How U.S. foreign policy under Trump erodes legitimacy in the Global South

WHEN Vladimir Putin addressed the Munich Security Conference in 2007, he accused the United States of having “overstepped its national borders in every sphere, economic, political and humanitarian, and imposed itself on other states.” 

At the time, the remark was dismissed across Western capitals as the bitterness of a declining power. Yet nearly two decades later, under Donald Trump’s renewed presidency, that line reads less like provocation and more like diagnosis.

This is not because Putin was morally right. His own violations of sovereignty, most notably in Ukraine, stand as egregious breaches of international law. But the accuracy of his critique lay elsewhere: in identifying the dangers of unrestrained power in a unipolar system. 

Under Trump, the United States has abandoned even the pretence of multilateral restraint, replacing it with a coercive, transactional foreign policy that treats sovereignty as conditional and economic pressure as a legitimate substitute for diplomacy.

For the Global South, including South Africa, this shift is neither abstract nor new. It is the intensification of a pattern long experienced by states outside the West, now applied with unprecedented openness.

Venezuela remains the clearest illustration of American overreach. For years, Washington has justified sweeping sanctions as tools to promote democracy and alleviate human suffering. In practice, these measures have functioned as blunt instruments of economic strangulation, targeting the country’s oil sector and, by extension, the livelihoods of millions of Venezuelans.

Under Trump, sanctions policy has become even more transparently transactional. Restrictions are eased or tightened not in response to humanitarian outcomes, but according to U.S. strategic interests, particularly access to energy resources and the exclusion of geopolitical rivals such as China and Russia.

Secondary sanctions punish third countries for trading with Caracas, effectively extending U.S. jurisdiction far beyond its borders. For Global South states, this resonates deeply. Many have faced similar coercion: economic penalties imposed without UN authorisation, enforced through financial systems dominated by Western power, and justified through selectively applied moral language. Venezuela is not an anomaly; it is a warning.

If Venezuela exposes economic coercion, Trump’s renewed fixation on Greenland reveals something more unsettling: the re-emergence of imperial thinking in plain sight.

The suggestion that Greenland, an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, could be acquired by the United States was initially treated as farce. But it has returned with sharper edges, accompanied by threats of tariffs against European states unwilling to entertain negotiations. This is not merely diplomatic eccentricity. It reflects a worldview in which territory, like trade, is subject to bargaining under pressure. Sovereignty is not inviolable; it is negotiable, provided sufficient leverage exists.

For countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, this logic is chillingly familiar. It echoes an era when borders were redrawn and resources extracted through coercion rather than consent. The difference today is not the principle, but the bluntness with which it is articulated.

Trump’s treatment of the European Union underscores how far this approach extends. Long framed as America’s closest partner, the EU has increasingly been treated as an economic rival to be disciplined through tariffs, threats, and public disdain for multilateral negotiation.

Trade measures are deployed not to resolve disputes, but to extract political concessions, whether on energy, defence, or regulatory policy. This weaponisation of interdependence undermines the rules-based system the United States once championed and exposes its conditional commitment to cooperation.

For much of the Global South, Europe’s shock has been met with weary recognition. This is what economic coercion looks like when it is finally turned inward, applied not just to peripheral states but to fellow centres of power.

At the heart of Trump’s foreign policy lies a belief that tariffs are tools of discipline rather than instruments of economic regulation. They are imposed to compel alignment, not to correct market distortions.

This shift has profound consequences. It accelerates the erosion of the World Trade Organization, normalises unilateralism, and incentivises states to seek alternatives to US-dominated financial and trade systems.

For South Africa and other middle powers, the result is heightened vulnerability in an increasingly fragmented global economy. Ironically, this strategy hastens the very multipolar world Washington claims to fear. By undermining trust in U.S. leadership, it pushes states towards hedging strategies, strengthening BRICS, exploring alternative payment systems, and deepening South–South cooperation.

South Africa has long championed multilateralism, strategic autonomy, and a rules-based international order, not out of ideological purity, but necessity. In a world where power is increasingly exercised through coercion, weaker states rely on rules to protect sovereignty.

Trump’s America challenges that premise. It signals that rules apply selectively, alliances are transactional, and economic pressure is a legitimate substitute for consensus. For South Africa, this reinforces the importance of diversification, of trade, diplomacy, and strategic partnerships, rather than reliance on any single hegemon.

Putin’s 2007 warning was never about Russia’s virtue; it was about American excess. In 2026, that excess has become overt. The danger is not merely hypocrisy, but normalisation, a world in which coercion replaces cooperation and sovereignty becomes conditional. 

For the Global South, this is not a future threat but a familiar present. If the United States continues to overstep its borders economically, politically, and diplomatically, it will find that its greatest loss is not influence, but legitimacy. And legitimacy, once eroded, cannot be restored through tariffs, threats, or transactional deals.

Brown is an MPhil candidate at UCT.