Here’s the true mystery of Donald Trump’s foreign policy

The real mystery of Donald Trump, the former US president and now president-elect, is not his personality or even his politics. And neither is it – as many grieving American liberals seem to believe – how Trump, “bombastic, profane, and frequently untruthful” (according to the largely pro-Trump Wall Street Journal), could possibly have amassed so much popular support. 

That question is actually very easy to answer: Firstly, he could because the Democrats are just so incredibly awful in every way imaginable, from genocide to alienating elitist snobbism. There was a reason pre-election polls showed that “a majority of Americans believed the US was on the wrong track”; and they were right, even if they may well find out soon that there is more than one way of losing one’s way. And secondly, like it or not, much of America-as-it-really-is recognizes itself in Trump: obsessively individualistic yet deeply conformist, naturally anarchic yet intuitively authoritarian, and, last but not least, violently aggressive yet thin-skinned, too.

In short, the Democrats are turning into outsiders, at least for now, and deservedly so, while Trump vibes with his people, whether he or they deserve that or not. That says more about them than about him, but none of it is terribly complicated; it just takes a certain degree of disillusionment to acknowledge.

Rather, what is puzzling about Trump is that we should know him quite well by now, including from his first presidential term, and yet we don’t. Symptomatically, well-informed American observers hold diametrically opposed views on whether we finally have Trump’s measure or not: International Politics scholar Daniel Drezner stands for those stressing that much about Trump and, in particular, his foreign policy is now “clear,” presenting to us a “much better read than before.” For historian and Stalin expert Stephen Kotkin, though, Trump remains “unpredictable.” The upshot is we simply cannot stop speculating about what the next president will do – or at least try to do – with his second term. Consider that yet another way in which Trump, this intuitively supreme manipulator of his own image and our attention, has a hold on us.

Of course, our curiosity can be forgiven because it also has objective reasons. Whatever Trump may really want and whoever he really is, one thing is certain: He is now backed up by a triumphant comeback with a strong popular mandate. This time, unlike before his first term, he has not only trounced the Democrats in the bizarrely un-representative Electoral College but also won the popular vote, that is, the actual majority of individual ballots nationwide. In addition, with Republican control of the Senate and the House of Representatives now certain, Trump has a so-called “trifecta,” with the presidency and both chambers of Congress in one hand.

As a result, despite the general decline of American power, Trump is now – more so than in his first term – on his way to being one of the less than a handful of men (yes, all men at this point; it’s just a fact) who can plausibly claim to be the most powerful leaders on the planet. If Trump so chooses, he will have the means to exert massive influence on the fate of not just the US but literally humanity, for better or for much worse, which is more likely – not because of Trump’s character but because American power is structurally biased toward being destructive.

That is why we are seeing such intense interest in Trump’s ongoing picks for high positions in his incoming administration. They have included established yet submissive neocons, such as Marco Rubio as state secretary, odd newcomers, such as the TV personality Pete Hegseth for the Defense Department, and loyal veterans of the first Trump administration, such as Stephen Miller. Trump’s appointments, it seems, can tell us at least something about how exactly he intends to wield his new, improved power.  

Trump will certainly not challenge the power of the US oligarchy: Massive corporate influence will persist and grow. Trump is a thoroughly unrepentant billionaire, billionaires tend to like him, and billionaire oligarchs Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, Trump’s new best friend, have already been offered a whole new department created especially for them. But there is a question about Trump’s relationship to the deep state narrowly understood, namely as the higher levels of the bureaucracy and especially the American “siloviki” in the FBI, the judiciary, the 18 (!) sprawling intelligence agencies, and the military. 

Regarding the judiciary, the FBI, and the spies, both the appointments of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence and of Matt Gaetz as attorney general (even if Gaetz is not certain to be confirmed) seem to indicate that Trump wants to assert himself, as in: with a hammer. Likewise concerning the military top brass: Hegseth’s appointment and a recent leak seem to point to a serious intention to pick a fight and even conduct a de facto purge. Gabbard, in addition, also sends two further signals: In the past, she has been hounded for not hating Russia and articulating the outsider view, in US political culture, that war is usually a bad idea. Giving her a powerful position means, at the very least, Trump is stressing that he could not care less about such criticisms. 

