Trump’s Second Term Foreign Policy in Historical Context

About this episode

The episode explores the implications of Donald Trump's second term foreign policy in relation to historical US geopolitical strategies.

Beneath the chaos of Donald Trump’s second term foreign policy—the bluster, bravado, back-handers and backdowns—is there something else going on? Has the United States reached a turning point in its relationship to the rest of the world? The era in which the United States constructed multilateral alliances to defend western Europe and advance a global free trade agenda appears to be over. Listen to the people around Trump and you will hear them talking in quite different ways – contempt for Western Europe, admiration for the audacity of Putin in reasserting Russia’s regional sphere of influence. It is as if the United States has decided to retrench geopolitically – controlling Greenland, fantasising about annexing Canada, realising total domination of the northern part of the western hemisphere with all its mineral wealth and, with climate change, new strategically vital sea-lanes? But if this is a new American foreign policy, is it one that has more than an echo of the pre-Second World War past? After all, it was a commonplace of nineteenth-century US politicians to make fiery speeches threatening to annexe Canada, and they actually did annexe half of Mexico and threaten much…

People in this episode

Host: Adam Smith

Guest: Daniel Drezner

Topics covered

• Trump's foreign policy
• US geopolitical strategy
• historical context
• multilateral alliances
• Western relations
• climate change
• regional influence

Keywords

• Trump
• foreign policy
• geopolitics
• alliances
• Western Europe
• Putin
• Canada
• Greenland
• climate change
• historical context

Mentioned in this episode

Places: United States, Western Europe, Greenland, Canada, Mexico, Russia

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