How has Donald Trump changed the world? Already, the U.S. president’s second term has seen a sharp acceleration in the erosion of international law; the global trading order has been blown up; the trans-Atlantic alliance has weakened; and amid increased warfare, more and more countries are talking about seeking nuclear weapons.

In a new cover essay for Foreign Policy’s Spring 2026 print issue, the geopolitical thinker Hal Brands describes three scenarios for what the world after Trump might look like. First, a return to bloc politics, in which the United States and China jostle for influence. Second, an age of empires, in which several powerful states subjugate their neighbors and smaller countries. And third, a more dangerous world of jungle law, where anything goes and each state is out for itself.

I asked Brands to elaborate on these scenarios, and how to avoid the worst outcomes, on the latest episode of FP Live. Brands is a professor of global affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page or download the FP Live podcast for free. What follows here is a condensed and lightly edited transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: Hal, let’s begin with an overview of the three scenarios you lay out. What are they?

Hal Brands: Of the three scenarios, the first is essentially a new cold war or a two-world scenario, in which you have a Chinese-led bloc doing battle geopolitically and geoeconomically with an American-led bloc. We have to acknowledge that at this point, the American-led bloc is likely to be looser and more transactional than we might have expected even a couple of years ago. But the guiding theme of this scenario is that the U.S.-China rivalry is real. It is here to stay, regardless of what happens in summits between [Chinese President] Xi Jinping and Donald Trump. And it will exert powerful structural pressures on both the United States and China and the rest of the actors in the international system, just as the Cold War rivalry did.

Scenario two is what you might think of as a classic spheres-of-influence approach. In this scenario, you have a United States that essentially doubles down on its dominance of the Western Hemisphere and, in the process, pulls back from security commitments in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. As it does so, it creates opportunities for other regional powers to pursue their own spheres in their geographical backyards. You can imagine a Chinese sphere of influence encompassing large swaths of East Asia and Southeast Asia. You can imagine a Russian sphere of influence encompassing parts of the former Soviet space. You can imagine India striving for greater primacy within South Asia and the Indian Ocean littoral and so forth. This is a world that is fragmented not into two giant blocs but into several regional spheres, each of which becomes almost a domain unto itself, even though there is persistent interdependence to some degree between them.

The third and final scenario is basically into the darkness. It is a return to the pervasive global instability that we saw in the opening decades of the 20th century, when you had two world wars in close succession. The forcing function here is an America that turns increasingly acquisitive and predatorial. In that circumstance, the three most powerful countries in the world—the United States, China, and Russia—are all essentially revisionist powers, and they create a sense of self-help among other countries, which now have to take desperate measures, whether it’s acquiring nuclear weapons or otherwise, to defend themselves. The result is essentially a spiral downward into chaos. That is a dire scenario, but we can’t treat it as being totally out of the question anymore.

RA: It strikes me that the world we’re in right now has elements of all three of these to varying degrees. But are you convinced that there’s no fourth option of returning to the American rules-based order that we’ve had for the last 80 years?

HB: I think the rules-based order as we understand it—and as it has been pursued in the last 25 or 30 years in particular—is just dead and buried at this point. When we think of the prevailing international or the American-led international order, there are really two phases to that.

The first is the post-World War II phase, running through the end of the Cold War, where the United States built an essentially Western order. It featured aspects that we associate with today’s international order, but it was confined first to the trans-Atlantic world, then to parts of what we would now think of as the global West, such as Japan and South Korea. What we saw after the end of the Cold War was the aspiration that this Western order could essentially go global, that you could bring new regions into the order as countries democratize and embrace market economics, and that you could bring aspiring powers into the order by making them responsible stakeholders in that system.

I think that aspiration is totally dead because we see countries like China and Russia pushing back hard against the system that the United States created and we see a lot of ambivalence in the United States about whether that system is worth supporting in the first place. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that the United States will continue to play a broadly constructive role in international politics, but it’s going to be more transactional and tougher-minded.

RA: Some of this sounds like a loss of idealism. So, even if American leaders hark back to the ’80s or the ’90s, other parts of the world do not have much of an appetite for going back to that era.

Let’s dig into the first of your scenarios: a world in which the United States and China fight it out for influence and form two big blocs. What does that world look like? Why is it a bad thing? Wasn’t it inevitable?

