..ignorance in action."
By: Michael Birnbaum
Washington, D.C.
Michael is WaPo's White House correspondent covering the Trump presidency and foreign policy.
"In his first month in office, President Donald Trump has upended the nation’s nearly century-old approach to global affairs.
The speed and energy with which the president has moved to remake Washington’s role in the world has been most visible in his approach to the war between Russia and Ukraine. He has embraced Russia’s strength and blasted the smaller country, falsely accusing President Volodymyr Zelensky of starting a conflict that began with a Russian invasion. He has insulted U.S. allies in Europe, who for decades have relied on the United States to check Russian power.
The result, diplomats and analysts say, has been to cede influence to Moscow. But that might just be the beginning. At worst, Trump’s strategy could embolden other global powers, notably China, to adopt more bellicose policies toward their neighbors, they say — the opposite of what some of his allies say needs to be the focus of U.S. foreign policy.
Trump has gone further than he did in his first term to redefine whom the United States embraces and whom it combats, surprising fellow world leaders who thought they knew Trump’s playbook and had been working to please him. Instead, the president is spurning a post-World War II international system built to block global aggressors, embracing far older ideas of allowing military powers to build regional spheres of influence and exert dominion over their neighbors. He appears to be turning back the clock to a time in world history when countries with the biggest militaries constructed empires, demanded tribute from weaker nations and expanded their territories through coercion, analysts say.
“This is classic geopolitics, actually: influence on the areas that are closest to you geographically,” said Rosa Balfour, the director of the Brussels office of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank. “If you pair that up with this conversation with Putin, then you see the potential emergence of a worldview where the world is carved up by different powers. This fits in very well with a Russian view of things.”
Trump’s approach has stunned U.S. allies, in part because of their view that his rush to strike a deal with Russia over Ukraine — and apparent rejection of Washington’s long-standing role of checking the power of the Kremlin — might reduce the nation’s influence in the world rather than expand it.
“We are in a new era where, by and large, international relations aren’t going to be determined by rules and multilateral institutions. They’re going to be determined by strong men and deals,” Alex Younger, the former chief of Britain’s foreign intelligence service, MI6, told BBC Newsnight last week. “That’s Donald Trump’s mindset, certainly Putin’s mindset. It’s [Chinese President] Xi Jinping’s mindset … I don’t think we’re going back to the one we had before.”
Previous administrations have also sought to reevaluate the American role in the world, especially after the perceived overreaches of President George W. Bush, who led the nation into war in Afghanistan and Iraq after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. President Barack Obama sought a “reset” with Vladimir Putin months after the Russian leader invaded neighboring Georgia, then held back when Syria used chemical weapons on its own people. President Joe Biden withdrew from Afghanistan at a pace that left allies scrambling.
But Trump’s attitudes fall in a different category, many policymakers say, and they have been shaken at how quickly they have translated into concrete U.S. policy over the last month.
Trump has offered at times contradictory visions for his foreign policy. He has proposed a United States that sits astride the world using its economic power as a bludgeon through tariffs. But he has also articulated a more isolationist, “America First” stance, actively shrinking the U.S. footprint and ceding ground to rivals so long as they steer clear of American borders.
The war in Ukraine “doesn’t have much of an effect on us because we have a big, beautiful ocean in between,” Trump said Friday, dismissing generations of U.S. orthodoxy that Washington’s interests are affected when a rival starts a war of territorial conquest.
Some of Trump’s aides-turned-critics from his first term caution against making grand pronouncements about the president’s governing philosophy.
“Trump has no overarching national security philosophy. He doesn’t do grand strategy,” his former national security adviser John Bolton wrote in National Review last week. “His decisions are transactional, ad hoc, anecdotal, and episodic.”
Trump and his backers say that they are simply reasserting the primacy of U.S. interests after decades in which both Democrats and Republicans lost sight of ordinary Americans when making decisions about how to position Washington in the world. A narrower vision of U.S. interests will help conserve resources and reward American citizens and businesses with better trade terms internationally, they say.
“Under Donald Trump, we don’t do regime change. We are going to deal with the countries that are in front of us, and our criteria is not how do we make that country better,” Richard Grenell, Trump’s envoy for special missions, told the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday. “How do we make America better, stronger and more prosperous for the people that live here?”
In recent days, Trump has repeatedly attacked Zelensky, calling the democratically elected leader a “dictator,” falsely blaming Ukraine for starting the war and holding back from public statements that would point to the Kremlin as the aggressor.
