page_title: Presidency of Donald Trump
section_title: Foreign policy
hierarchical_section_title: Presidency of Donald Trump / Foreign policy
caption_attribution_description: President Donald J. Trump delivers remarks to the Venezuelan American community at the Florida International University Ocean Bank Convocation Center Monday, Feb. 18, 2019 in Miami, Fla. (Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks)
context_page_description: The presidency of Donald Trump began at noon EST on January 20, 2017, when he was inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States, succeeding Barack Obama. A Republican, Trump was a businessman and reality television personality from New York City at the time of his 2016 presidential election victory over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. While Trump lost the popular vote, he won the Electoral College vote, 304 to 227, in a presidential contest that American intelligence agencies concluded was targeted by a Russian interference campaign. Trump has made many false or misleading statements during his campaign and presidency. The statements have been documented by fact-checkers, with political scientists and historians widely describing the phenomenon as unprecedented in modern American politics. Trump's approval rating has been stable, hovering at high-30 to mid-40 percent throughout his presidency.
  Trump rolled back numerous environmental protections, as well as reducing enforcement of existing regulations.
context_section_description: The stated aims of the foreign policy of the Donald Trump administration include a focus on security, by fighting terrorists abroad and strengthening border defenses and immigration controls; an expansion of the U.S. military; an "America First" approach to trade; and diplomacy whereby "old enemies become friends". The foreign policy positions expressed by Trump during his presidential campaign changed frequently, so it was "difficult to glean a political agenda, or even a set of clear, core policy values ahead of his presidency". Despite pledges to reduce the number of active duty U.S. military personnel deployed overseas, the number was essentially the same three years into Trump's presidency as they were at the end of Obama's.
  Trump has repeatedly praised nationalist and authoritarian strongmen such as Poland's president Andrzej Duda, China's president Xi Jinping, Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, King Salman of Saudi Arabia, Italy's prime minister Giuseppe Conte, Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban. Trump also praised Poland under the homophobic, anti-immigrant Law and Justice party (PiS) as a defender of Western civilization.
  The New York Times reported on January 14, 2019 that on several occasions during 2018, Trump privately said he wanted America to withdraw from NATO. Top defense and national security officials, such as Jim Mattis and John R. Bolton, reportedly "scrambled to keep American strategy on track without mention of a withdrawal that would drastically reduce Washington's influence in Europe and could embolden Russia for decades". In September 2019, Trump and Poland's president Andrzej Duda agreed to send 1,000 U.S. troops to Poland. On February 29, 2020, the Trump administration signed a conditional peace agreement with the Taliban, which calls for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 14 months if the Taliban uphold the terms of the agreement.
  A January 2019 intelligence community assessment found that Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons and North Korea was unlikely to relinquish its nuclear arsenal. Both assessments directly contradicted core tenets of Trump's stated foreign policy. The intelligence community also assessed that Trump's trade policies and unilateralism had damaged traditional alliances and induced foreign partners to seek new relationships. The day after the heads of the intelligence community presented their findings in public testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Trump referred to them as "extremely passive and naive" and "wrong" in their assessments. The following day, Trump asserted the press had misquoted the intelligence chiefs' testimony to fabricate a conflict, claiming that he and the intelligence community were "on the same page!" In a subsequent interview with The New York Times, Trump falsely asserted that the intelligence community had characterized Iran as "essentially, a wonderful place".
  On February 5, 2019, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to rebuke Trump for his decisions to withdraw troops from Syria and Afghanistan. Drafted by majority leader Mitch McConnell, the measure was supported by nearly all Republicans.
  After initially adopting a verbally hostile posture toward North Korea and its leader, Kim Jong-un, Trump quickly pivoted to embrace the regime, saying he and Kim "fell in love". Trump engaged Kim by meeting him at two summits, in June 2018 and February 2019, an unprecedented move by an American president, as previous policy had been that a president's simply meeting with the North Korean leader would legitimize the regime on the world stage. During the June 2018 summit, the leaders signed a vague agreement to pursue denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, with Trump immediately declaring "There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea." Little progress was made toward that goal during the months before the February 2019 summit, which ended abruptly without an agreement, hours after the White House a
caption: On February 18, 2019, Trump appealed to the Venezuelan military to back opposition leader Juan Guaidó.[654]
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