The Trump Era

Upon moving into the White House, U.S. President Donald Trump could have opted for a cautious approach, carefully learning the ropes while building political alliances and public support. Instead he has taken the opposite tack, rapidly staking out ambitious, even revolutionary positions. Among these were draft executive orders to drastically reduce American involvement in the United Nations and other international organizations, and withdraw from some multinational treaties. If implemented, these policies will signal a fundamental shift in the world role the United States has played for the past 75 years. They would be revolutionary indeed. While Trump did not often [...]

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump took intransigent stands on several prominent issues, notably immigration and trade. But he also said he was “totally flexible on very, very many issues,” leaving considerable ambiguity about where he would take the United States on a range of domestic and foreign policies. He was silent, for example, on the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, for counterterrorism. He did say in November 2015 that he “would bomb the hell out of” the self-proclaimed Islamic State, but the U.S.-led coalition has done plenty of that. Since it began hitting targets in Iraq and [...]

No matter whether President Donald Trump’s executive order blocking entry to the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries is called a “temporary suspension” or, as Trump himself labeled it, a “ban,” it has caused furor both inside the United States and abroad. Even putting aside the morality of the policy, its hard-to-understand inclusion of some predominantly Muslim nations but not others, and the bizarre way it was developed and rolled out, it is having a major effect on America’s global security, much of it negative. While the entry ban might be good domestic politics for Trump, it defies the time-tested [...]