Foreign Policy - A Better “America First” What Trump Gets Right—and Wrong—About Foreign Policy - Charles Kupchan - October 19, 2026

 Foreign  Policy 

A Better “America First”

What Trump Gets Right—and Wrong—About Foreign Policy

Charles Kupchan

October 19, 2026

U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., July 2022 

Sarah Silbiger / Reuters

CHARLES KUPCHAN is Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University and a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of Bringing Order to Anarchy: Governing the World to Come.

Critics from across the political spectrum have disparaged U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America first” brand of statecraft—and for good reason. He has alienated allies, appeased great-power rivals, launched yet another failed war of choice in the Middle East, and blundered into trade wars that have worsened the United States’ affordability crisis.

But as debate heats up about what the next administration’s foreign policy should look like, Democrats and Republicans alike must be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Trump is right to recognize that U.S. strategy is in need of an overhaul. Most of his instincts are sound and align with fundamental changes in the international system and in American public opinion. His “America first” foreign policy is a symptom, not a cause, of global disarray and the public’s turn against the establishment; many U.S. voters have been disillusioned by the country’s chronic overreach abroad and the affordability crisis at home. Trump successfully tapped into these grievances by promising to scale back international entanglements and bring back factories and manufacturing jobs.

These are worthy goals, but Trump’s policies have badly missed their mark. He has started new wars and mostly failed to end old ones, and his tariffs have fueled inflation while doing little to resuscitate the manufacturing sector. Trump has implemented his course corrections with marked incompetence, making policy by impulse, gutting the diplomatic corps, relying on an inexperienced inner circle, and prizing loyalty over fact.

The challenge ahead is not to reflexively restore what came before; liberal internationalism long served the United States well, but during an era that no longer exists. Instead of burying “America first,” Trump’s successor should salvage its best elements and implement them more capably. The next version of U.S. foreign policy should marry the realist impulses that shape “America first” with the liberal cause that remains at the heart of the American experience. That composite strategy would see Washington pare back its commitments abroad, reach across ideological dividing lines to work with great-power rivals, operate through nimble coalitions, and repair the United States’ broken social contract and ailing democracy. Foreign policy starts at home: only by redressing the socioeconomic discontent that has cleaved the body politic into hostile camps can the country recoup the bipartisan centrism and democratic vitality needed to anchor a purposeful and steady statecraft.

OUT OF THE MIRE

Two tectonic shifts are leading to a historic turning point. Power is rapidly shifting from West to East and North to South, as Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and other large developing countries rise. The United States and its democratic allies, assuming they manage to stay partners, will remain an influential bloc, but no longer a preponderant one. As the diffusion of power fuels geopolitical rivalries, Americans are growing weary of entanglement in a fragmenting world. Meanwhile, technological advances made possible by the digital age have undermined the social contract of the industrial era and hollowed out the middle class. As broadly shared prosperity has given way to economic insecurity and inequality, political cleavages have emerged along socioeconomic, educational, and rural-urban lines. Liberal democracy is in retreat worldwide, including in the United States, where the centrist, bipartisan compact that long anchored U.S. statecraft has collapsed.

Enter Trump. By the time U.S. forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021, more than 70 percent of Americans deemed the two-decade war a failure. Speaking to an electorate fed up with the never-ending conflicts in the Middle East, Trump pledged “no more wars” as he ran for reelection in 2024. He began his second term by using force sparingly. The single-night air campaign against Iran’s nuclear installations in June 2025 and the in-and-out raid to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January 2026 succeeded in their narrow aims. Perhaps emboldened by these low-cost wins, Trump then proceeded to launch a full-scale war against Iran in February 2026. By planning for a short conflict and getting stuck in a long one, he fell into the very trap that he swore to avoid.

