It is ‘head spinning’ but also ‘head shaking’. Talking with colleagues they convey the sense that it is difficult, if not nearly impossible to frame US foreign policy with Trump as president. Things will remain bad and Trump’s actions will fail to improve the various crises and conflicts – or will create even more likely to beset the current global order. It is also very difficult to articulate a Trump strategy and identify its priorities, notwithstanding the constant refrain by commentators to examine the National Security Strategy (NSS) document. In the end it may require action from others – if that is possible – to draw matters to a close or at least a substantial pause given the inconsistency of Trump. Or it may just be time passing which draws Trump elsewhere. Nevertheless, I am at least trying to grasp Trump actions, and where possible, faithfully describe Trump foreign policy initiatives and its possible consequences.
So, first, let’s explore the latest Trump actions and social media pronouncements. Recently I had an opportunity to tackle Trump actions, or inactions – this was with my colleague Tom Wright from the Brookings Institution in a podcast. Tom was deeply enmeshed in US foreign policy under the Biden administration and has now returned to Brookings. So I invited Tom to join me in the Virtual Studio for an episode of ‘Shaking the Global Order’ – in this case Season 4, Episode 1. If it isn’t out yet, it will be very shortly I hope, and you’ll be able to find it at the Global Summitry Project (GSP) podcasts, or your favorite podcast distributor. Let me know what you think and I am always eager to receive podcast suggestions.
So the real dilemma in understanding Trump actions is his lack of consistency and his inability to maintain focus. Here is Ravi Agrawal, the Editor in Chief of FP discussing Trump strategy with Ian Bremmer, President of the Eurasia Group:
“But what ultimately makes Trump fail is not the resilience of the system. It’s his lack of discipline. Because while he’s doing all of that, he’s also doing Greenland and Venezuela and Iran and everything else. And Trump is just not a committed revolutionary.”
“He’s completely convinced that his political instincts are always right, no matter what he’s focused on, and he’s very energetic, so he doesn’t leave things to second-order people. He wants to be involved in a surprisingly robust number of decisions. So, I think, for all of those reasons—all of the distractions, the commitment that he’s right, and not authorizing those capable advisors who would like a revolution, like Russell Vought or Stephen Miller—ultimately, his revolution fails.”
So in the end, it seems to me Trump foreign policy failure is built on his conviction, unshakable, I suspect, of the rightness of the actions, often rather extreme and then rounded up with a lack of focus maintenance.
Look at a number of recent actions. Let’s start possibly with his most audacious move possibly – that with Venezuela. Okay, so he takes Maduro and his wife but then what. Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the Venezuelan actions this way according to Oliver Stuenkel my Brazilian colleague from FGV, and a senior Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) fellow, and his CEIP junior colleague Adrian Feinberg writing for the Carnegie Endowment:
“Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a three-phase plan for administering the country’s vast oil reserves from Washington. Beyond overseeing production and sales, Rubio also suggested that the United States would control how the proceeds from oil sales are allocated, claiming this would ensure that revenues benefit the Venezuelan population rather than corrupt powerholders. Given that oil accounts for the significant majority of Venezuela’s public income, this would effectively give Washington decisive influence over the country’s budgetary priorities.”
But as these colleagues point out:
“The administration’s Venezuela plan represents a stark departure from U.S. regime-change operations of the past eight decades. It reflects neither the ideological motivations of the Cold War era nor the democratic idealism that shaped post–Cold War interventions. Instead, President Donald Trump’s vision of low-cost extraction—managing the sale and proceeds of Venezuelan oil without U.S. administrators or troops on the ground—seems to revive a much older model: fiscal receivership.”
“This approach, pioneered under President Theodore Roosevelt in the early twentieth century, offers a set of instructive historical precedents as Washington embarks on a potentially risky experiment in Venezuela.” …
“History does not necessarily repeat itself, and Venezuela in 2026 is not the Caribbean of 1906. But these precedents are nonetheless instructive. Early twentieth-century fiscal receiverships offered the illusion of control while failing to resolve structural problems, stabilize politics, or deliver lasting economic benefits—either for the countries involved or for U.S. investors. They underscore a recurring lesson: Even hegemonic powers face sharp limits when attempting to manage the political economy of other states from a distance, producing anti-American sentiment and rally-round-the-flag effects.”
