When American Foreign Policy Devolves Into a Bunch of Stuff

My latest for World Politics Review

Photo by Ricardo Viana on Unsplash

One of the basic intellectual exercises we do in the international relations business is examine an array of foreign policy actions and attempt to discern a cogent strategy. Most of the time, this makes sense. Most leaders do have a conscious plan guiding the bulk of their foreign policy actions. It might not be the greatest plan, but it should be a coherent one.¹ Indeed, most of the time foreign policy leaders want their strategy known, since it can send effective signals to allies and rivals alike.

Sometimes, however, what is actually happening can best be encapsulated by the closing moments of The Simpsons’ second-season episode titled “Blood Feud”:

This is where the Trump administration’s second term comes into play. As Brad DeLong has observed, far too many pundits look at this president’s recent actions and attempt to distill a rational strategy when there really is not one:

I do see this over and over again.

I should not have to say: Somebody got to Trump so he obsesses about how important it is to do good things for his friend Milei in Argentina. Somebody got to Bessent and convinced him that it would be a political disaster for Milei if the peso were to collapse before the current election. Possibly Bessent really cares that some of his friends had money in Argentina they wanted to pull out at a high valuation—everyone else in the Trump administration is corrupt as f***, so why not Bessent too? The Treasury’s experts pointing out that money spent defending an incredible exchange rate peg is money wasted unless policies change to make the peg credible—they were told to sit down and shut up. And so you have a policy. It has next to nothing to do with a struggle for influence in Latin America between China and the U.S,

I should not have to say: Somebody got to Trump and convinced him—correctly—that building ships needed to be done in Japan and Korea. How they managed to do this is a mystery. But it is a one-off: it has nothing to do with any recognition that any manufacturing superpower capable to going toe-to-toe with China over the next generation has to have production- and value-chains that reach far outside the United States, spanning two if not three oceans.

I should not have to say: A Trump who was genuinely interested in making the later “20..” years an American- rather than a Chinese-dominated epoch would be able to remember for more than a week that we are stronger the closer are our ties and alliances with Canada and Mexico.

And yet, because Bill Emmott and a legion of other people who know better write things like this, I do.

And this leads me to my latest for World Politics Review, “Trump’s ‘Bunch of Stuff’ in the Western Hemisphere.”

I look at the administration’s actions in this hemisphere and come away unconvinced that there is any real strategy at work. But as noted in the column, I do understand the irresistible impulse to ascribe one to Trump:

With so much focus on the Western Hemisphere, there is an inevitable desire to argue that there is an underlying strategy at work. Human beings are keen to detect patterns, and international relations analysts are even more keen to explain patterns—whether they exist or not. The administration’s defenders and acolytes are further incentivized to explain Trump’s actions as exercises in five-dimensional chess, even if it seems that he is just eating the pieces. There is cognitive comfort in believing in some overarching design to explain things. Such explanations bolster ontological security while reducing the costs of navigating uncertainty. As the Joker explained to Harvey Dent in “The Dark Knight,” most people feel better if they believe events are following some kind of plan, even if the plan is nefarious….

One reason recent U.S. actions seem scattershot is because they look like the handiwork of Trump’s underlings, each of whom is pushing their own agenda. On Venezuela, for example, there has been widespread coverage of the role that Rubio and senior Trump aide Stephen Miller have played in nudging Trump toward gunboat diplomacy. Some observers trace Trump’s bellicosity toward Canada to the decades-long resentment held by his close economic adviser, Peter Navarro. And Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has taken the lead in directing the administration’s bailout of Argentina to bolster the government of President Javier Milei, much to the benefit of major hedge funds led by Bessent’s close friends….

The New York Times’ David Sanger recently summed up the administration’s first nine months of foreign policy by saying that “the only thing predictable about Mr. Trump’s handling of global affairs is that it will be an unpredictable mix of instinct, grievance and ego. And there is little evidence that his tantrums, swerves and reversals are strategic and thought-out, as his supporters sometimes insist, rather than the products of impulsivity, mood and circumstance.” This sounds far more plausible than anything Barnett posits about grand design.

In other words, when it comes to explaining Donald Trump’s foreign policy, believing that there is an overarching plan is a fool’s errand. It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.

Do read the whole thing. Amidst a depressing autopsy of random foreign policy stuff, it was awfully nice to work in a reference to my favorite Simpsons ending ever.

1. This seems like the right moment to note Dick Cheney’s passing.