It’s no secret that President Donald Trump has global aspirations — despite his promises of focusing on “America First.” The past few weeks have seen US action in Venezuela; threats to Greenland, Europe, and Iran; and Trump’s open solicitation of a Nobel Peace Prize.
The president’s latest global push: the Board of Peace.
With its billion-dollar lifetime membership fee, the new body has been labeled a minor bid to replace the United Nations. So far the countries who have joined are relatively minor players on the world stage, including Belarus, Azerbaijan, and El Salvador.
But whether or not the board ends up successful in its mission to create “a more nimble and effective international peace-building body,” it’s Trump’s latest attempt to exert a new kind of international power, especially over America’s neighbors.
“He’s trying to reestablish the US sphere of influence, its control over the Western Hemisphere,” said Monica Duffy Toft, professor of international politics at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and director of the Center for Strategic Studies.
Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Toft about where our idea of a “world order” came from and where it may be headed after Trump’s shakeup. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
It is unbelievably still January of 2026, and we have had really significant events in Venezuela, over Greenland, with the EU and NATO. And all of this is leading people to say President Donald Trump is trying to remake the world order.
What is the world order?
So the world order was established after World War II. The United States and its Western allies decided to establish rules that would govern the international system and along with that a series of institutions, including, by the way, the United Nations. And what they were trying to do is set up a system of law — international law, norms, and rules in order to prevent a third world war.
The idea was that the use of force — the use of the military — was no longer going to be an acceptable form of international politicking on the global arena.
This is the thing that President Trump seeks to change or to undo or to disrupt. You’ve written about a philosophy that you think is relevant right now. What’s the philosophy?
He’s trying to reestablish the US sphere of influence, its control over the Western Hemisphere. And a sphere of influence, it’s best understood as control without rule. States within a sphere are sovereign on paper; they have their own government, their own borders, their own money, and they have international recognition. But their strategic choices are restrained by the great power, and in this case, it’s the United States.
What [the US] is doing is saying, under President Trump and his administration, [countries within its sphere] can’t freely choose alliances, trade partners without crossing lines or without getting agreement from the United States.
What’s the sphere of influence that the US is seeking? We clearly want to have a lot of influence in Venezuela. Greenland, the president has been very clear there as well. But what other nations and regions do we see Trump wanting to have influence over? And what does he want them to do or not do?
We know that he wants the Western sphere under US control. This was part of the National Security Strategy that was released. And it’s very clear that the United States is going to dominate the region. You can look at what is done in Venezuela, where it just said Venezuela can no longer have [formal trade] relations with China and with Russia.
But paradoxically, [the Trump administration] also wants to have global reach. And so now we’re seeing the tensions. There’s a flotilla moving to the Middle East in order to get Iran to behave. And then also the United States wants to maintain its leverage in Asia. It has allies there, of course: Japan and Taiwan and South Korea.
So on the one hand, it’s really pressing its case in the Western Hemisphere, but then it’s also insisting that it should have some leverage in these other regions. And the one that is probably most problematic is Asia. Because of course if the United States can have pointy elbows in its own sphere, China could make the argument, then why can’t we?
This makes me wonder then: Who are the other great powers? Who are the other nations trying to influence the smaller nations h