The war in Ukraine is approaching its end. After three and a half years of grinding industrial warfare in eastern Ukraine (and more than a decade since Russia’s annexation of Crimea), a leaked 28-point peace plan, drafted by US special envoy Steve Witkoff with input from the warring parties, contains several concessions that Kiev had previously stated are off the table. These include the exchange of territories not fully controlled by Russian forces and formal restrictions on the size of the Ukrainian military.
Yet the deal also provides Ukraine with a security guarantee modeled after NATO’s Article 5. It doesn’t recognise Moscow’s territorial claims as a legal matter. And it stipulates Russian withdrawal from several territories that it claims to control. Under the plan, some $100 billion in expropriated Russian assets will be used to fund Ukraine’s postwar reconstruction. President Trump has given Ukraine a week to accept this deal; it is unclear which of its 28 points can be negotiated, if any.
Capitals in Western and Northern Europe are irate, feeling cut out of the process and confused by an apparently dovish turn in Washington’s approach after a few weeks during which Trump had ratcheted up pressure on the Kremlin. They shouldn’t be surprised: The Ukraine settlement is part of Trump’s broader effort to free America from its strategic entanglements in Europe (and the Middle East) to focus on more strategically crucial — and politically rewarding — regions.
The hawks and Atlanticists still operate on the assumption that America’s and Europe’s strategic interests are deeply aligned. Trump, like many ordinary Americans and Europeans, understands that the age of alignment is over, and that a fundamental break with the 20th-century arrangements was long overdue.
Since the end of World War II, the pursuit of three core interests has defined American grand strategy. First was the security of postwar Western Europe. Through military alliances like NATO and economic programs such as the Marshall Plan, Washington provided an effective bulwark against both the forward expansion of the Soviet Union and the threat of revolution within the war-shattered European societies.
Second, the United States has maintained a considerable presence in the Persian Gulf region, assuming Britain’s former role as the principal outside power to ensure continued Western access to the region’s oil. Third, America has viewed the East Asia-Pacific region as a core strategic interest, ever since the seizure of the Philippines by President William McKinley during the Spanish-American War in 1898, which protected US commercial entry into Asia and signaled Washington’s ambitions as a global power.
The three regions of interests formed a hierarchy of sorts: Europe first, the Middle East second, and Asia third. And despite runaway globalisation, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the rise of China, this hierarchy of priorities has largely remained consistent. The past several US administrations doubled down on toppling regimes in the Middle East while acting as though Western Europe requires the same amount of US assistance that was needed to remedy the destruction of WWII and fend off Communism.
Despite President Barack Obama’s promises to “pivot to Asia” in response to China’s rise, Washington launched interventions in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, while expanding military aid to support the actions of other states in Mozambique, Ukraine, and Gaza, among others. President Joe Biden likewise maintained the priority of Europe and the Middle East, notwithstanding his withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Now, a quarter century into the new century and an additional decade since the end of the Cold War, the second Trump administration is finally giving shape to a new, post-Cold War framework of American grand strategy.
This Trump Doctrine appears to be a reorientation of American strategic interests for the 21st century. While media critics initially framed Trump as an “isolationist,” his record has unambiguously disproved that allegation. This doctrine is best understood not through universal principles, but by examining how Trump is diverging from America’s traditional priorities and interests.
“The Trump Doctrine is a much needed update to last century’s strategic status quo.”
At the heart of the president’s vision is a desire to devolve European security back to European states and to disengage from the sands of the Middle East. Reducing American commitments in those two regions is paired with an activist approach to the Western Hemisphere, while playing hardball economic statecraft with Beijing. While the execution of this reorientation has been mixed and, in several cases, dangerously flawed, the Trump Doctrine is a much needed update to last century’s strategic status quo.
Start with Europe. American presence in Europe has been consistent since World War I. After assisting the European allies in two world wars, Washington turned its attention to the long-term containment, and later “rollback,” of Soviet Communism. The United States stationed troops throughout Europe, and granted institutionalised security guarantees to NATO allies, all under the shadow of nuclear war.
America paired this projection of military power with the largest foreign-aid program in global history: the Marshall Plan. Between 1948 and 1952, the United States supplied more than $13 billion in economic assistance to Western Europe, equivalent to approximately $160 billion today. The Marshall Plan acted as a mass subsidy for postwar social and Christian democracy, thus staving off revolution and realignment with the Communist sphere.
