In the late Soviet president’s memoirs, Andrei Gromyko says that Richard Nixon was a productive diplomatic partner because the man from Yorba Linda stuck to highly concrete particulars: “I cannot remember an occasion when he launched into a digression on the differing social structures of our states. He always presented himself as a pragmatist uninterested in the theoretical aspects of an issue, a man who preferred to keep discussions on a purely practical level.”
The man from Queens, our own Donald Trump, has similar instincts; that’s all to the good. Politics is not the realm of geometry. Universals—we won’t negotiate with terrorists, we’ll back whomever for however long as it takes, autocracies versus democracies, and so on—tend not only to make for unsound policy, but retrospectively to be embarrassing and politically damaging.
Anyone might be forgiven for wishing Trump had just a touch more ideology, though. The realist and restrainer foreign policy camp has always overstated the degree to which Trump shares their priors; this has been well proven by interventions in Syria, Iran, Yemen, and elsewhere. They’re not alone in this: Social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, and various breeds of libertarian have all been disappointed to varying degrees by Trump’s moderate-at-best attitudes about abortion, sexuality, policing, and deficit spending.
Trump is, however, a politician and an opportunist; if the Republican primary field he’s facing has an ideological commitment to a long-running, deeply unpopular war, he’ll use that stick to smack his enemies. His hesitation about the use of armed force is as much a canny recognition of how badly long wars have gone for American politicians in his lifetime as it is some abstract commitment to peace, love, and understanding.
Trump is extraordinarily reactive to American public opinion. (An unexamined hypothetical is that his recent moderating statements on legal immigration are a response to the fabulously unpopular implementation of his immigration enforcement policy.) He is extraordinarily protective of his room for maneuver. This adds up to being—by modern standards—extraordinarily hesitant to take on long-term obligations with almost unlimited liability, such as foreign wars. But it is not a coherent policy, or even a coherent premise. If Trump thinks he can drop some bombs and get away with it, he is happy to do so; if some policy course is proving difficult and immediately unproductive, he will pursue apparent shortcuts and workarounds.
Related to this remarkable sensitivity to public opinion is the fact that Trump likes guys who seem like winners—Tiger Woods, Javier Milei, Shedeur Sanders (“great genes!”), Ahmed al-Sharaa, the Gulfis, the Israelis. He understands that the American people also like winners. (A peculiar American syndrome is affecting to like underdogs while always putting money on the favorite.) If he can bandwagon on someone who is on a hot streak—Zohran Mamdani, the Republic of Turkey—he will.
So, you’ll protest, this all is known; this is old stuff, there’s nothing fresh here. Fine. But it’s worth revisiting in the context of whatever the hell is going on in the Caribbean and the uncertain-but-not-quite-skunked Ukraine deal.