Yesterday marked the end of the first year of Donald Trump’s second term — though it only felt like a century.

To mark the occasion, my Columbia University colleague Elizabeth Saunders and I published an essay over at Foreign Affairs entitled, “Trump’s Year of Anarchy.” An excerpt:

Although U.S. President Donald Trump did not single-handedly bring about the decline of the post-1945 order, he has, in his first year since returning to office, accelerated and even embraced its demise. Trump’s appetite for territorial expansion eviscerates the most powerful post-1945 norm: that borders cannot be redrawn through the force of arms. And his disregard for domestic institutions has allowed him to run roughshod over any attempts at home to check those foreign expansionist dreams.

The anarchy that is emerging under Trump, in other words, is more chaotic. It is closer to the more primitive anarchy of the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes—a world of “all against all,” where sovereign power cannot be challenged domestically or internationally. In this Hobbesian order, driven by a leader who rejects any constraints on his ability to act and who is emboldened by technology to move at a whirlwind pace, anything goes. Order may well eventually emerge from this anarchy, but that order is unlikely to be led by—or to benefit—the United States.

I have long admired Saunders’ work, and I have assigned much of it in my own courses. So it really was an honor to co-author with her. And this was a natural topic for us wordsmith together. For me, it was a refinement of ideas I first wrote about here last week; for Elizabeth, if was an extension of her Good Authority column from last week as well.

Anyway, please read the whole thing.

Now would ordinarily be the moment when the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World would sign off. But not today. See, something interesting happened over on Bluesky yesterday when both Saunders and I posted about it:

We received complimentary responses from our IR colleagues, as well as responses from anarchists who were displeased with our employment of the term.

Now as I noted last week, international relations scholars use the term “anarchy” in a particular way:

The modern international system is defined by anarchy — that is to say, what makes international politics distinctive from other realms of politics is the absence of any legitimate authority governing the globe. In contrast to domestic politics, where authority is more hierarchical, there is no central government that spans the entire world. Anarchy in this sense merely means the absence of a centralized, legitimate authority.

Does that definition correspond to a dictionary meaning of the word? Yes, according to Merriam-Webster. There are, to be sure, additional meanings of the word. And interestingly enough, Merriam-Webster offers some thoughts about this array of diverging definitions:

Anarchy exemplifies how words may have similar yet distinctive meanings. The earliest recorded use of the word, from the early 16th century, meant simply “absence of government,” albeit with the implication of civil disorder. A similar but ameliorated meaning began to be employed in the 19th century in reference to a Utopian society that had no government. The establishment of these two senses of anarchy did not stop the word from being applied outside the realm of government with the broadened meaning ”a state of confusion or disorder.” The existence of definitions that are in semantic conflict does not imply that one (or more) of them is wrong; it simply shows that multisense words like anarchy mean different things in different contexts.

Why yes, that sounds like an entirely reasonable position to hold about a word in the English language. Unfortunately, however, it does not seem to be a position held by, well, anarchists.

As our colleague Dan Nexon pointed out, “weirdly enough this fairly bog-standard… discussion of ‘anarchy’ triggered a SkyMob by anarchists unhappy about about the way that international-relations scholars use the term ‘anarchy.’” Indeed, despite the anarchist belief that freedom from authority is the utopian ideal, anarchists are rather autocratic in wanting their definition of “anarchy” to be the only one in existence.

Here is the natural experiment part of the post: despite Saunders and I writing nearly identical posts about the article, there was an noticeable difference in distribution of social media reactions to them.

Both of us posted multiple times about our Foreign Affairs essay. Only one of us, however, received a steady barrage of vitriolic criticism over the course of the day. Wanna guess which one of us it was? I bet you already know!

Maybe this was because Saunders was the first of us to post about the FA essay. Or maybe there was an anarchy subreddit that found her skeet first. Or maybe there is another, more straightforward explanation for why the lady co-author received harsher responses than the gentleman co-author.

The straightforward explanation is unsurprising. That does not make it any less dispiriting.