This is an odd moment for the Trump administration and its MAGA supporters. I’m not talking about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, which has led at least a few members of this weird political cult to question their slavish devotion to a deeply flawed leader. Rather, I’m talking about the recent shifts in Trump’s foreign policy, which are a clear departure from positions that he has taken in the past.
Instead of cutting a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin and ending the war in Ukraine “within 24 hours,” as he promised he would during the 2024 campaign, or permanently halting all U.S. aid to Ukraine, Trump is now promising to send Kyiv more military assistance and even encouraged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to strike Moscow directly (advice that he walked back after the story broke). Trump is not pledging Biden administration-era levels of support, and there are good reasons to question whether this new policy will last, but it is still a striking shift that sparked sharp criticism from previously loyal MAGA-types such as firebrand House Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and former Trump aide Steve Bannon.
This is an odd moment for the Trump administration and its MAGA supporters. I’m not talking about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, which has led at least a few members of this weird political cult to question their slavish devotion to a deeply flawed leader. Rather, I’m talking about the recent shifts in Trump’s foreign policy, which are a clear departure from positions that he has taken in the past.
Instead of cutting a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin and ending the war in Ukraine “within 24 hours,” as he promised he would during the 2024 campaign, or permanently halting all U.S. aid to Ukraine, Trump is now promising to send Kyiv more military assistance and even encouraged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to strike Moscow directly (advice that he walked back after the story broke). Trump is not pledging Biden administration-era levels of support, and there are good reasons to question whether this new policy will last, but it is still a striking shift that sparked sharp criticism from previously loyal MAGA-types such as firebrand House Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and former Trump aide Steve Bannon.
Similarly, instead of disengaging from Europe and pivoting sharply toward Asia—as officials such as Deputy Secretary of Defense Elbridge Colby have long urged—Trump has also expressed a newfound affection for NATO. He’s not abandoning the Middle East, either: He’s letting Israel do whatever it wants (as all his recent predecessors have done), but last month, he went to war against Iran at Israel’s request, ordering U.S. forces to bomb Iran in a failed attempt to eliminate its nuclear program. Never-Trumper neoconservatives such as Bill Kristol were delighted, of course, but former fans such as Tucker Carlson were dismayed. Lastly, Trump recently agreed to let Nvidia resume advanced chip sales to China, suggesting that he’s backing away from past efforts to stifle Chinese technological advances via export controls.
I’m not saying Trump’s a new man. He’s still committed to his economically illiterate tariff war, still undermining relations with key allies that the United States needs to balance China, and still engaged in a breathtakingly stupid effort to gut the United States’ once-dominant scientific community and undermine its premier universities. China’s leaders must be giddy with delight: In an era when scientific and technological mastery is the key to world power, the Trump administration is engaged in act of unilateral disarmament.
Trump also continues to conduct vendettas against perceived personal enemies, shows growing signs of cognitive decline, and is happily presiding over the most corrupt administration in U.S. history. At his advanced age, he’s not going to become a different person. But his recent actions are not the foreign policy that he promised or that his followers expected.
How might we explain these shifts? I can think of at least three possibilities.
One obvious explanation is that the foreign-policy “Blob” is beating him again, despite Trump’s efforts to bring it to heel. As I argued in my last book, the foreign-policy establishment thwarted most of Trump’s efforts during his first term because Trump didn’t understand how government worked and had neither a clear strategy for overcoming the establishment nor a cadre of loyal officials who would faithfully implement his vision. Except for trade policy, therefore, the substance of U.S. foreign policy didn’t change very much during Trump’s first term. True to form, Trump blamed his many failures on the so-called “deep state” and vowed to do better if he got another chance.
This time around, Trump tried to overcome the Blob by appointing photogenic loyalists, such as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, or easily manipulated opportunists, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio or Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, to key cabinet posts or other influential positions.
But putting obedient lackeys at the top of key departments hasn’t worked out as he had hoped. For starters, Trump is a bad manager who is incapable of giving his subordinates clear, coherent, and consistent instructions to follow. Second, as many had feared, Hegseth is an unqualified and inept administrator who has blundered repeatedly and whose own office is a sea of dysfunction, according to a former aide. Rubio is an ideologue with strong neoconnish tendencies; he won’t buck his boss, but he’ll nudge him in dangerous directions.
