Washington, DC – Identifying Donald Trump’s worldview can be difficult.
During the first 100 days of his second term, the US president launched a World Trade War, targeting allies and enemies alike. He also issued a statute in other international forums to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on Climate and the World Health Organization.
Trump is to take over the Panama Canal, annex Greenland, and make Canada the 51st province and “own” Gaza.
And despite his promise to become “peace” president, Trump said he intends to raise the US annual Pentagon budget to a record $1 trillion.
He distances himself from neoconservative foreign policy and does not stand as a promoter of human rights or democracy abroad. His “American first” attitude and skepticism at NATO are consistent with the principles of realism, but his impulsivity and highly personalized diplomacy are divided from traditional realism.
At the same time, he does not seek a complete military or diplomatic retreat from global operations, setting him apart from isolationists.
So, what exactly drives Trump’s foreign policy?
Experts say it is driven primarily by dissatisfaction with the current global system. Instead, it appears Trump wants Washington to harness its enormous military and economic powers to set rules to assert global control.
“Trump’s doctrine is ‘smash and grab’, take what you want from others and let your allies do the same,” said Josh Lubner, a lecturer in the Justice and Peace program at Georgetown University.
“Just demolish it”
Mathew Burrows, program lead for the Strategic Foresight Hub at the Stimson Center think tank, said Trump wanted us to have an advantage without paying the costs associated with it.
“He’s withdrawing the United States from other parts of the world, particularly economically,” Burrows, a veteran of the US State Department and CIA, told Al Jazeera.
“But at the same time, he believes somehow the United States can order other countries to stop fighting and do whatever the US wants,” he said. “Hegemony doesn’t work that way.”
Trump appears to believe threatening, imposing tariffs, and sometimes threatening violence, is a way to adopt US leverage to force world leaders to acquiesce his demands.
However, critics say the US president is urging them to discount the power of nationalism in other countries and ultimately fight back. That was the case in Canada.
After Trump imposed tariffs and called on Canada to become the 51st state, this led to a wave of nationalist pride to its northern neighbours and a sudden shift from the Conservative to the Liberals.
Foreign governments from Canada to China have accused Trump of “bullying” and threatening him.
Some of Trump’s democratic rivals have rushed to accuse him of abandoning the US’s global role, but at the same time, the US president is projecting American power to put pressure on other countries.
Though not entirely isolated, his approach shows a major shift from that of his predecessor.
The late Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was well known in 1998 for “We are an essential country. We are taller and we will see more in the future than other countries.”
As Albright imagined, his assertion of power and wisdom placed the United States in the position to implement Pax Americana, a concept of a peaceful global order led by Washington.
Trump believes the United States is more famously tall than other countries, but perhaps it doesn’t mean Albright.
“The US doesn’t need other countries as much as other countries need us,” White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told reporters earlier this month.
However, her statement was to emphasize that other countries must negotiate with the United States to avoid Trump’s tariffs.
In this context, Trump is looking for revenue and work. It is not an international system dominated by liberal values in the way Washington defines them.
But Burrows said the main purpose of Trump’s foreign policy is to dismantle the existing global order.
“A large part of his worldview is his negative feelings about the current order that others seem to be rising,” Burroughs said. “So a lot of this is just broken.”
Global orders
Many of the systems that manage relations between different countries were introduced after World War II and led by the United States.
The United Nations and its agencies, provisions of international law, various environmental treaties, nuclear proliferation and trade, and formal alliances have dominated global issues for decades.
Washington critics point out that the US has breached and opted out of a system they deemed appropriate.
For example, the United States has never joined Roman law, which established the International Criminal Court in 1998. In 2003, it invaded Iraq without permission from the UN Security Council for a clear violation of the UN Charter. And despite well-documented abuse of Palestinians in US allies, it has provided unconditional support to Israel.
“The United States has done a lot to launch a kind of multilateral agency (such as the United Nations) that is based on these ideas,” says Matthew Doss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy.
“But the United States has always found ways to violate these norms and laws when it serves our purposes,” he added, pointing to former President Joe Biden’s support of Israeli Presidents with Gaza and President George W. Bush’s policies following the 9/11 attack.
