‘I don’t need international law’: Trump’s Wild West doctrine freezes European brains
European countries are trying not to think about how much they still need Donald Trump. Some diplomats say it’s time they did.' - Politico, Tim Ross
The Plural Coercive Order
Why Trump’s doctrine is not an aberration but America’s adaptation — and why Europe has no alternative to law.
1. The end of the legal illusion
International law did not function because humanity matured.
It functioned because:
the U.S. needed allies,
allies needed protection,
the Soviet Union existed.
Law had a sheriff and a rival.
That architecture collapsed twice:
in 1991 — when the USSR disappeared,
in 2020–2024 — when the U.S. realized it no longer needed to pretend to enforce the architecture that kept the Cold War stable.
Trump did not kill international law.
He merely declared the body dead.
2. The new geometry: functional hegemony
The 21st century is not “multipolar” in the Cold War sense.
That is strategic nostalgia disguised as analysis.
The real landscape is functional plurarchy — a system in which different powers dominate different functions, not territories:
U.S. — kinetic reach + dollar leverage
China — industrial chains + critical materials
Russia — energy leverage + nuclear risk + war
India — demographic weight + neutral hedging
Gulf — hydrocarbons + capital
Turkey — geography + drones
North Korea — nuclear blackmail
EU — regulation + standards
No one dominates everything.
And that is unprecedented.
3. Why Trump frightens Europeans
European elites cling to the idea that international law is the skeleton of order.
Trump’s doctrine says the opposite:
“Law is not the order. It is a tool until the U.S. no longer benefits.”
This horrifies Europeans not because it’s new,
but because it’s accurate.
The uncomfortable forecast is this:
Democrats will not reverse this trajectory.
They may restore decorum, joint statements, summits and communiqués,
but they will not restore enforcement — because enforcement is expensive and yields diminishing returns in a plurarchic world.
This is what Europe cannot metabolize.
4. Why the United States cannot “do everything”
Plural coercion does not mean omnipotence.
It imposes structural constraints:
Washington cannot halt Chinese supply chains,
cannot force India into Western sanctions,
cannot shut down Saudi oil production,
cannot isolate Russia outside the OECD-NATO envelope,
cannot contain Iran without regional war.
The U.S. remains the strongest kinetic actor,
but no longer the guardian of systemic compliance.
5. The European condition: not idealism but compulsion
It is tempting to say Europe “believes” in international law.
This is analytically wrong.
Europe does not believe — Europe has no functional alternative.
Europe is the only major actor that:
requires law because it lacks coercive force,
requires institutions because it lacks sovereign power,
requires trade because it lacks resource and energy autonomy.
What appears as idealism is actually structural dependence:
law without force — not by conviction, but because Europe has no army of consequence,
institutions without power — not by principle, but because sovereignty is fragmented,
trade without sovereignty — not by ideology, but because industrial energy and raw materials were outsourced.
Hence the inevitable result:
Europe weaponizes norms not out of belief, but out of necessity.
Sanctions, regulations, taxonomy, ESG, GDPR, extraterritorial standards, courts —
these are not Enlightenment virtues.
They are substitutes for coercion.
And the key truth is simple:
Norms without soldiers are administrative complaints, not instruments of order.
Europe imitates power without admitting it has none.
6. The world Europe refuses to see
Europe still models the system as:
USA vs China
Reality is:
USA + China + Russia + India + Gulf + ASEAN + unaligned Africa
and most of these actors do not want Europe’s norms —
they want Europe’s markets, technology, and currency stability.
The world is not anti-Western.
It is post-Western.
This is the conceptual gap that disables 90% of Western think tanks.
7. Trump as adaptation, not anomaly
The most honest sentence you can write in Washington today is:
Trump is not a deviation from U.S. grand strategy — he is its vernacular.
Biden manages the same structural shift,
but with multilateral syntax.
Republicans strip the grammar,
Democrats retain the punctuation.
The sentence remains identical.
8. And here is the uncomfortable coda
When Europe says:
“We must defend international law.”
The Global South hears:
“Europe wants the 1990s back.”
When Trump says:
“I don’t need international law.”
The same audience hears:
“At least one hegemon is speaking the truth.”
In the Plural Coercive Order,
the first hegemon to drop the mask sets the tempo.
Trump dropped it.
Everyone else is adjusting.
