The defining photo of the recent White House Ukraine summit will likely turn out to be one depicting five European leaders plus the leaders of the European Commission and NATO smooshed in around the Resolute Desk, seemingly listening to a soliloquy by the unseen President Donald Trump.
The photo was impossible for observers not to compare to an iconic one from Trump’s first term, showing a group of G7 leaders led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel hovering over Trump. (France’s Emmanuel Macron is the only one that appears in both.)
If in the earlier image Trump looks like a petulant child being lectured by exasperated adults, in the latter, he’s clearly where he wants to be: at the center of attention, surrounded by people, powerful in their own right, who are there to listen to him. Trump clearly relished the moment, posting, “A big day at the White House. We have never had so many European Leaders here at one time. A great honor for America!!!”
He later told reporters, “They jokingly call me the president of Europe.”
The moment encapsulated something that is often missed in attempts to diagnose and define Trump’s foreign policy. For all his America First rhetoric and vilification of “globalists,” Trump clearly sees himself as a global leader who plays an indispensable role on the world stage and is responsible for solving other countries’ problems — not only America’s. The fact that he carries out this role in a very different way from any of his predecessors shouldn’t distract from the fact that he’s leaned into this tendency even farther in his second term in office.
As Trump recently told The Atlantic, during the first term he was just running the country. In his second, as he sees it, “I run the country and the world.”
Trump has never really been an “isolationist,” though he has frequently been described as one, and some of his rhetoric makes it easy to understand why. He has charged previous presidents with overextending America’s resources, “rebuilding other countries while weakening our own.” He frequently attacks “nation builders” and “interventionists,” including in a May speech in Saudi Arabia, where he argued that “far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins.”
He’s frequently unimpressed by international organizations and institutions, and he often views US allies as free-riders taking advantage of American largesse. He is plainly uninterested in upholding any “rules-based international order.”
In his second term, Trump has eviscerated America’s foreign aid system and drastically downsized the State Department and National Security Council, doing potentially permanent damage to the traditional tools of American foreign policy.
Trump’s critics, both Democrats and disaffected Republicans, frequently charge Trump with abandoning America’s global leadership role. The late former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, who coined the term “indispensable nation” to describe the United States in the 1990s, charged Trump during his first term with promoting a “doctrine of “every nation for itself,” and staking out “isolated positions on trade, climate change and Middle East peace.” The neoconservative scholar Robert Kagan has called Trump’s America First doctrine an “invitation to global anarchy, a struggle of all against all.” After President Joe Biden took office in 2021, he used his first speech to an international audience to declare, “America is back,” implying that it had left the world stage for four years during Trump’s first term.
Trump is absolutely not a liberal internationalist or a neoconservative, but he probably wouldn’t disagree with Kagan that American leadership is vital for preventing the world from falling into violent anarchy. He just thinks it’s his leadership that’s needed.
Trump is consumed with negotiating peace deals abroad — whether or not they actually bring peace
Trump has repeatedly asserted that Russia would not have invaded Ukraine in 2022 and that Hamas would not have attacked Israel in 2023 had he been president, though he has not yet followed through on his campaign pledge to quickly end the still-raging wars that resulted from those events.
Lately, Trump has taken to boasting that he has ended “6 Wars in 6 months,” sometimes raising the number to seven, citing the conflicts between India and Pakistan, Israel and Iran, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Thailand and Cambodia, and Armenia and Azerbaijan.
This is misleading at best: the Twelve-Day War between Israel and Iran was one the US backed and participated in, and it’s unlikely Israel would have launched its own strikes without US backing; fighting is still going on in Congo; Armenia and Azerbaijan, a long-running conflict, haven’t actually been actively fighting since 2023. It’s also not as if Trump is the first president to play this sort of role: The US has been the default crisis-broker in past India-Pakistan flare-ups, as it was for the most recent one in May. But it’s still telling that Trump appears to see putting out these fires as part of his job description, in contrast to some within his administration, such as Vice President JD Vance, who tends to see them as “none of our business.”
