Next week marks 100 days since U.S. President Donald Trump took office for a second term. In the last three months, Trump and his team have taken steps that have surprised even some seasoned observers, from turning Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency loose on the federal bureaucracy to imposing steep tariffs on most U.S. trading partners.
The chaos that now emanates from the White House has already reshaped U.S. relationships with allies and foes alike, as well as perceptions of Washington on the global stage.
Trump has struck deals with Latin American nations to assist with immigration enforcement—most notably El Salvador, which has accepted hundreds of people deported from the United States into its prison system without due process. He has presented Ukraine with a “final offer” peace framework that includes tangible gains for a revanchist Russia. And his administration fired the first shot in a trade war with China, which faces a minimum tariff rate of 145 percent on most U.S.-bound goods.
As the 100-day mark approaches, we asked 10 FP columnists and contributors to assess the start of Trump’s second term—to make sense of all that has happened so far and what might come next. Read on for their responses, or click on an individual topic below.
—Audrey Wilson, managing editor
JUMP TO TOPIC
Trump’s Trade Policy Tests His Own Team
By Edward Alden, columnist at Foreign Policy and visiting professor at Western Washington University
The first 100 days of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term have been a test of whether the radicals and neophytes he placed in senior economic posts could accomplish what the so-called adults of his first term could not: remaking the rules of the global economy to serve the president’s America First agenda.
So far, the results have been spectacularly bad. Trump’s trade policy has lurched from empty threats to sweeping tariffs to humiliating retreats, roiling markets and destroying remaining confidence in U.S. economic leadership. Unless the administration can bring some discipline to its approach, Trump will accomplish none of his goals and leave the United States poorer and weaker.
Business leaders and U.S. trading partners had hoped that Trump’s second term would look like his first—certainly more protectionist, but with a coherent approach. But Robert Lighthizer, the veteran who served as U.S. trade representative from 2017 to 2021, was left off the team, reportedly because Trump thought he was “too scared to go big.”
Trump has gone big, but in chaotic and unpredictable ways. He threatened 100 percent tariffs on BRICS member countries if they reduced transactions involving U.S. dollars, imposed and partially lifted tariffs on Canada and Mexico over illegal immigration and fentanyl smuggling, expanded steel and aluminum tariffs, and added 25 percent to the cost of most auto imports.
The coup de grâce was his April 2 announcement of so-called reciprocal tariffs on U.S. trading partners, reaching 50 percent for some countries. The administration used a laughably crude formula that sent stock and bond markets into a tailspin, forcing Trump into retreat.
No one on Trump’s team has been able to explain the president’s actions, much less constrain them. All are novices in government, except for U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, who worked with Lighthizer, as well as White House advisor Peter Navarro, a radical protectionist who never met a tariff he didn’t like.
Most of the explaining has been left to U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who predicted that the new tariffs would create jobs for millions of Americans—even as some manufacturers blame the tariffs for layoffs. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has looked lost, insisting the tariff announcement was all a negotiating strategy even as Navarro, Lutnick, and others said the opposite. Trump has nonetheless given Bessent a leading role in trying to negotiate new trade deals.
The most serious damage has been to the U.S.-China relationship, which Lighthizer nurtured during Trump’s first term even as he imposed tariffs. This time around, China’s temerity in striking back with retaliatory tariffs has left the two countries in an economic death spiral, with each imposing tariffs high enough to block most trade. No one on the Trump team looks capable of sorting that mess out.
Latin America Jumps up the Priority List
By Catherine Osborn, the writer of Foreign Policy’s weekly Latin America Brief
U.S. President Donald Trump’s fixation on mass deportations in his first 100 days has flung Latin America up the foreign-policy priority list. Under other circumstances, that attention might be celebrated. After all, it’s rare that a U.S. secretary of state makes their first international trip to the region, as Marco Rubio did in February when he visited Panama, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic.
But one of Rubio’s goals on that trip was to lay the groundwork for deportations to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. The United States later transferred migrants there, alleging that they were gang members, even though most had no criminal records in the United States and appeared to be accused based on little more than their tattoos.
Despite the indiscriminate nature of these deportations, many Latin American leaders are facilitating them—and not only those who seek a close relationship with Trump. This in part continues a trend of regional governments emulating the United States’ restrictive immigration policies. It also reflects that Latin American governments want to preserve their political capital for countering another of Trump’s policies: economic pressure.
