The Age of Kleptocracy: Geopolitical Power, Private Gain

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/age-kleptocracy-cooley-nexon

Analysts have long struggled to characterize U.S. President Donald Trump’s foreign policy. Because Trump pointedly rejects liberal-internationalist sensibilities, many have associated him with some form of realism, understood as the pursuit of the national interest defined entirely in terms of power. During his first term, after his 2017 National Security Strategy invoked “great-power competition,” the foreign policy community treated the phrase as the decoder ring by which they could rationalize his maneuvers. More recently, many have claimed that, to the contrary, Trump clearly favors a world in which great powers collude to carve up the world into spheres of influence. Throughout, the only constant interpretation has been that Trump has a “transactional” approach to international politics—the “art of the deal” as grand strategy.

But these assessments all rest on a category error. They begin from the premise that the Trump administration’s primary goal is, as its 2025 National Security Strategy insists, to advance the United States’ “core national interests.” Indeed, U.S. debates about foreign policy, national security, and grand strategy take it for granted that leaders design policy to serve the public good—even if those leaders’ view of the public interest is flawed—rather than to enrich themselves or inflate their personal glory. This is why so many foreign policy analyses argue that the “United States” or “Washington” ought to adopt a particular policy. They assume that the United States has interests that transcend party and that officials occupy their positions as a public trust.

The Trump administration, however, has destroyed this premise. Especially in his second term, Trump has instead wielded U.S. foreign policy principally to increase his own wealth, bolster his status, and personally benefit a small circle of his family members, friends, and loyalists. U.S. foreign policy is now largely subordinate to the private interests of the president and his retainers. These interests may, from time to time, align with some plausible understanding of the public good. Much more often, however, the Trump administration invokes U.S. national interests to deflect from its self-dealing by eroding the distinction between its private interests and those of the American people.

Many news reports on how Trump’s foreign dealmaking will line his supporters’ pockets still treat such arrangements as side payments, not as the main purpose of his statecraft. But if the administration’s foreign policy were not fundamentally kleptocratic, it would not be systematically attempting to subvert the independence of—or simply disable—the institutions that have long made U.S. foreign policy, including the National Security Council, the State Department, and the Defense Department. This de-institutionalization will almost surely undermine U.S. policymaking for at least a decade. It would not be relying on a practice that could be called “transactional bundling,” which intentionally collapses conflict resolution, economic bargains, and arrangements that benefit Trump cronies into grandiose megadeals that are hard or impossible to scrutinize. And it would not have systematically dismantled decades of bipartisan efforts to combat international corruption.

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