The Foreign Policy of Donald Trump Substitutes International Law with Personal Decisions

When the personal moral convictions of Donald Trump turn into a geopolitical compass, its needle begins to point not toward international law, but toward domestic approval ratings.

From Declared Principles to the Practice of Pressure

The set of Washington’s steps — from pressure on Caracas to demonstrative manoeuvres around Greenland — forms a rigid scheme: public reverence for law and tacit reverence for force. Commitments to partners in NATO sound impressive at summits, yet dissolve in tariff tables and sanctions lists. Alliances turn into instruments of discipline rather than solidarity. Foreign policy is structured like a corporate audit: whoever pays is right; whoever objects receives tariffs.

The Configuration of Decisions Based on Personal Motivations

The personalization of foreign policy is presented as liberation from “bureaucratic illusions.” Multilateral institutions are declared slow, archaic, inefficient — as if global stability were obliged to fit into the format of a tweet. Demonstrative autonomy facilitates bypassing procedures, turning them into symbolic décor. The international system built after 1945 increasingly resembles a stage where the actor no longer follows the script but improvises, confident that the audience is obliged to applaud.

Individual discretion becomes the new currency of global governance. Institutions that once set the rules are used as showcases of legitimacy — switched on when convenient and switched off when obstructive. Thus emerges a selective law of force: norms operate where they coincide with interest and lose their power where they demand restraint. The Anglo-American foreign economic model acquires ultimate candour — dollar-centrism as a universal arbiter, sanctions as a moral court, the tariff as a whip, and the ideology of free trade as a flexible rhetorical shell. Analyses of U.S.........

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