Given that the United States keeps getting mired in errant conflicts, Congress urgently needs to reassert its constitutional obligation to approve acts of war and oversee retrenchment. The bar for engaging in major conflicts outside the core strategic areas of Europe and East Asia should be quite high. It is past time for Washington to return to its traditional geopolitical vocation: playing the role of great-power balancer in order to preserve stability in the strategic heartland. American strategy toward Europe and East Asia has been a steady and cost-effective success, facilitating great-power peace since 1945. The roughly 150,000 U.S. troops still stationed in these core theaters are a wise investment in extending that track record.

Power is rapidly shifting from West to East and North to South.

A retrenchment from the Middle East and other peripheral areas does not mean a comprehensive retreat, but it does mean relying far more heavily on diplomacy and economic engagement than on the military. When force is required to counter threats to U.S. interests or allies, the United States should generally limit itself to supporting regional partners and relying on special forces and surgical strikes. As it seeks to end its addiction to military force, Washington could take a page from Beijing: China has spread its influence and maximized its leverage in the global South not through armed intervention but through investments, trade, and the Belt and Road Initiative, the biggest infrastructure project in modern history.

As the United States refocuses its attention and resources on maintaining stability in Asia and Europe, it can nonetheless lighten its load by rebalancing its alliances. Trump made headway by pushing allies to shoulder their fair share of the defense burden; NATO members and Asian allies are substantially increasing their defense budgets. But true to form, Trump has marred this success by taking actions that corrode decades of trust, such as threatening to seize Greenland and repeatedly demeaning allied leaders.

Allies are force multipliers; rather than alienating them, the United States should hold them even closer as they beef up their militaries. Washington should work with allies’ defense industries and military planners to come up with a new division of labor, set force levels, and create a realistic timetable to meet their goals. The United States’ network of defense pacts is poised to get stronger as its allies get stronger, but only if rebalancing occurs with consent, foresight, and respectful treatment of partners.

SPHERE FACTOR

Adjusting U.S. strategy to the onset of multipolarity also entails building on Trump’s recognition that regional spheres of influence are making a comeback. As power diffuses across the international system, Washington will be neither willing nor able to oversee all the world’s main strategic theaters. Instead, major powers in each theater will play a more prominent role in guiding projects of regional integration, shaping regional order, and providing public goods.

For decades, most American policymakers have denounced spheres of influence. In 2021, Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the concept “a recipe for an international system that falls apart.” Yet since the founding era, the United States has prioritized establishing and defending its own sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere. During the Cold War, Washington granted the Soviet Union a buffer zone in Eastern Europe while entrenching its own zones of control in Western Europe, Northeast Asia, and the Middle East.

Trump recognizes this double standard. The 2025 National Security Strategy endorses a reassertion of U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere and calls on other countries to “assume primary responsibility for their regions.” Trump has exhibited long overdue regard for the strategic interests of other great powers and appropriate caution about the extension of U.S. commitments into their backyards. He has precluded the possibility of Ukraine’s entry into NATO, aware that membership would run afoul of Russia’s legitimate security interests and overextend the alliance. He is also looking for ways to reduce tensions in East Asia, pausing arms sales to Taiwan and canceling military exercises with South Korea.

When the United States defects, others follow.

But even if Trump is right to herald a return of spheres of influence, he has acted with self-defeating excess. In the Western Hemisphere, he has been driving away Canada, treating Venezuela like a U.S. colony, strangling Cuba, ordering strikes of questionable legality against boats allegedly running drugs, and renaming the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario. Instead of working toward a benign sphere of influence that attracts neighbors and promotes stability, Trump has been building a malign sphere of coercion that prompts other countries to run for cover.

Trump is making a similar mess in other theaters. Even if he is right to close NATO’s door to Ukraine, he has failed to convince Russia to end its war of aggression. A vision of a stable security order in Europe is nowhere to be found. And although regional integration offers the best bet for creating the stronger Europe that Trump seeks, he is backing far-right parties hostile to the European Union. Trump’s approach to East Asia is similarly muddled. He holds summits with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and hopes to do the same with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, but his administration lacks a coherent strategy for China or northeast Asia more broadly.

