In his second term, U.S. President Donald Trump has outlined grand diplomatic ambitions. He has promised to bring peace to Ukraine and Gaza, sought to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb, pursued dozens of new trade deals, demanded cooperation on migration and drug trafficking from Latin American states, and pushed U.S. partners to provide more for their own defense. To achieve these goals, Trump has often attempted coercion. In this term alone, Trump has made threats, both economic and military, against at least 20 countries, some of them U.S. allies.
But again and again, the administration’s coercive efforts have been frustrated. Russia’s war against Ukraine rages on. Only a handful of trade deals have been inked, and U.S.-imposed tariffs remain high. Threats to annex Greenland and Canada have managed only to alienate U.S. partners. Most recently, after his economic “maximum pressure” campaign failed to coerce Iran into making concessions on its ballistic missile and nuclear programs, Trump turned to outright warfare. But Tehran dug in, securing a new level of control over maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, and with the cease-fire broken, conflict over the Strait has resumed.
The paradox is plain: Trump is exceptionally dedicated to coercion as a core foreign policy tool yet is one of its least effective practitioners. The problem lies in Trump’s conflation of coercion—a nuanced foreign policy strategy—with belligerence and raw demonstrations of strength. But effective coercion requires more than heavy-handed threats. In fact, Trump’s approach makes opponents less likely to comply with his demands, both by revealing the limits of U.S. capabilities and resolve and by undermining the credibility of U.S. assurances that targets will be left alone if they acquiesce.
Trump’s self-defeating efforts at coercion are undermining America’s real coercive power. Unless future administrations, and Congress, act to reverse this damage, ironically, a president enamored of coercion will have degraded the U.S. ability to use it effectively for years to come.
DO IT OR ELSE
When a state employs a strategy of coercion, it uses threats of punishment (such as sanctions, tariffs, or airstrikes) to try to change another state’s behavior. After catching another country building a secret nuclear reactor, for instance, it might compel the target to accept international inspections to avoid the destruction of the facility through military force. Or it might push a government to cease human rights abuses to avert the pain of an economic embargo. Coercion offers a choice: obey the demands of the coercer or suffer the consequences.
In an ideal scenario, coercers need not actually carry out their threats, as targets concede solely on the basis of prospective punishment. In reality, however, a demonstration of power is sometimes required to prove that threats are credible and severe: imposing sanctions, mobilizing troops, or conducting limited strikes may all be part of a coercive strategy. But when a state tries to achieve the full object of its initial demand by brute force, coercion has failed—destroying the nuclear facility via airstrikes after the target state refused to voluntarily shut it down, for example.
Most policymakers intuit that coercion’s effectiveness depends on the strength of the threat. They assume that targets make concessions when a threat of punishment is so undeniably serious that there is no alternative other than to acquiesce. But threats alone are insufficient for successful coercion because even highly credible threats fail if they are not conditional. For coercion to work, the target must trust that it will be able to avoid pain through compliance. As the economist Thomas Schelling argued decades ago, coercers must not only threaten targets but also assure them that they will not be punished after they change their behavior.
Effective coercion requires more than heavy-handed threats.
An overemphasis on threats is problematic for coercers because it degrades assurances. Even sincere coercers still face this dilemma: the actions they take to bolster the credibility of their threats often undermine their assurances. For instance, a mobilization of military forces augments the credibility of a threat to use them, but it also risks communicating that the use of force is inevitable and shrinks the time a coercer has to decide between going to war or standing down. It may seem that states with powerful militaries would be excellent coercers. But counterintuitively, research shows that advantages in military power do not increase the odds of successful coercion. In a study of international threats made between 1918 and 2001, the political scientist Todd Sechser found that coercers that are militarily stronger than their targets got what they demanded 36 percent of the time, compared with an average of roughly 41 percent for states overall. In another example of the assurance dilemma, when coercive states form coalitions, they can increase the severity of some punishments, such as sanctions. But forming coercive coalitions also makes it harder to lift those sanctions, weakening the credibility of offers of relief. And the multiplicity of demands by the coercers can make it more difficult for a target state to offer clear concessions.
