Trump’s New Great Power Relations?

by Tony Spanakos

In 2012, Xi Jinping promoted the idea of a “new era of great power relations,” a term that had been introduced in China decades earlier, but which took on new meaning given China’s remarkable economic development. It was, early on, a sort of invitation to then U.S. president Barack Obama and a signal of Chinese newfound confidence as a leader in a global order to which it hoped to contribute not only materially but in terms of values and norms. President Obama demurred and his successor, Donald Trump, gave a clearer response in his 2017 National Security Strategy, which spoke of a new era of great power competition. Even so, for several years Xi Jinping promoted the concept of a “new era of great power relations,” and it was dissected and evaluated at length by Chinese scholars and sinologists. In the end, he adjusted to a “new era of international politics.”

In a forthcoming essay, Chen Gang and I explore why Xi Jinping was unable to persuade audiences, domestic and international, to endorse the idea of a “new era of great power relations.” In a striking contrast, U.S. president Donald Trump, with little interest in conceptual elaboration, generated a seemingly endless discussion of how he has brought about changes in the international system, and, despite severe criticism, many political leaders have proven themselves willing to engage with the shifts he has introduced, such as the global tariff-cum-bilateral negotiation scheme he launched without warning in April 2025.

This essay offers a preliminary analysis of the foreign policy of the second Trump administration. While there is so much to address, as with his earlier administration, the current administration has moved quickly and delivered constant rhetorical displays to attract attention. But this mandate features much bolder and more definitive policy moves, as well as a more confident and less leaky administration, which largely acts first and explains later. For reasons of space, I hoped to limit the discussion to the Western Hemisphere, the area identified by the National Security Strategy (NSS) of December 2025 and the National Defense Strategy (NDS) of January 2026 as the most important region for U.S. security. Yet the ongoing military activities in Iran make such a restriction impossible.

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