When the Bourbon dynasty returned to the French throne in 1815, it is said that Talleyrand remarked that they had ‘learned and forgotten nothing’. I was recently reminded of this judgment when reflecting on what – if anything – has changed in Donald Trump’s worldview since he first started to engage with international affairs 45 or so years ago. In so doing, I was mindful of Henry Kissinger’s celebrated dictum that ‘the convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office’. Nearly ten years ago, Charlie Laderman and I traced the development of Trump’s beliefs before he took office. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. So what is old and what is new in ‘Trump 2.0’?

Donald Trump was born in 1946, when American global power was at its zenith. The United States had emerged victorious on two fronts in the Second World War, had manufactured the lion’s share of military equipment, and still enjoyed a monopoly of nuclear weapons. It accounted for about half of global GDP. By the time Trump made his first intervention into world affairs 34 years later, in 1980, the United States was in deep, and many thought irreversible, decline. It had lost the war in Vietnam, its share of global GDP had halved, and it was being humiliated by the Iranian hostage crisis. Over the course of the following decade, Trump was to critique this misère repeatedly.

Unlike many sceptics of US foreign policy, Trump did not accuse Washington of being ‘soft on communism’ or of being unnecessarily obsessed with it. In fact, he had virtually nothing to say about the Soviet Union and its ideology. What exercised Trump was what he regarded as the unfair distribution of the cost of the common defence, especially the way in which – in his view – US allies ‘took advantage’ of his country. This sentiment infused his sulphurous open letter ‘To the American People’, which appeared as a full-page advertisement in the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe on 2 September 1987 (at a cost of $94,801). The background was the ‘tanker war’ during that summer, which had seen US Navy vessels protect international shipping against Iranian attacks, while US allies in the Gulf – and across the world – held back.

Trump argued that the Persian Gulf was an area ‘of only marginal significance’ to America, but much more important to other powers. Why, he asked, were these states not paying the United States for its investment in their security? ‘The world’, Trump lamented, ‘is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.’ The country he had primarily in his sights was Japan, which, in his reading, had grown rich under the shade of America’s free military umbrella. It was time, Trump concluded, to ‘make Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others pay for the protection we extend as allies’. That money could then be used to help ‘our farmers, our sick, [and] our homeless’.

These remarks spoke to a widespread anxiety about the possible displacement of the United States by Japan as the world’s strongest economy. By the time Trump’s letter appeared, this issue had been partially addressed by the Plaza Accords of 1985, which forced the Japanese to increase the value of the Yen. This made their products less competitive, but it also increased their cash surpluses, at least in the short term, leading to a buying spree in the United States and elsewhere. Trump proposed, in effect, that this bonanza be top-sliced to reimburse the United States for defending Japan. He made similar remarks about West Germany, threatening to impose tariffs on its car manufacturers. Already at this stage, Trump was much more concerned with America’s friends than with her enemies.

The US adversary Trump did single out for particular mention was Iran. In October 1980, as US hostages languished in Tehran, he opined that the situation was symptomatic of the global lack of ‘respect’ for the United States, a position that other countries would not have tolerated. In May 1988, Trump announced that ‘I’d be harsh on Iran. They’ve been beating us psychologically, making us look a bunch of fools.’ If they so much fired at US forces, Trump warned, he would ‘do a number on Kharg Island’, which was then the world’s largest offshore crude oil terminal and Iran’s principal sea port for the export of crude oil.

At this time, Trump showed no hostility towards Canada or interest in territorial expansion. In fact, when questioned about the US-Canadian free trade agreement by a caller on the Larry King Show on 2 September 1987, the same day on which his open letter appeared, Trump made clear that he valued the alliance with that country. They had been ‘one hell of a good ally’, he stated. Trump then contrasted the Canadians with other allies who were not pulling their weight. If he harboured thoughts of annexing Greenland at this time, he kept them to himself.

In the 20 years following the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, Trump was less engaged in world affairs, occasionally surfacing to critique the Kosovo Campaign, Iraq War or some other aspect of American foreign policy. During the second decade of the 21st century, however, Trump resumed his battering of Washington’s complacency, as he saw it. Now it was not Japan but China in his sights. He accused the People’s Republic of China, whose economy had grown enormously after admission to the World Trade Organization ten years earlier in 2001 of ‘stealing’ American jobs and profiting from ‘poor leadership’ in the United States. When asked by Bill O’Reilly of Fox News whose ‘butt’ he would kick first as president, he answered: ‘I would say China number one,’ explaining that he would slap a 25 per cent tariff on all goods coming into the United States. Trump also re-iterated his determination to make US allies pay more for their defence. Both themes featured strongly in his 2015-16 Presidential election campaign.

