One year into the second Trump administration, an actual US foreign policy remains just a nice idea. Instead, the world has been forced to adapt to the world according to Donald Trump: one increasingly shaped by his erratic shifts and unpredictable decisions, his fury at perceived slights and his growing desire to stamp his legacy in the model of an imperial leader from centuries past.
Think of it as the mad king’s court, where every day is a carnival.
Consider the last few days. Trump texted the Norwegian prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, at the weekend to tell him that because he had not been awarded the Nobel peace prize “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.” The world would not be secure “unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland”, he wrote.
The Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, has said a US takeover of Greenland would mark the end of Nato, and the drama will continue to play out at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week. When the French president, Emmanuel Macron, sought to organise a G7 meeting and dinner to smooth over their differences, Trump leaked that conversation too.
At the same time, the US president invited Vladimir Putin to an ill-defined “board of peace” intended to oversee the transition to a lasting peace in Gaza, despite the Kremlin’s continued invasion of Ukraine that has left millions of casualties and threatened Europe’s security. Trump appears to be positioning the new group to undermine the UN, which despite its flaws has been a cornerstone of the post-second world war order that has prevented the outbreak of further global conflict. When informed that Macron may not join, Trump threatened to slap a 200% tariff on French wine and champagne.
Trump was also pictured last week grinning broadly as the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado presented him with her Nobel peace prize medal. After considerable pressure, the award was handed over as tribute. “Does President Trump not realize he looks kind of silly taking that prize from her as she tries to basically suck up to him?” said Mark Warner, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate’s select committee on intelligence.
It has been, to paraphrase Lenin, the weeks when decades happen.
World leaders may previously have felt that they could manage the Trump administration’s frenetic focus by slowing down his demands on Ukraine, Nato spending or Gaza. But it now appears primed to ignore its allies and shake up the world order – perhaps mindful that with one year already passed in the White House, Trump only has three years left and faces painful midterm elections later this year.
“What you see now is simply just everything could be justified in pure power terms, and that’s very new for the United States … that’s not really something we’ve done for the last 80 years,” said Max Bergmann, the director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia programme at the Stuart Center in Euro-Atlantic and Northern European Studies, part of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC.
“Now what we have is America just acting willy-nilly. We’re acting like Russia,” he said. “And I think that that is what the world is sort of awoken to … That here is a 19th-century America that wants to operate along imperial lines, the way the world operated in the late 19th century.”
Facing resistance to his efforts to rewrite electoral laws and deploy the national guard and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers at home, Trump has turned towards the world stage as a salve.
He has claimed to have “solved” six, and then seven – and then eight wars, more than any other president, despite the dubious nature of many of the “peace processes” concerned. His anger at being overlooked for the Nobel peace prize, which was famously given to his nemesis, Barack Obama, shortly after the Democratic president’s election in 2009, has also driven a quest for global recognition that has played out in tragicomic terms.
“For the president, the question of legacy is important, which is why we’ve seen so much foreign policy activity in this term, unlike the first,” said Kristine Berzina, the senior fellow for US defence and transatlantic security at the German Marshall Fund. “Efforts at peace, efforts at regime change and efforts at territorial acquisition are all part of a notion of legacy. And there isn’t that much time.”
Trump had a busy year in foreign policy in 2025, capped in January this year by the capture and rendition of the Venezuelan strongman, Nicolás Maduro in a legally dubious raid that Trump presents as a signature foreign policy victory. He brokered a shaky and incomplete peace in Gaza, largely by giving Israel carte blanche, but it is now unclear how to make good on his plan to disarm Hamas. He bombed nuclear sites in Iran during Israel’s brief war with Tehran, and targeted Houthi rebels in Yemen in a campaign seen as ineffective.
He successfully pushed Nato allies to increase defence spending while bringing relations with European capitals to the breaking point over tariffs, his Ukraine policy and his claims that Europeans are stifling free speech and enabling mass migration. His advisers harangued Ukrainian leaders, he cosied up to foreign dictators and announced surprise tariffs that have unsettled world markets.
All of that has been done virtually ad hoc. Strategy in Washington is not hammered out through policy memos or inter-agency meetings. Key foreign policy decisions have been increasingly mediated by a group of five, including Trump’s vice-president, JD Vance; his secretary of state, Marco Rubio; his powerful deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller; his envoy Steve Witkoff and his chief of staff, Susie Wiles.
Despite different priorities, those figures have found common cause on key decisions – in Venezuela, Rubio’s focus on leftwing regimes fuelled by his Cuban heritage coincided with Miller’s obsessive focus on combating immigration to the US and Vance’s interest in countering Chinese influence in Latin America.
In Greenland, Vance, an outspoken critic of Europe, has seen a chance to further undermine the transatlantic relationship and set European leaders on edge when he joined Rubio to receive the foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland last week. But Trump’s ultimate goal is to put his name in the history books.
“Greenland for the sake of territory, Greenland for the sake of how you transform a map, Greenland for a sake of legacy,” said Berzina. “Those are the primary objectives.”
In Trump’s world there are winners and losers, bullies and the bullied. The only US foreign policy now is one of might makes right, and Trump and his allies have made clear that in their worldview geopolitics is a zero-sum game.
Given that conflict in the Arctic was likely in the future, his treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, mused: “Better now peace through strength, make it part of the United States, and there will not be a conflict because the United States right now, we are the hottest country in the world. We are the strongest country in the world. Europeans project weakness. US projects strength.”
In May last year, Trump accepted a UK plan to return the Chagos Islands, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, to Mauritius – and Rubio praised the deal, saying Trump had told Keir Starmer it was a “monumental achievement” that they would maintain access to a US-UK base on Diego Garcia. A year later, Trump posted that it was an “act of GREAT STUPIDITY” and one of his many reasons for demanding the handover of Greenland.
In Trump’s new world order, all agreements and alliances can find themselves hostage to the whims of the moment.
“These are International Powers who only recognise STRENGTH, which is why the United States of America, under my leadership, is now, after only one year, respected like never before,” he wrote.
