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.

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........

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