to usher in a new era of friendly Russian ties with the United States and Europe. It was widely thought that post-communist Russia would focus on economic and political development. And relations got off to a good start when Russia, rather than standing by its long-time client Iraq, cooperated with the US in reversing Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.

The goodwill did not last. Just why will be a matter of debate among historians for decades to come. Some observers will blame successive US presidents, pointing to a lack of economic support extended to a struggling Russia, and even more to NATO enlargement, which, by treating Russia as a potential adversary, increased the odds it would become one.

It is true that the US could and should have been more generous as Russia made its painful transition to a market economy in the 1990s. Nor is it clear that NATO enlargement was preferable to other security arrangements for Europe that would have included Russia. That said, the lion’s share of the responsibility for the emergence of a second Cold War is Russia’s, and above all Vladimir Putin’s. Like many of his predecessors, Putin viewed the US-dominated world order as a threat to his rule and to what he regarded as his country’s rightful place in the world.

Russia in recent years has used armed force to seize, occupy and annex Crimea, in the process violating the fundamental principle of international law that borders may not be changed by armed force. Putin continues to use military or covert means to destabilise Eastern Ukraine, Georgia and parts of the Balkans. And Russia employed military force in particularly brutal ways in Syria to prop up Bashar al-Assad’s appalling regime.

Putin’s Russia also went to great lengths, in the words of US Special Counsel Robert Mueller, to carry out ‘fraud and deceit for the purpose of interfering with the US political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016’. Heads of US intelligence agencies have made clear that they expect further such efforts between now and the midterm congressional elections in November.

As Russia has become a revisionist country, with few if any qualms about overturning the status quo by whatever means it judges necessary, shoring up Europe’s defence and providing lethal arms to Ukraine is a sensible response. But what more should the US do, beyond reducing the vulnerability of voting machines and requiring technology firms to take steps to prevent foreign governments from trying to influence US politics?

First, Americans must recognise that defence is not enough. Congress is right to call for additional sanctions, and Donald Trump is wrong to refuse to implement sanctions that Congress has already passed.

The US government also needs to find its voice and criticise a Russian regime that arrests its opponents and reportedly murders journalists. If Trump, for whatever reason, continues to coddle Russia, then Congress, the media, foundations and academics should publicly detail the corruption that characterises Putin’s rule. Circulating such information might increase internal opposition to Putin, persuade him to hold off on further interference in US and European politics, and, over time, buttress more responsible forces within Russia.

At the same time, the objective should not be to end what little remains of the US–Russian relationship, which is already in worse shape than it was for much of the first Cold War. Diplomatic cooperation should be sought whenever it is possible and in America’s interest. Russia may well be willing to stop interfering in Eastern Ukraine in exchange for a degree of sanctions relief, if it could be assured that ethnic Russians there would not face reprisals. Likewise, the Kremlin has no interest in a military escalation in Syria that would increase the relatively modest cost of its intervention there.

At the same time, Russian support is needed to tighten sanctions against North Korea. And maintaining arms-control arrangements and avoiding a new nuclear arms race would be in the interest of both countries.

There is thus a case for regular diplomatic meetings, cultural and academic exchanges, and visits to Russia by congressional delegations—not as a favour, but as a means to make clear that many Americans are open to a more normal relationship with Russia if it acts with greater restraint. The US and its partners have a large stake in greater Russian restraint while Putin remains in power—and in a Russia characterised by other than Putinism after he is gone.