Is There a Trump Great Game?

 by Victor Davis Hanson

Critics of Trump’s second-term foreign policy—the usual Left and some on the neo-isolationist Right—claim it is recklessly herky jerky and guided by no consistent grand strategy.

Yet, in both the first Trump administration’s National Security Strategy paper and its second-term update, he clearly disdained ground wars abroad, nation-building, and isolationism.

A better description of U.S. strategy across Trump’s two terms in office might be called Jacksonian or preemptive deterrence.

That is, Trump’s foreign policy neither ignores nor merely reacts to crises.

Instead, it seeks out favorable cost-benefit scenarios to weaken its strategic enemies and bolster its friends.

The aim is to preclude the outbreak of major wars of the sort that were common during the Obama and Biden years.

Those two administrations projected indifference abroad and anemic deterrence. As a result, four major theater conflicts broke out during their tenures: the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea, the 2014 absorption of much of the Donbas, the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the 2024–25 Middle East theater war.

Some telling first-term examples of the Trump grand strategy were the lethal strikes on Iranian general and terrorist mastermind Qasem Soleimani and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The 2018 demolition of a Wagner Group force in Syria and the 2018–19 bombing of ISIS into irrelevance also restored a deterrent U.S. presence in the Middle East.

Trump’s first-term warnings to China and Russia, respectively, not to move on Taiwan or invade Ukraine, were effective—as were ultimatums to North Korea to cease its reckless missile launches.

However, the ensuing Biden administration’s skedaddle from Afghanistan, its mixed prewar signals to Putin, and the pathetic efforts to reenter the Iran deal and to put distance between Israel and the U.S. all collapsed prior U.S. deterrence, ensuring the outbreak of major wars.

Biden’s own cognitive decline and his policies of open borders, therapeutic woke/DEI Pentagon initiatives, and uncertainty over who was in charge of U.S. foreign policy also confirmed an image of an America adrift at home and abroad.

Trump’s second-term strategy has focused on diminishing the power and influence of China, weakening Russia while offering it an eventual out by détente/reset with the West, and neutering Chinese–Russian terrorist client states.

Compare the following:

1. Trump’s confrontation with Panama about its de facto violations of the spirit and the law of the Panama Canal Treaty eroded China’s effort to absorb or control the canal.
2. In Venezuela, the removal of the Maduro Marxist government and the restoration of the Monroe Doctrine restored U.S. predominance in the Western Hemisphere—again, at the expense of China.
3. Closing the U.S. southern border, stern warnings to the Mexican government, and efforts to stop Chinese shipments of raw fentanyl to the cartels have likewise damaged China’s Western Hemisphere efforts.
4. The diminution of the Iranian nuclear threat, and perhaps soon even the theocracy itself, with the end of the Assad regime in Syria—both terrorist states supported and aided by North Korea, Russia, and China—also restored American preeminence in the Middle East.
5. Record U.S. oil and gas production lowered world prices at the expense of Russia and the Middle East. Interrupting embargoed oil shipments from Venezuela and Iran has weakened Chinese influence and nearly strangled Cuba.
6. Passive-aggressive, tough-love talk with NATO members encouraged (or enraged) Europeans to raise their NATO spending targets from 2 to 5 percent and expand the alliance with strategically valuable members like Finland and Sweden. Trump’s appeal to Europe’s self-interest (and its innate anti-American chauvinism) helps the region rearm and deter Russia, while freeing up U.S. assets for an increased Western profile in Asia and the Pacific.
7. Efforts to strangle the Cuban and Iranian governments will starve their respective anti-Western surrogates and their own terrorist efforts in Latin America and the Middle East—once more to China’s chagrin.
8. Pivoting the defense budget toward both weapon quantity and quality, prioritizing battlefield efficacy over social agendas, and expanding the number of defense contractors will increase American lethality.
9. Quietly continuing aid to Ukraine to ensure it does not lose the war, while appealing to Putin that it is in his self-interest to cut his catastrophic losses, could restore Russian triangulation with the West vis-à-vis China.
10. The Trump domestic economic, social, and cultural counterrevolution has encouraged the spread of conservative, pro-American governance in South America, Japan, and soon Europe as well—with negative consequences to China.

The media has fixated on Trump’s tariffs and his provocative tweets. Meanwhile, he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have already done more to hinder China and its terrorist clients and proxies than any administration in memory.

https://amgreatness.com/2026/02/26/is-there-a-trump-great-game/