Establishment officials in Europe and the United States are shedding longstanding norms of empire denial by taking positions on what the Trump administration’s foreign policy means for the future of Pax Americana.
Since former U.S. Ambassador to NATO and longtime architect of American empire Ivo Daalder declared “the end of Pax Americana” after the 2024 election of Donald Trump, deliberation over the fate of U.S. imperial power has intensified at the highest levels of government, where officials are trying to determine if the United States will continue to dominate the world.
Although many establishment officials remain reluctant to speak of U.S. imperial power, the Trump administration’s foreign policy has grown so volatile, now including military aggression against Venezuela, that several establishment leaders have begun to reveal deep concerns over the implications for Pax Americana.
In May of last year, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen went so far as to propose a Pax Europaea as an alternative.
“We cannot sit idly by as upheaval unfolds,” von der Leyen said. “We cannot allow ourselves to be thrown off course by the seismic changes that we are facing.”
Establishment Concerns
For over a decade, foreign policy elites have been deliberating over the future of Pax Americana, or the global imperium that the United States has led and dominated since the end of World War II.
Since well before von der Leyen issued her call for a Pax Europaea, U.S. strategic analysts have been trying to discern the most consequential factors for Pax Americana. Driven by deep anxieties about challenges to U.S. imperial power, including the knowledge that all empires have fallen, they have come to focus on two major developments.
One is rising powers. Concerned about China and Russia, U.S. strategic analysts began warning about a transition away from a unipolar world dominated by the United States to a multipolar world wracked by great-power competition.
In 2012, the National Intelligence Council delivered a stark warning in its Global Trends report. “With the rapid rise of other countries, the ‘unipolar moment’ is over and Pax Americana—the era of American ascendancy in international politics that began in 1945—is fast winding down,” the National Intelligence Council reported.
Although analysts agreed that the United States remained the world’s most powerful country, knowing it could still direct major attacks against countries such as Venezuela, they feared that the United States was losing its ability to impose its will on the world. Following Russia’s 2014 intervention in Ukraine, analysts increasingly asserted that global politics was entering a new era of great-power competition.
Soon thereafter, analysts began to identify another major challenge to Pax Americana. As they pushed U.S. leaders to reframe U.S. foreign policy in terms of great-power competition, they raised alarms about the political rise of Donald Trump, especially his impulsive nature, disdain for allies, and cruder perspective on American empire.
Over the course of Trump’s first term in office, the U.S. foreign policy establishment was one of his main critics, even working against him. Although Trump shared the establishment’s commitment to U.S. military dominance and his advisor Stephen Bannon spoke of Pax Americana, the U.S. foreign policy establishment remained convinced that Trump generated instability. Daalder began warning about the waning of Pax Americana.
Since the start of the second Trump administration, the U.S. foreign policy establishment has grown more critical. Although it has reproduced many of the same warnings about Trump’s impulsive behavior, it has been warning more openly about the implications for U.S. imperial power.
Leading the way, Daalder has made some of the most dramatic assertions. Not only did he announce “the end of Pax Americana” in an op-ed shortly after the 2024 election, but he and his colleague James Lindsay wrote a detailed obituary of Pax Americana for Foreign Affairs, the main journal of the U.S. foreign policy establishment.
“Pax Americana is gone,” Daalder and Lindsay declared in the opening line of their article. “The U.S.-led international rules-based order died with the second inauguration of Donald J. Trump.”
The Transatlantic Context
Daalder’s dramatic pronouncements may have gained little attention beyond establishment circles, but they have created a basis for a more open discussion among establishment figures about U.S. imperial power, especially among Atlanticists.
Since Daalder first declared the end of Pax Americana in the European edition of Politico, the U.S. foreign policy establishment has shown particular concern for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), one of the key pillars of Pax Americana. Unlike the Trump administration, which has displayed special interest in the Western Hemisphere, the U.S. foreign policy establishment has maintained the position that strong transatlantic relations are foundational to U.S. global power.
