Donald Trump's foreign policy has disoriented allies and adversaries alike. His prolonged friendliness with Vladimir Putin — which in May led to a fragile three-day ceasefire in Ukraine and negotiations that, according to the White House, "are getting closer every day" — his repeated references to an annexation of Greenland, a tariff policy that has come to be based on an almost childish formula, and the more recent "strategic mistake" of intervening in Iran expecting immediate regime change have fueled two years the image of an erratic and dangerous leadership for the world. The question that many ask is simple: is there really a plan?
Taken together, however, these seemingly inconsistent actions reveal a pattern. The gestures towards Moscow, territorial revisionism, the chaotic application of tariffs and even the intervention in Iran could acquire a strategic sense — albeit heterodox — if the focus is on the military aspects and on a single objective: to curb the rise of China. In this scheme, the apparent irrationality of the president would not be a defect, but a tool.
China today has twice the manufacturing capacity of the United States and contests its technological leadership in almost all sectors. It drives world trade and has become an economic power comparable to Washington. For years, U.S. strategists have bet that economic liberalization would foster political openness and that an aging population would slow China's momentum. The bet failed: neither the pandemic nor the advent of artificial intelligence have stopped Beijing's model.
However, the United States retains clear military superiority, even as the gap is narrowing. China already produces stealth fighters and aircraft carriers, has its own nuclear triad and is advancing rapidly in the space and cyber domains. In the face of this threat, the question was never whether Washington would react, but when and how. And the answer is reminiscent of the recipe used to contain the Soviet Union half a century ago: geopolitical encirclement, military deterrence, economic isolation and proxy wars.
1. The "Kissinger in reverse" maneuver
The first axis is geopolitical encirclement. This would be answered by the rapprochement with Putin, one of Trump's most commented on "follies". Today allies, China and Russia are however natural rivals due to their geographical proximity. During the Cold War, Henry Kissinger identified this fracture and approached Beijing to drive a wedge into the socialist bloc.
Trump would seem to be trying the opposite maneuver: courting Moscow to distance it from Beijing. Tariff exemptions for Russian products and the urgency of achieving peace in Ukraine, hence the presidential insistence on ceasefires negotiated during the year.
2. Territorial deterrence
The second axis aims at a form of indirect deterrence. China could soon achieve military parity with the United States in a specific scenario: a war for Taiwan. The problem is how to avoid it.
The Biden administration has tried to dissuade Xi Jinping by abandoning "strategic ambiguity" and committing Washington more clearly to the defense of the island. But the decision has further hardened relations with Beijing and emboldened Taiwanese nationalists, convinced that they can turn their country into a "porcupine of steel" with US support, paving the way for a nuclear escalation. Ambiguity had to return; it remained to find another way to dissuade.
Trump would seem to be exploring a different path: the threat of his own territorial expansion. By suggesting — even in a provocative tone — the annexation of Greenland, Canada or the Panama Canal, he sends a message to Xi: if you move your borders, we could do the same. This is not an empty gesture: the United States occupied Greenland during World War II. In a world that is returning to bipolarity, where signals between great powers matter, the symbol matters.
3. A curtain of tariffs
The third axis is economic isolation. Curbing China and preventing its militarization in the long run requires separating it economically not only from the United States, but from a large part of the world.
The pricing policy has been called erratic, impulsive and even self-defeating, and the judicial process seems to prove the critics right. Its domestic cost is high: independent estimates calculate that the 2026 tariffs are equivalent to a tax increase of several hundred dollars per US household. And yet they have a strategic logic towards China, both for what they signal and for what they have already produced.
That price paid by consumers can be interpreted as a "costly signal": one accepts economic damage to show how much one is willing to pay — even a war, possibly — in order to achieve a goal, which in this case is to contain Beijing.
Moreover, the tariffs have already produced two desired results: starting to separate the markets of the two powers and putting pressure not only on China, but also on allies forced to choose sides. Thus, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, from Helsinki to Seoul a tariff curtain could fall in front of China and the global economic system could fragment into two spheres: one around Washington, the other around Beijing.
4. Proxy wars
The fourth axis is intervention in peripheral scenarios such as Iran. Probably not desired (Trump would have preferred a fall of the regime), these proxy wars nevertheless produce advantages.
Iran is strategically more important to China and Russia than to Washington, whose domestic and Venezuelan energy reserves make it less vulnerable. At the same time, it offers the United States a justification to mobilize and modernize its military capability in a distant theater and to experiment with a naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz that would then have to be replicated in the Strait of Malacca in the event of a conflict with China.
Thus, what is happening in Iran today may not be much different from what the United States did in Korea or Vietnam: using an indirect confrontation scenario to send signals to the rival superpower about Washington's determination to defend its interests.
5. The logic of irrationality
The fifth pillar of this "strategy" is the appearance of madness. The baptism of a "Gulf of America", the televised clash with Volodymyr Zelenskyy or the billboards with which the country-by-country tariffs were announced would not be simple impromptu outings — it would be too simplistic an explanation — but elements of the strategy itself.
Making unpredictable decisions prevents the adversary from devising a counter-strategy, makes threats more credible — even toward one's allies — and increases, even if minimally, the likelihood of a reckless move, plausible enough to extract concessions from the negotiating table.
I do not know whether the "theory of the madman" that Richard Nixon used to reorganize the international system in the 1970s appears in The Art of the Deal. But the study of these "games of chicken" in the field of nuclear deterrence has already yielded several Nobel Prize winners. And, at least for the writer, it is preferable to think that there really is a method to the madness that seems to reign today in the first world power.