Two years into U.S. President Donald Trump’s tenure, there is still endemic confusion about what, exactly, his foreign policy is. Many critics blame this confusion on the president’s purported inarticulateness. Whatever one thinks of his tweets, however, the fact is that he has also delivered a number of speeches that lay bare the roots, contours, and details of his approach to the world.
A simpler—and more accurate—explanation for the confusion is that Trump’s foreign policy does not yet have a widely accepted name. Names can be useful in sorting and cataloguing ideas and in avoiding the unnecessary elaboration of things everyone already knows. But to dredge up an old philosophic argument: The name is not the thing. The underlying phenomenon is what matters; the name is just shorthand. Yet too often the U.S. foreign-policy establishment—current and former officials, international relations professors, think tankers, and columnists—uses names as a crutch. People treat names as sacrosanct categories and can’t process things not yet named.
So the fact that Trump is not a neoconservative or a paleoconservative, neither a traditional realist nor a liberal internationalist, has caused endless confusion. The same goes for the fact that he has no inborn inclination to isolationism or interventionism, and he is not simply a dove or a hawk. His foreign policy doesn’t easily fit into any of these categories, though it draws from all of them.
Yet Trump does have a consistent foreign policy: a Trump Doctrine. The administration calls it “principled realism,” which isn’t bad—although the term hasn’t caught on. The problem is that the Trump Doctrine, like most presidential doctrines, cannot be summed up in two words. (To see for yourself, try describing the Monroe, Truman, or Reagan Doctrine with just a couple of words.) Yet Trump himself has explained it, on multiple occasions. In perhaps his most overlooked, understudied speech—delivered at the APEC CEO Summit in Da Nang, Vietnam, in November 2017—he encapsulated his approach to foreign policy with a quote from The Wizard of Oz: “There’s no place like home.” Two months earlier, speaking to the U.N. General Assembly, he made the same point by referring to a “great reawakening of nations.”
In both cases, the president was not simply noting what was going on: a resurgence of patriotic or nationalist sentiment in nearly every corner of the world but especially in parts of Europe and the United States. He was also forthrightly saying that this trend was positive. He was encouraging countries already on this path to continue down it and exhorting others not yet there to pursue it.
A simpler—and more accurate—explanation for the confusion is that Trump’s foreign policy does not yet have a widely accepted name. Names can be useful in sorting and cataloguing ideas and in avoiding the unnecessary elaboration of things everyone already knows. But to dredge up an old philosophic argument: The name is not the thing. The underlying phenomenon is what matters; the name is just shorthand. Yet too often the U.S. foreign-policy establishment—current and former officials, international relations professors, think tankers, and columnists—uses names as a crutch. People treat names as sacrosanct categories and can’t process things not yet named.
So the fact that Trump is not a neoconservative or a paleoconservative, neither a traditional realist nor a liberal internationalist, has caused endless confusion. The same goes for the fact that he has no inborn inclination to isolationism or interventionism, and he is not simply a dove or a hawk. His foreign policy doesn’t easily fit into any of these categories, though it draws from all of them.
Yet Trump does have a consistent foreign policy: a Trump Doctrine. The administration calls it “principled realism,” which isn’t bad—although the term hasn’t caught on. The problem is that the Trump Doctrine, like most presidential doctrines, cannot be summed up in two words. (To see for yourself, try describing the Monroe, Truman, or Reagan Doctrine with just a couple of words.) Yet Trump himself has explained it, on multiple occasions. In perhaps his most overlooked, understudied speech—delivered at the APEC CEO Summit in Da Nang, Vietnam, in November 2017—he encapsulated his approach to foreign policy with a quote from The Wizard of Oz: “There’s no place like home.” Two months earlier, speaking to the U.N. General Assembly, he made the same point by referring to a “great reawakening of nations.”
In both cases, the president was not simply noting what was going on: a resurgence of patriotic or nationalist sentiment in nearly every corner of the world but especially in parts of Europe and the United States. He was also forthrightly saying that this trend was positive. He was encouraging countries already on this path to continue down it and exhorting others not yet there to pursue it.
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