This is a Cato Special Podcast. I'm Caleb Brown. The next president of the United States will be Donald J. Trump.

Very little is known about his foreign policy in part because his comments on foreign policy have varied widely.

Emma Ashford is a research fellow at the Cato Institute, she comments on the challenges ahead.

In this election, Russia and Vladimir Putin seemed to loom much larger than they should have. Why was that?

Well, there were some legitimate concerns about Russia.

And so we have the DNC hacking scandal that was almost certainly facilitated by Russian

intelligence via WikiLeaks.

So there were some sort of legitimate concerns that Russia might actually be trying to, if not throw the election

to Donald Trump, then at least make everything a little more confusing than it should be

for voters. But Putin's influence on the election was

relatively small in real terms. Nobody believes he you know actually got

Donald Trump elected. Instead what we saw was this sort of very public debate about what

our future relationship with Russia should be. Hillary Clinton advocating probably a much

more hawkish line than even the Obama administration has taken.

And Donald Trump, just bizarrely for a Republican candidate saying that he wanted better

relations with Russia, that he wanted to end the crisis in Ukraine, that he admires Vladimir Putin's leadership.

So this was a very strange topsy-turvy debate.

All right, so now that Donald Trump has won, what can we say broadly about his foreign policy?

You know, the conversations I've had with Trevor Thrall and you and others,

the answer seems to be not much.

There are more questions than answers on Donald Trump's foreign policy and I think that probably holds true for a lot of policy areas.

You know, I know an energy policy, he's not very,

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