Der Schlüssel zum Verständnis von Trumps chaotischer Außenpolitik
https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/03/18/the-key-to-understanding-trumps-chaotic-foreign-policy/
Der Schlüssel zum Verständnis von Trumps chaotischer Außenpolitik
https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/03/18/the-key-to-understanding-trumps-chaotic-foreign-policy/
5 Kommentare
There is little doubt that U.S. President Donald Trump is willing to upend traditional American foreign policy. But how much will it eventually destabilize the international system?
The puzzling nature of Trump’s policies may seem inexplicable through the lens of geopolitical analysis and competition over the world order. This is because both traditional geopolitics and the realist school of international relations overlook a crucial dimension of state behavior in the international system: regime competition.
It is within the framework of regime competition that Trump’s seemingly self-defeating policies can be understood as part of a deeper struggle between competing political systems.
As Trump autocratizes elements of the American political system, his foreign policy increasingly espouses the characteristics of autocratic regimes. Whether deliberately or unwittingly, Trump’s policies so far are mostly in service of countering democratic restraints at home and abroad, reflecting his self-avowed preference for strongman rule over democratic oversight.
Written by Nicholas Bequelin, a senior fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center and the former Asia-Pacific director of Amnesty International.
I think it’s past time for articles like this to stop wondering if Trump is being intentional or not. Of course he is.
A good way to understand it for Americans is to say Trump is merging the state to himself. He spent his life running a family business, so that’s what he understands. The Trump business is him and he’s the Trump business. Now America is him and he’s America, just like Putin is Russia and Orban is Hungry and other strongmen are their country. They prefer to deal with each other because their personal relationships extend to the political. Putin deciding to do something is the same as Russia agreeing in a way that Starmer, for example, can’t, or wouldn’t, negotiate for the U.K.
The key to understanding Trump’s foreign policy is that he doesn’t understand foreign policy, and he has no interest in doing so. He’s interested in the spectacle of it all, the detail and importance is of little to no consequence.
His first term at least had people around him attempting to explain the basics in the simplest terms. Think of that Simpsons episode where the FBI agents keep stepping on Homer’s foot to get him to respond to „Mr. Thompson“, it’s really that level of ignorance.
His second term so far, that all goes. He’s stripped his circle of anyone who might challenge him intellectually, replacing them with those, like Marco Rubio, who are willing to dumb themselves down to avoid his wrath. He’s hostile to intellectual curiosity, and that extends to anyone with a coherent geopolitical worldview. Foreign policy is set accordingly.
As for decision-making, it’s completely off-the-cuff. No strategy, no grand plan, just impulse that feeds self-interest. People still try to characterise him as someone with a strategy, don’t bother. Nothing about Trump as an individual needs intellectually characterising further than is needed.
There is no understanding it. It’s whichever way the wind blows. In his first term, his people would create talking points for him before speaking, but then once on the stage, he’d go totally off script
He doesn’t like foreigners. Seems be only thing in common really.