Return to Royalism: An Overview

Other scholars have warned of a return to the “patrimonial” state, with rational-legal bureaucracies displaced by personalized rule and “extra-legal” sovereignty.Footnote ⁸ We suggest that it is not only domestic structures of sovereignty at stake, but international ones as well. We use “neo”-royalism to describe this order because, while it recalls pre-sixteenth-century European dynastic systems, this is not necessarily the return of kings and divine right. Instead, it is an international system structured by a small group of hyper-elites who use modern economic and military interdependencies to extract material and status resources for themselves.

Building on a robust literature on European state formation, imperial and dynastic politics, and historical international orders,Footnote ⁹ we argue that a neo-royalist order diverges from Westphalian and liberal orders in at least four key areas: its primary actors; its purpose; the means of sustaining the order; and its legitimation (see Figure 1).Footnote ¹⁰

FIGURE 1.

Liberal, Westphalian, and neo-royalist orders

From States to Cliques

Most International Relations (IR) scholars treat “states” as the primary actors in international politics. An ideal-typical Westphalian state is one where sovereignty is centralized and territorially bounded, with a political organization holding exclusive authority within its borders. International orders provide the rules structuring interactions across state boundaries. While IR theorists often treat states as generalizable across time and space, such political communities are not only unique, but outliers across human organization. Historical orders, including the “Chingissid” order of Genghis Khan, China’s tributary system, and the dynastic European system among others, centered not on states but on a narrower set of players and their ambitions, often ruling through personal loyalties and kinship ties.Footnote ¹¹

We call these actors royalist cliques: small, bounded, exclusive networks, defined through their connection to an absolute sovereign.Footnote ¹² Royalist cliques include the Khanate “great houses,” monarchical families and their courts (the “Tudors” or the “Habsburgs”), and political conglomerations, such as the Medicis in Florence, to name some prominent examples. We use the general term “cliques” rather than “houses,” “families,” or “dynasties,” because such terms differ in their substance but share key structural elements.Footnote ¹³ First, royalist cliques center on an absolute sovereign, an individual who claims unrestricted authority to rule over a political community. The source of that authority varied across royalist cliques. In some, such as the original Khanate and Roman cliques, supreme authority stemmed from successful conquest. In others, it derived from lineage. Whatever the source, sovereignty is concentrated in a single and singular individual.

Second, while an individual’s sovereign claim is absolute, sovereign practice relies on the array of social ties that connect the monarch to other actors, and secure power and wealth. These might be kinship networks that define succession. Social ties to lesser nobility secured, not only obeisance, but military might. Monarchs maintained ties with banking houses—the Habsburgs with the House of Fugger, the Mughals with the Jhaveri family—to finance their ambitions.

These are sovereign actors, but not Westphalian states. As Zarakol details, the Westphalian state relies on a “horizontal” centralization of power, with a political organization claiming supreme authority across all a defined territory. In contrast, cliques are “vertically” centralized around dense social ties that create personal loyalty and connections. Non-clique individuals (for example, commoners) remain relatively isolated from royalist actors. These networks can extend across territorial boundaries, and intertwine within them. Sovereignty can thus be fragmented within a territory, and a physically distant sovereign may have authority over local rule. Famously, Pope Alexander’s papal bull of 1493 swept clean any notion of internal sovereignty within the Americas and granted the Spanish dynasty authority over its colonies.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the Westphalian states had replaced royalist cliques as dominant actor in international politics, yet clique-based interactions continued to exist alongside state interactions, particularly among dynastic rulers, elite pacts, and transnational oligarchs.Footnote ¹⁴ Over the last decade, we have seen a resurgence in leaders that adopt the model of neo-royalist cliques, with individuals claiming personalist sovereignty, and ruling through an exclusive, tightly linked network of individuals. Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi defied parties and depended on an exclusive media and financial clique to solidify his regime. Orban, Modi, Xi, and Putin have all centralized sovereignty within their personal cliques, and scholars even argue that these leaders are relying on royalist practices that never disappeared from their political systems.