The diffusion of power makes a more regionalized world inevitable, and to maintain order in that world, the United States will need to work with China, Russia, and other countries that hold sway in their neighborhoods. Trump’s successors will need to salvage his defective effort to help guide this transition. Washington needs to exercise a restrained and lawful brand of hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, respecting the sovereignty of its neighbors and pursuing mutual gains. That approach will encourage other powers to do the same in their own neighborhoods. To that end, Washington needs to grant Russia and China more breathing room in return for their readiness to exercise restraint within their regions. Moscow and Beijing might well take a less coercive stance toward their neighbors if the United States were to reduce its own military presence in and designs on their rimlands.

It will be particularly important for the United States to work with China, its only peer competitor, to de-escalate tensions without encouraging Chinese expansionism. On one hand, the United States needs to make allowances for growing Chinese power and ambition. A new regional order in Asia will endure only if the reigning hegemon and rising challenger can come to terms on the distribution of power and influence within the order. On the other hand, Washington cannot allow Chinese aggression against its neighbors. The United States needs to walk a fine line between prudent accommodation and dangerous appeasement. The goal in the long term would be to establish a multilateral system of regional governance—anchored by China but accepted by its neighbors.

UNTIED NATIONS

Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy embraces what it calls “flexible realism,” a pragmatic foreign policy that aims to establish good relations with all countries “without imposing on them democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories.” This readiness to work across ideological lines is an important corrective to the “democracy versus autocracy” framework that guided the Biden administration’s foreign policy. The United States must navigate the world as it is, not as it would like it to be. Trump is right to reach out to autocracies and set aside the zealous promotion of democracy.

Trump’s flexible realism also entails recognizing the need to form bespoke coalitions of the willing to augment the United Nations and other large multilateral institutions. When it comes to preventing or stopping major conflicts, the UN has largely been a bystander. Support for formal multilateralism has also evaporated in Washington; Republicans, in particular, have embraced a hostility toward institutionalized international commitments. Coalitions of the willing are already emerging as the vehicles of choice for resolving conflicts. China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States negotiated the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. Oman, Pakistan, and Qatar have led efforts to mediate between Iran and the United States. Meanwhile, a coalition of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States has been working to end Sudan’s civil war.

Yet even if Trump’s brand of realism marks a needed course correction, its implementation has been deeply flawed. Trump’s outreach to Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin occurs in fits and starts and lacks a clear set of objectives. Washington’s unilateralism and fondness for ad hoc coalitions have also gone too far. The UN system admittedly falls woefully short on managing most security issues, but it plays an important role in humanitarian relief, global health, and climate change. By slashing humanitarian assistance and withdrawing from the World Health Organization and the Paris climate agreement, Trump has hobbled effective multilateral initiatives. And even though his signature coalition of the willing, the Board of Peace, has potential, it was thrown together haphazardly. The board’s first mission—to pacify and bring lawful governance to Gaza—has been an utter failure.

Americans have little choice but to ride out the Trump era.

Whoever comes after Trump should continue his pragmatic effort to work with autocracies. But that effort must be guided by a clear set of strategic objectives, promote geopolitical stability, and be anchored by the sustained work of experts, not just a handful of financiers. Experienced U.S. diplomats should thoroughly prepare summits and identify concrete deliverables with their foreign counterparts. Summits between world leaders are critical opportunities to advance the cause of global stability and must be treated as such.

Greater reliance on coalitions of the willing is the right move, but they need to be fit for their purpose. The Board of Peace is certainly not. It has over 25 members, including countries that carry little diplomatic weight, such as Kosovo, Mongolia, and Paraguay. Instead, the board should function as a concert of great powers, both democratic and autocratic, tasked with managing crises and overseeing and building consensus on matters of global governance. Unlike the UN Security Council, which is often paralyzed by veto, this steering group would forgo binding rules and formal charters. It would strive for consensus through the give-and-take of diplomacy, providing a venue for sustained engagement that currently does not exist.

