For years, there has been an increasingly bitter foreign policy fight between two factions of the Republican Party. On one hand, you have the GOP hawks who want the United States to impose its will on the world by force. On the other, you have the “America First” crowd who want the US to withdraw from international commitments and refocus its attention on domestic concerns.
The big question, as always, is where President Donald Trump lands. If Trump says that the MAGA foreign policy is one thing, then that’s what it is — and the rest of the party falls in line.
And yet, I think the factional debate remains far less settled than it seems. In fact, I believe it will remain unsettled as long as Trump is in power.
Trump’s own foreign policy thinking does not align neatly with either of the two main camps. The president does not do systematic foreign policy, but rather acts on the basis of a collection of impulses that could never amount to anything so grandiose as a doctrine. Those gut instincts include a sense that the United States should look out for itself only, ignore any rules or norms that might constrain it, use force aggressively without regard to civilian casualties, and seek “deals” with other states that advantage the United States and/or make Donald Trump look good personally.
It looks, in effect, like an internationalized version of Trump’s approach to New York real estate in the 1980s and 1990s.
So, if Trump’s guide is his instincts, why do the factional disagreements splitting the GOP matter?
Because we know for a fact that Trump can be easily influenced by the people around him. While he has some fixed and unchangeable views, like his peculiar idea that trade deficits are inherently bad, there are many areas on which he doesn’t have a strong opinion — and can be talked in one direction or another.
In Trump’s first term, this ended up having a surprisingly stabilizing effect on policy. He was surrounded by more establishment types like Jim Mattis and Mark Milley, who would frequently talk him out of more radical policies.
As we all know, the second term is different. The Mattis types are gone, replaced instead by loyalists. The factional disputes are not between Trump’s allies and establishmentarians who wished to check him, but rather between different strains of MAGA — some more hawkish, others more dovish. But neither is big on stability, in the sense of wanting to ensure Trump colors within the longstanding lines of post-Cold War US foreign policy.
This creates a situation where each faction is trying to persuade Trump that their approach best and most truly embodies his MAGA vision. The problem, however, is that no such vision exists. Each will have successes at various times, when they succeed at tapping into whichever of Trump’s instincts is operative at the moment. But none will ever succeed in making Trump act like the ideologue they want him to be.
What this means, in concrete policy terms, is that the chaos and contradictions of Trump’s early foreign policy is likely to continue.
In the post-9/11 era, presidents have accrued extraordinary powers over foreign policy. Even explicit constitutional provisions, like the requirement that Congress declare war or approve treaties, no longer serve as meaningful checks on the president’s ability to use force or alter US international commitments.
This environment means that the twin factors shaping Trump’s thinking — his own jumbled instincts and his subordinates’ jockeying for his favor — are likely to have direct and immediate policy consequences. We’ve seen that in the whiplash of his early-term policies in areas like trade and Iran, and have every reason to believe it will continue for the foreseeable future.
In a new Foreign Affairs essay, the political scientist Elizabeth Saunders compares US foreign policy under Trump to that of a “personalist” dictatorship:
“Without constraints, even from elites in the leader’s inner circle, personalist dictators are prone to military misadventures, erratic decisions, and self-defeating policies,” she writes. “A United States that can change policy daily, treat those who serve its government with cruelty, and take reckless actions that compromise its basic systems and leave shared secrets and assets vulnerable is not one to be trusted.”
So long as Trump remains in office, this is the way things are going to be. American foreign policy will be primarily determined not by strategists or ideologues, but by the confused and contradictory whims of one unstable man.
