Waiting In Vain For A Trump Foreign-Policy Doctrine

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Tariffs climbed to their highest levels in a century, until the Supreme Court intervened and complicated the legal footing under which many of them were imposed. Greenland has been the subject of coercive territorial rhetoric that would have been unthinkable from any postwar American president.

And a fragile Gaza peace framework sits alongside a still-unresolved war in Ukraine, where the traveling diplomacy between Mar-a-Lago and Kyiv has produced summits and photo opportunities but not, as yet, a settlement.

Try building a single doctrine out of that. Restrainers will tell you the Venezuela operation and the Greenland threats are naked imperialism, incompatible with any coherent version of“America First.” Hawks will point to the Iran strikes as proof that Trump is not, whatever the slogans suggest, an isolationist.

Free traders will note that a tariff regime aimed simultaneously at allies and adversaries is not a strategy toward China, or toward anyone else - it is a mood. Even the administration's own description of its year, delivered through a spokesperson's talking points about“ending eight wars” while simultaneously invading a country and bombing another, reads less like doctrine than like marketing copy stitched together after the fact to fit whatever happened to occur.

This is, I'd suggest, the wrong place to be looking. The scholars and journalists chasing a“Trump Doctrine” are still operating on the postwar assumption that American presidents govern foreign policy the way they're taught to in international-relations seminars: containment, then détente, then democracy promotion, then a“pivot to Asia,” each with its position papers and its named authors.

Trump does not work this way and never has. He works the way a dealmaker works - case by case, leverage by leverage, personality by personality - which is precisely why his foreign policy looks incoherent to people trained to expect a syllabus and looks, to Trump himself, perfectly consistent: every decision is being made by the same person, using the same instincts, for the same immediate purpose. That is not nothing. It is just not a doctrine in the sense Foreign Affairs editors mean when they use the word.

None of this is an argument that the instincts themselves are wrong. There is a real and defensible critique buried under the chaos: that Europe has taken advantage of American security guarantees for decades, that the unipolar moment produced more wars than it prevented, that Washington's foreign-policy class mistook institutional entrenchment for strategy.

Trump's early impulses - skepticism of NATO free-riders, wariness of forever wars, a focus on the Western Hemisphere over distant theaters - were closer to a genuine realist critique of the post-1991 consensus than his critics generally credit.