February 12, 2025
MANILA – Shortly before unleashing his million-strong army on European soil, the Persian Emperor Xerxes was confronted with his chief adviser’s misgivings. Artabanus, who served both as a military chief and consiglieri to the Persian “king of kings” (Shahanshah), counseled caution, underscoring the logistical difficulties of waging large-scale conventional warfare on new terrains and against smaller yet more nimble adversaries. But Xerxes quickly rebuffed his adviser by insisting “if you were to take account of everything,” you would end up “never do[ing] anything,” since it’s always “better to have a brave heart and endure one half of the terrors we dread than to [anticipate] all of the terrors and suffer nothing [in actual world] at all.”
It’s hard to see how Donald Trump, the modern world emperor, is not consumed by the same fire as the Persian emperor two millennia earlier. Despite all the trapping of republican democracy, the American president is effectively the modern incarnation of ancient emperors, who single-handedly defined the lives of countless nations. Today, the United States enjoys military access to hundreds of sites all across the world and lords over a global network of treaty alliances and strategic partnerships with no precedence in history. Bereft of independently minded generals and modern-day Artabanuses, the second Trump presidency has proven even more disruptive than its first iteration. And perhaps no other power is happier with the direction of Trump’s foreign policy than China.
Trump’s roughshod trade wars against closest neighbors, Canada and Mexico, and brazen bullying of key allies have rankled the entire North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Trump’s unabashed attempts to create a 21st-century “Monroe Doctrine” by taking over Greenland and ceasing the Panama Canal has shattered any pretension to ”good neighborly” foreign policy. Worse, it has provided both Russia and China imperial excuses to bully and even colonize those perched in their traditional spheres of influence.
Even worse is the Trump administration’s callous treatment of Palestinians by, inter alia, proposing ethnic cleansing of Gaza as well as sanctioning the International Criminal Court; this has left America with little credibility as the supposed anchor of a rules-based international order. And lest we forget, the perfunctory suspension of US development aid coupled with unjustifiable sanctions against fellow democracies, such as South Africa, has only deepened America’s growing unpopularity across the Global South.
In 2025, American foreign policy more resembles President William McKinley’s than Barack Obama’s. In contrast, China has deftly positioned itself as a supposedly ”responsible superpower” by, inter alia, supporting a two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict as well as withstanding collective Western sanctions immiserating millions of modern-day Persians under a so-called “maximum pressure” campaign, which has repeatedly failed to bludgeon an incorrigibly proud Tehran into submission. Not to mention, China’s offer of billions of dollars in aid and infrastructure investment across the Global South and Eastern Europe, which has made a mockery out of America’s minimal public investments overseas.
Europeans have been so troubled by Trump’s belligerence that they have openly flirted with mending ties with China as a hedge against Washington’s excesses. No less than European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has floated the prospect of cutting new “agreements” with China and “even expand[ing] trade and investment ties” in the face of Trumpian disruption. To top it all, the second Trump administration is also staffed with the likes of Elon Musk, who has a deep investment in Beijing and is a chum of Zhongnanhai, as well as isolationists such as Andrew Byers, the Pentagon’s new deputy assistant secretary for South and Southeast Asia in the Department of Defense, who has advocated for a “cooperation spiral with China” in order to “avoi[d] military conflict and a new Cold War.”
Byers has even argued for the unilateral withdrawal of “US military forces or weapons systems from the Philippines in exchange for the [China Coast Guard] executing fewer patrols [in the West Philippine Sea].” As a US treaty ally, the Philippines should hope for the best, especially from sympathetic figures such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, but it shouldn’t be naïve enough to rule out a Trumpian ”grand bargain” with China at the expense of frontline states. More than ever, we need a truly ”independent” foreign policy lest we end up as a pawn in the new era of great power competition.