HB: One way to think about this is as a revival of the old heartland-rimland clash that was often described by classical geopolitical thinkers. The core of the Chinese-led bloc would be China and the other Eurasian autocracies: Russia, Iran, North Korea. It would probably also encompass some portion of the global south that will fall into China’s economic slipstream. Opposing that bloc would be a reformed Western bloc of advanced democracies: the United States, Europe, parts of East Asia and the Indo-Pacific. Maneuvering between them would be a group of swing states, let’s call them—India, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia—which might selectively align with one side or the other on particular issues but are basically going to try to get the highest price they can by playing the alignment game very selectively and very opportunistically.

Why is this a challenging scenario? It’s a challenging scenario for all the reasons that the initial Cold War was a challenging scenario. That’s not to say the two scenarios are the same. China is obviously much more deeply integrated economically with the rest of the world than the Soviet Union ever was. But this is a world where you have high-stakes diplomatic and military crises where the two blocs intersect. That might be in Ukraine or in the Taiwan Strait. You’re going to have intense fights over the terms of residual interdependence between these blocs, even as the economic and technological ties are probably attenuated due to geopolitical rivalry. It is probably the scenario that would feel most familiar to a lot of American policymakers because it does bear those similarities to the Cold War.

RA: The divide between these blocs could be read as democratic and nondemocratic, or it could be read as East-West or maybe as North-South. What divides these countries? If you are Nigeria or Sri Lanka, how do you think about which bloc you want to be a part of?

HB: If you’d asked that question a month after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the answer to some significant degree would have been that these blocs are defined by ideology. That is the way the Biden administration described it, but that’s not really how American leaders see the issue right now.

One of the questions around these scenarios is whether the United States is still committed to leading the West or the free world or the democratic community or whatever you want to call it. In the most optimistic circumstance, the answer might be yes, but it’s going to be a more transactional form of leadership than we had before, where Europe and the United States will stick together not out of a belief that these two great actors in international affairs share deep commonalities of values but just that they have a common interest in preventing China from dominating the globe economically and otherwise.

That affects the second part of your question, which is the value proposition that the two sides might make for countries in the global south. My guess is that it’s going to vary a lot by country. You’ll have some countries that have long been wired into the American system through military and intelligence ties or technological ties. Think of some of the Gulf powers in that context. You have others where there’s much less connective tissue historically between them and the United States, and since the Chinese geopolitical or military threat is so remote for those countries, the Chinese offering may be more attractive. That doesn’t mean they’re going to go all in with Beijing, but it does mean that they’re going to be very reluctant to go in with Washington. These sort of hedging and balancing dynamics would be pervasive among the swing states and in the larger global south in this scenario.

RA: Let’s contrast this with your second scenario, which you describe as an age of empires, as it were. Talk about what that looks like and how different it is from scenario one.

HB: If you think about scenario one as a throwback to the second half of the 20th century, scenario two looks like a throwback to the 19th century. It is all about a revival of the type of empires, albeit in less formal guise, that we might have seen 150 years ago. In this scenario, you have an American-led sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere. We can clearly see the contours of that today with the so-called Donroe Doctrine. The critical factor is that in this scenario, the United States isn’t carving out a sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere as a platform for global intervention. It’s carving out a sphere of influence as a way of retreating safely from the rest of the world. As that happens, U.S. alliances in Europe and in the Western Pacific collapse, or they become dead letters. That opens the door for other powers to exert more influence there.

We could probably argue about what exactly falls into a Chinese sphere of influence in East Asia. Does Japan get swept into it? Or does Japan decide that it would prefer to fight it out or develop nuclear weapons to stay out of China’s economic and geopolitical grasp? A variety of these regional empires spring up across what was once thought of as the Old World to compete with the American sphere of influence in the New World.

Now, this is a messier scenario than it would have been 100 years ago, 200 years ago, because economic interdependence, even in this era of de-risking and decoupling, is so much deeper and more complex. So it’s a tough scenario to get to in some respects. In the example of the Western Hemisphere, it’s easy for the United States to express military dominance there. There’s nobody who can compete with it. It’s harder if the United States wants to extirpate Chinese influence from South American telecommunications grids or trade relationships. Those are relatively deep and sticky relationships that would presumably take a lot of coercion or inducement to rupture. So you don’t want to think of it in the purely classical spheres-of-influence sense.

