Donald Trump’s second presidency has been characterised by military aggression, trade disruption and disengagement from multilateral institutions. The world is now asking whether the US can be trusted to support the international order it helped build after the Second World War.

At the NATO summit in Ankara in July, United States President Donald Trump blasted the alliance and European allies. ‘I’m not happy with NATO,’ he declared in a bilateral meeting with the organisation’s Secretary-General Mark Rutte to open the summit, blaming Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and France for failing to join America’s war on Iran.

He further singled out Spain for refusing to allow the US military to use its airspace, threatening to cut off all trade with the country. ‘I don’t want anything to do with Spain,’ Trump said. The President also renewed demands for the US to take control of Greenland, a territory of Denmark. And he mercurially declared the ceasefire with Tehran over after US and Iranian forces exchanged missiles across the Persian Gulf.

It was classic Trump – making himself and his perceived needs the centre of attention, breaking diplomatic norms and insulting people. But, as is often the case, President Trump’s words were more noise than substance. By the end of the summit, he had met with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and agreed to let his country manufacture Patriot air defence missiles – a major breakthrough for Kyiv.

‘In a certain way, President Trump has been among the more transparent of presidents. Whether one agrees or not with the policy positions, or challenges the veracity of particular statements, they have been presented up front,’ says Steven Richman, Chair of the IBA Bar Issues Commission, who speaks in a personal capacity. ‘Political leaders set the agenda. Whether they can achieve it in the manner they seek to do so will be judged ultimately by the courts or the legislature, but judging the success or failure of a leader to implement campaign promises should involve more than a zero-sum analysis,’ Richman says. ‘Sometimes changing the paradigm and the way people think is more of an achievement than a piece of legislation.’

There’s no question that the parameters of public debate both at home and abroad have changed, says Richman. This is the ‘Overton window’ – the range of subjects and arguments acceptable to mainstream audiences. For example, Trump has shifted the debate on NATO funding so much so that European nations and Canada have been forced to expand defence spending.

The problem is how President Trump has gone about it. The president’s hostile language and arbitrary threats to withdraw troops and weapons has undermined confidence in the NATO alliance and ultimately caused Europe to pivot toward security autonomy, a paradigm shift with profound implications.

Whatever else President Trump is, he’s a disruptor by instinct and design. He understands power and asserts leverage when and wherever he pleases, often in unconventional ways.

As a result, he has moved the window of discourse on trade and the economy, immigration, foreign policy, multilateral organisations and human rights. Domestically, he has shifted US debate on executive power, law and the courts, free speech and even race and culture. What is now subject to question and judgement is the real-world impact.

‘Fair is foul and foul is fair’

One area of great consequence is international trade. President Trump has imposed costly and punitive tariffs on trade across the board, as well as against specific countries. Many of those tariffs, imposed under an emergency economic powers statute, were knocked down in February by the US Supreme Court, which ruled that Trump lacked the authority to impose them.

Other tariffs based on national security remain, and President Trump is seeking to use alternative statutory authorities to reimpose tariffs struck down by the Court. The President has previously argued that his tariffs will liberate America from dependence on foreign goods and boost US jobs.

More generally, President Trump’s core argument in his executive orders and the US Trade Representative’s policy documents is that global trade has been systematically unfair to his country. In his view, the large US trade deficit is evidence of decades of foreign barriers and one-sided market access that previous administrations tolerated rather than confronted. Trump administration officials argue that the President is now simply demanding fair and reciprocal treatment. ‘For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike,’ President Trump said in April 2025 when he announced his ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs.

Raj Bhala, an officer of the IBA International Trade and Customs Law Committee, sees President Trump’s trade record in tragic Shakespearean terms – fraught with instability and betrayal. ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair,’ the three witches said in the opening scene of William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth. This line captures President Trump’s approach to trade, says Bhala, who is a University Distinguished Professor of Law at Kansas University School of Law. ‘The second Trump administration is to trade deals as Macbeth is to all of his perceived enemies,’ Bhala says. ‘It has killed all the US trade relationships. This administration will sign a deal, or a memorandum of understanding today, and will rip it up or threaten to do so tomorrow.’

The Trump administration’s pattern has been to negotiate a topline agreement, keep it under threat of revision or of non-renewal, or subject it to unilateral reworking. Reciprocal trade arrangements the administration negotiated with Japan, South Korea and the EU are being undercut by renewed US tariffs and threats – most recently President Trump’s threat to cut off all trade with Spain. ‘What we knew of trade relations – stability, certainty – what we knew of acceptable bounds of behaviour – decency and dignity – that’s all been turned around,’ Bhala says. ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair.’

