No One Should Kid Themselves About Trump's Second-Term Foreign Policy

Eliot Cohen tries to kick the foreign policy football that Lucy is holding. Again.

Photo by Stephen Radford on Unsplash

As Donald Trump has become the favorite to win in 2024, those who oppose his worldview with every fiber of their being are coping in myriad ways. Some point out, correctly, that the race is far from over and that the outcome can change. Others, however, are processing the possibility of a second Trump term and suggesting that maybe things will not be so bad after all.

That second response prompts a queasy feeling of déjà vu from the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World. Back in early 2017 there was a lot of loose talk about how Donald Trump would grow into the presidency and not turn out to be the clusterfuck we all feared. As late as 2019 I had friends — smart, savvy, politically connected friends — who insisted to me that nothing catastrophic had happened during Trump’s first term. Even after he lost in November 2020, those who closely worked with Trump claimed he would exit the stage with grace.

All of those predictions ended up like this:

This brings us to Eliot Cohen’s latest essay in the Atlantic. Cohen, a longtime foreign policy thinker, former State Department counselor, and former dean of SAIS, is one of the original Never Trumpers. He helped organize the original open letter from GOP national security leaders warning everyone about Trump’s chaotic, self-destructive foreign policy. After Trump won in November 2016, Cohen urged GOP national security professionals to work for Trump for the good of the country — only to admit less than a week later that he had been wrong.

My point is that Cohen does not agree with Trump on foreign policy and will never serve in a second Trump administration. So when he writes, “Cancel the Foreign-Policy Apocalypse: A second Trump term probably wouldn’t change U.S. foreign policy all that much” in the Atlantic, it is not an exercise in supplication. Cohen must really believe what he’s saying:

As hard as I find it to admit, it is possible that things may be less bad than they seem. Despite the warnings, a second Trump term may not be a riot of alliance-shattering isolationism, bellicose warmongering, or catastrophically stupid diplomacy.

Begin with the Republican platform, which is not so much binding for Trump as it is a reflection of his priorities. It starts with a celebration of 20th-century victories over Nazism and Communism, but also features a robust effort to stop illegal immigration; a commitment to military strength; a promise to reinforce American alliances, particularly, but not exclusively, in the Indo-Pacific; support for Israel; and protection of U.S. infrastructure against “malign influences of Countries that stand against us around the World.”

Setting aside the random capitalization of nouns, an illiterate twitch now pervasive in official and personal documents of all kinds, it is boilerplate, and not especially scary boilerplate at that. It has an edge, but it is not an isolationist pronunciamento.

As someone who basically said the exact opposite of this in my recent Politico essay, I feel the need to critically examine Cohen’s logic. Is he right — or is Lucy gonna yank that football away again?

Let’s start by acknowledging where I agree with Cohen. He is correct to point out that on multiple issue areas there is a throughline running from Trump I to Biden to Trump II that would likely remain unbroken:

Tariffs and supply-chain protection? The Biden administration has already gone down that path. Preoccupation with China and serious efforts to build up alliances and partnerships to contain and balance its growing power? Policies initiated in the first Trump administration have extended into the Biden years. A commitment to Israel and an interest in cementing relationships in the Persian Gulf? Same thing. A desire to disentangle ourselves from the Middle East and Afghanistan? That wish was shared by Obama, Trump I, and Biden.

Of course that still leaves a lot of foreign policy that Trump II could wreck. It also elides the ways in which Biden vastly outperformed Trump in areas of foreign policy agreement. For example, the Biden team has ben far more adroit at building up alliances and partnerships to counter Russia and China.

Cohen offers four reasons for why Trump II would not be that much of a foreign policy rupture:

1. His subordinates would not be that bad: “The question is whether he goes instead for some of the marginal figures in his camp, such as the disgraced and dotty Michael Flynn, or for political figures like Senator Tom Cotton and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. If the former, serious trouble awaits. If the latter, something much more normal lies ahead.”

2. Foreign leaders will know how to deal with him better: “Foreign leaders, too, will be better prepared. Mark Rutte, the new secretary-general of NATO, has been adroit in avoiding any criticism of Trump.”

3. Trump and the GOP don’t really have well-formed foreign policy views: “Trump and the Republicans around him have visceral preferences and views, but not necessarily firm policy lines. Too much of policy consists of reactions to events. It would be a mistake to think that Vance, the firmest neo-isolationist in Trump’s circle, would necessarily have an outsize voice.” And, finally…

4. Trump is a changed man. “Which brings us to the man himself. During second terms, most presidents have an eye on the judgments of history, and that does not incline them to wildness. The most inveterate Trump opponents have to admit that his intimate encounter with mortality did not immediately produce venom or incitement, but instead, a kind of Trumpian grace. We do not know how it will affect his worldview, and although no one should expect it to turn him into a statesman, it may very well moderate a man who stands on the verge of an astonishing personal as well as political victory.”

