It has been a year since Donald Trump was re-elected as US President, shocking the world. In the months that followed, countless analyses predicted that America under Trump 2.0 would turn inward — cocooned by its Make America Great Again (MAGA) rhetoric and detached from forward posturing. At best, most analysts argued, Trump would focus solely on containing the rise of China, at the expense of traditional allies in Europe.
It is now abundantly clear that those predictions were only half right.
Trump’s America is not inward-looking. It is awkward-looking — a paradoxical power, simultaneously entrenching itself deeper into multiple theatres abroad even as it claims to be retreating from the world. The US aids wars while declaring the end of endless wars, cuts alliances while multiplying engagements, and unabashedly provokes both anxiety and dependence.
In my November 2024 column, I had argued that the current global dynamics prevent America from adopting an isolationist stance or focusing exclusively on the Indo-Pacific. One year later, Trump has not turned the US inward; he has made it transactional, unpredictable, and inconsistent (even to US interests at times).
The un-apologist
If the Biden years were marked by cautious and often restrained diplomacy, Trump’s second term has been unapologetic. Every partnership, from India to Japan to the European Union, is now measured not in convergence of strategic visions or interests, but in the math of what each side can immediately deliver to the US.
For middle powers like India, this has been a jolt out of the comfort zone. Trump’s pressures on trade and energy have exposed inconsistencies in New Delhi’s multi-aligned strategic imagination. India’s balancing act — buying Russian oil while benefitting from Washington ties — has faced sharp scrutiny. But paradoxically, this has also forced India to strengthen economic and defense ties with more predictable partners like France, Japan, and the UK and to deepen engagement with Europe as a whole.
Trump’s unpredictability is not the absence of strategy — it is strategy by other means. And it works only if the other side is not Beijing.
Trump’s Middle East entrenchment
If one theatre defines this “awkward America”, it is the Middle East. Conventional analyses suggested that Trump’s MAGA instincts would push him away from the region’s quagmires. Yet reality has been the opposite.
Trump has become further entrenched in the Middle East than any of his recent predecessors. His two administrations have spanned efforts from reviving the Abraham Accords to authorising direct military deployments as new threats have engulfed the region.
The 7 October Hamas attacks upended the fragile normalisation that Trump 1.0 had so carefully brokered. Yet, instead of retreating, Trump doubled down. His decision to deploy B-2 bombers alongside Israel against Iran was unprecedented for any US president—Republican or Democrat — as was his tacit nod for Israeli strikes on targets inside Qatari territory, a long-standing US defense partner. The move rocked the Gulf’s strategic architecture, pushing Saudi Arabia to sign an unusual security pact with Pakistan, invoking Islamabad’s “nuclear umbrella.”
That said, these crises have drawn Washington deeper, not reduced its stakes. After his fancy for regaining Bagram in Afghanistan, Trump has recently pushed for a military base in Damascus to monitor the security situation in fragmented Syria. His liking for Al Sharaa, the new Syrian leader, has turned Syria into an unlikely hub for Trump’s regional balancing act. A full-fledged US base in Damascus would symbolise a fundamental realignment — positioning Washington as a broker between Israel and Syria on the one hand and Israel and Turkey on the other, while further isolating weakened Iran and declining Russia.
This re-iteration comes alongside hurried diplomatic improvisations—a new Gaza peace plan that nobody fully understands, let alone trusts, a fresh security deal with Qatar, and ongoing discussions with Saudi Arabia to expand defense and energy ties. In fact, Trump is willfully expanding the base of the Abraham Accords by including Kazakhstan and egging Saudi Arabia—a move that might win the accords more nods in other Muslim nations.
However, Trumpian inconsistency sits at the heart of this – for the conditions that enabled the original Abraham Accords are no longer holding with Israel’s unstoppable rampage and devaluation of US assurances by and large.
Trump’s critics accuse him of fueling chaos; his supporters call it strategic boldness. Both are right. He has made America less trusted but still indispensable to the Middle East again although his method is constant improvisation rather than a coherent strategy.
