Trump’s foreign policy: the method behind the madness

The disclosure of the deliberations over a military strike on Yemen among top Trump administration officials—only known because National Security Adviser Mike Waltz added journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to the group chat on the Signal app—gave the foreign policy establishment an opening to slam Trump’s amateurish foreign policy. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s New York Times op-ed summed up this view. “How much dumber can this get?” Clinton asked.

Of course, Clinton has no objection to the US using its military power to attack another nation in a raid that killed dozens of civilians. It’s that she and the foreign policy establishment she represents prefer smart people like themselves to carry them out. For liberals and establishment types, “Signalgate” exposes Trump’s foreign policy as the province of people in way over their heads, and whose actions threaten to unravel the US’s position as the main world superpower.

That assessment may be true, but it’s also shot through with a conceit that Trump and his administration have no strategy or theory behind what they are doing. Trump’s foreign policy plays are seen simply as the whims of a fool interested in his own personal aggrandisement.

Even if Trump tends to see US foreign policy as little more than an extension of his reality TV persona, the changes that his administration are initiating are momentous.

In the traditional mainstream understanding that Clinton encapsulates, US foreign policy is the summation of three main prongs: its external economic policy, its “hard power” (expressed through its military and political clout) and its “soft power,” or its ideological and cultural influence.

Since the end of Second World War, the US has achieved most of its goals through the construction of—and US dominance over—an array of global institutions, such as the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, to name a few. Since the end of the Cold War and the establishment of the US’s “unipolar moment”, the US has projected its military, economic and political hegemony under the guise of maintaining the “rules-based international order” ostensibly dedicated to promoting democracy and human rights.

This self-projection of US aims was always more rhetorical than real. The US never allowed international political institutions to constrain its unilateral actions. And it continues to spend more on its military than the rest of the world combined. US promotion of global economic trade and US corporate expansion around the world always relied on US “hard power”, to back it up, as the famous quip from the New York Times’ muse of empire, Thomas Friedman, put it:

“The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15, and the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technology is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”

The wars in Gaza and Ukraine exposed the utter hypocrisy of US dedication to the “rules-based international order”. US leaders, from President Joe Biden on down, denounced Russian bombings of Ukrainian hospitals and schools as “crimes against humanity”, while providing Israel with the weapons and political cover it used to carry out identical atrocities in Gaza.

For 80 years, the existing alliances and institutions of global politics have served US imperial policy well. Now, we are faced with what appears to be the unprecedented situation in which the “hegemonic power” has become the main “revisionist power” in the world system, as New Left Review contributor Dylan Riley put it. In other words, it appears than the US, the global “hegemon” who has benefited so richly from the existing framework of international politics, is, paradoxically, the main actor (the “revisionist power” in the language of international relations) seeking to overturn that order.

The question is why. The answer lies in the challenge, emerging dramatically in the last twenty years, that China now poses to US economic and political leadership in the world.

By most mainstream accounts the US maintains military superiority over China for now. But it is rapidly losing its economic and technological edge to China, where more scientific research is now published than in the US. The January stock market panic over the announced success of Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) firm DeepSeek suggested that the US is on the way to come in second to China on the cutting-edge technology of the 21st century.

These challenges, combined with US-led disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq that weakened the US, punctured the “unipolar moment”, leading to a more fragmented and multipolar world. The results have been increased nationalism and protectionism, and the ratcheting up of military budgets across the globe. On these indices, Biden built off initial moves in these directions under the first Trump administration. For example, Biden did not lift tariffs on Chinese manufactured goods that Trump imposed in 2018. Now, Trump appears to want to blow up the whole system.

Following the Greek left Keynesian economist Yanis Varofakis, let’s take Trump’s tariff obsession seriously to find a method in Trump’s apparent madness. Trump’s critique of the postwar global order starts with the observations that the US has extended its nuclear and security umbrella over its NATO allies and has acted as the “importer of last resort” for the global trade system. US corporations have offshored and downsized their productive capacity. In exchange, and because the US dollar is the world exchange current, other leading powers finance the US’s debt and allow it to run huge deficits and maintain a military machine that would bankrupt any other country.

While this system has benefited the US enormously, Trump argues instead that “other countries are ripping off” the US. Trump wants to see the US dollar depreciate—to encourage US exports and cut US trade and government deficits—while maintaining the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency. He uses tariffs and threats to withdraw US military protection to get other countries to accept those terms. Using various trade carrots and sticks, Trump thinks he can make multiple deals with individual countries or groups of countries. He rejects global institutions and multilateral “grand bargains” because he thinks he can win better terms with fewer constraints on US actions.

Whether this is a correct diagnosis of the US’s standing in the global political economy or a correct prescription for what the US should do is beside the point. The WTO has been largely non-functional since the first Trump term as both the Trump and Biden administrations have refused to appoint US representatives to appeals boards that are supposed to resolve trade disputes between the two countries. The current obsession of the US ruling class with a coming conflict with China has augured in an era of protectionism in economic affairs and greater political competition and conflict between the leading powers.

In this environment, Trump’s “America First” and “US against the world” outlook will be tested. Liberals tag him with the 1930s epithet of “isolationist”. But he’s less committed to disengaging with the rest of the world, as he is prepared to throw around the US’s weight to advance its own interests. He has more of a “gunboat diplomacy” nineteenth-century colonial/imperial mentality.

So, if he thinks that Greenland contains minerals the US wants, or its possession will allow the US to dominate the Arctic, other nations will be wary of the US, even if annexing the island appears to be a Trump fantasy. Historically, the “America First” strain of US politics has considered the land mass between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, from pole to pole, as being fair game for US hemispheric domination.

Consolidating a US-dominated sphere of influence in the region supports “America Firsters’” aggressive posture against other spheres, such as Europe or Asia. This is the twisted logic behind Trump’s pressure on Mexico and Canada, as well as his threats to Panama and Greenland. Trump’s sabre rattling against Panama has already produced the sale of the canal’s operational contract from the Hong Kong-based CK Hutchinson to a Blackrock-led consortium. Beyond this, Trump has allies among the Latin American far right, from Argentina’s Milei to Brazil’s Bolsonaro to El Salvador’s Bukele.

The most shocking development to the foreign policy establishment has been the Trump regime’s shift on Ukraine to an essentially pro-Putin position in enforcing a ceasefire in the war. In February, the US cast an amazing vote alongside such champions of democracy as North Korea and Belarus against a UN resolution identifying Russia as the aggressor in the Ukraine war.

How to explain this? Trump and his MAGA allies promised this, so it didn’t come out of blue. It is part of a piece with Trump’s break with global alliances such as NATO and seeing the EU as more of a competitor than an ally. Trump certainly has more affinity with petrostate dictators like Putin or Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin-Salman than he has with the US’s traditional allies. The administration’s antagonism to Europe appears deep-seated, as Signalgate’s revelations of Vice President Vance’s anti-EU comments showed.

It also appears to fit with Trumpism’s nineteenth-century view that great powers have their “spheres of influence” that they carve up between them. So, Russia gets Ukraine. China gets Taiwan. And the US gets Greenland.

Whether this Trumpian shift in US foreign policy will produce the “golden age” that Trump promises is doubtful. But what we can predict is that world politics is entering a much more dangerous and unstable time in which wars, conflict and repression will be more on the order of the day than they have been for decades.

First published at the International Socialism Project. Lance Selfa is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History and editor of US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality.