The Iran war is testing Trump’s “America First” message
Trump spent years criticizing prolonged U.S. wars overseas. Now, his own war with Iran is fueling backlash from some of his strongest supporters.
LONDON − Bomb Oman. Abandon South Korea. Pull out of NATO. Seize Greenland. Maybe Canada, too.
Order U.S. special forces to snatch a troublesome Latin American dictator. Then grab that country’s oil reserves.
For the best part of a decade since he first entered the disorderly world of global diplomacy, President Donald Trump has played fast and loose with U.S. foreign policy. He’s repeatedly threatened traditional American allies. He’s spent large amounts of time courting and flirting with unpredictable adversaries like North Korea and Russia.
The U.S. foreign policy establishment has bristled at this approach, which appears to make allies of foes, and foes of allies. Markets, which crave certainty, don’t like it either. U.S. international partners have struggled to adapt to it.
But is there a defensible logic to this turn-on-your-friends, win-over your-foes strategy? Or is it simply hastening the decline of American power at a time when China is matching, if not surpassing, the U.S. in various hyper-competitive fields from technology to military advancements, from scientific research to extending the reach of its soft power?
Some political scientists and former government officials say the answer is Yes and No. Sorta. Somewhat. Alliances are shaking up, resetting, reordering. But it’s unclear if it’s a permanent, irreversible and wholly unprecedented shift.
And, they say, it may not be all for the bad.
“The establishment is apoplectic. In my career, I’ve never seen them so downcast and so convinced that our leader is making mistake after mistake,” said Lyle Goldstein of the reshuffling of the longtime American overseas playbook. He’s the director of the China Initiative at Brown University’s Watson School of International and Public Affairs.
“I do agree Trump’s making a lot of mistakes. However, I have some sympathy for his skepticism of alliances. It’s obvious that one reason the United States has fallen behind in so many indicators of living standards is that we are carrying much more of the burden than other countries,” said Goldstein, who also serves as director of the Asia Program at the Washington think tank Defense Priorities, which argues for a smaller global U.S. military footprint.
Goldstein said Trump’s apparent disdain for international institutions such as NATO and the United Nations that have been the main venues for western cooperation and security since the end of World War II is gradually forcing a new world order that he calls “complex multipolarity.” That’s where power could eventually be spread among several major nations or regions rather than being concentrated in the hands of two superpowers: the United States and China.
Still, Daniel Fried, former U.S. ambassador to Poland and a fellow at the Atlantic Council, an international affairs think tank based in Washington, said he is not yet ready to say that Trump is entirely remaking the world order.
To change the world order, Fried said, “you’ve got to have some structure as an alternative.” Fried also worked as a special assistant to former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
“I’m not sure there is one in mind or that the Trump administration has settled on what it wants. And I’m not sure how much will be lasting after the end of this administration.”
Trump seems to be focused more on consolidating American power than remaking the international order, said Dan Hamilton, a foreign policy expert at the Washington-based Brookings Institution’s Center on the U.S. and Europe.
“He believes that international rules are simply constraining,” Hamilton said. “If you’re the biggest power in the world, then everybody is trying to tie you down, and you don’t like it.”
America First, Second and Third
The scope of what the Trump administration has sought to achieve on the world stage has been wide-ranging and the pace relentless. It started in Trump’s first term when he expressed deep skepticism of multilateralism, deploying a barrage of executive orders that pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, withdrew it from an Iran nuclear agreement and left the global-health-promoting World Health Organization in the U.S.’s rear-view mirror.
Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved the U.S. embassy there in defiance of decades of U.S. practice to be sensitive to Palestinian political aspirations.
He also started his assault − accelerated during his second term − on free trade by exiting the Trans-Pacific Partnership with 12 Pacific Rim nations and replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which is currently toiling in a half-dead state because his administration has neither renewed nor killed the pact.
What’s clear, said Robert Muggah, cofounder of Canada-based geopolitical risk and security consultancy SecDev Group and the Igarapé Institute, a Brazil-based think tank, is Trump approaches alliances as explicit transactions.
“He has aggressively pressed some of America’s closest partners including Canada, Japan, South Korea and European countries for concessions on trade, defense and market access,” he said.
“He sees dependence on the United States as leverage. Countries that rely heavily on the American market or security umbrella have more to lose from a rupture. That gives Washington considerable room to exert pressure.”
And unrelenting pressure, and what appears to be genuine enthusiasm for personal diplomacy with leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, has been the name of Trump’s game since he returned to the White House. He’s intimidated NATO ally Denmark by floating the idea of annexing its Greenland territory for its natural resources and to ward off seaborne national security threats from China and Russia. He’s mulled, in an informal fireside-chat way, about doing a “friendly takeover” of Cuba.
Over and over again he’s talked down the utility of the 77-year-old “paper tiger” NATO military alliance.
“Kim Jong Un has always treated me with great respect, and we’ve met on numerous occasions, actually, two primary occasions − spoken and spent time. I understand him. He understands me,” Trump said after announcing he’d ordered the Pentagon to scale back military exercises with South Korea.
The drills with South Korea are designed to help prepare Seoul for a possible war with Pyongyang, its secretive and volatile nuclear-armed rival and neighbor.
For decades, security on the Korean Peninsula has rested on a single assumption, wrote Ju Hyung Kim, a specialist in the region, in a recent article in 38 North, a North Korea-related analysis website: “that in the event of an all-out war, U.S. reinforcement would be swiftly introduced both from Japan and the continental United States . . . such an assumption is increasingly being questioned.”
