Since the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and the ensuing claim by US leaders that “we’re in charge” of a sovereign nation, President Trump and his allies have gloated. “Cuba looks like it’s ready to fall,” Trump told reporters, implying that the island country was next on his takeover list as he flew back to Mar-a-Lago this weekend. “Nobody is going to fight the US militarily over its future,” Stephen Miller, a top aide, snarled during a Monday appearance on CNN, as commenters on the right, basked in hubris, declared American might is the only international law of importance.
“Fuck around,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth keeps warning other nations, and “find out.”
The parade of threats, which had seemed absurd until Friday, has prompted many to wonder: Why? What is the point of invading other countries? Could it really be as simple as oil? A play for a sphere of influence? Age-old imperialism? Is it because, as Chuck Schumer meekly suggested, that Republicans just aren’t “stepping up to the plate?”
If you’re in a system that is about rules, then this looks irrational because it’s not following the rules. But if it’s a system that’s about status and hierarchy dominance…then it makes perfect sense.
If you can’t help but shake the feeling that such theories don’t quite fit this moment, you’re not alone. On Bluesky, I noticed a new theory that popped up: neo-royalism, which argues that we’re talking about this moment all wrong. That the world order as we’ve known for the last century—let’s loosely call it Cold War liberalism—is disappearing. And in its place, a new order shaped by the private interests of individual men and their fiercest allies, not the interests, private or public, fair or foul, good or bad, of a nation.
“Neo-royalism says that the state, the country, is not the key actor,” Abe Newman, a political scientist at Georgetown who co-wrote a paper coining the term, told me. “It’s groups of elites that are organized around political leaders. That system doesn’t play by the same rules.”
If that sounds like a return to the era of kings, you’re on the right track. But neo-royalism expands this to a global structure, with American power dominating the world and King Trump attempting to reap profit across the globe. It’s through this lens that, suddenly, the tech CEOs and other countries groveling with golden gifts make more sense.
I caught up with Newman on the emerging theory and what it really means. Our conversation has been lightly edited.
For those who haven’t come across your paper, let’s loosely define neo-royalism and how this framework might explain Trump’s chaotic foreign policy.
Let me start by asking: What do we usually think of how international politics works? For the last 100 years or so, it was based on what people call the rules-based international order. The United Nations and the World Trade Organization interacted based on the idea that each state was sovereign. They could control their territory, and there were certain basic principles of interaction. These were kind of the rules of engagement.
What my co-author, Stacie Goddard, and I are saying is that the lens everybody uses to think about how international politics works is no longer functioning.
What we propose, neo-royalism, is basically just saying to begin with, the state is not the key actor like the country. It’s groups of elites that are organized around political leaders. That system doesn’t play by the same rules, but it is very inherent to how humans think about international politics.
So, I usually like to use Game of Thrones. Everybody relates to Game of Thrones. You watch it, you read it, and you’re like, “Oh, I understand how politics is working.” That is what we’re seeing in the international system. It’s groups of actors that are jockeying for their interests, and they’re trying to grab hold of the state to use its power to get what they want. It’s not national interests that are driving international affairs, but the interests of these different competing elite groups.
I struggle to believe that this decline in the international world order is happening in some kind of Trumpian vacuum. But I could be wrong! Is America’s embrace of neo-royalism singular to Trump? If not, what milestones led us to this moment?
Jeff Kopstein, a professor at UC Irvine, has this great book about the rise of what you would call patrimonial systems of government versus what we’ve seen over the last several decades. He documents the rapid disassembly of the internal, bureaucratic state. In the case of the US and the disassembly of that system here, it’s not only because of Trump. It’s because of many different polarizations and Supreme Court decisions, such as Citizens United. There’s been a whole bunch of things that have degraded the bureaucratic state, and it’s moved us into what the Supreme Court might call the unitary executive doctrine. It’s a version where there’s very little bureaucracy around the decisions of the leader, and instead, the leader can make decisions based on their personal interests. That’s not just a change in the United States; you see that in Russia, Hungary, Turkey, wherein many states have seen the same evolution away from what people will call the Weberian state, to this more patrimonial system. And what our argument is that has international consequences. It’s not just changes domestically; it’s also having this transformative effect globally.
Right now, actors are debasing themselves to this order, like the Swiss bringing gold bars and Rolexes to the White House to avoid being targets of tariffs.
How should this framework influence the way we view Trump’s actions right now?
I think a lot of people start with the idea that Trump is about spheres of influence balancing against China. Sometimes people call it America First. But that’s a red herring. But really, what you’re seeing is a set of foreign policy decisions that are about accumulating status and material wealth and then concentrating that in that group of insider elites. This is about status hierarchy, the relations of individuals.
Why does Trump have a big fight with India and put huge tariffs on India? It’s because Modi won’t recognize Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s not about competing against China. Why did we sell lots of semiconductors to the UAE? It doesn’t make a lot of sense from an America First perspective. So what’s going on there? It’s about the amount of money that the UAE is going to put into World Liberty Financial, the crypto company that’s associated with Steve Witkoff and their children. It’s about seeing the global chessboard as a site of status and material wealth. The same thing with Venezuela. People think it’s the oil companies that are pushing Trump to take over Venezuela. They’re not. That’s not the story. It’s about how Trump sees Venezuela as a resource that he can then distribute across his allies.
