American presidents are supposed to have a grand theory of foreign policy — a proper doctrine, like Harry Truman and James Monroe and all their imitators — because how else would we categorize them?
Various doctrines have been attributed to Donald Trump over the years: Jacksonian, realist, nationalist, isolationist, unconventional dove, conventional hawk, anti-imperialist, neo-imperialist. (And of course Putinist, fascist, Manchurian candidate.) Clearly he is no kind of idealist, no starry-eyed Wilsonian; those labels can be ruled out. But is there a definite idea at the heart of his approach to foreign policy?
Only if you consider dealmaking an idea. Because it’s the quest for the handshake that guides Trumpian foreign policy on almost every front, often leaving rival theories of what the president is up to trampled in its wake.
These include theories expressed by Trump himself. Obviously “America First” nationalism is essential to his self-image. But it doesn’t necessarily predict his actual behavior. If our allies in the Middle East want to make a big, beautiful deal to build up their artificial intelligence capacities, Trump is ready to shake hands even if involves outsourcing some of the world’s most important emergent technology. If our rivals in Beijing want to come to the negotiating table on tariffs, the nationalist dream of a total decoupling from China can be set aside.
Likewise, Trump styles himself an anti-interventionist; he gave a big speech in Saudi Arabia on that theme. But any neo-isolationist impulse can dissolve quickly when there’s a big incentive for dealmaking — as in, most recently, the India-Pakistan conflict. And Trump is happy to be hawkish when it suits him, ordering a bombing campaign against the Houthis, threatening North Korea in his first term, even making vague threats against the territory of a NATO ally because he covets Greenland. He sees military force as a useful tool when a rival isn’t yet willing to be a dealmaker, but he switches from hawk to dove as soon as those conditions change.
You can see this plainly with his Middle East strategy. In Trump’s first term, he mostly behaved like a traditional Republican hawk in his policy toward the Islamic Republic of Iran. But this conventional approach to the region, protective of Israeli interests and oriented toward regime change in Iran, has been discarded so far in Trump 2.0. Why? The simplest explanation is that Trump has decided that Iran’s government seems more eager to make peace with him, while Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is suddenly a hawkish obstacle to dealmaking.
Crucially, this doesn’t mean that Trump has suddenly embraced the Obama-era hope that peace with Iran might enable the United States to disentangle itself from its alliances with the Gulf monarchies. They love dealmaking with America, so Trump is all in for those relationships as well.
Nor does he seem guided at the moment by the worldview associated with some of his appointees, like Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, that makes Sunni radicalism a particular bête noire. Instead, Trump happily met with the new president of Syria, long associated with a branch of Al Qaeda, and promised to drop sanctions on his country. It was the fear of Al Qaeda in power that helped justify Gabbard’s partial defenses of the Assad regime, but if an erstwhile Qaeda terrorist wants to talk, Trump is ready to let bygones be bygones — because the deal’s the thing.
There’s a similar pattern with Russia and Ukraine. Trump’s warmth toward Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and bursts of hostility toward the Ukrainians are often interpreted as indicators of an ideological desire to align the United States with authoritarian regimes. But you’ll notice that Trump can be talked into a friendlier attitude toward Ukraine — he armed the Ukrainians in his first term, and been more critical of Putin as the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky acceded to a resource deal — whenever it appears that Moscow is intransigent and Kyiv is more accommodating. As much as the president tends to admire a certain kind of foreign strongman, that admiration hits a limit when the prospects for dealmaking recede.
This doesn’t mean that Trump won’t talk himself into a bad bargain with Putin in the end. The problem with making deals your North Star is that it can be hard to distinguish between good ones and bad ones. (The other problem, for a president with a family business, is that what’s good for Trump Inc. may differ substantially from what’s good for America.)
But a key reason that many Americans preferred Trump to his rivals, both traditional Republican hawks and internationalist Democrats, is that the high-minded doctrines animating U.S. foreign policy for the last 20 years have often hastened our decline. And a dealmaker in chief is less likely than other presidents to find himself trapped by dogmatic beliefs in untenable positions, less likely to be led around by client states and less likely to run headlong into war.
That’s the case for the Trumpian corrective in U.S. foreign policy. Now let’s see what his deals look like in the end.
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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times With Ross Douthat.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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