While the Soviet threat is no more, and the Continent has long since recovered from the destruction of World War II, Europe has continued to stay at the forefront of American foreign policy. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Biden administration sounded Cold War-era civilisational rhetoric. “If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine,” Biden claimed in his 2024 State of the Union Address, “I assure you he will not.”
Vladimir Putin’s Russia came to serve as a substitute for Stalin’s USSR in the minds of hawks in Brussels, London, and Washington. This, despite contemporary Russia’s weakness relative to a Soviet Union that had just defeated the Nazi war machine, occupied most of Central Europe, and installed puppet governments in multiple states. While Soviets steamrolled through half the Continent, today’s Russia has gotten stuck in an embarrassing war of attrition with one of the poorest countries in Europe, experiencing casualties that dwarf those of the Soviet-Afghan War. Despite Cold Warrior fantasies to the contrary, the conquest of Europe is not on the agenda for a country that can’t manage the conquest of eastern Ukraine.
That said, Russia’s resolve in Ukraine shouldn’t be underestimated, either. Putin has stated that he considers Ukrainian accession to be an existential threat to Russia: whether or not you believe him, it is clear that the Russians are not about to retreat empty-handed. Despite a massive Western sanctions regime, considerable aid to Ukraine, and a coup attempt, there has been little evidence that Russian military efforts are on the brink of collapse.
Having borne high costs, Putin’s behavior reveals his belief that the costs of surrender are still higher. The last three and a half years have shown that Putin is committed to this conflict for the long haul, and that Moscow will continue expending the resources necessary to pursue its objectives in Donbas. Biden’s strategy was to lean into that resolve, running down Russian resources in the hopes that Putin would withdraw from Ukraine or lose domestic support at home. Neither outcome came to pass, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives were destroyed in the bargain.
Trump, by contrast, has long disdained — and now explicitly broken with — the postwar status quo in Europe. Yet rather than abandoning Ukraine, his approach has involved consistent efforts to pressure both Volodymyr Zelensky and Putin to the bargaining table, while passing responsibility for European security to the likes of Germany, France, and Poland.
Trump hasn’t been soft on Russia — he has continued to provide considerable aid to Ukraine, granted permission to use Western weapons on targets within Russian territory, and imposed a new set of extremely harsh sanctions on Russian oil following the cancellation of peace talks in Budapest this autumn. However, these actions aren’t instruments of attrition, but rather intended to pressure Putin to negotiate. Biden’s policies were intended to extend the war by keeping Ukraine in the fight. Trump’s approach, in contrast, has been focused on ending the conflict altogether.
The new 28-point peace plan comes at a moment when the United States has started deporting Ukrainian refugees so that they can be drafted into the Ukrainian military, with Zelensky saying of the deportees, “We’ll find good use for them.” If this is what Ukraine’s defense now relies on, a deal is best approved sooner rather than later. The plan’s core features are consistent with what smarter analysts have been saying for multiple years now. Ukraine is denied NATO accession but is granted a non-NATO security guarantee and a pathway to EU membership, while Russia keeps the territory it has held behind a line of conflict that continues to creep westward. While it remains to be seen if the proposal will be adopted, it offers the opportunity to stop Ukraine’s continued bleeding. Zelensky would be wise to accept it and focus on his country’s recovery and opportunities as a member of the European Union.
In the meantime, the administration has maintained a consistent message that the days of European “dependency” on Washington are coming to a close. While this initially sparked a panic that Trump was about to withdraw from NATO, this has not happened. Instead, European leaders have now agreed to a new distribution of burden-sharing by committing to invest 5% of GDP annually on their own security by 2035. Eighty years after the end of World War II, the responsibility for European security is being handed back to Europe in a fraught but measured transition.
“Trump has consistently expressed a desire to get the United States out of the Middle East.”
Which brings us to the Middle East. American strategy in that region has also largely been determined by the postwar status quo, with a considerably more imperial bent than in Europe. US involvement began with treaties ensuring American access to oil in 1928 and 1944, coinciding with the handoff of Western hegemony from the declining British Empire to the rising American imperium.
