Five years after Dahl wrote his seminal article, Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz wrote an article titled “Two Faces of Power,” in which they pointed out the incomplete nature of Dahl’s popular definition. As they wrote, “Of course power is exercised when A participates in the making of decisions that affect B. But power is also exercised when A devotes his energies to creating or reinforcing social and political values and institutional practices that limit the scope of the political process to public consideration of only those issues which are comparatively innocuous to A.” In other words, if A can define the institutional rules of the game in such a way that vast areas of policy are simply taken as “given” in a manner that favors A, that is exercising the second face of power.

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Twelve years later, Steven Lukes came along and published “Power: A Radical View,” in which he suggested a third face of power that went beyond the institutions of Bachrach and Baratz. Lukes argues that there were forms of domination that could cause Actor B to internalize the values espoused by Actor A. Joseph Nye’s notion of soft power, defined as “Actor A gets Actor B to want what A wants,” fits in with this third face of power.

Sometimes the different faces of power are substitutes for one another. Sometimes they are complements. But there is consensus that, absent a crisis, it is better to exercise the second and third faces of power. Those faces of power tend to be less costly and more legitimate and are less likely to engender blowback from other actors. In an ideal world, a government does not exercise coercion until it has exhausted all the other faces of power, because that is usually the most costly face of power.

And this brings us to the Trump administration.

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I’ll say this for the administration: It is a big fan of the first face of power. Looking at foreign affairs, one has to admire the fact that Washington coerced not just China, not just China and Russia, but China, Russia, Japan, Canada, Mexico and the European Union simultaneously across a wide array of issues. Seriously, the Trump administration has found a reason to sanction all of these countries at the same time. That takes some doing.

At the same time, the Trump administration has also pretty much abandoned exercising either the second or third face of power overseas. On the institutional front, President Trump seems bound and determined to undermine or withdraw from institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the United Nations. Trump couldn’t even call the renegotiated NAFTA an agreement, referring it as a “transaction” instead. Little surprise, then, that the rest of the world is laughing at Trump and that rival powers are perfectly happy to fill in the vacuum left by Washington.

As for the third face of power, I think it’s safe to say that it hasn’t really worked out for Trump. This administration has abjectly failed to promote any set of appealing values to the rest of the world. As previously noted, “America First” obviates the possibility of appealing to common values. And we already know that Trump is uniquely disliked across the rest of the world (more on this point later in the week).

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Distilled to its essence, Trump’s foreign policy relies only on coercion and tactical issue linkage to make it work. Now coercion can net a few concessions here and there, but it usually produces diminishing returns over time. This is particularly true if other actors start to question the institutional and normative structures that have benefited the United States in recent decades.

One wonders whether the same dynamic is playing out in domestic politics, with the same results. As president and leader of the GOP, Trump has done things by executive fiat and ramming things through Congress on party-line votes. He also has attempted to bully, browbeat or otherwise insult countervailing institutions. In the process, he has lost his ability to persuade the American people. He is also mobilizing opponents to push back on the more subtle faces of power: See this Henry Farrell tweetstorm for more on this argument. When partisans start talking about court-packing, it’s a bad sign for anyone hoping that the status quo can be preserved.