When a US presidential election race enters its final stages, there are, as one would expect, earnest conversations in Whitehall about the likely course of the different presidential candidates’ foreign policies. These can be dissatisfying, partly because the overriding importance of the US relationship to Britain’s national security interests restricts the parameters of the conversation, and partly because of the recognition that “events, dear boy” will always get in the way.
In the case of the second administration of Donald J Trump, the one thing that can be said for certain is that surprise, and indeed shock, are essential parts of the playbook. On the home front, polling suggests that the mid-terms this year may be tricky for the administration – a challenge compounded by tensions within the conservative movement – leading some to speculate that we have already passed peak Maga. On the international stage, though, the president clearly feels he can set the agenda with bold and daring acts – as he did at Christmas by dropping bombs in Nigeria to protect Christians and then by kidnapping and arresting the leader of Venezuela to raise the curtain on the new year.
As President Maduro discovered to his misfortune this week, history sometimes unfolds in a series of flashes and bangs. In a fable which applies to British foreign policy, you don’t always get time to put on your suit and tie before the Swat team comes crashing through the door.
Discerning a pattern from the new year fireworks is not an easy task. But one can see at least three distinctive characteristics to the Trump administration’s foreign policy behaviour one year into its second term.
The first is a willingness to use executive power to deploy the American military instrument in bold and decisive ways.
In this respect, there is a significant degree of continuity with the first Trump term. I was foreign policy advisor in No 10 in the new year of 2020, when Trump ordered the killing of General Qasem Soleimani, leader of the Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. I remember the concern among officialdom about the extra-judicial nature of assassination and the setting of a dangerous precedent, despite Suleimani’s role as a menace to regional security and mastermind of terrorism far beyond Iran. I remember the justifiable concern about the lack of forewarning, given that the UK had troops in American bases across the region which Iran threatened to attack, as well as British-flagged shipping which the Royal Navy was sent to protect. And I remember too the gnashing of teeth at Unesco and the raising of stern objections from Dominic Raab’s Foreign Office when Trump threatened to destroy cultural and historical sites if Iran sought to hurt US troops to deter any such response.
One can see this habit – the use of lightening military strikes in surprise attacks – reasserting itself within even greater alacrity today. If nothing else, it should put to bed forever the nonsensical idea that Trump is some sort of neo-isolationist. There was, for example, nothing inevitable about the Trump administration joining the Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June last year; by all accounts there was a lively debate within the administration and within the Maga movement about the value of engaging in another Middle East war, just as there had been over further strikes against the Houthis. But when the moment came, US involvement in the form of Operation Midnight Hammer was swift and decisive in targeting the key sites at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan which many had believed too risky to be on the agenda. It may be that 2026 requires another set of strikes to prevent the nuclear programme getting back on track – one to watch in the months ahead. But at the moment the Iranian regime has too many other problems, in the form of a groundswell of domestic protests, to want to test Donald Trump’s appetite to break another taboo by targeting the leadership in Tehran. Reports in the media suggest the Ayatollah may already have a bag packed for any such eventuality.
Following the latest use of executive powers to intervene in Venezuela, a debate is now raging in the US about Trump’s willingness to take such action without the consultation, let alone authority, of Congress. But even on the Democrat side of the aisle, it is not the same debate about verities of international law that we are having in European capitals.
As part of this, a new paradigm is emerging for how the military power is deployed, in an age when defence technology companies like Palantir and Anduril are the darlings of the Department of War. It is one that places a premium on information and technological superiority – often associated with the use of special forces and set up in contradistinction to the idea of long campaigns and “forever wars” in godforsaken parts of the world. It is not an unpopular argument with the American population given the long tail of those wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the costs paid in blood and treasure. So far the distinction is enough to keep the splits within the Maga movement under control, given the considerable distaste for any type of foreign interventionism that exists in the base.
Unconventional as it is, the commander in chief and the maker of deals inhabit the same strategic brain. Thus, the use of the military instrument is repeatedly used to buttress an unsentimental and hyperactive realpolitik. Witness the situation in post-Maduro Venezuela. Here the early signs are that Trump would rather cut a deal with the chastened remnants of the old regime than usher in some colour revolution in which the democratically-elected opposition takes the reins and the credit. To be clear, he is not solving for a queasy Western liberal audience who would be better able to stomach the political decapitation of Maduro if there followed the anointment of the highly palatable Maria Corina Machado, the latest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. As we have seen in the administration’s Middle East policy, being a person with whom one is able to do business, not trade in virtue, is the order of the day.
The second and most interesting aspect of what happened in Venezuela, is what it reveals about a new form of brutal mercantilist logic that underpins the administration’s broader approach. A major reason why the trajectory of Venezuela was deemed so unacceptable was that it saw one of the most oil-rich nations in the world – in addition to having vast reserves of gold, gas and iron ore – flaunting its assets to Chinese and Russian bidders in ways that cut across American commercial interests. This was understood in Washington and Florida as a direct affront to American dominance of international finance and commodities markets in its own backyard. The icing on the cake, and the casus belli, was Maduro’s tolerance of drug running and destabilisation of more pro-US neighbours in Guyana and Colombia, who also host vast US investments.
