Trump Had an ‘America First’ Foreign Policy. But It Was a Breakdown in American Policymaking.

A second Donald J. Trump presidency would almost certainly mark a return to an era of foreign policy decrees, untethered to any policy process, at a moment of maximum international peril.

What Donald J. Trump promised in his first term in office was America First. What he delivered, as his allies, adversaries and many of his former aides remember it, was chaotic foreign policymaking.

Most of what Mr. Trump has said in his campaign to return to office suggests that in a second term, he plans more of the same, that he considers unpredictability to be his signature weapon. He revels in it, telling The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board in October that he wouldn’t have to threaten China with the use of American military force over Taiwan because President Xi Jinping “respects me and he knows I’m crazy,” using an expletive before “crazy” for emphasis.

Foreign policy experts often cast the choice Americans will make next week as one that will decide whether America moves back toward isolationism or stays with some version of President Biden’s alliance-building, internationalist approach.

That is partially true: If Mr. Trump is defeated, his single term in office could very likely be viewed in history as a blip in America’s post-World War II approach to the world.

If Ms. Harris loses, however, it would mean that Mr. Biden’s term was the definitive end of an era in which the United States was a reliable guarantor of Western security.

Mr. Trump was never a true isolationist, of course, and for all his internationalist talk Mr. Biden has demonstrated more than a few streaks of nationalism. But should Mr. Trump prevail, it will almost certainly mark a return to an era of foreign policy decrees, untethered to any policy process, at a moment of maximum international peril.

To be sure, Republicans now point out that the United States was not entangled in two foreign wars during the Trump administration, and tensions with China were not as acute as they are now.

But when Mr. Trump was president, his aides would cringe at the onset of a weekend, knowing that their boss, roaming the White House, would tweet out policy changes after talking on the phone to a major donor, or a foreign leader who had called directly to plead his case, routing around the State Department or national security officials.

That is how Mr. Trump decided one weekend to pull American forces out of northern Syria, after a call with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that blindsided aides. When Mr. Trump realized he had been played by the Turkish leader, who wanted to go after Kurds in his own military operation, he half-retreated, posting that “if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey.”

Or that moment in October 2020, in the midst of his failed re-election effort, when Mr. Trump declared that the 2,500 American troops in Afghanistan would be “home by Christmas,” for which there was no military plan. The British went into a panic, thinking that their own troops would be left with no way out, since they depended on American airlift.

Mr. Trump’s own secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, was given the unpleasant duty of convincing Mr. Trump to back off the deadline — an incident Trump team members have apparently forgotten as they criticize Mr. Biden for his disastrously executed retreat from the country the following year.

Such reversals have continued during the current campaign, in which Mr. Trump has flipped on policies he set as president. Four years ago, he promised to use his presidential power to force TikTok’s Chinese owners to sell the wildly popular app to an American company. The company he had in mind was Oracle, whose chief executive ranked among his biggest supporters. “We’ll either close up TikTok in this country for security reasons, or it’ll be sold,” he declared in September 2020.

It was a rare case in which Mr. Trump won over Democrats, Republicans and Mr. Biden, who signed legislation — now being challenged in the courts — that could ban the app in January unless it can find a government-approved American buyer.

But in September, Mr. Trump changed his position, perhaps because many MAGA personalities have large TikTok followings, and perhaps under pressure from another billionaire supporter who holds a major stake in TikTok’s Chinese parent company.

Policy-by-Impulse

To read the memoirs of Trump officials who tried to manage foreign-policy-by-declaration is to page through a litany of anger-management incidents and decisions made without benefit of any real policy process or consultation of allies. But perhaps the most striking is how Mr. Trump’s aides — or at least those whom he later fired — recount story after story of keeping a naïve president from being manipulated by authoritarians, from Kim Jong-un of North Korea to Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

There was the moment recalled by H.R. McMaster, Mr. Trump’s second of four national security advisers, when Mr. Trump wanted to send a congratulatory note to the Russian leader and attached a clipping from The New York Post with the headline, “Putin Heaps Praise on Trump, Pans U.S. Politics.” But it was only days after Russian agents had deployed a rare nerve agent to try to kill the dissident Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Britain.

Mr. McMaster never sent the note, prompting Mr. Trump’s anger. “Putin would have almost certainly used the note to embarrass you” and alleviate international condemnation over the Skripal incident, Mr. McMaster told the president, according to his recently published memoir, “At War With Ourselves.” He also recalled warning Mr. Trump that the note, when public, would “reinforce the narrative that you are somehow in the Kremlin’s pocket.”

Mr. McMaster was soon replaced with the hawkish John R. Bolton, whose own memoir, “The Room Where It Happened,” was filled with scathing stories that portrayed Mr. Trump as clueless. At one point Mr. Trump asked him why the United States was placing sanctions on North Korea.

Mr. Bolton recalled replying, “Because they are building nuclear weapons and missiles that can kill Americans.” Mr. Trump said, “That’s a good point.”

Mr. Bolton was fired not long afterward.

