The year in foreign policy

Editor’s note: We’ll be off for the holidays for the next two weeks. We’ll return to your inbox on Friday, January 9, 2026.

As 2025 winds down, it’s a good time to look back, step back, and try to see what bigger themes and lessons might be drawn from the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term.

When Trump was reelected president last year, many Americans believed, for good reason, that he would chart an isolationist course for the country. But one of the biggest foreign policy surprises of 2025 might well be that, one year into this term, Trump has not only eschewed isolationism but established a new brand of American internationalism with Trumpian characteristics.

Indeed, it’s hard to be an isolationist and call for the acquisition of the Panama Canal, Canada, and Greenland. That’s nothing if not international engagement. Nor does one earn a Nobel Peace Prize by sitting on the sidelines. Rather, Trump has taken credit or been personally involved in nine international conflicts, including Gaza and Ukraine.

On the campaign trail, Trump made it known that he had been obstructed in his first term by neoconservative and globalist advisors who thwarted the unbridled implementation of his American First foreign policy agenda. He argued his predecessors, including former President Joe Biden, were too focused on conflicts and peacemaking abroad in Europe and the Middle East. He condemned “forever wars” and opposed state-building efforts, calling the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq misguided. Trump made strikingly clear that under his leadership, democracy promotion and human rights would no longer dictate his foreign policy, and that the United States would leave the domestic and regional affairs of other countries to their own leaders.

With nearly a year of foreign policy under this guidance behind us, however, it’s now clear that Trump is no isolationist. This isn’t to say that he is a liberal internationalist like his Republican and Democratic predecessors, who worked to strengthen international institutions, followed a rules-based system, and underscored the importance of international cooperation to address both national interests and transnational challenges. Far from it. Rather, he has recast internationalism in his own image.

This term, President Trump is bringing his A-game of personal diplomacy to the fore., with a seemingly indefatigable appetite for international engagement. However, at times, his foreign policy in practice seems to be in tension with his critique of prior administrations’ foreign policies. Early in his term, for example, Trump noted that, “In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.”

After criticizing predecessors for involving the U.S. in foreign military conflicts, he has mounted an unprecedented display of gunboat diplomacy against Venezuela. He has ordered the U.S. military to strike more than twenty boats alleged to be involved in drug trafficking and has deployed the largest show of force to the Caribbean in decades, sending the Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group south to the Caribbean. All told, an estimated fifteen percent of the U.S. Navy has deployed to the region, supported by thousands of troops.

Moreover, the administration is engaged in a very complex state-building undertaking of its own: a twenty-step, multi-stage plan to rebuild Gaza. That plan, which is in its early stages of implementation, goes beyond a ceasefire, return of live hostages and hostage remains, release of prisoners, and surge of humanitarian aid. It also calls for the creation of an International Stabilization Force (ISF), governance by an “apolitical Palestinian committee,” and a reconstruction effort overseen by a “Board of Peace” chaired by Trump himself. While U.S. forces won’t be part of the ISF inside Gaza’s borders, some two hundred troops have deployed to the region to monitor the ceasefire and help facilitate the delivery of aid. The goal might not be Jeffersonian democracy, but it sure looks like state-building to me.

Finally, having criticized his predecessors for being preoccupied with human rights, Trump suggested early in his term, in remarks he made while visiting Saudi Arabia, that the United States would no longer be lecturing other countries on their domestic practices. Since then, though, he has reoriented the United States’ posture toward at least three countries—Brazil, Nigeria, and South Africa—for what the president views as mistreatment of political rivals and religious and ethnic minorities. Earlier this year, Brazil was subject to tariffs as high as 50 percent and its Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes (and his wife) were put under U.S. sanctions over the country’s prosecution of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Nigeria is under threat of U.S. military action for its treatment of Christians. And for South Africa, Trump boycotted the G20 host over what he has alleged is their genocidal policy toward white South Africans, while prioritizing slots for white South Africans entering the United States as refugees amid a record-low 7,500-person annual limit.

What we learned this year is that Trump does not seek the end of American international leadership, only its redesign. He has rejected traditional approaches to globalism and interventionism for their inefficiency, their moralism, and their failure to deliver visible results. Trump believes that American power can be exercised more selectively, more transactionally, and with fewer costs borne at home. The question now is whether this more selective, transactional approach can withstand the tradeoffs it inevitably creates. A president elected on a promise of no new foreign wars may soon face hard choices if pressure on Venezuela escalates beyond coercion and into conflict. “Peace through strength” will be tested not by rhetoric but by whether the administration is willing to devote sustained resources and accept real risk to bring the war in Ukraine to an end, or to enforce fragile ceasefires and political arrangements in Gaza or between Cambodia and Thailand. Even Trump’s emphasis on restraint carries its own costs: prioritizing homeland defense and hemispheric dominance may complicate efforts to deter China in the Indo-Pacific.

Trump’s emerging brand of internationalism is clearer than many expected. Whether it proves durable will depend less on its ambitions than on how the administration—and the public—respond when its internal tensions prove difficult to manage.

Let me know what you think about the year in review and what this column should cover next by replying to president@cfr.org.

What I’m tuning into this week:

• My appearance on CNBC’s Squawk Box earlier this week

• The Center for Preventive Action’s 2026 Preventive Priorities Survey Results

• Bruce Hoffman’s analysis of the Bondi Beach attack and the threat of ISIS for CFR.org

• Chao Deng and Drew An-Pham’s “Why Everyone Got Trump’s Tariffs Wrong” for the Wall Street Journal

• Chris McGuire’s assessment of China’s AI chip deficit for CFR.org

• The latest iteration of the CFR.org series “How I Got My Career in Foreign Policy” featuring William Davis