But Berlusconi, Modi, and even Putin were in no position to turn their domestic governing style into a world order. In contrast, Trump’s vision of absolute sovereignty, his reliance on a clique composed of family members (primarily his children), fierce loyalists (Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem), and elite hyper-capitalists (often tech elites like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen) guides not only US foreign policy, but his ordering of international relations itself. Consistent with neo-royalism, Trump sees certain leaders as holding something akin to monarchical sovereignty, and has prioritized relations with other dominant cliques. It was not by chance that his first international visit was not to European allies, as is the tradition, but to dynastic rulers in the Middle East, who treated him “as royalty,”Footnote ¹⁵ serving to burnish his own absolute legitimacy.Footnote ¹⁶ And where Trump goes, his clique follows, especially his sons, who have used these inter-clique negotiations to expand the Trump Organization’s real estate investments overseas.

Trump’s royalist proclivities with Putin are particularly notable. He sees negotiations over Ukraine as dealings between equal, rival houses, musing to France’s President Emmanuel Macron that “I think he wants to make a deal for me.”Footnote ¹⁷ In response, European leaders are increasingly acting like neo-royalist actors themselves. They rely on personalist pleas, such as their emergency meeting in Washington in August 2025, to influence US foreign policy toward Ukraine. Given his position, Trump has used his position to reshape relationships with both friends and rivals into neo-royalist ties; a change facilitated by the move from webarian states to patrimonial rule domestically.

From Absolute Gains to Pervasive Hierarchy: The Purpose of the Emerging Order

Orders have a purpose. Westphalia rested on the legal recognition that sovereign states maintain exclusive control within their boundaries. Under the LIO, noninterference remained, but liberal goals of facilitating peace and prosperity were added.Footnote ¹⁸ In both orders, states exist as legally equal entities, whatever their actual differences in power.Footnote ¹⁹

In neo-royalist orders, hierarchy is the point. The purpose of neo-royalist orders is to develop rules that allow a small clique to maintain dominance in both material and symbolic goods. It thus rejects notions of sovereign equality and noninterference, and rests instead on the idea that a royalist clique is dominant, and will only recognize rival “great cliques” as peers; all others are unequal, and not due recognition. The European dynastic order, for example, contained clear rules delineating which individuals would dominate the hierarchy. It involved practices like strategic marriages that created opportunities to enter the clique, and others, such as banishment, that excluded actors from elite networks. While these rules were often contested—as in competing succession claims—they ensured a continuity of hierarchy.Footnote ²⁰

Like the dynasts he emulates, Trump has made it clear that actors outside his royalist clique have little authority in international relations. His mocking of the Canadian prime minister as a “governor” or assertion of control over Greenland are designed to place the Canadian and Danish governments in a submissive position. It also sends a signal to other world leaders that their relative standing in the international system is not based on legal status, but on their relationship to Trump and his ruling clique. None of this behavior is consistent with a Westphalian system. The United States already has a military base in Greenland as well as repeated offers by Denmark to expand its presence. Canada has been a steadfast NATO ally, dependent on the United States for both its economic and military welfare. Threatening their legal sovereignty undermines the external balancing necessary in a traditional game of great power politics. It does, however, have the advantage of securing hierarchy for those on the inside.

Trump’s actions not only undercut potential balancing coalitions, but threaten the very norms of sovereignty that underpin the Westphalian order.Footnote ²¹ This may seem overstated, but the reactions of those forced into a submissive position speak volumes. Denmark views Trump’s recent stoppage of a Danish wind farm, coupled with rumors of influence operations by associates of the president, as an attempt to undermine its claim to Greenland.Footnote ²² Signaling the importance of inter-clique status, the Canadian prime minister took the rare move to invite King Charles to deliver a “speech from the throne in Canada,” something that Queen Elizabeth did only twice in her reign. In the speech, King Charles reasserted Canada’s sovereignty, in which he serves as the Canadian head of state.Footnote ²³ For these actors, the pressure on the Westphalian system is quite real.