Trump quickly threatened 25 percent tariffs on Mexico, only partially backing down after major concessions. In Panama, Trump coupled warnings about economic engagement with China with threats to take over critical infrastructure. And though Rubio has said he wants joint economic prosperity in the Western Hemisphere, few details have emerged about a positive economic agenda for the region.
The United States is more important for total trade and investment in Central America and Mexico than in South America, where China accounts for more of the economic pie. Trump’s pressure on Latin America to shun relations with China is familiar; but during his first term, many South American countries rejected that pressure and even doubled down on economic ties with Beijing.
In the face of Trump’s dramatic new trade barriers, Latin American countries are getting more creative. The Mercosur trade bloc has moved closer to a long-stalled trade agreement with the European Union; even Mexico City is in trade talks with Brussels. Presidents from the region were feted with state visits in India and Japan in recent weeks. So far, at least one effect of Trump’s second term has been to inspire countries toward trade diversification.
100 Days of Tearing Down Institutions—and Opponents
By Julian E. Zelizer, columnist at Foreign Policy and professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University
This time around, U.S. President Donald Trump’s first 100 days have been the polar opposite of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s in 1933. Whereas Roosevelt responded to the economic crisis that he confronted by building government programs and shoring up broken institutions, Trump has used the start of his second term to tear down as much as possible.
So far, Trump is so determined to pursue his goals that he has been willing to suffer the risk of throwing the economy into turmoil—as reflected by his announcement and then partial retreat from sweeping reciprocal tariffs this month.
Policy is not Trump’s only focus—retribution is another. At his first campaign rally of the 2024 election season, held in Waco, Texas, then-candidate Trump made his intentions clear: “For those who have been wronged and betrayed … I am your retribution.”
As promised, his administration has conducted an all-out assault on the institutions that opposed him and his agenda in the past eight years: law firms, universities, the press, the courts, the bureaucracy, foreign allies, and more.
But going after institutions is not just about settling scores. Another effect is to weaken, if not completely undermine, the foundation of opponents who could cause Trump problems as he ramps up his pursuit of an agenda that revolves around tariffs, tax cuts, territorial expansion, and gutting the administrative state.
If the president continues intimidating those with the capacity to fight back, there will be fewer people who can stand in the way as the administration grows bolder in its ambitions. So far, only federal judges have been willing to stand firm in the face of Trump’s executive storm.
Ultimately, the United States’ two major political parties still retain the most power to dictate the country’s direction. If enough Republicans broke with their decision to defend and empower the president, he would instantly become very vulnerable, even to the threat of impeachment. Should Democrats find an effective message and electoral strategy to win back control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2026, then they will have a formidable power base to rein him in.
Trump’s Policies Provide Cover for Chinese Missteps
By Zongyuan Zoe Liu, columnist at Foreign Policy and the Maurice R. Greenberg fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations
Seen from Beijing, U.S. President Donald Trump’s approach to China since returning to the White House offers evidence that Chinese President Xi Jinping is strategically correct in viewing the world as “undergoing changes unseen in a century”—and committing to make China self-reliant.
As China faces down U.S. tariffs as high as 145 percent, its use of a combination of tariffs and nontariff measures—such as adding U.S. companies to its “unreliable entity list,” expanding export controls, and initiating anti-monopoly investigations—showcases that it has expanded its tools and strengthened its capabilities to conduct targeted trade retaliation.
Unlike U.S. allies, who may have been blindsided by Trump’s aggressive tactics, China anticipated the confrontation and prepared accordingly. Since 2018, Chinese policymakers have accumulated experience navigating the intensifying U.S.-China strategic rivalry, which has come with increasingly restrictive U.S. policies.
China has urged local officials and major state-owned enterprises to bolster supply chain security and expand markets overseas. Beijing has developed domestic regulatory and administrative measures to counter foreign coercion, which makes it illegal for companies doing business in China to comply with foreign restrictions against Chinese entities—and creates a compliance dilemma for businesses.
Stringent Western sanctions to punish Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 further motivated the Chinese government to expand yuan-based financial infrastructure to mitigate vulnerabilities to foreign sanctions.
