Trump’s Incoherent Foreign Policy Is Upending the World

In the beginning, it was almost possible to believe Donald Trump had a coherent worldview. There were those, like Walter Russell Mead in Foreign Affairs, who argued that the president had a purposeful, Andrew Jackson-inspired “America First” policy. Alliances and treaties, especially trade deals, would be measured according to a narrow definition of national interest rather than long-term global stability. This was a simplistic, nearsighted strategy, but at least it made some political sense. It was what his constituency wanted. The primacy of domestic electoral considerations has certainly been notable in Trump’s world. His withdrawal from the nonbinding Paris climate accord is a lot more popular in places he won, like southern Ohio and western Pennsylvania (with the exception of Pittsburgh), than it is in California, where there are more people working in solar energy than there are coal miners left in the entire nation.

But there is more—or, perhaps more accurately, less—to Trump’s foreign policy than that. There have been at least two other complicating factors. There is the suspicion that aspects of Trump’s global actions, especially his curious relationship with Russia, are tangled up with his personal business interests, including his debts. And, of course, there is the mix of ignorance, personal pique, toxic narcissism, and conspiracy theory that is the hallmark of Trumpery, both foreign and domestic.