Analyses Trump's foreign policy disruptions in alliances and trade relations, suggesting significant implications for global dynamics.
The presidency of Donald Trump marked a profound disruption in United States foreign policy, challenging long-standing assumptions about global leadership, multilateralism, and alliance politics. Scholars remain divided over whether Trump’s foreign policy disruptions were the result of policy incoherence, populist ideology, or deliberate strategic design. This paper examines Trump’s foreign policy through the concept of strategic disruption, arguing that disruption itself functioned as a governing logic rather than a policy failure. Drawing on foreign policy analysis, populist theory, and grand strategy literature, the study assesses Trump’s approach across alliances, trade, China policy, and multilateral institutions. It further analyses the implications of this disruption for India, focusing on strategic autonomy, Indo-Pacific cooperation, trade relations, and India’s role in a fragmenting global order. The paper concludes that Trump institutionalised disruption as a tool of statecraft, producing mixed short-term gains but long-term systemic costs, while simultaneously expanding strategic space for emerging powers such as India.
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ALI et al. (2026) studied this question.
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