Three Ways of Looking at Donald Trump's Foreign Policy Leadership Style

Some thoughts on Henry Farrell's thoughts.

Photo by Marija Zaric on Unsplash

One of the best things about being a professor is putting items on one’s syllabus as a means to finally read them. This week that meant perusing Jung H. Pak’s Brookings Essay about Kim Jong Un, originally published in 2018. As psychological theories of foreign policy decision-making continue to ride high, Pak’s essay offers some interesting insights into Kim. This passage stood out to me:

Intelligence analysis is difficult, and not intuitive. The analyst has to be comfortable with ambiguity and contradictions, constantly training her mind to question assumptions, consider alternative hypotheses and scenarios, and make the call in the absence of sufficient information, often in high-stakes situations….. I am reminded about how humility is inherent in intelligence analysis—especially in studying a target like North Korea—since it forces me to confront my doubts, remind myself about how I know what I know and what I don’t know, confront my confidence level in my assessments, and evaluate how those unknowns might change my perspective.

Pak’s comfort with ambiguity and contradiction came to mind as I read Henry Farrell’s take on Donald Trump’s leadership style. As noted earlier this week, my Foreign Affairs essay on what to expect from Trump 2.0 has continued to provoke reactions. Farrell’s reaction is the most interesting. He argues that my take on Trump is excessively rationalist, in that I ascribe clear and coherent foreign policy preferences to Trump and posit that he will pursue those ends — unfettered by any adults in the room in his second term — in a transactional manner.

Farrell proposes an alternative explanation:

My theory of Trump is different. Building on Padgett and Ansell’s classic account of the court of Cosimo de Medici, I argued back in 2016 that Trump didn’t have goals in the usual sense of the term. Instead, his motivation was to maneuver everyone else so that they had to keep on paying attention to him….

This is a very different theory of Trump, which has some consequences for what his foreign policy may be. It suggests that his approach is not transactional but personalist. He doesn’t really care about goals in the ordinary sense of the term. All he cares about is getting other people to pay attention to him, and ideally to show him obeisance. The policies he adopts at any point in time will be the policies that allow him to strengthen his personal authority and dominance, while weakening the authority and dominance of others….

My alternative account instead suggests that we will see less constancy in foreign policy. It argues that the most important source of chaos in Trump’s first administration was not the battle between Trump and his underlings, but Trump himself, as he constantly shifted policy, depending on who he had last talked to, and what seemed most likely at any moment to confound and vex his opponents. Now that the restraints are much weaker, we will see that the only constant is Trump’s wish to burnish his self regard, and to ensure that he is always at the center of the spider web.

Now as someone who has written at length about the ways in which Donald Trump practices an immature leadership style, it is difficult for me to disagree with Farrell’s argument. Trump is someone who possesses a short attention span, displays oppositional behavior, and craves drama. One can see why this would lead Farrell to conclude that inconstancy will be the one constant of Trump 2.0.

Some of Trump’s cabinet selections might also represent data points in Farrell’s favor. To be frank about it, I have little confidence in Pete Hegseth or Tulsi Gabbard or Matt Gaetz to be responsible stewards of the bureaucracies that they run. This suggests that Trump cares far more about deconstructing the national security machinery than retooling it to fit his purposes.

That said — and this is a sentence that I never thought I would write — when it comes to foreign policy, Donald Trump possesses core convictions. As Thomas Wright explained in Politico nearly nine years ago, Trump has been a mercantilist since the late 1980s. He believes that U.S. allies are free-riding off of the U.S. security umbrella. And he is a huge fan of using bellicose threats, brinksmanship, and sanctions as a means to achieve his desired ends. The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World finds most of these beliefs to be laughably absurd, but I would be lying if I said Trump was the only global leader who felt that way about trade or alliances.

Furthermore, as Elizabeth Saunders noted over at Good Authority in an essay arguing that Trump’s foreign policy was predictable: “the beliefs that presidents hold when they arrive in office are ‘sticky’ – in other words, presidents don’t change their core views much over time.” Indeed, on most of the issues mentioned in the previous paragraph, Trump’s beliefs have intensified over the past decade.

So, how to resolve this seeming contradiction between Farrell’s argument and mine? Is there a way to reconcile ambiguity and contradictions?

Making use of a different Elizabeth Sanders article, let me suggest that the key variable at play here is Donald Trump’s knowledge, experience, and interest about different subject matters. In the foreign policy areas where he has keen interest, I would expect my theory would outperform Farrell’s. Trump was president for four years, and by the end of that term had finally begun to figure out his levers of power. As Saunders notes, an experienced foreign policy leader should be able to ride herd over his policy team. So on tariffs, or on immigration, or on alliance management, I expect a constant Trump.

While important, these areas are just a small fraction of American foreign policy. Beyond those areas there are whole vast territories of knowledge that has never interested Donald Trump. Trump telling RFK Jr. to “go wild on health,” for example, is a sign that Trump does not give a flying fig about health. It bores him. In these areas, Trump remains an inexperienced and uninformed president who mostly wants his underlings to display fealty to him. These are the issue areas where Farrell’s argument likely carries greater sway: Trump will care less about the specific policy and more about the loyalty that his subordinates will display to him. If a subordinate goes off the reservation — which is easier to do when Trump is substantively uninterested in the issue area — headlines will trigger Trump’s intervention. The result would be a lot of inconstancy and policy reversals and Trump-level personnel churn.

We will have the next few years to empirically determine the answer.