WIREDGOV

Within 12 months, the US President’s second term in office has had an impact on international relations unlike any in recent memory.

Unpredictable. Unorthodox. Unprincipled. Foreign leaders, military officers, think tank experts, academics and prominent journalists have used these and far harsher words to criticise the Trump administration’s foreign policy during this past year.

The main reason for this assessment, and what has most unnerved America’s friends and allies around the world, is the Trump administration’s enthusiastic disruption of the existing liberal international order. Previous American administrations, from both parties, constructed this order by embedding US power within international alliances, institutions, rules and norms, seeking to coordinate with like-minded states and build the widest possible consensus on key issues, while prioritising long-term stability. For all its shortcomings, this order is credited with helping win the Cold War, lift millions out of poverty, spread democracy, alleviate famine and manage great power conflict.

Within a remarkably short period, the Trump administration has taken a sledgehammer to this old order, redefined America’s interests, and reframed its relationships with long-standing friends and great power adversaries. It is accelerating the old order’s demise and ushering in a new one with a very different set of behaviours and no rules. This shift has upset all those countries, most of all, those in Europe, that have come to depend on the US for its security assurances and guarantees, commitment to free trade and devotion to a rules-based international order.

Trump 2.0 has instead emphasised transactional deals, looking to maximise short-term gains, often economic in nature. It has sought to leverage the military, diplomatic and economic power the US has accumulated over decades to coerce or compel countries to do its bidding. The President has raged against a corrupt international trading system that ‘screwed’ the US, and claimed executive authority to unilaterally levy tariffs on offending countries. His administration extended US power to the Western Hemisphere, which included abducting Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and claiming the country’s oil, unilaterally renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America and reaffirming American control over the Panama Canal. It has downplayed democracy promotion and human rights; it has withdrawn from multilateral institutions. This is the real divide between the Trump administration and its predecessors: the ends to which Washington now deploys America’s military, economic, cultural and diplomatic power.

This critical assessment also derives from the surprise, even shock, at how dramatically and swiftly the second Trump administration has deviated in its personnel, rhetoric and behaviour from its first term.

Instead of appointing experienced Washington, DC veterans to major national security positions, this time around Trump selected staff on the basis of their MAGA credentials, their personal loyalty and how telegenic they appear. The search for suspected members of the ‘deep state’ led to the firings, removals, or forced retirements of scores of experienced intelligence and State Department officers, including the recall of two dozen ambassadors at year’s end. The public got a sense of his national security team’s unseriousness when their March 2025 discussions over bombing the Houthis were disclosed in an unclassified Signal group chat. At times, the President conducted foreign policy without input from other countries – even those existentially invested like Ukraine or NATO members. And repeatedly during the year, the President would cavalierly announce a new foreign policy or contradict existing policy, often revealed to the world (and his own administration) through his social media platform, Truth Social.

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