Today marks one hundred days since Donald Trump took office as the forty-seventh president of the United States. On the latest episode of The President’s Inbox, Jim sat down with Matthias Matthijs, senior fellow for Europe at the Council, and Carla Anne Robbins, senior fellow at the Council, to answer questions submitted by CFR’s social media audience about Trump’s foreign policy in this first phase of his second administration.

Here are three takeaways from their conversation:

1) Trump is intent on disrupting U.S. foreign policy in both style and substance. He has discarded U.S. norms on territorial sovereignty by making threats to annex Canada, occupy Greenland, and retake the Panama Canal. He has criticized NATO members and functionally announced that the United States may not abide by the treaty’s collective defense provisions. Most recently, Trump launched a massive tariff war against almost every nation in the world in a bid to force the renegotiation of existing trade deals. "Donald Trump's approach is very transactional,” Matthias explained. “It doesn't matter whether you have the same values of democracy and freedom." Trump has sought to court adversaries like Russia, China, and Iran to strike unilateral deals. In doing so, he has eschewed standard diplomatic routines in favor of using personal envoys like golfing friend Steven Witkoff to negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Iranian government, and representatives of Hamas. Social, cultural, and diplomatic tools have been thrown away, with Elon Musk’s DOGE team dismantling the international aid apparatus and the State Department making massive cuts in personnel and operations. Trump rejects the core assumption that global engagement strengthens American power. He sees trade and alliances not as strategic assets, but as liabilities that weaken the United States and empower others at its expense. This marks a sharp break from the post–World War II consensus that U.S. leadership and multilateralism were essential to protect national prosperity and security.

2) Trump is unconstrained by advisors, commitments, and politics. In his first term, Trump appointed establishment figures like James Mattis and Rex Tillerson, who often opposed his instincts and tried to restrain him. In his second term, he has surrounded himself with loyalists dedicated to executing his vision. In a reversal, establishment-friendly figures such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, who favor strong alliances and a firmer stance on rivals, now find themselves constrained by Trump’s inner circle. Carla noted: “There are no major players around him. It’s all Donald Trump.” Trump has disregarded prior commitments, including trade deals from his first term like the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. With Republicans controlling the House and Senate, Trump faces little congressional resistance, even when defying core GOP positions. If there is a “Trump Doctrine 2.0,” Carla said, it is that, “American exceptionalism means not just America first, but America unconstrained.”

3) Trump’s foreign policies have weakened American power and increased global instability. As Matthias summed it up: “At the end of a hundred days, he [Trump] doesn't have that many results to show for." The trade war has produced zero new deals, and he has yet to bring the war in Ukraine to an end. Fractures in the transatlantic alliance have widened as European leaders increasingly question U.S. reliability. Incoming German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has said that Europe should pursue “independence” from the United States and in Canada, where the Liberal Party swept to a major election victory yesterday by promising to confront Trump’s threats of annexation, Prime Minister Mark Carney declared, “our old relationship with the U.S. is over.” This shift risks a permanent break in “the West” as a unified ideological and security bloc. Russia and China are capitalizing on these divisions. Russia is pursuing its military campaign in Ukraine with growing confidence. China has expanded its regional influence, striking trade and security agreements with Indo-Pacific states like Vietnam, and positioning itself as a better partner for countries wary of the United States. The question, according to Carla, “is whether the United States is really going to retreat into this world of spheres of influence? And that’s a pretty Hobbesian world of nasty, brutish, and short lives.”

If you’re looking to learn more about the consequences of Trump’s disruptive foreign policy, check out Jim’s Foreign Affairs article with Ivo Daalder, “The Price of Trump’s Power Politics,” and his recent piece for CFR.org, “First 100 Days: Trump’s Foreign Policy Disruption Is Just Beginning.”