It is highly likely that these actions will not work to sustain domestic tranquility with the thugs still holding leadership and the transformational forces in Venezuela yet to convince Trump to support a path to democratic reform.
Then there is the ‘revolution’ in Iran. Here it appears that Trump has determined after various threatening statements to hold back as opposed to taking kinetic action to support the huge demonstrations in the street against the Iranian regime. As Suzanne Maloney the director of the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution described it in the NYTimes recently:
“The history of Iran and its neighbors shows that the pathway to durable, positive change is precarious. Washington can play a crucial role in the next stage of Iran’s contestation, but neither military strikes nor another round of nuclear talks will secure a better future for Iranians or for U.S. interests.”
“Unfortunately, while the moral imperative for targeting Iran may be compelling, the prospects of U.S. strikes delivering near-term relief for beleaguered Iranians or a conclusive end to their oppressive regime are slim.” …
“Instead, Mr. Trump should pursue a heightened pressure campaign on the regime: launching cyber operations aimed at critical military capabilities, encouraging countries that still have diplomatic relations with Tehran to expel Iran’s diplomats, seizing Iran’s ghost fleet of oil tankers, placing sanctions on Chinese imports of Iranian oil and identifying and exposing perpetrators of violence. Most important, Mr. Trump should invest in the funding and organizational support that could eventually enable Iran’s opposition to prevail and prepare for future governance.” …
“Regime change is not a one-and-done matter, especially for a system as deeply entrenched and fiercely determined to prevail as Iran’s revolutionary theocracy. Even if airstrikes succeeded in briefly disrupting Iran’s crackdown on dissent or taking out the regime’s top leadership, as the Israelis nearly did in June, Tehran has patience and a deep bench.” …
“There is a more pernicious danger in Mr. Trump’s proclivity for treating decisions of war and peace as the latest reality television episode — all showmanship for ratings with little regard for the fallout. His rhetoric cruelly raises hopes for many Iranians of American deliverance without any real commitment to the cause, even as he dangles the prospect of diplomacy that would provide the regime with a lifeline.”
Finally, in the realm of the absolute ‘head scratching’ is the Trump determination to take Greenland. Here, the Trump determination to claim US sovereignty even in the face of an ally and the possibility of NATO’s destruction is unbelievable. As David French a columnist for the New York Times put it recently in a NYTimes column :
“On Jan. 9, President Trump said that if America can’t acquire Greenland “the easy way” then it would resort to the “hard way.””
““We are going to do something in Greenland, whether they like it or not,” Trump said, “because if we don’t do it, Russia or China will take over Greenland, and we’re not going to have Russia or China as a neighbor.””
Forget the fact that such Russian or Chinese action is highly unlikely, it appears this is one of those long standing beliefs that will not easily be forgotten at least for now. Indeed, as French writes:
“Bullying Denmark to seize Greenland would be the equivalent of threatening a friend to steal his car after he already let you borrow it.”
“The best description I’ve read of Trump’s flawed approach comes from Kori Schake, a senior fellow and director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Writing in Foreign Affairs last June, she noted that “since the end of World War II, American power has been rooted mostly in cooperation, not coercion.””
““The Trump team,” she argued, “ignores that history, takes for granted all the benefits that a cooperative approach has yielded, and cannot envision a future in which other countries opt out of the existing U.S.-led international order or construct a new one that would be antagonistic to American interests.”” …
“Although he would never put it this way, Trump favors the failed Soviet approach. The Western Hemisphere is his version of the Warsaw Pact. He wants to transform it into a region that exists under American domination, where nations conduct their foreign and even domestic policies under a watchful American eye, always mindful of the awesome power of American arms.”
So it is all about Trump coercion and not just against adversaries. A sad decline in American policymaking for sure. As Susan Glasser at The New Yorker concludes:
“Greenland, it turns out, is not a punch line but a template that explains much about Trump’s foreign policy: it’s about a power-grabbing President who looks at territory on a map and says he wants to own it. Trump could not articulate a rationale for acquiring Greenland—“from a strategic standpoint, from a locational standpoint, from a geography standpoint, it’s something that we should have,” he told us—any more than he can elaborate on what his plan is for Venezuela now that he’s toppled the country’s leader and seized some of its oil.”
It is all a bit disheartening I must admit.