But reading the tea leaves of Trump’s appointments, while not useless, has limits. Think of it as part of an American equivalent of what Western observers used to call “Kremlinology” during the late Soviet period: the art of guessing about very important things with very limited clues. 

It is true that during his first presidency, Trump was new to the game and also felt constrained to compromise with more traditional forces in the Republican Party, which resulted in him appointing officials that were incompatible with him and did not last. One of them, General H.R. McMaster, has just published a tell-all book about his time as national security adviser in Trump’s last administration. McMaster’s account may have its biases, but it rings true on one important feature of the former and now incoming president’s personality: he loves to be flattered and he hates being contradicted, which means he favors sycophants.

Now Trump has prior experience, a stronger mandate, and more organized resources behind him, while the traditional wing of the Republican Party is either dead or subdued. He also will start, as a recent Foreign Policy article has pointed out, “with a more loyal circle of advisers.” Finally, he is inevitably emboldened by his own comeback success. That much, as a matter of fact, is only human: How would he not be? At the same time, Trump’s style and temperament remain, indeed count for more precisely because he is freer to be fully himself now.

That means that whoever Trump appoints now still may or may not last, depending on whether they make the boss happy or not. As the authoritative American political scientist Stephen Walt has commented on X, Trump’s current picks in the crucial domain of national security look as if he is not merely assembling the loyal, but is “going for people who lack the standing, authority, backbone, or wisdom to stand up to him, no matter what he decides to do,” producing, according to Walt, a “team of lackeys.” That, in turn, makes Trump’s personal policy ideas and preferences, whether vague or concrete, all the more important. 

Against that background, is there anything we can identify as rock-solid about Donald Trump and how he sees the world? Yes, of course, and it’s hidden in plain sight. Encapsulated in the slogan “Make America Great Again,” it is really three things: First, the admission that America’s current standing is actually not great. Second, the unquestioned assumption that it used to be great and the will to repair that greatness. Third, the equally unquestioned, though anything but self-evident, assumption that it can be repaired.

For now, let’s set aside the obvious question if America has really ever been “great.” Patriots may not like to hear it, but there are compelling arguments for answering in the negative. Ask, for starters, the native Americans exterminated to, literally, make room for the USA; the slaves who kickstarted its modern economy (if, that is, they survived the genocidal transatlantic deportation to “join” it); or the many who have suffered, all over the world, from America’s relentless political, economic, and military aggression. Or ask the over three quarters of Americans who, according to Forbes, are living paycheck-to-paycheck now, meaning that their “income barely covers essential living expenses” and a single one missed paycheck would put them “in a difficult spot.”

Posing such questions, however, means to step far outside what Trump can even imagine. And so, it may help us understand what he cannot do because he can’t even think of it, but it won’t help us understand what he actually might do. Let’s try to, instead, take him by his word: Think of Trump for a moment as the equivalent of a late-Roman emperor: He will rule an empire whose best days are behind it, that suffers from an unusually high degree of corruption and moral and intellectual decay, and that will not face the facts of its diminishing power and prestige. And neither will Trump. Instead, he wants to put himself at the head of a great struggle for recapturing its imagined, or imaginary, lost glory. What could “Make America Great Again” actually mean? And if we treat it on its own terms, what might it take to make it work in the realm of foreign policy in particular? Conversely, what kind of policies are sure to make it fail?

That question cannot be answered by yet again going through the usual list of US foreign policy issues: Tariffs, Ukraine, Russia, China, Taiwan, Israel (really, of course: Palestine), Iran, Venezuela, NATO, maybe even the EU, if it can still get any attention at all, and so on… Rather we need to take a big step back. The decisive issue is not what exactly Trump and his administration will do on this issue or that, but how they will frame the problems that they are trying to address.