Mr. Trump’s camp describes Mr. McMaster and Mr. Bolton, as well as former defense secretary James Mattis and former secretary of state Rex Tillerson, who shared similar stories, as disgruntled ex-employees. But even one of the former president’s most enthusiastic supporters, Robert O’Brien, his last national security adviser, told a group of Times reporters in 2020 that he would print out Mr. Trump’s weekend tweets, bring them to the office, and tell aides to come up with a policy that would agree with whatever the president said. That, of course, turned the usual process of assessing the implications of a presidential decision on its head.

With Ukraine, Looking for Deals

Mr. Trump once portrayed himself as Ukraine’s defender, the man willing to give it weaponry — mostly Javelin anti-tank weapons — that President Barack Obama had refused it. “Ukraine wouldn’t be having a chance without them,” he told a crowd in March 2022, shortly after the Russian invasion. “That was all sent by me.”

But early in his 2016 run he complained that the United States should not care about Ukraine more than Germany and other European neighbors. During his presidency, Mr. Trump famously withheld security assistance to Ukraine and asked President Volodymyr Zelensky to implicate Mr. Biden, then a presidential candidate, in Ukraine-related scandals.

In the days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Mr. Trump, by then out of office, initially called Mr. Putin’s move “genius” and “savvy.” He dialed that back after he was widely condemned for it. Now he insists that the war never should have happened because the right “deal” would have prevented it, presumably one in which Ukraine would have agreed to placate Mr. Putin by turning over part of its territory.

That approach appears to be what Mr. Trump has in mind when he says he would end the war “in 24 hours,” or perhaps even before taking office. That probably means he would force Ukraine to accede or lose American military aid, which he has opposed. In the latter part of the campaign he has also overstated the depletion of American arms stockpiles, claiming in August that “now we have no ammunition because we’ve given it all away.”

But to underscore the incoherence of his policy, when he spoke to The Wall Street Journal in October he again portrayed himself as Ukraine’s great defender. “I said, ‘Vladimir, if you go after Ukraine, I am going to hit you so hard, you’re not even going to believe it. I’m going to hit you right in the middle of fricking Moscow,’” Mr. Trump said — describing a conversation with Mr. Putin that no aides have ever reported took place.

He has told similar stories about threats to other leaders, in other places.

Trump’s China Strategy: Tariffs

China is the most challenging problem in American national security: Its leader has vowed the country will be the world’s No. 1 economic, military and technological power by 2049, the 100th anniversary of Mao’s revolution. It is already the fastest-growing nuclear power, a program that became clear during Mr. Trump’s term and accelerated during Mr. Biden’s. And the coming together of Russia and China — with ever-deeper links to North Korea and Iran — has become the newest, and arguably among the most dangerous, geopolitical developments in recent years.

Almost none of that has been discussed or debated in this presidential campaign. Vice President Kamala Harris has said almost nothing about it. Mr. Trump, for his part, has offered a single solution to all ills: tariffs, “the most beautiful word in the dictionary. More beautiful than love, more beautiful than respect.”

It has a populist ring, even if many economists say Mr. Trump’s promise of tariffs of “100 percent, 200 percent, 1,000 percent” would strike consumers hard, the poor hardest, and might tank the American economy. But it also does not address the vast security challenge that China poses, from the South China Sea to Taiwan to cyberspace, or the technology competition that is at the core of the China challenge.

During his term in office, Mr. Trump’s foreign policy team reoriented American national security strategy toward a focus on superpower conflict and began to develop plans for restricting China’s ability to obtain key technology — in advanced semiconductors, work on quantum computers and artificial intelligence — from the U.S. and its allies. Some of Mr. Biden’s aides have credited the Trump administration, if grudgingly, for focusing the government on those key elements.

But Mr. Trump himself often undercut them, offering to lift key export controls in return for the elusive big trade deal with China that he never achieved. And the other day, he attacked the CHIPS and Science Act, passed with overwhelming Republican support, complaining that it had given government support to key American competitors.

“We put up billions of dollars for rich companies,” he said on Joe Rogan’s podcast, referring to the $52 billion in government seed money to build advanced semiconductor plants in the United States. So far Intel, Samsung, Taiwan Semiconductor and others have begun to build facilities on American soil, though the effort is running more slowly than projected.

“You didn’t have to put up 10 cents,” Mr. Trump insisted. “You tariff it so high that they will come and build their chip companies for nothing.”

On the Middle East, a P.R. Problem

If Ms. Harris loses on Tuesday, one reason may be that she has lost the support of Arab Americans and young voters who believe the Biden administration failed to use its leverage to limit Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza following last year’s Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas. Most estimates put the loss of life from the Israeli military action at more than 40,000, including Hamas terrorists.

There are few more complex issues on the diplomatic agenda than how to balance Israel’s self-defense with the creation of a new dynamic in the Middle East and alleviate the humanitarian crises worsened by multiple wars. Mr. Trump has largely steered clear of both the political and moral complexities. His strongest argument has centered on the optics of the bombing campaign. In April he said Israel was “absolutely losing the PR war,” and added, “Let’s get back to peace and stop killing people. And that’s a very simple statement.”

But he has offered no cease-fire plan and no ideas for winning the release of hostages held by Hamas. When he spoke to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after Israel killed the leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas, he expressed his admiration for the skill of the operations and then told him: “Do what you have to do.”

Dylan Freedman contributed reporting.