Sovereignty, Burden-Sharing, and China Define the Trump Foreign-Policy Doctrine

Donald Trump’s foreign-policy significance, Kiron Skinner argues, lies beneath the “drama and noise and theater” associated with him. He reopened a serious argument over America’s role in the world by restoring the nation-state—rather than multilateral institutions or an idea of global citizenship—as the basic unit of international politics.

Trump’s formulation of “America First,” Skinner says, is imperfectly named. His speeches, including his first two addresses to the UN General Assembly, advance a broader exhortation: every country should put its own national interest first. Sovereignty is not isolationism or an instruction to abolish international organizations. Rather, nations should engage one another as politically independent states responsible for their own prosperity, security, and territorial integrity.

That principle connects foreign policy to Trump’s domestic agenda, especially border control. In Skinner’s formulation, a country without political and territorial sovereignty cannot properly function as a nation-state. Economic opportunity, physical security, voting, and political accountability all remain organized within states, not through an abstract global citizenry.

Skinner treats this as a return to a core premise of both the Westphalian system and the liberal international order, rather than a simple rejection of the latter. Trump did not, in her telling, consistently call for abandoning the United Nations, though he withdrew from parts of it; he spoke much more freely about the possibility of leaving NATO. His larger intervention was conceptual. He pushed sovereignty back to the center of international-relations debate and, Skinner contends, prompted substantial theoretical work after 2017.

The consequences are uncomfortable for those who favor a more moralized American foreign policy. A sovereignty-centered doctrine leaves less room for crusading projects abroad. It also implies skepticism toward democracy promotion and nation-building—projects Skinner describes as far older than the Bush administration, extending back before Korea and Vietnam. Trump’s objection, as she frames it, was not simply ideological: foreign commitments require domestic resources, and “guns versus butter” tradeoffs can damage the American economy.

On this question, Skinner sees more continuity between Trump and Barack Obama than is usually acknowledged. Both opposed endless wars and questioned the long-term utility of remaking other societies. What distinguished Trump was his willingness to tie that position to a more explicit theory of sovereignty and national interest.

The doctrine’s alliance model is not withdrawal so much as a preference for temporary regional coalitions over permanent security bureaucracies, Skinner argues. Countries can deepen commercial ties, conduct military exercises, make security arrangements, and “surge together” when needed without constructing another NATO: a standing structure with a large bureaucracy and an expectation that Washington will ultimately bear the burden.

Kiron Skinner treats Trump’s statement that there would be no “new NATOs” as a substantive strategic position. He spoke repeatedly about leaving NATO and questioned whether Article 5 made defense of some member states America’s responsibility. But he never withdrew, Skinner notes, and the alliance was never tested in the manner his rhetoric implied. The tension in her account is clear: Trump challenged the terms and burdens of the existing alliance while identifying looser regional arrangements as the model for future cooperation.

The Indo-Pacific Quad represents the kind of arrangement Skinner expects to matter more: a regional grouping with practical security and commercial purposes, rather than an attempt to replicate NATO in another geography. She places the Abraham Accords in the same category. Several Gulf states, she says, already had commercial ties with Israel but kept them quiet. The accords made those interests public and productive rather than requiring resolution of the Palestinian issue before any broader regional cooperation could proceed.

That approach “flipped the script,” in Skinner’s view, on an establishment assumption that the Palestinian question had to block other diplomatic openings. Morocco and Sudan joined the accords before Trump left office, extending the arrangement into North Africa. The Palestinian issue remained unresolved, but it did not have to determine whether other states could build commercial and security ties.

NATO burden-sharing supplied Skinner’s clearest example of why Trump challenged the older model. During his 2016 campaign, she says, the alliance had 29 members and the Wales pledge called on each to devote 2% of GDP to mutual defense. In Skinner’s account of that period, only the United States, the United Kingdom, Estonia, Poland, and Greece were meeting the benchmark.

For Skinner, the shortfall was not merely an accounting issue. When relatively small states such as Estonia and Greece are among the countries meeting the pledge, it reveals a deeper weakness in Western defense. She adds that 1% of Greece’s stated 2% went toward veterans’ payments, limiting what the figure conveyed about current military investment.

The larger issue was what low spending revealed about the strategic choices of wealthier European states. Germany and France, she maintains, were not committing sufficient resources to research, development, and the “exotic technologies” likely to matter in future conflict. Meanwhile, the United States was hampered by continuing resolutions and difficulty producing a budget. European allies could plan five years ahead and allow social-welfare programs to grow, she argues, partly because they expected the United States to underwrite their security.

Trump’s exits from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris climate accord belong, for Skinner, to the same demand for reciprocity. He promised to leave those agreements and did so. Presidential campaigns can be unusually revealing, she says, because candidates must sustain fragile coalitions and cannot stray too far from what those coalitions expect them to pursue. Applied to alliances and agreements, the standard was straightforward: the United States should not accept open-ended obligations while other parties retain the benefits of American protection.

China is central to Skinner’s case that the older foreign-policy framework no longer matches geopolitical reality. Kiron Skinner credits Trump with galvanizing attention to the return of great-power competition—an idea present in the George W. Bush administration but eclipsed after that administration was, in her phrase, “mugged by history.”

The earlier framework was more inclined to see China as a World Trade Organization member moving toward incorporation into the liberal international order. Trump’s shift was to treat China as a global strategic competitor. That change belongs alongside the restoration of sovereignty and skepticism toward open-ended nation-building: it begins with the geopolitical realities Skinner describes rather than an expectation that economic integration will produce political convergence.

Skinner’s description of that setting is deliberately unsentimental. The United States, she says, is no longer overwhelmingly in control of the world’s GDP. The nonaligned world is no longer a collection of countries compelled to choose between East and West; many have become independent strategic actors. Many now participate in BRICS Plus, she says, and have expressly sought an international order less organized around a U.S. or Western liberal framework and more shaped by India and China.

She also casts the Western Hemisphere as a strategic future rather than an American “backyard.” A majority of its countries, in her description, have democratically elected progressive governments that dislike the United States, while the hemisphere is headed toward a population of a billion people.

These conditions require something more coherent than opposition to Trump himself, Skinner maintains. The question is not whether Trump is flawless, nor whether every element of his doctrine is desirable.

Her conclusion is that Trump’s approach is closer to those realities than the establishment’s response. It is designed to help the United States remain a predominant power for another generation while maintaining and expanding the zone of free and democratic nations. The doctrine is imperfect, as is its chief advocate, but Skinner believes criticism has been more cohesive in its hostility toward Trump than in offering a comparable strategy.

The durability of this doctrine, Skinner contends, depends on more than Trump’s time in office. It is paired with a transformation of the American electorate that she believes the foreign-policy establishment failed to anticipate.

Kiron Skinner describes the old New Deal coalition as a combination of cities, the South, urban constituencies, and segments of the academic elite. In her view, it had effectively broken down by the 1970s, and Jimmy Carter failed to recognize the scale of political change underway.

Trump, she contends, has remade the Republican Party into a blue-collar party. Voters once associated with the New Deal coalition are moving toward the GOP: workers in the middle of the country, along with Black and brown voters in urban communities—especially men, though she says that movement is expanding to women.

This is more than a demographic observation. It is the domestic political base for the strategic doctrine Skinner describes: sovereignty and border integrity, skepticism toward foreign-policy crusades, alliance burden-sharing, reciprocity, and a more competitive posture toward China.

The result could be an electoral coalition capable of prevailing for “a generation or two,” she says. Whether one supports Trump or rejects every part of her analysis, this alignment is the development Skinner believes the establishment did not anticipate.