Trump's Foreign Policy Is a Lot of Noise
It’s hard to tell how serious his threats are—and maybe that’s by design.
Former President George W. Bush was an oilman. Former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden were lawyers. President Donald J. Trump is an entertainer. And the first two weeks of his second term have been entertaining.
On Sunday, Trump ordered 25 percent tariffs on Canada, demanding that Canadians surrender their sovereignty to become "our Cherished 51st State." He suspended the tariff order the next day, after Canada announced it was stepping up border security. The Canadian government, of course, was mostly rehashing a border security plan that it had already announced in December 2024.
So it has gone in a lot of other countries. Trump threatened economic sanctions on Colombia after it refused to take U.S. military flights carrying deportees, then claimed Colombia had backed down when it sent its own military to pick them up. Trump threatened to take back the Panama Canal, and the Trump camp claimed victory when Panama announced that it would let its Belt and Road Initiative economic agreement with China expire.
Similar deals may be cooking elsewhere. Trump announced on Tuesday that he wanted the U.S. to "take over" Gaza and empty out its Palestinian population. White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt walked it back, and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz claimed that Trump was really asking "the entire region to come with their own solutions." And last week, after special missions envoy Richard Grenell met with Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, Trump declared that Venezuela had agreed to take back deportees. It's unclear what Maduro gets in return.
In other words, Trump likes to spin compromise as a victory. And that might be just what the doctor ordered. It's no secret that the United States has overstretched its military power around the world. Poll after poll shows that Americans want their government to pull back from policing the world, and to "prioritize" things "that impact our national interest directly," as Secretary of State Marco Rubio put it in an interview with Fox News' Megyn Kelly last week.
"It's not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power," Rubio said. "That was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, great powers in different parts of the planet."
However, the political costs of giving up on U.S. intervention are quite high. The U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan—which both Trump and Biden had agreed needed to be done—became a major scandal that the Biden administration never fully recovered from. Even potential win-win attempts at avoiding war, such as Obama's diplomatic openings with Iran and Cuba, were slammed by Republicans as weak-minded appeasement.
Trump seems to have avoided paying this price in his first term. Even after Trump met with fearsome North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un and agreed to tone down U.S. military presence in the region, Democratic attempts to call Trump a weakling appeaser just haven't stuck. Nor have Democratic attempts to blame the Afghan crisis on Trump's agreements with the Taliban. Polling shows that voters trust Trump to end wars. His "peace through strength" pitch lands.
Former President Theodore Roosevelt often said that a leader should "speak softly and carry a big stick." But maybe Americans want the opposite: someone who will pull back on U.S. military power while projecting an image of strength.
What Trump does share in common with the elder Roosevelt is his focus on the American hemisphere. Along with his saber rattling at Canada, Panama, and Colombia, the President wants to treat organized crime in Mexico as a national security threat and seize Greenland from Denmark.
On one hand, the hemispheric focus tracks with Rubio's theory. If the world is going to be divided between multiple great powers, it makes sense for the U.S. to lock down its own sphere of influence. On the other hand, pushing around nearby countries is just easier than threatening faraway ones, especially because most countries in the Americas already depend on the U.S. economically and militarily.
But the bluster is not completely cost-free. If any statement can be read as a negotiating bluff, then it's hard to say what U.S. policy actually is. Even if the progressive fetish for procedure and rules deserves to be knocked down a peg, there should be some stable, public baseline for what the administration is trying to achieve. Otherwise, how can Americans know what they're voting for?
And Trump's threats to Greenland have alarmed Europe, which can act a lot more independently than U.S. neighbors can. European officials are having a "conversation" about whether to cozy up to China in response to U.S. pressure, The Financial Times reports.
"The European borders are sovereign whether it's north, south, east and west," French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said on the radio, offering to send the French military to defend Greenland. "Nobody can allow themselves to mess around with our borders."
While it's unlikely that the United States will get into a shooting war over Greenland, it seems pointless to alienate an important power bloc that was otherwise eager to cooperate against Russia and willing to play ball against China. And the payoff is unclear. Greenland's population of 60,000, who largely don't want to be ruled by either the U.S. or Denmark, have been otherwise happy to host U.S. military bases and mining companies, the main U.S. interests in the island.
The real test is how the Trump administration's bluster fares against rival great powers of China, Russia, and Iran.
On the Russian-Ukrainian war, Rubio said that "both sides are going to have to give something up, I'm not going to pre-negotiate that," in line with Trump's promises to end the war in Ukraine. Somewhat surprisingly for a China hawk, Rubio also said that China is "a tough people, they have nuclear weapons, they're a great power with a large economy. They're going to be a global power. But it can't come at our expense."
Trump, meanwhile, has been unleashing a flood of threats and offers to Iran in hopes of de-escalating tensions. He wrote on social media: "I want Iran to be a great and successful Country, but one that cannot have a Nuclear Weapon. Reports that the United States, working in conjunction with Israel, is going to blow Iran into smithereens,' ARE GREATLY EXAGGERATED. I would much prefer a Verified Nuclear Peace Agreement, which will let Iran peacefully grow and prosper. We should start working on it immediately, and have a big Middle East Celebration when it is signed and completed. God Bless the Middle East!"
Iran has so far responded with the same mix of bluster and openness to compromise. "Maximum pressure has been a failed experiment, and testing it again will fail again," Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told reporters on Wednesday. "If the heart of the matter is that Iran can't pursue nuclear weapons, this is doable, this is really not a problem."
Next week, U.S. envoy Keith Kellogg is heading to the Munich Security Conference to inform European allies about Trump's Russian-Ukrainian peace plan. The plan would freeze the current front lines, allowing Russian troops to stay on the territory they've conquered (with ambiguous legal status) but providing Ukraine with guarantees of protection against further attack, according to Bloomberg News.
It's a far cry from blowing "the tops off the Kremlin" that Waltz, the national security adviser, promised. And it's also a far cry from the "surrender" to Russia that Democrats warned Trump was going to make.
Where the negotiations with both Russia and Iran go from that starting point is hard to know in advance. One thing, however, is clear: Trump will spin the end result as a Tremendous Deal.
