The Most Reckless Trump Foreign Policy

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Since many of my international politics students—now college juniors and seniors—were still in middle school during Trump’s first inauguration, they are largely unsure of what to expect from a second Trump administration. Trump’s reelection has forced me to tear up my international law syllabus, just as I did every semester during the first Trump administration, when virtually every subfield and topic came under direct assault. In response to Trump’s withdrawal, Iran expanded its nuclear program and stepped up enrichment of weapons-grade uranium; the nation now constitutes a “critical threat.” If a second Trump administration reverts to his maximum-pressure posture, or indeed makes the sequel bigger than the original, Iran may exit the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty altogether, expel international inspectors, and take the final steps toward making a bomb. Yet, as I’ll remind my students, so many of the policies of the first Trump administration ran afoul not only of U.S. domestic laws—which could be reworked through executive orders and a pliant Congress—but of the nation’s international treaty obligations, which may be easier to evade but harder to change.