Donald Trump’s Foreign Policy Betrayal
On The Time of Monsters: Stephen Wertheim on how Trump is blocking real change to the status quo.
The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer
The Time of Monsters podcast features Nation national-affairs correspondent Jeet Heer’s signature blend of political culture and cultural politics. Each week, he’ll host in-depth conversations with urgent voices on the most pressing issues of our time.
Donald Trump’s Foreign Policy Betrayal w/ Stephen Wertheim
Since 2015, Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized the American foreign policy establishment
for being too belligerent and unwilling to negotiate with adversaries. But in office, Trump has
carried out a foreign policy that has all the vices he has criticized and been even more inclined
to risk war or get into new wars. In a recent essay in The New York Times, Stephen Wertheim,
a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, has written an incisive critique of Donald Trump’s foreign policy
incoherence emphasizing how the president’s ad hoc response to problems and his excessive
faith in his own deal making ability prevents any systematic change from the status quo.
Stephen and I have a wide-ranging discussion on the over-stretched American empire and why
Trump is just making things worse.
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Donald Trump reacts as he plays a round of golf at Trump Turnberry golf course during his visit to the UK on July 27, 2025.
(Christopher Furlong / Getty Images)Since 2015, Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized the American foreign policy establishment for being too belligerent and unwilling to negotiate with adversaries. But in office, Trump has carried out a foreign policy that has all the vices he has criticized, and has been more inclined to risk war or get into new wars. In a recent essay in The New York Times, Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has written an incisive critique of Donald Trump’s foreign policy incoherence emphasizing how the president’s ad hoc response to problems and his excessive faith in his own dealmaking ability prevents any systematic change from the status quo.
Stephen and I have a wide-ranging discussion on the overstretched American empire and why Trump is just making things worse.
Subscribe to The Nation to support all of our podcasts: thenation.com/podcastsubscribe.
The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer
The Time of Monsters podcast features Nation national-affairs correspondent Jeet Heer’s signature blend of political culture and cultural politics. Each week, he’ll host in-depth conversations with urgent voices on the most pressing issues of our time.
Trump is Using Terrorist Charges to Wage Political War w/ Josh Kovensky
Over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Kovensky has written an essay on the Trump
administration’s use of anti-terrorism law to target political groups it doesn’t like.
In that piece, Kovensky notes,
"Across the country, federal prosecutors are upgrading what would have been routine
prosecutions into terrorism cases when they involve people President Trump has cast as his
political enemies.
It represents a dramatic departure from how the Justice Department has historically used the
federal material support for terrorism statute. For decades, counterterrorism prosecutors have
largely reserved the statute — 2339A — for the kinds of audacious plots that wreak real, lasting
damage or whose ambition forms the stuff of movie screenplays."
I spoke to Kovensky about his essay and the history and politics of this dangerous legal
innovation.
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