The Trump administration scaled back the military exercises with South Korea as a gesture toward Pyongyang, even as North Korea continued missile launches, providing weapons and ammunition to Russia for its war in Ukraine, and as Kim has rebuffed renewed nuclear talks on terms that would satisfy Washington.
And Trump’s friendly tone and relationship with Putin − coming at the same time he has belittled Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy − has caused skepticism and alarm in Europe, which views Russia’s war on Ukraine as a long-term threat to the security of the entire continent.
“For Trump, relations with adversarial and authoritarian leaders carry fewer expectations and less institutional baggage,” said Muggah, the cofounder of SecDev and the Igarapé Institute. “He seems to prefer dealing directly with such leaders, especially when he can portray himself as the person who gets the deal done.”
Trump probably won’t bomb Oman, but he’s threatened to because he’s frustrated the Gulf state has explored an agreement with its clerical leaders to fully open the Strait of Hormuz shipping waterway that’s been largely closed because of the war of choice he started − and is struggling to end − in coordination with Israel on Iran in February.
“It’s becoming conventional wisdom that the Iran war is a fiasco of the first order,” said Goldstein, from Brown’s Watson School and Defense Priorities. “There is an argument out there that if United States is struggling to fight a middle power like Iran, it may be totally inconceivable that we could go head-to-head against China.”
Europeans − and consumers − paying more
Earlier presidents have, like Trump, also pursued transactional foreign policies. Theodore Roosevelt and his successors used military intervention in Latin America to protect U.S. financial interests, while Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy later used foreign aid and land reform as an inducement to reduce communism’s appeal.
But no president has appeared to so directly link diplomacy to his own economic interests, according Patrick Shea, a professor of international relations and global governance at the University of Glasgow, Scotland.
The Trump Organization has expanded its Gulf business ties through Trump-branded developments in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates − all countries that have sought to influence his Middle East policies. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner’s investment firm secured $2 billion from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund about six months after he left the White House, prompting conflict-of-interest concerns that Kushner has rejected.
Trump also accepted a Boeing 747-8 from Qatar, valued at roughly $400 million. The aircraft now serves as Air Force One and is expected eventually to be transferred to Trump’s presidential library. He netted more than a billion dollars in crypto-related earnings in 2025, according to his financial disclosure reports. One of the biggest investors in this part of his private business is a Saudi real-estate developer with close ties to the Saudi government.
However, there may be some traces of method in what many of Trump’s critics view as his foreign-policy madness.
On some issues, former presidential special assistant Fried said, the administration has a valid argument.
The administration has argued that a free-trade model has created global problems, particularly with countries like China that game the system and exploit the rules. Trump also has been highly critical of NATO, arguing that European countries aren’t spending enough money on the military and thus aren’t paying their fair share of the alliance’s mutual defense.
But in the case of NATO, the administration has won the argument, Fried said, because the Europeans are now boosting their defense spending and realizing they need to do more to stand on their own feet militarily.
And yet, the administration seems to be unable to turn such victories into lasting policy, Fried said.
“There seems to be this destructive impulse that gets the better of them.”
Trump’s trade tactics have extracted material commitments as well.
Japan and South Korea have now agreed to U.S. investment packages worth hundreds of billions of dollars, while Europe has made substantial commitments involving American energy and investment spending. Many of these promises have yet to be delivered. But they may help explain why Trump believes pressure works.
Still, the opposite may also be true.
Trump’s tariffs on Canada, for example, have touched off a trade war with one of the United States’ closest allies. Vowing to match Trump’s duties on Canadian imports “dollar for dollar,” Canada struck back with retaliatory tariffs on $20 billion worth of U.S. products, including steel, aluminum, furniture, clothing, cheese and seafood.
This restructuring, combined with elevated oil prices amid on-and-off-and-on-again U.S. military strikes on Iran, has sowed stability doubts among international investors and created volatility in global financial markets, opening the door for the euro to challenge the dollar as the world’s dominant currency, according to some financial analysts.
As the Iran war has faced an uncertain timeline to wind down, it has also driven up inflation fears and government borrowing costs, with yields on long-term U.S. Treasury bonds sitting near multi-year highs. This ultimately makes it more expensive for consumers to take on debt, whether for mortgages or personal, shorter-term loans.
Congress has pushed back on some of Trump’s actions, so it’s unclear even if the next president is a Republican whether they would continue, said Hamilton of the Brookings Institution.
“Certainly with a Democrat, I think a lot of it would change,” he said.
Some of Trump’s actions could easily be undone. The next president, for example, could choose to rejoin the Paris climate agreement or decide to participate again in some of international groups that the United States pulled out of under Trump. Trump’s trade deals could be rescinded because they are not formal treaties ratified by Congress.
Trump has just a little over two years left in office, so the strategy adopted by some U.S. allies has been to try to limit the short-term damage his policies have wrought by pushing back occasionally and trying to win him over with flattery, Fried said. In the long run, though, they are looking beyond Trump, he added.
“I don’t think they’re taking Trumpism as something that will be lasting.”
Trump is extracting more from American power today while giving other countries reasons to depend on it less tomorrow, Muggah said.
Kim Hjelmgaard is an investigative journalist covering global stories for USA TODAY, from living rooms to conflict zones. Follow him on X and Instagram: @khjelmgaard
Michael Collins, a former White House correspondent, is a national correspondent on USA TODAY’s Investigations and Storytelling Team. Follow him on X: @mcollinsNEWS