Despite the need for balance, U.S. policymakers have long emphasized threats over assurances. From the Reagan era to the Biden administration, national security strategy documents, which serve as rough proxies for U.S. diplomatic signaling, have specified threats 13 times as often as they have expressed assurances. This overreliance on threats has weakened the credibility of U.S. assurances, undermining Washington’s coercive efforts. Adversaries often convey that they expect unconditional punishment from the United States. In the mid-1990s, for instance, the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein framed his predicament to his advisers: Iraq could either endure U.S.-led sanctions while also agreeing to inspections for weapons of mass destruction, or endure those same sanctions without the inspections. Perceiving no opportunity to escape from punishment, Hussein simply stopped cooperating, and U.S. efforts at coercion failed. The Trump administration’s failure at coercion has made this long-standing problem in U.S. foreign policy far worse.
NEIGHBORHOOD BULLY
In his first term, Trump attempted to employ both economic and military coercion—notably in his threats to rain “fire and fury” on North Korea in 2017 and the assassination of the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in 2020—but such endeavors were still relatively limited and pursued alongside other tools of statecraft. In his second term, however, Trump’s foreign policy doctrine has honored a simple axiom: always threaten. He has spurned noncoercive and soft-power elements of the foreign policy toolkit—as evidenced by his dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development and massive layoffs at the State Department—in favor of bullying both allies and adversaries with threats of tariffs, sanctions, and military force. Trump’s aggressive extortion of NATO partners on both trade and territorial issues reveals a preference for extracting concessions now rather than building relationships for the future.
When he has met resistance to his coercive demands, Trump has been quick to engage the U.S. military. This includes striking the Houthis in Yemen in 2025 after the group’s attacks on Red Sea shipping lanes, capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January to secure control of the country’s oil, launching ongoing strikes against so-called narcoterrorists in the Caribbean, and embarking on months of warfare in Iran. These brute force military operations have tended to come after coercive failures. Maduro would not surrender, so Trump authorized his capture; Iran did not forfeit its uranium enrichment facilities, so Trump bombed them. Despite mounting domestic and international criticism, his appetite for conflict appears undiminished. This year, Trump has continued to issue threats against Canada, Cuba, Denmark, and other countries.
This approach is best described as belligerence: Trump’s foreign policy uses bellicose threats as a first resort. Belligerence makes for poor coercive strategy for a number of reasons. The first is that military force has limits, and exposing these limits can embolden adversaries to resist. The ultimate goal of coercion is to obtain the desired result without using force—to convince the target that the price of defiance is prohibitive without needing to prove the point. When coercers are forced to follow through on threats, they must demonstrate that they can actually make the punishment too painful for the target to endure. If the coercer proves incapable of backing up words with deeds, or if the target proves more resilient than anticipated, coercion fails.
The contrast between Trump’s military operations in Venezuela and Iran illustrates the difference between success and failure. The raid that captured Maduro revealed that the U.S. military could execute direct, precise operations against recalcitrant Venezuelan leadership at minimal cost. Delcy Rodríguez’s successor regime has complied with Trump’s demands to avoid suffering Maduro’s fate or worse. In Iran, however, the war has revealed American limitations. Iran’s geography, as well as its drones and mines, rendered the United States unable to prevent Tehran from closing the Strait of Hormuz, and the rising cost of oil and dwindling of U.S. stockpiles of missile interceptors made it risky for Washington to commit to an extended military engagement. This emboldened Iran to resist U.S. demands, and nuclear concessions that Tehran may have considered before the war are now likely off the table.
Trump’s foreign policy uses bellicose threats as a first resort.
