How Trump’s first year ushered in ‘the law of the jungle’

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“The United States of America is running Venezuela. By definition that’s true,” Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, said in a notable CNN interview last week.

“You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world – in the real world – 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.”

Miller’s quote resonated because it encapsulated something analysts and commentators have described about the second Trump administration but which is rarely articulated explicitly by an official. Under Trump 2.0, the so-called norms of the rules-based order – working through global institutions and frameworks, co-ordinating with allies, respecting the “niceties” that Miller mentioned – are being tossed aside in favour of raw power and brute strength, both military and economic.

In his first 12 months, Trump has upended the free trade system with an array of tariffs that serve all sorts of purposes, from reducing United States trade deficits to punishing perceived trade injustices and maximising US leverage against both friends and adversaries. He has played global cop, dubiously claiming to have ended eight wars, while extending an arm to Russia’s Vladimir Putin as he tries to negotiate an end to the war against Ukraine.

Trump has withdrawn the US from multilateral organisations, lectured the globe on the climate change “hoax” and the perils of mass migration, bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, killed alleged terrorists from Syria to Nigeria and Yemen, pushed the idea of Canada becoming the 51st US state, conducted dozens of extrajudicial killings of alleged drug runners at sea, and negotiated a ceasefire in Gaza that is now proceeding to the second stage of a longer-term peace plan.

In the first weeks of this year alone, he conducted a daring but successful operation to snatch Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and put him on trial for drug trafficking in New York, refreshed his threat to take over Greenland from Denmark by force, and is now toying with the idea of air strikes aimed at supporting Iranian anti-government demonstrators and bringing down the Islamic theocracy in Tehran.

Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro is escorted to the courthouse in Manhattan after his capture at the start of this month.

Trump has seemingly ended his first year on a roll. Along the way, he rejoiced in the superiority of America’s military might and the unmatched reach of American power.

“FAFO” was how the White House characterised Trump’s leadership upon the capture of Maduro, an acronym that stands for: “F--- around, find out.” It is part online fun, part unsubtle message to America’s adversaries.

“It’s fairly straightforward law of the jungle,” Ian Bremmer, a New York-based political scientist who leads the Eurasia Group consultancy, said at an event hosted by Foreign Policy magazine on Friday (AEDT). “It’s a belief – and Stephen Miller made this point – that it has always been about power. What he didn’t say is it’s also always been about how you decide to deploy that power.”

While it may seem now that Trump is throwing his weight around the world relatively unimpeded, Bremmer reminds us of another acronym ascribed to Trump: TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out). “Trump tries FAFO everywhere, he just fails a lot. It wasn’t like he wasn’t trying FAFO with the Russians in the beginning, he just failed because Putin says no.”

Those countries seen as weak tend to get the FAFO treatment, while strong ones eventually get TACO. Mexico and Venezuela are in the FAFO basket. So is Ukraine, which Trump likes to describe as “brave”, while Denmark might be about to find out where it stands.

Where this approach has come unstuck is China, which, through its sheer economic size and stranglehold over the world’s supply of critical minerals, has forced Trump to backtrack on tariffs and into an uneasy truce. That has also involved Trump playing down concerns about the future of Taiwan and reportedly urging Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi to tone down her rhetoric on the subject.

“Most countries that find themselves really vulnerable [to the US], they’re trying to defend first – not get into a fight, say all the right things to Trump – and hedge second,” said Bremmer. “China hasn’t navigated anything. China basically said, ‘We’re not even returning your phone call until you back off’, and Trump was surprised, but ultimately, he backed off.”

Still, one of the administration’s top priorities is to weaken Beijing’s dominance in that regard. Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury secretary, says the goal is not for the US and its allies to decouple from China but to de-risk their economies from reliance on China’s rare earths. Australia, which signed a critical minerals co-operation agreement with the US in October, is potentially a major partner in that effort.

‘This doesn’t strike me as a sea change’

Some critics within the MAGA movement – most notably former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who had a spectacular falling out with the president – see Trump’s first 12 months of foreign policy intervention as antithetical to the “America First” agenda. Since December, the president and his team have made a deliberate effort to get him talking about the economy and the cost of living, including at several rallies around the US.

Bremmer says that while it may seem right now that Trump is becoming more intent on military intervention around the world, his approach is not markedly different from his first term.

“This doesn’t strike me as a sea change. It’s not a sudden break in Trump policy, either from last year or from his first administration. He’s used military force in his first administration. It was never about regime change. It was never about extended American confrontations that the US would have to pay for both financially, as well as in blood. That continues to be true,” Bremmer said at the Foreign Policy event.

In Venezuela, for example, Trump removed Maduro – regarded by the US and many nations as an illegitimate dictator – but is now working with Maduro’s deputy, Delcy Rodriguez, and has shown little interest in regime change or democratic elections. Trump’s main interest in Venezuela is to secure its oil – the largest proven reserves in the world – for the US.

Bremmer notes Trump’s main objective is financial. He wants to compel countries and companies to invest money in the US, he wants greater control of – and even government equity stakes in – key companies and industries, and he wants to make more money for himself, his family and his friends. “All of those things are ramped up significantly from [his] first term. But again, the seeds were there, and they’ve now grown.”

