Is the United States acting like a rogue state? Stephen Walt, a Harvard University professor and FP columnist, has been making the case in these pages that the Trump administration is showing all the qualities that we once associated with Iran or North Korea. How damaging will this prove to be for Washington’s reputation, and what can countries do to navigate a United States that has abandoned the pursuit of soft power?

On the latest episode of FP Live, Walt joined me to discuss his recent essay on this topic. Subscribers can watch the full conversation on the video box atop this page or download the free FP Live podcast. What follows here is a condensed and lightly edited transcript.

Is the United States acting like a rogue state? Stephen Walt, a Harvard University professor and FP columnist, has been making the case in these pages that the Trump administration is showing all the qualities that we once associated with Iran or North Korea. How damaging will this prove to be for Washington’s reputation, and what can countries do to navigate a United States that has abandoned the pursuit of soft power?

On the latest episode of FP Live, Walt joined me to discuss his recent essay on this topic. Subscribers can watch the full conversation on the video box atop this page or download the free FP Live podcast. What follows here is a condensed and lightly edited transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: You’ve called Trump’s America predatory, or even a rogue state. Explain what you mean by that.

Stephen M. Walt: The predatory part is that, during [President Donald] Trump’s second term, the United States has essentially adopted a zero-sum approach to all of its relations—not just toward adversaries, with whom all great powers tend to act in a fairly assertive and predatory fashion, but toward some of our closest allies. You see this in the tariff policy, trying to extract concessions on economic terms by threatening other countries with tariffs; in constantly threatening to withdraw American military protection if he doesn’t get what he wants from partners; in expecting allies to come to the White House and show acts of fealty and submission. All of this is designed to get the lion’s share of any deal. One other example is the coveting of Greenland, which doesn’t belong to the United States—but that doesn’t matter to Trump.

So the notion that the United States might have common interests with others, and that we adopt mutually beneficial relations, is largely alien to a predatory hegemon. Their guiding credo is, “What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is negotiable.”

RA: Whenever we talk about transactionalism or being predatory, I tend to add the word “nakedly.” Because it’s one thing to try to achieve one’s ends by being transactional, which all of us do at some level, or by trying to get a better deal, which all of us want on some level. But Trump’s way seems to be nakedly so, so much so that everyone is talking about it. Countries see it quite clearly.

SW: It has a couple of other dimensions to it as well. Certainly, the open, almost gleeful embrace of this has been noticed by everyone. But it means that people lose confidence in the U.S.’s willingness to keep its promises. You reach a deal over some particular issue, and that might get changed a few months or years later. So, other countries are going to be less inclined to cooperate with the United States because they won’t be sure any deals will be kept.

The second part is that it’s contradictory. It forces our allies and partners into situations that are almost impossible. For example, on one hand, we want our allies to invest a larger share of their wealth on defense. That makes sense from an American perspective. But at the same time, we’re imposing onerous economic tariffs on them, which hurts their economies and makes it harder for them to contribute more to defense. What’s missing, in short, for a predatory hegemon is the idea that sometimes you can make yourself better off........

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