What Would Trump's Future Foreign Policy Look Like?

Saying that Trump wouldn’t usher in a radical break on foreign policy shouldn’t be taken as a compliment or as an argument in support of his candidacy.

Stephen Walt makes the case that a second Trump administration wouldn’t lead to major changes in U.S. foreign policy:

Trump was a poor judge of foreign-policy talent during his first term (and provoked unprecedented rates of staff turnover), and that tendency may hamstring U.S. policy implementation and lead foreign governments to hedge even more. There would be subtle differences between Biden 2 and Trump 2, but I’d bet against a radical transformation.

Saying that Trump wouldn’t usher in a radical break on foreign policy shouldn’t be taken as a compliment or as an argument in support of his candidacy. Given how destructive and dangerous so many U.S. policies have been over just the last twenty-three years, continuity is not desirable at all. Walt is on solid ground in assuming that there will mostly be continuity under Trump because his foreign policy record was largely one of continuity with the policies he inherited. When he did break with Obama, as he did on the nuclear deal and Cuba policy, he was often siding with prevailing conventional hawkish views in D.C. Trump’s presidency was a boon for the extremists that dominate the debates over Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba.

For all the talk of Trump being a “disruptor,” he conducted a hardline Republican foreign policy that was not so different in practice from what most of his 2016 competitors would have done in his place.