Unlike JFK or Bill Clinton, Donald Trump does not have an official court historian. But the echoes from previous eras are striking and they are being consciously evoked. In his first term, it was a portrait of the feisty Scots-Irish radical Democrat president Andrew Jackson – a favourite of Steve Bannon – who was on the Oval Office wall. This time around it is William McKinley, the president most associated with tariffs and the Spanish-American War of 1898. Indeed, American history from the turn of the last century is awash with examples of the US marine corps being deployed to Latin America to protect trade routes and commercial investments in banana republics. It is worth recalling here, too, the threats made last year to take back the Panama Canal due to the expansion of Chinese influence. Notably, these have receded, with the Panamanian government taking the heat out of the situation with the type of careful diplomacy Maduro was unable to perform.
Following on from this, the third element of Operation Absolute Resolve that is garnering a lot of attention is the notion of a new “hemispheric approach” to US national security. A quick look at the State Department’s social media accounts reveals this is how the communication’s people want it to be perceived. This new grand strategy was at the centre of November’s national security strategy, which declared that Trump would add his own corollary to the Monroe doctrine – prioritising not only border security but defence and dominance of the Western Hemisphere, including forcing out “extra-hemispheric” powers from its own backyard. Part of the appeal, of course, is that it is a narrative of American great power that does not depend on what is perceived as globalist guff about the world America made after 1945.
For those in Europe who are most concerned about Ukraine, or those in Asia most concerned about Taiwan, the worry is that there is an implicit – and in some cases explicit – quid pro quo which would allow the great powers of other hemispheres a greater free rein in their own near-neighbourhoods.
Lived experience suggests that putting a doctrine on Trump’s foreign policy approach is a fool’s errand. There is no simple Maga script. While the cultural and civilisational rhetoric garners the most attention in Europe, the economic and technologist-inspired drivers to the decision-making in the administration are not sufficiently understood. But the idea of a hemispherist approach is the balloon that currently has the most amount of air in it. And while that balloon is currently flying over Latin America, there is more reason than ever to believe that it will make a journey north to Greenland to cast a shadow there.
It is at this point that the differences between how America asserts its dominance in the northern versus the southern Western Hemisphere will come into sharp focus. The type of relative European acquiescence to events in Venezuela would of course be impossible should Greenland come under serious threat of annexation. The period from now – when the hemispherist argument has greatest momentum – to the mid-terms in November will be hard to navigate.
What is to be done in this period of radical uncertainty? A year ago, before Trump’s second inauguration, I wrote in these pages: “Much as we may wish it to be the case, we are not in a rule-of-law era… Instead, raw power is being asserted everywhere we look.” Harnessing the example of Ernie Bevin, Labour’s great postwar foreign secretary, I went on to argue that: “Hawking our conscience around, engaging in historical apologia, or merely clinging to our old assumptions will not be a profitable path.”
There followed a very polite exchange with the renowned lawyer and historian Philippe Sands, who has argued that international rules and norms are vital to our prosperity and security and that we abandon them at our peril. In truth, I don’t disagree with that sentiment. As a biographer of Clement Attlee, a great builder of the postwar order, I don’t contemplate the disordering world around me with much relish. I’ve also written about the profound problems of aping the so-called realpolitik of Carl Schmitt and pseudo-Bismarckians – the dual bogeymen of a rare foreign policy speech made by the Attorney General, Richard Hermer, last year. Should I ever attend a dinner party, Professor Sands and I may find ourselves just a few places apart at the same table.
But that is kind of the problem. Debates about the merits or otherwise of the so-called rules-based international order still have some theological and perhaps even practical value, but they should not consume any more of our energy than they already do. Britain and Europe – in whatever configuration – retain enough assets, including financial and cultural power, to have a considerable say in the shaping of international outcomes that matter to our security and prosperity. Some consequential moves have been made on UK and European defence. But there is still a way to go towards realising the radical implications of the arena in which we find ourselves.
As such, the acid test for seriousness cannot be the extent to which our leaders are expected to express unyielding fidelity to the old religion, for a world which we are right to mourn, but is not coming back. It cannot be healthy, for example, that more energy is spent in European capitals assessing the legality of Maduro’s toppling than on a post-mortem on the failure to mobilise frozen Russian assets in support of Ukraine at the most critical point in the war. And it is not enough to decry the ugly mercantilism now dominant in the most economically dynamic part of our hemisphere without developing our own version of economic and technological statecraft worthy of the name. The world has changed in ways that shake us to our foundations. Whether we like it or not, we must change with it.
[Further reading: Venezuela and the mutation of American imperialism]
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This article appears in the 07 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, What Trump wants
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Subscribe here to commentIs there not a fourth characteristic? The law of the jungle / “might makes right” / or as Thucydides’ put it: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” John Bew hints at that when he says the rule of law era is rapidly making way for an era of raw power.
As absolutely vital as al this is, the government is facing extreme problems at home due to the unravelling of the social fabric, with Reform and the Conservatives trying to pit prople against each other and vast wealth inequalities.