Trump’s foreign policy worldview, full of -isms, erodes long-standing American international policy principles.
By Jinane Ejjed '26
America’s verdict to elect Donald J. Trump for a second term was decisive, and unlike in 2016, he won the popular vote and the Electoral College, improving his margins in almost every demographic.
Four years ago, Donald Trump’s end of his first term marked a sharp departure from traditional U.S. leadership in trade and diplomacy. However, in his upcoming term post-January 20, 2025—one that political analysts and international relations scholars call “Trump 2.0”—Trump’s term will differ significantly from his first. Harvard professor Daniel Ziblatt recently noted three key differences between this election cycle and that of 2016: Trump has now come to power without much aid from the Republican Party, the Supreme Court is now heavily Republican-leaning, and Trump has criminal immunity from any “official” actions he carries out during his presidency as ruled in Trump v. United States. Considering that 8,000,000,000 people are affected by American foreign policy, and 7,666,000,000 do not get a vote in how that policy is constructed, the implications of another Trump presidency extend beyond the domestic sphere and will cause a significant shift in the global order.
In Trump’s inaugural address, he introduced his blunt “America First” policy to the country, stating, “It is the right of all nations to put their own interests first.” In his foreign policy, Donald Trump often leaned into “madman theory,” using bold threats—be it steep tariffs or promises of “fire and fury”—to pressure adversaries into yielding economic or strategic concessions. This approach tied disparate issues together, fostering a transactional framework that emphasized leverage over diplomacy. At the 2017 NATO summit, he lambasted member nations for failing to meet defense spending goals and broke precedent by refusing to endorse Article 5, the alliance’s cornerstone of collective defense, signaling a dramatic departure from traditional U.S. leadership in NATO.
Trump’s treatment of America’s allies points to his rhetorical antagonism and extortionate attempts to control their spending, ultimately failing to abide by the state-to-state concept of burden sharing. Trump’s approach to foreign policy has often pushed the limits of traditional alliances, fostering right-wing nationalism within European domestic politics and casting doubt on the future of NATO and the EU. He has also questioned the U.S. commitment to its Indo-Pacific partnerships while alienating allies in Europe and Asia through aggressive rhetoric. At the same time, his policies have overlooked the strategic advantages provided by U.S. military bases overseas, critical assets for maintaining American influence and power projection globally.
Within days of his inauguration, Donald Trump began reshaping the United States’ role in international agreements and institutions, signaling a clear departure from the multilateral approach of his predecessors. Three days into his first term, Trump withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a 12-nation trade agreement that had been a cornerstone of Barack Obama’s Asia strategy. Soon after, Trump announced the U.S. exit from the Paris climate accord, asserting that the deal was unfair to American workers.
These actions set the tone for a presidency defined by skepticism toward global cooperation. In March 2017, he imposed sweeping tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, targeting China and igniting a trade war that economists widely agree the U.S. failed to win. Seven months after declaring that he would no longer certify Iran’s compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Trump withdrew entirely from the 2015 agreement designed to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions, citing its failure to address the country’s broader regional behavior.
Trump’s disdain for international bodies in his first term also extended to the United Nations. He pulled the U.S. from the UN Human Rights Council, accusing it of a consistent bias against Israel and hypocrisy in tolerating rights-abusing member states like China and Venezuela. In 2020, his administration formally notified the UN of its intent to leave the World Health Organization, blaming it for missteps during the COVID-19 pandemic. Critics saw such actions as a blow to global health cooperation at a critical time.
The administration’s exit from the Treaty on Open Skies marked another sharp break from international norms. The treaty, in effect since 2002, had allowed member nations to conduct unarmed surveillance flights over each other’s territories to build trust and transparency. Trump cited Russian noncompliance as the rationale for leaving, but arms control experts warned that the move weakened global security frameworks. Russia’s subsequent decision to withdraw underscored the treaty’s unraveling.
Perhaps most controversially, in December 2018, Trump announced the withdrawal of over 2,000 U.S. troops from Syria, declaring victory against ISIS despite warnings from military officials and allies that the group remained a threat. This decision, like many of Trump’s foreign policy choices, reflected a transactional and unilateral vision—one that prioritized perceived short-term gains over long-standing commitments. By the end of his term, these actions had fundamentally redefined America's role in the global order, raising questions about the durability of U.S. leadership.
A transactional country that demands economic fealty from allies forfeits its once-distinguished authority, instead positioning itself as a co-actor on the international stage. This shift undermines the United States's global standing, projecting an image of retreat rather than resolve. Historically the United States has not shaken hands with the Taliban, nor does it ask anything of Luxembourg in NATO. Trump’s international policy principles signal to allies and adversaries alike that American actions are no longer guided by a commitment to spreading democratic ideals or maintaining influence but are instead reactive and inconsistent. This perception risks eroding the nation’s reputation as a reliable leader, leaving a vacuum in the international order and casting doubts about America’s strength and its ability to uphold its principles on the global stage.
The United States historically has identified international institutions (UN, NATO, G7) as a means to rope others into support for global public goods and institutions that are in America’s and others’ long-term interests. While the notion of isolationist foreign policy might seem appealing, in a world brimming with international organizations, international laws, and norms, isolationist policy will destroy the U.S.'s long-term competitiveness and fail to account for interstate complexities otherwise addressed by the cooperation and liberalism that have defined the country for hundreds of years.
With a world on fire, wars and numerous crises of governance have shaken the globe, continuing to wreak havoc within the delicate realm of international politics. In Gaza, with an unbridled 12 months of death and destruction—more chaos than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo from 2012-2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II—American policy toward Israel under a new Trump administration will likely stay consistent. On the other hand, Trump has indicated he wants an end to the Russia-Ukraine war, the single largest conflict in Europe since World War II, while admiring Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has demonstrated in the past that he intends to dismantle America’s long-standing commitment to Ukraine’s fight against Russia, last year pressing United States lawmakers to delay a $61.4B military aid package to Ukraine, and claiming he would end the Ukraine war “in a day” if he won. Similar to the effect of Biden’s pulling out of Afghanistan, if Trump pulls the United States out of the Russia-Ukraine war, he will simultaneously bury American credibility and respect.
A second Trump term gestures to the international stage that America’s presence in the very global order it created is declining. Even so, describing Trump’s foreign policy simply as isolationist would be a gross misrepresentation; instead, as Josh Rudolph, the head of the German Marshall Fund's Transatlantic Democracy Working Group argues, it is “more aptly described as pro-dictator.” While Trump has advanced policy to steer clear of permanent alliances, he also has grown closer to dictators, compromising the image of democracy and advancing human rights that the United States has cast as central to its national interest. Trump’s MAGA movement’s antidemocratic designs romanticize his affiliation with dictators such as Vladimir Putin, Victor Orban, Kim Jong Un, and Hitler; as he reportedly proclaimed, "I need the kind of generals that Hitler had" in a private conversation in the White House.
After decades of unparalleled economic dominance and military preeminence that positioned the U.S. as a guardian of human rights and republicanism, the United States now finds itself navigating a transformed global order where it can no longer unilaterally dictate the rules: it is clear that the era of American exceptionalism has passed. In what is perhaps one of the only upsides to his restrictive foreign policy, should Trump’s prior strategy of “rebalancing trade” to favor domestic production be revived, it could offer the United States a pathway to stem the decrease of its manufacturing base and reduce the offshoring of American jobs. However, Trump will not only speed up the end of American exceptionalism by striking down the concept of the liberal order but, if left unchecked, his administration will reveal what America stands for in the 21st century and burn any of the remaining American-led global order to the ground.
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