He has also demanded massive mineral concessions from Ukraine. He is slashing the Pentagon budget in a manner expected to sweep thousands of U.S. troops from Europe. He froze U.S. efforts around the world to combat Russian and Chinese influence through development aid. And he has declared his appetite for the territories of Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal.
“I’m going to try and get all that death ended. So we’re asking for rare earth and oil, anything we can get. But we feel so stupid. Here’s Europe and you know, it affects Europe. It doesn’t really affect us,” Trump told the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, where he praised far-right leaders around the world who had come to the gathering.
The approach has flummoxed even friendly audiences. Pressed repeatedly on Friday by Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade to acknowledge that it was Russia that started the war, Trump dodged every time.
“I get tired of listening to it, I’ll tell you what. I’ve seen it enough,” Trump said. He dismissed Zelensky’s complaint last week that he had been excluded from U.S.-Russia talks intended to bring peace to Ukraine’s territory. “He has no cards, and you get sick of it. You just get sick of it. And I’ve had it.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky arrives to meet with the German chancellor at the 61st Munich Security Conference on Feb. 15. (Sean Gallup/POOL/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
U.S. allies say that the lessons they are taking from Trump’s first month in office run deeper than his dismissive attitude toward Ukraine and his sympathy toward Putin’s views that Kyiv should never be allowed to join NATO, the defense alliance between the United States and European nations founded in 1949 on the pledge that every member country will come to the aid of any other under military attack.
Historic U.S. foes, meanwhile, have embraced Trump’s rhetoric.
“If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US president, I would have laughed out loud,” the deputy chairman of Russia’s security council, Dmitry Medvedev, wrote on X of Trump’s post falsely calling Zelensky a “Dictator without Elections.”
“@realDonaldTrump is 200 percent right. Bankrupt clown …” Medvedev said.
After Trump blasted Ukraine last week, his administration refused to allow language calling Russia the “aggressor” to be used in a statement from the Group of Seven world powers, two senior European diplomats said, instead demanding far more equivocal language.
At the United Nations, similarly, the United States has pressured Ukraine and the European Union to withdraw a resolution commemorating the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 that refers to the war as “aggression,” three other senior diplomats said. Instead, the Trump administration has circulated a rival resolution that condemns the loss of life in the “Russia-Ukraine conflict,” placing the two countries on equal footing and winning plaudits from Russia, one of the diplomats said.
“It’s self-explanatory” what is happening, the diplomat said.
The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic conversations.
Even Trump’s top national security officials have been forced to disavow past statements that once would have been considered uncontroversial. Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, was asked Thursday whether he still believed what he wrote in a 2023 opinion piece that Putin was to blame for the war.
“It shouldn’t surprise you that I share the president’s assessment on all kinds of issues,” Waltz responded. “What I wrote as a member of Congress was as a former member of Congress. Look, what I share the president’s assessment on is that the war has to end.”
Many Europeans are still scratching their heads about Trump’s strategy. Few policymakers expected Ukraine to join NATO anytime soon. Nor did they view Ukraine’s reclaiming its full territory as a realistic short-term goal. But dismissing those ideas from the start, as Trump has done, eliminated the most valuable negotiating chips Ukraine and its backers had with Russia, they say.
Some analysts say that Trump’s approach may still be a work in progress.
“He’s not somebody who says, here’s my foreign policy — here’s the Trump Doctrine. We have to see what unfolds, who influences him and in what ways. I don’t perceive that all his advisers are exactly on the same page,” said Clifford May, the president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a foreign policy think tank that has advocated a tough stance on Iran.
“If the goal is to make America great again, then you have to define what greatness means. What does a great America look like, in terms of hard power, in terms of its leadership and influence in the world, in terms of whether there’s going to be a continuation of Pax Americana, of an American-led world order. These are all serious and, I think, unresolved questions,” he said.
Some allies see Trump’s positions as an existential threat to NATO.
Germany’s likely next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said in a television interview Friday that the security assurances underlying NATO are no longer reliable.
“We must be prepared for the fact that Donald Trump will no longer fully accept the NATO treaty’s promise of support,” Merz said. He said Germany must start formal security talks with Britain and France, Europe’s nuclear powers, to extend their nuclear protection over Germany, a departure from decades of doctrine in which Berlin has relied on the United States. Merz is widely expected to lead his center-right Christian Democrats to a victory in national elections Sunday.
The German politician said Trump’s approach to the conflict is head-spinning.
“This is basically a classic reversal of the role of perpetrator and victim,” Merz told a German radio station. “This is the Russian narrative, and this is how Putin has been portraying it for years. And I am honestly somewhat shocked that Donald Trump has now apparently made it his own.”