Since U.S. President Donald Trump returned to office, no state has been too small to find itself in his cross hairs. In his inaugural address in January 2025, Trump pledged to take back the Panama Canal and acquire sparsely populated Greenland. This menacing of small and medium-sized states accelerated in 2026, with a spectacular raid to remove the president of Venezuela and an oil blockade of Cuba. Chafing at papal criticism of his foreign policies, Trump even lashed out at Pope Leo XIV, the sovereign of tiny Vatican City.
The president’s might-makes-right approach is the latest manifestation of an alarming trend: the erosion of restraints on great-power behavior. As Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and China’s expansionism in the South China Sea make clear, the United States is not alone in throwing its weight around. Now, with great powers shredding the fabric of international law and institutions, there are vanishingly few checks on intervention and conquest.
The world’s smaller states are the biggest victims of the chaos of an unwinding global order. As the weaker partners in asymmetric international relationships, countries as disparate as Kenya, Paraguay, and Singapore cannot unilaterally set the rules and often struggle to shape them. Smaller states confront increased economic barriers, diplomatic marginalization, and intensified shocks such as volatile markets and extreme weather. An integrated world economy, in which they could find niches to develop, is fragmenting. International organizations, which gave smaller states seats at the table and allowed them to reach global audiences, are hobbled by shrinking resources and waning legitimacy. And the gutting of foreign aid and global public goods has deprived smaller states of buffers against disasters.
The dilemmas facing smaller states also matter mightily for great powers. Big powers may bully their way to success, as the United States has done in Panama, where pressure from Washington drove a review of Chinese-linked port operators near the canal, and in Venezuela, whose newly U.S.-backed leadership has opened the country’s oil industry to U.S. companies. But sustaining coercion is expensive and risks miring the strong in the affairs of the weak. As in Cuba today, great-power coercion can prompt social and economic catastrophe without a clear political endgame. The failure to achieve initial goals often puts great powers on a slippery slope toward increasingly costly interventions.
Ameliorating the risks to smaller states will require countries of all sizes to invest in the international system, rather than simply seeking to extract from it. The United States should use its resources and influence to reform, not rupture, international institutions. Smaller states must also work collectively to not let these international organizations atrophy, as these bodies provide a vital shield against great-power predation. Meanwhile, smaller states will need to invest in their diplomatic capacities and exploit opportunities to advance their overlapping interests.
The global public goods the United States provided, such as support for international organizations and relief from natural disasters and economic crises, were never charity; they were a winning wager that a relatively stable and open system would underpin U.S. alliances, partnerships, and prosperity. Smaller states are woven into global value chains, serve as financial hubs, act as strategic chokepoints, and offer basing opportunities. This is particularly true today, when the United States is engaged in a geopolitical competition with China, which assiduously courts the broader UN membership. Ultimately, a superpower that roils the waters around smaller states will find that the waves reach its own shores.
THE ORDER THAT WAS
The international order created at the end of World War II was a boon to smaller states, offering them security norms, opportunities to be heard, economic openness, relative predictability, and even a modicum of global insurance. New countries emerged from the collapse of colonial empires, joining a United Nations that endorsed their sovereign equality and territorial integrity. By the 1980s, UN membership had more than tripled from 51 to 159. Following another post–Cold War expansion, that number surged to 193. Most of the newcomers were small and medium-sized states—countries that are now facing the greatest pressures from intersecting global crises.
No one doubted the persistence of power asymmetries and privileges in the postwar order, as embodied in the five veto-wielding permanent members of the UN Security Council and a nuclear club closed to newcomers. But international law helped protect weaker countries. As former Estonian President Lennart Meri quipped in the late 1990s, “The nuclear weapon of small states is international law.” The UN Charter codified norms championed by smaller states, including protecting countries’ territorial integrity and enshrining the principle of nonintervention in other countries’ affairs. Although never perfectly honored, international norms and laws compelled aggressors to justify their actions when they breached these rules. They exercised a restraining influence.