Moreover, although getting rid of former commanders and firing a lot of civilian officials leaves key agencies understaffed and less effective, it doesn’t change the worldview of the people who remain in place or prevent them from advancing policies that might be contrary to Trump’s instincts. The bottom line is that taking on the Blob would require the president to put a lot of smart, experienced, and knowledgeable people in key positions and work with them to develop a coherent strategy that reflected a different set of principles. The president has now had two opportunities to accomplish this goal, and he’s whiffed both times.
A different and more flattering explanation is that Trump is simply adjusting to reality. He has discovered that his supposed friendship with Putin didn’t give him much influence over the Russian leader, and that Putin wasn’t about to end the war just because Trump wanted him to. Trump may not share former President Joe Biden’s view that Putin as an evil leader who must be decisively defeated, but he now recognizes that the Russian president won’t negotiate seriously as long as he’s confident of eventual victory, which has led him to move closer to Biden’s approach. Restoring U.S. aid to Ukraine is supposed to put pressure on Putin to cut a deal, although the level of aid that Trump is promising is probably insufficient to achieve that aim. Still, in this interpretation, Trump’s recent shifts are evidence that he’s learning, and not a sign of lingering deep state influence.
One could tell a similar story about the Middle East. Like Biden, Trump was never going to put any serious pressure on Israel, which is why the genocidal war against Gaza continues to rage with active U.S. support. Iran was never going to agree to Trump and Rubio’s demand that it give up its entire nuclear enrichment capability. With diplomacy frozen, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was able to convince Trump that airstrikes could eliminate Iran’s nuclear program once and for all and cement Israel’s regional dominance.
The war did not achieve these aims, however, and Israel is still too small to establish genuine hegemony in the region. But in this admittedly charitable interpretation, Trump was pragmatically adjusting U.S. policy as events in the region evolved as well as resisting calls for a protracted air campaign or an increased ground force presence.
As for China, perhaps the president and his advisors realized that an all-out economic war with Beijing was going to do considerable harm to the U.S. economy and wasn’t going to halt China’s technological advances. If so, then lifting the ban on the export of Nvidia chips and negotiating some sort of interim trade deal makes sense.
I’d like to believe that this explanation is the right one, and that Trump is trying to adapt to changing circumstances, but it implies a degree of coherence and strategic vision that is hard to discern. Helping Israel kill more Gazans and letting it bomb the Houthis, Lebanon, and Syria whenever it wants won’t make the United States or Israel more secure, and bombing Iran is more likely to convince its leaders to sprint for the nuclear bomb instead of choosing to remain only a latent nuclear weapons state. Sending more Patriot missile systems or other arms to Ukraine won’t alter the situation on the battlefield or Putin’s political calculus, and the administration has neither proposed a political solution that both sides might accept nor admitted that it has no solution and chosen to walk away. (Trump flirted with the latter option earlier this year, but he ultimately backed off.) Yes, the Trump White House has revised its policies in light of events (as all presidents must), but it takes a great deal of squinting to see a well-developed strategy behind its various responses.
Which leaves Option 3: The recent shifts in Trump’s foreign policy are mostly about the president’s ego. He’s sending more arms to Ukraine not because he has a newfound commitment to that country’s independence, but because Putin was making him look bad. He decided that NATO was OK after NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte showered him with flattery worthy of a medieval courtier. He jumped into a pointless war in the Middle East because blowing stuff up made it look like he was in charge, regardless of the results.
Trump’s on-again, off-again approach to tariffs is also entirely consistent with this explanation: He likes tariffs because they keep everyone’s attention riveted on him. They go up, they go down, they are paused then reinstated, and every single time the media goes into a tizzy and starts talking about him once more.
For some observers, such as Janan Ganesh of the Financial Times, Trump’s lack of a consistent or coherent worldview and relentless preoccupation with his own image is preferable to the doctrinaire extremism common within the MAGA base, because his lack of any genuine policy convictions or deeply held policy preferences (apart from his fixation on tariffs and trade deficits) makes it easier for him to alter course as needed.
I’m not so sure. Because Trump cannot separate the national interest from his personal interest, remains a terrible judge of talent, and is notoriously vulnerable to flattery, U.S. foreign policy on his watch is proving to be even more erratic, internally inconsistent, and counterproductive than ever.
Washington could get away with this when it was the sole superpower (though it paid a substantial price for its various follies), but global circumstances are far less forgiving today. In an era when the United States is facing the most formidable peer competitor in its history as a great power, having an impulsive and erratic leader giving orders to subordinates chosen for their loyalty rather than their competence is a poor recipe for success.
Americans can only hope that German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck was right when he supposedly said that “God has a special providence for drunkards, fools, and the United States of America.” The country is likely to need it.
