How to predict Donald Trump’s foreign policy

JOHN BOLTON, Donald Trump’s national security adviser in 2018-19, has simple advice for anyone trying to understand his former boss’s philosophy on foreign policy: don’t bother. Mr Bolton, who fell out with Mr Trump, says the former president has no consistent principles, only moods, grudges and an obsession with his image. Thus he could both threaten North Korea with “fire and fury” and hold three chummy summits with Kim Jong Un, for example, or both talk about leaving the NATO alliance and then reinforce its eastern flank.

Mr Trump’s current acolytes retort that “America First” is a perfectly coherent ideology, which was never properly adopted owing to obstructive advisers like Mr Bolton and the inexperience of the ex-president’s true devotees. Anyway, enthuses Fred Fleitz of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a Trumpist think-tank, “You forget how good things were when Trump was in office.” There were no big wars, four peace deals between Israel and Arab states, a successful renegotiation of the NAFTA free-trade agreement with Canada and Mexico and a partial trade deal with China—not to mention low inflation and a less permeable southern border. If Mr Trump regains the White House, he will reverse President Joe Biden’s “weakness” which, in the Trumpists’ telling, encouraged Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Hamas’s attack on Israel and China’s bullying of Taiwan. By sheer force of character, Mr Trump will restore American power, deter foes and impose order.