Institutions American Power
The Institutional Decline Thesis — and the Strongest Case Against It
The prevailing view in serious foreign policy commentary holds that the current trajectory — sanctioning the ICC, striking unilateral energy deals with Russia, resuming contested deportations against UN objection — weakens American credibility and soft power over the long term. Allied trust erodes, international institutions hollow out, and the United States ends up with less leverage in a more chaotic world.
The strongest counterargument, rooted in realist foreign policy thinking associated with scholars like John Mearsheimer and Barry Posen, runs as follows: the postwar international institutional order was always premised on American primacy and American willingness to fund it. As American relative power has declined — with China's economy approaching parity and middle powers proliferating — those institutions have become less effective regardless of US commitment. The ICC has not deterred war crimes in Myanmar, Ethiopia, or the Donbas. WTO dispute resolution was already dysfunctional before the current administration accelerated its deterioration. If institutions do not work, maintaining them may impose costs that exceed their value, and retreating from them is rationalization rather than decline.
The counterargument weakens, however, on the coordination problem. International institutions are costly and imperfect, but they provide a shared syntax for states to manage disputes without escalation. Removing that syntax — even a clunky version of it — forces states back onto bilateral power relationships, which systematically advantage larger, more powerful actors. The United States, as the largest and most powerful state, benefits specifically from rules-based frameworks because it helped write the rules; the alternative is a world where every dispute is resolved by coercive capacity, which is not obviously favorable even for the most powerful state.
Concrete indicators will test which analysis is aging better. Specific ones to watch: European defense spending trajectories over the next six months; whether other governments accelerate ICC withdrawal following Trump's public urging; US diesel prices at the pump three months from now relative to comparable markets; and whether Van Hollen's war powers bill advances in committee or stalls as previous versions have. Those are trackable signals rather than conclusions reached in advance — and the Russia diesel deal could itself become an early data point, supporting the realist case if it demonstrably reduces American fuel costs without significantly funding Russian military operations, and undermining it if the opposite proves true.
The Collapse of Diplomatic Discretion: A Pattern, Not a Coincidence
The Israel and Brazil stories are chapters in the same larger narrative: a fundamental reorientation in how the United States exercises diplomatic influence. The traditional model — maintained through administrations of both parties for decades — rested on a distinction between public posture and private action. Washington might have strong preferences about who governs a foreign country and might even act on those preferences through intelligence channels or economic levers. But publicly, it maintained a posture of respecting foreign democratic processes, because that posture was itself a form of soft power.
What is happening now is the collapse of that distinction. Trump calling Brazil's election rigged, Trump aides openly leaking their Israeli coalition preferences to Axios, Reuters reporting sanctions being pushed for electoral benefit in Brazil — all of this is occurring in public, or close to it. One reading of the openness is carelessness: an administration that views traditional diplomatic discretion as hypocrisy and doesn't bother maintaining it. A second reading is that the openness is intentional — that loudly demonstrating a willingness to use American power on behalf of preferred governments is itself a signal to those governments about what relationship they can expect.
The second reading has Cold War precedent. American support for friendly governments — including authoritarian ones — was often overt enough that all parties understood the arrangement. The current moment may represent a return to that transactional alignment, stripped of the democracy-promotion rhetoric that characterized U.S. foreign policy from roughly 1991 through 2016. The problem with that model, as the Cold War demonstrated repeatedly, is blowback: governments preferred because they serve American interests generate lasting resentment among populations that didn't choose them, and that resentment becomes a durable recruiting tool for anti-American movements. Brazil's history of U.S.-backed military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985 is alive in its political culture. If American fingerprints are perceived on the Bolsonaro victory, that historical memory activates in ways that could reshape Brazilian public opinion toward the United States for a generation.
The diplomatic forecast for the coming months is murky. Israel without a functional government — a real possibility if coalition negotiations fail — creates a vacuum in U.S. Middle East diplomacy at a moment when multiple active crises require a coherent Israeli interlocutor. Brazil with a contested election, a hostile Congress, and sanctions allegations floating in the international press creates an unstable anchor for South American economic and political stability. Neither outcome serves American interests, regardless of which leaders Washington prefers.