In his second term, Donald Trump has crafted a foreign policy that is more radical than that of his first but also more politically viable. The stabilizing influence of powerful Cabinet members (the so-called axis of adults) is a thing of the past. In its place stands an unsettling but coherent vision that exploits U.S. allies for economic gain and downplays strategic competition with U.S. rivals in favor of moneymaking deals.Democrats and conservative internationalists warn of long-term costs—above all to American alliances and competitiveness with China—but the short-term consequences have so far been muted, and that may be the most consequential revelation of all. President Trump has shown that a nationalist, protectionist, and transactional approach to global affairs can be sustained without immediate calamity.Calamity could still arrive before November 2028. In that case, Democrats would have a relatively easy time countering the “America First” worldview. But if no bill has yet come due by the next election, Trump’s opponents will need new arguments to convince Americans that might does not make right.Trump’s second-term foreign policy rests on beliefs that the president has held at least since the 1980s. He has long claimed that America’s allies are ripping Washington off and should pay for U.S. security commitments. He has also long objected to free-trade agreements and wanted Washington to use tariffs to set more favorable terms. He has consistently expressed admiration for strongmen. He once praised the Chinese Communist Party for cracking down on protesters in Tiananmen Square and dismissed Mikhail Gorbachev as weak for not behaving similarly. Trump spent his first term surrounded by Cabinet officials—including Gary Cohn, H. R. McMaster, Mike Pence, and Mike Pompeo—who were traditional Republican internationalists. They tried to constrain his choices. Cohn once famously stole a letter off Trump’s desk terminating a trade agreement with South Korea before the president could sign it. McMaster produced a national-security strategy that prioritized great-power competition. The “axis of adults” didn’t always succeed in heading off Trump’s radical policies, such as global tariffs, but they managed to keep a lid on them.In his second term, Trump is determined to have his way. He has surrounded himself with subservient officials willing to do his bidding without question. Earlier this year, the president’s unconstrained “America First” approach seemed poised to drive the country off a cliff. The “Liberation Day” tariffs spurred a dramatic stock-market sell-off and a bond-market crisis. A global trade war and recession seemed likely, if not inevitable. Seven months on, however, despite some upward pressure on inflation, the overall economic picture is not so grim. The S&P 500 is up about 37 percent since April 8, and the Atlanta Federal Reserve estimates that annual economic growth is currently 4 percent.Trump has raised the average U.S. tariff rate from 2.3 percent at the start of his term to 17.9 percent. With the exception of China, other countries have largely not retaliated (or have retaliated only a little), apparently because they worry that the United States has escalation dominance: If they respond in kind, Washington will raise its tariff rate even more. European allies also express concern that a trade war could lead Trump to pull the plug on Ukraine, so they are better off accepting Trump’s terms.Trump has not stopped at tariffs. He has used his leverage to extract grossly unbalanced trade deals from U.S. allies. For instance, Japan has agreed to invest $550 billion in the U.S. economy—with the U.S. reaping 90 percent of the profit from that investment after the principal has been paid off. Trump has negotiated a similar deal with South Korea.Trump’s hardball tactics have gotten American allies to invest more in their militaries. Most NATO countries have agreed to spend 3.5 percent of GDP on defense and 1.5 percent on defense-related infrastructure. Amid some grumbling, Indo-Pacific allies are also increasing their defense spending. These numbers were trending up anyway, but the commitments are probably higher than they would have been had Trump not threatened to withdraw American-security guarantees.[Charles Kupchan: Trump is right that Pax Americana is over]The turn in U.S. foreign policy must be deeply worrying to America’s allies, who can only hope, but not plan, for it to be temporary. For the moment, they have to take Trump’s threats seriously, and they are doing all they can to accommodate his demands. They are also trying to hedge against America by investing in their own capabilities—even though they may not be altogether optimistic that they can achieve autonomy anytime soon.Trump and the “America First” movement can point to these accommodations as vindicating their position. They can say: Bullying works! We treated our allies like garbage, and they took it and even rewarded us for it. Why wouldn’t we continue?The administration’s posture toward America’s rivals is similarly out of step with past practice, and so far appears to have come at similarly little immediate cost. Trump has gone well out of his way to forge a new cooperative relationship with Russia, only to be thwarted by Vladimir Putin’s imperial ambitions and refusal to accept a favorable peace deal. Trump has largely excommunicated China hawks from his team and de-prioritized strategic competition with Beijing. He’s even eased some of the export controls on semiconductor chips associated with AI. Around the time of his October 30 meeting with Xi Jinping, he repeatedly declared the birth of a U.S.-China G2 relationship (implying that the U.S. and China would run the world together, as a “group of two”), something that Japan, India, and others have long feared. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth posted on X that he and the president agree that the “relationship between the United States and China has never been better.”If a Democratic president had done any of this, congressional Republicans would be apoplectic with rage. But, with a few exceptions, such as Senator Mitch McConnell, they are quiet, presumably because they don’t want to cross Trump. The result is a visible fracturing of the supposed tough-on-China consensus at little political cost to Trump.The economy may prove to be a bubble, tariffs could cause an inflation spike, and China may act aggressively. But internationalists need to be ready for the possibility that an unconstrained “America First” policy might be politically popular, or at least not politically unpopular, because the short-term costs are not obvious. Its problems could take a while to become self-evident. They must figure out how to make the case against “America First”–ism—not just the noise and chaos surrounding it, but its core tenets.The best way to do that is to talk plainly about the troubled state of the world today and the choice America faces. That starts with recognizing that Putin, Xi, and Trump destroyed the so-called rules-based international order, which is no longer salvageable. Russia embarked on a war of conquest in Europe, shattering a norm against territorial expansion. China broke the global economy by flooding it with goods from heavily subsidized industries, and now it appears to be preparing for a war to take Taiwan. Under Trump, the United States has embraced tariffs and is flirting with acquiring new territory through force. Even if U.S. policy were to shift back to internationalism in 2028, China and Russia will not have changed. The damage has been done.[Margaret MacMillan: This is the way a world order ends]We’re back to the law of the jungle, where countries can and will do what they feel they can get away with. That transformation coincides with another one—a technological revolution that has upended the way people live and work. The combination presents Americans with an entirely new threat environment. We face not just distant menaces, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or Iran’s nuclear program, but some that lie much closer to home. China has used cybertools to penetrate American infrastructure, positioning Beijing to carry out devastating attacks in the event of a conflict (the Trump administration has said practically nothing about this). Groups based in Russia and North Korea are believed to be behind several ransomware attacks on American hospitals and businesses. The Chinese threat to Taiwan, which is one of the globe’s leading producers of semiconductors, could cut off the international supply of advanced chips and plunge the world into a depression. China has all but threatened to hold back the minerals and rare-earth metals that have become vital to the U.S. economy.The United States has to decide what it wants to be in this dangerous new world: the captain of a team that works together to navigate and improve these conditions, or a predatory lone wolf that maximizes its own short-term gains.Trump and J. D. Vance have made clear that they choose the predatory lone wolf. Democrats need to make the case for why America is better off as a team captain.America’s competitors and rivals—especially Russia and China—have formed their own team, which is ever more closely aligned. They have integrated their military and industrial efforts, they’re sharing sensitive technologies to gain an edge over the United States, and they are cooperating closely to advance an illiberal agenda through groups such as BRICS (an 11-country forum) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.The United States is not big enough to compete with China on its own. As the former Biden-administration officials Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi recently pointed out, China is now able to outproduce the United States across the economic, technological, and military domains. The United States needs to work closely with allies and partners, including the European Union, Japan, India, South Korea, and Australia, if it hopes to compete. A strong team of like-minded countries can join forces to protect workers and businesses against unfair competition, confront technological threats, obtain needed minerals and rare-earth metals, and forge partnerships in the global South.Trump has convinced many Americans that U.S. alliances are a favor to other nations and that there is no cost to squeezing allies until their pips squeak. He frequently describes America’s allies as worse than its adversaries. He has convinced his voters that those allies are yieldingto his indomitable strength. But that is not what’s happening.As traditional U.S. allies yield to Trump, they are accommodating not the president, but American power. That power has been carefully accumulated by successive presidents over the course of decades, through a relatively enlightened foreign policy of alliances and institution-building. Trump now treats American potency as a wasting asset, drawing it down over and over to satisfy his personal whims and ideas. If the United States bullies its teammates and views them as easy marks, they may pay out for a while, especially while they are dependent on America. But these countries won’t remain on America’s team for any longer than they absolutely have to. To fix this, the United States needs to show that it will help build and lead a stronger team that benefits all of its members.This logic may not convince die-hard “America First”-ers who are happy to go it alone. But it levels with the American people about the true state of the world today, rather than harkening back to a supposed golden age of a rules-based order that is already long gone.