Five months into the most consequential foreign-policy presidency since Richard Nixon left the White House, Donald Trump’s approach to the world is taking on a definitive shape.
First and foremost, restraint isn’t part of Mr. Trump’s political method. He seeks to accumulate as much executive power as possible at home; he wants the same thing internationally. Far from limiting America’s world role, Mr. Trump intends to place the country at the center of international affairs. What Alice Longworth said of her father, Theodore Roosevelt, is true of Mr. Trump, at least as far as his approach to international and domestic politics. He wants to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, and the baby at every christening.
That doesn’t mean he is a neoconservative or a liberal internationalist. The 47th president loathes crusades for democracy, despises multinational institutions, and treats international courts with the contempt he believes they deserve. While he genuinely hates war, Mr. Trump believes in pressing America’s economic, technological and military advantages as far as he can in pursuit of an expansive vision of the national interest.
His presidency is about the concentration of power for maximalist goals. His trade policy, whatever economists may say about it, has concentrated unprecedented power in his hands at home and abroad. At home, he can affect the profitability of almost every company in the U.S. by setting tariffs.
Mr. Trump’s opponents criticize him for blowing up the multilateral trading system. In their view, that system better safeguarded American economic interests than a chaotic and fluid system resting more on bilateral and political agreements. We shall see whether Mr. Trump’s gamble that he can get better deals bilaterally than the U.S. got through the multilateral system pays off. But what isn’t in doubt is that his goal is to maximize rather than to restrain American economic power.
Mr. Trump’s Europe policy shows every quality except restraint. From laying claim to Greenland and repeatedly interfering in European elections to ripping up the trade relationship and threatening to walk away from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, everything this administration has done has been intended to increase American power in Brussels and beyond. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has been condemned for comparing Mr. Trump to “daddy,” who sometimes has to get tough. But America’s president is Europe’s daddy now—and he has gotten the Old World to jump through more hoops than any of his predecessors in the past 50 years.
In the Middle East, Mr. Trump has similarly flouted the restrainers’ advice and engaged in a free-wheeling and far-reaching policy aimed at reasserting American hegemony while avoiding long-term military engagements. From bombing Iran and threatening the life of its supreme leader to proposing the mass removal of Palestinians from Gaza and threatening Israel with a dramatic suspension of aid, the president has been a hyper-activist in the region.
That Secretary of State Marco Rubio was celebrating the signing of a peace deal between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda last week highlights the immense ambition that drives Trumpian foreign policy. The world is a stage, and Mr. Trump intends to stand in its limelight.
The Congo-Rwanda agreement, which may or may not succeed on the ground, illustrates a hallmark of Trumpian diplomacy: an unconventional and amplified reliance on American economic power to achieve international goals. Whether it is the mining deal with Ukraine, the critical minerals agreement in central Africa, or the spate of artificial-intelligence deals with the Gulf countries, President Trump and his diplomats seek to unite American security and economic interests.
Landing disabling blows against Iran, the weakest of the major revisionist powers, both strengthens the American global position and telegraphs warnings to Moscow and Beijing. So does forcing Europe to rearm. It remains to be seen whether and how Mr. Trump will deploy his preferred elements of American power to assert his primacy over Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.
China and Russia are the two great powers that most want America’s might and its ambitious president restrained. Both these revisionist powers see how Mr. Trump has asserted American dominance in Europe and strengthened the U.S. role in the Middle East. China and Russia perceive Trumpian ambition as a threat and will look to derail any project that would diminish their global clout.
The outcomes of this competition are impossible to predict, but one thing is clear. Donald Trump is no shrinking violet, and as long as he sits in the Oval Office, the U.S. is unlikely to retreat from the world.