An expert’s point of view on a current event.
The Top 10 Trump Administration Foreign-Policy Mistakes
So far.
By Stephen M. Walt, a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.
September 10, 2025, 6:30 AM
Let’s admit it: It’s hard not to watch a video of a plane crash or a building demolition, and one feels the same disturbing fascination watching the Trump administration’s handling of U.S. foreign policy. We have front-row seats to the greatest voluntary liquidation of a great power’s status and geopolitical influence in modern history: The results are dramatic and alarming, but it’s almost impossible to look away. And it’s been less than eight months.
So
many bad things have happened that even full-time foreign-policy mavens
have trouble keeping track of all of them. Do you even remember Signalgate? As a public service, therefore, today I offer my top 10 Trump administration foreign-policy blunders (so far).
1. The terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad trade war. I’m not a free trade absolutist, and I recognize that there are a few legitimate reasons
to restrict international trade via tariffs or other measures. But
President Donald Trump’s inconsistent, erratic, and unwarranted assault
on the global trade order manages to harm the United States and lots of
other countries at the same time.
Although
market reactions have thus far been muted for various reasons, taxing
foreign imports is already reducing U.S. and global economic growth, fueling inflation, hampering U.S. manufacturing
by increasing the cost of imported inputs, and pissing off a lot of
other countries. It is also at odds with some of the administration’s
other goals: Asking allies to spend more on defense
and then taking a baseball bat to their economies is self-defeating,
and using tariffs to punish governments whose leaders happen to irritate
the thin-skinned U.S. president makes the United States look like
vengeful bully.
The
managed, rule-based liberalization of the world economy is one of the
most impressive foreign-policy achievements of the post-World War II
period, and it is one of the reasons that most Americans live more
bountiful lives today than their grandparents did. Is that order
perfect? No. Does it require constant maintenance
and occasional, well-thought-out reforms? Of course. What it doesn’t
need, however, is the sort of destructive dumpster fire that Trump has
ignited—an approach that is both economically illiterate and
geopolitically foolish.
2. Coveting Greenland, Canada, and maybe more.
What kind of strategic genius openly declares in advance that he’d like
to take territory that clearly belongs to another country? Trump’s
proposal to make Canada the 51st state and his punitive tariff policy toward that country—see above—helped defeat a pro-Trump candidate in the last Canadian election and may have permanently alienated a society that has been an exceptionally good neighbor for more than a century.
His equally misguided desire to seize Greenland makes neither strategic nor economic sense, but it has roiled relations
with Denmark, previously one of the most pro-American countries in
Europe. Not anymore: A recent poll by a Danish newspaper found that 41 percent
of Danes now regard the United States as a threat. And does Trump
realize that undermining existing norms against this type of imperial
behavior will open the door to similar predatory actions by others? The
answer is no—he doesn’t.
3. Uniting others against the United States.
In a multipolar world, one’s goal should be to attract as many
important allies as possible and keep your main rival(s) isolated. As
German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck put it, in a world of five rival
powers, the goal should be to be one of three. The late U.S. Secretary
of State Henry Kissinger offered a similar view during the Cold War,
saying that in a triangular relationship (such as the United States,
Soviet Union, and China) it was better to join with the weaker of the
two to contain the stronger.
Because
the United States is a long way from the other major powers, and
because it had no significant territorial ambitions in Eurasia, many
important states there preferred to balance with the United States instead of combining against us. That’s a big reason why the U.S.-led alliance system was larger, stronger, and much richer than the Warsaw Pact, and why all the other major powers didn’t join forces to check the United States during the unipolar moment. On the contrary, many of them sought U.S. help to deal with challenges closer to home.
Trump
has managed to put that considerable advantage at risk, mostly by
indulging in a personal spat with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
As the Aug. 31 and Sept. 1 summit in Tianjin showed, his actions have
helped bring India into closer alignment with Russia, China,
and North Korea, undermining a nearly three-decade U.S. effort to
cultivate New Delhi as a counterweight to Beijing’s growing power. I
knew that Trump’s preferred model for global governance—a “conference of kingpins”—wouldn’t work, but I didn’t realize that he’d blow it up himself and leave the United States on the outside looking in.
4. Greenlighting genocide.
U.S. Middle East policy has been dysfunctional for a very long time,
and Trump is not responsible for the Biden’s administration’s shameful
and ineffective response to Israel’s genocidal war
on Gaza. Providing generous and unconditional support to Israel despite
its actions there and on the West Bank is not making Americans safer or
richer or more respected around the world, and public opinion polls increasingly show that the American people no longer support it.