Right. I think there’s also an instinct to neatly explain this with, well, he’s just fucking crazy.
World leaders like the Danish prime minister have [expressed confusion], like, “This doesn’t make any sense, these threats over Greenland.” But that’s because people are using this old logic and viewing this as irrational based on the liberal international order, or that it’s not rational if we’re thinking about spheres of influence. But what my co-author and I argue is that what is rational depends on the ordering system. If you’re in a system that is about rules, then this looks irrational because it’s not following the rules. But if it’s a system that’s about status and hierarchy dominance, it’s if it’s Game of Thrones, then it makes perfect sense.
You’re reorganizing the chessboard in order to funnel resources, material, and status to your supporters. I think that once we can name it and describe it, then we can try to understand it and also offer an alternative. Because right now, too often, actors are debasing themselves to this order, like the Swiss bringing gold bars and Rolexes to the White House to avoid being targets of tariffs.
In your view, which characters, either in the administration or in his family, make up this theoretical clique? What do they stand to gain?
There’s the family, right? They’re clearly involved in these types of activities. Jared Kushner, not Marco Rubio, is at the table in Ukraine. So there’s the kind of familial characters and also what we would call loyalists and ideologues like Stephen Miller. Then you have economic actors, the kind of Elon Musks, the people who have a way to reorganize economic structures to their benefit.
In political science, we’re always thinking about power. There are different ways to accumulate it; sometimes it’s economic, and sometimes it’s status, and it’s often to maintain that power.
And they’re thinking beyond Trump, right? He is, after all, an elderly man.
Oh, definitely. Many of these actors are quite explicit about their long-term views. Just look at the advisers around all this. There’s Chris Buskirk, an adviser to JD Vance who runs the organization, 1789, and he talks about how we need to bring back an aristocratic system of governance. There’s an intellectual framework that is opposed to democracy and argues that elites should be in charge of this system. And I think it’s naive to think that when Trump retires, that will be the end of the system. There are multiple actors—whether it’s the family, loyalists, or economic leaders—and they’re all kind of vying for succession.
The US government doesn’t actually want to keep invading countries; it just wants people to give it stuff for free.
Supposing your theory is correct, what now? How should countries that oppose Trump’s neo-royalism respond? Because the current admonishments seem incredibly naive.
There has to be both a domestic and an international response. If you look at Sen. Chuck Schumer’s response recently, he was basically saying, “Well, Republicans should vote against this.” But there has to be a recognition that this is an attempt to transform how the international system works. I think a lot of times people are like, “I’m scratching my head. What’s Trump doing?” There’s a much larger agenda afoot, and it is basically degrading the norms and processes that we’ve based the international system on. Somebody needs to stay that rules are this way because they prevent violence, coercion, and corruption. If we get rid of rules, we’re likely to have violence and corruption—and we’re already seeing that play out. The stakes are very high.
If you’ve ever seen movies like Heathers or Mean Girls, we all know most of what we do in life is because of norms. It’s because of these tacit rules of how we’re supposed to behave. This isn’t just Trump. It’s transforming what the basic principles of international affairs are, and we at the domestic level have to push back, even if we think Maduro is a terrible guy and his whole regime is terrible.
Ultimately, the United States has the preponderance of military power. It can do things if it wants to. But the key is, what is the reaction to that? Do people say, “Okay, I guess you can do that.” Well, then the US will keep doing that. I think what’s important to remember is that using coercion is actually very difficult and costly. The US government doesn’t actually want to keep invading countries; it just wants people to give it stuff for free.
In April, Trump proposed very large tariffs, and the bond market freaked out. So he pulled it back and restructured the tariffs. So I think other actors have to say, “Look, you can’t keep doing this. We’re not just going to go along or get along. There will be a cost.
I’ve been particularly fascinated by the aesthetics of the Trump administration over the past year, specifically as to how they signal loyalty to the president. What are the traditional ways of doing this in the realm of neo-royalism?
There is a part of the piece where we ask: How do you create legitimacy when you’re not based on rules? In a neo-royalist system, it’s about exceptionalism. It’s about this notion that we’re so special, and so we get to do these things. That’s why traditional monarchs justified their behavior either by God or bloodline. The United States doesn’t have that as much. But we have Trump and these leaders who look for visuals and narratives that underscore exceptionalism. And so you saw, like the White House, they did a Time magazine cover. Look at his speeches. He doesn’t say that his power comes from us, the people. It is about “I alone can save you.” It’s never about whether we can do this. And so that the images and narratives are usually about something divine. As Trump has said, “God saved me from the assassination.” Or there’s the patriarchal, like the NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte calling Trump “Daddy.”
Since you mentioned it, I’ll end by asking which Game of Thrones house you’d liken Trump to.
I’m not sure if there’s a perfect house, but the Lancasters are the ones trying to dominate. I like that question. I’ll think about that.
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.