Trend Overview
Edited by John Hardie
Welcome back to the Trump Administration Foreign Policy Tracker. This is a special edition covering President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office. As always, FDD’s experts assess the administration’s foreign policy with trendlines of very positive, positive, neutral, negative, or very negative for the areas they watch.
Although Russia has so far rebuffed his calls for a ceasefire, Trump has focused his ire not on Moscow but on Kyiv. The administration’s Ukraine policy, along with its broader desire to divest from European security and reset ties with Russia, has fractured transatlantic trust.
Writing in Foreign Policy last week, columnist Emma Ashford described four models that might explain Trump’s chaos in his first 100 days in office. Ashford is a realist scholar—a school of thought that sees countries as prioritizing interests rather than values—who joined FP Live to discuss Trump’s foreign-policy choices, and where they might converge with realist principles.
“Many realists, including myself, have long advocated for some of how the Trump administration is approaching [the Russia-Ukraine] negotiations, like not being doctrinaire on issues like Ukraine joining NATO,” Ashford said. “There is divergence over Trump’s willingness to give things away to Russia; I would argue he should drive a harder bargain. But he’s pursuing a broadly realist approach to ending this war.”
And how does the rest of the world see Trump?
“We should not exaggerate the extent to which Trump is killing the liberal international order, the rules-based order. Some of that would be happening naturally. We’re moving toward a more multipolar world, where the U.S. can’t necessarily control or manage everything. We’ve seen presidents including Joe Biden violate various aspects of the rules-based order, like humanitarian protection. Trump is continuing to move in that direction, but this isn’t some abrupt shift or aberration. He is part of a process of change in U.S. foreign policy. The consensus after the Cold War was that America was the world’s policeman. Now we’re moving closer to a focus on American interests and what Americans want to see from the world. And to be fair, I think many allies grasp this.”
Related
100 días de Trump: «esta vez gobierno el país y el mundo» (Pablo Suanzes, EM, Washington)
5 aciertos y 5 errores (Tunku Varadarajan, El Debate)
