Greg Ip

You have to sort of like divide US foreign policy in the post-war period into two phases, the Cold War and the post-Cold War period.

So during the Cold War period, the North Star was push back communism.

And the United States did a lot of, you know, unsavory things in the pursuit of pushing back communism.

We fomented a coup d'etat in Iran.

We pushed out duly elected people like the president of Chile because they were too close to the communists and the Russians.

It was less about containing the Soviet Union, which no longer existed.

It was more about spreading democracy and also keeping the world stable and free of the influence of rogue states like Iran and North Korea.

It was primarily an ideologically driven approach to foreign policy, where the goal was to make the world, as America saw it, safer for the things that Americans valued like democracy and freedom.

Sure.

Well, a very good example would be in the original peace negotiations with Ukraine, right?

So the president made it clear upon taking office that he wanted to end that war, stop the killing.

But he also wanted to end it on terms that were very favorable to the United States.

He stopped giving weapons and so on to Ukraine.

He arranged for European partners to pay for those weapons.

And he also essentially pressured Ukraine into signing an agreement that would give the United States a piece of its mineral wealth in the event of a peace settlement.

Now, was that settlement actually worth much to the United States?

I guess you could have a debate about that.

But the point was that for Trump, this kind of like financial accounting of international transactions was core to his approach.

A, they're in the Western Hemisphere, and B, they all represent potentially very significant economic assets.

The Panama Canal, for example, Trump has said over and over again he thought it was a mistake to give the canal back to Panama, and so he has said he wants it back.