The Axis of Illiberalism (2026) — Part IV

Power Without Restraint: The Illiberal Turn in American Foreign Policy

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NATO protection publicly questioned. Sweeping tariffs imposed on treaty allies. Trade agreements overridden by executive fiat. An invaded country blamed for its own invasion. Its president publicly rebuked during a White House meeting broadcast worldwide. Territorial integrity treated as negotiable. Military support linked to preferential access to natural resources. A civilian population described as a problem to be removed. International courts dismissed as illegitimate when they scrutinise allied violence. Agreements broken as routine practice. Authoritarian leaders praised. Democratic allies disciplined.

Taken individually, each of these actions can be (sort of) rationalised. Taken together, they cannot. What emerges is not erratic leadership or diplomatic incompetence. It is a coherent shift in how American power now understands itself. This is not isolationism, nor a return to classical realism. It is an illiberal doctrine of foreign policy that mirrors the hollowing out of liberal democracy at home and projects it outward as strategy.

Illiberalism does not stop at borders. Once restraint is dismantled domestically, it becomes optional internationally. The same suspicion of law, hostility to oversight, and contempt for universality that erodes democratic constraint inside states reappears abroad as doctrine. Power no longer seeks justification in universal terms. It asserts, conditions, and disciplines.

The complete doctrine is not written down as a single manifesto. It is visible in repeated decisions and priorities. It rejects multilateral restraint. It treats international law as conditional. It embraces hierarchy over reciprocity. It collapses the boundary between public authority and private gain. It shows no principled objection to alliances with repressive regimes, provided they do not constrain executive power.

The consequences fall unevenly. Smaller states absorb the pressure. Institutions fracture. Civilians bear the cost. Predictability disappears. Protection becomes conditional. Survival becomes negotiable.

The pattern becomes clearer when viewed alongside the governing logic of other illiberal actors. Vladimir Putin represents the blunt version, enforcing spheres of influence through force, wars described as “special military operations” and treating sovereignty as contingent. Viktor Orbán demonstrates the institutional version, retaining elections while hollowing out constraint and paralysing multilateral bodies from within. Benjamin Netanyahu exemplifies the permanent emergency model, framing politics as existential security management and portraying legal restraint as hostile interference.

These actors do not share a military alliance. What they share is method. Rules are for others. Power is for us. Constraint is illegitimate when it binds the strong.

American foreign policy has increasingly converged with this logic. Ukraine provides the clearest illustration. Under Trump, US peace proposals increasingly treated Ukrainian territorial integrity as a bargaining chip in great-power negotiations rather than as a principle of international law. This posture was made visible during a widely broadcast White House meeting where President Volodymyr Zelensky was publicly pressured to accept imposed terms and admonished in front of cameras. The message was unmistakable. Ukrainian sovereignty was conditional. Ukrainian dignity was optional.

At the same time, continued military and economic support was explicitly linked to preferential access for American firms to Ukraine’s critical minerals and reconstruction contracts. Aid was reframed as investment. Survival was exchanged for extraction rights. Illiberal doctrine does not merely ignore injustice. It monetises vulnerability.

America’s Europe strategy illustrates how illiberal logic is laundered into official doctrine. The 2025 United States National Security Strategy reframed Europe not as a partner in democracy and shared restraint but as a civilisation in decline, undermined by migration, demographic change, and supranational governance. The European Union was recast as an obstacle to sovereignty rather than a guarantor of rights, while ethno-nationalist movements (favoured by Russia) were portrayed as corrective forces. This was not rhetorical excess. It was a signal that alignment with Washington would increasingly bypass multilateral institutions in favour of bilateral loyalty.

The text did not invoke conspiracies like “Cultural Marxism” or the “Great Replacement”. It did not need to. Those narratives share a common structure: civilisation under existential threat, institutions as agents of decay, extraordinary measures as necessity. Illiberal doctrine translates that structure into statecraft, replacing conspiratorial language with strategic euphemism while preserving the diagnosis and the targets. This is how illiberal ideas enter international policy.

Economic policy follows the same logic. In 2025, the United States imposed sweeping tariffs on close allies including Canada and the European Union, despite existing trade agreements and without meaningful multilateral consultation. These measures were not narrow remedies for specific trade violations. They functioned as discipline. Compliance was rewarded. Resistance punished. Unpredictability embraced. Allies openly debated strategic autonomy and decoupling as a result. This was not classical protectionism. It was economic gunboat diplomacy, where markets became leverage and trade law became optional.

