A popular critique of Trump’s foreign policy over his two administrations is that it has been supposedly conducted with too much uncertainty, if not chaos. This spring and summer, Trump announced that we were at war with Iran, then reengaged in negotiations, then at war, and then negotiating again—through seven such iterations.
As a result, some MAGA apostates have accused Trump of fighting a “forever” or “endless” war against Iran, while the Left worries that America has lost its likeability in the eyes of sophisticated Europeans.
Critics further complain that whatever positive developments have occurred abroad on the president’s watch have mostly been negated by his off-putting messaging—interpreted by the international community, we are told, as mostly chaotic, mercurial, and incoherent tweets and rants that alienate allies and turn neutrals into belligerents.
Another objection is that Trump seems to become distracted or to tire in the midst of using force abroad. And such interruptions do not ensure a final denouement favorable to the United States even after impressive initial actions. In addition, his confidence in his private and public success “art of the deal” negotiating skills may have sometimes blinded him that certain theocratic or totalitarian regimes—Iran in particular—believe that deal-making is simply a ruse for delay and obfuscation if not a sign of weakness. Many regimes such as North Korea and Iran have no intention of honoring any agreements they might conclude, at least to their agreed-on fulfilment.
Yet many of these domestic criticisms imagine that Trump’s communications are failed attempts at being persuasive rather than calibrated tactics focused on obtaining what America needs. So they sometimes misunderstand and ignore what may be intended as Trump’s art-of-the-deal style—a stratagem that can often leave adversaries more confused and prone to error and miscalculation than true or traditional diplomacy. Consequently, Trump’s foreign policy cannot be judged by his off-putting rhetoric or his bruised critics’ outrage, but only by what has actually transpired in the nearly six years of his governance.
Moreover, Trump’s foreign policy is predicated on a realist assumption that nations gravitate toward perceived strength, but keep distant from hesitant or weak leadership. To that end, a chauvinist Trump hammers home the message of an American $31 trillion economy, the greatest oil and gas production of any nation in history, preeminence in space exploration, satellite launches, and artificial intelligence, record foreign investment, and, despite the uncertainty of the Iran war, a solid economy characterized by a record Wall Street, low unemployment, strong non-government job growth, and inflation—even with high gas prices—still much lower than the 5 percent average yearly inflation rate of the Biden years.
Just as importantly, Trump believes that an administration that risks controversial measures to remedy long-standing domestic crises—10 million illegal entries during the prior administration, a military short of thousands of recruits, a nihilist war on fossil fuels, a crime-ridden Washington DC, and a weaponized bureaucracy and administrative state—radiates confidence abroad. Certainly, the rise of pro-American governments in Latin America and conservative political parties in Europe owes much to the perceived momentum, daring, and the successes of Trump’s counterrevolution.
But the best method of evaluating Trump’s foreign policy is to assess why the world abroad bears little resemblance to the one of 2017 when he first entered the presidency. As a footnote, we might first remember that earlier, purportedly more sober and judicious administrations oversaw a twenty-year misadventure in Afghanistan, the most humiliating and costly theater retreat in a half-century from Kabul, a multibillion-dollar weapons gift to the Taliban, a decade-long ground war in Iraq, nine-months of incoherent and inconsequential bombing of Libyan factions, three separate Russian invasions of neighboring nations—Georgia, Ukraine, Crimea—orchestrated by Vladimir Putin, an embarrassing Chinese diplomatic putdown in Anchorage, Alaska, the worst single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust during the October 7, 2023 invasion of Israel by Hamas terrorists, and an unchecked and seemingly unstoppably ascendant China that threatened Taiwan, the American-built Panama Canal, and American interest in Latin America.
In contrast, Trump’s approaches to foreign relations over two terms have led to both the long-term benefit of American interests and allies and to the detriment of American enemies. For example, Trump quickly eliminated enemies such as ISIS in Iraq (Obama’s “JV team”) and a contingent of the Russian Wagner Group in Syria. He took out terrorist kingpins such as the feared Iranian general Qasem Soleimani and the terrorist ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—reducing anti-American terrorism in the Middle East at little cost to the U.S.