Let’s deal with these in order:

1. Trump’s supporters will totally be that bad. The best guide to how Trump will staff his foreign policy team is to see who he leaned on at the end of 2020, as well as who he’s leaning on now. The names of Ric Grenell, Kash Patel, Russ Vought, or J.D. Vance are, to put it gently, not reassuring.¹ In his second term, Trump will prioritize loyalty to him over all else. That means he will be nominating D-list talent to cabinet-level positions. And that means it will be a foreign policy shitshow.

2. Foreign leaders knowing how to deal with him does not necessarily bode well for American foreign policy. If Cohen is wrong, the result will be a shattering of U.S. alliances. If Cohen is right, the result will be allies knowing how to play Trump to advance their interests at the expense of the United States. I don’t see how this argument helps reassure anyone about American foreign policy.

3. Trump’s foreign policy worldview is pretty well calcified at this point. Go back and read Tom Wright’s January 2016 analysis of Trump’s foreign policy worldview in Politico. As Wright notes, Trump’s views on a lot of matters were already in place back in the 1980s. The notion that Trump will suddenly change his mind now is absurd. Furthermore, contra Cohen, Trump’s choice of Vance as his vice presidential nominee is the clearest sign yet of where he wants to go on foreign policy. The only real difference between 2017 and 2024 is that the GOP is way more MAGA now than it used to be.

4. Trumpian grace is an oxymoron. Cohen filed his copy before Trump’s acceptance speech, which is proof enough that Lucy has yanked the football away just before Cohen could kick it.

As I wrote in “Immature leadership: Donald Trump and the American presidency,” what Cohen fails to understand is just how unconstrained the U.S. president is on matters of foreign policy:

Over the past century and more, the White House has amassed an increasing array of formal and informal powers, and Trump has been the beneficiary of these prerogatives. As the head of the executive branch, the president has at his disposal several ways of acting without consulting the other branches of government. These include executive orders, executive agreements, presidential proclamations, presidential memoranda, signed statements and national security directives. As American history has unfolded, presidents have availed themselves of these forms of direct action at an accelerating rate. William Howell concludes: ‘The president's powers of unilateral action exert just as much influence over public policy, and in some cases more, than the formal powers that presidency scholars have examined so carefully.’

Another reason for the erosion of constitutional checks and balances is that the other branches of government have voluntarily ceded authority to the executive branch. This has been most evident in foreign relations. Indeed, this was the wellspring of Arthur Schlesinger's concerns about an ‘imperial presidency’: ‘Confronted by presidential initiatives in foreign affairs, Congress and the courts, along with the press and the citizenry, often lack confidence in their own information and judgement and are likely to be intimidated by executive authority.’ Congress has not formally declared war since 1942; but that has not stopped presidents from using military force dozens of times since then. Presidents have relied on the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to authorize the use of force in Somalia, Syria and Yemen; Trump used it to kill Soleimani. The vast system of alliances has further empowered the president to deploy military forces without consulting Congress. Congress has demonstrated neither the will nor the capacity to claw back those powers. Similarly, after passing the disastrous 1930 Smoot–Hawley tariff that helped to trigger the Great Depression, Congress decided it could not responsibly execute its constitutional responsibilities on trade. Over the ensuing decades, it delegated many of those powers to the president. Polarization has further debilitated congressional power. Political scientists have found that presidents are both more able and more likely to act unilaterally when the legislative branch is paralysed by party division.

Foreign policy is the arena in which the powers of the other branches of government have receded the most. President Trump has used his authority to withdraw from a panoply of international treaties ranging from the Trans-Pacific Partnership to the Iranian nuclear deal to the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty. On trade, he has used his legal prerogatives to impose significant tariffs on a wide range of allies and adversaries. His administration imposed a travel ban on entry to the United States from several Muslim-majority countries, an action that has advanced neither American interests nor American values. His administration has overhauled a plethora of immigration policies to make them more restrictive, with effects including the separation of migrant families seeking asylum in the United States. He declared a ban on transgender people serving in the military. In each of these cases, Congress has been unable to restrain the president, and the Supreme Court has eventually sided with the Trump administration.

The only things that have changed in the four years since those words were published has been an acceleration of those trends. Trump has greater familiarity with the levers of power than he did in 2017. His administration, armed with Schedule F, Project 2025, and a fully supportive Supreme Court, would accelerate the imperial presidency even further.

So, to sum up: I think Eliot Cohen is wrong. Not a little bit wrong. All the way wrong. Very, very, very, very, very wrong.

1. Also, Tom Cotton is not exactly the adult in the room that Cohen wants him to be.