Even as it sets up a great-power steering group to manage core security issues, Washington should resume supporting the UN to advance human welfare. The World Food Program, the World Health Organization, and the Paris climate agreement may not be perfect, but Washington should try to make them more effective, not undermine them. And when the United States defects, others follow. France, Sweden, and the United Kingdom all slashed spending on foreign assistance after the United States gutted its own budget. Washington needs to be a leader, not a laggard, on issues of human welfare. Doing so is not only a matter of altruism; the United States itself will have to grapple with migrants fleeing failing states, pandemics, and the dangers of climate change.

Finally, although the United States should continue to practice ideological pluralism and work with autocracies, that effort must be paired with a revival of democracy at home. Americans have no choice but to learn to live comfortably in a politically diverse world. Yet they should do so while upholding the original version of U.S. exceptionalism, which was to spread republican ideals by serving as a democratic exemplar. Americans should not give up on their messianic mission to bend the arc of history toward more freedom. But instead of seeking to foist democracy on others, they should pursue this mission by refurbishing the American experiment and demonstrating that representative government can outperform the autocratic alternatives.

IT STARTS AT HOME

The antiestablishment wave that Trump rode to power in 2016 and 2024 is animated by discontent with the quality of life at home at least as much as overreach abroad. Much of Trump’s voter base feels left behind by automation and globalization, displaced by immigrants, and sidelined by progressive social and cultural trends. Trump has responded by cracking down on immigrants and attacking “DEI”—diversity, equity, and inclusion. At the center of his domestic agenda is his pledge to rebuild the middle class. As he ran for reelection in 2024, Trump promised that higher tariffs would turn the United States back into a “manufacturing powerhouse,” with plenty of factory jobs to go around.

Trump is right to want to tame inequality, scale back some of the excesses of globalization, and secure supply chains of critical goods. But his protectionism won’t revive the manufacturing sector. Automation, not free trade, is the main cause of the decades-long decline in manufacturing jobs. Despite years of tariffs and industrial policy, manufacturing jobs have continued to disappear. And the rate at which machines replace humans will pick up as firms grow reliant on artificial intelligence. Around 80 percent of the U.S. workforce already works in the service sector, and most will not be headed back to the production line. In the meantime, Trump’s tariffs, combined with the supply chain disruptions caused by the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, have significantly raised the cost of living—the main reason that Republicans are heading into the midterms in deep political trouble.

Instead of promising to claw back manufacturing jobs that are gone for good, the next administration should train Americans for the jobs of the future. The public sector must work with the private sector to fashion an education and employment ecosystem fit for the digital age. In the decades ahead, most Americans will work in information technology, data processing, education, finance, health care, travel, hospitality, leisure, and retail. And as AI disrupts labor markets in many different sectors, workers will need transferable skills that will allow them to adapt. Expanding worker retraining programs, investing in the ailing public school system, and improving access to community colleges will do far more than tariffs to rebuild the middle class—and are the first steps in forging a new social contract. A credible plan for getting Americans back on their feet is critical to repairing the nation’s democracy and steadying its statecraft.

Even if the Democrats take back control of one or both chambers in the November midterms—which appears likely—they will struggle to change Trump’s course. He ignores Congress on most issues, but especially on matters of foreign policy, over which the legislative branch has limited power.

Accordingly, Americans have little choice but to ride out the Trump era and try to limit the damage that he does by defending democracy at home. But getting ready for the next administration requires drawing the right lessons from his errant presidency. Trump has begun implementing a needed overhaul of U.S. grand strategy, but he is incapable of turning good instincts into sound policy. It will be up to his successor to better align U.S. grand strategy with a changing world and provide the judgment and competence missing from Trump’s time in charge.