Also in his first term, for a year in 2018 he stood down Kim Jong Un’s indiscriminate missile launching. His rhetorical antics aimed at getting European allies to feel a greater sense of responsibility for their own defense and to spend like it did lead to a radical recalibration of NATO. China’s profile abroad has been diminished. Chavezism and its communist tentacles are mostly inert in Venezuela. Cuba is reeling.
Regardless of what ultimately transpires in Iran—at comparative little cost in blood and treasure given the enormity of the challenge—Trump has already destroyed much of its half-century, half-trillion-dollar military, industrial, nuclear complex.
One aspect of Trump’s ‘art-of-deal’ foreign policy is that it has attempted to rectify long-standing challenges that had been identified in the past as such by both parties as existential. Yet they mostly were considered unsolvable, in a cost-to-benefit analysis by earlier presidents.
Another characteristic of Trump’s foreign policy is that it is not linear. In matters of the use of military force, the script does not follow the usual one practiced by the last seven presidents of threats and ultimatums, followed by the use of force, leading either to an adversary meeting conditions, or the use of force that supposedly would decide the issue at hand–but unfortunately in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya certainly did not.
In contrast, Trump’s style was transactional and fluid. He saw no contradictions between bombing Iran one day or killing arch terrorist Gen. Soleimani, and within hours reopening negotiations, or even claiming he wished “to make Iran great again.” Whether it was persuading North Korea in the Trump first term to cease missile launches over our allies’ airspace, or the June 2025 twenty-five-hour bombing war in Iran to disable nuclear facilities, Trump was eager to negotiate a deal with fanatics in the midst of a nuclear standoff, or hours after derailing much of the Iranian effort to become nuclear. The resulting confused messaging illustrates a twofold theme: one, the unpredictable Trump was capable of doing anything to anyone at any time anywhere; and two, there were no necessarily permanent enemies as long as nations did not threaten the U.S., its interests, or allies.
Yet the proper evaluation of the Trump foreign policy again is to examine the world abroad, region by region, since he first entered office with what followed. Consider Europe. In 2017, NATO was a shell of its former Cold-War self. President George W. Bush and Barack Obama had both complained bitterly that virtually unarmed “Old Europe” nations were “free-riders,” assuming endless U.S. protection while often damning American policies abroad.
Prior presidential needling and polite whining at summits had brought few results. Only four of the 32 NATO nations had kept their promises to invest 2% of their annual GDP in defense expenditures. So breaking all precedent, Trump (“a bull in the nuclear china shop” according to one former Obama diplomat) immediately began raging at their noncompliance, now threatening, now coaxing members into action. To achieve this aggregate $1 trillion increase in European NATO spending, an exasperated Trump variously threatened to leave the membership, to aid only those nations that had met their 2% targets, and to question the very relevance of Article V of the alliance.
By the first year of his second term in 2025, all the thirty-two members had met their long neglected targets, however irate or judgmental they may have felt about Trump’s “dangerous” attacks on the trans-Atlantic alliance structure. And all but Spain had promised to meet longer-term goals of 5% defense expenditures—especially after the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and Trump’s controversial message to the allies that although the U.S. would help, it could not alone ensure that Europe and Ukraine were safe from Russian aggression. Critics would charge even Trump’s undeniable results were not worth the alienation of close allies. Trump differed, and assumed an angry but up-armed Europe was preferable to the status quo of a friendly but near defenseless continent.
NATO is not the only way that Trump’s hostile approach to Europe now looks vindicated. Europe used to be amused at Trump’s shrill warnings about the dangerous Russian entanglements of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline or Chinese mercantile threats to Western nations. Yet while out of office, Trump was proven prescient when Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022. And later he used tariffs and the bully pulpit to achieve greater symmetry in Chinese trade. Just this year European Union nations dropped their naïve rapprochement with China and instead labeled it a "critical long-term strategic challenge."
