USQ Law Society Law Review
Chelsea Keirsnowski
Winter 2022
CHANGE IN FOREIGN POLICY UNDER TRUMP CHELSEA KEIRSNOWSKI The Donald Trump presidency triggered concerns among US military allies and economic partners because, as the first President without military or political experience, he made notable departures from traditional US foreign policy. This essay will investigate how Trump’s “America First” approach to foreign policy was significantly different to post-war US foreign policy, as it rejected three major liberal mechanisms including free trade and economic interdependence, US leadership through multilateral international organisations, and the promotion of democracy. Trump was sceptical that an open, interdependent global economy benefitted the US and opposed the limits to the state’s economic freedom of action imposed by the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Trump not only rejected multilateral agreements in trade, but also had less support for multilateralism in security, environmental protection, and diplomacy. Trump preferred to act unilaterally, consequentially causing traditional allies to feel exploited by the power imbalance of the US hegemon. Whilst some democratic promotion initiatives continued under Trump’s presidency, he did not advocate these ideals as past presidents had done. Trump’s foreign policy was divergent from US tradition as it was cynical of the benefits of free trade and economic interdependence. Instead, he chose to rescind previous free trade agreements and go against the rules-based order of the WTO. For approximately 70 years preceding Trump, Free Trade Agreements (FTA’s) had been gaining prevalence, the US leading the liberal world trade movement. Barack Obama presided over negotiations for the plurilateral FTA’s of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership as well as engaging economically with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.1 Obama described himself as America’s first “Pacific President” in November 2009, as he believed in the importance of regional economic integration to promote trade and security.2 Contrastingly, Trump’s “America First” approach was exemplified by the reneging of the TPP shortly after his inauguration.3 Trump perceives relationships and agreements between countries as having winners and losers. Rather than reaching multilateral win-win agreements, Trump tended to prefer using the influence of America’s significant economic power coercively to get better deals which solely 1
Arne Melchoir, Free Trade Agreements and Globalisation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) 2-3.
2
Peter H Gries, ‘Humanitarian Hawk Meets Rising Dragon: Obama’s Legacy in US China Policy’, in Oliver
Turner and Inderjeet Parmar (eds), The United States in the Indo-Pacific: Obama’s legacy in US China Policy (Manchester University Press, 2020) 29, 33. 3
Paul K Macdonald, ‘America First? Explaining Continuity and Change in Trump’s Foreign Policy’ (2018)
133(3) Political Science Quarterly 401, 403.
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