U.S. International relations and foreign policy June 2025-

U.S. International relations and foreign policy
20 January-31 May 2025

4 June 2025
The Trump Doctrine
Richard Haass, President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations
For a long time, the United States sought to promote democracy and respect for human rights, annoying some and inspiring others. Those days are now gone, in some ways for better, but mostly for worse.
(Project Syndicate) Doctrines play an important role in American foreign policy. With the Monroe Doctrine, announced in 1823, the United States asserted that it would be the preeminent power in the Western Hemisphere and would prevent other countries from establishing competitive strategic positions in the region. At the outset of the Cold War, the Truman Doctrine pledged US support to countries fighting Communism and Soviet-backed subversion.
… Although no Trump Doctrine has been explicitly put forward, one has begun to emerge all the same. You could call it the “look the other way” doctrine, the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” doctrine, or the “none of our business” doctrine. Whatever the label, the doctrine signals that the US will no longer try to influence or react to how countries conduct themselves within their borders. The administration has refrained from criticizing Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for arresting his principal political opponent, Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for repeated attempts to weaken the country’s judiciary, or Hungary’s long-serving prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who has steadily undermined democratic institutions there.

Foreign Affairs March/April edition
The Predatory Hegemon — How Trump Wields American Power
By Stephen M. Walt
Given the United States’ still considerable assets and geographic advantages, predatory hegemony may work for a time. In the long run, however, it is doomed to fail. It is ill suited for a world of several competing great powers—especially one in which China is an economic and military peer—because multipolarity gives other states ways to reduce their dependence on the United States. If it continues to define American strategy in the coming years, predatory hegemony will weaken the United States and its allies alike, generate growing global resentment, create tempting opportunities for Washington’s main rivals, and leave Americans less secure, less prosperous, and less influential.

8 February
The Aftermath of Feeding America’s Credibility Into the Woodchipper
By Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International.
(NYT) Last February, Elon Musk boasted of “feeding USAID into the woodchipper” as President Trump kicked off his second term with an unanticipated assault on the agency. A year later, the brutal fallout is coming into focus. Humanitarian aid last year reached 25 million fewer people than in 2024 despite rising global need. More than 2,000 health clinics have closed in crisis zones around the world. Global food aid funding dropped by 40 percent from 2024 to 2025. Millions of people have lost access to critical H.I.V. treatment and testing.
This damage is severe on its own merits. But it also previewed something larger about America’s engagement with the world under an “America first” foreign policy. An administration that began its tenure by abandoning aid recipients has proceeded to alienate treaty allies over Greenland and launch legally dubious military strikes. In retrospect, U.S.A.I.D.’s early demise looks like a canary in the geopolitical coal mine, heralding a dark shift in America’s values.

7 February
The quiet force influencing Trump’s and Vance’s confrontational Europe policy
You might not have heard of Andy Baker. But he’s a leading NSC intellectual whose moves could dictate the future of the GOP’s foreign policy.
(Politico) Baker’s role in the Munich speech and strategy document have not been previously reported.
Coupled with the administration’s aggressive new diplomatic posture, Baker’s and Vance’s focus on remaking alliances in Europe and their open skepticism toward NATO poses “a challenge to the whole establishment,” argued Mark Episkopos, Eurasia Research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
“This is much more of a direct challenge because of the way that it’s framed,” Episkopos said of Baker’s approach. “It’s framed in a way that rejects, or at least casts into serious doubt, the basic underlying assumptions of what it is that we’re even supposed to be doing here. What are these values that we’re supposed to defend? Why does NATO look the way it does?”

4 February
A year after aid cuts, the image of American power shifts under Trump
By Ishaan Tharoor with Mikhail Klimentov
(WaPo) The impact of the ostentatious slashing of foreign aid by President Donald Trump can be measured in human lives. It’s been about a year since the dismantling of USAID, the United States’ key humanitarian agency. The move rocked the international humanitarian system and the supply chains of critical aid to some of the world’s most benighted communities. Food kitchens closed in war-ravaged Sudan; lifesaving medicines failed to reach desperate patients in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Hundreds of people probably died as a result. As the United States cut its humanitarian outlays, other major donor countries scaled back their contributions too.
A study published this week by the British medical journal Lancet projects an extra 9.4 million deaths by 2030 if the current trends persist. “The study amounts to an early picture of how funding reductions from the United States and other Western countries could undo decades of health gains, leading to upsurges in HIV/AIDS, malaria and hunger across the developing world,” explained my colleague Chico Harlan. …
The gutting of USAID was a prelude to other Trumpist disruption on the world stage. The White House began trade wars on adversaries and allies alike, pulled out of myriad international institutions, and, at various moments, has threatened the underpinnings of the transatlantic alliance.
Trump and his allies cast their actions as a necessary reckoning with a postwar world order no longer operating in American interests. Stephen Miller, a prominent ultranationalist White House official characterized by some as Trump’s “prime minister,” rejected the American need to engage in “international niceties” and proclaimed a return to a world “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” That ethos has trickled down to what’s left of the U.S. government’s humanitarian apparatus.

