A few quick thoughts on the reporting and the reality of the Trump administration’s foreign policy.🧵 Both US and European news media are likely to talk a lot about the “unpredictability” of Trump’s foreign policy as if it’s some kind of strategy. This is misleading – Trump foreign policy wasn’t and isn’t unpredictable, it’s incoherent. Trump 1 policy was incoherent because what Trump said and did often didn’t align with his own administration (not just career State Dept people but his own appointees). And, of course, we could see very little of what Trump and his inner circle were doing behind closed doors. Trump personally has always appeared highly predictable on foreign policy because he has a consistent set of interests (money, status), low levels of knowledge, and a worldview that hasn’t changed for at least 40 years. Trump himself won’t have changed, though the level of his input might have: foreign policy will be presented as Trump's, but others may well be making the decisions. But it’s clear that the people around him who expect to have power in the administration are much more focused on removing opposition than in term 1. To the extent they succeed, foreign policy may well be more internally coherent. There are likely to be lots of headline-grabbing, wacky announcements, as there already have been. These are good for news headlines but not good for helping people understand what’s actually going on. The behaviour of the Trump inner circle in term 1 and what we can see so far about the shape of term 2 suggest it would be a mistake to think of their foreign policy as intended to advance US interests - though, again, this is likely to be how most news coverage presents it. Trump administration foreign policy is likely to be about advancing the personal interests of those with power in the White House and not very much more. However bad foreign policy was under previous presidents, that wasn’t the case – the Trump administrations really are exceptional in that respect. This is one reason why previous US presidencies’ foreign policy practices may not be a good guide to what happens during the next Trump presidency. Other types of regime may be more useful comparators – ones where power is personalized not embedded in institutions; where the financial interests of those in power drive decision-making; and where democratic institutional constraints don’t function. The decision-makers in the Trump administration appear hostile to traditional US allies and friendly to Russia. Shifting goalposts on NATO members’ spending and making claims on allies’ territory seem designed to unsettle, to keep allies on the back foot. From what we can see, it would be spectacularly unwise of any ally to expect their intelligence relationship with the US to remain secure. Europe is facing its most dangerous moment since the early 1940s: its primary security relationship is, at best, severely compromised and its primary threat, Russia, thinks that it now has influence in the White House. It may be diplomatically necessary for European states and other former allies to talk about the importance of partnership with the US in the next few years, but it would be very foolish to believe it. One final, specific prediction about the next few years: we won’t hear Trump ever, under any circumstances, say anything critical of Putin.