It’s no secret that President Donald Trump has global aspirations — despite his promises of focusing on “America First.” The past few weeks have seen US action in Venezuela; threats to Greenland, Europe, and Iran; and Trump’s open solicitation of a Nobel Peace Prize.
The president’s latest global push: the Board of Peace.
With its billion-dollar lifetime membership fee, the new body has been labeled a minor bid to replace the United Nations. So far the countries who have joined are relatively minor players on the world stage, including Belarus, Azerbaijan, and El Salvador.
But whether or not the board ends up successful in its mission to create “a more nimble and effective international peace-building body,” it’s Trump’s latest attempt to exert a new kind of international power, especially over America’s neighbors.
“He’s trying to reestablish the US sphere of influence, its control over the Western Hemisphere,” said Monica Duffy Toft, professor of international politics at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and director of the Center for Strategic Studies.
Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Toft about where our idea of a “world order” came from and where it may be headed after Trump’s shakeup. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
It is unbelievably still January of 2026, and we have had really significant events in Venezuela, over Greenland, with the EU and NATO. And all of this is leading people to say President Donald Trump is trying to remake the world order.
So the world order was established after World War II. The United States and its Western allies decided to establish rules that would govern the international system and along with that a series of institutions, including, by the way, the United Nations. And what they were trying to do is set up a system of law — international law, norms, and rules in order to prevent a third world war.
The idea was that the use of force — the use of the military — was no longer going to be an acceptable form of international politicking on the global arena.
This is the thing that President Trump seeks to change or to undo or to disrupt. You’ve written about a philosophy that you think is relevant right now. What’s the philosophy?
He’s trying to reestablish the US sphere of influence, its control over the Western Hemisphere. And a sphere of influence, it’s best understood as control without rule. States within a sphere are sovereign on paper; they have their own government, their own borders, their own money, and they have international recognition. But their strategic choices are restrained by the great power, and in this case, it’s the United States.What [the US] is doing is saying, under President Trump and his administration, [countries within its sphere] can’t freely choose alliances, trade partners without crossing lines or without getting agreement from the United States.
What’s the sphere of influence that the US is seeking? We clearly want to have a lot of influence in Venezuela. Greenland, the president has been very clear there as well. But what other nations and regions do we see Trump wanting to have influence over? And what does he want them to do or not do?
We know that he wants the Western sphere under US control. This was part of the National Security Strategy that was released. And it’s very clear that the United States is going to dominate the region. You can look at what is done in Venezuela, where it just said Venezuela can no longer have [formal trade] relations with China and with Russia.
But paradoxically, [the Trump administration] also wants to have global reach. And so now we’re seeing the tensions. There’s a flotilla moving to the Middle East in order to get Iran to behave. And then also the United States wants to maintain its leverage in Asia. It has allies there, of course: Japan and Taiwan and South Korea.
So on the one hand, it’s really pressing its case in the Western Hemisphere, but then it’s also insisting that it should have some leverage in these other regions. And the one that is probably most problematic is Asia. Because of course if the United States can have pointy elbows in its own sphere, China could make the argument, then why can’t we?
This makes me wonder then: Who are the other great powers? Who are the other nations trying to influence the smaller nations here?
The top two are probably the Russian Federation, of course, which invaded Ukraine in 2014 and then again in 2022. And [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s made it very clear that he wants to determine Ukrainians’ foreign policy so much so that it doesn’t want to join in the EU or NATO, and it doesn’t want NATO expanded. So the Russian Federation is one.
And of course, the other one is China, whose economy is booming, as a huge population and a large landmass.
This makes me think of the way [China’s leader] Xi [Jinping] and Putin talk about their objectives in the world. Let’s go back to early January, after the United States spirited [Venezuelan President] Nicolas Maduro out of Venezuela.
Stephen Miller got on television and he said to CNN’s Jake Tapper, “We live in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world — since the beginning of time.”
It was striking. It reminded me of the way Vladimir Putin talks about the world and the way Xi talks about the world.
Is the United States just doing what Russia and China are already doing?
Noel, that is a great way to put it. But what I would say is we were already there.
The United States superpower has always been [about] trade, and free trade. And so what’s paradoxical here is that we did not need to use force to do that. Now we’re using force, but at a time in history when we’re finding that it’s not as effective in securing our national strategic goals.
What’s kind of a shame here is that the United States is, under President Trump — he seems to like this muscular foreign policy. You get the quick victories, [like] Venezuela. But over the longer term, it’s eroding the American reputation. And over the longer term, it’s actually undermining our interests.
What you’re going to see is a balancing against the United States. You’re already seeing the hedging, where you’ve got [Prime Minister] Mark Carney of Canada declaring,“We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it.” That we’re in a new world order, and we cannot rely on our allies — we cannot rely on the United States. And he’s not alone.
You said the United States is using force, and I wonder to what degree you think that’s true. So Venezuela, yes, we did go in. It was a quick mission, I think we could put it that way. Greenland, we did not actually do anything, nor did we even end up levying tariffs on Europe over the whole Greenland fight. President Trump backed off.
So when you say we’re using force, how do you see that? You’re not talking boots on the ground, right?
The Trump administration did say with the Greenland operation, before it deescalated, thankfully, that they wouldn’t discount putting American forces in there and reestablishing those bases.
I wasn’t fully confident that the US wasn’t going to deploy troops. And I’m pretty sure the Europeans feared that the US was going to take that step.
We love sanctions and Trump loves tariffs, and we’re using them not only against adversaries, but against allies. Noel, that’s the difference, right? Is that we’re threatening our allies, and because the United States is so quick with the trigger, we can’t be trusted that we’re not going to use force.
It feels like we are barreling toward something in this moment. Trump’s Board of Peace, at this juncture, is this minor bid to replace the United Nations. We’ve talked about the international norms that are being upended. What do you think we are barreling toward?
What’s unnerving is that it really does seem to be one individual within this administration that has a lot of say about where we’re headed.
But the question is: How far is the administration willing to push this? And my concern, Noel, is that [bombing] Iran [in June 2025] was a successful operation. At least, they’ve sold it as that. The experts say, “No, we didn’t denude the nuclear capacity of Iran for that long,” but [the Trump administration] sees it as a victory.
And then secondarily, Venezuela was quick and dirty, right? We got in and we got out.
These mini successes may embolden them a little bit more. And the question is: How are our allies going to respond? And we see how they’re responding; they’re uniting. They’re saying, we’ve got to keep this together because the United States is now not a reliable partner. They feel as if they’re fighting for that Western liberal order and that Ukraine is the front line.
And then the adversaries — the Russian Federation and China — what lessons are they taking from this? China under President Xi is kind of thumping [its] chest and saying, “I’m the big boy in the room,” right? “We’re stable. We’re not going to use force.” And then Putin is looking at this smirking, thinking, “Great, if the United States can get away with these shenanigans, then I can too” — right?
We’re in kind of a Wild West situation. And the question is: How are they going to respond to it?
