In the sixth swap since the Gaza ceasefire took hold on 19 January, 369 Palestinians held by Israel will also be released.

The extraordinary evolution of American leadership over the past decade can be grasped from just two moments. In 2016, Senator Marco Rubio, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, lectured Donald Trump, then an upstart presidential candidate, on the Middle East. “The Palestinians are not a real-estate deal, Donald,” Rubio quipped during a primary debate on CNN. “With your thinking,” Trump retorted, “you will never bring peace.” Turning to the audience, Rubio got in a last word: “Donald might be able to build condos in the Palestinian areas, but this is not a real-estate deal.”

On Wednesday, President Trump sat alongside the king of Jordan and reiterated his plan for the U.S. to take over Gaza from its inhabitants and rebuild the area. “We’re going to hold it; we’re going to cherish it,” he said. “It’s fronting on the sea. It’s going to be a great economic-development job.” Sitting on Trump’s left was Rubio, the secretary of state tasked with carrying out the plan he’d once publicly derided. In the span of 10 years, U.S. foreign policy had transformed from the domain of expert-brokered consensus to the province of personality-driven populism.

[Read: Nobody wants Gaz-a-Lago]

In his first term, Trump could be dismissed as an accident of the Electoral College, someone to be humored domestically and internationally before the resumption of traditional elite-managed American governance. Today, with Trump returned to office and a host of like-minded leaders ascendant around the globe, he looks less like an aberration from the old international order and more like the apotheosis of a new one. But what will that new order look like? The past few weeks, during which Trump has hosted multiple leaders from the Middle East, rattled sabers with traditional American allies, and proposed his radical plan for Gaza, provide some early clues.

A new era of American empire

While Trump was out of office, a mythology arose that cast him as not simply a dissenter from military misadventures abroad, but a fundamentally anti-war figure dedicated to American restraint. Promulgated by prominent commentators such as the right-wing pugilist Tucker Carlson and the libertarian gadfly Glenn Greenwald, this narrative helped Trump present himself as the “peace candidate” to a war-weary electorate. “Why do they hate Trump so much?” asked the John Jay College professor Christian Parenti in an influential essay. “To the frustration of those who benefit from it, Trump worked to unwind the American empire. Indeed, he has done more to restrain the US imperium than any politician in 75 years.”

In reality, Trump supported the Iraq War before he turned against it, failed to pull out of Afghanistan during his first term, and escalated American arms sales and drone strikes in the Middle East while in power. Since returning to the White House, he has governed not as a neo-isolationist, but almost as a neo-imperialist, calling for the United States to “get Greenland,” musing about making Canada the 51st state, and demanding that America take over Gaza. He has also fast-tracked arms sales to Israel and likely soon to other states in the Middle East, while his border czar recently threatened military action in Mexico. Trump’s team has signaled its desire to wind down the war in Ukraine, in accordance with the preferences of most Republican voters. But otherwise, “Donald the Dove,” as the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd once dubbed him, has once again failed to report for duty.

[Read: The political logic of Trump’s international threats]

On balance, Trump’s personnel choices align with this aggressive posture. The small but capable neo-isolationist wing of the Republican Party and its leftist sympathizers can fairly point to Vice President J. D. Vance and several notable hires in the Pentagon as fellow travelers. But those calling the shots at the top are far more hawkish—Trump, Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz—and the administration’s policy to date has largely reflected their inclinations.

A Middle East policy that includes the Palestinians, but not the Palestinian national cause

Trump’s first administration famously brokered the Abraham Accords between Israel and the Gulf Arab states without including the Palestinians in the process. The success of this endeavor disproved decades of conventional wisdom that Israeli normalization in the region would not happen without a comprehensive peace deal with the Palestinians. For a time, the momentum of the Abraham Accords looked as though it would carry all the way through to an Israeli agreement with Saudi Arabia, leaving the Palestinians in the cold.

After October 7 and the ensuing brutal war in Gaza, however, the Palestinians can no longer be sidelined from the discussion. Trump has responded to this new reality by attempting to include them in his diplomacy while sidelining their aspirations for statehood. He has downplayed the prospect of a two-state solution and, with his Gaz-a-Lago proposal, called for millions of Palestinians to leave the decimated Strip in favor of “beautiful communities” in third-party countries “away from … all the danger.” Speaking to Fox News, Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff made the logic behind this thinking explicit. “Peace in the region means a better life for the Palestinians,” he said. “A better life is not necessarily tied to the physical space that you are in today. A better life is about better opportunity, better financial conditions, better aspirations for you and your family. That doesn’t occur because you get to pitch a tent in the Gaza Strip and you’re surrounded by 30,000 munitions that could go off at any moment.”

