Trumpist Foreign Policy and its Consequences
The state of these United States is grim. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have ravaged the country with illegal invasion practices, summarily executing two legal observers in Minnesota and forcing millions more to the ground, the US has bombed the Venezuelan capital of Caracas along with military targets in Iran and Syria, and even the financial unreliability of the US has prompted the United Nations to issue a warning of its own possible collapse. The Trump administration’s actions, and the events occurring in Trump’s second term have caused even previous unflinching allies of Trump—including former GOP congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green and the National Rifle Association (NRA)—to rebuke Trump’s recent policy.
It is clear the administration is utilizing muzzle velocity, the strategy of unleashing a slew of problematic policy all at once to divide attention and muffle the voices of dissenters. This editorial has decided to highlight an underserved topic on the global scale: the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS).
The NSS
In the initial NSS report from November of 2025, Trump’s strategy laid bare. President Trump’s goal was to bring “peace and stability in our world”—a plan Trump has all figured out.
In his baseline NSS, Trump frames the Biden administration as plagued with extremism and the perpetuation of deadly violence which polluted perceptions of Americans globally. In Trump’s eyes, reversing the foreign policy approach of the Biden administration was the right move. Trump orchestrated more military strikes in a single year than the entirety of Biden’s first term. He’s used the US military to emerge a victor in each of his endeavors. But on a motivational level, an examination of President Trump’s military strategy over the past year has slowly emerged as something much more complicated than initially displayed—as an oil and trade game.
His methods have been largely untoward: he openly flaunts that he has achieved so “dramatic a turnaround in so short a time.” Which he has, entirely unconventionally. Rather than rushing to join with others, as a country we’ve turned away from climate accords and peace deals and research funding. We’ve left our allies, refugees and the diseased, and international law out of consideration.
Instead of using those connections, we’ve used threats via exorbitant tariffs, travel bans, and visa promises to alienate our friends and neighboring countries. On the part of the President, abrupt, rash, and overtly harmful decisions have been made without consultation with the presidential cabinet—let alone Congressional leadership. With regard to the example of Venezuela, President Trump reportedly briefed oil executives on the US takeover without so much as a notice to Congress before the operation to kidnap Nicolás Maduro took place.
State by State
In Panama, in an attempt to gain important military and geographical vantage points a little under a year ago, Trump used unconventional and informal channels (via social media) to share his goals for the future. He asked to “take back” the Panama Canal with little to no incentive—just a looming (and potentially empty) threat of ‘something bad’ directed toward Panamanian leaders to push them to let go. And with an unpredictable president who continuously exhibits patterns of irrational behavior, it’s difficult to see why Panama wouldn’t be scared.
Conflict with Venezuela, for which consent was manufactured by concerns over drug smuggling and immigration over US borders, was incited by Trump, who chose to bomb capital Caracas and kidnap Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, who decided to designate the new Venezuelan leader, and who claims to be “settling raging conflicts” globally.
Apparently, that’s by starting new ones. Indeed, the Trump administration’s threats to Greenland have been questioned by innumerable foreign policy experts and world leaders. Trump’s moves seem to have been prompted by his anger at not receiving last year’s Nobel Peace Prize, stating in a letter to the government of Norway that “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace [sic],… but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.” The Trump administration’s threat to levy tariffs against states that oppose Trump’s ownership deepened the already existing gorge between the US and the EU. One unique component of Trump’s foreign policy seems to be a lack of follow-through. Indeed, from questionably enforced tariffs to empty threats of military intervention in other disputes, both aspects are present in Trump’s Greenland strategy. Trump’s backed down from both military and economic threats to Greenland, but the damage has already been done to the US’ reputation, with nothing gained in return.
In Ukraine, Trump has reversed the Biden administration’s stance on the conflict. He’s reversed the US’ commitment to long-standing American alliances (including our previously solid bond with Ukraine) by making them more transactional and less empathetic. He publicly argued that the Ukrainian people (who are being attacked, invaded, and bombed by Russian President Putin) are the barriers to peace. And, instead of helping without recognition, Trump’s foreign policy seems to be exclusively transactional. “I’ll give you US assurances if you sign this peace deal” seems to be how Trump approaches deal making. And while that might reflect how Trump envisions the world going around, it doesn’t bode well for the future of the United States.