The struggle to control access to the region’s natural resources persisted throughout the Cold War, with ambiguous CIA involvement in the 1949 Syrian coup d’état followed by the CIA-led operation to overthrow the government of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran after he nationalised Iranian oil. Efforts to prevent Soviet capture of the Persian Gulf region led to numerous interventions, proxy wars, and covert operations, a habit that wasn’t broken when the Soviet Union fell.
Here, too, Trump has departed from the status quo. Beginning in the 2016 Republican primary, when he described the Iraq War as a “big fat mistake,” Trump has consistently expressed a desire to get the United States out of the Middle East. The result has been a significant shift in both policy and public discourse. While Trump received some criticism for negotiating with the Taliban, his goal of ending the American occupation of Afghanistan after 20 years of continuous and counterproductive military presence has been one of his chief achievements — even if it was Biden who pulled the final Bandaid.
Trump’s second term has involved new challenges, above all the war in Gaza. While Trump has followed an approach similar to the policy pursued in Ukraine — supplying significant aid to Israel while pressuring both sides to reach a negotiated settlement — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has consistently derailed American attempts at diplomacy. The Israeli attack on Iran scuttled US efforts to negotiate a new treaty governing the Iranian nuclear program and ultimately pulled America into military action, albeit in a manner designed to limit escalation.
The Jewish state’s strike on Iran — and similar attacks on targets within the sovereign borders of Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia, Qatar, and Yemen — severely undermine the strategic interests of the United States, both in the region and globally. At a moment when Trump is attempting to turn the ship of American policy around, Israel continues to sow chaos among its neighbors. While “mowing the lawn” in the region may (or may not) be in the best interests of Israel’s security, it is destabilising, and impels Washington to deploy back to a region Americans across the political spectrum are resolved to leave behind.
Furthermore, Israel’s incommensurate response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack has been a disaster for American legitimacy abroad in increasingly multipolar times. Israeli impunity has fueled claims of Western hypocrisy, pushing states out of reach of American influence as its material supremacy is increasingly eroded. The peace plan currently in place for Gaza — potentially the crowning achievement of Trump’s presidency and recently adopted by the United Nations — rests on an extremely fragile ceasefire which has already been violated a number of times.
If Trump wants to pacify and deprioritise the Gulf region, he will need to ensure that Netanyahu does not derail his strategy to extricate America from the Middle East. He has, so far, failed on that count.
Then there is the Asia-Pacific region. Here, Trump has maintained the greatest strategic continuity with his predecessors. Biden’s national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, advocated for what he called “a foreign policy for the middle class,” focusing on industrial renewal at home and measured economic competition with China, undergirded by stable security commitments to allies in the Indo-Pacific.
At the macro level, Trump’s approach to Asia has emphasised the same points: self-sufficiency in the tech domain, coercive economic statecraft, and secure trans-Pacific commerce, while attempting to revive American industry. While avoiding the previous administration’s direct provocations of China and apocalyptic rhetoric concerning global democracy, Trump has again made some missteps in execution that have undermined America’s position in the Pacific.
Trump’s affinity for tariffs has been the distinguishing characteristic of his foreign policy. As an instrument of statecraft, tariffs have a few different logics. First, a regime of broad, long-term tariffs on imports are designed to protect domestic industry from being undercut by foreign producers, a key concern among Trump’s base.
Second, tariffs can be used in a way similar to sanctions, as an instrument of economic coercion, imposing costs on a specific state until it cedes to American demands. This use of tariffs involves sanctions targeted at a specific country, with clear conditions for their removal. Finally, tariffs have historically been used as a revenue source, requiring a broad, continuous application while maintaining significant trade relationships to keep the revenue flowing.
“Trump’s tariff policy has been strategically incoherent.”
The issue is that the Trump administration has claimed all three of these logics at one time or another, despite that they are mutually exclusive. Protectionist policies would not involve the on-again, off-again application of coercive tariffs, which should not be broadly applied to loyal trading partners; and tariffs as a source of revenue boost consumer prices in the long run, without the revitalisation of domestic industry. For tariffs to be an effective instrument of policy, there needs to be a clear strategic objective guiding their use. Trump’s tariff policy has been strategically incoherent.
