‘Tearing down': What drives Trump's foreign policy?

Al Jazeera

29-04-2025

Washington, DC – Donald Trump's world view can be difficult to pin down.
During the first 100 days of his second term, the United States president started a global trade war, targeting allies and foes alike. He also issued decrees to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement on climate and the World Health Organization, amongst other international forums.
Trump continued to double down on a series of unconventional foreign policy proposals: taking over the Panama Canal, annexing Greenland, making Canada the 51st US state and 'owning' Gaza.
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 neo-conservative foreign policy and does not position himself as a promoter of human rights or democracy abroad. His 'America First' stance and scepticism of NATO align with realist principles, but his impulsiveness and highly personalised diplomacy diverge from traditional realism.
At the same time, he has not called for a full military or diplomatic retreat from global affairs, setting him apart from isolationists.
So what exactly drives Trump's foreign policy?
Experts say it is primarily fuelled by a dissatisfaction with the current global system, which he sees as unfairly disadvantaging 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.
'The Trump doctrine is 'smash and grab', take what you want from others and let your allies do the same,' said Josh Ruebner, a lecturer at Georgetown University's Program on Justice and Peace.
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.
'He's withdrawing the US from the rest of the world, particularly economically,' Burrows, a veteran of the US Department of State and CIA, told Al Jazeera.
'But at the same time, he somehow believes that the US … will be able to tell other countries to stop fighting, to do whatever the US wants,' he said. 'Hegemony just doesn't work that way.'
Trump appears to believe that threatening and imposing tariffs – and occasionally violence – is a way of employing US leverage to get world leaders to acquiesce to his demands.
But critics say the US president discounts the power of nationalism in other countries, which prompts them to eventually fight back. Such was the case for Canada.
After Trump imposed tariffs and called for Canada to become the 51st state, this led to a wave of nationalist pride in the northern neighbour and an abrupt shift from the Conservative Party to the Liberal Party.
From Canada to China, foreign governments have accused Trump of 'bullying' and blackmail.
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.
While not entirely isolationist, his approach marks a significant turn from that of his predecessor.
The late Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously said in 1998: 'We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.'
That purported power and wisdom, as Albright envisioned, put the US in a position to implement Pax Americana – the concept of a peaceful global order led by Washington.
Trump does see the US as proverbially taller than other nations, but perhaps not in the way Albright meant.
'America does not need other countries as much as other countries need us,' White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told reporters earlier this month.
Her statement, however, was to stress that other nations must negotiate with the US to avoid Trump's tariffs.
In this context, Trump is seeking revenues and jobs – not an international system governed by liberal values in the way that Washington defines them.
However, Burrows said the chief aim of Trump's foreign policy is to dismantle the existing global order.
'A big part of his world view is really his negative feelings towards the current order, where others appear to be rising,' Burrows said. 'And so, a lot of this is just tearing down.'
Much of the system that manages relations between different countries was put in place after World War II, with the US leading the way.
The United Nations and its agencies, the articles of international law, various treaties on the environment, nuclear proliferation and trade, and formal alliances have governed global affairs for decades.
Critics of Washington point out that the US violated and opted out of the system where it saw fit.
For example, the US never joined the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court in 1998. It invaded Iraq in 2003 without United Nations Security Council authorisation in an apparent breach of the UN Charter. And it has been providing unconditional support to Israel despite the US ally's well-documented abuses against Palestinians.
'The United States has done a lot to stand up sort of multilateral institutions – the UN and others – that are based around these ideas,' said Matthew Duss, the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy.
'But the United States has always found ways to violate that violate these norms and laws when it when it serves our purposes,' he added, pointing to former US President Joe Biden's support for Israel's war on Gaza and President George W Bush's policies after the 9/11 attacks, which included extraordinary rendition, torture, invasion and prolonged occupation.
But for Trump and his administration, there are indications that the global order is not just to be worked around; it needs to go.
'The post-war global order is not just obsolete, it is now a weapon being used against us,' Trump's Secretary of State Marco Rubio told senators during his confirmation hearing in January.
Trump recently told Time Magazine that the US has been 'ripped off' by 'almost every country in the world'.
His rhetoric on foreign policy appears to echo his statements about promising to look after 'America's forgotten men and women' who have been mistreated 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.
Globalisation saw the outsourcing of US jobs to countries with less expensive labour. Past interventionist policies – particularly the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – are largely seen as strategic blunders that produced a generation of veterans with physical and mental injuries.
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.
'The fact is that the benefits of globalisation were very maldistributed, and some people up at the top made enormous plutocratic sums of money, and very little of that flowed down to the mass of the working class,' Kabaservice told Al Jazeera.
For people who saw their factories closed and felt like they were living in 'left-behind areas', electing Trump was 'retribution' against the system, Kabaservice said, adding that Trump's 'America First' approach has pitted the US against the rest of the world.
'America is turning its back on the world,' Kabaservice said. 'Trump believes that America can be self-sufficient in all things, but already the falsity of this doctrine is proving true.'
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, a think tank that promotes diplomacy, said Trump's foreign policy, including his approach to allies, comes from '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 calling on NATO allies to increase their defence spending, while suggesting that Washington should be paid more for stationing troops in allied countries like Germany and South Korea.
So how does Trump view the world?
'He's an aggressive unilateralist, and in many ways, he's just an old-school imperialist,' Duss said of Trump. 'He wants to expand American territory. He wants to extract wealth from other parts of the world … This is a kind of foreign policy approach from an earlier era.'
He noted that Trump's foreign policy is to act aggressively and unilaterally to achieve what he sees as US interests.
Kabaservice said Trump wants the US to return to an age when it was a manufacturing powerhouse and not too involved in the affairs of the world.
'He likes the idea that maybe the United States is a great power, sort of in a 19th-century model, and it lets the other great powers have their own sphere of influence,' he said.
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'.
This notion of an America with its own 'sphere of influence' appeared to be supported by Rubio when he spoke earlier this year of the inevitability of 'multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet'.
Parsi said that Trump is seeking hemispheric hegemony above all, despite his aversion for regime change – hence his 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.
'Focus only on your own hemisphere.'
The US may have already experienced what happens when these views of nostalgia and grievance see real-world implications. Trump's erratic trade policy rocked the US stock market and sparked threats of counter-levies from Canada to the European Union to China.
Eventually, Trump postponed many of his tariffs, keeping a baseline of 10 percent levies and additional importing fees on Chinese goods. Asked why he suspended the measures, the US president acknowledged that it was due to how the tariffs were received. 'People were jumping a little bit out of line. They were getting yippy,' he said.
Ultimately, Trump's unilateralism and unpredictability have 'broken the world's trust in significant ways' that will outlast his presidency, Kabaservice told Al Jazeera.
'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.
During his inauguration speech earlier this year, the US president said his legacy 'will be that of a peacemaker and unifier'.
'His actual legacy will be that he has torn down the global system that the US created,' said Burrows, of the Stimson Center.