And that means, how they will conceive of, literally, the world and America’s place in it. Simply put, Trump can aim to make America great again by clinging to the tired, Quixotic aim of “primacy” and an imposed and widely resented, even hated “leadership” shared with no one. Or, alternatively, Trump could, intuitively or more explicitly, do something that American leaders have been extremely bad at recently, namely, learn. He could, in other words, accept that absolute – or seemingly absolute – “primacy” is gone forever, while the US could still secure a comfortable place as one great power among several. In other words, Trump could hypothetically recognize that multipolarity is here to stay. Or, if you prefer a more traditional vocabulary, that the world is entering an era of a global balance of powers or, in the very unlikely best-case scenario, concert of powers, with a handful or so of players at the top and in the center and a second tier of not quite as powerful but still important states orbiting around them.

Descending from its always partly delusional “unipolar” heights, the US – still – has the resources to engineer a soft landing for itself among those top-level powers of the new order, if, that is, its leaders finally come to understand that no one can reverse or stop the flow of, for want of better words, history. On the other hand, if America’s leaders persist in pursuing the already impossible aim of lonely supremacy, they will end up with a more severe geopolitical demotion because the ensuing conflicts will cost them too much and also end with their defeat, for instance in a war against China that may also go global.

Consider, in this context, two recent articles in Foreign Affairs, one of America’s two most prestigious magazines of imperial geopolitics produced by and for the American establishment. In “The End of American Exceptionalism,” Daniel Drezner argues that, due to Trump’s genuine popularity, “when the rest of the world looks at Trump, they will no longer see an aberrant exception to American exceptionalism; they will see what America stands for in the twenty-first century.” For Drezner, this is clearly regrettable. He fails to notice the obvious: that America has always stood for overbearing violence wrapped in blatant hypocrisy. It is not the “21st century,” silly; it’s the whole damn story. Trump is just rude enough to make it screamingly obvious even for those US academics most committed to preserving, at least, appearances. 

And then, also in Foreign Affairs, there are Dan Caldwell and Reid Smith, making “the case for a foreign policy that eschews primacy and embraces restraint.” For them, a true “America First” policy – the cousin slogan of “Make America Great Again” – must acknowledge that the US “has overreached in its foreign policy and must correct course,” thereby finally creating the preconditions for not repeating “the deadly mistakes of the last 20 years.” Put differently, for decades, America’s many victims and critics around the globe have shouted that the US should “go home.” Now, there are Americans within the right spectrum of the ruling section of the American establishment who admit that that, actually, is not such a bad idea. 

It is easy – and very stupid – to scream “isolationism.” Isolation is not even an option. Whatever Trump chooses to do regarding, for instance, tariffs or NATO, the US will remain a heavyweight part of the international system. The real question is whether its elites will finally accept to be a normal part of that system, if still a powerful one. That brings us a to a paradox: Could it be that this president, perceived as so anomalous will end up making America not a better, but at least, a less anomalous place? Ultimately, Drezner, Caldwell, and Smith are saying the same thing: That that is the way things will have to go. Some like it, some don’t. But frankly, who cares?

If – and it is, to speak Trumpese, a huge “if” – Trump 2.0 were to consistently implement a policy of abstaining from war and also economic warfare via sanctions, even while otherwise engaging in a hardnosed pursuit of national interest, then the Trumpists would have a chance to manage America’s inevitable relative decline in the global pecking order. If, on the other hand, they were to continue a policy of reckless escalation, with all means always “on the table,” as Americans like to say, then they would only polarize the emerging multipolar system against the US.

America is entering a new world order which it will not dominate. Its new leaders can be smart and find an influential and perhaps prosperous place for it, or they can go for broke in an attempt to recreate the bad old days of “primacy.” If they do, the empire will not only decline but fall. And, again, maybe that would be all for the better.