Trump is not wrong that Gaza is a “demolition site” and that its people desperately need something better than the decades of war they’ve experienced while caught between Hamas and Israel. And contrary to the claims of many activists, the preferences of the Palestinian people are not always congruent with the demands of Palestinian nationalism. If given the chance, many Gazans would jump at the opportunity to escape the trap they find themselves in, even if it means moving abroad. But to address Palestinian material needs without regard to their historical and national ones is to bracket a core component of Palestinian identity and ignore what makes their conflict with Israel so intractable. Perhaps Trump’s gambit will once again confound the experts with its outcome. But for now, his policy seems more like an answer provided by someone who failed to read the entire question.

The eclipse of the rules-based international order

For decades, American foreign policy has been guided by the assumption that the United States is the benevolent shepherd of a global system, underwriting international security and trade through positive-sum alliances and international institutions. “We’ll lead not merely by the example of our power but by the power of our example,” President Joe Biden declared in his 2020 inaugural address. “We’ll be a strong and trusted partner for peace, progress, and security.”

Arguably no concept was invoked more frequently by his foreign-policy team than the “rules-based international order,” the notion that there ought to be evenly applied standards for all state actors. Like most ideals, this one was often observed in the breach, with critics regularly pointing to perceived American hypocrisy, most recently in Gaza.

But the postwar order has been under severe strain for some time. Russia, a revisionist power, flouted it with an expansionist assault against neighboring Georgia back in 2008, resulting in little pushback and ultimately leading to the war on Ukraine. China, a rising power, subverted Hong Kong, menaced Taiwan, and sterilized Uyghur Muslims in camps, all while the liberal international order effectively shrugged and made its next purchase from Temu. Even those who purported to venerate the rules-based order regularly made a mockery of it. The United Nations, the avatar of internationalism, stood by haplessly as all of these events unfolded—that is, when it wasn’t actively abetting them, as when the members of its human-rights council rejected debate over China’s treatment of the Uyghurs. South Africa took Israel to The Hague over the war in Gaza, while simultaneously backing Vladimir Putin in Ukraine.

Trump, by contrast, has never felt constrained by such ideals in the first place, having long preferred power over pieties. He has expressed admiration for dictators, used American muscle to extract concessions even from allies, and dismissed the protests against his approach from bureaucrats, nongovernmental organizations, and international institutions as the grumblings of the “deep state.” With Trump’s return to Washington, critics of the flawed U.S.-led rules-based order are discovering what a world without it looks like.

Freed from the need to justify his actions in traditional terms, the president has enacted policies no predecessor would have countenanced while moving to purge any internal dissenters. He has dismantled USAID, putting desperately needed American assistance around the world in jeopardy, including George W. Bush’s anti–HIV/AIDS program, PEPFAR; proposed relocating Gazans from their land, feeding far-right dreams of ethnic cleansing; and sanctioned the International Criminal Court.

[Read: The cruel attack on USAID]

Whether one considered the rules-based order a faulty but essential engine of collective prosperity or a sclerotic hypocritical holdover from another era, it now appears to be in decline. Trump is transitioning the old order to a new regime remade in his image—one where statecraft is entirely transactional and the strong, not international lawyers, write the rules. After all, how many divisions does the United Nations command?

Yesterday, during Trump’s meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah II, he was asked “under what authority” he was permitted to take the “sovereign territory” of Gaza. The president responded: “U.S. authority.” In the Trump World Order, no more explanation was required.

If President Donald Trump defies the courts by refusing to comply with their rulings, what will stop him? This question has suddenly become central to U.S. democracy, as federal judges have temporarily barred numerous administration actions, including ending birthright citizenship and granting Elon Musk’s team access to a Treasury Department payment system. Troublingly, Vice President J. D. Vance has repeatedly suggested that the executive should disobey the courts in certain cases, writing last weekend that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

Conventional wisdom, dating back to Alexander Hamilton, is that independent courts should protect democracy; the judiciary, Hamilton argued, is an “excellent barrier to the encroachments and oppressions” of elected politicians. Yet Hamilton also observed that “from the natural feebleness of the judiciary, it is in continual jeopardy of being overpowered, awed, or influenced by its coordinate branches,” meaning the executive and Congress. Hamilton’s paradox is that courts are designed to restrain a powerful executive but lack a clear basis for their own power. When and how, then, do courts prevail over an executive who threatens to flout their rulings?

[Read: The constitutional crisis is here]

As a political scientist, I have researched this question by interviewing high-ranking judges and lawyers in backsliding democracies, collecting original data in Turkey, Israel, and Brazil. The answer: When courts confront a powerful, noncompliant executive, three paths enable the judiciary to stop an executive power grab. Each path musters support for the courts from a distinct outside source: intrastate actors such as state governors and Congress, societal mobilization, or the armed forces. The first path is most effective; the second is costly and challenging to organize; the last is itself dangerous to democracy.

To ensure that powerful leaders obey legal limits, the first and most reliable path is to mobilize intrastate allies—that is, actors within the federal, state, and local governments who can implement the court’s decision over political resistance from the executive. Take the example of Brazil under President Jair Bolsonaro. After Bolsonaro was elected, he clashed repeatedly with Brazil’s Supreme Federal Tribunal. Bolsonaro even threatened to close the court, impeach its justices, and refuse to comply with a judge’s rulings. But at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, when Bolsonaro “systematically sabotaged” pandemic control measures, the high court successfully constrained an antagonistic president.

