Understanding How Trump Sees the World

Donald Trump’s first National Security Strategy, released at the end of 2017, announced the start of a new era for American foreign policy—one that put great-power competition at its center and focused especially on intensifying rivalry with China. For all the dissension and turbulence in American politics since then, that framework for American foreign policy has proved remarkably durable.

Nadia Schadlow is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and served as deputy national security adviser in the first Trump administration. She was the primary author of Trump’s first National Security Strategy and helped crystallize the return of great-power competition as the organizing principle of U.S. strategy. But what great-power competition means for America’s greatest challenges today—and whether it still accurately describes Donald Trump’s view of the world—is an entirely different question.

Schadlow joined Dan Kurtz-Phelan to talk about Trump’s second-term approach—in Ukraine, in Asia, with global trade, and more—and laid out a vision of what a successful Trump foreign policy might look like.

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