Trump’s policies in his second term so far provide a convenient cover for Chinese leaders to walk back recent policy missteps without embarrassing Xi or the Chinese Communist Party, allowing them to galvanize political will and financial resources to promote self-reliance and rally Chinese private entrepreneurs around patriotism to advance the state’s strategic plan despite individual sacrifices.
Though the chilling effect of the Chinese government crackdown on technology companies and the humiliation of entrepreneurs has not fully dissipated, the chaos introduced by the Trump administration makes China appear less uncertain despite its economy’s persistent structural woes. The state-owned People’s Daily, for example, has invited foreign investors to “use certainty in China to hedge against uncertainty in America.”
In the past two months, the window for a Trump-Xi summit where the two leaders could strike a deal has narrowed. That does not mean that the intention to reach a deal has vanished: In a newly released white paper on U.S.-China economic and trade relations, the Chinese government called for resolving tensions through equal dialogue and mutually beneficial cooperation.
This is a clear signal that Beijing will not yield to the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” approach.
Trump Looks to Modi for Appeasement
By Sumit Ganguly, a columnist at Foreign Policy and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution
During U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term, he invited Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the United States and held a massive rally in Houston, Texas, with considerable fanfare. In turn, Modi hosted Trump in New Delhi as well as in Ahmedabad, in his home state of Gujarat.
Both visits were marked by bravado but were shallow on issues of substance. Nevertheless, the relationship between the two leaders, who place much stock in personal diplomacy, remained downright friendly, even as Trump apparently in private caricatured Modi’s accented English.
So, while Trump disassociates himself with any policy initiated or endorsed by former President Joe Biden, at least one issue remains a constant: the distrust of China and the need to rely on India as a possible strategic bulwark.
Despite this, Indian officials thinking that Trump would feel unfettered in his second term ensured that Modi visited the United States in early February. During this trip, Modi said that U.S.-India trade could reach $500 billion by 2030—probably to appease Trump. At the U.S. president’s urging, Modi also tentatively agreed to purchase an unspecified number of F-35 fighter jets from the United States.
Still, some wrinkles in the U.S.-India relationship remain. First is the issue of illegal immigration from India. Despite a domestic political uproar initially, Modi’s government has quietly accepted the harsh deportation of hundreds of undocumented Indian immigrants. Second is the matter of H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers. India, which is the largest recipient of these visas, obviously wants few curbs on them, even as Trump associates speak out against them.
As Trump completes the first 100 days of his second term, the U.S. relationship with India—though still cordial—appears a bit more fraught. As he threatens trade wars, Trump has referred to India as the “tariff king,” and more recently, a report from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative highlighted a range of trade barriers that have hobbled U.S. exports to India. Trade talks between Washington and New Delhi are ongoing.
After Trump’s April 9 announcement that he would pause hefty tariff increases for 90 days, Indian interlocutors will no doubt be scrambling to extend this relief.
What Is Trump’s Foreign-Policy Doctrine?
By Matthew Kroenig, columnist at Foreign Policy and vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security
After U.S. President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office, is a foreign-policy doctrine coming into view? In the 19th century, the Monroe Doctrine warned European countries to keep out of the Western Hemisphere, and four decades ago, the Reagan Doctrine promised to support freedom fighters around the world.
But what is the defining feature of Trump’s second-term approach to global affairs? Contrary to mainstream assessments that the president is completely unpredictable, there is a reliable worldview underlying his foreign policy, and it consists of three main pillars.
First, Trump believes in America First, which is more than a slogan. While former President Joe Biden divided the world between democracy and autocracy—and some U.S. policy wonks talk about allies versus adversaries or the developed versus the developing world—Trump’s mental map draws the key global fault line between the United States and everyone else. In his view, the United States stands apart.
The second pillar of Trump’s second-term doctrine is that the United States is getting ripped off. Washington shoulders too much of the burden of global leadership. Past presidents were foolish or weak, allowing adversaries and allies alike to take advantage of U.S. wealth, power, and goodwill. The results, in his view, are unfair trade deals, free-riding allies, and open borders that facilitate the flow of drugs and criminals from other countries. Trump sees his job as president as righting these wrongs and getting a better deal for the American people.
Third, the method to redress these global imbalances is escalate to de-escalate. As Trump writes in The Art of the Deal, his preferred negotiating strategy revolves around making threats and extreme demands to throw one’s negotiating partner off balance and ultimately bring them crawling to the table for a deal.
