Trump’s Power Paradox | Foreign Affairs

In his first term as U.S. president and on the campaign trail for reelection in 2024, a variety of Donald Trump’s instincts were visible. One was an appreciation of power for its own sake. For Trump, it is power, not principles, that makes the world go round. Another was Trump’s view of prosperity as a talismanic organizing principle of foreign policy. “We are going to make America wealthy again,” Trump vowed in 2016. “You have to be wealthy in order to be great.” A third instinct was the close alignment of politics with personality. “Only I can fix it,” Trump declared at the 2016 Republican nominating convention.

Trump’s new National Security Strategy, which was published late last week, synthesizes and formalizes these three instincts, presenting them as the necessary drivers of international order. The NSS points to “the character of our nation, upon which its power, wealth, and decency were built,” entrusting the protection of this character to the president himself and his “team,” who in his first term “successfully marshaled America’s great strengths to correct course and begin ushering in a new golden age for our country.” It is Trump’s personality, power, and supporters that have enabled this golden age.

The strategy document is also an expression of American conservatism. Trump’s Republican Party is not that of George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan, two presidents who tied conservative domestic politics to liberal internationalism. Trump’s GOP is motivated more by an eagerness to separate friends from foes, a distinction that unites domestic politics with foreign policy. This binary mandates a blanket rejection of the Biden administration (to which Trump, in his introductory letter to the NSS, attributes “four years of weakness, extremism, and deadly failures”), a concern with national purity and hence with foreign contamination, and a will to shore up civilizational principles “in Europe, the Anglosphere, and the rest of the democratic world.”

The new strategy simultaneously mirrors and distorts international reality. In enshrining the importance of personality—“presidential diplomacy” in the language of this document—it nods to our media-driven world, in which individual leaders have enormous presence, latitude, and power. This is a world Trump has helped bring into being. The NSS collides with international reality by privileging raw power over persuasion and by focusing U.S. foreign policy first and foremost on the Western Hemisphere, even though the Indo-Pacific has become the world’s economic center of gravity (as the document notes) and the precedent-setting war of the early twenty-first century is taking place in Europe.

The document celebrates American power and is geared in part toward sustaining and amplifying it. At other times, however, the goal seems to be to restrain U.S. ambitions. Although the strategy document is unlikely to explain Trump’s day-to-day decision-making, it describes an aspirational world order. The order would not be American-led. It would not be the function of great-power competition or of civilizational clashes, and it would not be rules-based. It would issue instead from a dense network of personal relationships that supersede any alliances or any division of countries along the lines of democracy or authoritarianism.

This network could provide Russian President Vladimir Putin with an opening to end the war in Ukraine on his terms. It could be conducive to Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s grandiose plans for his country. Most of all, though, it will accommodate the actions of a man who sees the world in viscerally personal terms, who can easily and quickly change his views and his commitments, and who thinks less in terms of negotiation and treaties than in terms of rapid-fire dealmaking. This is more than just the world Trump wants. It is the world that he has.

DEARTH OF A SALESMAN

Trump is at ease with twenty-first-century diplomacy. Over the past decade, multilateral institutions such as the United Nations and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe have declined in influence, and structured long-term diplomacy has become less common. The Helsinki Final Act of 1975, which solidified western Europe’s U.S.-backed security architecture, proceeded from fine-grained negotiation carried out by faceless diplomats; it now belongs to a distant past. Bureaucracies, institutions, and ministries of foreign affairs have all been losing stature, as ambitious, centralizing leaders—some charismatic, some authoritarian, some both—have emerged in many of the world’s biggest countries. Trump, Putin, and Xi, along with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, dominate the foreign policies of their respective countries.

Contemporary media can still democratize access to information, but it also augments the optics of personalized power. In the digital realm, Trump embodies the United States, Putin embodies Russia, Xi embodies China, Modi embodies India, and Erdogan embodies Turkey. National and international publics relate directly to these leaders, who set the tone for international relations with their actions, their statements, and their preferences. Whether effective or ineffective in reaching their goals, these leaders straddle the global attention economy; they are impossible to ignore. Their whims can have the status of law. In this order, binding agreements are as elusive as transactional back-and-forth is commonplace.

A striking feature of the strategy is its presentism. Other than its allegations of pre-Trump dysfunction and its admiring references to the Monroe Doctrine, it lacks a historical backdrop. Absent is a common historical argument: that after World War II, the United States built an institutional architecture conducive to security, prosperity, and liberty. The document offers no alternative history. It is a security strategy for the age of social media, pegged to a never-ending, fluid, ever-adjustable present tense. To the extent that this impression maps onto reality, it empowers the chief executive. The world must patiently stand by, watching and waiting for his next steps.

The strategy traces multiple contradictions. It celebrates an economic statecraft conducted (if necessary) through military means in the Western Hemisphere and through the implementation of tariffs elsewhere; and the selective application of military force, such as the U.S. strikes this past summer that Trump says in his letter “obliterated Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity.” In its other mode, the document champions pulling back and prioritization. After the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, it claims, “American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country.” For the Trump administration, the non-American world is “our concern only if [its] activities directly threaten our interests.” American power must be delimited; it must not be overstretched.

