What Trump’s Ukraine Aid Pause Says About America’s Broken Foreign Policy
There aren’t infinite assets.
When asked on July 7 whether the United States would be sending more weapons to Ukraine, President Donald Trump responded in the affirmative. “We have to, they have to be able to defend themselves,” Trump told reporters, referring to the Ukrainians. “They’re getting hit very hard. Now they’re getting hit very hard. We’re gonna have to send more weapons.”
Many foreign policy analysts in Washington and Europe greeted the remarks with a sigh of relief. Six days earlier, the Trump administration suspended some U.S. arms shipments to Ukraine in a move American defense officials at the time said was part of a broader review of the U.S. military’s munitions stockpiles. That decision elicited a mix of disappointment, panic and anger, with U.S. lawmakers—including some within Trump’s own Republican Party—calling the move counterproductive to White House’s aims of pressuring Russia’s President Vladimir Putin into a serious peace process.
Yet the latest dizzying rollercoaster ride on Ukraine aid misses a crucial point: a pause, however temporary, was always inevitable at some point. And because the U.S. military and the U.S. defense-industrial base are vastly overstretched and burdened with numerous flash-points in multiple regions simultaneously, it’s likely a similar situation will happen again.
All of this boils down to a simple proposition: The United States is simply doing too much, the consequence of an outdated U.S. foreign policy of primacy that Washington continues to lean on. In general, primacy is a resource-intensive approach that seeks to defend a state’s status as the world’s foremost power by keeping competitors down and allies close. Maintaining dominance over the international system is the name of the game, and U.S. administrations under Republican and Democratic presidents alike sought to ensure American power was unrivaled and unchallenged.
Such a strategy was workable in the 1990s and early 2000s, when America was at the cusp of its unipolar moment and other challengers—like Russia and China—were either too weak or uninterested to resist U.S. policy. Washington’s unipolar moment has long since passed. The United States may still be the world’s strongest superpower, but it’s no longer a hegemon free to do what it likes.
China, whose economy is more than 15 times larger than it was at the turn of the century, is now a strong (if not the strongest) military and economic power in Asia with both the intent and capability to balance Washington in its neighborhood. Russia may be dealing with systemic problems in terms of demographics and economics—not to mention a three-year war in Ukraine that is churning through young Russian men by the hundreds every week—but it’s nevertheless led by a man, Vladimir Putin, who is willing to use force in an attempt to cling to whatever sphere of influence Moscow has left. The foundations of U.S. foreign policy have failed to catch up with a world order that is becoming more multipolar with time and where middle powers in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia are constantly on the lookout for opportunities.
This is bad news for the Trump administration because a correct diagnosis of international politics as it currently exists is a prerequisite for smart policy. What we have instead is an attachment to an old stratagem that creates more problems than it solves.
Indeed, primacy is not a risk-free enterprise. As recent history has shown, it can lead to hubris, shallow thinking and a sense of unbridled self-importance, whereby every international challenge—no matter how small—is viewed as an urgent and present danger. Prioritization—determining what interests are truly vital to U.S. security and prosperity, where to expend the country’s limited resources and which challenge should be left for allies or partners to manage—falls by the wayside as U.S. policymakers increasingly buy into the fallacy that America is the only state with the capacity and responsibility to solve the world’s problems. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s description of America as “the indispensable nation,” made in 1998, is still very much a core tenet of U.S. foreign policy in 2025.
Trump may repeatedly crow about allies in Europe and Asia not picking up their fair share of the defense burden, but the sheen of primacy hasn’t worn off yet. Despite reorientation from fighting counterinsurgency wars in the Middle East to competing with China in the Pentagon’s strategy documents over the last decade, the U.S. force posture remains global, hindering the purported shift to the Indo-Pacific that U.S. defense planners frequently talk about.
Desperately clinging to a dying hegemony means shortchanging military readiness over the long-term, rapidly moving military resources thousands of miles at a time without due regard for long-term strategy and expending defense assets at a rate that current production can’t match. Eventually, those decisions will add up and result in difficult decisions down the line, like the one Washington just confronted regarding Ukraine.
The last two years have been a study in foreign policy mismanagement. Strategic planning has been sacrificed to short-term expediency and the pressure to react to events. Often this translates into sinking more U.S. troops, fighter aircraft, and air defense systems into the Middle East and shortchanging other regions like Asia that, if the Pentagon’s own guidelines are to be believed, are supposed to be the new center of gravity. Instead of delegating certain tasks to others and allowing U.S. partners to prove their mettle, America insists on taking the lead, disincentivizing the very burden-sharing Trump claims to care about.
When the Houthis targeted civilian shipping in the Red Sea, it was the U.S. Navy, not European or Gulf Arab states, that tried to subdue the Yemeni group into submission at a cost of more than $1 billion worth of missile interceptors—some of the very same interceptors the Ukrainians are now begging for and Pentagon planners want for a future contingency against China. When Iran started shooting drones and ballistic missiles toward Israel last month, it was the United States—not the Europeans and certainly not the Arab States—that rushed over with air defense assets. According to Haaretz, the U.S. military used in 12 days of conflict close to half as many THAAD missile interceptors as the U.S. defense industrial base produced in all of last year. It’s no wonder U.S. defense planners are compelled to reassess their inventories.
The Trump administration may have cleared up the weapons snafu with Ukraine. But as long as America continues to delude itself into thinking it can be everywhere all of the time, don’t be shocked to see another version of this episode in the future.
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