To be sure, this three-part framework is simplified, but it explains a large portion of Trump’s foreign policy since he took office in January, including his approaches to border security, Chinese presence in the Panama Canal, NATO burden-sharing, Russia’s war in Ukraine, Iran’s nuclear program, the U.S. trade deficit, and more.
Though tactical unpredictability in his foreign-policy strategy is likely, you can count on these three pillars to serve as a guide to U.S. foreign policy for the next three and a half years.
Trump’s Far-Right Allies in Europe Lose Out
By Caroline de Gruyter, columnist at Foreign Policy and Europe correspondent for the Dutch newspaper NRC
U.S. President Donald Trump blinked first, averting trade war with the European Union for now—but the damage is done. After weeks of turmoil and insults from senior members of the Trump administration, Europeans are rapidly becoming disenchanted with the United States.
According to a poll conducted in nine European countries in March, 63 percent of the people surveyed think that Trump makes the world “less safe,” and 51 percent said that he is an “enemy of Europe.” Interestingly, people were by far the most negative in countries that are traditionally trans-Atlantic-oriented, such as Denmark and the Netherlands.
Such public opinion, in turn, has a curious side effect: Some far-right parties in Europe, seen as allies of the Trump administration, have already begun to lose public support. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who are among Europe’s staunchest far-right Trump supporters, are going down in the polls.
For them, it was one thing to cheer Trump’s overtures toward Russia, but now that the United States is trying to undermine the EU and to pit one country against another, far-right leaders on the continent are becoming uncomfortable.
The perhaps unexpected result of Trump’s anti-European maneuvering is that Europeans are rallying around the flag—yes, the European flag. According to the European Parliament’s winter Eurobarometer, survey 74 percent of Europeans polled now think membership is beneficial for their country—the highest score since the question was first asked in 1983. In March, thousands of people marched through Rome to demand more European unity, a rare sight.
Europe’s far-right leaders once hoped that Trump’s second term would boost their influence, but they are now distancing themselves. Orban, who often compares the reach of the EU to Soviet repression, has fallen silent. The leader of the French far right, Marine Le Pen, was recently convicted of embezzlement; she ignored Trump’s call to “free” her.
Instead, during a meager far-right rally in Paris, Le Pen professed her respect for independent courts, as if to say directly that she is not Trump. Wilders stopped wearing his Russian-Dutch friendship pin, now that it is clear that Trump doesn’t really want to make peace in Ukraine.
With friends such as Trump, even Europe’s far right doesn’t need enemies.
Trump’s $397 Million Exception for Pakistan
By Michael Kugelman, the writer of Foreign Policy’s weekly South Asia Brief
At the end of February, the Trump administration decided to exempt $397 million in security assistance to Pakistan from its massive foreign aid cuts. The funds will be allocated to a program that monitors Pakistan’s U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets—to make sure that they are used for counterterrorism, and not for action against India.
The United States has suspended most security aid for Pakistan since January 2018, early in President Donald Trump’s first term. With strong critics of Pakistan now in the White House and strategic focus shifting elsewhere since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Washington’s partnership with Islamabad isn’t a priority. Setting aside funding for Pakistan of all places seems like a striking choice.
But it makes sense from the Trump administration’s perspective. Just days after news broke about the F-16 monitoring program, in March, Trump delivered a joint address to Congress in which he thanked Pakistan for helping the United States capture an Islamic State militant involved in an attack that killed U.S. troops in Kabul during the 2021 military withdrawal.
Washington has signaled that it sees Islamabad as a helpful if limited partner in tracking down terrorists that target U.S. citizens.
What happens if the Trump administration concludes that Pakistan is cheating with its F-16s? In 2019, India claimed that it shot down one of the U.S.-made jets during a military clash with Pakistan. At the time, FP reported that Trump administration officials said none of Pakistan’s F-16s were missing—though they did convey their unhappiness with how they were being used.
In his second term so far, Trump is more aggressively bringing U.S. foreign policy in line with his America First approach—which means that any U.S. foreign assistance must directly advance U.S. interests. So, if the administration finds that Pakistan isn’t holding up its end of the bargain, Washington may not go as easy on it this time around.