The Trump administration announced in July that it wasn’t renewing the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, previously known as the North American Free Trade Agreement, which entered into force in 1994 and was renegotiated by President Trump during his first term. A senior Trump official told reporters that the revised free trade agreement had only accelerated US trade deficits with Canada and Mexico.

The administration’s move throws the North American car manufacturing industry, which relies on complex supply chains in all three countries, into uncertainty. And it also opens a door to competition from China, says Bhala. ‘Trump has lost the plot on the Sino-American trade war. He’s turned all trade relations, torn them asunder […] and lost focus on the one true strategic adversary that threatens everybody,’ Bhala says.

President Trump’s summit meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, which took place in Beijing in May, yielded side deals on China’s purchases of Boeing aircraft and soybeans but didn’t change the underlying trade tensions. Bilateral trade between the two nations declined by 30 per cent in 2025 – Trump’s first year back in office – according to government data. Both sides have been observing a tariff ceasefire that nevertheless has left US tariffs on most Chinese goods at about 33 per cent. Chinese electric vehicles, lithium batteries and solar panels face prohibitive 145 per cent tariffs.

President Trump’s trade policy increasingly looks like an expensive failure. Despite Trump’s claims to the contrary, tariffs are taxes and those implemented in 2025 cost Americans between $700 and $1,200 per household, according to estimates by economists. President Trump’s 2018 trade war with China, initiated in his first term, cost the US economy an estimated $7.8bn annually.

If President Trump’s goal in imposing protectionist trade policies has been to fast-track a resurgence of US manufacturing, there’s little evidence that this is happening, according to a report published in April by management consulting company, Kearney. Some production has shifted out of China to other low-cost countries. However, reshoring – where businesses based in a different jurisdiction return to their original country – continues to face structural obstacles in the US due to higher labour costs, workforce availability and inadequate infrastructure.

Dismantlement and withdrawal

Trade isn’t the only arena where the Trump administration is retreating from international engagement and global obligations. ‘The second Trump administration has been a disaster for human rights, gutting human rights protections both at home and abroad,’ says Jonathan Hafetz, Treasurer of the IBA Human Rights Law Committee.

‘Abroad, the administration has engaged in extrajudicial killings on the high seas, violated the prohibition against the use of military force against other countries other than in self-defence and undermined international human rights institutions, including through non-compliance with reporting obligations, reductions in funding for human rights bodies and programmes and withdrawal from international mechanisms,’ says Hafetz, a professor of law at Seton Hall University School of Law in New Jersey.

The US military has killed more than 125 people through an ongoing campaign of strikes on suspected drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, with many of the vessels targeted believed to have originated in Venezuela. Asserting extraordinary presidential authority, President Trump declared drug cartels to be unlawful combatants in a legal memo and said the US was engaged in a ‘non-international armed conflict’ with them, reports say. The Trump administration denies the strikes are illegal.

The boat strikes caused particular controversy in autumn 2025 after a report emerged that US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth had ordered the Navy to hit one boat a second time after the initial attack, leaving ‘no survivors’. Hegseth denied giving any such order.

In October, Admiral Alvin Holsey, then head of the US Southern Command, resigned abruptly amid reported clashes with Hegseth over the legal basis for the maritime strike campaign. Meanwhile, the strikes on boats have continued into summer 2026.

Rather than purely being a counter-narcotics operation, the boat strikes – at least those taking place in the first few months of operations – appear to have been part of a larger regime change campaign by President Trump against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, according to senior Trump administration officials who spoke to the press in late 2025.

Those boat strikes escalated into a broader US intervention that culminated in the seizure and removal of Maduro to a prison in New York, where he now awaits trial on multiple US charges, including relating to drugs. He denies all charges.

These uses of military force, as well as the US attacks against Iran, were illegal under international law and the UN Charter, say Hafetz and many other human rights lawyers. The war on Iran, beginning in late February, was characterised by President Trump initially as a pre-emptive defensive measure intended to prevent Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

President Trump’s acts of military aggression come amid a wider pattern of dismantlement and withdrawal from UN organisations and multinational frameworks. The Trump administration formally withdrew from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Paris Climate Agreement in January, ending US funding and participation. Signalling a disregard for international consensus-building, President Trump has during his second term taken the US out of numerous international organisations including the UN’s International Law Commission, Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and Peacebuilding Commission.

Markus Beham, Co-Chair of the IBA Human Rights Law Committee, notes that the US has always been selective about which treaties it chooses to ratify. It has, however, operationalised humanitarian law through its domestic military manuals and training. In reality, it’s through domestic implementation, rather than rhetoric, that international law has its greatest practical effect, he says. ‘It is fair for a state to choose which efforts befit its national interests. If the rest of the international community is of the view that these efforts should be preserved, they must also show that they are willing to compensate for the losses,’ says Beham, a professor of international law at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt.