In general, once taboo European issues—open borders, massive illegal immigration, dismal fertility, restrictions on free speech, anemic militaries, the war on fossil fuels—are now openly discussed, in part because of the occasional hammering from the Trump administration. Eastern Europe, Greece, and Cyprus have never been more pro-American, in part because they feel Trump can be counted on to help friends (he greenlighted the EastMed pipeline, cancelled under Biden, and has increased mutual military cooperation), and to punish enemies.
Perhaps the most dramatic developments abroad have been the about face of Latin American nations from prior socialist and communist governments to pro-American, free-market democracies. By 2017 Western Hemisphere Spanish-speaking nations were trending hard left—with past wink-and-nod support from the prior Obama administration. Cuba and Venezuela, both with Chinese and Russian support, were openly trying to subvert the few remaining pro-American governments.
Yet of some 33 sovereign nations in South and Central America and the Caribbean, only four are now still ruled by leftist, anti-American governments—in Brazil, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Paraguay. John Kerry in 2013 had renounced the Monroe Doctrine (“the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over”) at the height of the so-called “Pink Tide” in Latin America, as the communist Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) bloc seemed the wave of the future.
Yet Donald Trump revived the Monroe Doctrine (now dubbed the “Donroe Doctrine”), and proved a proactive America could help to roll back communism and foreign hegemons from the Western hemisphere. The removal of Chinese surrogate companies from the Panama Canal and the communist Maduro government from Venezuela, along with adroit diplomacy by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have ushered in a new Pan-American age.
Our North American neighbors may be irate at Trump’s antics, but they too are slowly addressing long-standing asymmetries that past presidencies lamented but never dared to rectify. Mexico, for example, rakes in some $65 billion each year in remittances—for the most part sent southward by illegal aliens, subsidized by generous American entitlements. Such vast sums are now just beginning to be taxed by the IRS.
The end of catch-and-release and applications for refugee status after entering the U.S. illegally—coupled with a reenergized ICE and progress in finishing the border wall—have all shocked Mexico into a new relationship with the U.S. that will either become symmetrical or not exist at all.
A mercantile Mexico had long abused its North American free trading privileges by racking up some $200 billion in trade surpluses—an imbalance that it is currently under pressure to reduce. Trump has also warned Mexico that its cozy, ‘see no evil’ relationship with the cartels is no longer sustainable, given for years they have caused the deaths of some 70 thousand Americans per annum from overdoses—due to toxic Chinese-imported raw Fentanyl, deliberately refined and disguised by the cartels as less lethal narcotics.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is losing the trade war, after he walked out of negotiations over Canada’s perpetual $50 billion-dollar trade surplus with the U.S. His country is 1/9th the population of the U.S. Its economy is 1/13 the size of its American counterpart, and its annual per capita GDP (1.1%) is the most sluggish of Western industrialized nations. Canada’s trade is 75% with the U.S.; America’s is 10% with Canada. Forty-five percent of Canadians are either first or second generation immigrants with enormous social welfare needs that a neo-socialist economy cannot sustain.
Carney picked the fight by warming up to communist China as leverage against the U.S., and concluding a number of bilateral agreements with Beijing that will cost Canada dearly and ultimately endanger its security. Perhaps Carney will soon have second thoughts concerning his prior nonchalance about Canada’s chronic backsliding on its prior two-percent NATO commitment, its one-sided $50 billion trade surplus with the United States, and its haphazard control of its side of the border. None of these disagreements were necessarily critical issues, but they did reflect a paradox of assuming permanent U.S. strategic protection of all of North America, while ignoring efforts to ensure trade symmetry.
In the case of an adversary like China, one can argue over the various rhetorical and trade measures Trump has aimed at Beijing. But it is indisputable that Beijing's global aims have been pruned back, while it is facing a series of domestic crises. The fall of the Maduro government in Venezuela, coupled with forcing the Chinese government-affiliated CK Hutchison Holdings to give up its management of the entry and exit of the Panama Canal, effectively ended the once high Chinese profile in Latin America and its purchases of discounted sanctioned oil.