2 February
Max Boot: America is alienating what could become a superpower
… If Europe and Asian democracies coordinate, they can reshape the global balance.
The collective potential of the “mighty middle powers” is almost unlimited. I’m not referring to countries like Brazil, India, Indonesia or South Africa, which are often not on the same page as the Western democracies. President Joe Biden learned that it was impossible to mobilize the Global South against Russian aggression in Ukraine, for example. But there is a strong overlap of outlooks between the non-American members of NATO (Europe and Canada) and the great democracies of East Asia and Oceania: Australia, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan.
If these countries could act together, they would be a superpower in their own right. The “Eurasia bloc” has a population of nearly 900 million, GDP of $39.5 trillion, defense spending of $830 billion and 3.1 million soldiers. That dwarfs America’s population (338 million) and beats its GDP ($31 trillion) while their defense spending is roughly similar to America’s ($850 billion this year).

2025

5 September
How Trump’s Blunt-Force Diplomacy Is Pushing His Rivals Together
Some of President Trump’s pressure tactics appear to have backfired, sending would-be allies into the embrace of China.
(NYT) At the Capitol in January, India’s foreign minister was seated in the front row for President Trump’s inauguration, a sign of the deepening ties that a generation of American presidents have attempted to forge with the world’s most populous nation.
Now, just months later, Mr. Trump is publicly lamenting that India has abandoned him for the embrace of China, Washington’s strategic rival.
“Looks like we’ve lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest, China,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social on Friday morning, as he posted a photo of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia with China’s leader, Xi Jinping. The three leaders met in China earlier this week.
It was a rare acknowledgment that Mr. Trump’s attempts at blunt-force diplomacy, not to mention punishing tariffs, were having some unintended consequences.
30 August
The Nobel Prize and a Testy Phone Call: How the Trump-Modi Relationship Unraveled
President Trump’s repeated claims about having “solved” the India-Pakistan war infuriated Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India. And that was only the beginning.
Mr. Trump had been saying — repeatedly, publicly, exuberantly — that he had “solved” the military conflict between India and Pakistan
[PM Modi] told Mr. Trump that U.S. involvement had nothing to do with the recent cease-fire. It had been settled directly between India and Pakistan.
Mr. Trump largely brushed off Mr. Modi’s comments, but the disagreement — and Mr. Modi’s refusal to engage on the Nobel — has played an outsize role in the souring relationship between the two leaders, whose once-close ties go back to Mr. Trump’s first term.
The dispute has played out against the backdrop of trade talks of immense importance to India and the United States, and the fallout risks pushing India closer to American adversaries in Beijing and Moscow.

29 August
Trump cuts $4.9-billion in foreign aid approved by Congress with maneuver last used in 1970s
(AP via Globe & Mail) President Donald Trump has told House Speaker Mike Johnson that he won’t be spending US$4.9-billion in congressionally approved foreign aid, effectively cutting the budget without going through the legislative branch.
Trump, who sent a letter to Johnson on Thursday, is using what’s known as a pocket rescission – when a president submits a request to Congress to not spend approved funds toward the end of the fiscal year, so Congress cannot act on the request in a 45-day timeframe and the money goes unspent as a result. It’s the first time in nearly 50 years a president has used one. The fiscal year draws to a close at the end of September.
The letter was posted Friday morning on the X account of the White House Office of Management and Budget. It said the funding would be cut from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, an early target of Trump’s efforts to cut foreign aid.

