Increasingly without Restraint: Trump's Foreign Policy

This is the slightly revised English version of an essay first published in the German daily newspaper 'Koelner Stadtanzeiger' in German on January 19, 2026.

The world has been in turmoil for months. Trump is taking harsh and bold action. This applies to his domestic policy, but also to his foreign policy, where he rarely distinguishes between allies and enemies. And it’s not getting any better. After a year in office, Trump seems to have tasted blood. He is acting increasingly without restraint.

In the first three weeks of 2026 alone, Trump has had Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro kidnapped and threatened military invasion against Cuba, Mexico, and Colombia. He has withdrawn the US from 66 international organizations, including the important UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which was ratified by the US Senate. During the recent mass protests in Iran, Trump threatened the regime with massive military strikes.

At home, Trump has vigorously backed an immigration officer who ruthlessly shot an unarmed mother of three. Trump even increased the number of masked and militarized immigration officers in Minneapolis and extended the tour of duty of the approximately 2,500 National Guard troops deployed in Washington, DC, until the end of 2026. In addition, the administration announced the end of immigration visas for 75 countries, and Trump’s Justice Department launched a criminal investigation into the chairman of the supposedly independent Federal Reserve. Jerome Powell has been refusing for months to significantly lower the US key interest rate. The American judiciary has become an instrument of Trump’s vendetta.

The president has also been talking for weeks about the US wanting to annex Greenland through a military strike. Trump has no real interest in buying it, and in any case, the island is not for sale. Nor does Trump want to enter into lease agreements for the exploitation of rare earths in Greenland and the expansion of the US’s only military base in the autonomous territory belonging to Denmark. He has threatened to impose an additional 10 percent import duties on products from European countries that have backed Greenland. Trump wants to take full possession of the world’s largest island. After all, strategically important Greenland is as large as Texas, California, and Montana combined. Trump would go down in American and world history forever, if he succeeded in expanding the territory of the US by 18 percent. To achieve this, he would not hesitate for a moment to jeopardize the existence of NATO.

The upheavals of our Time started well before Trump’s entry into politics

But the upheavals of our time did not begin with Trump. The end of the Cold War in 1990/91, the sudden decline of the Soviet Empire, and China’s rapid rise to become one of the strongest and most influential powers of our time were probably the most significant factors. The rapidly growing dissatisfaction of the countries of the Global South in view of their massive discrimination regarding the distribution of global wealth also weakened the Western-dominated liberal-democratic world order.

In the US itself, the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor in society led to increasing conflict. The emergence of a small but enormously influential class of super-rich and the increasingly squeezed working and middle classes made everything worse. Right-wing extremist ideologies were once again booming. In the US, the Democratic Party elite no longer understood the world, and Trump cleverly exploited this in his 2016 election campaign and, to his own surprise, was soon able to move into the White House. Then came Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Trump’s even more erratic second term in office that began exactly 12 months ago. Trump’s far-right nationalist policies are about to deal the final blow to the global system that has been in place since World War II.

Trump’s main objectives

What does Trump actually want to achieve with his nationalist policies and his “predictable unpredictability”? Despite all the chaos, Trump has two overarching goals. He and his MAGA movement are primarily concerned with cementing the enormous economic and military power of the US and preventing the rise of all foreign and domestic rivals for a long time to come.

To achieve this, Trump wants to destroy our globally minded and globally networked world. He is firmly convinced that the neoliberalism of the 1980s and 1990s and a globally oriented economic and financial policy have caused great damage to the US and its people. He believes that most of the international organizations, such as the UN and the EU, serve a globalized elite, but run counter to America’s interests. Trump wants to end the rampant globalization and the accompanying “political correctness” and “woke tendencies” of the last 30 to 40 years and return to ultra-conservative nationalist values.

At my own university, the administration has now decided with excessive zeal that many of our international research centers should be closed. This affects the Center for Asian Studies, the Africa Center, the Center for European Studies, the Middle East Center, the Latin American Center, and a few others. This is at least partially because the Trump administration is concerned with the relentless renationalization of all areas of US foreign and domestic policy.

All of this could already be read in the blueprint for his second term, the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025.” But these ideas could also already be gleaned from his first two speeches to the UN General Assembly. In September 2018, Trump announced: “America is governed by Americans. We reject the ideology of globalism and embrace the doctrine of patriotism. Responsible nations around the world must defend their sovereignty against threats, not only from global governance structures, but also from other new forms of coercion and domination.” He was convinced, as he told the UN a year later: “The future does not belong to the globalists. The future belongs to the patriots.”

But in Europe in particular, many people are still aware that the unchecked power of the nation state can quickly lead to devastating wars and the development of an authoritarian police state. Of course, global approaches are also essential when it comes to combating pandemics, climate change, the global nuclear armament race and the greedy commercial exploitation of many raw materials and defenseless people. But Trump is solely concerned with ruthlessly enforcing national power politics. The next 12 months give cause for serious concern.