In Canada, the situation has progressed very differently for Trump. Current Prime Minister Mark Carney managed to reverse the electoral trajectory of a historically unpopular Liberal Party after years of stagnancy under Justin Trudeau, using Canadians’ fear of threats made by the US to form a huge majority in Parliament. Carney has used Canada’s government as highly effective foreign opposition, with Ontario premier Doug Ford using the Midwest’s reliance on Ontario’s resources like electricity and lumber to spike prices in America and punish the US government for its statements. Furthermore, the Canadian government has pursued economic decoupling measures that more indirectly harm the US abroad. Most recently, Canada and China achieved a landmark trade deal finally allowing Chinese electric vehicles into North America, an extreme threat to US car manufacturers who worked with the Biden administration to insulate the manufacturers from competing with China’s vehicles. Furthermore, Canada signalled the beginning of a long-standing partnership with China with the inclusion of a proto-freedom of movement agreement, allowing Canadians and Chinese to move back and forth between the countries with no visa. Canada has created the definitive foreign policy model for opposition states in 2026, and we can expect to see other states follow along the same line.
Consequences
They’ve already begun to. This week Germany placed the United States on a travel advisory, which will inevitably further harm the already bleeding US tourism industry. While the ball has started to roll quite slowly, the part that matters is that it did. Expect more to come from the international community soon.
Trump’s foreign policy is causing domestic issues as well. In 2025, the US passport dropped to the 12th most powerful passport in the world, leaving the top 10 for the first time in US history. The US’ actual foreign policy infrastructure has begun to erode as well; foreign service officers today report overwhelmingly that recent changes in US policy have demoralized them and inhibited their ability to engage in effective foreign policy. Former Director General to the US Foreign Service and US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield characterized the sentiment: “[the American Foreign Service Association’s] data confirms we’re asking our diplomats to do more with less precisely when robust engagement is needed most.” Ultimately, foreign service officers sit across the table from people they know may be threatened by Trump next. Trump’s wild and unpredictable foreign policy agenda has degraded the ability of the US to make foreign policy in the first place.
Finally, the US’ foreign policy sets a concerning precedent, and may be the final death knell of the post-World War II liberal international order. The message sent by Trump’s threats to Greenland, Panama, Cuba, and Canada, compared with his actions in Venezuela, display a foreign policy ideology centered around spheres of influence. The logic of the Trump administration is that because the United States is the most powerful country in this hemisphere, we should be able to treat our neighbors as tributary states and lord over them. This upsets the precedent set by decades of international norm-setting and policymaking that respects states’ sovereignty and right to self-governance. Trump has seemingly pitched the other “great powers,” being China and Russia, as having the right to govern their own spheres of influence. This new precedent has severe consequences, especially for the people of Taiwan and Ukraine. Especially with regard to Taiwan, the US’ foreign policy has basically left China to its own devices. If the world’s great powers are entitled to the territory and the sovereignty of the states around them as the US’ foreign policy suggests, then there is no reason China isn’t entitled to Taiwan, or Russia isn’t entitled to Ukraine or Poland. The Davidson window, the theoretical period by which China could be prepared to invade Taiwan, opens in 2027. Due to China’s ongoing birthrate crisis, the window may close just as soon. Thus, China experiences a sense of urgency to take Taiwan before the possibility is pushed just as far into the future as it was in 1949.
Overall, Trump’s foreign policy has been a historic failure. While failing to make any territorial gains, Trump has pushed our closest neighbors and allies away, in some cases into the arms of the US’ rival states. Meanwhile, states reliant on the US like Taiwan are even more at risk than they ever have been. The US has missed its obligation to fund the UN, and the international order is on the verge of collapse as the norm of sovereignty fades while the world descends further into spheres of influence.
