How to Navigate Trump’s Foreign Policy
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Hi, I'm Ravi Agrawal, Foreign Policy's Editor-in-Chief. This is FP Live. Welcome to the show. We've had a few days now to digest the results of the US election.

At FP, we're already turning our attention to what a second Trump term could mean for the world. On Monday, Trump named Tom Homan as the new border czar, ostensibly to carry out a mass deportation of illegal immigrants. And he named Elise Stefanik as his ambassador to the United Nations.

Stefanik, of course, is a New York representative who's been a staunch Trump loyalist for years and made headlines for her interrogation of the presidents of elite colleges about allegations of anti-Semitism on their campuses. Meanwhile, Trump ruled out two other names that had been on our watch list, former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, as well as his former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley.

The reason why we're looking at all of these names as closely as we are is that it might give us a clue about the specifics of Trump's foreign policy priorities in a second term. But beyond the names, there's also still a battle of ideas with scholars putting out visions for what a conservative foreign policy could or should look like.

My guest today is a former policymaker who's been making the case for what she calls conservative internationalism. Cori Sharkey has served in both the state and defense departments and the National Security Council. She's a well-known conservative, but she's been a fierce critic of both the Biden and Trump administrations. She's now at the American Enterprise Institute. Let's dive in. Cori Sharkey, welcome to FP Live.

It's a great pleasure, my friend. So I think it might be useful to just begin with an assessment. If you look purely at Trump's first term, not 2.0 and what we imagine things would be like, purely at the first term, how would you characterize his foreign policy?

Well, in the first term, as I expect will be the case in the second term, there will be a very high chaos premium because it's so difficult to predict specific policy choices in a Trump administration. And so even though, as Tom Wright pointed out in 2016 and Elizabeth Saunders has pointed out in recent weeks,

The main lines of Trump policy are actually quite predictable, right? He thinks tariffs are a useful bludgeon against friends and enemies alike.

He believes allies are a burden on the United States rather than a cost-effective way to limit the costs and risks to the United States. He thinks immigration is overwhelming the United States culturally and economically.

Those things are quite predictable elements of his policy. And the second thing I would point out as an indicator for a second term is that in his first term, he actually made a lot of effort to implement what he had campaigned on.

And so I think listening to what he said when he was campaigning does give a sense of his priorities. You know, one of the things President Trump, candidate Trump was extraordinarily successful at in 2016, 2020 and 2024 was.

was using his rallies as a way to test drive public support for his priorities. And he did keep faith in the first term on immigration limits and in particular on immigration limits on Muslims and on people coming from war-torn or poor countries.

He created an enormous amount of friction with America's allies, calling into question mostly privately the NATO Article 5 guarantee, but publicly threatening and attempting to carry out the removal of American forces from Europe, Japan and South Korea. And in the Japanese and South Korea case,

unless the contributions of those governments were tripled to the cost of American operations for common defense. Corey, I'll just add there, if I may, that one of the things we all struggle with in interpreting Trump is that sometimes his bark can be worse than his bite. So he says things that are designed to...

you know, get other actors to change their behavior. So threatening to pull out of NATO, for example, he may do that. But, you know, in hindsight, then his advisors and his surrogates often say, oh, he did that to get European countries to up their spending.

So I agree with that judgment. And one of the things that is noticeable is President Trump is privately, I think, saying the same thing right now, which is that by threatening Europeans on American willingness to carry out our alliance obligations, he is leveling the playing field and inducing more from them. And as far as it goes, that's true.

But what President Trump and the people advising him do not take into account is the fact that by calling the alliance commitment into question, it also raises uncertainty, which may cause adversaries to test our willingness to carry out our obligations. And it also raises the cost of adversaries

allies helping us with other policies we're trying to carry out in the world. Because if allies have to focus much more on their own defense, they are much less likely to help us on our biggest priorities, like navigating China's aggression.

Now, Trump, of course, sees his sort of what he calls craziness or unpredictability as a strength. I mean, as you're pointing out, that can easily just be interpreted as a weakness as well. So a lot of that was what Trump 1.0 was like.