During his first administration from 2017-21, Trump made a sustained effort to reset the global system on terms more favourable, in his view, to the United States. When initial attempts failed, he threatened Germany with punitive tariffs, and actually imposed them on China. Trump also unilaterally withdrew from the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran, which he dubbed a ‘bad deal’.

Despite claims of ‘collusion’ between Russia and the Trump team, though, his administration pursued a harsher policy towards Moscow than that of his predecessor, Barack Obama. Not only did he send Javelin missiles to Ukraine, he also substantially increased the US presence in Poland and the Baltic States. NATO allies were cajoled into spending more, though nowhere near as much as requested or required. Intellectually, all this found expression in the administration’s 2017 National Security Strategy, which spoke of the return to ‘great power politics’, especially rivalry with China and Russia, as the defining feature of the age, though there is some doubt to what extent that document actually reflected Trump’s own views.

If much of this had been heralded in previous decades, some of Trump’s other moves had not. Despite the fact that there is no record of him having mentioned it before 2017, quite a lot of attention was devoted to the North Korean Nuclear programme, and, for a while, the two countries appeared to be on the brink of war. Then, in 2019, seemingly out of nowhere, Trump suggested that the United States might buy Greenland. The idea was quickly dismissed by Denmark and there the matter rested, at least for the time being.

From the start of Donald Trump’s second administration in 2025, it was clear that while much remained the same, a great deal had changed. The determination to impose a new dispensation on friend and foe alike was even more marked than previously. The EU, UK, Japan and Australia were hit with tariffs, and so was the People’s Republic of China in what was dubbed ‘Liberation Day’, a phrase presumably intended to signal America’s emancipation from its self-imposed economic bondage. NATO allies, who had already stepped up defence spending after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, were stampeded into further increases. Though there was a marked shift in tempo, these were familiar themes.

What was completely new was the emphasis on the Western Hemisphere, heavily trailed in advance of the new National Security Strategy (December 2025). The Trump administration restated the Monroe Doctrine’s claim that the Americas were a US strategic preserve; officials began to speak of a ‘Donroe Doctrine’. Pressure on adversarial regimes in the region, such as Cuba, Venezuela and Colombia, was stepped up. The president repeatedly suggested that Canada should become the republic’s 51st state. In January 2026 US special forces snatched Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and took him to New York for trial on drug-trafficking charges.

Shortly after, Trump stunned the Western Alliance by demanding the right to buy Greenland to safeguard American security, and threatening those countries who leapt to Denmark’s defence with punitive sanctions. It was in this context that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney pronounced the old rules-based international order ‘dead’ in an electrifying speech at Davos.

The other innovation was the administration’s overt intervention into European domestic politics. To be sure, Trump had previously targeted ‘woke’ tendencies on the continent in off the cuff remarks, but nobody expected the barrage of criticisms of the continent’s supposed civilisational decline unleashed by Vice-President JD Vance in his controversial speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025. These continued throughout the year and were repeated in the December 2025 National Security Strategy.

These measures were aggravated by Trump’s apparent willingness to reach a ‘grand bargain’ with Vladimir Putin, abandoning Ukraine in the process. In the first few months of 2025, American diplomats refused to condemn Russia’s aggression at the United Nations and met Russian officials in Saudi Arabia, excluding both Ukraine and the Europeans. Trump and Vance also sparred openly with Zelensky in the Oval Office, and the United States even briefly suspended intelligence support for Ukraine.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, the administration launched large-scale air-strikes on the Iranian nuclear programme during the 12-Day War of June 2025. Tensions continued to simmer away in subsequent negotiations with the Iranian regime, until Trump launched Operation Epic Fury on 28 February. A renewed bombardment of Iran, carried out in cooperation with the IDF, has killed the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, throwing both the regime and the region into a new crisis. In parallel to this antagonism with Tehran, Trump has pursued a peace settlement in Gaza based on an American-dominated ‘Board of Peace’, which would not only bypass the United Nations but also include Russia.

The new approach to foreign affairs was garnished with a self-consciously brutal rhetoric about American might and the redundancy of the international legal order. Stephen Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, summed this up when he remarked that ‘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… that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.’ He also announced that ‘nobody’ was going to ‘fight’ the United States over Greenland.