RA: Let’s jump to scenario three now. I call this jungle law. You’re describing it as a self-help world. Why are you using that term, and what does this scenario mean?

HB: Self-help is really an academic term that basically refers to the forms of behavior we would expect in a world where there is no overarching authority or benign hegemon to provide security. We have mostly avoided a self-help world over the past 80 years because the United States has provided a lot of the security relationships and other global public goods that countries rely upon—freedom of the seas, security of trade lanes, and things like that.

But let’s imagine a world now in which the United States is not only not providing those goods, but it has become a predatory, aggressive empire in its own right. Let’s imagine a scenario where the United States says, “Maybe we will just grab Greenland militarily. Maybe we do want Canada to be the 51st state.” It becomes another one of the revisionist powers tearing up the rules and the norms and the relationships that have structured the modern world. In that scenario, there’s really no place for smaller powers to hide because you have three great powers—China, Russia, and the United States—that are all pursuing revisionist agendas. There’s no great power committed to protecting smaller states and preserving the status quo in the way that the United States has been committed to doing for a number of years. What this basically does is takes us back into a world of self-help. It unleashes all of the chaotic dynamics that U.S. primacy has helped suppress.

So, if you are a Japan or a South Korea or a Poland or even a Finland in this scenario, what do you do? You might develop nuclear weapons because you are looking for something that can guarantee your security in a very anarchic world in the way that the United States did for a long, long time. You might see intensified rivalries in regions like East Asia or Europe, where American power has provided that security pacifier in recent generations. And you might just see a whole lot more of the disorder and fragmentation that have been suppressed by American power all this time.

You can see certain elements of this scenario at work right now. One example is that we are hearing louder and more serious debates about nuclear weapons in Tokyo, in Seoul, in Berlin, in Stockholm, in countries throughout America’s alliance bloc. Some of those debates are not new, some of them are new, but it underscores the degree to which countries understand they at least need to be thinking about the possibility of a fundamentally different world.

RA: The overarching premise of your essay is that these three scenarios could be where we are headed after Trump. But of course, many critics of U.S. foreign policy writ large would say that the U.S.-led liberal international order after World War II was hardly perfect. You mentioned this in the essay as well: There was hypocrisy. There was coercion. Rules were regularly broken. Since we’re talking about the world after Trump, what made the world before Trump that special?

HB: There’s always a danger when we talk about the post-1945 international order that we will airbrush out all of the hypocrisies and imperfections in a way that distorts history. We don’t want to do that. That said, if you understand that international politics is a rough game, then the proper metric of comparison for the U.S.-led international order is not a perfect international order free of coercion and hypocrisy—it’s every other international order that has ever existed. And if you stack the U.S. order up next to the competition, it looks pretty good.

RA: If we pull back now and look at those three scenarios, which one is most likely to prevail?

HB: If you made me bet a dollar right now, I would bet on the Cold War II scenario. I think it is going to be virtually impossible to stabilize the U.S.-China relationship over the next five to 10 years because even though you have nice words being spoken by Xi and Trump right now, the reality is that the Chinese challenge to American influence in the Western Pacific, the global economy, and international institutions is only increasing. That challenge is going to create structural dynamics that are very hard to escape. They’re going to exert a lot of pressure on the bilateral relationship with the United States.

So I don’t expect this relatively calm moment in U.S.-China relations to continue for the next five or 10 years. And we know historically that when the two most powerful actors in the international system clash, it creates pressures to align that are very difficult for other states in the international system to escape.

If you made me bet, I would bet on that scenario—but what makes the current moment so interesting and precarious is that it’s a narrow bet. I wouldn’t bet much money on it because we can also see lots of early signs of a spheres-of-influence world or even a more chaotic world. Whereas five years ago I might’ve more confidently predicted that we were heading into a two-world scenario, it’s a closer call now.

RA: We’ve been very disciplined in this debate so far to not play a good-bad game. We’re laying out scenarios, talking about likelihoods and probabilities. But if you had to ascribe values to the three scenarios you’ve laid out, it seems you would favor scenario one.

HB: That’s right. It’s important to note that these are all bad scenarios relative to what we’ve experienced over the past 25 or 35 years. The Cold War II scenario is not what anybody would want because it’s likely to be dangerous. It’s likely to require huge investments and outlays of effort by the United States and its allies to outcompete China and its friends; it’s likely to see a further fragmenting of the international economy.

This is not the scenario that you hope for, but I do think it is the scenario in which we are least likely to see the accomplishments of the past 80 years crumble. In the Cold War II scenario, you at least preserve some of the cooperation between the United States and what we might once have called like-minded countries that allows them to sustain a balance of power in which democratic systems can survive and perhaps thrive. That’s the core redeeming virtue of the Cold War II scenario—it presupposes that level of basic cohesion and cooperation despite all of the stress that these alliances have been under. There’s a certain amount of residual goodness in that.

RA: As we look at the next few months and years ahead with the elections that are coming up—the midterms [this year] and the next presidential election in the United States [in 2028]—what trends or policies are you watching that could forecast which of these three scenarios we might land on?

HB: I would use the 2028 election as a heuristic for thinking about this. You can imagine electoral outcomes that would map onto any of the three scenarios that we’ve talked about. In scenario one, imagine that you get a traditionalist restoration, either a national security Democrat or an internationalist Republican who follows Trump and tries to use the constructive aspects of his policies—getting allies to spend more on defense and that sort of thing—to put the free world club back together, albeit on a more transactional basis. You can imagine a second scenario where Trump is followed by someone who is more in line with the neoisolationist elements—the Tucker Carlson wing of the MAGA coalition. In that scenario, the United States pivots harder toward the “come home to the Americas” approach that is more favorable to a spheres-of-influence world.

And then you can imagine a third scenario where we look back on Trump as the moderate version of the MAGA coalition. It’s not unknown for revolutions to eventually be captured by their most extreme elements. So maybe there is a successor who believes that the problem is that Trump wasn’t serious enough about acquiring Greenland, that he wasn’t serious enough about rupturing international law and behaving in a more nakedly acquisitive fashion. And perhaps that pushes us toward the third scenario. But the 2028 and 2032 elections will be crucial because those are the mechanisms we use to hash out how we think about public policy and international affairs. They will help determine which of the tendencies that are vaguely present in U.S. policy today become dominant and harden into patterns that are harder to reverse over time.

RA: If you’re a policymaker watching or listening to this discussion and you want the best outcome of the three scenarios, what are the things said policymaker would need to do right now?

HB: They would need to pursue a period of restoration in American ties with the democratic world. The United States has made its point around burden sharing and some other issues over the past year. There was a sense, certainly around Greenland in January, that the United States was just pushing it. It was one thing to beat up on European countries over trade practices or burden sharing; it was another to threaten the sovereignty of European nations. That was the sort of thing that was likely to simply be incompatible with the preservation of a trans-Atlantic strategic community. So I think to the degree that the United States can focus on the “good news” stories of the past 14 or 15 months, while toning down the things that seem to take it way too far, will actually be decently positioned for success in a two-world scenario.

RA: When you take a step back and look at the last 80 years, how much of this moment—where we’re at this crossroads you’re describing—is down to regime type, and how much is it down to particular individuals like Trump, Xi, or [Russian President Vladimir] Putin?

HB: The answer to your question of which of these factors is key is: Yes. It’s down to all of these things. It is impossible to imagine the United States pursuing the project it pursued after 1945 if you don’t also imagine a scenario where there have been two world wars in a generation and there’s a threat of a cold war or a third world war that could be even more devastating. That was the necessary spur to get the most geographically secure country in the world to embrace this incredibly broad view of its own interests. It’s also unthinkable that the United States would not have been a democracy. You would have gotten a very different post-1945 international order if the most powerful country in this system was a totalitarian regime.

And since 1945, it has come down to individuals as well. It is hard for me to imagine the post-1945 order taking shape in the way it did without key individuals like Harry Truman and [U.S. Secretary of State] Dean Acheson being there at critical moments. It’s hard to imagine getting such a relatively smooth transition from the Cold War to the post-Cold War period without George H.W. Bush at the helm. And it’s hard to imagine some of the disruption we’ve seen in recent years without thinking about the personality of Donald Trump.

Trump is as much a symptom as he is a cause. In many ways, he’s simply channeling pent-up dissatisfaction with the elements of the existing order, both domestically and internationally. But many of the policies he pursues are inflected with very Trumpy elements. If you think about his use of tariffs, that is distinctively Trumpy, even if there is a broad sense that globalization has gone too far. So it’s all of these things: It’s the nature of the circumstances in the system. It’s the nature of a regime. It is the nature of individuals.