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Throughout this entire Ukraine peace plan episode, we’re going to hear a great deal about how the United States is “backing away” from its self-fashioned “rules-based international order.” What we won’t hear enough of, however, is the more uncomfortable question: Did the U.S. ever truly follow its own rules? And more importantly, is Trump’s transactional diplomacy simply exposing the performative scaffolding beneath decades of American exceptionalism?
The 28-point “peace plan” floated by the Trump administration is less a diplomatic blueprint and more an exercise in cynical improvisation. It’s equal parts realpolitik, investor-laden opportunism, and old-school great-power ego stroking. In form and function, it’s a striking departure from the post-WWII Marshall Plan ethos. That plan was no saintly enterprise either. It was realist, calculated, and undeniably self-interested. But it at least married economic expansion with ideological ambition. It recognized that rebuilding Europe served American industry and the liberal democratic project. Today’s vision is lacking that duality. What remains is a skeletal logic of private enrichment wrapped in the ceremonial garb of “peace.”
Where the Marshall Plan embedded democratic norms through institution-building, Trump’s Ukraine strategy is more a kind of kleptocratic diplomacy. The actors aren’t just diplomats; they’re investors, real estate magnates, and tech oligarchs. Energy policy becomes a geopolitical lever that is wielded through oil price manipulation, arms deals, or outright bullying of OPEC members (as this CSIS report outlines). Meanwhile, AI firms and surveillance contractors circle like vultures, eager for a piece of Ukraine’s reconstruction market, which is increasingly being shaped not by Marshallian idealism but by Qatari intermediaries, defense executives, and private capital from Central and Eastern Europe’s most ambitious firms.
What’s unfolding here is not just a break with liberal internationalism, it’s the logical endgame of its contradictions. The U.S.-led order never truly reconciled its democratic pretensions with its coercive, often colonial, interventions. As Deborah Welch Larson points out, status competition among great powers, Russia, China, and yes, the U.S., has always undergirded international behavior, regardless of liberal window dressing. The “liberal order” was always a partial truth, convenient in NATO communiqués but incoherent when filtered through the bloodied streets of Baghdad or the rubble of Kabul.
What Trump offers, then, is not a radical departure but a more honest sequel. His peace plan isn’t interested in pretending Ukraine has agency; it’s there to be bartered. His administration has simply dispensed with the liberal theater and kept the orchestration of multipolar spheres of influence, high-stakes energy diplomacy, privatized militarism, and a ruling tech elite with transnational loyalties and domestic grievances. This is what Clotilde Bomont referred to as the rise of the U.S. “tech-industrial complex”: a fusion of government power and monopolistic tech giants now untethered from any commitment to democratic norms, either at home or abroad.
And here we must return to the foundational lie: that American hegemony ever truly meant democratic solidarity. The performative outrage we’re seeing from some foreign policy elites, about Trump’s embrace of Putin, or his sidelining of European allies, rests on the belief that he’s destroyed something sacred. But in truth, the sacred was already profaned, eroded not only by hypocrisy but by inattention to the very costs liberal internationalism imposed on others.
Sanctions that didn’t deter.
Regime-change fantasies that didn’t deliver.
Surveillance policies that made a mockery of privacy.
And a fixation with strategic ambiguity that became strategic incoherence.
Trump, in his blunt-force transactionalism, may be unpleasantly transparent, but he’s also the inheritor of a system that long rewarded rhetorical high ground while practicing low tactics. His approach may lack finesse, but it doesn’t lack precedent. As Adair Cox reminds us in the Army War College’s strategic review, deterrence is only as good as credibility, and credibility suffers when you speak of democracy and act with impunity.
So let’s be honest: this isn’t about the collapse of a rules-based order.
It’s about the reckoning with an order that was already creaking, undermined by its own contradictions and now being reassembled under new terms. The real scandal isn’t that Trump is changing the rules. It’s that he’s finally acknowledging they were negotiable all along.
Trump’s Health Care Plan (Maybe)
The Trump administration and its Republican allies have delayed the release of their long-promised proposal to “fix” the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a system they have spent years sabotaging through administrative rule changes, strategic confusion, and regulatory dismantling. Now, facing the imminent expiration of enhanced premium tax credits at the end of 2025, they’re trying to conjure a last-minute solution: throw $50 billion at the problem and hope voters don’t notice the fire until after the next election.
The idea, in its crudest form, is to hand people cash, via Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) or “Trump Health Freedom Accounts,” instead of preserving the ACA’s premium subsidies. The theory is that if people get a deposit into their personal accounts, they can shop for care like they’re at a grocery store, bringing that sweet aroma of “personal responsibility” and “choice” back into the air. It fits squarely within the GOP’s aesthetic of rugged individualism, where everyone is expected to bootstrap their way through cancer.
But here’s the structural issue: the ACA marketplaces function on risk pooling, that is, people paying into a system whether or not they’re sick, so that when someone does need care, the collective pool can cover them. If you replace subsidies with cash and send people off into the consumer wilderness, healthier individuals may opt out of marketplace plans entirely. That leaves sicker, higher-cost patients holding the bag, and premiums spike for those who can least afford it. The system frays; the market destabilizes. This isn’t a theory.
It’s exactly what health economists, like those at KFF and CRFB, are warning about.
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