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 with the U.S. 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 U.S.’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 who is interested in his own personal aggrandizement.

Even if Trump tends to see U.S. 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, U.S. 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 U.S. has achieved most of its goals through the construction of—and U.S. 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 U.S.’s “unipolar moment,” the U.S. has projected its military, economic and political hegemony under the guise of maintaining the “rules based international order” ostensibly dedicated to the promotion of democracy and human rights.

This self-projection of U.S. aims was always more rhetorical than real. The U.S. 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. U.S. promotion of global economic trade and U.S. corporate expansion around the world always relied on U.S. ‘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 U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

The wars in Gaza and Ukraine exposed the utter hypocrisy of U.S. dedication to the “rules-based international order.” U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S., 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 20 years, that China now poses to U.S. economic and political leadership in the world.

By most mainstream accounts the U.S. 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 U.S. The January stock market panic over the announced success of Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) firm DeepSeek suggested that the U.S. is on the way to come in second to China on the cutting-edge technology of the 21^st century.

These challenges, combined with US-led disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq that weakened the U.S., punctured the “unipolar moment,” leading to more fragmented and multipolar world. The results have been an increase in 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 U.S. 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. U.S. corporations have offshored and downsized their productive capacity. In exchange, and because the U.S. dollar is the world exchange current, other leading powers finance the U.S.’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 U.S. enormously, Trump argues instead that “other countries are ripping off” the US. Trump would like to see the U.S. dollar depreciate—to encourage U.S. exports, and to cut the U.S. trade and government deficits—while maintaining the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency. He uses tariffs and threats to withdraw U.S. 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 U.S. actions.

Whether this is a correct diagnosis of the U.S.’s standing in the global political economy or a correct prescription for what the U.S. 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 U.S. representatives to appeals boards who are supposed to resolve trade disputes between the two countries. The current obsession of the U.S. 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 “U.S. 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 U.S.’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 U.S. wants, or its possession will allow the U.S. to dominate the Arctic, other nations will be wary of the U.S., even if annexing the island appears to be a Trump fantasy. Historically, the “America First” strain of U.S. politics has considered the land mass between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, from pole to pole, as being fair game for U.S. hemispheric domination.

Consolidating a U.S.-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 saber rattling against Panama has in March 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 U.S. cast an amazing vote alongside such champions of democracy as North Korea and Belarus against a UN resolution identifying Russia as he 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 ally. Trump certainly has more affinity with petrostate dictators like Putin or Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin-Salman than he has with the U.S’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 U.S. gets Greenland.

Whether this Trumpian shift in U.S. 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 that they have been for decades.