President Donald Trump shakes hands with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung during a ceremony in which Trump was presented with a replica of a crown worn by the kings of Silla, at the Gyeongju National Museum on October 29, 2025. | Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty ImagesKey takeawaysTwo political scientists have proposed “neoroyalism” as a new framework to understand Donald Trump’s foreign policy. The idea is that the administration often behaves more like a royal family in medieval Europe than a modern nation-stateSigns of neoroyalism are the degree to which the administration mixes private enterprise and diplomacy, Trump’s habit of handling negotiations through family members and old business partners rather than the traditional bureaucracy, and his habit of enforcing global hierarchy by undermining the sovereignty of weaker nations. Trump isn’t the first modern leader to act this way, but given the importance of the United States system, he has the power to shape the global system and turn this type of politics into the norm.It was not a particularly subtle gift, but as the recipient himself would probably admit, he’s never been a particularly subtle guy. When President Donald Trump arrived in South Korea last month, President Lee Jae Myung presented him with a bejewelled golden crown, a replica of one worn by ancient Korean rulers. The gift came just a few days after millions across the US for the so-called No Kings rallies against Trump’s government. Trump has, in the past year, referred to himself as “the king” on social media and posted AI-generated images of himself wearing a crown.This is all hyperbole, of course. Trump is not a king. But if you want to understand this administration’s often unpredictable foreign policy, it might be useful to think of him as one sometimes. That’s what two political scientists argued in a recent article for the journal International Organization. Stacie Goddard and Abraham Newman coined the term “neo-royalism” to describe how the Trump administration behaves on the world stage. This is not just another argument that Trump is an authoritarian — the article isn’t concerned with Trump’s domestic governance at all. Rather, they argue that the traditional methods of studying international relations, which assume that sovereign nation-states are the primary actors on the world stage, are inadequate when it comes to talking about an administration that acts in often puzzling ways from a traditional international relations perspective, for instance by ratcheting up pressure on allies like Canada and Denmark while seeking deals with adversaries like China and Russia. Instead, they argue, Trump’s reliance on a “clique composed of family members (primarily his children), fierce loyalists (Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem), and elite hyper-capitalists (often tech elites like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen).” The clique tends to mix private interest and national interests in an open and unashamed way that’s totally alien to modern state bureaucracies. Other countries have taken advantage of this tendency: The Wall Street Journal recently reported that as it seeks to sell the White House on its preferred peace plan for Ukraine, Russian representatives have been looking to “bypass the traditional U.S. national security apparatus and convince the administration to view Russia not as a military threat but as a land of bountiful opportunity” involving energy, rare earth deals and even space exploration. It’s not the hardest sell for a president who, back in the 1980s, tried to sell Soviet leaders on a plan to end the Cold War while building a Trump tower across the street from the Kremlin. “It’s misleading if you think of it just as corruption or just a degenerate category of neoliberalism,” Newman, a political scientist at Georgetown University, told Vox. “It’s an entirely different system of how actors distribute power amongst themselves.”It is an approach that has more in common with royal houses before the Enlightenment than modern nation-states and one that has the power to reshape not just American politics but the world order.Return of the royalsMuch ink has been spilled over Trump’s challenge to the so-called liberal international order — the systems of global institutions and norms that emerged after World War II — but Goddard and Newman suggest that, to fully understand Trump, we have to go back to an earlier war and an even more fundamental world order. This kind of analysis is having something of a moment. As Vox reported last year, other scholars have proposed “neomedievalism” to describe a world where great powers like the US, Russia, and China no longer seem to have the political power to match their military might. Scholars often use the term “Westphalian” to describe the modern nation-state system, referring to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 that ended the 30 Years’ War. Under Westphalian sovereignty, a state has exclusive political power within a set of defined borders. While states may differ in their overall military or economic power, they all have an equal right to sovereignty. Before the 17th century in Europe, nation-state borders were less defined, with power often overlapping. The king of Spain could be the duke of Burgundy. The king of Prussia could be an absolute ruler in his own territory, but also subordinate to the Holy Roman Empire. Alliances were often cemented through marriage. This kind of politics might seem remote in today’s world of standing national armies and UN Security Council debates. “I think sometimes we have a little bit of historical amnesia,” said Goddard, a professor of political science at Wellesley