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Trump’s foreign policy defies definition: Financial Times chief US commentator Edward Luce at HTLS 2025
Edward Luce, the chief US commentator at the FT, painted a picture of a White House driven by a chaotic agenda and the whimsies of the two-time president
The global order is in flux. And at the heart of the churn is US President Donald Trump, who has upended decades of established international policy.
Edward Luce, the chief US commentator at the Financial Times, argues that Trump’s foreign policy does not lend itself to easy definition, is driven by financial opportunities, and that he gravitates away from rules-based systems.
In an online session at the 23rd Hindustan Times Leadership Summit, Luce also painted a picture of a White House driven by a chaotic agenda and the whimsies of the two-time president, who has in his second term moved swiftly to redraw America’s domestic and foreign agendas.
“You’ll see him getting along better with Pakistan, for example, than with India, because India is still a rules-based system. You’ll see him getting along better with Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE than with Canada or even Britain and France, for precisely the same reasons. Those countries cannot offer crypto deals to Trump’s children or to the children of Steve Witkoff, his foreign policy envoy, or Howard Lutnick, his Commerce Secretary,” he said in a session with Kaveree Bamzai
He said Trump holds “escalation dominance” over the news cycle. Trump causes the reaction, Trump controls the narrative. Much in the same way, the US President also holds Washington – Trumpistan as Luce calls it – in a vise grip. “A personalist one-man administration in which he’s at the top of a pyramid and everybody beneath him owes their position to absolute loyalty to Trump,” said Luce.
For a country that prides itself on a robust federal model and its vast democratic freedoms, Luce said this “is a very strange and new thing”.
On the local front, Trump has slashed jobs across federal departments, clamped down on immigration, given a free hand to law enforcement to act against “illegal aliens”, moved away from the Biden administration’s plans to transition to renewable energy and signed into law sweeping changes in taxation and healthcare funding.
On the global front, he has wreaked havoc on international trade by issuing a flurry of tariffs and publicly lobbied for the Nobel Peace Prize.
“There isn’t really a Trump foreign policy strategy – it’s the wrong word. I think that’s a form of ‘sanewashing’,” he said.
“There is what Trump does and we can try and build a pattern out of that, but he will make your pattern irrelevant and redundant within an hour of you finishing it.”
But China and Russia have consistently ducked Trump’s attempts to influence global policy. Where Beijing has undercut his tariffs with its control of rare earth minerals – “a bigger bazooka”, as Luce called it – Moscow has evaded – till now – his attempts to try and bring the Ukraine conflict to a halt.
“If you’ve got leverage, you can defeat Trump; if you haven’t got leverage, nothing much will stop him.”
Trump’s efforts may have pushed China and Russia to build closer ties.
“The first rule of geopolitics, going back to ancient Chinese thinkers and people like Kautilya, is that you don’t push all your enemies together and you don’t push your friends in with your enemies either,” said Luce.
“If you’re pushing your friends and your enemies together into an anti-American camp, well, you’re not doing geopolitics right.”
This is doing long-term harm to the country’s international power by “reducing America’s leverage”, “shattering its soft power”, “raising the cost of America getting its way” and “creating conditions for others to strike deals with each other” because of a trust deficit.
Trump’s “America First” policies are an attempt to satiate his MAGA (Make America Great Again) fanbase, but has created fertile conditions for a seismic shift in Washington’s politics.
Bamzai referred to Nick Fuentes, a far-right white nationalist with a history of racist and antisemitic rhetoric but also commands a cult following. Luce pointed out that Fuentes was “until very recently considered unhygienic even on the MAGA right because he’s a full-blown pro-Hitler, Holocaust-denying far-right figure.”
“The problem with having a ‘cordon sanitaire’ for people like him is if you’re the rest of the MAGA movement, you’re saying: ‘Immigrants are fair game, Muslims are fair game, brown people are fair game, gays are fair game, everybody’s fair game—but we’ll stop at the Jews.’ Well, you’re going to get people saying, ‘Why are we stopping at the Jews?’” he said.
Older Republicans have now created a monster that they have now lost control of, Luce postulated. US vice-president JD Vance, he said, is positioning himself as the standard-bearer of the new, menacing MAGA.
But Democrats, flailing as they may be, will have taken hope from a clutch of election wins across the US, including Zohran Mamdani’s run in the New York mayoral polls, as well as races in Virginia, New Jersey, Georgia, Pennsylvania and California. “There’s going to be a lot of people auditioning to be the Democrat who beats Trump or whoever Trump’s heir is in 2028. I think this period in the wilderness is probably coming to an end for Democrats.”
