Since returning to office in January, President Donald Trump has pursued a series of head-spinning moves to reorient U.S. foreign policy, from initiating a global trade war to threatening long-standing NATO allies to teasing a takeover of Canada. Political analysts like to say these shifts reflect Trump’s transactional, zero-sum worldview—an “America First” approach that prioritizes a narrow conception of national interest and deprioritizes moral concerns.
This approach seems a far cry from previous U.S. administrations, which espoused, to varying degrees, a commitment to values such as freedom, democracy, and human rights. While often criticized for hypocrisy or a failure to live up to such ideals, a “values-based” foreign policy remained a core component of U.S. policymaking in the decades after the Cold War.
Yet beneath the surface, the reality is murkier. Since taking office, key members of the Trump administration have, in fact, begun to pursue a values-based foreign policy of their own—albeit a very different one than before.
Vice President J.D. Vance’s remarks at the Munich Security Conference in February formed the blueprint for this new values-based foreign policy, which is now embraced, to varying degrees, by other Trump officials and allies. In his speech, Vance stunned European attendees by taking them to task for what he described as “the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.” Vance argued that Europeans were failing to live up to shared commitments to democracy and free expression, highlighting the cancelation of Romania’s election results due to alleged Russian meddling and the suppression of right-wing voices across the continent.
At its core, Vance’s speech was a rejection of the interpretation of freedom and democracy that has been a mainstay of U.S. politicians and diplomats for decades, casting it as liberalism run amok. But it was couched in the language of those very ideals. Repeated references to “shared values,” a call for partnership in promoting “freedom,” and a commitment to standing up for “the people” bear striking similarities to prior U.S. foreign-policy pronouncements.
The speech represented a plea to embrace a new interpretation of “shared values” in guiding foreign relationships, not to throw them out entirely. In 2025, Washington has adjusted which values it prioritizes. LGBTQ rights and women’s empowerment are out; free speech absolutism, anti-“woke” censorship, and a defense of Western culture are in. While the approach isn’t fully consistent, it’s far more ideological than many pundits might have us believe.
Other U.S. officials such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio have since echoed these sentiments. And many of the Trump administration’s actions evince a similar ethos: the move to cut aid to South Africa in response to what officials allege are “serious human rights violations” related to its new land law, which critics have argued enables the expropriation of white Afrikaner property; an embrace of figures such as Javier Milei, Argentina’s aggressively libertarian president, who said that “the winds of freedom [were] blowing stronger” after Trump’s election; even a campaign against the European Union’s data privacy protections, which State Department officials have framed as an effort at “shutting down the global censorship-industrial complex.”
These are not the actions of policymakers following the hard-nosed logic of realpolitik. They represent instead a strong ideological undercurrent, at times at odds with the core material interests that Trump allegedly prioritizes. U.S. pressure on the United Kingdom to repeal hate speech laws initially emerged as a stumbling block at the outset of trade negotiations between the two countries in April, for example.
Washington is also redeploying the tools of the old values-based foreign policy toward new targets. Visa bans and revocations, traditionally used to punish rights-abusing regimes, have taken aim instead at prominent Trump critics. Meanwhile, as Trump threatens to deport various groups seeking safety from persecution in their home countries, his administration has harnessed refugee resettlement infrastructure to welcome white South Africans fleeing what Trump and others in his orbit have called “genocide.”
Even Trump’s embrace of Russia, which has upended long-standing U.S. policy, is consistent with a new values-based foreign policy, which sees Moscow’s championing of so-called traditional values and broadside against Western moral decadence as causes to be celebrated.
Similarly, it’s no secret that Trump and his supporters have long admired Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has reshaped his country as a model for the international conservative movement. Trump-aligned members of Congress have sought to defend Orban and reorient U.S. foreign aid to support rather than challenge his autocratic tendencies. But viewing support for Orban merely as an affinity for autocrats overlooks the deeper ideological motivations of Trump’s support. It is connected to an international right-wing movement that seeks to strengthen global freedom—so long as that freedom yields conservative policy wins.
Indeed, the new values-based foreign policy is largely unconcerned about seeming partisan or appearing to intervene in the domestic affairs of other states. “Lecturing” was a common accusation directed at proponents of the old values-based foreign policy. Autocratic governments complained that U.S. calls for reform and human rights were unwelcome barriers to collaboration, and advocates of transactionalism and restraint argued that the insertion of values weakened the United States’ capacity to achieve its goals.
Yet the policy approach embraced by leaders today is often unabashedly interventionist. Telling other countries how to police hate speech or run migration policy, for instance, has remained on the agenda. The Trump administration even declared the South African ambassador persona non grata for unofficial statements he made about white supremacy in the United States. Trump-aligned figures such as Elon Musk explicitly endorsed the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) before Germany’s February election and called the sitting German president an “anti-democratic tyrant” when he objected. When Germany’s domestic intelligence agency later labeled the AfD as “extremist,” it elicited a strong rebuke from Vance and Rubio, among others, who said the move amounted to “tyranny.”
Ultimately, the ideological struggle at home is permeating abroad. A battle to “own the libs” now motivates not only domestic politics but increasingly foreign policy as well. The struggle over foreign aid is case in point. Feeding the U.S. Agency for International Development “into the wood chipper” was about much more than cost savings (which turned out to be minimal). For those leading the charge—including Musk and Pete Marocco, the official who oversaw the dismantling of the agency—it was about challenging the “globalist” agenda and supporting an entirely different notion of “freedom” and “rights”—righting the ship of so-called American values that, in their eyes, had been set off course.
Although internal incoherence within the MAGA coalition may stymie its advance, the new values-based foreign policy could quickly become more intrusive, more partisan, and more willing to take sides than the old version ever was. A move back toward a world where sovereignty norms are sacrosanct seems less likely by the day.
Nevertheless, the new values-based foreign policy has thus far remained parochial, concerned much more with the West than with the “rest.” Indeed, it has relatively little to say about countries and regions beyond Europe and the Americas. The ideological landscape of other places, such as Southeast Asia and the Middle East, is more challenging to pin down and, perhaps, uninteresting to many in Trump’s orbit. This may put countries in these regions at an advantage, as they are less likely to attract the ire of U.S. officials.
But it also may undermine the capacity of actors within these countries to appeal to the administration on “values-based” grounds—which may be frustrating for Iran or China hawks, who have long relied on moral framing to make their case. In the case of China, the result has been inconsistency: no clear strategy, just an ambient desire to win, absent the ideological scaffolding that shapes the administration’s antagonistic posture toward the West.
The new values-based foreign policy is neither entirely coherent nor the sole driver of decision-making within the new administration. At times, Trump himself seems happy to focus on cold-blooded dealmaking, absent sentimentality or the squishiness that comes with ideological sacred cows, as he exhibited on his recent trip to the Gulf. Nevertheless, values have clearly crept in, and it is increasingly difficult to understand the foreign policy of the current administration without an ideological lens. Even for an America in transition, old habits can be sticky.
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