Replacing Rules with Rents: The Means of Sustaining Order

All orders rest on power. Westphalian states rely on mobilization, using vast military, fiscal, and social bureaucracies to produce power.Footnote ²⁴ The LIO added institutions that could regulate state interactions, directing them away from unproductive competition and toward greater security and prosperity.

Neo-royalism maintains the LIO’s cross-boundary collaboration, because it allows them to maintain their power through the extraction of rents or tribute and the provision of bribes. This is not liberal cooperation, but instead is much closer to the type of collaboration practiced in oligarchic or mafioso systems and protection rackets. Leading cliques engage with local cliques in a process of distribution, in which they leverage threats, promises of access to the inner circle, or status recognition to maintain their hierarchical positions.Footnote ²⁵ While tactics of domination are often most visible (for example, threats of the use of force), many everyday interactions are resolved through exchange processes. In contrast to the LIO, protection and cooperation become private goods dolled out to encourage obedience.

These exchange relations benefit a clique’s position, and may even come at the expense of a state’s general welfare. European dynasties were infamous for international deals consolidating their power, which frequently left their domestic subjects worse off. The goal of rent extraction is not simply self-enrichment; it amasses wealth from both the domestic and international peripheries so as to perpetuate and extend clique political dominance. Such dominance strategies can prove resilient as royalist cliques disrupt collective resistance through side payments and use the shadow of violence to create powerful incentives for obedience. What appears as arbitrary demands and threats of coercion can be understood as “regulated injections of distrust,”Footnote ²⁶ which increase the demand for protection.

In the first weeks of the new administration, President Trump radically upended the global trade regime in ways that not only defy the LIO, but also make very little sense as a means of increasing sovereign state power. While a great power politics perspective might ascribe tariffs to US–China competition, the United States ultimately walked back many of those tariffs and continued pressuring Europe and India, and ostensible friends like Canada and Mexico are repeatedly threatened by new forms of economic coercion. Because of the nature of global supply chains, American companies were also effected, undercutting US power as a result.

From a neo-royalist perspective, the trade war is a rent-seeking strategy, a regime based on arbitrary decisions, aimed at extracting maximum wealth for the clique. As the president’s advisors explained, a key goal of the tariff policy was to start ninety negotiations in ninety days where the reversion point of a failed outcome is not the LIO policies of most favored nation or free trade agreements. The art of the deal is not about creating a cooperative equilibrium but leverage, whereby parties must offer concessions to avoid higher tariff rates. The United States and global firms are put in a position of tithing in exchange for exceptions from the tariff policy. Nvidia, for example, agreed to give 15 percent of its revenue to the US government in exchange for increased market access in China. Such arrangements deepen the dependence of key segments of capital on the royalist clique. Or as The Washington Post explains, “CEOs can kiss the president’s ring by offering to give him something he wants and in return be exempted from whatever policy threatens to damage their business. In this way, companies deepen their dependence on government and on Trump personally.”Footnote ²⁷

In the first weeks of the administration, international partners also offered a range of tributes to minimize tariff threats. The royal family of Qatar gifted the president a “flying palace,” which the president could use to replace an aging Air Force One.Footnote ²⁸ The Trump family has also benefited from the new trade environment. In Vietnam, where “Vietnam’s government sees Mr. Trump’s administration and the Trump Organization as one,” the Trump organization was reportedly able to short circuit conventional permitting requirements to break ground on a $1.5 billion real estate development.Footnote ²⁹ Since the start of his reelection campaign, Trump and his family’s net worth has doubled to over $5 billion.Footnote ³⁰ Even when concessions did not go specifically to the president or his family, they have been used to enrich the insider clique.Footnote ³¹ As the New York Times concludes, “the line between Trump the president and Trump the tycoon is now seen by diplomats, trade officials, and corporations worldwide as so obviously blurred that governments feel more compelled than ever to favor anything Trump-related.”Footnote ³²

