Donald Trump’s Overwhelming Force/Surrender Style of Negotiation and Governing

Image: United States Institute of Peace Building. Washington DC - Felix Mizioznikov/shutterstock.com

U.S. President Donald Trump is making worldwide news everyday with his “shock and awe” style of governing.  We, like so many others, have been entirely unable to keep up with what is going on, and have chosen not to comment on everything, as we have neither the time nor the expertise to contribute much to existing coverage. But we want to note three particularly alarming actions that the Trump administration has recently taken, or is apparently about to take, that relate directly to our own fields of peacebuilding and conflict resolution.

The first is the threatened shut down the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS). (We earlier wrote that this had occurred, but apparently, as of March 31, 2025, it is not complete.) FMCS was established in 1947 to mediate labor-management conflicts, and has been very successful at that. The second is the apparent planned closure of the Community Relations Service (CRS) which was established under the 1964 Civil Rights Act to handle civil rights conflicts. We have undertaken two projects documenting their excellent work, which has been able to resolve a  great many tense racial disputes.

Finally, there is the dismantling of the United States Institute of Peace. USIP was established in 1984 after an extensive campaign by many of the founders of the conflict and peacebuilding movements. We have worked with USIP many times over the years and have always been impressed by their expertise and the sophisticated way in which they have addressed the world's most difficult conflict problems. Especially noteworthy has been the respect that the Institute has earned for their work from Republicans, Democrats, diplomats, and the military.

The mission of all three of these agencies has been to help people resolve intractable conflicts in nonviolent, constructive ways. In pursuing this mission, they have consistently worked to advance and implement the core ideas of the conflict and peacebuilding fields.

The fate of these three agencies is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg. The bigger story is President Trump's total rejection of compromise-oriented efforts to find mutually beneficial solutions to public policy and international problems. Instead, President Trump is demonstrating through his personal behavior and his administration's actions that he rejects that way of dealing with conflict. Rather, he seems to believe in what might fairly be called the “overwhelming force/surrender model” of negotiation or, what we have elsewhere referred to as "power-over politics" and "I'll fight you for it" rules.

We know a lot of our colleagues were warning about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies before the election, and are probably now thinking or saying, "I told you so." But that isn't going to do us any good. The voters have spoken, and we believe in the rule of law and free and fair elections. So, our challenge now is to figure out how to make the best of what is clearly a difficult and dangerous situation. 

To us, it seems that the first responsibility of those in the conflict and peacebuilding fields is to help make the larger U.S. society understand that, as a nation, we've embarked on a giant experiment – one that will determine whether or not Trump's hardline approach to conflict will actually do a better job of protecting our individual and collective interests than what we had before. Conflict resolution theory, together with a great deal of conflict resolution practice, suggests strongly that it will not. It seems very likely to dramatically (and maybe catastrophically) undermine the web of relationships upon which U.S. prosperity, security, and true power are based.

Given that, we believe we have an obligation to explain to the public why President Trump's approach is a grave mistake – one that will threaten the interests of his supporters, the nation as a whole, and our friends around the world. 

We have a voice and we should use it. We should take the fullest possible advantage of the many available opportunities for public input that our democracy provides. These include legal challenges (and strong support for judicial independence), appeals to legislators, electoral politics, vigorous public information campaigns, and principled nonviolent protests.

As we do this, our credibility and effectiveness are going to be greatly enhanced by the degree to which we are also willing to challenge the left's brand of power-over politics and its complex apparatus for suppressing and canceling anyone who dares disagree with its progressive policies and beliefs. A big part of Trump's success stems from widespread resentment that so many feel toward the left's hardball politics.

In the likely event that we will be unable to persuade the Trump administration to change course anytime soon, we also believe that our second responsibility is to do what we can to help preserve society's ability to revert to a more compromise-oriented approach to governance in the likely event that Trump's policies start to fail and our society collectively decides to change course. This means taking the steps needed to preserve the institutional memory associated with these and other similar organizations that might be discontinued.

While the situation certainly appears bleak at the moment, it also does not seem sustainable. There are deep contradictions embedded in President Trump's approach to governance and in the promises that he has made to his constituents. To paraphrase Herb Stein, "things that can't go on like this, won't." Sooner or later these contradictions will erupt into some sort of crisis – a crisis that will create opportunities for the kind of course correction that we so badly need.

This is the point when our painstaking efforts to explain why more constructive approaches to conflict (and on-the-shelf models for doing so) could start to pay off. Over the near-term, this might persuade Republicans in Congress and some in the Trump administration to make changes that will allow it to more responsibly pursue its goal of counterbalancing the Democrats' overreach. Over the longer-term (2026-2028), it could provide Democrats with an opportunity to re-earn the public's trust sufficiently to reverse some of their electoral defeats. With luck, we might get both — and a return to a healthier democracy that truly serves the interests of all citizens. 

Related articles:

Trump's first month: Flooding the zone (3-minute read)

From democratic leader to autocratic example: The global impact of US backsliding (3-minute read)

The US in 2024: An election that worked and a democracy that doesn't (10-minute read)

Donald Trump 2.0 (3-minute read)

The death of accountability: How America's democratic crisis threatens freedom worldwide (3-minute read)

Guy and Heidi Burgess have been working as a team at the intersection of research, teaching, and practice in conflict resolution and peacebuilding since the early 1980s. They taught at the University of Colorado, the University of Denver, and the Carter School at George Mason University, have co-edited one and co-authored a second book, as well as numerous articles. But most of their work since 2000 has involved the development, direction, editing and growth of a massive online knowledge base on intractable conflict called Beyond Intractability (BI). BI has 1000s of articles, videos, and audios, contributed by over 500 authors. Since retiring from teaching in 2020, the Burgesses have contributed a lot of their own writing to BI, and have expanded its focus to democracy as a conflict system.