Trump's second term foreign policy likely to focus on 'strength' and 'deterrence': expert

A second Trump presidency is giving supporters hope of a continuation of his first-term policies, while critics worry that he'll isolate the U.S. on the global stage at a delicate time for the international security landscape.

Richard Goldberg, senior adviser at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and a former Trump administration NSC official, told Fox News Digital he sees a second Trump term as "going back to the basics of peace through strength [and] restoring deterrence." 

"They're prioritizing China as our top threat to national security," Goldberg said, referencing the campaign’s platform. "Investing in our military, modernizing our military, expanding the use of AI and space, to ensure that we are able to overpower the CCP and Beijing and its wider access around the world."

Trump’s foreign policy record has remained a key point of comparison between him and his successor, President Biden, with many arguing Trump took an isolationist "America First" approach that damaged relations with key allies. 

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"Isolationism is about going it alone and about viewing America's way of engaging the world as unilateral and independent and alone, as opposed to building multilateral alliances — a sort of unilateral mindset," Joel Rubin, a former State Department official during the Obama administration, told Fox News Digital.

"The U.S. can't always act unilaterally, but that doesn't need to be the predisposition," Rubin argued. "Trump never ignored the world, no, but what his foreign policy was focused on was America acting independently and unilaterally, and that I think is where there's a difference. The United States is a leader, not an independent actor."

Golberg disagreed with that assessment, arguing people often "mistake populist rhetoric for isolationism … or, certainly, some sort of instinct not to use force when necessary to defend the United States." 

"The president was tested by Iran, and Qassem Soleimani lost his life because of it," Goldberg said as an example. "There was that moment where I think President Trump demonstrated to all the enemies of the United States that he's not an isolationist. He's a conservative. That's following basic conservative principles of peace through strength, willing to show deterrence … which means you have the capability, but also the will, to use force when necessary."

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Rubin lamented that Trump’s hard-line stance on NATO ally contributions to defense spending hurt relations between the U.S. and such a vital network of allies and worried what that might mean for the alliance at a time when Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine requires unity and strength. 

"Turning away from American alliances has put us in a hole that we’re barely coming out of now, and, thankfully, Biden restored our alliances with NATO," Rubin said, adding that the deal to withdraw from Afghanistan, which Trump first brokered and Biden decided to uphold, "really put us in a weak position." 

That fear remains firmly in mind for European leaders as they worry about what happens next in the event Russia succeeds in subduing and conquering Ukraine. Jens Spahn, a lawmaker of Germany’s center-right opposition party CDU, told outlet DW during the NATO summit in Washington, D.C., last week that "we should not make the same mistake again" with Trump.

"No one really had a network with his team," Spahn said, explaining the several meetings NATO delegations had arranged with Republicans close to Trump’s camp, DW reported.  

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Ricarda Lang, co-leader of the German Green Party, meanwhile, argued that Trump’s vice resident pick of Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, left little doubt that Trump would "deliver Ukraine to Putin" after Vance said in 2022 that he didn’t "really care what happens in Ukraine one way or the other." 

Rubin acknowledged that Trump made some positive contributions to the global landscape, such as through the Abraham Accords, which he judged as "a positive contribution to the Middle East" along with Trump’s handling of North Korea. 

"I thought that it was very important for him to do what he did with North Korea, in terms of making the effort to engage and speak with Kim and seek progress on the nuclear program," Rubin said, though he noted that, "unfortunately, nothing really came out of it."

"I think the lack of a real commitment to its symptomatic program with North Korea was a loss when he had opened up something in a way that had not been done before, which I thought had a lot of promise," Rubin added. 

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Goldberg defended several Trump-era policies as significant wins for American foreign policy, mainly touting global stability during the majority of Trump’s pre-pandemic administration. 

"Russia was deterred from any sort of aggression in Eastern Europe — certainly not an invasion of Ukraine," Goldberg said. "Iran was running out of money, almost bankrupt. And after the killing of one of the world's leading terrorists, Qassem Soleimani, they stopped expanding and escalating their nuclear enrichment."

"Israel was not facing a seven-front war, and, obviously, other actors, most importantly, China, had to think about what was next as the United States was investing more in its military, spending more on its defense industrial base, trying to finally accelerate what was needed to compete with China and potentially win a war in the future against China," Goldberg added. 

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He acknowledged, though, that Trump faced typical growing pains for a new president when he took office and was slow to begin some of his more effective policies, such as the "maximum pressure" campaign on Iran. 

"I think his instincts are always to do the unexpected, to do something that hasn't been tried before," Goldberg argued. "If everybody's tried doing things the same way and it hasn't achieved the right result, maybe there is a different approach. And I think we'll see more of that in a second term."