Deconstructing Trump’s foreign policy

THE conventional wisdom is that President-elect Donald Trump is by nature a foreign policy “isolationist”, but that pressures at home and abroad would prevent him from pursuing a radical global America-first agenda.

That conclusion is based very much on Trump’s first term in office. Recall the concerns that he would pull the US out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) and other multilateral security groupings, or that he would end up drawing the US into new wars around the world with, say, North Korea or in the Middle East.

Ultimately, these and similar scenarios did not materialise. He did pressure Nato members as well as other international allies to increase their defence budgets, which they did – 23 of Nato’s 32 members have now made the target of spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence.