Is there a Trump doctrine? Making sense of US foreign and security policy since Trump’s return to the White House

In January 2025, Donald Trump returned to the White House. The ensuing months have been a dizzying blur for American foreign and security policy.

Unprecedented U.S. import tariffs have been threatened, reversed, and imposed. Allies have been lectured and harangued, while adversaries have been warmly welcomed. Trump dressed down Ukraine’s president, embraced Russia’s, and then did a U-turn. He stood by Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza, backed its escalation against Hizballah in Lebanon, and joined in bombing Iran, but then pressured Israel into a peace deal. His administration, which seemed to see China as a rival to American dominance, cultivated allies in the Pacific and launched a trade war, but has also signalled a pullback from East Asia and a renewed focus on the Western hemisphere. Amidst the turmoil of the Trump administration, is there an emerging logic to US foreign and security policy? Is a Trump doctrine taking shape?

Ron Krebs, author of the award-winning Narrative and the Making of US National Security, and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Grand Strategy, will take stock of the Trump administration and US foreign and national security policy a year after the momentous 2024 election. Following Krebs' talk, a panel of LSE experts will join the discussion to share their views.

Meet our speakers and chair

Ronald Krebs is Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. His primary focus is international conflict and security. He has written extensively, for both scholarly and general interest publications, on US foreign policy; grand strategy; military recruitment and service; civil-military relations; and rhetoric, narrative, and politics. From 2020-2023, he was editor-in-chief of the journal Security Studies.

Boram Lee is Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations at LSE. Boram's research interests lie in how value-based issues affect economic globalisation and how industrialised democracies negotiate human rights or environmental side agreements during trade negotiations to export their values to trading partners. Her book project examines how the US and the EU adopt different strategies to make those side agreements look credible in the eyes of their domestic constituencies and how those side agreements affect their relationships with partner countries.

Katharine Millar is Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of International Relations at LSE. Her broad research interests lie in examining the gendered cultural narratives underlying political violence and the modern collective use of force. Her on-going research examines gender, race, sexuality and the transnational politics of death; gender and cybersecurity; and liberal notions of political belonging.

Luca Tardelli (@luca_tardelli) is Associate Professor (Education) in International Relations. His research focuses on international security, military intervention, and US foreign policy. His research draws primarily on both realism and political sociology to study the practice of military intervention, particularly how elite politics and elite relations shape US decisions to intervene in civil wars and revolutions.

Rohan Mukherjee (@rohan_mukh) is Assistant Professor and Deputy Director of LSE IDEAS in the Department of International Relations at LSE. His research focuses on rising powers and how they navigate the power and status hierarchies of international order. His regional focus is on the Asia-Pacific, particularly how major powers such as India, China, the United States, and Japan, and smaller states in south and southeast Asia, manage the regional effects of global transitions.

More about this event

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