Nov 19, 2025 Current Resources

Why Is Washington Acting Like a Revisionist Power?

Not long after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, a European friend asked me: Why is the United States behaving like a revisionist power when it so clearly benefits from the status quo? The only answer that I could offer was that, rightly or wrongly, American leaders no longer viewed the status quo as beneficial following the 9/11 attacks.

The Sept. 11 attacks crystallized a certain then-contemporary anxiety that had not previously translated into policy—the idea that threats to the United States’ post-Cold War global primacy were gathering and that an aggressive approach was warranted to head them off.

Since then, U.S. preeminence has remained surprisingly stable, and we have not seen a catalyzing incident of comparable significance to 9/11. And yet revisionist temptations remain. The United States is never quite satisfied, and perhaps great powers are inherently unsatisfiable. Only 10 months into President Donald Trump’s second term, and the White House has announced renewed sanctions on Russia, military escalation in Latin America, and trade wars both with geopolitical rivals such as China and neighbors such as Canada. Who knows what next week will bring.

Are Americans in fact getting a raw deal out of nominal primacy? Is it a deal whose benefits accrue to too few of the country’s citizens? Or is the United States simply leaving too much money on the table, such that the conditions of hegemony are due for renegotiation? Few leaders tend to obsess over this last question like Trump does, but those broader doubts have been circling U.S. strategic discussions for some time now.

Revisionism as such is not remarkable; it stands to reason that rising powers would have incentive to challenge the prevailing order—like the Tattaglia and Barzini families in The Godfather, or Sparta prior to the Peloponnesian War, or Germany prior to World War I. It is more noteworthy for the superpower to do so, particularly when it played a strong role in establishing that order.

There is, meanwhile, no getting around the idiosyncratic character of the current occupant of the White House. There is no Trumpism—only Trump. And there have already been too many attempts to backfill a strategic rationalization for decisions made on the presidential whim. Political scientist Seva Gunitsky has wisely cautioned against overstating the coherent strategic logic behind Trump’s own preferences.

At the same time, those preferences don’t arise in a vacuum. Yes, there is something personally idiosyncratic about many of Trump’s idées fixes, such as his repeated antagonism of Canada. But his popular appeal, going back a decade now, was always a reflection of discontent (Michael Anton’s essay “The Flight 93 Election” is a representative expression), and it was inevitable that some of that discontent would have a geopolitical dimension.

The latest shake-ups share a certain logic with the post-9/11 outlook, which can be expressed with two questions. First, does the status quo in fact serve U.S. interests more than those of any other power? And second, is the status quo sustainable, or is it leading us toward future risks that are best dealt with now? The Trump administration appears to have responded, respectively, with “no” and “the latter.” That is, in the administration’s view, the status quo does not sufficiently serve U.S. interests—and in addition, unmanaged threats, above all a rising China, are looming on the horizon.

This revisionist outlook has both domestic and international sources, and these overlap. The view is essentially that past U.S. administrations—and indeed, the entire structure of the international political economy that they sustained—have facilitated the rise of a strategic rival at the expense of American workers and the country’s overall future.

The strong case for revisionism is that the status quo going back some decades is hollowing out the source of U.S. power—domestic manufacturing and the middle class—and that those who wish to conserve it are effectively contributing to relative national decline. Indeed, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors gave a White House briefing in early April in which he argued that the U.S. dollar’s reserve function—long viewed as a central pillar of U.S. hegemony—is in fact a net cost for the country.

Many analysts now argue that codifying “most favored nation” status for China back in 2000 was a grave error that was compounded by broader failures to adjust strategically to China’s remarkable growth in the intervening quarter-century. If you accept that argument, then the status quo looks far less appealing.

At the same time, it’s deeply unclear whether the present trade disputes are a preliminary step toward making such an adjustment or merely a distraction from it. Moreover, there is no guarantee that a reversal of those liberal trade policies will necessarily lead to a reversal of the outcome that they produced. That is to say, Chinese aggrandizement may simply be a fact of world politics at this point (or may be induced just as much by confrontational economic policies as by cooperative ones).

Some—mostly leftists and paleoconservatives of various stripes—have long held that hegemony may have been good for America but not Americans. They argue that the U.S. imperial project works at cross-purposes with the United States as a nation, and those whose careers are tied to that project—in finance, defense contracting, and the like—have achieved success at the expense of those who are not. Thus, revisionist policies that attenuated the United States’ hegemonic power would actually benefit the country at large. Those without personal or professional stakes in its international apparatuses do not necessarily benefit from its entrenched obligations abroad and trade arrangements, and they are often harmed by them.

The great strategist George Kennan in fact went further still, believing that the United States’ size and imperial interests had become such a threat to the traditional U.S. way of life, to the extent that he urged that the country be disaggregated into a half-dozen or so smaller territories. Now, this goes further than anything presently being contemplated by the Trump administration. But it is an indication of a tension that has persisted—particularly since the end of the Cold War—in the United States’ dual identity as a nation and as a global hegemon.

In any case, the present revisionism reflects that tension even as it tries to ameliorate it by insisting that its domestic and international goals are ultimately congruent. Meanwhile, whatever happens in the coming months with respect to tariffs and an increasingly blunt approach to otherwise friendly powers, and for that matter whatever happens with Trump himself, the underlying doubts concerning the status quo ante will likely remain.

There is a lesson here for those who do not support the revisionist turn, and it is this: The benefits of a favorable status quo are not alone sufficient to ensure its stability. It must be a goal of political rhetoric to make compelling claims on behalf of the existing regime—especially to those who derive less obvious benefit from it.

There is admittedly a danger to inertia, especially when it comes to the domain of international politics, which is defined by flux and change and requires flexible policies to match. As the famous line in The Leopard has it: If we wish for things to remain as they are, it is necessary for everything to change.

In this sense at least, revisionism may only be provisional, though it risks taking on its own reality—it may, in other words, aim primarily at preservation of the status quo even as it unintentionally contributes to overturning it. The Soviet policies of glasnost and perestroika, after all, were not undertaken with the aim of radically altering the international system but, rather, were unsuccessful attempts at restabilizing a listing superpower. This is the core wager of a revisionist strategy. The danger is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Of course, even if it’s directionally correct, there is still the matter of adjudicating among strategic priorities, especially where domestic politics is concerned. Indeed, this was a major critique levied against past administrations by certain figures in Trump’s orbit, such as Elbridge Colby: that Washington had committed U.S. resources to secondary or even tertiary conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East while failing to husband them against the more substantial threat that China represents in the Pacific.

Even if the United States does manage to work out these priorities, the need to reorganize major features of postwar international relations has contributed to the country treating erstwhile trade partners and allies in more bluntly instrumental ways. Online commentator Niccolo Soldo predicted in a much-discussed essay that the logic of hegemony would impel the United States to begin to impose more overtly extractive policies on once-friendly nations, and this increasingly looks to be the case.

All of this makes explicit a certain feature of U.S. supremacy, and to a large extent of great-power politics: that it operates as a protection racket. Strong states maintain their position by denying space to contenders and extracting rents from weaker allies under their protection—a tradition that goes back at least to Periclean Athens.

But Washington has generally benefited from not insisting on this reality. And considering this comparison of statecraft to gangsterism, one can’t help recalling Henry Hill’s final monologue in Goodfellas and wonder whether Washington will look back in the same way as the country pursues its present revisionist course: “We had it all, just for the asking. … And now it’s all over.”