Donald Trump Will Be His Own Secretary of State: What Early Days Tell Us About the President’s Foreign Policy
The incoming President’s appointments have generated a lot of attention. But his own unconventional approach will ultimately determine the course of his administration’s foreign policy.
President Donald Trump is sworn in for a second term. The Trump White House, via Wikipedia.
Foreign affairs is perhaps the policy area where both Donald Trump’s supporters and detractors expect him to diverge most drastically from traditional Republican Party positions. Unlike his hardline anti-immigration stance or his support for loosening regulations, his foreign policy is where his views appear less consistent.
During the campaign, Trump attempted to position himself as the “peace” candidate, arguing that neither the war in Ukraine nor the war in Gaza would have taken place under his watch, without offering much about how he planned to reduce tension in either conflict. The former President has pledged to put “America First” in his foreign policy, which, to some, suggests a reduction in the United States’s military involvement and an overall retreat in the global leadership role that Washington has assumed since the end of the Second World War.
While Trump’s rhetoric often points toward more American global retrenchment, his record during his first term in office from 2017-2021 largely indicated the opposite, as he continued unconditional U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen, imposed aggressive sanctions, and brought the United States to the brink of war with Iran. On certain key bilateral relations, such as those with Mexico and China, a second Trump presidency promises to be more hawkish than its predecessors.
As a result, Trump’s recent string of nominations to important foreign policy and national security roles drew massive amounts of attention from policymakers, journalists, and others. Those who adhere to Washington’s post-Cold War consensus — which calls for American global primacy undergirded by military power — were reassured by the nominations of Sen. Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and Congressman Mike Waltz as National Security Adviser. Other choices, notably that of former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, are more in line with the campaign’s anti-establishment ethos and hint at a more heterodox approach to foreign policy. The selection of Senator JD Vance as his running mate over the summer also signaled that Trump’s administration would be willing to buck GOP orthodoxy.
The discourse over these nominations demonstrates the push-and-pull between the various factions on the American right today. The foreign policy issue that has probably most split the Republican Party since Trump left office has been the war in Ukraine. Most Republicans have criticized Joe Biden’s approach — some have attacked him for doing too much, urging the White House to pursue a diplomatic settlement and avoid a dangerous escalation with Russia, while others have urged the Biden administration to give more weapons to Ukraine, and at a faster pace than they have done so far. Trump has not taken a clear position. Much of his campaign rhetoric suggested that he would force Kyiv to pursue a deal with Moscow, but more recent media and expert analysis has argued that this is far from a given. Many of his advisers have been similarly inconsistent, seeming to be more driven by scoring partisan political points than adhering to consistent beliefs. In the early days of the war, for example, Rubio was among the most prominent Russia hawks in Congress. But during his hearings, the former Senator — who recently became the first Trump nominee to be confirmed —said that it should be the “official position of the United States that this war should be brought to an end.”
But what the nominees themselves believe may not end up mattering all that much. The number one quality that all of his new nominees — not to mention those selected for other positions throughout government — share, is fealty to Trump as a person, rather than to a clear set of ideological beliefs. The new President seems prepared to apply lessons learned during his first term in the Oval Office. The outcome, as history professor David Milne recently wrote in Foreign Policy magazine, is that “Trump Is His Own Secretary of State.” Milne argues that this will be a replay of Trump I, when “[t]here was no significant advisory influence on Trump’s last presidency.” That advisers didn’t affect Trump’s policy the first time around isn’t entirely true. While many of the falling-outs happened for personal reasons, some disagreements were on more explicit policy grounds. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, for example, resigned in protest of Trump’s plan to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria. That plan never fully came to fruition, as members of the President’s team repeatedly convinced or misled him into slowing the withdrawal process and leaving a residual force on the ground. At other times, aides resigned in Trump’s more reckless instincts: reports suggest that then-national security adviser H.R. McMaster also eventually managed to talk Trump down from his plans to invade Venezuela. The new cabinet may soon confront similar tests. In the weeks leading up to his inauguration, Trump repeatedly pledged to buy Greenland, to “take back” the Panama Canal, and to turn Canada into the “51st state.” Whether or not his team goes along with such unorthodox, imperial aims could serve as a useful barometer for whether Trump’s whims now represent his party’s policy.
During his first presidency, Trump named a team that was similarly mismatched to these top roles, and very few of the cabinet or other high-level roles from that term remain on his good side. Trump, it would appear, wants to ensure that no similar breakups take place this time around. Sometimes, prominent national security officials can overshadow a president in the realm of foreign affairs. That won’t happen under Trump.
A few fights still remain. After some early questions surrounding, in particular, Gabbard and Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth, all of Trump’s nominees appear on the path to confirmation, though that is not guaranteed. Just as importantly, these various government agencies also still need to fill the deputy and junior positions who often play an overlooked role in crafting policy.
Reading the tea leaves from Trump’s personnel selections could have been useful if the chosen names clearly indicated a specific direction or preference toward one worldview or the other. In the absence of such a trend, it seems as if Trump is to pacify all Republican camps during his transition, and that many decisions may ultimately come down to the President’s impulses — which are themselves often difficult to decipher.
Editor
Corinne Lattermann, Editor in Chief
Blaise Malley is a first-year MA student enrolled in the joint Global Journalism and International Relations Program. He graduated from Claremont McKenna College in 2020 with a B.A. in government. From 2022 to 2024, Blaise worked as a reporter at Responsible Statecraft, the online magazine published by the Quincy Institute, covering the intersection of U.S. domestic politics and foreign policy. Prior to that, he has worked as a reporter, editor, and fact-checker for The New Republic, The National Interest, and The American Prospect and has written for various other publications.
