Presidents Trump and Putin will meet at a summit in Alaska today, the first meeting between President Putin and an American President since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Mooted as a summit to end the war, it may end as the latest Trump-era American action to undermine the rules-based international order and threaten the sovereignty of smaller states.

We already know that President Trump admires authoritarians like President Putin. Indeed, he wishes he could rule as one – his domestic policies are a clear effort to turn the US into a more authoritarian state. He also sees international relations as an arena of great power politics, in which the only states that matter are those with immense hard power, and, as Thucydides put it, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

Just as his domestic policies threaten to transform the US into an authoritarian regime, his foreign policy threatens a return to an older form of international order, which we thought had been put to bed by international institutions like the United Nations.

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In this old (or new, depending on how you look at it) order, states like the US, Russia, and China carve the world up into spheres of influence in which they exercise power without external intervention. They control the smaller states around them, dictating how those smaller states act to their advantage, always with the threat of force behind every diplomatic overture. When the interests of those powers conflict, they sit around a table and hammer out a deal. Whether that deal is acceptable to smaller states or not is irrelevant – they are coerced into compliance.

That is precisely........

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