Many Democrats and a growing number of prominent Republicans are openly questioning
this policy, which means that Trump has had a golden opportunity to
remind Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the United States
is a great power and Israel is a dependent client state, and thus put
U.S. relations with Israel and other states in the region on a new and
sounder basis. All he had to do was tell Netanyahu that U.S. aid would
cease if he didn’t accept a cease-fire, stop the de facto annexation of
the West Bank, and get serious about a two-state solution.
What did Trump do instead? He whiffed and chose to back Israel’s futile and self-defeating attempt to establish permanent regional dominance instead.
5. Letting Putin pick his pocket.
Unlike many of Trump’s critics, I don’t think his views on ending the
war in Ukraine are entirely wrong. I wish the situation were different,
but he is correct to think that Ukraine won’t get all of its lost
territory back (in the foreseeable future) and that a peace settlement
will have to address some (though not all) of the reasons that led
Russia to launch its illegal war in the first place. It must also ensure
that Russia’s predations are not resumed.
But
Trump’s belief that he could end the war by browbeating Ukraine’s
leaders and appeasing Russian President Vladimir Putin was naïve at
best, and that poorly prepared, embarrassing, and ultimately meaningless
“summit meeting” with Putin in Alaska was an embarrassing reminder that Trump is a careless and inept negotiator more interested in getting attention than in making genuine progress toward peace.
6. Reversing the green revolution.
Pop quiz: At a moment when greenhouse gas emissions are driving up
global temperatures, magnifying dangerous weather events, and
threatening millions of lives around the world, and when artificial
intelligence and other technological developments are simultaneously
driving demand for vast new amounts of electricity, does it make any
sense at all to gut U.S. efforts to build greater solar and wind capacity? And then to pressure other countries to do the same? Are you kidding me?
Even
if you wanted to protect big oil and gas companies (and continue to
attract their campaign contributions), these head-in-the sand policies
just make the United States look ignorant and shortsighted. They also
mean that the United States is ceding the future of renewable energy production
to countries such as China, which already dominates many green
technologies and is likely to command the high ground in these areas in
the future. It takes a special kind of blindness not to see the folly in
these actions, but I’m afraid that this administration has myopia to
spare.
7. Pointless displays of military force.
To his credit, Trump is wary of the kind of “forever wars” that
ensnared former President George W. Bush and from which President Barack
Obama could not escape. But he’s fond of using airpower in brief
campaigns against weak adversaries who can’t easily hit us back, such as
Iran, the Houthis in Yemen, or a small boat carrying alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean.
The problem is that these semi-random acts of war do not achieve any concrete strategic purpose—the Houthis remain defiant, Iran’s nuclear program was not destroyed,
and the flow of illegal drugs from Latin America will continue unabated
by this illegal act of political theater. Trump’s parallel efforts to
turn the U.S. military into an instrument of domestic repression should
worry all Americans, both because of the threat that they pose to
liberty at home but also because using the National Guard and other
military assets on U.S. soil will inevitably reduce the United States’ ability to handle an increasingly powerful array of foreign foes.
8. Trying to take over the Federal Reserve.
Trump’s attempt to oust Fed Chairman Jerome Powell and Gov. Lisa Cook
might appear to be a purely domestic issue, but it has big implications for U.S. foreign economic policy.
A reliably independent central bank increases foreign confidence that
U.S. monetary policy won’t be tailored to a president’s personal
interests or whims, which in turn makes them more willing to accept U.S.
debt and use the dollar as a reserve currency.
When
politicians take control of monetary policy—as President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan did in Turkey or as various Argentine leaders have done in the
past—the results are usually disastrous. If Republicans in the Senate
and the current Supreme Court back Trump’s attempt to politicize the
Fed, then Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues will earn a
special place in the annals of destructive judicial misconduct.
9. Institutionalizing incompetence.
These foreign-policy blunders aren’t surprising, because the
administration has made a point of appointing officials who are not
qualified for the positions they hold, have little or no experience
running large organizations, and were chosen not for their professional
knowledge but for their personal their loyalty to the president.
I’m
talking about you, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth; and you, Director of
National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard; and especially you, special envoy
Steve Witkoff. For crying out loud: Who would give a real estate mogul
with zero diplomatic experience the difficult task of resolving the war
in Ukraine and ending the genocide in Gaza? Answer: a president who
didn’t really care about achieving either one. These are the kind of unserious people who think that calling a body of water the “Gulf of America” or trying to rename the Defense Department will magically make the United States safer, stronger, and more prosperous.
