What Is Donald Trump’s Foreign Policy?

By MAX FISHER NOV. 11, 2016

Donald J. Trump in New York on election night. He seems to approach foreign policy as a

series of deals, each divided between a winner and a loser. Credit Damon Winter/The New

York Times

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump will enter the White House having

promised to radically alter United States foreign policy, with ramifications for Americans

and the world.

But it’s not yet clear how. Mr. Trump offered vague and sometimes contradictory proposals

during his campaign, with few of the typical details or white papers. Voters, foreign policy

professionals and the country’s allies are all, to a real extent, left guessing.

Here, then, is a rundown of what we know about Mr. Trump’s foreign policy ideas and

what some experts say about their feasibility and likely ramifications.

What are Mr. Trump’s proposed policies?

Mr. Trump has repeatedly emphasized a set of ideas that would reduce America’s role in

the world. He said he would take unilateral action, move away from traditional allies and

move closer to adversaries.

He said during the campaign that he would diminish or possibly abandon American

commitments to security alliances. That includes NATO and defense treaties with Japan

and South Korea.

He has threatened to pull out of the World Trade Organization and called the North

American Free Trade Agreement “the single worst trade deal ever signed in this country.”

And he said he would “cancel” the international agreement on combating climate change,

reached last year in Paris.

Mr. Trump has suggested that more countries should acquire nuclear weapons, to protect

themselves without Washington’s help. He has said allies like Saudi Arabia must pay for

American support.

He has voiced admiration for Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, and said the United

States should work with him and align with his Syrian ally, President Bashar al-Assad, in

that country’s civil war.

But Mr. Trump, not a dove, has indicated a willingness to use force and promised to

reinstate waterboarding, a form of torture.

“Somebody hits us within ISIS, you wouldn’t fight back with a nuke?” Mr. Trump asked

rhetorically in an MSNBC interview this spring.

When the Iranian Navy intercepted American sailors who had drifted into their waters, Mr.

Trump said that, had he been president, the Iranians would have been “shot out of the

water.” He has threatened to dismantle the international agreement that limits Iran’s nuclear

program.

He supports imposing punitive economic measures on China, threatening high tariffs that

would devastate trade between the world’s two largest economies.

He supported the United States-led invasion of Iraq at the time, but harshly criticized it

during the campaign, and he said that American troops should have “taken the oil” from

that country by force. He has also said that the United States should have seized Libya’s oil.

Perhaps most famously, he has promised to build a wall on the country’s southern border

and force Mexico to pay for it.

Are these sincere proposals, or just campaign talk?

It is difficult to extrapolate concrete plans from his pronouncements, particularly since they

are not always consistent.

Some days, for example, he called NATO “obsolete” and implied that he would reduce

American commitments to European security. On others, he did not go as far, saying only

that European states should contribute more to NATO and focus more on terrorism.

Some statements seemed mainly about making a political point. For example, Mr. Trump

said he opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal because it “was designed for China

to come in, as they always do, through the back door,” though the deal excludes China.

The agenda seemed to change with his mood, and he has released relatively few policy

papers, making many foreign policy analysts wonder whether he may be entering office

without a plan.

“You should not believe anyone who says they know what Trump will do — even if that

person’s name is Donald Trump,” Jeremy Shapiro, research director of the European

Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in a postelection policy brief.

Could President-elect Trump execute his ideas?

American presidents enjoy unusual autonomy on foreign issues, and Mr. Trump would be

able to make some of his proposals happen quickly.

He could scuttle the Iran nuclear deal (though its European signatories would most likely

refuse efforts to negotiate a replacement), ignore United States commitments on climate

change and impose tariffs on China and Mexico.

But other policies would be more difficult to enact. Mexico, for instance, seems unlikely to

comply with his demand to pay for a border wall. Other ideas, such as seizing Iraq’s oil,

may not even be physically possible (the oil rests beneath the ground of a sovereign state).

His own administration could be his biggest roadblock.

Foreign policy is conducted by vast institutions — the Pentagon, State Department and

intelligence agencies — staffed with thousands of career officers.

Mr. Trump has only a handful of like-minded advisers. So he will need to staff these

agencies with his party’s foreign policy veterans — a group with which he has broken so

acrimoniously that many denounced him and his policies in open letters. Now, they will

have a sort of veto power over moves like withdrawing from NATO or striking Iran.

Elizabeth N. Saunders, a George Washington University political scientist, said that foreign

policy bureaucracies have often steered presidents, rather than the other way around. They

can stonewall or slow policies they dislike. Selective leaks to the public or to Congress can

put pressure on the commander in chief to behave in a certain way.

When presidents openly overrule their foreign policy staff, Ms. Saunders found, public

approval of that president and his policies often dives.

What is the Trump worldview?

Beneath his specific proposals — or pronouncements — there does appear to be a guiding

worldview.

Mr. Trump seems to see the world as chaotic and threatening and inhospitable to traditional

American objectives like democracy promotion or international institutions. In this world,

the United States must pursue its interests narrowly, unilaterally and with unapologetic

force.

Thomas Wright, a Brookings Institution scholar, wrote in a long study of Mr. Trump’s

views that he consistently expresses “opposition to America’s alliance relationships;

opposition to free trade; and support for authoritarianism.”

Mr. Trump calls this “American first,” and it would be a significant break with the role

Washington has played in upholding the global order since the end of World War II.

Perhaps owing to his years in the competitive world of New York real estate development,

Mr. Trump seems to approach foreign policy as a series of deals, each divided between a

winner and a loser.

This may explain his skepticism of alliances: If every interaction must conclude with one

party’s humiliating loss, then mutually beneficial agreements are neither appealing nor

possible.

The historian Walter Russell Mead places Mr. Trump within a “Jacksonian” tradition in

American foreign policy, referring to President Andrew Jackson, who served from 1829 to

1837: nationalist, populist, suspicious of the outside world — and willing to use force to

beat it back.

What would happen if President Trump instituted these policies?

In most cases, it is nearly impossible to say.

Because Mr. Trump’s policies are so unusual and his election victory so unexpected,

foreign nations have not indicated how they might respond. So it is difficult to judge even

the first-order effect of, say, a NATO withdrawal or a partnership with Mr. Assad in Syria,

much less any ripple effects.

In practice, much of foreign policy is responding to crises. Mr. Trump’s lack of experience

or clear proposals make it difficult to predict how he would handle, for example, a major

breakthrough in North Korea’s nuclear program or a major Russian cyberattack.

Some proposals, though, are easier to study.

An analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a nonpartisan think tank,

found that Mr. Trump’s potential imposition of double-digit tariffs on China and Mexico

would, by decimating international trade, set off a recession in the United States and cost

4.8 million jobs.

Should he unravel the Iran nuclear deal, most analysts believe that Tehran would renew

nuclear development but that the deal’s other parties — Russia, China and several from

Europe — would blame the United States and decline to reimpose sanctions.

Beyond that, Mr. Trump’s likely impact on the world is difficult to predict. As Mr. Shapiro

wrote in his policy brief, “The essence of Trump’s foreign policy will be its

unpredictability.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 13, 2016, on Page A24 of the New

York edition with the headline: What We Know About Trump’s Foreign Policy Ideas.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/12/world/what-is-donald-trumps-foreign-

policy.html?_r=0