A seismic shift at home

Trump’s first year back in office upended as many norms on the home front as abroad; from Elon Musk and his team of young cost-cutters bulldozing their way through the federal government and slashing foreign aid; to a record-long government shutdown that had federal workers lining up at food banks; to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy hacking away at vaccine mandates and childhood immunisation, while trying to rewire Americans’ relationship with unhealthy food; and a full-throated attack on transgender people and gender-affirming care.

Federal law enforcement officers stand against protesters after a shooting in Minneapolis on Wednesday.

But the most seismic shift has been on immigration. Trump acted swiftly to shut down the US southern border with Mexico, a major concern for voters at last year’s election after millions of undocumented migrants flooded the country under Joe Biden. His efforts to deport illegal immigrants from the US proved trickier, with federal courts blocking or delaying many removals, and the overall numbers being lower than hardliners would like.

Most divisive, however, is the way Immigrations and Customs Enforcement have gone about rounding up the people it accuses of being in the US illegally. Nationally, ICE agents have largely targeted known or accused criminals, which the White House prefers to focus on in debates about the policy. But in major operations in certain cities, ICE has raided workplaces or car washes or even farms looking for undocumented migrants who cannot prove they are lawfully in the country. Armed agents frequently conceal their identity with masks, or drive unmarked cars, leading to accusations that faceless goons are kidnapping people off the streets.

A recent analysis by The New York Times found that in nationwide operations, a third of those detained by ICE this year had no criminal convictions or pending charges. But in enforcement blitzes in Los Angeles, Illinois, Massachusetts and Washington, DC, that figure rose above 50 per cent. In Illinois, it was as high as two-thirds.

The issue has most recently come to a head in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where ICE has surged as many as 3000 agents, who clash with protesters daily. The conflict was turbocharged after an ICE officer shot and killed 37-year-old US citizen Renee Good on January 7, in what the Trump administration portrayed as an act of self-defence against a woman using her car as a weapon. Its version has been widely challenged with video analysis that suggests Good was pointing her wheels away from the agent and trying to leave the scene.

Trump on Friday (AEDT) threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to quell the Minneapolis protests, which would allow him to dispatch the US military against American citizens.

And immigration, which along with the economy is certain to dominate 2026 into the midterm elections, is no longer a winner for Trump. Reuters/Ipsos polling finds his net approval rating on the issue has gradually fallen from a high of plus 10 points in March 2025 to minus 12 points in January, after the killing of Good. The January survey found 27 per cent of Americans thought immigration agents should use force “despite risk of serious injury or death”, compared with 69 per cent who said they should minimise harm, even if that meant fewer arrests.

The same poll of 1217 American adults found only 17 per cent backed Trump’s efforts to acquire Greenland, while only 4 per cent supported taking it by force. Trump’s overall approval rating hovers around 40 per cent, while his disapproval rating is generally between 55 and 60 per cent.

The midterms fear

Those numbers – along with political history – suggest Republicans are bound to lose their slim majority in the House of Representatives at November’s midterm elections, making the last two years of Trump’s term a losing battle. But some Trump strategists have a plan to turn that around.

Kellyanne Conway – the former Trump campaign manager and adviser who coined the term “alternative facts” – says Americans “need to be reminded just how bad and broken it was not that long ago”.

Then-president Joe Biden and president-elect Donald Trump depart the White House for the Capitol on the day of Trump’s inauguration on January 20 last year.

“The Democrats want to move right along from people named Biden or Kamala or Tim Walz,” she said during an event with the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned think tank and policy engine, in Washington last week. “We can’t allow that because President Trump, he got elected for many reasons last year, but a big one was ‘they broke it, I’ll fix it’.”

Conway says Trump needs to move the cost-of-living debate away from “gas and groceries”, which people can overcome by working from home or cutting back on meat, towards the big-ticket items such as healthcare and housing. Trump has already started doing that, trying to convince Americans that unwinding Obamacare and paying people directly so they can buy their own health insurance on the market will leave them better off.

Bremmer, the political scientist, points out that Trump has no shortage of constraints on his power at home – which are only likely to increase this year – and he has failed on several domestic priorities, including dispatching the National Guard to Chicago and indicting political enemies James Comey (the former FBI director) and Letitia James (the New York attorney-general), both of which were undone by the courts.

US President Donald Trump holds up his board of “reciprocal” tariffs in April.

The biggest roadblock may be just days away. The Supreme Court will soon hand down its ruling on the legal challenge to Trump’s sweeping global tariffs, which have been found unlawful by lower courts. Trump’s team have prepared a plan B, and believe they can reproduce the tariff regime using other laws. But the court ruling against the tariffs would still create a “mess” and demands for tens of billions of dollars worth of refunds.

“The US being the most powerful country in the world does not mean that Trump is the most powerful leader – he is not,” Bremmer said.

“Xi Jinping is the most powerful leader because Xi Jinping doesn’t have midterms. Xi Jinping doesn’t have an independent judiciary, he doesn’t have a free media, he doesn’t have any of the constraints that Trump does.”

Bremmer worries that ultimately, Trump’s cowboy approach to foreign policy will advantage Beijing, when a future president inevitably undoes a lot of Trump’s settings.

“I think Stephen Miller’s right that power matters – it just turns out that it doesn’t always work out in America’s favour,” he said. “The US is better off long-term when it is seen as reliable by its allies; that means more committed to rule of law. The United States, long term, really loses from the return to the law of the jungle, where the Chinese win.”

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