I know what you’re thinking. Given some of my other writings,
you might think I’d be in favor of taking a machete to the
foreign-policy blob, and that I would therefore applaud Trump’s efforts
to purge the State Department, fire a lot of senior military officers and top intelligence officials, and pressure plenty of other civil servants to resign.
But as I’ve noted before,
the main problems with recent U.S. foreign policy have arisen not from
the nonpartisan professionals in the civil or foreign service, but
either from the flawed ambitions of every post-Cold War president or the
political appointees whom they relied upon to advise them and implement
their vision.
So what is Trump doing? He’s going after the former, such as the CIA’s leading Russian analyst;
nonpartisan cybersecurity experts such as Jen Easterly; or Gen. Timothy
Haugh, the head of the National Security Agency and Cyber Command. His
reason, if you can believe it, is that crackpot social media influencer
Laura Loomer doesn’t like them.
As one of our ablest diplomats, former Ambassador and CIA Director William Burns, recently noted:
“If intelligence analysts at the CIA saw our rivals engage in this kind
of great-power suicide, we would break out the bourbon. Instead, the
sound we hear is of champagne glasses clinking in the Kremlin and
Zhongnanhai.”
Why
does this matter? Because one of the United States’ superpowers has
been the widespread sense that the country was led by competent people
who, for the most part, knew what they were doing. They were not
infallible (who is?), but since World War II, both allies and
adversaries alike recognized that most top U.S. officials were serious
people who did their homework, understood their jobs, and should be
listened to even when others didn’t agree.
Trump
prefers flattery and loyalty more than competence or integrity,
however, which is why he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor
Statistics for accurately reporting that his economic policies weren’t
working as he’d promised. Going forward, foreign officials will be less
willing to follow the U.S. lead because they won’t respect their U.S.
counterparts’ expertise and judgment or the so-called facts that they
claim to believe. They won’t say this out loud because they understand
that fawning flattery is the price of admission at the current White
House, but you can be confident that they know a clown show when they see one.
10. Dumbing America down.
The United States’ greatest strategic asset is its remarkably favorable
geopolitical location, but that enormous advantage has been reinforced
by the country’s world-class research universities, colleges, and other
scientific institutions. These organizations bring in billions of dollars of foreign tuition dollars every year, develop new discoveries and ideas that increase productivity
and make us healthier and safer, and help preserve the U.S. military’s
technological edge. If you were president and you wanted the United
States to remain the leading world power, then you’d work overtime to
retain a dominant position in most areas of science, technology, and
education—especially if you understood how hard China was working to
overtake us.
What you wouldn’t do is cut federal funding for scientific research, target U.S. universities
based on trumped-up (pun intended) accusations, discourage foreign
students from attending these schools, and make the United States a less
attractive place for scientists eager to do their work.
And
yet that is precisely what the Trump administration has done. The
damage may not be immediately apparent, but it will be extensive,
enduring, and hard to reverse.
Put these 10 items together, and they add up to a systematic shredding of what my late colleague Joseph Nye famously termed “soft power.”
Nye argued that soft power was first and foremost the “power to
attract”—to be a society that others admired, wanted to emulate at least
in some ways, saw as generally benevolent rather than selfishly
aggressive, and one that stood for widely shared values or aspirations.
Soft power cannot replace hard power, but it makes other states more
likely to follow the U.S. lead voluntarily and therefore makes the use
of hard power less necessary.
China
is trying to acquire more soft power to go along with its rising hard
power, mostly by trying to convince others that it is genuinely
committed to a more stable and just world order than the United States
is. One need not believe Beijing’s claims to recognize that they will
find a sympathetic audience in many parts of the world.
And
what is the United States doing in response? Under Trump 2.0, the
United States is imposing punitive tariffs on other countries for
assorted random reasons and with scant regard for the consequences. It
is illegally attacking other countries and civilian vessels and helping
its allies kill tens of thousands of innocent civilians, many of them
children. It is imposing sanctions not on the perpetrators of such
crimes, but on the officials at the International Criminal Court who are
trying to investigate their actions. At home, it has ordered troops into the streets of the nation’s capital, is rounding up and deporting people without due process, and breaking the law in countless other ways. And all the while, the president is enriching himself and his family, honoring insurrectionists and punishing those
who tried to hold them accountable. Only other would-be autocrats will
see these actions as something to admire, emulate, or follow.
Many
presidential administrations make rookie mistakes, and their
performance improves over time as the least competent officials get
fired and the rest of them learn how to do their jobs more effectively.
But this isn’t Donald Trump’s first term—he’s older and more
intellectually rigid, and his team this time around seems unusually
impervious to facts, evidence, logic, or learning. Which tells you that
this list of foreign-policy blunders is going to get a lot longer over
time.