26 August
Inside the USAID Fire Sale
Around the world, defibrillators, motorbikes, and water towers are being donated, sold, or simply abandoned.
By Hana Kiros
(The Atlantic) One of the more surreal knock-on effects of the gutting of USAID is that the U.S. government is now holding a massive fire sale for mosquito nets, water towers, printers, iPads, chairs, generators, defibrillators, textbooks, agricultural equipment, motorbikes, mobile health clinics, and more. Until recently, these items supported the 5,000-plus foreign-aid projects that the Trump administration has now canceled.
Normally, when a USAID project ends, its leftover, usable goods get methodically inventoried, then distributed to other projects or local partners who can put them to good use. This year is, quite obviously, different.
Federal and humanitarian workers have scrambled​​ to run a mass closeout before their own termination or their project’s bankruptcy, with little guidance from leadership at USAID or the State Department. The result is that millions of dollars’ worth of equipment that the United States has already purchased is being auctioned off, likely at an extreme loss, or simply abandoned.
Some USAID workers and local partners have managed to follow Plan A—that is, donating goods where they can be most useful—despite the fact that there are no longer any USAID-funded projects to hand equipment off to. (The State Department has assumed responsibility for the roughly 20 percent of USAID’s original projects that will continue.) After publication of this story, following requests for comment that went unreturned, I received an emailed statement from someone who used a State Department press inbox and repeatedly refused to identify themselves as anything other than a State Department spokesperson. This person told me that most of USAID’s grantees off-loaded property to local governments or NGOs.

9 August
Trump nominates State Dept spokeswoman Bruce as US deputy representative to UN
Bruce has been State Department spokesperson since Trump took office in January
Bruce was previously a Fox News contributor and commentator for 20 years
(Reuters) – President Donald Trump said on Saturday he was nominating State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce as the next U.S. deputy representative to the United Nations.
During press briefings, she has defended the Trump administration’s foreign policy decisions ranging from an immigration crackdown and visa revocations to U.S. responses to Russia’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s war in Gaza, including a widely condemned armed private aid operation in the Palestinian territory.
Bruce was previously a political contributor and commentator on Fox News for over 20 years.
Trump has picked former White House national security adviser Mike Waltz to be his U.N. envoy. Waltz’s Senate confirmation for that role, wherein he will be Bruce’s boss, is still due.
Waltz was Trump’s national security adviser until he was ousted on May 1 after he was caught up in a March scandal involving a Signal chat among top Trump national security aides on military strikes in Yemen. Trump then nominated Waltz as his U.N. ambassador.

22 July
It’s not too late to spare this crucial intelligence agency
In a world increasingly defined by uncertainty and great-power rivalry, the last thing the United States should be doing is cutting one of its most quietly indispensable assets: the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) at the State Department. And yet approximately 20 percent of the staff might soon be gone, having either been laid off or accepted deferred retirement. These cuts undermine not just the bureau, but the intelligence and diplomatic posture of the United States itself.
The small but mighty INR faces significant staff cuts despite its vital role supporting diplomacy.
Unlike other bureaus at the State Department, there is no replacement for INR’s mission or its method. It’s not just a matter of losing staff; also lost will be institutional memory, regional fluency, analytic rigor, and the highly experienced people who understand intelligence and diplomacy as two sides of the same coin.

Trump administration withdraws from UNESCO again, only 2 years after US rejoined
(AP) — The Trump administration announced Tuesday that it will once again withdraw from the U.N. cultural agency UNESCO, an expected move that has the U.S. further retreating from international organizations.
4 February
Trump announces withdrawal from UN human rights body and halt to funding for Palestinian refugees
The decision to pull U.S. funding and participation from UNESCO comes two years after the Biden administration rejoined following a controversial, five-year absence that began during President Donald Trump’s first term. The White House cited similar concerns as it did in 2018, saying it believes U.S. involvement is not in its national interest and accusing the agency of promoting anti-Israel speech.

17-18 July
Congress approves Trump’s $9 billion cut to public broadcasting and foreign aid
(AP) — The House gave final approval to President Donald Trump’s request to claw back about $9 billion for public broadcasting and foreign aid early Friday as Republicans intensified their efforts to target institutions and programs they view as bloated or out of step with their agenda.
The vote marked the first time in decades that a president has successfully submitted such a rescissions request to Congress, and the White House suggested it won’t be the last. Some Republicans were uncomfortable with the cuts, yet supported them anyway, wary of crossing Trump or upsetting his agenda.
What the Rescission Package Means for the UN
The Sharpest U.S. Retreat from UN Funding in Decades
Mark Leon Goldberg
(Global Dispatches) The U.S. Senate just approved a sweeping $9 billion clawback in federal spending — with foreign aid bearing almost the entire brunt.
At the heart of this so-called “rescissions package” is a targeted strike against U.S. contributions to the United Nations and the broader multilateral system. American funding for cornerstone UN agencies like UNICEF and the UN Development Program isn’t just being reduced — it’s being eliminated. Zeroed out.
And no part of the UN system is left untouched.
What are rescissions – and why does Trump want Congress to push them through?
The president is pushing for cuts in spending that Congress needs to approve to take effect – but what exactly are they?