International organizations cushioned smaller states against the unmitigated exercise of power and enhanced their diplomatic clout. Smaller states even organized their own groupings, such as the UN Forum on Small States, which has some 108 members, to enhance their voice within UN negotiations. Backroom deals among the powerful might still carry the day, but the small could denounce such deals before a global audience to build public pressure in support of their causes. Their voices and votes carried weight. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons—championed by Austria, Costa Rica, and Ireland, among others—and the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion on climate change, spearheaded by tiny Vanuatu, both helped shape public debate.
The world’s smaller states are the biggest victims of the chaos of an unwinding global order.
The postwar international order also provided openness and predictability, which allowed small countries to survive and thrive. In an open world economy, even very small states found spaces to develop comparative advantages, growing wealthier, on average, than larger counterparts. Qatar invested heavily to become an exporter of liquefied natural gas, a global investor, and a regional hub—achievements that are now at risk. Protected by international trade institutions, Chile diversified its economic links only to find itself pressured by the United States to choose sides in a deepening U.S.-Chinese competition.
A patchwork of global public goods and programs gave smaller states help in preparing and responding to shocks that they would have difficulty addressing on their own. Global monitoring systems, often anchored by U.S. scientific agencies, provided early warnings of impending disasters by tracking diseases, extreme weather, destructive storms, and even icebergs. When tragedy struck, governments and international organizations worked with civil society to respond. During financial crises, Bretton Woods institutions provided smaller states with a lifeline, as did myriad other development agencies.
The post-1945 order was riddled with hypocrisies, inequities, and historical baggage—hardly Dr. Pangloss’s best of all possible worlds. But as it evolved over seven decades, that order provided enough stability, legitimacy, and security to make the world safer for smaller states than preceding international systems were able to.
VANISHING CERTAINTIES
The certainties of the post-1945 order have all but vanished. In the absence of strong international cooperation based on shared rules and procedures, great-power competition is driving small-country defections and side deals. These provide short-term gains and protection, but in the long term they weaken what had been a more beneficial system. Acting as a “predatory hegemon,” as Stephen M. Walt described in these pages, a rogue United States now discards rules and institutions that do not serve its immediate ends. Thanks to Trump’s disruption and unpredictability, global markets swing daily, forcing smaller states to navigate constant turbulence.
Today, smaller states confront imposing economic barriers. The average U.S. tariff rate has surged from less than three percent to 13.7 percent, and some states have been hit with far higher, crippling fees. One is Lesotho, a country with a GDP per capita of about $1,000; in April 2025, the United States unveiled 50 percent tariffs aimed at its denim industry, prompting factory freezes and layoffs among a vulnerable, largely female workforce. In the past, aggrieved trading nations could have pleaded their case before the World Trade Organization. But the WTO has been neutered by great-power discord and U.S. steps to paralyze its dispute resolution body, including by blocking the appointment of new appellate judges.
Even some global governance innovations touted as enlarging representation—such as the expansion of BRICS (whose first five members were Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) to 11 members—have troubling implications for smaller states. As decision-making power shifts from the universal UN system to exclusive “minilateral” frameworks, smaller states are left out. Likewise, the middle-power diplomacy now advocated by countries such as Canada, Indonesia, and Turkey to advance shared commercial, technological, and security interests cuts both ways. These coalitions may provide an alternative to great-power dominance, but they may still ignore or even bully smaller countries.
Meanwhile, the global norm against aggression is at its weakest since World War II. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in 2022, and China’s ongoing expansion of military outposts on rock formations and islands in the South China Sea, the United States has been issuing threats and conducting military actions without even a nod to international law. Since Trump’s return to the White House, the United States has threatened the sovereignty of Canada and the territorial integrity or inviolability of Colombia, Mexico, Panama, and Denmark (via threats to Greenland). It has kidnapped a head of state in Venezuela and helped kill another in Iran without any pretense of legality. Disorder is spreading. Israel has been unrestrained in its military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon. Even as Pakistan seeks to mediate an end to fighting in Iran, it continues its own “open war” against Afghanistan, without response or repercussion from the great powers.
