Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nexon
Analysts have long struggled to characterize U.S. President Donald Trump’s foreign policy. Because Trump pointedly rejects liberal-internationalist sensibilities, many have associated him with some form of realism, understood as the pursuit of the national interest defined entirely in terms of power. During his first term, after his 2017 National Security Strategy invoked “great-power competition,” the foreign policy community treated the phrase as the decoder ring by which they could rationalize his maneuvers. More recently, many have claimed that, to the contrary, Trump clearly favors a world in which great powers collude to carve up the world into spheres of influence. Throughout, the only constant interpretation has been that Trump has a “transactional” approach to international politics—the “art of the deal” as grand strategy.
But these assessments all rest on a category error. They begin from the premise that the Trump administration’s primary goal is, as its 2025 National Security Strategy insists, to advance the United States’ “core national interests.” Indeed, U.S. debates about foreign policy, national security, and grand strategy take it for granted that leaders design policy to serve the public good—even if those leaders’ view of the public interest is flawed—rather than to enrich themselves or inflate their personal glory. This is why so many foreign policy analyses argue that the “United States” or “Washington” ought to adopt a particular policy. They assume that the United States has interests that transcend party and that officials occupy their positions as a public trust.
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