Whether it’s because of his frequently mentioned desire for a Nobel Peace Prize or, as he unexpectedly suggested on Fox News recently, because he’s concerned about the fate of his eternal soul, Trump clearly relishes the role of peacemaker. This is one reason why — despite the zigs and zags of his approach to Russia — he seems unlikely, for the time being at least, to entirely abandon Ukraine.
Back in 2016, Trump distinguished himself from his Republican rivals — and from his eventual Democratic rival Hillary Clinton — with his willingness to criticize the war in Iraq and the Bush administration’s foreign policy, earning a reputation as a critic of foreign intervention. But as president, he has frequently proved eager to get involved — to a point.
A number of MAGA-aligned foreign policy figures, including a number that serve in the Trump administration, are identified as “restrainers,” meaning they favor more limited use of military force abroad. This backlash is not surprising after the two decades of “forever wars” following 9/11, and it’s probably not a coincidence that more dovish advisers like Vance and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard served in those wars. Even Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, though not exactly a “dove,” has described himself as a “recovering neocon” due to his experience in the military.
At this point, Trump has a track record of launching a limited military strike and then moving on, or — as in the case of Yemen — cutting his losses when a military operation starts to look like a quagmire.
Trump shares their aversion to long drawn-out military engagements, but the president who wants to rename the Department of Defense the “Department of War” is hardly against a high-profile, demonstrative use of military force, as his Pentagon’s recent air campaigns against Iran’s nuclear program and Yemen’s Houthi rebels demonstrated.
In a recent article, Jeremy Shapiro, director of the US program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, analyzed Trump’s use of military force in his first term — examples included the drone strike that killed Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani and the airstrikes responding to Syria’s use of chemical weapons — and found that he tends to favor “limited engagements with achievable goals, often leveraging overwhelming US capabilities against enemies who could not strike back to send a message of strength without risking prolonged involvement.”
When he launches one of these interventions, analysts tend to warn of the risk of mission creep and quagmire. (I include myself here.) But at this point, Trump has a track record of launching a limited military strike and then moving on, or — as in the case of Yemen — cutting his losses when a military operation starts to look like a quagmire. The still ongoing US military campaigns under Trump, such as those targeting al-Shabaab in Somalia and ISIS in Syria, tend to be lower intensity operations that get much less media attention.
As Washington Post columnist and former George W. Bush adviser Marc Thiessen argues, Trump has effectively overturned former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s famous “Pottery Barn rule,” that when it comes to using military force, “if you break it, you own it.” Sometimes, Thiessen writes, “You can just break it.”
The avoidance of “long, drawn-out” operations is, Vance argues, what distinguishes Trump from the “dumb presidents” whose military operations he has criticized in the past. But while they haven’t turned into quagmires, it’s less clear what these operations have accomplished. Despite their agreement with the Trump administration not to attack American shipping, the Houthis have continued their attacks on global shipping (even sinking two ships) and their missile strikes against Israel. Iran’s nuclear program was clearly set back by American and Israeli strikes, but the best evidence we have suggests it was not “obliterated” as Trump claimed, and the country now has more incentive than ever to develop a nuclear weapon. Any hope that the political momentum from the successful US-Israeli strikes would help bring an end to the fighting in Gaza has clearly been dashed.
Trump has avoided George W. Bush’s nation-building hubris, but not his penchant for declaring victory before all the facts are in.
Trump meddles in other country’s internal politics — in his own way
Trump has long held that it’s not America’s responsibility to “spread universal values that not everybody shares or wants,” and he certainly has no squeamishness when it comes to lavishing praise on foreign autocrats, be they Russian, Saudi, or North Korean. In this term, his State Department has instructed diplomats to avoid criticizing the conduct of other countries’ elections and slashed its standard-setting yearly human rights report.
But this doesn’t mean Trump and his administration are entirely unconcerned about the domestic politics of other countries. He has threatened to use tariffs or aid cutoffs to punish countries for prosecuting his political allies, including Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
Vance stunned European officials with a speech in April at the Munich Security Conference, suggesting that the biggest threat to Europe comes not from Russian aggression but from uncontrolled migration and restrictions on right-wing political parties. Trump’s ambassador to France and machatunim Charles Kushner recently released an open letter accusing France of failing to combat antisemitism that enraged French officials who accused him of violating “international law, particularly the duty not to interfere in the internal affairs of states.”