Many of the global public goods that smaller states have long relied on are disappearing. Official development aid plummeted by nearly a quarter in 2025—and it is still falling as the United States and other donors pull back sharply. Compounding matters, Washington has slashed political and financial support for international organizations, rending what remains of the global safety net. The costs are clearest for small-island developing countries, triply threatened by climate inaction, broken storm-warning systems, and diminished funds for disaster relief and recovery. Going forward, the United States, China, and other powers are likely to link international loans to commodity collateral, consistent with Beijing’s lending practices and with U.S. supervision of post-Maduro Venezuela’s oil industry, which will further impinge on smaller states’ autonomy.
HANG TOGETHER
In the face of these existential threats, smaller states must heed the advice often attributed to Benjamin Franklin: if they do not hang together, they will surely hang separately. On specific issues, the interests of smaller states will differ and may even clash. Cutting a side deal with the Trump administration may seem safer and surer than pursuing uncertain collective action. But smaller states have an overriding interest in constructing a world of rules instead of acquiescing to the rule of the strongest. They would do well to demonstrate their commitment to the international order by boosting contributions to international organizations and offsetting U.S. cuts. Thanks to rising incomes in many smaller states over recent decades, countries beyond great powers have the ability to spend more.
Working collectively—particularly through one-state, one-vote bodies such as the UN and regional institutions like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)—smaller states can help rebuild a more resilient international system. They can try to hold the Security Council accountable, including through efforts such as the “veto initiative,” a 2022 UN General Assembly resolution led by the microstate Liechtenstein, which requires permanent members to publicly justify veto decisions. In climate talks, which for many are a matter of survival, smaller states can combine to attain visibility and influence that vastly outstrip their economic and military weight. For the past three decades, the Alliance of Small Island States—a coalition that now contains 39 countries—has done just that by fashioning joint positions and shaping multilateral climate negotiations.
Smaller states must also improve their diplomatic capacities. This will be no small task, because most do not have the resources to maintain embassies throughout the world or the personnel to staff every meeting of the UN’s countless bodies. They must specialize and exercise niche leadership, including by building issue-driven coalitions of their own. The Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, for instance, which encompasses some of the world’s smallest countries, pools resources for better joint representation abroad. The model can be expanded and replicated.
Smaller states have an overriding interest in constructing a world of rules.
Additionally, smaller states will have to get better at hedging. In the Western Hemisphere, many countries responded to Trump’s exploitation of U.S. dominance over the past two years by immediately aligning with the United States. This impulse is understandable but ultimately self-defeating because it deepens dependence on Washington and leaves the region more subject to future U.S. whims. It would be more strategic to diversify intra- and cross-regional partnerships, ideally below the radar of a mercurial hegemon. Pursuing multialignment where possible can also increase small states’ leverage and expand their options. ASEAN, for example, has turned U.S.-Chinese geopolitical and economic competition to its advantage, as seen in its ASEAN Plus Three forum, where the association sets the agenda for joint meetings with China, Japan, and South Korea. Building on such dialogues, ASEAN led the creation of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which brings fifteen Asian and Oceanic economies into the world’s largest free trade agreement.
At the same time, smaller states must become more sophisticated at transactional diplomacy, forging relationships with more powerful states that advance their own material interests. Bilateral diplomacy has always coexisted with a multilateral order. The Trump administration has been widely criticized for subordinating U.S. idealism to the art of the deal. But small and medium-sized countries that hold a strategic location or control access to critical materials should not hesitate to exploit that leverage, both to advance particular interests and to enshrine broader norms in bilateral accords. Over the past year, many countries outside the great-power ranks, including Argentina, Ecuador, Malaysia, Paraguay, Peru, and the Philippines, have explored or signed mineral agreements with the United States. Done right, such agreements can provide mutual benefit without undercutting international rules.
What Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has called “the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality” hits smaller states the hardest. The erosion of the international order carries growing risks. Yet these countries are not powerless. Working together, through collective action and astute diplomacy, they can continue to survive and thrive.
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