In his second term, U.S. President Donald Trump has outlined grand diplomatic ambitions. He has promised to bring peace to Ukraine and Gaza, sought to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb, pursued dozens of new trade deals, demanded cooperation on migration and drug trafficking from Latin American states, and pushed U.S. partners to provide more for their own defense. To achieve these goals, Trump has often attempted coercion. In this term alone, Trump has made threats, both economic and military, against at least 20 countries, some of them U.S. allies.

But again and again, the administration’s coercive efforts have been frustrated. Russia’s war against Ukraine rages on. Only a handful of trade deals have been inked, and U.S.-imposed tariffs remain high. Threats to annex Greenland and Canada have managed only to alienate U.S. partners. Most recently, after his economic “maximum pressure” campaign failed to coerce Iran into making concessions on its ballistic missile and nuclear programs, Trump turned to outright warfare. But Tehran dug in, securing a new level of control over maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, and with the cease-fire broken, conflict over the Strait has resumed.

The paradox is plain: Trump is exceptionally dedicated to coercion as a core foreign policy tool yet is one of its least effective practitioners. The problem lies in Trump’s conflation of coercion—a nuanced foreign policy strategy—with belligerence and raw demonstrations of strength. But effective coercion requires more than heavy-handed threats. In fact, Trump’s approach makes opponents less likely to comply with his demands, both by revealing the limits of U.S. capabilities and resolve and by undermining the credibility of U.S. assurances that targets will be left alone if they acquiesce.

Trump’s self-defeating efforts at coercion are undermining America’s real coercive power. Unless future administrations, and Congress, act to reverse this damage, ironically, a president enamored of coercion will have degraded the U.S. ability to use it effectively for years to come.

When a state employs a strategy of coercion, it uses threats of punishment (such as sanctions, tariffs, or airstrikes) to try to change another state’s behavior. After catching another country building a secret nuclear reactor, for instance, it might compel the target to accept international inspections to avoid the destruction of the facility through military force. Or it might push a government to cease human rights abuses to avert the pain of an economic embargo. Coercion offers a choice: obey the demands of the coercer or suffer the consequences. 

In an ideal scenario, coercers need not actually carry out their threats, as targets concede solely on the basis of prospective punishment. In reality, however, a demonstration of power is sometimes required to prove that threats are credible and severe: imposing sanctions, mobilizing troops, or conducting limited strikes may all be part of a coercive strategy. But when a state tries to achieve the full object of its initial demand by brute force, coercion has failed—destroying the nuclear facility via airstrikes after the target state refused to voluntarily shut it down, for example.

Most policymakers intuit that coercion’s effectiveness depends on the strength of the threat. They assume that targets make concessions when a threat of punishment is so undeniably serious that there is no alternative other than to acquiesce. But threats alone are insufficient for successful coercion because even highly credible threats fail if they are not conditional. For coercion to work, the target must trust that it will be able to avoid pain through compliance. As the economist Thomas Schelling argued decades ago, coercers must not only threaten targets but also........

© Foreign Affairs