Trump’s Foreign Policy, Explained
The foreign policy scholar Emma Ashford explains what President Trump is really doing in the Middle East and Ukraine.This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
One thing that’s been on my mind is that we’ve not been covering Israel and Gaza or Ukraine and Russia nearly as much as we did in 2023 and 2024, frankly, as much as I think we should be. There have been two reasons for that.
One has been that President Trump’s second administration has felt, in many ways, like a domestic emergency, and it has pulled much more of our focus here. The other is that often, when we’re covering these conflicts, what we’re really covering — implicitly or explicitly — is the American position on them: How are we going to use our might, our money, our weaponry, our leverage to bring them to some kind of close or settlement?
And early in Trump’s second administration, he basically filled me with despair. He seemed to have little interest in Gaza, except for potentially building hotels there. Beyond that, he seemed perfectly happy to let Israel annex whatever it wanted. On Ukraine, he was at odds with Volodymyr Zelensky, and his main interest seemed to be his relationship with Vladimir Putin.
But things have been changing a bit. Other parts of his “America First” foreign policy have been coming into more focus. So what is Trump’s foreign policy? What, at this point, can we say about it? How has it been evolving over the course of his still young second term?
To help me think that through, I wanted to bring Emma Ashford back on the show. She is a senior fellow at the Stimson Center. She’s the author of the forthcoming book “First Among Equals,” and she’s a foreign-policy analyst who is more of a realist. She’s in fundamental ways more sympathetic to some of the motivating impulses of Trump’s foreign policy, even if she doesn’t always agree with how that’s carried out. So I thought she’d be a good person to help me steel-man what the administration is doing and think through whether that’s working or has a real chance of working.