All this has led some to wonder whether the Trump administration is pursuing some kind of ‘partition’ of the world into spheres of influence, with the United States dominating the Western Hemisphere, especially Latin America, but also Canada and Greenland, with Russia hegemonic in Europe, or at least its eastern half, and the PRC leading in Asia, taking Taiwan and the South China Sea. There was even talk of the world dividing into ‘Great Spaces’ of the kind advocated in the 1930s and 1940s by the Nazi international lawyer Carl Schmitt.

It is certainly true that such an arrangement would be welcome in Russia, where it has been hailed by the notorious ‘Eurasianist’, and Schmitt enthusiast, Aleksander Dugin. There would be many takers in China, too, where the idea of an ‘Asian Monroe Doctrine’ has been circulating since at least the 1930s. Riffing on the term ‘Donroe Doctrine’, the eminent China scholar Rana Mitter has waggishly suggested that the PRC might like the idea of controlling the ‘South China Xi’. It is not hard to see why these spectres should have set off an acute ‘fear of abandonment’ in Europe, Asia and Australia.

In reality, though, there has been little sign that Trump is willing to ‘share’ the globe in this way. He claims the Western Hemisphere, to be sure, but he has no intention of confining himself to it. His multiple interventions in the Middle East and his continuing interest in the security of Europe and Asia – reflected, for example, in the oil sanctions against Russia and continued intelligence support to Ukraine – do not reflect any global American retreat. The Russians know this. Unlike the start of 2025, there is very little crowing in Moscow at the moment. Putin’s core demand now – that Ukraine surrender the rest of the Donbas – may be completely unacceptable, but it is a far cry from the maximalist programme articulated at the start of the conflict.

Instead, what we are seeing is another attempt to establish a global Plaza Accord, a re-organised American ‘Tributary System’, in which the burdens of defence are shared more equally with allies, and US security commitments are leveraged for commercial advantage. For example, the trade deal which the European Union accepted in the summer of 2025, which bears the somewhat Orwellian title of ‘Framework Agreement on Reciprocal, Fair, and Balanced Trade’, was anything but from Brussels’s point of view. Nonetheless, the Union’s dependence on US protection left the EU no choice.

Much of this is unpalatable to the Democratic West and the protagonists of the rules-based international order – and rightly so, in many respects. The Trump administration has seriously damaged the Western Alliance through its contemptuous rhetoric, its encouragement of sycophancy towards the president, his lies (for example, about allied military performance in Afghanistan), and his territorial ambitions. The attempt to coerce Denmark over Greenland was particularly outrageous because it targeted not only a NATO ally but one which is spending ever more on defence, whose casualties in Afghanistan were (proportionately) equal to those of the United States, and whose hardline immigration policies, of all European countries, were the closest to those of the Trump administration.

That said, we have only ourselves to blame for ignoring polite American requests for greater burden sharing for so long, and – worse – for not listening to Donald Trump’s warnings going back as far as the 1980s. Mark Carney made a fine speech at Davos, but his country’s paltry defence spending tells Trump its own story. Neither Biden nor the Europeans deterred Putin from attacking Ukraine, and both the EU and the UK had more than two and a half years to put their military house in order before Trump was re-elected in November 2024. In so far as they are now spending much more to contain Russia, this has been primarily in response to Trump’s brutal measures and rhetoric.

The Western Order is therefore left with a paradox. On the one hand, the Trump administration has forced US allies to do much more for their own and collective defence, which is a good thing in and of itself. This is something they would never have done left to their own devices. On the other hand, the president’s abusive language and often wayward policies have undoubtedly damaged the West and reduced western morale. Trump, to use his own language, may have increased investment, but he has damaged the brand. We do not yet know what exactly this means for the western share price.

Finally, the Trumpian paradox extends also to his administration’s relationship with Europe. Washington has repeatedly criticised not merely the continent’s military decline but also its alleged ‘civilisational’ decline. Whatever one makes of the latter charge, it does not suggest an America trying to disengage from Europe. Quite the opposite: in its own mind, the administration is speaking out of concern, not indifference, more in sorrow than in anger. Trump and Vance want to ‘save’ Europe, and they want a Europe that is, in their view, worth saving. This approach brings its own challenges, as we have seen, but it is preferable to being completely abandoned. If there is one thing worse than Trump being interested in Europe, it is him not being interested in Europe.