The more American power must be constrained, the more Washington will have to excel at persuasion, the obligatory pursuit of countries that are not hegemons. Yet the strategy offers no foundation for persuasion. Its passages on Europe are especially revealing in this regard. Rather than calibrated persuasion within an alliance structure, the document advocates a strategy of promoting conservatism in Europe. It recommends “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations,” a trajectory that inclines toward liberal internationalism or, in the case of the European Union, toward liberal transnationalism. Altering Europe’s political trajectory is a radical political project for the United States. Accomplishing it would require the sustained application of American power overseas.

The mantra of “America first” complicates the practice of persuasion and fits more comfortably into a U.S.-led world. Meaningful persuasion requires empathy for foreign countries or at least attention to them: they must be a concern not only when they pose an acute threat. Meaningful persuasion requires the suspension of some short-term interests for the sake of long-term interests, which is why coercive economic statecraft among allies is ill advised. It may yield the occasional victory, but over time it degrades the alliance. Meaningful persuasion enshrines deference toward other countries (when merited) so that others may respond with deference in return (when merited). All too often in Trump’s brash strategy document, foreign policy is construed as nothing more than naked assertiveness, a means to the end of “an American-led world of sovereign countries and free economies.”

SOLUTIONS IN SEARCH OF A PROBLEM

To judge from the new strategy, Europe is a second-order consideration. Passages on the Western Hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific precede those on Europe. The strategy rightly establishes freedom of navigation and regional stability as priorities in the Indo-Pacific, positioning China as a competitor while underscoring the importance of avoiding direct conflict with a nuclear power that is a military behemoth. The Indo-Pacific, the document states, “will continue to be among the next century’s key economic and geopolitical battlegrounds.” The geoeconomic might of the Indo-Pacific makes it a place of infinite opportunity for the United States, a conviction of the Biden and Obama administrations and one that the Trump administration appears to share.

It is bizarre, then, that the Western Hemisphere enjoys pride of place in the strategy document. The implication is that illegal immigration and drug trafficking from Latin America are the preeminent national security challenges for the United States. Severe as these problems are, they pale beside the potential for major destabilization in Europe or the Indo-Pacific. Illegal immigration and drug trafficking are also problems that demand a nuanced set of solutions, from reforms rooted in domestic American politics to collective problem solving with the countries that contribute to migrant or drug flows into the United States. Trump’s strategy risks militarizing problems that are not military in nature.

The document is at its weakest when addressing the war in Ukraine. Part of its problem is theoretical. In some passages, the document defines “stopping regional conflicts” as a U.S. responsibility. In this view, Washington must prevent any one antagonist (meaning Russia or China) from achieving a position of regional dominance. The war in Ukraine should be Europeanized so that Europe can police its own region and keep Russia from exerting outsize influence beyond its borders. Elsewhere, however, the strategy recognizes “the outsize influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations,” describing their influence as a “timeless truth of international relations.” Some countries are entitled to preeminence, and Russia may be one of these countries. But regional stability in Ukraine and elsewhere will not arise from spheres of influence created by a handful of great powers.

The strategy advances the search for “strategic stability with Russia” and blames European elites for standing in the way of peace. It assumes Ukraine will survive the war but is silent about Ukrainian security (apart from predicting that Ukraine will not join the NATO alliance) and about Ukraine’s integration into Europe. The document does not acknowledge that Ukraine could lose the war, which is a real possibility, and it skirts a fundamental dilemma for the United States, which is that strategic stability with Russia can be realized only by giving Russia some degree of control over Ukraine. Yet were Russia to acquire such control, it would destabilize NATO and non-NATO European countries. On Ukraine, the new strategy does little more than make assertions, many of them too sanguine about what the country needs to survive and too credulous about Russia’s potential to serve as a constructive regional actor. The strategy document contends that peace might be at hand in Ukraine, if only Europe’s elites can be bypassed. This understates the conflict’s stakes and in particular the risk of rewarding and thereby normalizing Russia’s zeal to control Ukraine.

YOU CAN’T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT

National security strategy documents of this kind are not blueprints. American presidents end up reacting to crises more than dictating outcomes. On September 11, 2001, George W. Bush’s presidency became a reaction to an unanticipated terrorist attack. Barack Obama spent much of his presidency responding to the Arab Spring, to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and to the Syrian civil war. Donald Trump’s first term was refashioned by the COVID-19 pandemic. Joe Biden had to contend with Russia’s re-invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and with the regional fallout from Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel. No doubt Trump’s second term will be defined more by unpredicted future crises than by any paragraph, sentence, or phrase from the 2025 NSS. That is the story of every American presidency.

This past February, I wrote in Foreign Affairs about the potential for “flexible diplomacy” from the Trump administration and the possibility that a nimble White House could pull off “the deft management of constant tensions and rolling conflicts.” At times during the past year, such nimbleness has materialized: in diplomacy that yielded a cease-fire in Gaza, for example, and a peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Yet the strategy document inadvertently illustrates the internal contradictions and the paradoxes of the world Trump wants. Resolving the conflict in Ukraine would demand not just flexibility but close coordination with allies and carefully plotted incentives to curb Russian aggression. This is incompatible with the project of imposing American-style conservatism on Europe. Contending with China’s reach in the Indo-Pacific and beyond will benefit from Washington’s talent for persuasion rather than for imposing tariffs. And if the United States is to minimize its military footprint, it will have to look past civilizational patterns and affinities, whatever these may be, and establish global partnerships that are based on mutual respect. Having campaigned on moderating American power, Trump has shown himself to be enamored of it and the world-changing options it creates.

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