Trump’s Principled Realism
Scholars of international relations and foreign policy experts have attempted to understand the foreign policy doctrine and approach of Donald Trump since he announced his candidacy for the office of the President of the United States. The ‘America first’ and similar campaign slogans for most of the campaign trail accounted for his foreign policy plans along with constant criticism of then-President Obama’s foreign policy decisions (Kirkey, 2018). With the outcome of the 2016 presidential elections; and Trump’s subsequent inauguration in January 2017, the United States foreign policy doctrine took a dramatic shift to what the Trump administration called principled realist approach to foreign policy in mid-2017 (Ettinger, 2019). Incorporating most of the campaign slogans into his foreign policy; such as withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and the Iran nuclear deal, the renegotiation of NAFTA, the so-called ‘Muslim ban’ and other campaign promises, the administration provided a new direction to the US foreign policy. This was a surprise shift from the doctrines his predecessors Barack Obama and George W. Bush followed (Gibson, 2019). This essay attempts to examine the available literature on Trump’s foreign policy doctrine; and with consideration to a range of empirical examples, it argues that ‘principled realism’ is simply a realist approach to foreign policy that states use to advance and protect their national security interests in the anarchic world order. Secondly, it attempts to provide a criticism of the aforementioned argument and argue on the contrary that Trump’s principled realism is neither realist nor principled.