Donald Trump’s world view can be challenging to pin down in Washington, DC.
During the first 100 days of his second term, the United States president started a global trade war, targeting allies and foes alike. Additionally, he also signed decrees requiring the US to leave, among other international forums, the Paris Agreement on climate and the World Health Organization.
Trump continued to make contradictory foreign policy proposals, including “owning” Gaza and annexing Greenland, taking over the Panama Canal, and “owning” the country of Israel.
And despite promising to be a “peace” president, Trump has said he intends to take the US annual Pentagon budget to a record $1 trillion.
He has distanced himself from a neo-conservative foreign policy and does not support democracy or human rights abroad. His “America First” stance and skepticism of NATO are in line with realist principles, but his impulsivity and diplomacy deviate from the norm.
At the same time, he has not called for a full military or diplomatic retreat from global affairs, setting him apart from isolationists.
What precisely motivates Trump’s foreign policy?
According to experts, the current global system is primarily fueled by dissatisfaction, which unfairly discredits the US with its rules and restrictions. Instead, Trump appears to want Washington to leverage its enormous military and economic power to set the rules to assert global dominance while reducing US contributions and commitments to others.
According to Josh Ruebner, a lecturer at Georgetown University’s Program on Justice and Peace, “the Trump doctrine is “scrap and grab,” allowing your allies to do the same.
Simply “tearing down”
Mathew Burrows, programme lead of the Strategic Foresight Hub at the Stimson Center think tank, said Trump wants US primacy without paying the costs that come with that.
According to Burrows, a veteran of the US Department of State and CIA, “he’s withdrawing the US from the rest of the world, especially economically.”
He continued, “But at the same time, he somehow thinks the US will be able to persuade other nations to end fighting and to do whatever the US wants.” “Hegemony just doesn’t work that way”.
Trump appears to think that using US influence to sway world leaders to accept his demands, he can get tariffs imposed, and occasionally using violence.
However, some critics claim that the US president rejects other nations’ ability to support nationalism, which eventually leads to opposition. Such was the case for Canada.
Following Trump’s call for Canada to become the 51st state, there was a wave of nationalist pride in our northern neighbor and an abrupt transition from the Conservative Party to the Liberal Party.
Foreign governments have accused Trump of “bullying” and blackmail, including China and Canada.
Some of Trump’s Democratic rivals have rushed to accuse him of abandoning the US global role, but at the same time, the US president has been projecting American strength to pressure other countries.
His approach is significant in contrast to that of his predecessor, despite its minor differences.
We are the unquestionable nation, according to the late Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who was famous in 1998. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future”.
According to Albright, that alleged power and wisdom enabled the US to carry out Pax Americana, the idea of a peaceful global order under Washington’s leadership.
Trump may not agree with Albright’s assertion that the US is supposedly taller than other countries.
“America does not need other countries as much as other countries need us”, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told reporters earlier this month.
However, she emphasized that other countries must engage in trade with the US to avoid Trump’s tariffs.
Trump wants to create jobs and revenues in this context rather than an international system governed by liberal values, as Washington envisions.
However, Burrows said the chief aim of Trump’s foreign policy is to dismantle the existing global order.
According to Burrows, “his negative attitudes toward the current order, where others appear to be rising,” are a big part of his worldview. And so, a lot of it is simply torn down.
The global order
Following World War II, the US took the lead in establishing much of the system that governs international relations.
Global affairs have been shaped by the United Nations and its organizations, international law, international treaties, trade agreements, and formal alliances for decades.
Critics of Washington point out that the US violated and opted out of the system where it saw fit.
For instance, the US did not sign the 1998 International Criminal Court Statute, which established the International Criminal Court. In a clear violation of the UN Charter, it invaded Iraq in 2003 without the UN Security Council’s consent. And it has been providing unconditional support to Israel despite the US ally’s well-documented abuses against Palestinians.
According to Matthew Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, “the United States has done a lot to support sort of multilateral institutions – the UN and others – that are based on these ideas.”
However, he continued, citing former US President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s war against Gaza and President George W. Bush’s policies, including extraordinary rendition, torture, invasion, and protracted occupation. “The United States has always found ways to violate these norms and laws when it when it serves our purposes,” he continued.
