There has been so much misinformation and disinformation about the Trump Doctrine. Where to start? The biggest misnomer, as one event after another this year demonstrates, is Trump’s alleged isolationism. Critics and apologists alike have blithely conflated America First with America Alone. More accurate, it turns out, might be to see the US President’s foreign policy credo as a modern-day version of pre-communist China’s tributary system. That would, obviously, constitute the irony of all ironies.

For more than eight years, Paul Kelly, a key political commentator at the Australian, has persisted with the Trump-is-an-isolationist line. It started, as far as I can tell, after Trump pledged to withdraw the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Apparently this was a ‘devastating’ decision that would enshrine ‘a new protectionism at the heart of US power’ and end ‘American faith in liberal globalism’. Kelly, in the succeeding years, has maintained the rage – Trump is an isolationist, Trump is the biggest appeaser since the 1930s, and so on. He began articulating the same ‘deep concerns’ as the era of Trump 2.0 loomed on the horizon.

It would be interesting to know what Paul Kelly thinks of the latest commentary by Greg Sheridan, also at the Australian: ‘The US President has imposed himself on the international strategic order to greater effect than any American leader since Ronald Reagan.’ Hardly the accomplishment of an isolationist and 1930s-style appeaser, you might think. To be fair to Kelly, a doyen of political reporting, Donald Trump’s brand of globalism is not the ‘liberal globalism’ of the juvenile Bill Clinton, the hapless George W. Bush, the placatory Barack Obama or the clueless Joe Biden.

Which brings us to my proposition, as originally outlined in ‘Trump’s foreign policy isn’t unprincipled’ and ‘The man who bought the world’, that Trump wants to wield economic and/or military leverage over every other country in the world. One of his methods, as illustrated by so-called Liberation Day, is to rewrite the rules of the International Trading Order. According to the New York Times’ David Brooks, and all the other panicans, ‘Stagnation Day’ was Trump’s xenophobic declaration of war on the ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘venturesomeness’ that put America at the centre of global networks: ‘People will be outraged by the useless economic pain they are causing and, more subtly, by the cowardly values they represent.’

Along similar lines, Shlomo Ben-Ami, a notable (leftist) Israeli politician and keen intellect, wrote in January of this year an article for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute titled ‘Trump the revolutionary isolationist’. Trump, Ben-Ami insisted, was only interested in enforcing the Monroe Doctrine and reasserting American hegemony in its own hemisphere. The early Trump pronouncements on the southern border, Greenland, Canadian uppishness, China’s intervention in Panama and so forth supposedly confirmed this diagnosis. As for the rest of the world, the Russia-Ukraine War, Nato, China’s regional ambitions, the Middle East and Africa, they would be left to construct their separate components of what the propagandists in Moscow, Beijing and Tehran call a ‘multipolar world’.

And yet I write this as the ink has yet to dry on the peace treaty between the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of Rwanda brokered by the Trump administration. This comes after a thirty-year war which, according to J.D. Vance, ‘killed more than any since World War II, almost all of them black’. Those plagued by Trump Derangement Syndrome will dismiss the possibility that Donald Trump – unlikely, admittedly, to be well acquainted with the Congo, Rwanda and the Great Lakes region of Africa – should be touting his administration’s international outreach as a ‘great triumph’.

They were similarly dismissive of Trump’s role in stopping the 2025 India-Pakistan War in May of this year, a four-day conflagration that could have quickly spiralled out of control. The naysayers have pointed to PM Narendra Modi’s subsequent claim that Trump’s ‘mediation’ played little to no role in the cessation of hostilities. Meanwhile, Pakistan has formally nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize and praised him for his ‘pivotal leadership’.

The overarching ambition of the Trump Doctrine, notwithstanding Modi’s protests, is hard to deny: if a foreign government – regardless of its ideological bent or distance from the United States – is prepared to disavow ancient grudges, territorial ambitions, millenialist madness and economic and/or military threats to the American homeland – a deal, ultimately a bilateral deal, is on the table. It is noteworthy that Trump insists there will be ‘financial penalties’ – presumably tariffs, denied access to the US domestic market, sanctions and the prohibition of American investment – if either the Congo or Rwanda renege on their peace deal.

The same kind of US economic threat/enticement currently hangs over Pakistan and India. And now Operation Midnight Hammer has eliminated the immediate threat of a nuclear-armed Iran and brought to an end the Iran-Israel War, a bilateral economic deal between Washington and Tehran is not out of the question. But not until Ayatollah Khamenei bends the knee and forgoes his traditional anti-America invective of – in Trump’s words – ‘anger, hatred, and disgust’. The US President might be waiting a while for the Supreme Leader to yield. Until Khamenei (or his successor) relents, posted Trump on social media, ‘biting’ sanctions on the regime will remain in place.

Critics of Trump, such as Ben-Ami, have styled the US President as an isolationist and ‘an agent of anarchy’ when, seemingly, the opposite might be the case. Most experts on international relations, liberal internationalists and realists alike, believe that anarchy is the default position in a world where no single entity is the final arbiter of what is fair and just. Donald Trump, Manhattan property developer-cum-television celebrity-cum populist politician, is offering an unlikely remedy for that inherent anarchy – an America that puts its own national interests first but, as a result, has enough wealth, power and goodwill that the stability of the world is guaranteed. Consider, for instance, this AI definition of the traditional Chinese tributary system and exchange America for China: ‘The Chinese tributary system was a hierarchical political and economic structure where surrounding states acknowledged China’s dominance by offering tribute to the Chinese emperor. In return, these tributary states received benefits like trade opportunities, protection, and recognition of their legitimacy.’ Maybe Trump is onto something.