The current global disorder—marked by the war in Ukraine, the devastation in Gaza, renewed instability across the Middle East, rising great-power rivalry and now unilateral US actions in Venezuela alongside strategic pressure on Greenland—cannot be explained merely by regional dynamics or the ambitions of rival states.
These crises are also the result of a deeper long-standing struggle within the United States over the direction of its foreign policy and the nature of its global leadership.
At the center of this struggle is the confrontation between Donald Trump and a powerful nexus of unelected institutions, entrenched interests and ideological networks commonly described as the American deep state.
This conflict is not about peace versus war but about who controls American power, how it is justified and whose interests it ultimately serves.
Historically, US foreign policy was not always structured around permanent global engagement. Before World War II, American strategy was shaped by restraint and selective involvement. George Washington’s warning against permanent alliances reflected fears that foreign entanglements would undermine republican governance.
The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 institutionalized this logic by asserting US dominance in the Western Hemisphere while avoiding European power struggles. American power was real but geographically limited and strategically cautious.
World War II and the rise of the Soviet Union forced a fundamental shift. The United States embraced global leadership through institutions such as NATO and policies like the Marshall Plan.
Yet early Cold War strategy remained grounded in realism. President Dwight Eisenhower warned against the military-industrial complex, recognizing that permanent mobilization could distort democratic control.
Even President Ronald Reagan, despite ideological rhetoric, combined pressure with negotiation and ultimately pursued de-escalation. Power was exercised with clearer objectives and defined limits.
The end of the Cold War dismantled many of these restraints. With no peer competitor, liberal internationalism transformed American power into a moral project. Intervention became normalized through the language of democracy, human rights and a rules-based order.
Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria revealed a consistent pattern: overwhelming force followed by prolonged instability, mission creep and strategic incoherence. War ceased to be merely an instrument of policy and became a condition of governance.
Out of this environment emerged the American deep state, not as a conspiracy but as a functional ecosystem. Defense contractors, intelligence agencies, bureaucratic institutions, think tanks, media organizations and academic elites formed a self-reinforcing structure whose legitimacy depended on continuous crisis.
Elections changed leaders but policy direction remained remarkably stable. Failure was reframed as necessity and accountability diffused across institutions.
The Biden administration’s return to aggressive liberal internationalism exposed the exhaustion of this system. In Ukraine, the United States encouraged confrontation with Russia through NATO expansion and strategic signaling while declining to pursue a credible diplomatic exit.
What was framed as a moral defense of sovereignty evolved into a prolonged proxy war that devastated Ukraine, strained European economies, entrenched Russian militarization and deepened global polarization.
In Gaza, American inconsistency and selective morality emboldened non-state actors while producing mass civilian suffering. The United States appeared neither restrained nor decisive but reactive—trapped between rhetoric and reality.
Trump’s rise represented a rupture with this post-Cold War orthodoxy. The America First doctrine rejected permanent wars, questioned alliance structures that extracted US resources without reciprocal commitments and treated diplomacy as leverage rather than moral endorsement.
Trump avoided escalation with Iran, resisted direct confrontation with Russia, reduced US presence in Syria and Afghanistan and pursued dialogue with adversaries long considered untouchable. His presidency coincided with the absence of major new wars—an anomaly that directly threatened a system dependent on perpetual engagement.
Yet Trump was never opposed to American dominance itself. This is where Venezuela and Greenland must be understood. Trump’s willingness to use force or coercion does not contradict his conflict with the deep state; it clarifies it.
He opposes not the use of power but its institutional capture. His preference is for short, transactional, interest-driven actions controlled by the executive rather than prolonged interventions managed by unelected networks.
The US operation in Venezuela reflects this logic. While framed in terms of stability and law enforcement, it aligns with traditional concerns of hemispheric dominance and energy security.
Venezuelan oil and regional influence evoke an expanded Monroe Doctrine logic. This approach may be coercive and imperial but it differs fundamentally from the deep state’s preference for prolonged sanctions regimes, humanitarian narratives and managed instability that sustain bureaucratic relevance without resolving crises.
Trump’s approach to Greenland follows the same pattern. By openly pressuring Denmark and bluntly articulating Greenland’s strategic value in terms of minerals, Arctic positioning and security infrastructure, Trump stripped away the moral language that often conceals geopolitical ambition.
Rather than embedding competition within NATO committees and institutional consensus, he exposed the raw calculus of power. This transparency destabilizes a system that depends on moral abstraction and procedural legitimacy.
The deep state’s resistance to Trump stems from this exposure. Its authority rests on presenting American power as altruistic, inevitable and rules-based. Trump disrupts this by centralizing decision-making, rejecting bureaucratic continuity and reasserting electoral authority over foreign policy.
Intelligence leaks, legal resistance, media alignment and diplomatic backlash reflect not merely opposition to Trump’s personality but to his challenge to institutional supremacy.
Trump’s confrontation with the deep state is therefore not a struggle between peace and militarism but between two models of empire. One is technocratic, moralized and permanent. The other is nationalist, transactional and overt.
Both carry risks. Trump’s model threatens alliance norms, sovereignty and global stability. The deep state’s model has already produced endless wars, moral hypocrisy and systemic exhaustion.
The contradiction remains unresolved because it reflects a deeper crisis within American leadership itself. Trump positions himself as a challenger to a system that has hollowed out democratic control over foreign policy even as his methods test the limits of restraint.
Whether his vision represents renewal or merely a different form of dominance remains uncertain. What is clear is that the struggle between Trump and the deep state is not a personal feud but a structural battle over the future of American power and the global order it sustains.
H. M. Sabbir Hossain, a graduate student of international relations at the University of Chittagong in Bangladesh