It is a world turned upside down. In his first year in office, Donald Trump has bullied Ukraine, bombed Iran and toppled the leader of Venezuela. In the eyes of critics, he has turned the US into a rogue superpower that poses a greater threat to Nato allies than its foes.
The blitzkrieg has left diplomats in foreign capitals scrambling to understand Trump’s motivations and what – or who – is shaping his thinking. Like past presidents, he has an inner circle of advisers who are playing a crucial role in determining his worldview.
But Trump’s freewheeling style also allows for an unusually wide outer circle, from members of Congress to rightwing media personalities to members of his own family, to try to nudge his foreign policymaking in their direction.
“Trump is more accessible to a broader range of voices than any president in recent history,” said Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group. “He’s on his phone constantly and people – friends, business associates, media – contact him all hours of the night. When he’s in Mar-a-Lago, he’s available, he’s there, he’s holding court, everyone comes up to him. They all have thoughts and ideas that they’re pitching him, and he’ll listen.”
Trump’s policy is all over the map in every sense. Nearly a year after his inauguration, he claims to have ended eight wars – an assertion dismissed by factcheckers as an exaggeration – and appointed himself as chair of a Gaza peace board as part of the second phase of the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas.
In the past month alone he has launched military strikes on Syria and Nigeria and, a day after the audacious military operation in Venezuela, renewed his calls for a takeover of the Danish territory of Greenland and threatened military action on Colombia for facilitating the global sale of cocaine.
And in the past week no one has been more prominent in Trump’s orbit than Marco Rubio who, after Henry Kissinger, is only the second person to combine the roles of secretary of state and national security adviser.
Last Saturday Rubio helped orchestrate the dramatic removal of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and briefed Congress on the operation then spoke in Spanish by phone with Venezuela’s vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, as he sought to ensure the country, which holds the world’s biggest proven oil reserves, does not collapse into disarray.
Raised in Miami’s anti-communist Cuban exile community, the former senator built his reputation confronting leftist regimes hostile to the US. He clashed bitterly with Trump in the 2016 election. Yet now his expertise aligns neatly with Trump’s ambitions: hemispheric dominance, Venezuelan oil and the containment of socialist influence.
Alexander Gray, who was chief of staff at the White House national security council during Trump’s first term, said: “What I have admired in this term, more so than the term I served in, is that Secretary Rubio, as national security adviser, has done a very good job of putting everything together in a coherent way and bringing the president options and bringing the process together in a disciplined way. Even though they’re getting lots of input, it’s much more orderly and organised than it was in the first term.”
Rubio is the administration’s top expert on Latin America and has warned that, since the fall of Maduro, the regime in Cuba is “in a lot of trouble”. But some observers question whether he has the same appetite, or sway over Trump, in other parts of the globe.
A former official in the Joe Biden administration, who did not wish to be named, said: “Marco Rubio seems to be a secretary of state who doesn’t want the entire world. It seems that he is quite content being the viceroy of Venezuela, worrying about being preoccupied with the western hemisphere and perhaps a couple other issues, while letting Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, others work on the thorny issues of Gaza, Russia, Ukraine, et cetera.”
Indeed, special envoy Witkoff, a property developer and investor who has known Trump since the 1980s, has been a key figure for the president in the Middle East and Ukraine. Critics say he has been naive and unprepared and pointed to a leaked recording in which he reportedly coached Moscow on how to handle the US president.
Kushner, a businessman who is Trump’s son-in-law, has often been at Witkoff’s side, fuelling concerns that Trump’s foreign policy is a family business. Some observers believe that the president’s sons Don Jr and Eric are working to ensure that his relationships in the Gulf and elsewhere will be friendly to the Trump Organization.
Brett Bruen, a former global engagement director in the Barack Obama White House, said: “It’s important to apply this economic lens because that’s the through-line from Venezuela to Ukraine to even Gaza, where Trump seems to have been motivated in a lot of these cases. Don Jr and Eric Trump are probably among the most internationally consequential counsellors to the president. I know from conversations with those who are in their orbit that they very much are making plans for development around these various global crises.”
Bruen, the president of the Global Situation Room, a public affairs agency, added: “Along with Trump’s sons, his son-in-law Jared Kushner remains among the most trusted of advisers, which again raises all sorts of ethical challenges as he hops from Ukraine to Gaza to Venezuela to Greenland. He’s solicited the support of foreign governments to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars and yet at the same time is the one advising the president, negotiating these bilateral, multilateral agreements.”
But Gray, a nonresident senior fellow with the GeoStrategy Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, denies that Trump is transactional. He said: “He’s a foreign policy realist in the tradition of Nixon and Kissinger, which is, he takes a very hard-edged look at how the world is and he deals with the world in a very interest-based manner.”
Other influences include the vice-president, JD Vance; the CIA director, John Ratcliffe; the rightwing provocateur Tucker Carlson; and Lindsey Graham, the senior senator from South Carolina and a longtime hawk who posed with Trump and a “Make Iran great again” cap onboard Air Force One last week. But for a world on edge as it awaits the president’s next move, perhaps no figure elicits as much dread as Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff for policy and adviser on homeland security.
Long the architect of Trump’s hardline domestic agenda, Miller has been signalling a foreign policy defined by brute strength and uncompromising ambition converging with his goal of curbing mass immigration.
In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper this week, Miller said in an abrasive tone: “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else but we live in a world — in the real world, Jake — that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”
Such rhetoric chimes with Trump’s apparent willingness to consider military action to advance US interests, including the potential annexation of Greenland. In a national security strategy published last month, he laid out restoring “American pre-eminence in the western hemisphere” as a central guidepost for his second term in the White House.
Trump has also pointed to the 19th-century Monroe doctrine, which rejects European colonialism in the western hemisphere, even quipping that some now refer to the fifth US president’s foundational document as the “Don-roe doctrine”. The push has fuelled fears of the death of Nato and return to a 19th-century world dominated by great powers – a shift in US foreign policy from neoconservatism to neocolonialism.
Venezuela was a rare subject that united Miller and Rubio, who have disagreed on issues such as immigration in the past. Still, commentators say, from the Oval Office to the golf course, Trump is surrounded by a cacophony of traditional hawks and “America first” isolationists wooing him in different directions.
John Bolton, who was a national security adviser during Trump’s first term, said: “Rubio in the Senate – and Lindsey Graham before Trump – I would describe as solid Reaganite Republicans. Now they’re less so, although their basic attitudes probably remain the same. That distinguishes them from JD Vance, who is more and more consistently an isolationist even than Trump is, and from Stephen Miller, who apparently likes conquest even more than he likes isolationism.”
Bolton recalled struggling to deal with the president’s short attention span and lack of core beliefs. “Trump has no philosophy, no national security grand strategy,” he said. “He doesn’t even do policy the way normal people understand that word. It’s all transactional, it’s all about Donald Trump, and that’s the prism through which he sees everything, including domestic policy, not just foreign policy. He listens to all these other people, but at the end of the day, it’s what’s in it for Donald Trump.”
The former Biden official agreed, pointing out that, unlike his predecessors, Trump has different advisers for different sets of issues. “There’s no ideological coherence within this administration. You have people pursuing their own agendas and their own prerogatives and it’s basically the camp that is able to make the most persuasive case to the president who has the upper hand and, occasionally, we’ve seen that take wild swings.”
