American Power Extra: What Even Is Trump's Foreign Policy?

American Power

In this American Power Extra, Chad Scott dissects the contradictions in Donald Trump's 'America First' foreign policy, highlighting how unpredictability

Key takeaways

• Trump's foreign policy oscillates between demanding ally self-reliance while simultaneously weakening alliances through unpredictability and transactional behavior.
• The U.S. is depleting critical missile inventories in the Middle East for a war of choice, diverting resources from China-focused deterrence strategies.

Main topics

• Contradictions in Trump's America First foreign policy
• Military resource allocation: China vs. Iran

Notable quotes

"Reliability and unpredictability work against each other when you make both of them central to a foreign policy."

"We're carrying Iran ourselves for five months so far, using the missiles that we reserve for China."

Conclusion

Trump's foreign policy, despite its stated goals of strategic focus and alliance strength, is undermined by

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:03) This is your host, Nat Towson. You're listening to an American Power Extra, a bonus episode with one of our experts designed to go deeper into the energy, military, and geopolitical stories driving the news. If you're looking for more context, more history, and a better understanding of forces shaping global events, you're in the right place. Take it away, Chad. Speaker 1 (0:24) So what exactly is Donald Trump's foreign policy at this point? Because it seems we're seeing contradictions everywhere. Back in April of 2016, Trump promised an America first foreign policy that would replace, quote, randomness with purpose, ideology with strategy and chaos with peace. He promised allies that, quote, America is going to be reliable again. But in that same speech, he also declared, quote, we must as a nation be more unpredictable. Speaker 1 (0:51) Maybe he meant unpredictable to our adversaries, but anymore, it's just unpredictable. Reliability and unpredictability work against each other when you make both of them central to a foreign policy. And 10 years later, we can see which one he picked. And that is the first contradiction in his foreign policy. Reliability versus chaos, essentially. And it's not nearly the last one. I've counted seven major contradictions, and I'm going to walk you through every one of them. Now, the 2026 National Defense Strategy prioritizes defending the homeland, deterring China in the Indo-Pacific, making allies carry more of the defense burden, and rebuilding the American defense industrial base. It says explicitly that this is not a strategy of isolation. It's supposed to concentrate American power on the threats that matter most, while allies handle more of everything else. Speaker 1 (1:41) And in small doses, parts of this strategy have worked. In 2016, Trump complained that only four of America's 28 NATO allies were meeting the alliance's 2% defense spending target. By 2025, every NATO member had reached 2% and is now moving past it. Trump deserves some credit for pushing burden sharing into the center of NATO's debate. But Putin and his invasion of Ukraine share some of that credit, as does the fact that some of these countries are rightfully nervous about Trump's claims towards Greenland and parts of Canada. Now, Taiwan is moving in the same direction. They just proposed an 18% increase in defense spending for 2027, taking their budget above 3% of GDP with a goal of 5% by 2030. That also fits Trump theory almost perfectly. Speaker 1 (2:27) Countries facing the threat should invest far more in defending themselves. And I agree with that theory. What I don't agree with is how Trump did it. But he was part of that push and China's belligerence in the South China Sea did the rest. But then Trump repeatedly acts in ways that work against his own strategy. Let's start with China. In early December, the White House published a national security strategy that said we were pivoting away from the Middle East, and it rested on the assumption that Iran's nuclear program was finished after Midnight Hammer. A month later, the Pentagon's national defense strategy translated that into force planning. It warns about avoiding America being drawn into simultaneous major wars across theaters. Speaker 1 (3:08) It names China as the military priority and calls for a powerful denial defense along the first island chain, which includes Taiwan. And on Iran, it says our regional allies and partners take primary responsibility with Israel and the Gulf states out front and the United States in support. Both documents, two months apart, share the same answer. Iran belongs to... our partners. That all seemed in line with much of what we expected from Trump, but then Trump went to war with Iran bilaterally with Israel and now faces the blowback unilaterally. Speaker 1 (3:42) Five months in, the United States has used virtually all of its available long-range precision missiles. Estimates suggest roughly 65% of available Patriot interceptors and 38% of THAAD interceptors have been consumed, along with nearly half of the Navy's Tomahawk inventory. Other estimates from the Washington Post put THAAD depletion at near 80%. Basically, weapons built for a major war are being consumed in the Middle East, expended on a war of choice. Speaker 1 (4:08) Now, the administration knows this is a problem. They signed a deal worth more than $3 billion to triple Patriot component capacity and quadruple THAAD component capacity, as well as increase Tomahawk production from roughly 60 missiles annually to as many as 1,000. That's a good policy. It's also a year late, because factories cannot instantly replace missiles that have already been fired. This needed to happen before any movement toward Iran, not after. Speaker 1 (4:35) Then we have the USS George Washington, which was pulled from the Western Pacific and moved towards the Middle East to replace the Abraham Lincoln. This left China's backyard without a deployed American aircraft carrier, while China keeps pressure on Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan, and the Philippines. So we have contradiction number two, and he wrote it down twice, that Israel and the Gulf were to carry Iran so that we can carry China. Then we carried Iran ourselves for five months so far. Speaker 1 (5:02) using the missiles that we reserve for China. But the missiles are not the only place where this China policy runs into China reality. On January 14th of this year, the administration reversed export rules that had stood since 2022 and approved sales of NVIDIA's H200 chip to China. Commerce moved its license review from a presumption of denial to a case-by-case standard, and the federal government now takes a 25% cut of the sales. And to me, that seems kind of shady. Now, the H200 is not Nvidia's best chip. Blackwell and Rubin were held back. But it's roughly six times more powerful than anything Huawei can build at scale inside China today, and Chinese firms placed orders for more than two million of them. Speaker 1 (5:44) So