Trump’s second-term foreign policy presents a complex picture when evaluated against classical realist principles. While certain elements align with realist thinking—particularly its emphasis on power politics and national interest—others reveal significant departures from the restraint and prudence that define the realist tradition.
The administration’s explicit embrace of spheres of influence represents perhaps the clearest realist turn in American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. The 2025 National Security Strategy openly acknowledges “the outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations” as “a timeless truth” and rejects “global domination” in favor of “global and regional balances of power.”
This fundamentally realist worldview breaks decisively with the post-Cold War liberal internationalist consensus that sought to export democracy and integrate rising powers into a rules-based international order. Instead, Trump’s strategy accepts the world as it is—a competitive arena where great powers inevitably dominate their regions.
The “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine demonstrates a geographically-focused strategy prioritizing the Western Hemisphere—from military strikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean to the emphasis on denying extra-hemispheric powers the ability to position forces or control strategic assets in the Americas.
This represents classic great-power behavior: securing one’s immediate periphery before projecting power globally, reminiscent of how Russia views its near abroad or China conceives of its regional preeminence in East Asia.
The transactional approach to alliances also reflects realist thinking about the instrumental nature of international cooperation. Trump’s explicit conditioning of NATO support on allies meeting defense spending targets, combined with efforts to broker trade deals and shift defense burdens to European and Asian partners, treats alliances as means to advance national interests rather than values-based commitments or permanent institutional arrangements.
This echoes the realist insight that states cooperate when interests align, not because of shared ideals or institutional inertia.
Departures from realism
However, Trump’s approach often embodies what might be called “illiberal interventionism” rather than true restraint. While rejecting liberal nation-building and democracy promotion, the administration has engaged in numerous military operations, including strikes against ISIS in Nigeria, Venezuelan facilities, and most dramatically, the capture of President Maduro.
These actions contradict realism’s core emphasis on restraint, selectivity and avoiding unnecessary entanglements that don’t serve vital interests. Classical realists would question whether these interventions pass the cost-benefit test or advance America’s fundamental security.
The Ukraine policy reveals the administration’s most glaring contradictions. The 28-point peace plan includes an unprecedented security guarantee modeled on NATO Article 5, committing the US to treat attacks on Ukraine as attacks on the “transatlantic community.”
This represents a significant open-ended commitment that could draw America into future conflicts—hardly the offshore balancing or buck-passing that realists typically advocate for regions beyond core strategic interests. A true realist approach might accept a Ukrainian settlement that acknowledges Russian predominance in its near abroad, rather than extending American security guarantees eastward.
The threats to annex Greenland and reclaim the Panama Canal, combined with rhetoric about Canada becoming the “51st state,” represent territorial ambitions that go beyond securing spheres of influence into outright expansion. This behavior risks alienating allies, creating new security dilemmas, and squandering diplomatic capital on projects of dubious strategic value—all outcomes that prudent realists would seek to avoid.
The realist reality
Trump’s foreign policy incorporates realist language and concepts—spheres of influence, burden-sharing, transactionalism, great-power competition—but the execution often undermines realist principles of strategic discipline and restraint.
The concentration of decision-making in the president personally, the “frenetic diplomacy,” and the use of American power “deployed at will, subject to change at his whim” create unpredictability that destabilizes the very international order that realists value for providing stability and predictability in great-power relations.
The administration’s approach has been described as achieving “some notable results in the form of trade deals” while leaving “Trump still in search of a major, concrete foreign policy win” and struggling “to produce a major positive outcome from its frenetic activity.”
The gap between ambition and accomplishment suggests that borrowing realist concepts without the underlying strategic coherence produces activity without achievement.
Perhaps the most telling assessment: rather than isolationism, Trump has “established a new brand of American internationalism with Trumpian characteristics,” one that borrows realist concepts but applies them inconsistently, often in service of personal rather than strategic objectives.
This is realism’s vocabulary without its discipline—a foreign policy that talks like Hans Morgenthau but acts more like impulse than interest. True realism requires not just recognizing power realities but exercising power with prudence, selectivity and strategic purpose.
This article was originally published on Leon Hadar’s Global Zeitgeist and is republished with kind permission. Become a subscriber here.