Latin American conundrum
If Trump’s engagement in the Middle East surprises, his renewed focus on Latin America confounds further.
After all, this was the region that interested him primarily for demanding tighter borders— core to his anti-immigration populism. Yet over the past two months, the US has flooded the Caribbean and South American waters with warships, fighter jets, and Marines, with strikes that have already killed about 65 people. All under the banner of an anti-narcotics campaign that now looks openly like a prelude to regime change.
The Trump administration’s escalating rhetoric against Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro — including a latest Senate vote rejecting any limits on Trump’s ability to strike Venezuelan targets — marks the most direct US threat to a Latin American government in decades. A bounty on Maduro and targeting Colombia’s Left-wing president, Gustavo Petro, perhaps carries a wider message— Trump is not content with building walls; he wants to reassert dominance in what he sees as America’s hemisphere—regardless of the costs.
Even where he withdraws aid, it is not a vacuum per se. He replaces diplomacy with deterrence. In this sense, Trump has militarised engagement with Latin America, not retreated—a posture far removed from isolationism.
Europe’s awakening: burden-sharing as strategy
Across the Atlantic, Trump’s unpredictability has become Europe’s undoing — and paradoxically, its wake-up call too.
While experts warned about NATO’s decapacitation, Trump’s relentless pressure on European allies to ‘pay for their own security’ has, in fact, forced them to act. Europe is now spending more on defence than at any time since the Cold War, even as it continues to depend on American technology, especially intelligence and arms. Trump has successfully monetised transatlantic anxiety, turning burden-sharing into a pragmatic business model.
The outcome is a militarising Europe — one that is paying more and yet feeling less secure.
Forgotten theatres of Africa
Even Africa, long under-engaged by Washington’s strategic gaze, has not escaped Trump’s erratic activism. His recent threat of military action in Nigeria — responding to what he called “mass violence against Christians” — is the first time since the early 1990s that a US president has publicly expressed intervention in sub-Saharan Africa outside a UN framework.
For the United States Africa Command, which has avoided direct combat missions since its creation in 2007—this could be a profound shift. Trump’s rhetoric, shrouded in moral outrage, is, in fact, a continuation of his core principles—transactionalism and unpredictability.
Also read: India’s exit from Ayni airbase reveals New Delhi’s power projection limits. A key location lost
Indo-Pacific paradox
Ironically, the one region most analysts expected Trump to prioritise — the Indo-Pacific — has been conspicuously under-attended and under-discussed. Despite his hawkish advisors and the rhetoric around China’s rise, Trump has displayed remarkable nonchalance toward the Quad and the future of Taiwan’s security.
Elbridge Colby and other Indo-Pacific hawks are hardly noticeable lately. Trump’s cozying up to Pakistan post Operation Sindoor and indifference to India’s sensitivities have further complicated the Indian Subcontinent’s balance. The once-promising renewal of the US.-India defence framework this month felt perfunctory, not substantive in the least.
This neglect means more than merely disengagement.
Strategic sprezzatura
The Italian term sprezzatura—a studied nonchalance that conceals intention—best captures the spirit of Trump’s foreign policy so far. He interrupts frequently, posts policy on ‘Truth Social’, basks in flattery, acts when others hesitate, and backs down when the adversary is China. The pattern is: unpredictability as method, transactionalism as ideology, and disruption as diplomacy.
This performance keeps allies guessing and adversaries off-balance. Their reactions, regardless, all remain caught in the pull of Trump’s America—still the world’s strongest power, now challenged by Beijing’s rise.
America under Trump seems unsettled with its own might—expanding abroad while fueling anxieties inward, often targeting the very immigrants who built the nation—recently highlighted by Zohran Mamdani, New York’s newest mayor.
Therefore, Trump’s America is neither fully inward nor fully outward—it continues to remain asymmetrically powerful and awkward.
Swasti Rao is a Consulting Editor (International and Strategic Affairs) at ThePrint. She tweets @swasrao. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)