He draws a distinction between a country that rejects the rules of the international order and one that simply breaks them when its interests demand. The more precise charge against the Trump administration may be that it regards international law as being of lower importance but hasn’t repudiated it entirely. Washington is treating legal obligations as negotiable when they conflict with what President Trump wants.

Anti-corruption and institutional capacity

It would be a mistake to conclude that the US government under the Trump administration has retreated completely from international engagement, says Samantha Feinstein, an officer for the IBA Anti-Corruption Committee. On the question of whether the US has withdrawn from its historic role as the driving force behind global anti-corruption norms, she is measured. ‘I wouldn’t necessarily describe the current moment as a wholesale retreat from anti-corruption,’ Feinstein says. ‘I do think it is a recalibration that aligns more with the president’s priorities, but our laws still remain in effect.’

‘This may be a signal of a moment and a signal of priorities now, but that doesn’t preclude enforcement later,’ says Feinstein, who’s Director of the International Program at the Government Accountability Project in Washington, DC. ‘The US has an opportunity, by remaining engaged and using the different tools at its disposal, to address legitimate issues at global institutions,’ she says, referring to bodies such as the WHO and the UNHRC. ‘But each decision to withdraw, cease participation or end support reduces the influence that comes from remaining at the table.’

The US government may have shifted its approach to the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) under President Trump, but that doesn’t mean enforcement has collapsed, Feinstein says. Rather, the emphasis now is on national security, transnational organised crime, border security and cartels. The FCPA remains in force and investigations continue.

One of the concerns for practitioners amid the US government’s shifting priorities under President Trump is the loss of institutional capacity at the country’s agencies that has resulted from sweeping workforce cuts. A substantial amount of federal work is now simply not getting done, while rebuilding regulatory agencies in the future will be challenging and take more time – perhaps happening over the course of several future presidential administrations.

J Michael Showalter, an officer for the IBA Environment, Health and Safety Law Committee, advises corporate boards and executives across the energy, manufacturing and financial sectors. ‘If you were in a corporate boardroom in 2025,’ Showalter says, ‘all anybody talked about was tariffs and trade.’ The dominant shock to American businesses in President Trump’s second term, in Showalter’s assessment, has been the sudden and unpredictable restructuring of supply costs. Tariffs have changed the fundamental economics of entire industries overnight. ‘If you change your cost base for an industry by 25 per cent or ten per cent or anything else, that means you have to redo every calculation in your whole business,’ he says.

One regulatory initiative that will probably endure after President Trump leaves office is reform to the permitting system for energy and manufacturing projects, says Showalter, a partner at ArentFox Schiff in Chicago. ‘No matter which side of the energy debate you’re on, getting a permit for renewable projects in America is too expensive and takes too long, and permitting factories in America is too expensive and takes too long,’ Showalter says. Reform of the permitting system, then, may be one of the more durable legacies of a presidency defined elsewhere by disruption and controversy.

The verdict

Richman says that US courts are resolving President Trump’s procedural missteps and policy overreaches. In cases where he has lost, while there has sometimes been unfortunate rhetoric, there remain opportunities for President Trump to advance his agenda, whether by appeal or by seeking congressional authority via legislation. ‘Consequently, not every promise can or will be fulfilled if it runs afoul of the rule of law,’ Richman says. He suggests the long view of this presidency will probably be more forgiving than short-term news cycles or the upcoming midterm elections.

Hafetz sees the damage President Trump has done already as structural and says history’s view is likely to prove unflattering. ‘Before Trump, the US remained a strong supporter of the post-World War II human rights legal architecture, however imperfect and inconsistent its fidelity to it may have been,’ Hafetz says. ‘Today, the US is becoming a rogue nation bent on tearing down that very architecture.’

Having spent several months in the UK and Europe over the spring, Bhala’s assessment of the current European mood is stark. The key phrase here, he says, is ‘can’t rely on the Americans’. Bhala says that everyone he spoke to said that ‘this administration has done lasting, enduring damage to our relationship, to our belief in the US and our belief in the credibility of the US’.

Nearly halfway through President Trump’s second term, the evidence suggests that the damage to the US’ standing in the world is structural rather than fleeting. Institutions, enforcement architectures and relationships with allies have all been altered in ways that no simple change of presidential administration or congressional leadership will repair. ‘I don’t think one or even a few administrations, regardless of party, can restore a sense of reliability and trust in US trade policy,’ Bhala says. ‘It will take several administrations with charismatic leadership who convince the British and Europeans that America – having gone through what will be viewed, 50 years from now, as an aberration – really does believe in interdependence.’

William Roberts is a US-based freelance journalist and can be contacted at wroberts3@me.com