Continually issuing threats also results in more backtracking. In several instances, Trump has decided not to follow through on threats when faced with high costs. He rescinded tariffs on Chinese imports after Beijing threatened key U.S. industries by suspending exports of rare-earth minerals. Similarly, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was forced to walk back Trump’s threat to annex Greenland by force after Denmark deployed troops to defend it, putting NATO’s cohesion on the line. This pattern of issuing major threats and then backing down undermines U.S. coercion by inviting defiance: opponents learn that the best way to fend off Trump is to show no weakness and threaten severe retaliation.
The worst flaw in Trump’s approach to coercion is the way he neglects to provide credible assurances that his punishments can be averted. A defining feature of the second Trump administration’s foreign policy is its emphasis on U.S. might and lethality and a corresponding rejection of any restraints on the American ability to use force. Trump’s claims to unconstrained executive power go hand in hand with his proposed $1.5 trillion budget for the so-called Department of War. Such militarization may make U.S. threats more credible, but it also casts doubt on U.S. assurances that threats will be pulled back if the target gives in to Trump’s demands. With the United States so willing to use military force, opponents must consider the risk that concessions will simply lead to a resumption of pressure tactics.
Trump’s personal reputation also hampers his coercive assurances. Global leaders have little reason to trust that the U.S. president, widely regarded as a bully, will honor his word. Instead, they anticipate that he will respond to concessions with further demands. Trump has reneged on U.S. commitments to multilateral institutions and to past agreements regarding nuclear arms control, the environment, and trade. This pattern of recalcitrance applies to deals that Trump himself forged, such as the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. In his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney explicitly acknowledged this dynamic: if countries “hope that compliance will buy safety,” he warned, “it won’t.” Under Trump, American threats are seen as a trap in Tehran, as a ploy in Pyongyang, and as a Catch-22 in capitals around Europe. This gaping assurance deficit is a powerful incentive for target states, both friend and foe, to resist U.S. coercion.
Moreover, the coercive successes Trump does enjoy are more likely to be short-term, Pyrrhic victories than long-term, durable achievements. If countries anticipate that Trump will renege on U.S. commitments, they will hedge by quietly preparing to do the same. This is the fundamental tension currently obstructing a nuclear agreement with Iran. Even before the latest return to hostilities, Tehran had good reason to believe that U.S. offensives would resume, no matter what Trump promised. This makes it more likely that Iran will pursue a nuclear deterrent in the future.
FIXER UPPER
Trump’s reputation for belligerence will continue to hinder his dealmaking ambitions for the remainder of his presidency. Trust is hard to gain and easy to lose, and the U.S. president has surely lost much of it around the world. America’s coercive weakness is also likely to persist after Trump is gone, as both allies and adversaries are now compelled to guard against future U.S. administrations that might similarly embrace a belligerent foreign policy. This is especially true given the demonstrated weakness of institutional guardrails meant to hold the president in check.
This, then, is the bitter fruit of Trump’s foreign policy: in being quick to threaten and cavalier with assurances, the president has undercut the vital qualities that enable coercion to succeed. To repair this damage, future administrations will need to cultivate a U.S. reputation for restraint. This will require painstaking diplomacy and a direct disavowal of Trump’s unconstrained militarism. It will also require rehabilitating the State Department and replacing lost diplomatic expertise. But even if future presidents pursue this course, no administration will be able to salvage the credibility of American assurances on its own. Congress must also reinforce restraints on unilateral executive action, including by tightening restrictions on tariff authorities and reforming the War Powers Act to prevent presidents from waging war without congressional consent.
The goal should not be to deny presidents the ability to coerce. Rather, it should be to ensure that coercive tools remain effective when they are needed. Trump has shown that the imperial presidency undermines coercive power because it cannot issue credible commitments. Congress, therefore, must save the executive from its worst impulses. Ultimately, coercion can be a powerful tool of influence. But might alone does not guarantee success. U.S. leaders must appreciate that coercion depends just as much on the power to assure as it does on the power to threaten.
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