The answer, if there is one, is leverage.
What strategies should other countries pursue to engage with—and, if necessary, constrain—the United States over the next decade?
The United States’ hunger for growth is even older than the nation itself. Once just a strip of loosely organized colonies on the eastern coast of North America, the country has ballooned in size and power with the force of an unstoppable train on the Transcontinental Railroad. On our country’s 250th anniversary, we find ourselves reaping the harvest of our hunger for primacy: a regime on war footing abroad building out its security state within.
But cracks are starting to show, and morbid symptoms abound. China has grown in economic and political prominence, giving American elites a scare. Iran has so far withstood the United States’ and Israel’s cartoonish war, which has upended the stability of the global economy and called into question the solvency of an American security guarantee. This moment—most neatly captured by the belligerent apoptosis of the second Trump administration—is one trembling with uncertainty.
This week, we asked our writers what the rest of the world should do at this juncture. Taking as a given the capriciousness of US policy, what options do other countries have for, at best, engaging with an erratic hegemon or, at worst, constraining a declining engine of global destabilization? We raise this question knowing that, for all its hypocrisies, the United States was once a plausible sponsor of global governance. No longer. What comes next?
Gadfly returns to our pages with a call to revive a nonaligned movement, strategically tailored to this moment, in which nations selectively ally with the US only if it’s to their benefit. Zanjebar suggests that the current domestic flux in the US provides an opportunity for other countries to exploit. And Losa Ruxemburg strikes at the heart of the matter—the US won’t bend unless capital is under threat.
What strategies should other countries pursue to engage with—and, if necessary, constrain—the United States over the next decade?
I. Gadfly
The traditional options for dealing with the United States are looking threadbare.
For treaty allies, the path is one of obedient anxiety. They murmur approval while watching a once-predictable patron succumb to tariff tantrums, foreign-policy whimsy, and the abandonment of the rules it once set. They protest, quietly, when tariffs rise or wars widen, and then they fall into line. The relationship has come to resemble a dependency, where agency is surrendered and protection is purchased.
For adversaries, the strategy is to exploit the United States’ divisions, probe its resolve, and hope the beast consumes itself in political chaos. Rather than direct confrontation, they opt for abrasion, exploiting polarization and alliance fatigue.
Neither approach is especially attractive to the rest of the world. Absolute obedience leaves countries exposed to policy whiplash. Betting on collapse is slow and unreliable. That leaves the large and growing middle, states that are neither clients nor challengers. These third states are not weak, not poor, and not keen to be lectured. They trade heavily with the United States, argue with it often, and hedge instinctively. Their leaders see a superpower that demands loyalty but offers uncertainty. They want options.
History suggests this instinct can be organized. The Bandung Conference of 1955 is often dismissed as moral posturing by weak states. This is a gross misrepresentation of a bold collective effort by medium powers to widen their room for maneuver amid Cold War pressures. Its participants disagreed fiercely but shared a belief that automatic alignment was a liability. The world has changed, but the logic of 1955 endures. As the US stumbles through a volatile decade of internal turmoil, a revival of strategic autonomy among the rest of the world through collective grit looks less nostalgic and more necessary.
Today’s nonalignment would not mean equidistance or moral purity. It would be pragmatic and case-by-case: for instance, cooperating with the US on maritime security or tech standards while declining to sign up wholesale to sanctions regimes, military (mis)adventures, or supply-chain decoupling that impose asymmetric costs. India buys American arms and trains with American troops, yet refuses to align on Ukraine, purchases Russian oil, and resists joining an anti-China bloc. Brazil cooperates on climate finance while deepening ties with China. Turkey, a NATO member, blocks Swedish accession one year and sells drones to Ukraine the next, all while it continues to operate Russian air-defense systems.
The foundation for a new nonalignment is already being poured, one pragmatic agreement at a time. The Asian Clearing Union facilitates non-dollar trade. The African Continental Free Trade Area is stitching together the world’s largest trans-national single market. The expanded BRICS+ bloc is quietly exploring shared monetary arrangements. Development banks like the NDB and AIIB operate beyond Washington’s veto. This is strategic coordination without alignment; what matters is not universal agreement but overlapping coalitions of the willing.
Acting in concert reduces risk. When Gulf states coordinated oil-production cuts despite American pressure, Washington complained, but then adjusted. When African countries resisted “Western” demands to isolate Russia at the UN, the result was not punishment but courtship. Influence spread across a group is harder to discipline than defiance by one.
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II. Zanjebar
Since the end of the Cold War, the world has organized itself around the United States as the unipolar great power, engaging with it through international institutions that shaped the world according to American ideological preferences. US primacy has eroded as the Pax Americana has provided other states with the space to grow, producing a global order in which the United States requires cooperation from other countries to achieve its aims and can be constrained by their defiance. For great and middle powers alike, translating their newfound leverage into their preferred outcomes requires collective alignment: coordinating resistance to American pressure and building capacity for productive engagement through alternative options and domestic political pressure.