I'm sorry, I should have said a couple of things that were advantageous in the first segment. Yeah, go for it. I think the main achievement of the first Trump term was the Abraham Accords, getting some of the countries of the Arab Middle East and the Sahel to openly acknowledge the consistency of their interests with Israel's interests and

and a commitment to deeper cooperation and to recognition. I think that was really important and very often underplayed by the Biden administration in how that reset the table of the Middle East. A second thing I think was advantageous is we often underestimate that many allies are

actually prefer to Biden, excuse me, prefer to Trump administration to a Biden administration. India, for example, a lot of countries in Asia that were tired of being hector about democracy, their domestic democracy, and also

are disappointed with promises the Biden administration made that they didn't live up to. So not all allies, especially those beyond Europe, thought a Biden administration was an improvement. So and we'll come to some of those areas individually, but if all of that was what we know of Trump 1.0,

What aspects of a second Trump term could we expect there to be variance on when it comes to foreign policy?

Well, I do think European security is going to vary quite widely. I think we should anticipate a beauty contest among America's NATO allies for who can break away from President Trump's

dislike of most of Europe. So I think Poland, Italy are leading candidates for Trump liking them even while he hates Europe. Hungary, of course, possibly Russia. I also wouldn't be surprised to see the Trump administration

Israel with the ability for Israel to destroy the Iranian nuclear infrastructure. I'm skeptical President Trump would want to do it, especially since he does have a fondness for military strikes, but concern and an aversion to

either attacking Iran directly. During his first administration, when Iran attacked Saudi Arabia, President Trump turned planes around rather than retaliate. But I do think it's likely he will sell Israel the ability to militarily prosecute

the American policy of preventing Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold. It's really hard to tell where North Korea policy would go. I think the Biden administration has basically ignored the North Korea problem and North Korea continued to add to its nuclear weapons stockpile. But President Trump was all over the board on that.

I think you'll see much greater personalization of international engagement. He probably won't show up for multilateral meetings, but he probably will want a lot of bilateral engagement at the presidential level rather than letting the Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of State manage those relationships as President Biden has done.

Well, I was going to ask you basically on that, you know, how much power and how much independence will his personnel have? In other words, right now, this week and next week, we're going to be obsessing over every personnel choice that Trump makes. Does it even matter?

I honestly don't know how to answer that question because I think it will not matter on the president's fundamental, you know, on immigration, on trade, and, you know, the issues that are at the core of his beliefs that have been consistent across decades. I think the personnel choices will amplify what the president already thinks on that.

But on other issues in the first Trump administration, there was the tyranny of the final briefer, where on stuff he doesn't care about, the last person he talks to can actually be extraordinarily influential.

And so I think one of the most important people in a Trump administration is going to be whoever controls his White House schedule, which may mean the White House chief of staff has an outsized role compared to other administrations.

That's fascinating. So in a bit, I want to get to your normative take on what a conservative policy should or could look like. But before I do that, I think it's worth hitting one more thing, Joe Biden. You've been very critical of Biden's foreign policy. Why? For two reasons, principally. First, that

There is an enormous gap between what President Biden says his policy is and the tools he's willing to resource and the risks he's willing to run in order to achieve those policies. The most important example is the way he has been so risk averse in assisting Ukraine in restoring its internationally recognized territory after the Russian invasion.

I mean, American allies who are much more at risk than the United States is, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Britain, they have all moved to accept greater risk than the Biden administration was on the weapons provided, on the magnitude of weapons provided. I mean, Denmark provided the entirety of its inventory of tanks to Ukraine.

The United States had to be shamed by its European allies offering tanks before we were willing to run that risk. I think that's been a huge drawback of Biden policy, and it has impeded the credibility of those very policies. And the third thing, I guess, is the president has been unwilling to make the case to the American people that

persistently about why we should run risks. For example, President Biden four times said the United States would send troops to defend Taiwan if China attacked it.

That would shock most Americans because at no point did he give speeches, much less fireside chats across years the way Franklin Roosevelt did to change American attitudes about confronting aggression.

So he ran the risk. President Biden has run the risk of a declaratory policy that he can't deliver public support on if an adversary actually challenges it. So I think those are three pretty big deficiencies of Biden administration national security policy.

I want to take on just one aspect of that defense spending before we move on to other areas. You know, Corey, there's a growing interpretation, and you can challenge this interpretation, but I'll go ahead, that part of why Trump won was his tapping into a general sentiment that the system is broken. And part of that system is the military-industrial complex and the idea that the old political establishment just wants more war and that, you know,

Even the Cheney name, for example, which Harris attached herself to, is associated with warmongering. And so how do you, when you recommend that Biden should have spent more on the military and that Trump should do so as well, how do you reconcile that with the notion, and it may not be a correct notion, but the notion that most Americans don't want more war and they want to spend more on other things?