While the tariffs levied against stalwart American allies such as Japan, South Korea, and Thailand have allowed Trump to extract some marginal concessions on trade policy, raising trade barriers against these countries is deleterious to American interests for two reasons. First, it renders trade with the United States more difficult, costly, and unpredictable, goading allies to find more dependable trading partners (hint: like China). If these policies are meant to help America compete economically with Beijing through cutting better deals, they have been counterproductive. The long-run effects of playing economic hardball will be a decreased reliance on trade with America.
Second, tariffs on military allies undercut their ability to invest in their own security. Trump’s demands of Asian allies have been similar to the demands he has made of Europe — America will help those who help themselves. Encouraging allies to raise their own defense spending has been a core component of Trump’s approach to foreign relations. Such demands are difficult to fulfill, however, when facing a punitive tariff regime imposed by the global hegemon.
Antagonising allies in the Pacific undermines the American security architecture, drives Asian states into closer economic ties with China, and places the costs of these missteps on American consumers. While macro-level strategy in the Pacific has been conventional, its execution requires a reevaluation.
Finally, there is Latin America. The true revisionism in Trump’s strategic orientation is taking place here, much closer to home. American engagement in the Western Hemisphere has historically oscillated between neglect and heavy-handed intervention. From the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 to Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 corollary, which endorsed US intervention into unstable or uncooperative South American countries, successive administrations justified US dominance over Latin America as a means to protect its own backyard.
Today, Trump’s foreign policy marks a return to that logic after decades of relative neglect during the post-Cold War focus on the Middle East. Trump, it seems, is staging something of a sequel to the Roosevelt Corollary. His administration has revived a muscular and interventionist approach to the Americas — justified in the language of law enforcement and border control, rather than the old rhetoric of hemispheric solidarity.
Washington has used coercive diplomacy, sanctions, and military threats, including moving an aircraft carrier group to waters just off Venezuela’s shores, under the pretext of deterring narco-traffickers. Trump’s turn to South America suggests an updated form of gunboat diplomacy aimed at maintaining dominance of the hemisphere and curbing the influence of rivals like China.
Yet the pursuit of regime change and coercive diplomacy in Latin America risks deepening the very crises it purports to solve. In countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua, US pressure has hardened authoritarian resolve, without producing stable alternatives. Interventions framed as humanitarian or anti-narcotics operations will create disorder in Latin America, destabilise local economies, empower non-state armed groups (primarily the established cartels), and push displaced populations northward, fueling the very migration surges that Trump has pledged to stop.
The expansion of US involvement in regional politics has also provided new openings for Chinese influence. As Washington relies on sanctions and pressure, Beijing offers a menu of loans, infrastructure, and trade that pulls Latin American states further into its economic orbit. The outcome is a paradoxical weakening of US influence in its own hemisphere.
Trump’s Western Hemisphere strategy, then, reflects both regression and innovation: a reassertion of American primacy through coercion, but couched in the language of sovereignty and border control. Whether this revived “gunboat diplomacy” can secure American interests without repeating the errors of past interventions remains an open question. What is clear is that the Western Hemisphere, once peripheral to US grand strategy, has again become a central concern of foreign policy.
Taken together, these regional realignments suggest not a retreat of American power, but its reorganisation. The Trump Doctrine doesn’t mark an abdication of global leadership so much as a recalibration of it — an attempt to convert sprawling, open-ended commitments into a more contained and transactional system of influence. Europe and the Middle East are being nudged toward self-sufficiency, the Pacific remains the primary arena of great-power competition, and the Western Hemisphere has reemerged as a laboratory for coercive diplomacy and border-focused security politics.
The underlying logic is one of consolidation: a recognition that America’s resources, attention, and legitimacy are finite, and that sustaining primacy requires pruning rather than perpetual expansion.
Trump’s style has suggested a desire to cut America’s losses in peripheral regions and an experimental exercise of alternative modes of power in Asia and South America. For all its inconsistencies and failures of execution, the Trump Doctrine represents an effort to realign America’s commitments with its interests. The resulting strategy is untidy, often improvised, and occasionally self-defeating, yet it gestures toward a long-delayed reckoning with the limits of American reach.
After decades spent expanding a liberal order now fraying at its edges, Washington is beginning to ask what can — and what should — be preserved. The answer, imperfect as it may be, is the outline of a humbler but more deliberate kind of primacy: a United States that still seeks to shape the world, but finally on terms it can sustain.
