Strategic Affairs no. 46

What is the Trump Foreign Policy?

Strategic Affairs no. 46

What is the Trump Foreign Policy?

March 5, 2025

How should we describe Trump’s Foreign Policy? It’s certainly unusual and atypical. It’s hard to say whom it pleases, or whether it will be successful. He’s off to a rocky start. His policy comes from his gut and not a well-examined policy process.

The guiding light of Trump’s foreign policy is America First. It is a neo-isolationist, mercantilist, fiscally-focused, short-term approach to the pursuit of the national interest. At its heart, it is also neo-imperial in its orientation. Allies should be obedient or sanctioned. The other Great Powers, China and Russia are not enemies, but other powers to be admired or reckoned with.

Some observations:

From the start, the White House has made a habit of picking on our allies and friends. Canada, Mexico, Panama, and Ukraine have all come in for harsh words, usually attributed to some bad behavior which is untrue or exaggerated. The President apparently believes, for example, that if you run a trade surplus with the United States, you are taking advantage of us. Sometimes, the President is reacting to something he heard, like China is running the Panama Canal and Panama is overcharging U.S. vessels.

Another behavior, unusual to say the least, is territorial acquisitiveness. In the past, the United States has been successful as a superpower because, while it sought influence and access to markets, it did not seek ownership or permanent occupation of any new territory. To the contrary, President Trump has talked about retaking the Panama Canal, buying Greenland, incorporating Canada as the 51^st state, and somehow owning Gaza to establish a resort, a Riviera in the Middle East.

His approach to Ukraine also has an element of acquisitiveness. To facilitate U.S. involvement, Trump wants an ownership stake in certain minerals in Ukraine. The final deal remains unsigned due to the shoot out in the Oval corral.

A third behavior is respect for China and especially Russia. Trump sees the authoritarian leaders of these two powers in a favorable light. He admires their administrative skills, and one suspects, their ability to deal with their political opposition. One gets the impression that if he had his way, Trump might say alliances be damned, let’s have a great power condominium, a cooperative rule of the international order by the three greatest powers.

China doesn’t get the love that Russia does from the President. The trade deficit with the Middle Kingdom is too great, and the Chinese are much more powerful economically. Perhaps out of respect for Xi Jinping’s power, Trump has been lukewarm in his support to Taiwan, which he sees as another disappointing U.S. ally. The Chinese are skeptically parsing every line in State Department documents.

Trump in the past few weeks has expressed trust for Putin and in his first term famously took Putin’s word over that of U.S intelligence agencies on the issue of election interference. Trump is so stuck on Putin he can’t relate to the plight of Ukraine, bloodied but unbowed after the vicious attack by Russia. The White House sees this terrible war of Russian aggression, in Vance’s term, as an ethnic dispute, to be settled quickly with a deal, the end of which may be a Nobel Prize for President Trump. The loss of nearly a fifth of Ukrainian territory seems to be a given in the Administration’s calculations.

The Kremlin could not be happier. After the debacle in the Oval, Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov said “the new U.S. Administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely coincides with our vision.”

A fourth behavior is a disrespect for our traditional alliances, especially NATO, where he often suggests that the Allies have taken advantage of us and are free riding to security at our expense. He admits to little advantage to alliances, except to reciprocal payments. He doesn’t believe in collective security but sees an advantage to providing security, if we get paid for it.

Underlying Trump’s behaviors is his inability to understand nationalism. He is unable to empathize with other nations or cultures. His power at home is such that the GOP, once the party of national security and strong defense, has become the party of slavish devotion to its leader’s often outlandish rhetoric. Staunch anti-authoritarian hawks like Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio daily contort their opinions to agree with the White House as it turns down the heat on Russia for its cyber offensives and its genocidal war in Ukraine.

The President is a transactionalist. Unlike Truman and Eisenhower, he is not a realist with an eye on supporting institutions that can provide peace and security for generations. Trump sees the world in terms of simple, short-term balance sheets. He sees close parallels with his real estate deals of old.

As John Bolton and others have noted, the President believes that all foreign policy matters are about personal relationships. Authoritarian leaders can play him like a fiddle. His attitudes are those of the suitor who asks “does he like me,” rather than the statesman, the leader of the free world, who follows the rocky path toward the long-term national interest.

The President needs better advice and a more rigorously debated foreign and national security policy. In his first term, he resisted tough advice from stalwarts such as H.R. McMaster and John Bolton. He has good people on the National Security Council, but they are not helping the President to craft policy, they are only reacting to it. Trump may have unfailing instincts in publicity and media relations, but he sorely needs help on foreign and national security policy. As the President noted in the Oval Office, we are playing with World War III here.

Joseph Collins is a retired Army Colonel and Dept of Defense civilian who spent 11 years in the Pentagon. He was educated at Fordham and Columbia universities and has written widely on war and peace issues. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.