The Foreign-Policy Contradictions of the Trump Administration: A Crib Sheet

During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump regularly contradicted himself on foreign policy. Now he has an entire administration to mix up the messages. Often these misalignments seem to be attempts by Trump's team to soften the more controversial statements made by the president. But any effort to walk back the tweeter-in-chief’s words needs to be viewed skeptically. As then-candidate Trump made clear in a presidential debate, when he brushed off a disagreement with his running mate about Syria by bluntly stating the two hadn’t spoken about the issue, he doesn’t feel obliged to coordinate messages with his team. Anyone who gets out too far in front of the president is vulnerable to being overruled in a late-night tweet.

All administrations suffer from coordination problems. Obama’s one-time Defense the president on America’s anti-ISIS strategy.But the Trump team’s contradictions are coming with such speed and regularity that it can be hard to tell who actually speaks for America, and indeed what the country’s foreign policy is at any given time. There currently seem to be several—and they’re not always compatible. What follows is an effort to keep track.