J.D. Vance Defines the ‘Trump Doctrine'

Time​ Magazine

25-06-2025

First, the U.S. denied involvement in Israel's strikes against Iran. Then President Donald Trump took credit for them. Trump insisted he wasn't working toward a ceasefire and would take two weeks to consider attacking Iran. Then he bombed Iran's nuclear facilities two days later and, two days after that, announced a ceasefire. His top officials said they were not seeking 'regime change,' then he said: why not? before declaring yesterday that regime change causes 'chaos' and he doesn't want that.
Some supporters say he's a master of misdirection. Critics liken it to 'schizophrenia.'
J.D. Vance calls it the Trump Doctrine.
'We are seeing a foreign policy doctrine develop that will change the country (and the world) for the better,' the Vice President posted on X on Tuesday, before giving a more detailed elucidation of a foreign-policy approach Trump himself has often distilled into the three-word phrase 'peace through strength.'
'What I call the Trump doctrine is quite simple,' Vance elaborated at the Ohio Republican Dinner on Tuesday night. 'No. 1, you articulate a clear American interest, and that's—in this case—that Iran can't have a nuclear weapon. No. 2, you try to aggressively diplomatically solve that problem. And No. 3, when you can't solve it diplomatically, you use overwhelming military power to solve it, and then you get the hell out of there before it ever becomes a protracted conflict.'
Former President James Monroe is credited with starting the trend of presidential doctrines, the core principles underlying a President's foreign policy. The Monroe Doctrine, according to the Office of the Historian at the State Department, focused on three main pillars: 'separate spheres of influence for the Americas and Europe, non-colonization, and non-intervention.'
Since then, numerous Presidents have outlined their own doctrines, though rarely as explicitly as Vance has done for Trump.
Observers struggled to interpret Joe Biden's doctrine. Following Trump's first-term 'America First' withdrawal from global forums, some suggested Biden hinted at his own doctrine in a line from a Washington Post op-ed before his first foreign trip to Europe in 2021: 'realizing America's renewed commitment to our allies and partners, and demonstrating the capacity of democracies to both meet the challenges and deter the threats of this new age.'
In a Foreign Affairs article titled 'What Was the Biden Doctrine?' published in August, former Carnegie Endowment for International Peace president Jessica T. Matthews wrote that 'four years is too little time to establish a foreign policy doctrine' but that Biden's approach seemed 'to eschew wars to remake other countries and to restore diplomacy as the central tool of foreign policy…proving that the United States can be deeply engaged in the world without military action or the taint of hegemony.'
For Barack Obama, many distilled his foreign-policy outlook to 'don't do stupid sh-t,' a guiding principle that some critics called overly simplistic and naive and supporters described as appropriately cautious given a history of costly, hubristic U.S. interventions abroad. 'The Obama Doctrine is a form of realism unafraid to deploy American power but mindful that its use must be tempered by practical limits and a dose of self-awareness,' wrote Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. in 2009.
TIME described George W. Bush's doctrine in 2007 as putting 'a primary emphasis on the projection of American military power.' Syndicated conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer first tried to define the Bush Doctrine in June 2001, before 9/11, as a 'new unilateralism' that 'seeks to enhance American power and unashamedly deploy it on behalf of self-defined global ends.'
After 9/11, observers often pointed to a National Security Strategy document released by the White House in 2002 that emphasized combatting terrorism as central to U.S. foreign policy. 'We will defend the peace by fighting terrorists and tyrants,' it said. 'We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. … America will hold to account nations that are compromised by terror, including those who harbor terrorists—because the allies of terror are the enemies of civilization.'
Bill Clinton's doctrine is often pinned to a line from a speech he delivered in San Francisco in 1999, when he said: 'The United States has the opportunity and, I would argue, the solemn responsibility to shape a more peaceful, prosperous, democratic world in the 21st century. … We cannot, indeed, we should not, do everything or be everywhere. But where our values and our interests are at stake, and where we can make a difference, we must be prepared to do so.'
While Vice President Vance has helpfully spelled out the Trump Doctrine, some observers had already seen it starting to become clear. Foreign Policy columnist Matthew Kroenig outlined in April a similar three-pillar worldview that underlies the President's seemingly erratic and unpredictable foreign-policy approach: 1) America First; 2) stop America from being ripped off—from trade to immigration to NATO; and 3) escalate to deescalate.
'As Trump writes in The Art of the Deal, his preferred negotiating strategy revolves around making threats and extreme demands to throw one's negotiating partner off balance and ultimately bring them crawling to the table for a deal,' Kroenig wrote of the third pillar in what turned out to be a remarkably prescient analysis of Trump's handling of the Israel-Iran war.
Whether the Trump Doctrine, which is certainly disruptive to some, is ultimately successful in changing the U.S. and the world for the better, however, is a question that remains to be answered.