8 July
Prosperity and power: Trump’s selective US-Africa summit and the race with China
Landry Signé

7 July
Who’s Running American Defense Policy?
Trump’s national-security institutions are still in disorder.
By Tom Nichols
In this administration, the principals are either incompetent or detached from most of the policy making, and so decisions are being made at lower levels without much guidance from above. In Trump’s first term, this kind of dysfunction was a lucky break, because the people at those lower levels were mostly career professionals who at least knew how to keep the lights on. In Trump’s second term, though, many of those professionals have been either silenced or outright replaced by loyalists and inexperienced appointees. Ironically, allowing various lower offices to fill the policy void empowers the unknown appointees whom MAGA world claims to hate in other administrations.
In Trump’s current administration, irrational tariffs and brutal immigration enforcement are the two big ideas. Both have foreign-policy ramifications, but they are being pursued by Trump and his team primarily as domestic political issues. Everything else is on the periphery of the White House’s vision: Pakistan and India, nuclear weapons, the Middle East (or nuclear weapons and the Middle East), the Ukraine war. All of these get Trump’s temporary attention in the form of a quick evaluation of their utility to Trump personally, and then they’re dumped back outside the door of the Oval Office.

29 June
In Sudan, where children clung to life, doctors say USAID cuts have been fatal
The Trump administration’s cuts to USAID had an immediate and deadly impact in war-ravaged Sudan, according to civilians, doctors and aid officials.

25 June
Ian Bremmer: Trump got his foreign policy win. Now comes the hard part
… The US president has staked his reputation on this fragile ceasefire holding. Trump wants a clean win. He cares about being seen as powerful and in control, about low oil prices, and about ending wars and keeping the US out of them. A resumption of the fighting would jeopardize all that. That’s why he (successfully) pressured Israel to scale back planned strikes against Iran on Tuesday, and why he’ll keep trying to discourage either side from taking actions that might restart the war.
…this is arguably the biggest foreign policy win of his second term to date. The president can take credit for degrading Iran’s nuclear program and enabling Israel to severely degrade its military and ballistic capabilities, all with no blowback to the US and without getting dragged into a broader war. True, Iran had never been weaker and its threats had never been emptier, but Trump still had the willingness to call the ayatollah’s bluff. And so far, the gamble seems to have paid off. One of the world’s most dangerous rogue states is significantly weaker today than it was two weeks ago (not to mention before Oct 7, 2023), and America is no worse for wear.
But how big a win this turns out to be in the longer term remains an open question.
Iran and the Fracturing West
Chris Patten
(Project Syndicate) US President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites instead of pursuing diplomacy is perhaps the clearest indication yet of his abandonment of the Western alliance. While working with allies is more likely to promote global stability, Trump’s contempt for democratic values makes that impossible.

13 June
Trump Talks Big on Global Diplomacy, but His Goals Are in Tatters
The president said he would bring a quick end to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and get China to bend on trade and Iran on its nuclear program. Instead, conflict is escalating.
(NYT) Donald J. Trump may be known for his combative, vindictive style. But as a candidate for president in 2024, he cast himself as a man of peace. His toughness and the “respect” he enjoys from foreign leaders, he insisted, would enable him to settle conflicts almost with a snap of his fingers.
The war in Ukraine could be ended in as little as 24 hours, he said. He would knock heads to reach an agreement between Israel and Hamas to stop the fighting in Gaza.
And he said he would strike a nuclear deal with Iran, “because the consequences are impossible. We have to make a deal.”
A day after Israel began a massive attack on Iran, however, Mr. Trump’s peace projects are in tatters. The fighting in Ukraine rages on and Mr. Trump appears to have lost patience with efforts to end that war. In Gaza, both Israel and Hamas cling to basic positions they staked out long before Mr. Trump took office.
And instead of announcing a new nuclear deal with Tehran, a president who often denounces America’s history of “stupid” Middle East wars is trying to navigate a dangerous conflict between Iran and Israel, the closest U.S. partner in the region.
Fulbright’s Future in Doubt as Trump Targets Elite Scholarship
The program’s academic freedom has been called into question after the Trump administration rejected awards.
(Bloomberg AI) The administration’s latest attempt to exert control over higher education has threatened a nearly 80-year-old institution that participants call a key instrument of American soft power. Every year, the highly selective Fulbright Program awards more than 8,000 grants, both to US scholars pursuing research projects abroad and foreign academics seeking to study in the states. Created by Congress in the aftermath of World War II, the grants were meant to strengthen ties with other nations and cement America’s image as a leader in cutting-edge research.

