Here is the unedited version of my latest piece for Salisbury Review in the U.K.:
The Trump Doctrine is the geopolitical extrapolation of The Art of the Deal (1987), co-authored by Donald Trump and Tony Schwartz. One key principle of the book instructs the negotiator to find out what the other party wants or fears and then resolutely leverage that until a favourable outcome is achieved. The immediate future of the world, therefore, depends on this Trumpian dictum: Know what the opposite number wants and fears and act decisively on that knowledge. In most cases, I would argue, U.S. foreign policy since January 2025 has done exactly this. There are crucial exceptions, however, where things have not gone to plan or, at any rate, give that appearance. Why, we need to now, has that happened?
Whatever the critics say, Trump has scored any number of triumphs on the international front. Take NATO, for instance. Its European contingent wants more than anything else for Washington to retain its commitment to Article 5. So what does Trump do? He threatens to disavow Article 5 unless the Europeans agree to scale up their investment in defence from 2 to 5 percent of GDP. This was an aggressive, even hostile, way to negotiate with longtime allies, but it got the intended result. At the June 2025 NATO Summit, they all acquiesced – albeit with the caveat of an extended time frame – to Trump’s demand. He bent them to his will.
Global tariffs is another area in which Trump has leveraged American power to force others to accept his idea of what is fair. The backstory to the 2025-6 U.S.-Japan Trade Deal is that Tokyo wants U.S. help as China seeks to become the unchallenged hegemon in East Asia. This is the context of Japan’s agreement to invest $550 billion in American strategic industries, such as semi-conductors, energy, and critical minerals. Meanwhile, Nippon Steel has been allowed by Trump to buy U.S. Steel on the proviso it invests billions of dollars in its new subsidiary and expand manufacturing jobs across the Rust Belt, MAGA territory. The 2025-6 US-EU trade deal is another instance of Trump leveraging the world to America’s advantage. Currently the deal is under threat, and yet the American market is so fundamental to the European Union we can wager on a compromise of some kind to emerge regarding its anti-trust measures against American tech giants.
And so it was with Panama after Trump threatened to ‘take back’ the Panama Canal if Chinese management of the two canal ports was not revoked. Speedily, President José Raúl Mulino withdrew Panama from Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) while the country’s Supreme Court ruled China’s involvement in the canal unconstitutional. The same with Venezuela. On January 3, 2026, U.S. special forces seized Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro in Operation Absolute Resolve. His deputy, Delcy Rodriguez, promptly came to an understanding with the Trump administration. She would publicly condemn the capture of her erstwhile boss but, nevertheless, restore diplomatic relations between Caracas and Washington. The United States now has complete control over Venezuela’s oil exports and revenues.
Why, then, has Trump not been able to use his leverage U.S. power to bring an end to the Russia-Ukraine war? This was something he pledged to achieve within ‘twenty-four hours’ of returning to the Oval Office. Why has the self-ascribed Peacemaker-in-Chief failed to secure a ceasefire, let alone a long-term peace deal? The answer is that both Russia and Ukraine believe they have more to gain by continuing the war than agreeing to a truce, let alone a long-term peace settlement. It is unlikely – though not impossible – Vladimir Putin still believes he can make a major breakthrough on the battlefield and rout the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU). But what he can do – and continues to do – is escalate Russia’s aerial campaign against Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities in the hope of forcing Volodmyr Zelensky to surrender the entirety of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts.
Zelensky, equally, has his own maximalist demands – including the return of Crimea – as Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) continues to transmute into ‘total war’. Any genuine ceasefire will be the result of developments on battlefield; and the battlefield, because of missile and drone technology, now stretches the length and breadth of Ukraine and the Russian Federation. Ukraine’s long-range missile strikes on Russia’s oil refineries and civilian infrastructure means that he, too, believes that a continuation of war could strengthen his hand in any future peace deal. In the context of this, it is not Zelensky who has ‘no cards to play’, as Trump and Vance insisted in their February 2025 Oval Office showdown, but the Trump administration.
Putin and Zelensky, then, have outplayed Trump with their respective versions of the Art of The No Deal. Only by arming (or threatening to arm) the AFU with the latest U.S. weaponry and directly affecting the battlefront could Trump pressure Russia into agreeing to a ceasefire. This is what the Kremlin fears but Trump, determined to have a ‘fantastic friendship’ with Putin, chooses not to do so. Instead, at the Anchorage Summit in August 2025, Trump offered to recognise Moscow’s sovereignty over the territory Russia had captured in eastern Ukraine plus the remainder of unconquered Donetsk. But Putin, to quote Macbeth, is ‘in blood/Stepped in so far’ that he found even this generous proposal unacceptable. The death – by mid-2025 – of an estimated 250,000 Russian soldiers demanded something more than a slither of Donetsk. And now, 14 months later as the figure of Russians killed approaches 500,000, Putin is even less likely to settle for anything less than his maximalist goals. Bluntly put, Trump failed to follow his own dictum: Know what the opposite number wants and fears and act decisively on that knowledge.
Trump cannot be blamed for Putin launching his SMO, but the same cannot be said about the current U.S.-Iran conflagration. Trump initiated hostilities in Operation Midnight Hammer in 2025 and followed that up in February 2026 with Operation Epic Fury. The deal he wishes to strike requires the regime to indisputably up its quest for nuclear-weapons capability. The previous Iran Nuclear Deal, which Barack Obama generated back in 2015, failed to persuade the theocrats of acquiesce to Washington’s demands. Though Obama kept insisting the military operation was ‘on the table’, few believed him: ‘If countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us.’ The Obama administration’s negotiating style focused almost entirely on unfreezing billions of dollars of Iranian assets if Tehran agreed – publicly, at least – to quit its nuclear-weapons program for a period of ten years. The Mullahs took the money and, besides funding its terrorist proxies in the Middle East, Hamas, Hezbollah et al, proceeded to enrich Iran’s uranium stockpile close to the 90 percent weapons-grade threshold while developing a complementary long-range missile.
Will Trump be any more successful than Obama at forcing Tehran to fall in line with American policy? Can his diplomatic outreach alternating with bombing ‘the hell out of them’ produce a New Iran Nuclear Deal, something more substantive than Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)? A regime that slaughtered an estimated 40,000 protesters on the evening of January 8-9 cannot be expected to submit to the Great Satan unless Trump maintains a blockade on Iranian ports and reigns devastation upon the Islamic Republic’s economic infrastructure. In other words, until the Iranian Republic Guard Corps (IRGC) and its civilian counterpart no longer possess the wherewithal to hold back the tidal wave of a people’s revolution.
If Trump is the Master of the Deal, Iran’s leaders – not unlike Putin – have so far been the Masters of the No Deal. Their leverage comes from a sense that Trump is desperate to lower the price of oil and gas in the USA before the mid-term November elections. Even without an army, navy or Air Force, and the nuclear-weapons program setback a decade, the regime still believes that by not signing a deal with Trump they hold the whip hand. A genuine Iran Nuclear Deal might be in place by the time you read this. That would see the Strait of Hormuz open and the Iranian regime, fearing an insurrection by a starving and unpaid population, bending to the will of the Great Satan for the first time forty-seven years. If that is the case, of course, we will be able to say the Islamic revolutionaries met their match in Donald Trump. Conversely, if the regime remains unbowed by American military might, Trump’s intervention in Iran will haunt him for the rest of his presidency, those victories in Panama and Venezuela just distant memories.