From Rules to Exceptions: Legitimation of the Patrimonial Order

Westphalian, liberal, and neo-royalist orders rest on different forms of legitimation. In Westphalian orders, legitimation revolves around the provision of public goods, especially security, to a political community.Footnote ³³ The LIO adds to these public goods the promise of collective wealth, prosperity, and individual freedom.Footnote ³⁴

Neo-royalists also make similar appeals—the sovereign needs to take care of her subjects, after all. But providing public goods is not what justifies domination. Instead, we find legitimation by exception: stories that explain why some actors are uniquely endowed with the right to wield sovereign power. Historically, narratives of exception revolved around divine right, the idea that a sovereign power rests on some transcendent entity. In dynastic Europe, exception was in the blood, quite literally: divinity circulated, not only within individuals, but through the kinship network itself.Footnote ³⁵ The emperors of imperial China invoked a “Mandate of Heaven,” and the Mughal emperor claimed his authority was divinely given. More recently Putin has claimed that he is enacting “God’s will” in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Modi suggests that God has “sent me for a purpose.”Footnote ³⁶

Neo-royalism also holds that the small clique has the right to rule because individuals—especially the sovereign leader—are endowed with unique qualities that give them the right to do so. While some of Trump’s legitimation appears nationalist on its face, his rhetoric sits uneasily with this Westphalian discourse. His descriptions of his right to govern focus on his individual, not national, strengths, and his own personal capacity to rule, not his right to rule as a representative of the people.Footnote ³⁷ Trump’s neo-royalist order lacks consensus on the drivers of exceptionalism. In some parts of the MAGA coalition, we see the explicit language of divine right. In his inaugural speech, Trump pronounced that the failed attempt on his life proved that he “was saved by God to make America great again.” A few months later, in May, the secretary of defense staged a Christian prayer service at the Pentagon, in which the New York Times reports that “President Trump was praised as a divinely appointed leader.”Footnote ³⁸ These religious claims sit alongside ideas circulating among “techno-optimists,” which suggest that democracy has largely run its course and should be replaced by business-led monarchs.Footnote ³⁹ Here too, the exceptionalism runs deep, with a narrative that tech leaders, through their command of technology and capital, are approaching the status of gods themselves.

Regardless of the differences, the neo-royalist clique shares the common purpose of legitimating their extractive order through claims of unique status. Other clique actors, seeking material gain and protection from coercion, engage in a competition to elevate the absolutist nature of the sovereign’s legitimacy, something that Xavier Marquez has dubbed “flattery inflation.”Footnote ⁴⁰ NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte turned to patriarchal frames as he trumpetted Trump’s role in the Iran negotiations, “Daddy sometimes has to use strong language.”Footnote ⁴¹ When they fail to do so, they can suffer quite powerful consequences, as Narendra Modi discovered when he refused to submit to Trump’s claim that he had ended the conflict between India and Pakistan and should be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. The price was not just an agreement to disagree but a diplomatic crisis.Footnote ⁴²

The neo-royalist framework also sheds light on what Trump seeks to delegitimate. For the neo-royalist order to be legitimated, it must both undermine proponents of rival orders and elevate those who support neo-royalism. Since the first Trump administration, traditional foreign policy analysts have been left confused by the president’s animosity toward the European Union and the United States’ European allies. In various settings, the president has addressed the European Union as a “foe”Footnote ⁴³ and a “scam,” and Vice President Vance called Europeans “pathetic.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Targeting the European Union as illegitimate is part of a broader effort to discredit the LIO. A synecdoche for the order, the EU symbolizes a cooperative, rules-based system, an alternative that must be delegitimated.