That isn’t what Pakistani officials want given how hard they have worked to build a new counterterrorism partnership with the United States, as well as to appeal to Washington on other issues, from untapped critical minerals to cryptocurrency.
Does Trump Have an Africa Policy?
By Nosmot Gbadamosi, the writer of Foreign Policy’s weekly Africa Brief
Before the 2024 U.S. election, some African leaders privately rooted for the transactional, business-friendly environment that they envisioned under U.S. President Donald Trump in a second term. They expected that they would be able to strike deals without the United States applying double standards about a rules-based international order.
Trump has yet to outline any specific foreign policy toward Africa as a whole, even after 100 days in office. But many of his administration’s executive orders have had devastating ripple effects on the continent. The 90-day pause on foreign aid (with an exception granted to Egypt) and the gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development prompted countries such as Nigeria to allocate emergency funds for medicines.
Meanwhile, Trump moved quickly on singling out South Africa for sanctions. An executive order that he signed last month offered refugee status to Afrikaners—descendants of primarily Dutch settlers—and cut aid to the country over its new land law, which aims to address persistent inequalities. (Some in Trump’s inner circle, including advisor Elon Musk, spent years living in apartheid South Africa.)
Though South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has attempted to mend relations with Trump, other members of his African National Congress party are less enthusiastic. The country looks to be set on a collision course with the United States that will not only limit South Africa’s economic growth, but also that of its regional neighbors.
Some countries have been proactive in attempts to secure business and security deals. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has proposed a minerals-for-security agreement to help fight Rwanda-backed M23 rebels. Countries such as Somalia that also fear Trump’s cuts might look to ink similar deals.
But a U.S. trade war with China could indirectly raise costs for African economies that rely more significantly on trade with Beijing. That—coupled with a precarious future for the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a preferential trade agreement—have prompted some nations to seek to diversify away from the United States. South Africa, for example, has already said that it will intensify seeking new alliances.
Trump’s broader trajectory will likely reaffirm Africa’s trade with U.S. adversaries, especially China. But some observers say that if African leaders implement the right fiscal policies, then their economies could emerge less reliant on the United States in Trump’s second term.
Trump Isn’t Gaining Traction in the Middle East
By Steven A. Cook, columnist at Foreign Policy and the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations
Measuring a U.S. president by their first 100 days—a time-honored tradition—has always struck me as arbitrary. Still, President Donald Trump promised to do a lot in the three months after his inauguration, and as a Beltway globalist, I don’t have much of a choice but to evaluate his approach to the Middle East.
Trump came into his second term like a lion, but he now looks more and more like a lamb. Yes, he has ordered the U.S. military to put an end to the Houthi threat to the Red Sea (and to Israel), which I support. Yet he hasn’t gotten a lot of traction on the region’s other big issues.
Trump forced Israel and Hamas to accept a cease-fire that was negotiated by former U.S. President Joe Biden, but the U.S. president and his emissary Steve Witkoff have not managed to build on it so far. Instead, the White House now supports a renewed Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip that is intended to pressure Hamas to give up its remaining hostages or to destroy the terrorist group, depending on who is talking.
When it comes to Iran, Trump’s bellicose rhetoric is the surest sign that he does not want to use military force against the regime. The U.S. president’s demands on Iran—dismantling its nuclear program, ending support for its proxies, and greatly reducing its missile forces—did not survive first contact between Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi.
It now seems like Trump is willing to agree to a deal that looks quite like the one that he breached in May 2018: the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Maybe the JCPOA will be renamed the Trump Comprehensive Plan of Action and declared the greatest arms control agreement of all time. That could be a good thing for global peace, but it also might only kick the can down the road and give a lifeline to an awful regime in Tehran.
But that likely won’t matter to Trump, who only seems interested in getting a deal. Relatedly—remember expanding the Abraham Accords to Saudi Arabia? He was going to make that happen. It isn’t Trump’s fault that Saudi Arabia is reconsidering its willingness to normalize relations with Israel amid the war in Gaza, but building on his signature foreign-policy achievement is no longer possible.
It is hard to achieve much in 100 days, but Trump set himself up by claiming that there would be a lot of winning in the Middle East. Maybe it’s me, but it still feels like a lot of people are losing.
The post Trump’s First 100 Days on the Global Stage appeared first on Foreign Policy.
