Foreign policy experts have struggled to make sense of the second Trump administration's incoherent and contradictory approach to world affairs — which in itself ought to serve as a clue. First of all, it suggests that the Trump team is operating without a recognizable or familiar playbook, driven partly by the Great Leader’s famous whims and fancies and partly by competing streams of ideology. Secondly, it illustrates that the generations of think-tankers churned out by the graduate programs of elite Anglo-American institutions are completely at sea in this bizarre historical moment, whether in foreign policy or any other supposed discipline of governance.
We’ve already worked through the theory that Donald Trump is reviving the expansionist foreign policy of Gilded Age America and William McKinley, who isn’t just a deeply inappropriate presidential role model for the 2020s but also an inexplicably strange one. (What schoolbook or outdated world map or old-school history teacher of Trump’s 1950s childhood is responsible for his McKinley love affair?) That seems partly true, or at least serves to explain Trump’s self-destructive fascination with tariffs, along with his obsessive interest in retaking the Panama Canal, purchasing or seizing Greenland and, um, “annexing” Canada (or something like that).