Yeah, it's a very easy question to answer, which is the stronger your military is, the less likely you are going to get your markers called in, right? That's the essence of deterrence. If you are strong enough to win wars and determined, gritty enough to win your wars, people are unlikely to challenge your commitments.

And we are not strong enough to deter aggression that we may be pulled in by our own interests to wanting to reverse. So I think that's the simple answer to a difficult question. A couple of things that come up when people are worried about defense spending.

One, and the one I want to smash with a hammer, is the notion that we can't afford it. You know, we spend 3% of our exorbitant gross domestic product on defense. That is an incredibly historically low proportion for the United States. We spent more than that when we were poorer than we are now.

and when the threats to our interests were less than now. So I understand that people would rather spend our money on roads and schools. I would rather spend our money on roads and schools. But our adversaries are challenging our right to be able to focus on roads and schools.

And we got to actually do something about that. And the best way to not have to fight our adversaries is to build a military strong enough that they lack confidence they could win a war against us. You've been making this argument for a while, Corey. Do you think if you had to gauge the likelihood of a Biden presidency or a Trump presidency listening to you on this, which one would be more likely?

Well, a Trump presidency for two reasons. First, because in his first term, he did increase defense spending. He did propose an increase and got congressional support for it in the first two years of his administration. And the second reason is because the Biden administration didn't, right? They, defense lost ground to inflation,

I think every year of the Biden administration. And so that's retrograde motion when advance is needed. And you are listening to Foreign Policy Live. Remember, you can catch these conversations live and on video on foreignpolicy.com. Subscribers get to send us questions in advance, which we often use, in addition to a range of other benefits, including our magazine. Sign up.

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So let's get to the normative discussion I promised. What should a conservative foreign policy look like?

A conservative foreign policy should first and foremost make America strong enough that we can defend ourselves and defend our interests. And that's strong enough economically, strong enough politically, which means building public support and cohesion in our country, and strong enough militarily.

The second thing is a conservative administration should acknowledge the fundamentals of economics, right? That the dynamism of the American economy underwrites our other strengths. And tariffs are a tax on consumers, not a tax on producers.

And tariffs have a tendency to fuel inflation, which is what Americans just sounded our barbaric yop over the roofs of the world about in this election.

And so fundamentals of economics are a big conservative issue. And I guess the third fundament for me of conservatism is that it's cheaper to do what we want in the world if other countries help us and other countries have bigger problems than we do.

So the challenge of getting the economy of scale of participation of other countries means you either have to rely on a community commonality of interests, or you can amplify that by American soft power, by people wanting us to succeed and wanting our adversaries to fail.

or you can amplify it by working to common purpose with them. And that's where internationalism comes in. You know, a transactional or a red in tooth and claw American approach to our friends and allies.

makes it harder for them to support us, which makes it more expensive for us to do what we want to do in the world. And that's why I think internationalism is such an important component of conservatism. Do you think there's any chance that Trump and the new GOP and Trump's new advisers, are any of them considering your pitch or do you feel like you're screaming into the void?

Well, I think it's unlikely because of President Trump's fundamental beliefs about allies and about economics that neither of those elements are going to get traction.

At least not until we see the consequences of his policies. You know, one of the most interesting things about the difference between 2016 and 2020, if you look at the polls conducted annually by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs,

In 2016, there was a lot of support for President Trump's fundamental anti-immigration, protectionist economics and an opposition to our belief that allies take advantage of the United States.

After two years of Trump policies, those numbers declined by more than 15%. So Americans agree with the principle, but they didn't like the policies that they saw. And I hope the Trump administration that's incoming will take that as a lesson that the policies that they pursued between 2016 and 2020

actually alienated a lot of potential American support. So the Democratic Party no doubt needs to now rethink what it stands for, and that includes on foreign policy. What happens to the old Republican Party, your old world, which I guess is now full of never Trumpers?

Oh, my friend, please don't crush my hope and aspiration that I'm not the last saber-toothed tiger thrashing around in a tar pit, and that it's possible to reconstitute a principled conservatism along the lines I described. Fair enough. I won't crush those hopes.

Let's keep looking at Trump 2.0. What in your mind are the biggest risks for the United States if Trump goes ahead with the plan that we think he will, which is basically his first term?

Well, the risk most in my wheelhouse of expertise and that I worry a lot about is the politicization of the American military. You know, we have an unbroken, nearly 250 year record of the American military not being a threat to democracy in our country.

And we are unique in the world at having a military strong enough to win our wars that chooses not to engage in domestic politics in the United States. And in his first term, Donald Trump in several ways sought to corrode that neutrality.

The way he tried to reach around the chain of command by pardoning war criminals convicted at courts martial, by disparaging the generals.

And this round, he is threatening to fire every general involved in the withdrawal from Afghanistan, even though it was the policy that he himself had negotiated with the Taliban and set in motion that he should be thrashing about and concerned on. Threatening to fire the woke generals.

which could include all of the service chiefs and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to have said that every senior appointment will, or people around President Trump, having said that every senior appointee will be vetted by their willingness to say that Trump was actually elected in 2020 and the election was stolen. If you make military leaders

participate in that kind of political falsification, the people who will do it, and eventually somebody will do it, just as they have in other areas of American civic life.

That's going to be a very different military. And we are not going to like what that military becomes because the biggest fallacy of the people working to corrode institutions in American democracy is that you can change the rules to advantage you and they're not going to advantage your adversaries. Wow.

What kinds of checks and balances do you think might stop some of the things you're describing? So I think the checks and balances held reasonably well in the first Trump administration. I mean, the courts upheld the law. The military found ways to remain outside of politicization.

And while Congress didn't exercise its constitutional authorities as aggressively as one might have hoped because of the constraints of political parties and their support among Republicans for what Trump wanted to get done,

Congress did set important limits in, for example, refusing the president the money to withdraw troops from Europe, Japan, and South Korea. And so I think the congressional role is going to be incredibly important. And the map of the 2026 congressional election is much more favorable to Democrats than the 2024 election was.

And so Republicans who are going to have to be reelected, especially in the Senate, may be a useful restraint. But the most important restraint isn't even legal or institutional. It's what the American public thinks, because that's what Congress reacts to. That's what the president reacts to.

Actually, I should add one more important constraint, which is the stocks and bond markets. Because it looks like the data that President Trump responds most to is the reaction of the stock market. But the one that's likeliest to constrain American spending and American choices is the bond market. Right.

Fascinating. Let's hopscotch around the world a little bit and we'll go to Ukraine first. How do you think Trump will approach the war in Ukraine? I mean, he's already had calls with Zelensky and Putin reportedly. What do you think the first few months of his presidency will look like in terms of trying to resolve the conflict there? Yeah, I do think in general,

A Trump administration is going to be largely indifferent to the fate of Ukraine. I think they're going to want to get this over with as quickly as possible. And that means they will pressure both sides into an early agreement.

I very much hope President Trump sticks to his threat to Vladimir Putin, that unless they come to the table and make a deal for peace in Ukraine, that President Trump will lift all restrictions and pile aid onto Ukraine for them to be able to continue prosecuting the war.

But I worry that given not only the president's indifference and his history of his first impeachment being the result of his choices about Ukraine and

To the extent Vice President Vance will be influential in policy, he is also not just indifferent, but actively hostile to the efforts of Ukraine to regain its internationally recognized territory. That's a subject on which I'm skeptical that cabinet appointments are likely to have much difference. I think the president's already made up his mind on that.

You know, your last piece for FP was about how North Korea joining Russia's war on Ukraine is a sign of Western weakness. Do you think Trump would change anything on that front? And, you know, given, of course, his prior attempts to, you know, talk to Kim, does that change anything? So I am hopeful that a Trump administration will take up the need to restore deterrence,

for the United States and a great place to start will be threatening the North Korean regime that unless they withdraw the soldiers they are committing to Russia's war effort to conquer Ukraine that there will be consequences on the Korean peninsula. Greater assistance to South Korea, more international action to constrain North Korea,

Remember in the first Trump term that President Trump was advocating fire and fury, a preventative strike on the North Korean nuclear program.

And so I think that would be a great place for beginning to restore deterrence. But that weird personal love affair with Kim Jong-un could drive that one off the rails, exactly as you suggest.

So let's get to the Middle East since you mentioned it. Curious how you think things might change at all with Israel's ongoing war in Gaza and Lebanon, but also Iran. I mean, it strikes me that among the group of people who have his ear, you kind of have two extreme constituencies, a group that wants to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities on the one hand, and then another faction that just wants to end US military action abroad.

What do you see happening there? Yeah, that's why I think it likely that the United States will sell or give

Israel the ability to take out the Iranian nuclear programs. Israel's success in the decimation of Hezbollah and Hamas has reset the equation in the Middle East pretty importantly because it punctured Iran's strategic depth of using proxies to destabilize neighboring states.

and be a threat to Israel. And the ease with which Israel has destroyed Hezbollah in particular, I think,

should make the Iranians very nervous that Israel and the Trump administration may think now's the time to prevent Iran from either rebuilding those proxies or being able to be an existential threat to Israel and a serious threat to the United States. So I think that's one thing to anticipate. I absolutely agree with your assessment.

that there are going to be contradictory frictions between the desire to stay out of wars and the desire to reestablish deterrence to assist the Israelis' war effort. So I think we're likely to see a lot of strikes like the

assassination of Soleimani, the strikes in Syria against Russian mercenaries operating there,

I think that's what you're likely to see as a way to resolve that internal tension. The other thing that will be different, of course, is there will be even less sympathy or interest in the plight and affairs of Palestinians in a Trump administration. - Of course, Mahmoud Abbas has already reached out to Trump. Let's see where that heads. I wanna come back to something

we discussed earlier in this conversation, and that's about transactionalism. So, you know, it seems to me that the whole world kind of understands that Trump is this nakedly transactional figure.

Many countries, as you said, I mean, India, but also across Asia, Africa, across the global South, they're not scared of that. They want transactions, they want deals, and they don't want lecturing on human rights or their democracy records, not only because they don't want it, but also because they think the US isn't in a position to lecture on

What happens to human rights and democracy promotion under a second Trump term? And these are all things that, you know, Republicans in the past cared a lot about.

Yeah, so Walter Russell Mead did an event at AEI a month or two ago, and I asked him the version of the question you just asked me. And he said something that's really had a lot of impact on my own thinking.

which is the United States government has gotten very involved in advancing American domestic political beliefs internationally. And it used to be that that was the role of civil society, of non-governmental organizations, of religious organizations, of immigrant diaspora organizations. And I think

that's likely to become how human rights and

and issues of human dignity and human security get advanced in a Trump administration. As with a lot of domestic democracy preservation in a Trump administration, there's going to be much more reliance on civil society organizations to affect the domestic politics in the United States and the domestic politics in countries where those groups would like to advance those issues.

Corey, we've been talking about some version of a post-American world for well over two decades now, or a post-Bretton Woods order. And I'm curious how you think if you put together Trump's first term, Biden's term, and now a second Trump term, how do you think all of that contributes or accelerates some sort of a shifting world order in which the US just has less influence?

I think that is such an important question and in fact maybe the most important question about the international order right now. I don't see evidence we are moving towards a post-American world. The American economy is not only outpacing China's economy now but is poised to outpace it

with more speed if the administrative state is reined in, if regulation is repudiated in some areas, if energy production becomes a US priority.

I mean, the American economy is not only outpacing China's, it's outpacing all the other G7 economies. So I think the economic basis of, oh, I'm sorry, I also should have said that I think dollar supremacy is likely to even be reinforced because people don't hold dollars because they like the United States or even because they like American foreign policy.

They hold it as a storehouse of economic value. And I think that's likely to be reinforced by the stability and dynamism and inventiveness of the American economy. So I don't even think what I anticipate to be very uneven and clumsy economic

performance of American allied and foreign policy is likely to dent that very much. What I think we are at risk of isn't an international order of diminished American power. I think we are at risk of an international order of increased but more heavy-handed and more unwelcome American power in the international order.

Well, that right there could be the subject of a whole new episode of FP Live or indeed a lot of big essays in our magazine. Cori Sharkey, thanks so much for joining us. It was a great pleasure. And that was Cori Sharkey, a senior fellow and the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

Our next episode will be with Ian Bremmer, the founder of the Eurasia Group, to talk about the geopolitical risks of and for a Trump White House in 2025. If you have guest suggestions or feedback, write us. We love hearing from you. And our email is live at foreignpolicy.com. FPLive the podcast is produced by Rosie Julin and the executive producer of FPLive is Dana Shuren.

I'm Ravi Agrawal. I'll see you next time.

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