But for Trump and his administration, there are indications that the global order is not just to be worked around, it needs to go.
During his confirmation hearing in January, Trump’s secretary of state Marco Rubio said, “The post-war global order is no longer just obsolete. It is now a weapon being used against us.”
Politics of grievance
Trump recently claimed that “almost every nation in the world” has “ripped off” the US.
His domestic policy rhetoric seems to resemble his promise to care for “America’s forgotten men and women” who have been treated unfairly by the “elites” domestically.
While the modern world order has empowered US companies and left the country with immense wealth and military and diplomatic might, Americans do have major issues to complain about.
Due to globalization, US jobs were moved abroad to countries with lower labor costs. Strategic errors that led to a generation of veterans with physical and mental injuries are largely seen as biased interventionist policies, particularly those that led to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Geoffrey Kabaservice, vice president of political studies at the Niskanen Center, a centre-right think tank in Washington, DC, noted that wages have stagnated for many Americans for decades.
According to Kabaservice, “the benefits of globalization were very poorly distributed, and some people at the top made enormous plutocratic sums of money that did not pass down to the working class’s general population,” Kabaservice claimed.
Voting Trump was “retribution” against the system, according to Kabaservice, who added that Trump’s “America First” strategy has pitted the US against the rest of the world for those who saw their factories closed and felt like they were living in “left-behind areas.”
“America is turning its back on the world”, Kabaservice said. Trump claims that America can be self-sufficient in all things, but it is already proving false.
According to Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, a think tank dedicated to diplomacy, Trump’s foreign policy, including his approach to allies, is influenced by “the politics of grievance.”
“He does believe that the United States – because of its role as world policeman, which he’s not necessarily in love with – has been shouldering a lot of the security burden of the world without getting proper compensation”, Parsi told Al Jazeera.
The US president has been suggesting that Washington should be paid more for stationing troops in allies like Germany and South Korea while calling on NATO allies to increase their defense spending.
Nostalgia
What is Trump’s opinion of the world then?
“He’s an aggressive unilateralist, and in many ways, he’s just an old-school imperialist”, Duss said of Trump. He desires to “extend” American soil. He wants to evict wealth from other regions of the world. “This is a classic example of foreign policy,” he says.
He noted that Trump’s foreign policy is to act aggressively and unilaterally to achieve what he sees as US interests.
According to Kabaservice, Trump wants the US to go back to a time when it was a major producer and not overly involved in global affairs.
He said, “He enjoys the idea that maybe the United States is a great power, sort of in a model from the 19th century,” and that it enables the other great powers to have their own sphere of influence.
Kabaservice added that Trump wants the US to have “its own sphere of influence” and to be “expanding in the way that optimistic forward-moving powers are”.
Rubio’s assertion that there is a “multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet” was supported by the notion of an America with its own “sphere of influence” earlier this year.
Parsi put it this way: despite his aversion to regime change, Trump is foremost seeking hemispheric hegemony, which is why he put an emphasis on acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal.
“You’re shifting not from the politics of domination towards restraint, you’re shifting from the politics of global domination to a more limited form of domination”, Parsi told Al Jazeera.
“Your own hemisphere is your only focus.”
When these nostalgia and grievance views have practical applications, the US may already have seen what happens. Trump’s erratic trade policy rocked the US stock market and sparked threats of counter-levies from Canada to the European Union to China.
Trump eventually delayed many of his tariffs, maintaining a 10% levie baseline and additional import taxes on Chinese goods. The US president acknowledged that the suspension of the measures was a result of how the tariffs were received. “People were jumping a little bit out of line. He claimed that they were becoming agitated.
In the end, Kabaservice told Al Jazeera, “Trump’s unilateralism and unpredictability have significantly damaged the world’s trust.”
“In the broad span of history, Trump will be seen as the person who committed terrible unforced errors that led to the end of the American century and the beginning of the Chinese century”, he said.
The US president declared that his legacy would be “that of peacemaker and unifier” in his inauguration speech earlier this year.