NATO reveals the security consequences most starkly. Throughout 2025, senior US officials repeatedly suggested that Article 5 collective defence commitments might not apply automatically to allies deemed insufficiently compliant with US demands. Protection was reframed as transactional favour rather than unconditional guarantee. European leaders warned publicly that such rhetoric weakened deterrence and fractured the alliance. Deterrence eroded not through withdrawal, but through doubt. NATO can never recovered from the damage inflicted by Trump’s illberalism, and Putin could not be happier.

Gaza extends the same logic to population itself. In early 2025, US and Israeli officials discussed post-war plans for Gaza that involved relocating Palestinians outside the territory as part of reconstruction and redevelopment. Human rights organisations warned that these proposals amounted to ethnic cleansing under international law, since they sought to make the continued presence of the indigenous population untenable. This was framed not as punishment, but as solution. Blatant ethnic cleansing was repackaged as humanitarian relief.

When international courts and human rights bodies raised objections, the response was not legal engagement but dismissal. Institutions were described as biased, politicised, or illegitimate. International law prohibiting forcible transfer was not rebutted. It was bypassed. Legality ended where alignment began.

Venezuela demonstrates how illiberal doctrine treats economic sovereignty and political independence as threats that justify coercion. In late 2025, US forces carried out air strikes on vessels in the Caribbean alleged, with minimal public evidence, to be involved in contraband trafficking. These strikes killed crew members. In at least one documented incident, survivors of an initial strike were targeted and executed while attempting to flee, raising serious questions under international humanitarian and maritime law. Reports indicated that aircraft involved in these operations were disguised to resemble civilian planes, a tactic that legal scholars warn may violate longstanding norms separating military from civilian actors.

On 3 January 2026, the United States escalated dramatically. Following air strikes on infrastructure in and around Caracas, US special forces seized President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores during a pre-dawn operation and transported them to the United States to face federal charges. Maduro was subsequently presented in custody across American media outlets, while US officials announced plans to assert control over Venezuelan oil exports and invite American companies to manage the sector.

A sitting head of state was forcibly removed and displayed. The operation was justified as law enforcement. It bypassed international legal process entirely.

Across these cases, the pattern is unmistakable. The United States is dismantling the rules-based international order.

At this point, a familiar objection arises. The United States has violated international law before. It has supported coups and dictators. It has invaded countries illegally. Israel’s domination of Palestinians did not begin yesterday. None of this is new.

The observation is correct. The conclusion drawn from it is not.

The liberal order was always compromised in practice. What is new is that it is now being rejected in principle. Earlier violations were framed as exceptions, emergencies, or regrettable necessities. They paid legitimacy costs. They required justification. Hypocrisy still acknowledged the rule.

Illiberal doctrine does not bother. Constraint is not bent. It is denied. Law is not violated reluctantly. It’s considered a bonus. Moral language is not rebutted. It is inverted.

Ethnic cleansing becomes humanitarian relief. Extraction becomes investment. Impunity becomes sovereignty. Collapse becomes proof that resistance was foolish.

This is not a change in tone. It is a change in operating logic. When power stops pretending to justify itself, restraint collapses faster. There is no reputational cost to absorb. No contradiction to manage. No institutional cover to maintain.

This is not realism. It is imperial logic updated for the 21st century. Gunboats have been replaced by sanctions, tariffs, and interdictions. Unequal treaties are renamed deals. Sovereignty is tolerated only when compliant.

The most dangerous feature of this doctrine is its export. American power is now used not only to shape state behaviour, but to legitimise illiberal movements inside other democracies. Courts are attacked. Press freedoms undermined. Citizenship narrowed. Executive power exalted. Illiberal democracy becomes a political export.

This is not chaos. It is Illiberalism. Hierarchical, transactional, extractive, and unconstrained by universal rules. It does not promise peace. It promises leverage.
It does not defend democracy. It redefines it. It does not dismantle the international system in its entirety. It repurposes it around power.

The question is no longer whether this doctrine exists. It is whether liberal democracies recognise it in time to respond collectively, rather than as isolated states reacting to pressure one by one. Because in an illiberal world, fragmentation is not an accident. It is the strategy.