As Donald Trump’s critics see it, he’s striking out badly on foreign policy.
But the president is still taking mighty swings.
His long-broken memorandum of understanding with Iran reached its 60-day expiration date on Monday. Instead of celebrating a nuclear deal that might have justified his war, Trump vented his frustration by finding some of America’s friends to punish and rekindling his relationship with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
Trump had on Sunday announced the US would scale back military drills with South Korea, a US ally since the 1950s, citing the cost; the fact that Seoul declined to participate in the war on Iran; and a desire not to upset Kim — a tyrant.
On Monday, Trump threatened to bomb Oman, apparently for negotiating with Iran to get shipping moving through the Strait of Hormuz — which was also a requirement of the MOU once hailed by Trump as the greatest-ever Middle East peace deal.
Once again, Trump seemed to be deliberately turning everything the world once thought it knew about American power and foreign policy values upside down.
“I don’t get it on cozying up to Kim Jong Un,” retired US Navy Adm. James Stavridis told CNN’s Kasie Hunt. “I don’t get it, on threatening to bomb Oman. Those are actions exactly the opposite of what we should be doing right now.”
Trump’s swipes at Oman and South Korea are not isolated incidents. They are symptomatic of a foreign policy that lacks conventional strategy; deliberately sidelines diplomats and experts; and seems to spring only from his gut.
From the outside, the chaos is accelerating.
First son-in-law Jared Kushner is, for example, racing around the Middle East trying to save what Trump last month lauded as a “monumental” deal for Hamas to disarm and Israel to withdraw from Gaza — which appears to ignore the hostile strategic reality between Israel and the Islamic Resistance Movement.
Back home, negotiators have no agreement yet to stave off Trump’s 50% tariffs on Canada before a Wednesday deadline. This is after he trashed his own first-term US-Canada-Mexico pact, which he lauded at the time as the “most important trade deal ever made.”
Trump’s unique approach to foreign policy — and why it may be foundering
This many-layered diplomatic imbroglio encapsulates Trump’s MAGA foreign policy. He prizes unpredictability; he tries to exert power through threats; he judges world leaders on how they treat him personally, never mind whether they act as enemies to the US or crush political freedoms at home. Trump believes that forging connections with strongman leaders can deliver wins beyond the imagination of previous presidents. And he regards alliances — such as the one with Seoul — not as force multipliers of US power but more as rackets in which foreign nations must pay handsomely to enjoy an eroding guarantee of American protection. Such alliances, in his view, also mandate that partners sign up for whatever foreign mission he chooses.
“America is respected again all over the world. We’re respected like never before,” Trump said at a rally on Long Island on Friday.
But in Trump’s second term, the growing disorder and volatility may be turning counterproductive.
“Whereas in his first term, he established a record for being pretty unpredictable, in his second term, he’s well on his way to establishing a record of being very unreliable. And the whole world is looking at that situation,” Christopher Hill, a former senior State Department official and ambassador who served both Republican and Democratic presidents, told Jim Sciutto on CNN International.
This risk is most clearly seen in Iran.
For all the administration’s claims to have destroyed Iran’s military forces, Trump is still struggling to restore the status quo that prevailed before the war — an open and freely navigable Strait of Hormuz. Iran seems to be spoiling for the next round of fighting, and the Wall Street Journal is reporting Tehran has used a break in full-scale clashes to step up missile and drone production.
Trump’s rebuke of South Korea might seem a purely East Asian security issue. But by his own account, he lashed out because of the unfinished Middle East war. Trump claimed that despite the thousands of US troops in his country, South Korea’s President Lee Jae Myung would “rather not get involved” in Iran. A politically shrewd choice, perhaps, given how the war has gone. But the president said Monday he’d told Lee, “Well, why are we involved in helping you?”
Trump’s pressure on South Korea is all the more surprising because it’s expected to pay more than $1 billion to support the US garrison this year, 73 years after the Korean War, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently praised it as an exemplar of burden-sharing.
Trump may be misreading the situation with North Korea just as he misread the pre-war realities with Iran. The idea that he and Kim have special chemistry is undermined by the summits of his first term, which were high on photo-ops and low on results. Since then, North Korea has accelerated nuclear and missile programs that threaten the US and its allies. It has been leaning far closer to two other major US adversaries, Russia and China. It has sent vast numbers of munitions to Russia for the war on Ukraine and dispatched more than 10,000 troops.
None of that seems to matter to Trump. “Kim Jong Un has always treated me with great respect,” he said Monday. “I understand him. He understands me … I get along with him. You know, he didn’t like Biden. He didn’t like Obama. He didn’t like anybody, but I get along with him very well.”
But Kim is hardly the only dictator Trump befriended with negligible results. Russian President Vladimir Putin ignored his plan to end the Ukraine war. China’s leader Xi Jinping outmaneuvered him in a trade war.
More broadly, the president has risked US credibility with his draconian threats followed by swift climbdowns on Iran. Transatlantic relationships are in their worst state since World War II. His anger toward South Korea now puts the entire US commitment to alliance commitments in East Asia in doubt.
It is a mark of America’s political polarization that Trump’s policies abroad, which foreign critics see as weakening US power and the alliances that sustained it, are regarded as hugely successful in Trump’s world.
At some level, destroying the pillars of traditional foreign policy is the point of Trumpism. The president has made clear in multiple speeches; at United Nations General Assemblies; and on disruptive foreign trips that he believes allies rip off the US and that international bodies constrain its power. He’s argued that free trade, which conventional presidents saw as lifting up everyone, created a globalized economy that sent US jobs to low-wage economies abroad.
And on his own terms, he’s had some success.
He waxes lyrical about the stunning special forces raid that extracted Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro from his fortress — even if the operation has failed to restore democracy and whipped up the hubris that led him to underestimate Iran.
Trump has helped elect like-minded populist nationalists in the Western Hemisphere in a triumph for MAGA ideology. His administration is imposing intense pressure on communist Cuba. But its critics warn another regional flagship policy — the extrajudicial killings of people the administration claims are narco-terrorists in the Caribbean and the Pacific — violated the law and the Constitution.
And while his Gaza diplomacy seems a long shot, Trump could save many lives if he somehow pulls it off.
Pentagon Policy chief Elbridge Colby says Trump’s foreign policy critics miss the point.
“There is a canard out there that America today is too unreliable to work with anymore,” Colby said in a speech in Manila last week. “Before, America was at the same time calculable from a negotiating point of view but frequently rigid and ideologically fixed on liberal shibboleths.”
Colby went on: “Under President Trump’s visionary leadership, we have a new approach defined by common sense. It is true that America now drives a harder bargain. But that is downstream of republican realism oriented on actually putting Americans first.”
There’s one significant area where Trump’s threats and transactional approach has indisputably succeeded. He’s forced NATO allies to commit to far greater defense spending, potentially laying the groundwork for a more robust Western alliance once he’s left office. And as America retrenches, is it not time for a president to ask whether, seven decades after the Korean War and eight after World War II, US allies ought to defend themselves?
But the danger for Trump is that his failure to end the war with Iran on his own terms is exposing the flaws in his foreign policy approach and creating a broader image of incompetence just as his popularity erodes at home.