Strategic autonomy and differentiated engagement are expensive and slow—but necessary and fruitful for governments willing to be patient. Not all engagements with the United States are the same, after all. Cooperation should be welcomed where interests align between the United States and other governments. But cooperation should become selective in areas of likely exploitation: Treaties without reciprocity and arrangements that risk pulling other countries further into financial dependence are how the United States already exerts influence over the world. Recognizing these differences allows countries to move away from the United States in a non-hostile manner while preserving relationships for future needs.
The goal is not to break with the United States. It is to leverage existing positions to create multiple exit opportunities across sectors. These exit opportunities can be classified as structural, institutional, or as diversification. Structural exits revolve around the development of genuinely independent domestic capacities ranging from energy to technology infrastructure and defense, investment into which can create redundancies while limiting reliance on US contracts. Institutional exits have already been seen in the form of parallel governance structures that do not require formal ruptures from the United States. BRICS+, AIIB, and other regional trade and investment blocs operate as additional multilateral institutions that reduce the dependence on US-influenced bodies. Finally, diversification is arguably the easiest to accomplish. It entails maintaining US ties while spreading dependence across multiple partners. Friendshoring or positioning as a neutral trade hub rather than taking sides can decrease a country’s dependence on any one trade bloc. Diversified procurement of products from rare earths to arms can assist in limiting the leverage of any one source, namely the United States, and can build more trade relationships as well.
American foreign policy voices have been discordant for some time, and nations waiting for a consistent, logical approach will find themselves an afterthought for the ensuing decade. As each new administration comes to power, as influence shifts from one party to the other, so does the character of US international engagement. Middle and great powers must recognize that the most likely constraint on the United States will not come from them, but from Americans’ own internal policy environment. Given the hard-power asymmetry that exists, this ceiling on external constraint only reinforces the point: Nations should invest in engaging domestic coalitions, influencing the information environment, and funding civil society networks in the United States. Such an approach can quietly multiply access points for foreign nations to engage with the United States. State-to-state balancing that is externally motivated will always invite suspicion—but if these ideas appear to originate internally, policymakers and coalitions will be far more receptive.
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III. Losa Ruxemburg
In this moment of grotesque American belligerence, to ask, “How should other countries engage the United States?” is to ask how one negotiates with a boot pressed against the throat. The answer, if there is one, is leverage.
American imperial power does not bend to moral persuasion, international law, or multilateral institutions. The only language it comprehends is the disruption of capital. It can weather moral outrage, having had more than a century of practice. What it cannot withstand for long are severed supply chains and strained balance sheets. The work, then, is to identify where American power is materially vulnerable, and to treat those sites as leverage. The Strait of Hormuz has proven to be far more than a shipping lane—it is a pressure point that capital feels in real time.
Within the labyrinthine architecture of modern trade and finance that the United States has superintended for decades, new pressure points like Hormuz have emerged. The Iran War seems to validate how control over resource and commodity flows, coordinated and exercised transnationally by Global South nations, can become an effective lever against the United States. Still, what’s really needed is an ambitious restructuring: Perhaps a monetary unit to replace the dollar, one that does not rearrange the hierarchy and belongs to no empire and no private actors, or a broader challenge to American dominance over global financial infrastructure itself.
But hope has limits. The uncomfortable truth that enthusiasts of multipolarity sidestep is that neither American allies nor most adversaries will pursue resistance to American dominance at the intensity and direction required. To challenge American capital is to work against the interests of their own ruling classes. Even as the states of India, Brazil, Nigeria, and Indonesia remain selectively subordinate to American empire, their comprador bourgeoisies are its partners. (Even the Chinese and Gulf investors reshaping supply chains in those states are themselves reliant on the dollar system.)
Even if America is contained, defeating American imperialism does not guarantee justice if those doing the defeating are merely other nations’ capitalists. The New Development Bank exists as a BRICS alternative to Western-dominated institutions like the World Bank, and China has its own Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS). But if alternative financial architectures like these insulate existing domestic oligarchies rather than dismantle class power, what we will witness is merely a managerial transition of empire.
So, yes: Sever the supply chains. Construct parallel financial systems. Wield commodity power where it exists. But do so without romanticizing the nation-states effecting the geopolitical revolution. States, after all, are neither people nor hive minds. They are apparatuses operated by ruling classes who translate the violence of accumulation into the lexicon of strategy, order, and values.
We must first see empire not as an idea or intention, but as a material system. Then, we must identify the points of leverage and thwart the collaborators—the domestic elites whose wealth is bound to empire’s survival, and who will sabotage any rupture that threatens their position in the order of things.
Our next issue will be published on August 5.
If you have thoughts, please respond below or send us a letter to the editor at caravanserai.forum [at] gmail [dot] com.