Michael Barone

Ten years ago this month, Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination for president, with a platform that was vastly different on trade and foreign policy from other recent presidents, Republican and Democratic alike.

How fares America – and the world – 10 years later?

In some important ways, things have moved in Trump’s direction. In 2016 and since, he complained constantly that Europeans were not contributing their fair share to NATO. That had been the position of previous administrations, but none emphasized it as Trump did.

Early in Trump’s first term, only five NATO allies met the stated goal of spending 2% of GDP on defense. A decade later, the goal has risen to 5%, and most NATO allies are moving toward that goal.

And as Russian President Vladimir Putin has threatened his neighbors, previously neutral (for nearly 75 years!) Finland and Sweden, with their highly competent militaries, have decided to join NATO and have made the Baltic Sea just beyond Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg a NATO lake.

In the Middle East, Trump has also made a difference. His predecessors’ policy was based on the hoary assumption that the key to stability was to pressure Israel to make a peace agreement with the Palestinians. So America’s task was to pressure Israel to make concessions.

Trump saw it differently. He pushed the Abraham Accords, diplomatic relations between Israel, Saudi Arabia and Persian Gulf oil producers. Progress has been uneven but palpable. Israel’s pacification of Gaza has not prevented the Saudis and United Arab Emirates from supporting Trump’s efforts, cooperating with Israel, to disarm and destabilize the regime in Iran.

On trade, Trump’s on-again, off-again threats, impositions and adjustments of tariff rates have resulted in channeling trade in different patterns.

Not everything has gone Trump’s way. His fixation on unproblematic trade “deficits” has led him to impose tariffs that have fed inflation and eroded his job approval at home. His initiatives in Iran, without persuasive explanations to voters or any attempt at buy-in by the political opposition, have also hurt him politically – although regime collapse in Iran remains possible and could put things in a different light.

More importantly, the world has changed, sometimes in line with his expectations, sometimes to the contrary. The prime example is Russia’s war on Ukraine. As Trump has noted, Putin launched his 2014 attacks on Donbas and his 2022 march toward Kyiv when Democrats were president. And former President Joe Biden’s restrictions on aid to Ukraine – especially bans on lobbing attacks on Russian territory – limited Ukraine’s defense.

“The nature of war has changed,” writes The Wall Street Journal’s Walter Russell Mead. “Rifles, mortars and tanks appear to be going the way of sword fights and cavalry charges.” As the liberal economist Noah Smith explains, “Drones are simply so cheap to produce in huge numbers that they can overwhelm any more expensive system.”

This has worrying implications for the U.S., whose Cold War strategy has emphasized complex, expensive weapons systems to the point that, as Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine projected, the cost of one ultimate fighter jet in 2054 would consume the entire defense budget.

Trump and War Secretary Pete Hegseth have concentrated on strengthening service members’ esprit de corps, which may – no one can be sure – have contributed to the astonishing success of the removal of former Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro from Caracas and the rescue of a downed pilot in Iran. But it’s not clear that they’re adapting to the obsolescence of mobile offensive warfighting that prevailed between 1939 and 2003, and to the new fixed-position-joystick defensive warfighting that resembles artillery in the trench warfare of World War I.

The final verdict on Trump’s foreign policies cannot be written now, with 32 months left in his term and so many kinetic events in unpredictable motion. But perhaps it can be said that while his departures from his predecessors’ policies have had some successes in reshaping the world, it is not clear that he has developed policies adapted to the world he has done so much to change.