But there are indications that Trump and his administration will not only resolve the global order. You need to go.
“The postwar global order is not outdated, it is a weapon used now against us,” Trump Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the senators at a confirmation hearing in January.
The politics of complaints
Trump recently told Time Magazine that the United States has been “destroyed” by “almost every country in the world.”
His foreign policy rhetoric appears to reflect his statement that he promises to care for “forgotten American men and women” who were abused domestically by the “elites.”
The modern world order has empowered American businesses and left the country with enormous wealth and military and diplomatic forces, but Americans have a major problem to complain about.
Globalization outsources US jobs to countries with cheaper labor. Past interventionist policies, particularly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – are viewed primarily as strategic blunt instruments that have produced a generation of veterans with physical and mental injuries.
Jeffrey Cabaselvis, vice-president of political science at the Niskanen Center, a think tank in the center right in Washington, D.C., pointed out that wages have been stagnant for many Americans for decades.
“The fact is that the benefits of globalization have contributed to a very poor outcome, with some people above making huge amounts of money that didn’t flow down to the working-class masses,” Kabaselvis told Al Jazeera.
For those who felt like they were living in “left-handed regions,” Kabaselvis said, Trump is “retaliating” against the system, adding that Trump’s “America-first” approach has made the United States opposed to other parts of the world.
“America has its back on the world,” Kabaservice said. “Trump believes America could be self-sufficient in everything, but the falsehood of this doctrine has already proven true.”
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, a think tank that promotes diplomacy, said Trump’s foreign policy, including an approach to allies, stems from a “politics of dissatisfaction.”
“He believes that because of his role as an American police officer, he is not necessarily in love, and therefore he is carrying many of the world’s security burdens without proper compensation,” Parsi told Al Jazeera.
The US president has called on NATO allies to increase defence spending, but has suggested that Washington should be paid more to troops from allies such as Germany and South Korea.
nostalgia
So how does Trump see the world?
“He’s an offensive, one-sided person, and in many ways he’s an old-fashioned imperialist,” Doss said of Trump. “He wants to expand America’s territory. He wants to draw wealth from other parts of the world. This is a kind of foreign policy approach from previous eras.”
He noted that Trump’s foreign policy is to act proactively and unilaterally to achieve what he sees in our interests.
Kabaservice said Trump hopes to return to age when the US is a manufacturing powerhouse and is less involved in global issues.
“He likes the idea that perhaps the United States is a huge force in the 19th century model and can have its own influence over other great powers,” he said.
Kabaservice added that Trump hopes the US will have “a scope of its own influence” and “expand in a way that has the power to change the optimistic future.”
This concept of America, with its own “range of influence,” appeared to be supported by Rubio when he spoke earlier this year about the inevitability of “multipolar world, multiple great powers in different parts of the world.”
Parsi said Trump is seeking hemisphere hegemony more than anything, despite his dislike of the change of administration. Therefore, the focus is on acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal.
“You are changing from a politics of domination, not from a politics of domination towards restraint. You are moving from a politics of global domination to a more limited form of domination,” Parsi told Al Jazeera.
“Focus only on your own hemisphere.”
The United States may already have experienced what happens when these nostalgia and views of complaints look at the real world meaning. Trump’s volatile trade policy has shaken up the US stock market and sparked an anti-levies threat from Canada to the European Union.
Eventually, Trump postponed many of his tariffs, maintaining a baseline of 10% tax and additional import costs for Chinese goods. When asked why he suspends the measure, the US president admitted that it was due to how tariffs were received. “People were jumping in line a bit. They were getting Yippy,” he said.
Ultimately, Trump’s one-sidedism and unpredictability “breaked global trust in a critical way” that would last his presidency, Kabaselvis told Al Jazeera.
“In a wide range of history, Trump will be seen as someone who made the terrible forced mistakes that led to the end of the American century and the beginning of the Chinese century,” he said.
In an inauguration speech earlier this year, the US president said his legacy would “be a legacy of peace overseers and uniters.”
“His real legacy is that he demolished the global system created by the US,” said Burrows of the Stimson Center.
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