Peter D. Feaver
Both supporters and critics of U.S. President Donald Trump agree that the first year of his second term has been an extraordinarily disruptive one. But for all its significance, this disruption wasn’t entirely unexpected. Even as the final votes were being tallied, enough was known about Trump’s intentions to make some relatively confident predictions about the shape of his second term, as I did one year ago for Foreign Affairs. Many of these predictions have already manifested. For example, Trump’s most senior advisers are, as he promised they would be, people chosen based on personal loyalty and their capacity to mobilize his base. With some notable exceptions, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, who may have fit into the old Trump cabinet, the personnel now driving Trump’s second term policy apparatus are the “chaos agents” who were expected after the election.
Trump is also leaning even further into unilateralism, which was predictable given that he entered office this time around without many of the geopolitical constraints he had previously. In 2017, for instance, he inherited two coalitional wars with U.S. troop involvement (Afghanistan and the counter-ISIS campaign), and his hands were tied in regard to Iran by the coalitional diplomatic approach embodied in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Similarly, the constraints of the global trading system, which the first Trump administration had already sought to reduce, were reduced still further in the intervening years by efforts after the COVID-19 pandemic to create greater resiliency. Economically, Trump had a much freer hand to play in 2025, and as such he could pursue his maximalist approach to tariffs.
It was also possible to foresee much rockier civil-military relations this time around. Trump spent much of his first term surrounded by retired military brass, but during the last six months of that term, when their advice increasingly diverged from Trump’s preferences and his base criticized him for giving in to their concerns, Trump concluded that the military was part of a “deep state” that was committed to hobbling him. Trump and his surrogates made clear that they intended to clean house on their return. Although his decision to summarily remove at least 15 senior officers—many of them women or people of color—without reference to specific instances of dereliction was alarming, it was not altogether surprising.
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