Neo-Royalism and Its Critics

We do not see a neo-royalist order as inevitable. Following the work of Hendrik Spruyt and others, international orders are not born fully baked, but emerge through a competitive process in moments of historical uncertainty among rival forms of political organization.Footnote ⁴⁵ In such moments, we argue, it is important to understand the actions of key order entrepreneurs—actors who work to ensure certain forms of order win out. Major powers like the United States—and their leaders—have good reason to compete to ensure their preferred order wins the day and they have many of the most powerful tools to shape order transitions. The closer the order aligns with Trump’s ambitions, the less resistance he is likely to encounter at home and abroad.

A neo-royalist order is far from simply a Trumpian game but has the potential to mobilize powerful groups that have long chafed under the LIO. Putin is often portrayed as a sovereign-nationalist, and a fervent devotee to Westphalian principles of nonintervention. Not only do his own actions in Ukraine suggest otherwise, his rent-seeking ties with oligarchs and his interest in extracting from Russian society suggests a neo-royalist proclivity, as does his insistence that a strong leader is above the law. Similar dynamics pervade politics in Hungary, Turkey, India, and the Gulf states.Footnote ⁴⁶ Supporters of neo-royalism extend beyond sovereign rulers, with particularly vocal advocates in global technology and finance sectors. From Rupert Murdoch to Peter Thiel to Erik Prince, hyper elites are playing strategic games unbound by national borders or Westphalian systems of political ordering.Footnote ⁴⁷ Ultimately, the durability of any neo-royalist order depends on the coupling of absolute rule with courtisans who control capital, information, and the means of force. This marriage of order-entrepreneurs with vast concentrations of capital might prove significant in shaping the future order. Just as an exhaustive amount of research has explored the stability and boundaries of the territorial state, we need a similar effort to understand how royalist cliques grow and fail. A neo-royalist logic also helps to map out the possible international consequences of the rise of personalistic regimes domestically.

Neo-royalist supporters face both external and internal challenges. Externally, not all clique leaders are equally attracted to the neo-royalist order. China’s leaders, in particular, face a conundrum. China did very well under the LIO, and it is not surprising that Xi continues to present himself as a defender of a rules-based order. And while Xi has increasingly entertained notions of individual exceptionalism and clique-based rule domestically, he has also consolidated his power with a pro-China and anticorruption legitimation strategy, one which sits in tension with the extraction and exceptionalism underpinning a neo-royalist world. And all neo-royalists face threats from both the palace coup and the guillotine. Within governments, there are elite factions that benefit from great power competition under a Westphalian-type order. Marginalized states and domestic populations may also challenge the order, and this resistance can morph to revolution; aristocrats tend not to do well in revolutionary times. And as neo-royalism is based around a set of absolute sovereigns, succession (and the lack of succession planning) within royalist cliques could have far-ranging impacts on the system. If history is a guide, this does not necessarily mean that the order itself will fail due to succession crises but rather that the system could experience periodic spasms of violence and conflict emanating from internal political transitions.

The objective of our intervention is less to predict the consolidation of a neo-royalist future and more to encourage IR theorists to develop a more expansive research agenda around the varieties of emerging international orders. A failure to take off Westphalian blinders could have far-reaching policy consequences, as neo-patrimonial strategies are mischaracterized as transactional great power politics, regularized systems of tribute are dismissed as singular acts of corruption, or the elevation of some cliques (Putin or the House of Saud) and rejection of others (the EU and Canada) is dismissed as a quirk of Trump’s personality rather than an emerging feature of the order itself. Even if a neo-royalist order does not win the competition to replace the LIO, the interests and logics of royalist cliques will echo through the emerging order.

Theoretically, developing a more expansive research agenda requires recognizing that states are a relatively recent political form, that interests may not be national but parochial, that hierarchy can be as pervasive as anarchy, and that legitimacy can reside in visions that are potentially more transcendental than technocratic liberal rules. It requires being willing to reach out further geographically than the European system, and further back in time beyond 1815 or even 1648. It may require a willingness to imagine a more diverse range of future orders, or perhaps even more challenging, a willingness to accept what is right in front of us. For as a White House press release, accompanied with an image of Trump wearing a crown, declared: “Long live the King.”Footnote ⁴⁸