The Trump administration may have cut protections for refugees from countries like Haiti and Afghanistan, but he has opened the door to white South Africans facing a nonexistent “genocide” and attempted to ambush that country’s president with allegations during an Oval Office meeting.
It’s very true that Trump does not interfere in the internal affairs of other countries in the name of “universal values,” but he’s repeatedly shown a willingness to interfere in the name of his own values and interests.
Then there’s the most overt form of interference in other countries’ affairs: Trump’s openly stated desire to acquire their territory. Just this past week, Denmark’s government summoned the top US diplomat in the country over reports of an ongoing covert influence campaign linked to Trump’s ongoing quest to acquire Greenland. Trump has not ruled out using military force to accomplish this, and has also baffled an enraged allies with talking of turning Canada into the 51st state, taking over Gaza, and reacquiring the Panama Canal. It’s hard to call yourself a non-interventionist when you’re proposing literal colonialism.
Trump is not the first businessman-turned-politician to suggest that the US should be run like a corporation, but he has a very different conception of what that means than his immediate predecessors.
The term “globalist” as it’s been used in recent political discourse tends to connote a faith in globalization and free markets. (That’s when it’s not functioning as a thinly disguised antisemitic slur.) This hardly describes the self-described “tariff man” in the Oval Office. That said, he’s hardly averse to negotiating trade deals.
An archetypal Trumpian trade policy may be the deal that required US-based microchip giants Nvidia and AMD to pay the US government 15 percent of the revenues from their sales of artificial intelligence chips to China.
Trump is pursuing a form of globalism stripped of any semblance of liberalism — political or economic.
Allowing China to buy these chips casts aside an approach dating back to Trump’s first term that continued under the Biden administration: limiting China’s access to the tools needed to build advanced AI applications — which could have serious military ramifications.
Trump has had hard-line national security China hawks in his administration, such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in his first term and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby in this one, but his own concerns have always focused less on Taiwan or the South China Sea than his perception that China is ripping the US off on trade. Trump’s almost entirely trade-focused view of Beijing — in contrast to the civilizational struggle that consumes many in Washington — has stayed consistent as the bipartisan consensus on China has shifted. He looked like a China hawk in his first term, and looks like a dove now.
The chip deal also highlights the degree to which Trump is willing to meddle in the affairs of private companies to a degree that would have been totally anathema to previous Republican presidents — a tendency that has continued with the stake the US government has taken in Intel (and perhaps soon, in Lockheed Martin).
It’s not as if business interests haven’t driven American foreign policy — including military campaigns and covert actions — in the past. But the retinue of CEOs that Trump brought along on his first Mideast trip (he reportedly wants a similar traveling party when he eventually visits China) and the minerals deal that Ukraine signed as a condition for future US military support both showcased an openly dispayed symbiosis of public and private that is something new on the world stage.
And that’s to say nothing of his own business interests: Trump’s vision for the future of Gaza naturally involves a beachfront (presumably Trump-branded) resort, and foreign leaders have learned to dangle the prospect of future Trump towers in meetings with him.
The fact is, Trump appears to be just as concerned with America’s place in the world as any jet-setting, Economist-reading, “Davos man.” He seems to agree that America plays an indispensable role in shaping the world — both in setting the economic rules of the road and in matters of war and peace. He also appears to believe that global events and trends matter to America. He just has a radically different set of priorities and plans for how to pursue them than the internationalists who have come before him.
Trump is pursuing a form of globalism stripped of any semblance of liberalism — political or economic. And he wants the United States to throw its weight around on the world stage and influence global events while seriously curtailing the tools — diplomacy, intelligence, foreign aid, troop deployments, participation in international organizations and alliances — that have traditionally allowed it to do that.
America is not leaving the world stage under Trump — it’s just playing a very different part.
