America First, Peace Last: Trump’s Return to the Naked Power State

Donald Trump’s security policy sells the return to the naked power state as common sense – and in doing so, saws off the very pillars that have kept democracies in Europe and North America from going to war with one another since 1945. Under the label “America First,” a global security order is being promoted in which military power, threat, and territorial claims matter more than law, reliability, and mutual commitments – a logic that systematically cancels Kant’s idea of “perpetual peace.” 
Kant famously sketched what states must refrain from if they do not want to live in a permanent state of war: no forced territorial acquisitions, no colonial expansion, no standing armies lying around like loaded pistols on the table. Republican constitutions, so his hope, would make war politically and morally so costly that democracies come to see each other as legal co-subjects rather than prey – the seed of what later became the democratic peace thesis. 
The Trump doctrine inverts this program without even bothering to understand it. Military superiority becomes the entry ticket to any negotiating room; alliances are only interesting as long as they can be cashed out as “deals”; and the distinction between partner and problem case is not a matter of shared norms, but immediate usefulness. Where Kant wanted the transition from a state of nature between states to a legal condition, Trump performs the reverse – including the open hint that the territory of a democratic partner like Greenland could, if necessary, be taken by force if it cannot be bought. 
Empirically, it is true: even under Trump, the United States has not gone to war with other major democracies. The democratic peace has not evaporated overnight. But its normative infrastructure is being hollowed out when Washington openly uses military power as leverage against allies, turns security guarantees into tradable goods, and treats multilateral institutions not as safeguards but as shackles. 
The democratic peace thesis rests on three elements: domestic hurdles to war, shared norms of restraint, and a web of institutions that channel conflict. “America First” attacks all three. The president presents himself as a directly legitimized sovereign bent on telling the security bureaucracy and allies the “hard truths.” Norms such as alliance loyalty and legal commitments are reduced to mere “political correctness.” Institutions from NATO to the United Nations are politically delegitimized. Democracies may still not fight wars against each other – but they are being encouraged to treat one another again as potential foes if the price is right. 
Behind Trump’s policy lies an old, merely rebranded logic: the world is to be carved up into spheres of influence of strong powers, and the strong decide what “security” means. In this view, alliances are instruments, not obligations; territories are strategic assets, not political communities; military force is a legitimate tool to “correct” inconvenient political realities. Greenland is the perfect case study. An autonomous territory of a democratic NATO partner is not addressed as a political subject with its own rights but as a kind of security real estate opportunity – first to be bought, then with the open suggestion that it could, if necessary, be seized. In Kantian terms, this is nothing other than the return of colonial land‑grab fantasies he had already condemned as legally and morally indefensible in the eighteenth century. 
For Europe, this logic is particularly dangerous precisely because it is articulated within a democracy and backed by the very military resources that once underwrote the liberal order. If the United States no longer sees its armed forces primarily as the shield of a “pacific union” of democracies, but as a lever for national deals, then European states will again be sorted according to who “pays,” who “obeys,” and whose territory is strategically “undervalued.” 
In concrete terms, this means: American security guarantees become contingent and transactional; the threshold for externalizing domestic political conflicts at Europe’s expense drops. The Arctic, the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Mediterranean become arenas of a three‑way power struggle among the United States, Russia, and China, in which EU members are treated less as co‑authors and more as playing fields. And the temptation grows on the European side to respond in kind – to meet Trump’s Schmittian power politics not with Kant, but with Schmitt of their own: more flags, more hardware, more posturing. 
Anyone who takes Kant seriously has to reach a bitter but clear conclusion: the answer to Trump cannot be to copy his logic. It is not to out‑muscle “America First” with a European version of the same. It is, rather, to double down on law, shared norms, and democratic self‑restraint precisely when the most powerful ally sneers at them. 
The alternative is not “perpetual peace” or apocalypse. But it is a very real choice about whether Europe allows itself to be dragged back into a world in which democracies are once again asked to imagine each other as potential enemies – with Greenland as the early warning sign that, in this brave new order, even the territories of friendly democracies can once more be declared strategic spoils.