As 2025 draws to a close, Donald Trump’s return to the White House has produced a foreign policy that defies easy categorization.
The president who campaigned against endless wars and promised an “America First” doctrine has instead pursued what can only be described as selective interventionism wrapped in the rhetoric of restraint—a curious amalgam of realpolitik, transactional dealmaking and occasional imperial hubris.
The achievements: peace Through pressure
To Trump’s credit, his administration has demonstrated that American pressure, when applied strategically and without ideological baggage, can produce results that eluded his predecessors.
The Gaza ceasefire agreement announced in September and signed in October stands as the year’s most significant diplomatic accomplishment. By leveraging relationships with Arab states and applying maximum pressure on both Israel and Hamas simultaneously, Trump achieved what Biden’s moralistic hectoring could not: an actual cessation of hostilities.
The 20-point peace plan, whatever its long-term viability, at least halted the immediate carnage. Trump’s willingness to pressure Netanyahu—something Washington’s foreign policy establishment has historically been unwilling to do—deserves recognition. His blunt, transactional approach cut through decades of diplomatic niceties that produced nothing but continued conflict.
Similarly, the administration’s focus on the Western Hemisphere represents a welcome correction to decades of neglect. The 2025 National Security Strategy elevates the Western Hemisphere as the priority region, a long-overdue acknowledgment that American interests are more directly affected by instability in Mexico and Central America than by distant conflicts in the Hindu Kush or the South China Sea.
The failures: incoherence and overreach
Yet these achievements are overshadowed by fundamental contradictions and dangerous overreach that threaten to undermine any positive legacy.
The Ukraine peace process exemplifies the administration’s incoherence. Trump dispatched his son-in-law Jared Kushner and real estate developer Steve Witkoff to negotiate with Putin—an unconventional choice that might charitably be called “personal diplomacy” but more accurately represents the substitution of competence with cronyism.
The initial 28-point proposal was so favorable to Russian demands that Ukrainian analysts described it as designed to assist Ukraine’s capitulation. While subsequent revisions have emerged from talks in Berlin and Florida, the fundamental problem remains: Moscow sees no reason to compromise while it continues gaining ground militarily.
Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine within days of taking office. Nearly a year later, the conflict grinds on, and his peace initiative appears increasingly likely to fail. This is not restraint; it is incompetence masquerading as dealmaking.
More troubling still is the administration’s rhetoric about Gaza. In February, Trump proposed that the United States “take over” Gaza and expel Palestinians to create a “Riviera of the Middle East”—a proposal that even sympathetic observers recognized as unworkable and that critics rightly compared to ethnic cleansing.
That the administration later walked this back with contradictory statements only highlighted the policy chaos. When the president’s public statements on a major foreign policy issue must be immediately “clarified” by subordinates, it suggests a decision-making process divorced from strategic thinking.
Structural problem: Monroe Doctrine redux
The most concerning aspect of Trump’s 2025 foreign policy is its embrace of what the National Security Strategy calls the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.
This represents not a withdrawal from global commitments but rather a reorientation toward hemispheric hegemony that critics have aptly described as neo-imperialist and a hardline version of the Monroe Doctrine.
The administration has deployed substantial military assets to the Caribbean, with what Reuters and the BBC described as “gunboat diplomacy,” while designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations to justify intervention. This is not restraint but rather the substitution of one form of interventionism for another—trading Middle Eastern quagmires for Latin American entanglements.
History suggests this will end poorly. The Roosevelt Corollary and subsequent American interventions in Latin America generated exactly the instability, resentment and migratory pressures the administration claims to oppose. As the National Security Strategy explicitly invokes this problematic history, we should expect similar results.
China policy: economics without strategy
The administration’s approach to China epitomizes its transactional worldview taken to an extreme. China is viewed almost entirely through an economic lens, with military threats barely mentioned. This represents a dangerous category error: treating great power competition as primarily a matter of trade balances rather than strategic rivalry.
Trump’s goal of reaching a $40 trillion economy by the 2030s while maintaining a “genuinely mutually advantageous” relationship with Beijing assumes that economic growth and strategic competition can be neatly separated.
They cannot. China’s economic power directly enables its military modernization and geopolitical ambitions. A policy that prioritizes balanced trade while downplaying security concerns is not realism; it is wishful thinking.
Europe: alienation disguised as accountability
The administration’s treatment of European allies reveals another fundamental confusion. Demanding that Europe spend more on defense is entirely reasonable and long overdue.
But the National Security Strategy targets Europe for “allegedly losing its identity” through immigration, while Vice President JD Vance challenged Germany’s isolation of the far-right AfD party—interventions in European domestic politics that serve no American interest.
This is not burden-sharing diplomacy; it is gratuitous provocation that weakens the very alliance structures that even a restrained American foreign policy requires. The result has been accelerated European moves toward strategic autonomy and reduced reliance on US support—precisely the opposite of what advocates of transatlantic burden-sharing should want.
The verdict: realism without wisdom
Trump’s 2025 foreign policy reveals a president who grasps certain realist principles—the limits of American power, the futility of ideological crusades, the value of transactional negotiations—but lacks the wisdom to apply them coherently. His instinct to prioritize American interests over abstract values is sound; his execution is haphazard.
As Council on Foreign Relations’ Michael Froman notes, Trump has “eschewed isolationism” and established “a new brand of American internationalism with Trumpian characteristics”—which is precisely the problem.
The administration wants hemispheric hegemony without Middle Eastern entanglements, burden-sharing from allies it habitually insults, and great power accommodation with China while waging economic war. These goals are fundamentally incompatible.
A genuinely restrained foreign policy would focus American power on defending core interests while acknowledging the limits of what even a superpower can achieve.
It would recognize that stability often requires living with outcomes we dislike, that allies must be treated as partners rather than tributaries, and that grand bargains with adversaries require actual compromise rather than demands for capitulation.
Trump’s foreign policy offers none of this. Instead, it combines the rhetoric of restraint with the practice of selective intervention, producing neither the peace that restraint promises nor the security that effective intervention might provide.
The result is a foreign policy that, despite occasional tactical successes, lacks strategic coherence and risks leading America into new commitments even as it alienates the allies necessary to sustain them.
The tragedy is that 2025 presented genuine opportunities for American foreign policy reorientation. Trump’s instincts about burden-sharing, regional focus, and skepticism toward endless commitments are basically sound.
But sound instincts without disciplined execution produce only chaos—and chaos, however well-intentioned, serves no one’s interests, least of all America’s.
This article was originally published on Leon Hadar’s Global Zeitgeist and is republished with kind permission. Become a subscriber here.
