Donald Trump’s return to the White House has produced a foreign policy that defies easy categorisation as 2025 draws to a close. The president who campaigned against “endless wars” and promised a revived “America First” doctrine has instead pursued what can best be described as selective interventionism wrapped in the rhetoric of restraint. It is a curious amalgam of hard-nosed realpolitik, transactional dealmaking, and occasional flashes of imperial hubris—one that has delivered a handful of tangible results while exposing deep strategic contradictions.
To Trump’s credit, his administration has demonstrated that American pressure, when applied strategically and without heavy ideological baggage, can still produce outcomes that eluded his predecessors. The most notable example is the Gaza ceasefire agreement announced in September and formally signed in October. After nearly a year of relentless fighting and failed diplomatic initiatives, the Trump administration managed to halt the violence—at least temporarily—by leveraging relationships with key Arab states while simultaneously applying pressure on both Israel and Hamas.
This dual-track approach marked a sharp departure from the Biden administration’s emphasis on moral appeals and public admonitions, which critics argue yielded little beyond symbolic statements. Trump’s 20-point peace plan, whatever its long-term viability, succeeded in stopping the immediate bloodshed. His willingness to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—something Washington has historically been reluctant to do—cut through decades of ritualized diplomacy that produced little more than stalemate. In purely tactical terms, the ceasefire stands as the administration’s most significant foreign policy achievement of the year.
A similar pragmatism underpins the administration’s renewed focus on the Western Hemisphere. The 2025 National Security Strategy elevates Latin America and the Caribbean to the top tier of American strategic priorities, acknowledging that instability in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean has a more direct impact on U.S. security than distant conflicts in Central Asia or Southeast Asia. This shift represents a long-overdue correction to decades of strategic neglect, during which Washington devoted enormous resources to far-flung theaters while migration pressures, drug trafficking, and state fragility worsened closer to home.
Yet these achievements are overshadowed by fundamental contradictions and episodes of dangerous overreach that threaten to undermine any positive legacy Trump’s foreign policy might claim.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the administration’s handling of Ukraine. Trump promised repeatedly during his campaign to end the war within days of taking office. Nearly a year later, the conflict continues unabated, and his peace initiative appears increasingly detached from political and military reality.
The decision to dispatch Jared Kushner and real estate developer Steve Witkoff as key envoys to negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin was defended by the White House as “personal diplomacy.” In practice, it looked more like the substitution of competence with cronyism. The initial 28-point proposal reportedly offered concessions so favorable to Moscow that Ukrainian analysts described it as a roadmap to capitulation rather than peace. Although subsequent revisions emerged from talks in Berlin and Florida, the core problem remains unchanged: Russia, still gaining ground on the battlefield, has little incentive to compromise.
This is not strategic restraint. It is wishful thinking masquerading as dealmaking, and it has eroded confidence among Ukraine’s supporters that Washington understands the basic dynamics of the conflict.
Equally troubling has been the administration’s rhetorical volatility on Gaza. In February, Trump floated the idea that the United States could “take over” Gaza and relocate Palestinians elsewhere to transform the territory into a “Riviera of the Middle East.” The proposal was widely condemned as unworkable and, by critics, likened to ethnic cleansing. Although senior officials later walked back the remarks, offering contradictory explanations and partial clarifications, the episode underscored a deeper problem: a decision-making process in which impulsive presidential statements routinely outrun strategic planning.
When major foreign policy pronouncements require immediate damage control by aides, it suggests not bold leadership but institutional disarray.
The most consequential—and controversial—dimension of Trump’s 2025 foreign policy lies in what the National Security Strategy terms the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. Far from signaling a retreat from global commitments, the doctrine represents a reorientation toward assertive hemispheric dominance. The administration has deployed significant military assets to the Caribbean and expanded naval patrols under the banner of counter-narcotics operations. Drug cartels have been designated as foreign terrorist organizations, a move that provides legal and political justification for cross-border operations.
Reuters and the BBC have described this posture as a revival of “gunboat diplomacy,” and critics see uncomfortable echoes of earlier eras of U.S. intervention in Latin America. The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine produced decades of resentment, instability, and blowback—precisely the conditions that later fueled mass migration and anti-American sentiment. By explicitly invoking this historical framework, the Trump administration risks repeating the very mistakes it claims to reject.
In this sense, Trump has not abandoned interventionism so much as redirected it. Middle Eastern entanglements are deprioritized, only to be replaced by the prospect of new, open-ended commitments in the Western Hemisphere.
The administration’s approach to China further illustrates its strategic incoherence. Beijing is viewed primarily through an economic lens, with trade balances, tariffs, and market access dominating official rhetoric. Military competition and security risks receive comparatively little attention, an omission that many analysts regard as a dangerous category error.
Trump’s stated ambition of achieving a $40 trillion U.S. economy by the 2030s while maintaining a “genuinely mutually advantageous” relationship with China assumes that economic interdependence and strategic rivalry can be neatly separated. In reality, China’s economic power underwrites its military modernization and regional assertiveness. Treating great power competition as a trade dispute rather than a comprehensive strategic challenge is not realism; it is denial.
Relations with European allies reveal another layer of contradiction. Trump’s insistence that Europe shoulder a greater share of its defense burden is widely supported, even among many of his critics. But this legitimate demand has been undermined by gratuitous interventions in European domestic politics. The National Security Strategy accuses Europe of “losing its identity” through immigration, while Vice President JD Vance publicly criticized Germany’s political isolation of the far-right Alternative for Germany party.
Such statements do nothing to advance American security interests. Instead, they weaken trust, accelerate European moves toward strategic autonomy, and reduce willingness to coordinate closely with Washington. For an administration that claims to favor burden-sharing, alienating partners is a self-defeating strategy.
Taken as a whole, Trump’s 2025 foreign policy reveals a president who grasps certain realist principles—the limits of American power, the futility of ideological crusades, and the value of transactional negotiations—but lacks the discipline to apply them coherently. His instinct to prioritize concrete American interests over abstract values is not inherently misguided. His execution, however, has been erratic.
As Council on Foreign Relations President Michael Froman has observed, Trump has not embraced isolationism but rather forged “a new brand of American internationalism with Trumpian characteristics.” That characterization captures both the novelty and the danger of the approach. The administration seeks hemispheric hegemony without Middle Eastern entanglements, demands alliance loyalty while routinely insulting allies, and pursues accommodation with China even as it wages economic war.
These objectives are fundamentally incompatible. A genuinely restrained foreign policy would focus on defending core interests, accept limits, and recognize that durable bargains require compromise rather than capitulation. It would treat allies as partners, not tributaries, and acknowledge that stability often means living with imperfect outcomes.
Trump’s foreign policy does none of this. Instead, it combines the language of restraint with the practice of selective intervention, producing neither lasting peace nor durable security. Despite occasional tactical successes, it lacks strategic coherence and risks drawing the United States into new commitments while eroding the alliances necessary to sustain them.
The tragedy is that 2025 offered real opportunities for a meaningful reorientation of American foreign policy. Trump’s instincts on burden-sharing, regional prioritization, and skepticism toward endless wars are broadly sound. But instincts without disciplined execution yield only chaos—and chaos, however well-intentioned, serves no one’s interests, least of all America’s.
