By Nick Dowling
In 2016, on a stage at Ohio State, I was asked to debate Donald Trump’s foreign policy. My answer was blunt: there wasn’t one. Trump wasn’t a neoclassical realist. He wasn’t an isolationist. He wasn’t anything you could diagram in an IR textbook. He improvised. And it was risky.
Nearly a decade later, the fog has lifted. Trump’s foreign policy isn’t incoherent: it’s transactional. Power-centric. Deal-driven. Less Grand Strategy and more Art of the Deal, Global Edition.
For years, many of Trump’s supporters and critics misread him as an isolationist. They pointed to his anti-globalist rhetoric, his contempt for multilateral institutions, and his scathing attacks on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The assumption followed naturally: Trump would pull America back from the world.
That theory is now dead.
A president who escalates involvement in the Middle East, plays hardball in Ukraine, greenlights regime change in Venezuela, and toys openly with brinksmanship over Greenland is not retreating from the world.
He’s reengineering how the U.S. exerts power within it.
Trump isn’t anti-intervention. He’s anti-unprofitable intervention.
The defining feature of Trump’s foreign policy is the intentional, transactional use of American coercive power, military, economic, political, to extract tangible returns for the United States. Ideology is irrelevant. Norms are optional. Outcomes are everything.
This logic also explains Trump’s much-maligned trade policy. Critics obsess over tariffs as if Trump were drafting an economics dissertation. He isn’t. Trump doesn’t see tariffs as economic theory. He sees them as a loaded gun on the table. They’re leverage. They force movement. And as a bonus, they generate short-term revenue.
Military power and economic power are, to Trump, interchangeable tools in the same toolbox. One compels with fear, the other with pain. Both get people to sign deals.
The biggest difference between Trump’s first term and his second is not policy: it’s confidence. Trump now understands what most second-term presidents eventually realize: the presidency grants enormous, often under appreciated freedom of action in foreign affairs. Fewer restraints. Fewer advisers willing to say no. Less concern about reelection.
The result is a foreign policy unleashed. Everything is negotiable. Trade deals. Peace deals. Resource deals. Even sovereignty itself. American power is the enforcement mechanism, and Trump is unapologetic about using it.
To his credit, some of the wins have been real, better terms extracted from Europe and China, dramatic realignments in Middle Eastern politics, adversaries forced to the table who once felt untouchable.
But the question lingers: at what cost?
Trump’s approach is tearing at the architecture of the international system built after World War II. The architects of that system — Truman, Eisenhower, Marshall — had seen the abyss. They understood the price of unchecked power in a nuclear age. So they constructed institutions, norms, and alliances designed not to win every deal, but to prevent catastrophe.
For eighty years, that system, underwritten largely by American power and bipartisan leadership, worked. It prevented great-power war in Europe and Asia. It fueled unprecedented prosperity. It expanded freedom. It cemented the United States as the indispensable nation.
Did it cost the U.S. money and flexibility? Absolutely.
But it delivered peace, stability, and American dominance in return.
Now that era is ending.
Longtime U.S. allies are recalibrating, not because America is weak, but because it is different. When the guarantor becomes a negotiator or the bully, everyone rereads the fine print. Alliances shift. And America may no longer get the benefit of the doubt.
My own view is conflicted. I am 100% in favor of sustaining an international system of alliances, trade agreements, international organizations, rules and norms. It is essential to prevent great war and to manage the complex challenges facing us internationally in the 20th century, from climate change to AI.
That said, the postwar system needed reform. It was ossified, hypocritical, and increasingly detached from the realities of rising powers like China, resurgent Russia, and a transformed Middle East.
In that sense, Trump may be unintentionally providing a degree of creative destruction, shattering old assumptions so something more durable and inclusive can emerge.
But destruction without construction is just vandalism.
If the United States alienates its European and North American allies in the process, those who remain central to our security, prosperity, and global leadership, the price of Trump’s deals may ultimately exceed their value.
Trump may be redefining how power works in the world.
The open question is whether America will still like the world that comes next.
Nick Dowling has 35 years of experience in national security sector, working in both senior government and corporate executive roles. He is a graduate of Harvard College, has a Masters from Georgetown University, and is a Lifetime Member of the Council on Foreign Relations.