There is, once again, something both depressing and hilarious about Washington’s search for a Trump foreign-policy doctrine.
Well over a year into Trump’s second term, the exercise has resumed with the same misplaced confidence that animated it in 2017: op-ed writers combing through a Venezuela invasion, a set of strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, a record tariff wall and a stalled Ukraine negotiation for the underlying “grand strategy,” as if a coherent architecture were hiding somewhere beneath the rubble of press conferences and Truth Social posts, waiting to be excavated by someone clever enough to name it.
It isn’t there. It was never there. And the fact that so many serious people keep looking for it says more about the analytical habits of the foreign-policy establishment than it does about the president.
Consider the raw material analysts are working with this year. Washington removed a Latin American strongman and now says it will “run” the country that used to be his, though nobody in the administration has explained what running Venezuela actually means in practice.
American aircraft struck Iranian nuclear facilities, an action variously described by supporters as decisive deterrence and by critics as the kind of preventive strike restrainers spent two decades warning against. NATO governments were pressured into a 5% defense-spending pledge, a genuine win for the burden-sharing argument Trump has made since his first term.
Tariffs climbed to their highest levels in a century, until the Supreme Court intervened and complicated the legal footing under which many of them were imposed. Greenland has been the subject of coercive territorial rhetoric that would have been unthinkable from any postwar American president.
And a fragile Gaza peace framework sits alongside a still-unresolved war in Ukraine, where the traveling diplomacy between Mar-a-Lago and Kyiv has produced summits and photo opportunities but not, as yet, a settlement.
Try building a single doctrine out of that. Restrainers will tell you the Venezuela operation and the Greenland threats are naked imperialism, incompatible with any coherent version of “America First.” Hawks will point to the Iran strikes as proof that Trump is not, whatever the slogans suggest, an isolationist.
Free traders will note that a tariff regime aimed simultaneously at allies and adversaries is not a strategy toward China, or toward anyone else — it is a mood. Even the administration’s own description of its year, delivered through a spokesperson’s talking points about “ending eight wars” while simultaneously invading a country and bombing another, reads less like doctrine than like marketing copy stitched together after the fact to fit whatever happened to occur.
This is, I’d suggest, the wrong place to be looking. The scholars and journalists chasing a “Trump Doctrine” are still operating on the postwar assumption that American presidents govern foreign policy the way they’re taught to in international-relations seminars: containment, then détente, then democracy promotion, then a “pivot to Asia,” each with its position papers and its named authors.
Trump does not work this way and never has. He works the way a dealmaker works — case by case, leverage by leverage, personality by personality — which is precisely why his foreign policy looks incoherent to people trained to expect a syllabus and looks, to Trump himself, perfectly consistent: every decision is being made by the same person, using the same instincts, for the same immediate purpose. That is not nothing. It is just not a doctrine in the sense Foreign Affairs editors mean when they use the word.
None of this is an argument that the instincts themselves are wrong. There is a real and defensible critique buried under the chaos: that Europe has taken advantage of American security guarantees for decades, that the unipolar moment produced more wars than it prevented, that Washington’s foreign-policy class mistook institutional entrenchment for strategy.
Trump’s early impulses — skepticism of NATO free-riders, wariness of forever wars, a focus on the Western Hemisphere over distant theaters — were closer to a genuine realist critique of the post-1991 consensus than his critics generally credit.
The tragedy of this second term is that those sound instincts have been married to an execution so undisciplined that it now produces its own kind of overreach — bombing runs and regime change and territorial threats against a small NATO-adjacent ally — that a genuinely restrained foreign policy would have avoided in the first place.
Sound instincts without disciplined execution do not add up to a strategy. They add up to chaos with good intentions, or sometimes without even those.
So when the next round of think-tank panels convenes to ask whether Trump 2.0 has finally revealed its doctrine, the honest answer is the one nobody gets invited on television to give: no, and the search itself is the story. Every administration eventually gets the doctrine label pinned on it retroactively by historians who need a tidy chapter title.
Trump’s will likely get one too, someday, applied by people who were not making the decisions in real time and who will impose an order on the record that the record itself never possessed.
Until then, the more useful question isn’t “what is the Trump Doctrine” — it’s why the same capital that spent eight months searching for one in 2017 hasn’t yet learned to stop asking.