College. “It’s not that long ago that these actors were dominant, and families like the Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns were still coexisting right along sovereign states up until World War I.” They never entirely went away. In today’s Persian Gulf, royal families that blur the lines between private business interests and national affairs are still the norm. (Saudi Arabia is a country named after the Saud family that rules it, after all.) So it’s not all that surprising that Trump broke precedent by making the first foreign trip of his term to the Gulf and seems to have such an affinity for the region’s absolutist rulers.What makes Trump’s foreign policy “neo-royalist”? First, the extent to which it’s a family business. Important diplomatic agreements are often negotiated by family members like his son-in-law Jared Kushner or his daughter’s father-in-law Massad Boulos, or longtime business associates like Steve Witkoff with often ill-defined job descriptions. The neoroyalist framing can shed a little light on the recent confusion over whether the 28-point Ukraine-Russia peace plan, negotiated by Witkoff and Kushner with a prominent Russian businessman but partly disavowed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, was actually a US plan or not. It was not really a Trump administration document — but it was a Trump family one. Trump has also mixed his family’s business interests and American foreign policy in an unprecedented way, whether it’s Vietnam circumventing its own laws to approve a Trump golf course during trade talks or Trump’s sons’ real estate deals in the Middle East. There was a telling hot mic moment at a Gaza-focused summit in Egypt in October when Indonesia’s president asked Trump for a meeting with his son, Eric. Trump’s suggestion for redeveloping an ethnically cleansed Gaza into a beachfront resort was the most extreme example of this tendency. Trump also has little regard for the Westphalian notion that all countries have equal sovereignty. In his world, some countries are a little more sovereign than others. According to Newman and Goddard, his talk about purchasing Greenland or making Canada the 51st state is not actually about traditional territorial expansion, spheres of influence or a “Donroe Doctrine.” (There are few benefits to controlling Greenland that the US doesn’t currently enjoy, as well as some new costs.) Rather, Newman said, “it’s about dominance, about saying [to Canada and Denmark], you are not equal to us.”Foreign leaders seem to be accommodating themselves to the new pecking order (or at least the more explicitly defined pecking order), most explicitly and hilariously when NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte referred to Trump as “daddy” at a meeting last June. Trump’s preferred all-purpose foreign policy tool, tariffs, also make sense through a neo-royalist view: They are likely attractive to the administration because they reinforce these power dynamics. The “liberation day” tariffs and pledge to negotiate “90 deals in 90 days” created a dynamic where countries had to pony up the cash in the form of investment pledges in the US to negotiate more favorable trade terms. The ruling clique often stands to benefit from these pledges, as in the case of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s sons, who are helping to finance the data center projects in the US that South Korea is building as part of its investment pledge. Then there are the literal gifts from countries seeking the “king’s” favor. The crown from South Korea, a gold bar and a Rolex from Switzerland, and, most famously, a jet from Qatar. While these lavish gifts have raised ethics concerns, Trump often appears not even to understand why they would be an issue, telling reporters that he would have to be “stupid” to turn down such an expensive plane. Exit, the king?The authors point to some recent precedents for Trump’s neoroyalism, such as how former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi “depended on an exclusive media and financial clique” to solidify political power, rather than traditional power. The factions of friends, business partners, and old security service colleagues that hold (and often compete for) power in Vladimir Putin’s Russia have drawn many comparisons to a czarist court. But, Newman and Gannett stay, what makes the Trump clique distinctive is that because of the economic and military power of the country it governs, it has the power to shape the international order in its own image, and that the changes might be hard to roll back. Consider how, under Trump, the US has taken a partial ownership stake in Intel and is taking a cut of NVIDIA’s sales of AI chips to China. Trump now regularly travels the world with a retinue of tech CEOs like Elon Musk and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang in tow, intermingling US geopolitical power and business interests in a way that will be hard to roll back. “It starts as a series of practices, you know, people might not even take it very seriously,” said Goddard. “But over time, it becomes not only the norm, but you get infrastructures that are built up over this. You know, you can’t easily move the data centers from Saudi Arabia. You can’t get the F-35s back, right? The chips are already in the UAE, right? These types of things are much stickier.”If this isn’t rolled back, where is it headed? Newman said to Vox that “in these types of orders, succession is always a point of incredible instability. Some people may think [when Trump leaves] then it will just be over, but our bet is that it will not be over. It will be a moment of international crisis.”All of which suggests it may be time for all of us to brush up on our Machiavelli.