Similarly, China has likely lost its only reliable client in the Middle East, Iran. At home, its domestic economy suffers from a fertility rate barely above half what would be needed to sustain the existing population level, deflation, high unemployment, a real estate crisis, and flat consumer spending. It now often imports 70 percent of its oil, over 40 percent of its natural gas, and 30 percent of its food—often from nations that are either hostile or deeply suspicious of Chinese agendas.
Other than its 5,500 nuclear weapons, Putin’s Russia is becoming nearly irrelevant in the Trump years, after losing over 1.5 million wounded, missing and dead combatants in Ukraine. It is now without any clients in Syria and shut out of Iran, Venezuela, and for the most part Cuba. It saw its oil industry sanctioned by the U.S., and the prewar price of oil weakened due to massive new American production. The Russians of all nations are now importing gasoline, and their economy is shot.
As far as our Asian and Pacific allies, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia and the Philippines have never been more committed to collective Western defense. All are rapidly rearming—often on the prompt and with the assistance of the U.S., which is actively forming an Asian-Pacific shield against Chinese expansionism. This is true even as the media outrage cycle turns to Trump's recent social media post announcing a reduction in the scale of a planned military drill with South Korea because North Korea, “as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful.”
Here is precisely an example of how Trump’s “art of the deal” foreign policy communication style focuses on the outcome, an attempt to show rogue state North Korea it can expect a reward for good behavior and an attempt to show ally South Korea that if it does not support American goals in Iran, it can expect unexpected censure. Trump critics can cry foul about the manners and morality of messages and policies like this, but if they lead to a world with less daring dictators and more two-way American alliances, Trump will have done his job.
In the Middle East, Iran’s immediate fate rests with the Trump administration’s decision to strangle it both economically or militarily. Iran’s supposedly indomitable ‘ring of fire’ of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis is broken, with the first two mere shadows of their former selves.
In contrast, Israel, despite hysterical global ostracism, has nevertheless proven itself again not just the military powerhouse of the Middle East, but also its high-tech hub. In surreal fashion, Israel has become the moderate Arab nations’ most effective and constant regional impediment to Iranian hegemony. Even after the Trump-instilled Abraham Accords, few could have imagined Israeli personnel manning Iron Dome/Iron Beam anti-missile batteries in the Muslim Gulf to protect it from Islamic rockets and drones launched from Muslim Iran.
The Gulf States are scrambling to make the Strait of Hormuz irrelevant to oil exporting in two to three years through new or expanded bypass pipelines to the Red Sea, Gulf of Oman, and Mediterranean Sea. Whatever lies ahead for Iran in the immediate future, it will likely no longer remain the wannabe nuclear and terrorist bully of the Middle East, or the maritime regulator of 40 percent of the world’s daily exports of oil.
Instead, it is being bankrupted by the most comprehensive economic and military blockade and sanctions regime in modern history—at a cost to the theocracy of a half-billion dollars a day in lost production and revenue. For all the Iranian boasts of its supposed take-over of the Strait of Hormuz, and defiant shouts that it has suffered little damage, in two years new pipelines bypassing the Strait will prompt the world to shrug at Tehran.
Trump’s problems in foreign policy arise from negative perceptions among the American Left and Western elite abroad. Both deeply resent his realist, Jacksonian policies, devoid of protocol and manners. Here and abroad they much preferred the diplomatese and deference of the Carter, Obama, and Biden presidencies in their heralded effort to manage the decline of a non-exceptional America.
Of course they are right that it would have been preferable for Trump to alter the world abroad to the advantage of the U.S. through cordiality and polite dialogue. But that was not one of the plausible options. The record of recent Obama and Biden-era American diplomacy was one of sugar-coating insidious American diminution, whereas Trump has been willing to pay the cost of appearing mean or aggressive when it is necessary to secure a world that is safer or fairer for America.
A deferential and predictable America was supposedly, according to decades of bien pensant thinking, necessary for our allies and enemies to respect us and treat us with reciprocity. Trump has proved that was precisely backwards.
