Trump Doesn’t Believe Anything. Transactionalism Wins.

[ltlee1]

"Last week, President-Elect Donald Trump nominated Morgan Ortagus, a
longtime State Department official, to serve as a deputy special envoy
for Middle East peace—and immediately undercut her. “Early on Morgan
fought me for three years, but hopefully has learned her lesson,” Trump
wrote when he announced her hire on Truth Social. “These things usually
don’t work out, but she has strong Republican support, and I’m not doing
this for me, I’m doing it for them.”

It might seem bizarre for an executive to employ someone they consider
at odds with their agenda. But there is a design behind this seeming
dysfunction, and it reflects one of Trump’s strengths: He is a nakedly
transactional coalition leader with few, if any, core beliefs. This
enables him to balance the demands of opposing constituencies without
alienating them. Because Trump has few real commitments, he can take
contradictory positions and appease rival factions—in this case, hiring
a member of the GOP establishment that he has assailed as “freaks,”
“warmongers,” and “neocons”—without paying a price for inconsistency. On
the contrary, Trump’s unapologetic amorality is a proven electoral asset
that allows him to do things other politicians cannot."

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/01/trumps-transactionalism-appointment-politicans/681250/

[ltlee1]

Does Trump transactionalist approach make him a realist?

Stephen Walt's 4-1,2016 comment:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/04/01/no-realdonaldtrump-is-not-a-realist/

"Trump may have said a few things that echo realist ideas, and his
criticisms of past blunders such as the Iraq War are in line with
realist opposition to that war, but his overall worldview and most of
his other utterances are at odds with realism’s core elements.

The case that Trump is a “closet realist” rests on two pillars, both
expressed in his interview with the Times. First, he has repeatedly
accused U.S. allies of “free-riding” on American protection and
suggested he’ll drive a harder bargain with those deadbeats. It is true
that some realists (including yours truly) have made similar suggestions
in the past, but so have nonrealists going all the way back to the
1960s. ... And Trump does have a point: U.S. GDP is about 46 percent of
the NATO total, but the United States provides nearly 75 percent of
total alliance defense spending. This isn’t a “realist” argument,
however; it’s just a fact (and one that no doubt resonates with the
American taxpayer).

Second, Trump also suggested in the interview that it might not be so
bad if a few U.S. allies — such as Japan or South Korea — acquired
nuclear weapons. Once again, realists such as the late Kenneth Waltz and
John Mearsheimer have proposed similar measures at various times, though
neither scholar advocated rapid or wide-ranging proliferation or
suggested it would be desirable in all circumstances. Rather, the
realist case for the spread of nuclear weapons is more limited: 1) It
sees these weapons as useful for deterring direct attacks on their
possessors but not for blackmail or conquest; 2) It maintains that the
fear of retaliation would deter new nuclear states from using their
weapons; 3) It argues that the slow spread of nuclear weapons would
increase stability in some regional contexts; and 4) It points out that
all-out U.S. efforts to keep states from going nuclear were not without
costs. And to be fair to the Donald, he’s not wrong to suggest that a
Japanese or South Korean nuclear deterrent would be more credible than
their relying on Washington to risk a nuclear exchange on their behalf.

I’d wager a ton of money that Trump has never read a word of the
scholarly literature on the complex topic of extended deterrence, and
there are a number of other reasons why letting these states go nuclear
might not be desirable for them or in the best interest of the United
States, but the core argument he’s making here is not a radical one. ...

In any case, those two points are pretty much the extent of Trump’s
alleged “realism. Nowhere in his Times interview do you find references
to the core logic of realist theory or the key tenets of a “realist”
foreign policy. Trump talks a lot about power and strength but doesn’t
say where it comes from, and he never identifies what U.S. vital
interests are or presents a George Kennan-esque focus on key centers of
industrial power. There is no indication that Trump understands the
workings of balance of power theory — arguably the core idea in the
realist canon — and there’s little sign that he grasps the essential
features of a globalized world economy.”

[ltlee1]

Another comment from Robert D. Kaplan arguing against Trump the realist:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/on-foreign-policy-donald-trump-is-a-fake-realist/2016/11/11/c5fdcc52-a783-11e6-8042-f4d111c862d1_story.html

"President-elect Donald Trump is being called a "realist" in foreign
policy. Don't believe it. He may have some crude realist instincts, but
that only makes him a terrible messenger for realism. Realists like
myself should be very nervous about his election.

Realism is a sensibility, not a specific guide to what to do in each
crisis. And it is a sensibility rooted in a mature sense of the tragic —
of all the things that can go wrong in foreign policy, so that caution
and a knowledge of history are embedded in the realist mindset. Realism
has been with us at least since Thucydides wrote "The Peloponnesian War"
in the 5th century B.C., in which he defined human nature as driven by
fear (phobos), self-interest (kerdos) and honor (doxa). Because the
realist knows that he must work with such elemental forces rather than
against them, he also knows, for example, that order comes before
freedom and interests come before values. After all, without order there
is no freedom for anybody, and without interests a state has no
incentive to project its values.

Trump has given no indication that he has thought about any of this. He
appears to have no sense of history and therefore no mature sense of the
tragic. A sense of history comes mainly from reading. That’s how we know
in the first place about such things as our obligations to allies and
our role as the defender of the West. All previous presidents in modern
times, without being intellectuals, have been readers to some extent.
But Trump seems post-literate, a man who has made an end run around
books directly to the digital age, where nothing is vetted, context is
absent and lies proliferate."

[ltlee1]

Overall, the criticism against Trump is criticism against
"Short-term-ism." That is, advantages today may turn out to be
disadvantages tomorrow. In addition, Trump is still seen by some as a
self-promoter more than a stateman.