The Trump Doctrine: Speak Loudly and Carry a Big Stick

Randall Fowler 

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Trump made innumerable, often contradictory, promises on the 2024 campaign trail. In foreign policy, he interspersed strong rhetoric against U.S. enemies with promises to end “forever wars” and bring peace to both Ukraine and Gaza within days—indeed, a day—of entering office. Nominations to his foreign policy team painted a similarly convoluted picture, with hawks, doves, conspiracists, pivoters-to-Asia, and a handful of converted neoconservatives populating key positions.

With Mike Waltz’s ouster as National Security Advisor close to the 100-day mark of Trump’s second administration, a less hazy outline of the 47th president’s approach to foreign policy is taking shape. While Ionut Popescu has posited that Trump is operating from a realist framework, Valerie Hudson contends that Trump’s attempt to carve out a coherent doctrine—restoring “great power spheres of influence, that is, a true multipolar world that relies on regional policemen, not one global policeman, to keep the peace internationally”—falls into incoherence when confronted with Trump’s actual policies in the Middle East and the Taiwan Strait. Others argue that the Trump doctrine essentially entails “unrestrained strength,” capricious opportunism, or a revival of conservative American nationalism. While each of these interpretations highlights an important dimension of Trump’s geopolitical disposition, none clearly identifies the strategic logic linking the president’s global actions to his domestic political considerations.

This essay offers a much simpler heuristic for analyzing Trump’s global actions in a way that accommodates many of the perspectives referenced above. This time around, despite his admiration for William McKinley, it’s McKinley’s successor, Theodore Roosevelt, that serves as the model for Trump’s foreign policy, which could be summarized as a twist on TR’s famous phrase: “Speak loudly and carry a big stick.”