The Emergent Trump Doctrine

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 3 June 2025

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Trump has been making some foreign policy moves I didn’t entirely expect. He seems determined to get a nuclear deal with Iran. He’s been public about his disagreements with Benjamin Netanyahu. He called Vladimir Putin “crazy.” And he keeps talking about wanting his legacy to be that of a peacemaker. So what, at this point, can we say about Trump’s foreign policy? What is he trying to do, and how well is it working? If he succeeds, what might his legacy be? Emma Ashford is a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, a foreign policy think tank, and the author of the forthcoming book “First Among Equals.” She comes from a school of thought that’s more sympathetic to the “America First” agenda than I typically am. But she’s also cleareyed about what is and isn’t working and the ways that Trump is an idiosyncratic foreign policy maker who isn’t always following an “America First” agenda himself. Book Recommendations: A Superpower Transformed by Daniel Sargent The Strategy of Denial by Elbridge Colby A World Safe for Commerce by Dale Copeland Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The One thing that's been on my mind is we've not been covering Israel and Gaza or Ukraine and Russia, nearly as much as we did in
0:41.0	20203 and 2024, but frankly, as much as I think we should be. And there's been two reasons
0:47.1	for that. One has just been that Donald Trump's second administration has felt in many ways
0:52.4	like a domestic emergency, and it has pulled much more of our focus here. But the other is that often when we're covering these
0:59.7	conflicts, what we're really covering implicitly or explicitly is the American position on them.
1:05.2	How are we going to use our might, our money, our weaponry, our leverage, to bring them to some kind of close or settlement.
1:13.6	And early in Trump's second administration, where he was basically filled me with despair.
1:19.9	He seemed to have little interest in Gaza, except for potentially building hotels there.
1:26.2	Beyond that, he seemed perfectly happy to let Israel
1:27.9	annex whatever it wanted. On Ukraine, he was at odds with Zelenskyy, and his main interest
1:35.6	seemed to be his relationship with Vladimir Putin. But things have been changing a bit.
1:41.8	Other parts of his America First foreign policy have been coming into more
1:44.8	focus. So what is Donald Trump's foreign policy? What at this point can we actually say about it?
1:50.3	How has it been evolving over the course of his still young second term? To help me think that through,
1:56.4	I wanted to bring Emma Ashford back on the show. Emma is a senior fellow at the Stimson Center.
2:02.1	She is the author of the forthcoming book First Among Equals, and she's a foreign policy analyst
2:06.6	who is more of a realist. She's in fundamental ways more sympathetic to some of the motivating
2:12.3	impulses of Trump's foreign policy, even if she doesn't always agree with how it's carried out.
2:17.8	So I thought you'd be a good person to help me steal man what they are doing and think through
2:21.1	whether or not it's working or has a real chance of working. One thing we don't get to that much in
2:26.2	this conversation is that what is happening on the ground and in the politics in Gaza, in the West Bank,
	...

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