COLUMNS

The Trump Doctrine: A Work in Progress

Dec 20, 2016 | 08:02 GMT

President Donald Trump's Foreign Policy Doctrine
Commentators among the Washington establishment have been quick to dismiss President-elect Donald Trump's foreign policy moves outright over the past few weeks, but his actions merit deeper exploration than knee-jerk disbelief.

(JEFF SWENSON/Getty Images)

The world is in a "frenzy of study," Henry Kissinger said in a recent interview. At home and abroad, strategists and pundits are trying to piece together a blueprint of American foreign policy under U.S. President-elect Donald Trump from a stream of Tweets, some campaign slogans, a few eye-catching Cabinet picks and meetings at Trump Tower, and a pingpong match already underway with Beijing. Highbrow intellectualism can be a handicap in this exercise. Commentators among the Washington establishment have been quick to dismiss Trump's foreign policy moves outright as erratic and self-serving over the past few weeks. In an op-ed entitled "Trump Failed His First Foreign Policy Test," for instance, columnist David Ignatius admonished the president-elect for the "hot mess" his phone call with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen precipitated. Trump makes people uncomfortable. It's what he does best, in fact. But how this quality applies to foreign policy is a...