Why? Brazil’s high court ruled that Bolsonaro could not override state and local public-health measures, and that decision mobilized governors and mayors as intrastate allies. These subnational government officials put muscle behind the court’s decision by acting to implement their own public-health policies against Bolsonaro’s wishes. What is more, the court benefited from support in Brazil’s Congress, which swiftly passed legislation to recognize the pandemic as an emergency.  

[Read: What the rioters in Brazil learned from Americans]

The federal system in the United States provides some opportunities for state and local actors to push for compliance with the courts. For instance, to override a court ruling to protect birthright citizenship, the Trump administration would need cooperation from officials nationwide, who could choose to side with the judiciary. But concerningly, many court decisions require active compliance from the Trump administration itself, on issues such as limiting the powers of Elon Musk’s team or placing thousands of federal employees on leave. The governors of California or Texas cannot easily use their state governments to restore the U.S. Agency for International Development. On many policy issues that the administration could lose on in court, a Republican-controlled Congress is unlikely to intervene.

When intrastate allies are absent, the second, more costly path to protecting judicial power becomes the next-best option: societal mobilization. This was apparent in Israel in 2023, after Benjamin Netanyahu’s government proposed a package of changes to curb the judiciary’s power. The effort to block this judicial overhaul mobilized support from the streets, economic power brokers, and state officials.

At the street level, every Saturday night, Israelis protested by the thousands to oppose the judicial overhaul. To apply economic pressure, trade unions, business leaders, and top Israeli economists spoke out about the economic damage of curbing judicial independence. Among state officials, military reservists threatened to refuse to serve, and Netanyahu’s own defense minister opposed the judicial changes. Ultimately, this mass societal mobilization forced Netanyahu to suspend the overhaul—and empowered the high court to strike down a law limiting the judiciary’s powers.

Mass societal mobilization, however, was costly for Israel’s economy and arguably its national security. The protests closed banks, shops, ports, and Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport. The contentious fight over the judicial overhaul reduced annual GDP by an estimated 2.8 percent. Societal divisions may also embolden geopolitical adversaries. In a survey after the attack of October 7, 2023, 70 percent of Israelis believed that the domestic discord over the judicial overhaul affected Hamas’s decision to attack.

Mass societal mobilization is also difficult to coordinate and sustain. In Israel today, many citizens are psychologically exhausted, and anti-government protests, although still significant, have become smaller. As the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way argue, illiberal leaders can also use state power to inhibit opposition, as individuals and organizations come to fear that publicly opposing the executive will cause repercussions such as tax audits and lawsuits.

The third and final path to upholding judicial power is a dangerous one: military involvement in politics. In Turkey during the 2000s, after Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party rose to power, the military served as the backstop for a powerful judiciary. Turkey’s generals and judges shared a militantly secular ideology, and the armed forces publicly backed judicial efforts to constrain Erdoğan’s religious conservative party. Because Turkey’s military had repeatedly ousted elected governments in 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997, the threat of military intervention put pressure on Erdoğan and his party to accept court decisions, rather than risk a constitutional crisis. Paradoxically, legal constraints on the executive—a hallmark of democracy—came from a deeply antidemocratic source, the threat of a coup.

Yet relying on men with guns to empower the judiciary was unsustainable, precisely because the military’s threat of coercion was democratically illegitimate. The military’s involvement enabled opponents of the judiciary to sell court reform to Turkish voters as democratic. Erdoğan argued persuasively that the military and judiciary were obstructing the “sovereignty of national will”—and won sweeping popular support for a constitutional referendum in 2010 that expanded the elected government’s influence over the courts. Key international players, including the European Union and President Barack Obama, praised the constitutional referendum as a step toward democracy. The referendum did improve a genuinely antidemocratic status quo, but it also created opportunities for Erdoğan to take control of the courts. In effect, the judiciary’s close relationship with the military enabled Turkey’s executive to cast himself as democratic when overhauling the courts—which severely eroded Turkish democracy.

[Read: Erdoğan is getting desperate]

Today, America’s judges face a dilemma that has more commonly confronted their peers in other embattled democracies: how to enforce their rulings against a president who is poised to challenge legal constraints on his power. Though Hamilton feared that “the judiciary is beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of power,” courts elsewhere have sometimes proved surprisingly resilient. Judges can prevail over disobedient executives with support from a range of outside allies, but these methods of preserving the judiciary’s power are not created equal. For the future of U.S. democracy, it is not only whether but how the courts derive their power that will matter.

Palestinian group in Gaza says a total of 369 prisoners held in Israeli jails are expected to be released on Saturday.

Israel’s weeks-long raid on the occupied West Bank has displaced thousands of Palestinians and caused destruction.