11 June
War and Peace, 2025: Canada, NATO, and a Rogue America
Jeremy Kinsman
(Policy) … Under Donald Trump, the US has gone rogue, not only regarding its institutions and arrangements with allies, but in its abandonment of the values, ideals and dependable motives that made it a soft-power superpower for more than a century, as well as the shared affinities that defined its foreign attachments.
G7 and NATO allies are agitated by growing evidence that Russia and China (and various other rogue actors) believe they can act with impunity from weakened international institutions and councils. But they are mostly agitated by the actions and attitudes of their long-standing American partner, who suddenly hews more closely to that autocratic model than to its 250-year history as a democracy.
… The fact is that the Trump administration is advancing a different worldview than America’s democratic allies, perhaps toward new geopolitical groupings around three dominant spheres of influence: the US in the Americas, China in Asia, and Russia in Eurasia. This is obviously anathema to US allies from Europe, Japan, and especially Canada.

4-5 June
Rights groups, but few world leaders, race to condemn the travel ban.
on Thursday, the morning after Mr. Trump targeted people from a dozen countries in a new ban, the immediate reaction was muted. Some leading rights groups condemned the move on social media, but few governments had a quick and decisive response to share.
See the Countries Under Trump’s New Travel Ban
President Trump has targeted the citizens of a dozen countries as part of a new ban on travel to the United States and restricted travel for those from several more countries.
US issues full entry ban on 12 countries, with dual citizens among exemptions
Order bans travel to US from 12 countries
Travel from 7 other countries restricted
Trump cites national security concerns
Ban becomes effective on June 9
(Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump signed a proclamation on Wednesday banning the citizens of 12 countries from entering the United States, saying the move was needed to protect against “foreign terrorists” and other security threats.
The directive is part of an immigration crackdown Trump launched this year at the start of his second term, which has included the deportation to El Salvador of hundreds of Venezuelans suspected of being gang members, as well as efforts to deny enrollments of some foreign students and deport others.

4 June
Russia’s RT network on the rise as VOA fades
The clash between the Trump administration and Voice of America continues. In March, an executive order was issued to eliminate VOA’s supervising agency. Since then, VOA has been slashed and has cut down operations while also challenging the executive order in court. But as VOA shrinks, Russian news agencies targeting international audiences are growing.
…Kari Lake, a former news anchor from Arizona-turned Republican politician…was Trump’s pick for senior adviser to the US Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA.
Soon, it became clear that Lake’s appointment was about closing down the network rather than reforming it. This March, VOA’s 1,300 employees were placed on administrative leave. Their website has been idle ever since — though some of its broadcasting continues.
Kari Lake has defended the cuts. In an interview last month with One America News Network she said, “The taxpayer, by the way, is footing the bill for this nearly billion-dollar agency which broadcasts news to the world, not here in America, but news to the world.”
Voice of America, and other similar news agencies funded by the US government, has always catered to a foreign audience. Mark Pomar is a senior national security fellow at the Clements Center at the University of Texas and is also the author of “Cold War Radio,” a book about the history of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

3 June
The meaning behind Trump’s foreign policy trolling
The president hasn’t purged idealism from GOP foreign policy. He has just redirected it.
Jason Willick
(WaPo) The divide between “realists” and “idealists” in foreign policy is simplistic but useful. Realists think the purpose of American foreign policy is to protect the country’s physical security and wealth. Idealists think the United States should promote democracy and human rights abroad. There’s huge overlap, of course, but the categories help separate those who see the world through the lens of national interest and those who see it through the lens of morals and values.
The Trump administration, Washington tends to assume, falls on the realist side of the ledger. Donald Trump is “America First.” He’s transactional. He reserves his most cutting opprobrium for neoconservatives — loosely defined as Republican idealists and democracy-promoters. But Trump hasn’t purged idealism from GOP foreign policy; he has aimed it at different targets.
The State Department last week published a pointed condemnation of antidemocratic behavior by foreign governments. That would be par for the course for a “neoconservative” administration — if the criticism were aimed at countries in the Middle East or at Russia or China. But the Trump State Department instead blasted Europe, which the document says “has devolved into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.”