Donald Trump’s Post-Cold War Vision of U.S. Foreign Policy

In 2000, as Donald Trump toyed with the idea of running for president on the Reform Party ticket, the businessman co-authored a campaign book with the writer Dave Shiflett. It’s a long-forgotten work, vastly overshadowed by The Art of the Deal. But one passage illustrates just how profoundly U.S. foreign policy could change under President Trump.

During the Cold War, Trump wrote, “foreign policy was a big chess game” between the Soviet Union and the United States and its allies, with every other country a “bystander.” But the fall of the U.S.S.R. had changed the game, he argued: “We deal with all the other nations of the world on a case-by-case basis. And a lot of those bystanders don’t look so innocent.” As Trump saw it, “the day of the chess player is over …  American foreign policy has to be put in the hands of a dealmaker.” There was precedent for this, he asserted. In recent memory, two great dealmakers had served as president: Franklin Roosevelt, who wheeled and dealed his way through World War II, and Richard Nixon, who initiated