Alarmed by Trump’s criticisms of NATO, including his claims that its expansion provoked Russia into invading Ukraine, establishment figures have been scrambling to make the case that NATO remains critical to the United States.
“NATO is one of our greatest strategic assets,” former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith told Congress in June.
Daalder, who is also a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, has gone to great lengths to advocate on behalf of NATO, even dropping the pretense that NATO is an alliance of equals. In a lecture on Pax Americana in July, Daalder openly acknowledged that the United States has historically directed NATO and used its power over the military alliance to control Europe and project U.S. military power into the Middle East. Daalder conceded that Trump has gotten European countries to increase their military spending and take more responsibility for their security, but he warned that the president’s tactics may weaken U.S. control over Europe.
Several years from now, Daalder warned, the result may be that “they’re less dependent on us than they are now, which means we have less capacity to control.”
The U.S. foreign policy establishment has remained determined that the United States continue to dominate both Europe and NATO, but it received a major shock in December, when the Trump administration seemed to move against Europe. Not only did the Trump administration express disdain for Europe in its National Security Strategy, but President Trump gave a highly provocative interview in which he called European leaders weak, alleging they are “destroying their countries.”
Following the provocations, growing anxiety among Atlanticists then spilled into the open, with some of the highest-level officials on both sides of the Atlantic taking positions on the future of Pax Americana.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz issued some of the most dramatic remarks, declaring that transatlantic relations are undergoing a fundamental change and that Pax Americana is ending in Europe.
“The decades of Pax Americana are largely over for us in Europe, and for us in Germany as well,” Merz said. “It no longer exists as we knew it.”
In response, Secretary of State Marco Rubio then defended the Trump administration’s approach. Rather than denying any interest in Pax Americana, as several U.S. presidents have done in the past, Rubio indicated that there is no merit to the German chancellor’s claim about the end of Pax Americana in Europe.
“I don’t know why he’s saying that,” Rubio said.
To support his position, Rubio insisted that the United States wields extraordinary influence in Europe. He cited massive U.S. military spending and alluded to the fact that the United States maintains a sprawling military presence across the continent.
“We have troops stationed there,” Rubio said. “We have capabilities there.”
Elites and Empire
Whatever the case may be for Pax Americana, major changes are taking place concerning how elites speak about American power. Breaking with longstanding norms of empire denial, high-level officials in both Europe and the United States are turning to imperial frameworks to explain U.S. foreign policy.
In many ways, President Trump spurred the change. With fewer establishment advisors restraining him since the start of his second term, the president has openly embraced imperial ambitions, demanding the annexation of countries and threatening to conduct military interventions. Trump declared in a major address to the nation that he wants the United States to be the “most dominant civilization ever to exist on the face of this Earth.”
The Trump administration presented imperial goals in its National Security Strategy, calling for economic dominance and military superiority. The strategy embraces the Monroe Doctrine and marks Latin America as a sphere of influence. It reads like a manifesto for American empire, even if providing a cruder imperial logic for a more volatile empire.
Recently acting on its imperial threats, the Trump administration directed a military intervention in Venezuela, the country with the largest known oil reserves in the world. U.S. military forces captured the country’s president, forcibly removing him from Venezuela and taking him to the United States.
Speaking at a press conference, Trump called the military operation “a spectacular assault,” declared that “we’re going to run the country,” and announced that he was handing over the country’s oil industry to U.S. oil companies.
“Under our new National Security Strategy, American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,” Trump said.
At the same time, however, establishment officials in Europe and the United States are also thinking in imperial terms, even while criticizing Trump. Concerned about the implications of the Trump administration’s growing volatility, for both transatlantic relations and the world, they are openly deliberating over the future of Pax Americana.
In other words, it is not only Trump who speaks the language of empire. Atlanticists harbor deep-seated imperial commitments as well.
Whatever conclusions establishment officials may draw, their open talk of Pax Americana indicates that they conceptualize the United States as an imperial power and care deeply about its imperial future.