Trump’s chaos may be destroying his own foreign policy

Strait of Hormuz, Seoul Drills, and a President Who Keeps Rewriting the Rules

Healfromzero.com – The waterway that carries roughly a fifth of the world’s daily oil and gas exports has once again become the flashpoint of American foreign policy — but not in the way Washington’s allies expected. On Monday, the 60-day memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran quietly expired, and rather than marking the anniversary of what Donald Trump once called the greatest Middle East peace deal ever struck, the president chose to threaten aerial bombardment of Oman. The Sultanate had been engaged in back-channel talks with Tehran aimed at restoring commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a task that was itself a stipulated obligation under the very MOU Trump had championed. The contradiction was not lost on observers.

A Pattern, Not an Anomaly

The Oman threat did not arrive in isolation. Just a day earlier, on Sunday, Trump declared that the United States would scale back joint military exercises with South Korea — a treaty ally dating to the Korean War of the 1950s. His stated justifications were threefold: the financial burden of the drills, Seoul’s decision not to join the American war effort against Iran, and, most strikingly, a wish to avoid provoking Kim Jong Un, the North Korean dictator. The conflation of a Middle East conflict with an East Asian alliance structure underscored how little conventional strategic logic governs the administration’s decision-making.

“I don’t get it on cozying up to Kim Jong Un. I don’t get it, on threatening to bomb Oman. Those are actions exactly the opposite of what we should be doing right now.” — Retired US Navy Adm. James Stavridis

Stavridis, who commanded NATO forces for nearly a decade, made the remark in conversation with CNN’s Kasie Hunt. His point was that the administration appears to operate without a coherent doctrine, sidelining career diplomats and subject-matter experts in favor of instinctive, personality-driven impulses.

The Gaza Thread and the Canada Deadline

While the Hormuz crisis dominated headlines, another diplomatic fire was burning in the Levant. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, was reportedly shuttling between capitals across the Middle East in a last-ditch effort to salvage a framework agreed last month under which Hamas would disarm and Israel would pull its forces out of Gaza. Trump had praised the arrangement as “monumental,” yet the deal appears to collide with the entrenched strategic hostility between Israel and the Islamic Resistance Movement, making implementation doubtful.

At home, a separate clock was ticking. Negotiators had yet to reach an agreement that would prevent Trump’s threatened 50 percent tariffs on Canadian goods from taking effect before a Wednesday deadline. The stakes were compounded by the fact that the president had already dismantled the core provisions of the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement during his first term — a pact he had, at the time of its signing, described as the “most important trade deal ever made.” The whiplash between lauding a framework and then tearing it apart within months has become a recognizable feature of his second-term diplomacy.

Unpredictability as Strategy — and Its Limits

The through-line across these episodes is a foreign policy that prizes surprise over predictability, personal loyalty over institutional continuity, and coercive posturing over negotiated compromise. Trump judges foreign leaders less by whether they threaten American interests or suppress domestic freedoms than by how courteously they treat him personally. Alliances, in his framing, are less force multipliers than revenue streams: partner nations must pay handsomely for a protection guarantee that is already eroding, and they must commit troops to whatever expeditionary mission he selects.

At a campaign rally on Long Island on Friday, the president declared:

“America is respected again all over the world. We’re respected like never before.”

On Tuesday, he reinforced that self-image by posting a social-media graphic depicting the Strait of Hormuz captioned “New U.S. Territory” — a visual claim that ignored the reality that Iranian attacks on commercial vessels had effectively strangled one of the planet’s most critical energy corridors. The stunt echoed a familiar second-term tactic: manufacturing a new narrative when the factual record no longer serves a political purpose.

Reliability Erosion and the Iran Question

The distinction between being unpredictable and being unreliable has become central to how the international community reads Washington’s signals. Christopher Hill, a former senior State Department official who served as ambassador under both Republican and Democratic presidents, put the shift plainly in remarks to Jim Sciutto on CNN International:

“Whereas in his first term, he established a record for being pretty unpredictable, in his second term, he’s well on his way to establishing a record of being very unreliable. And the whole world is looking at that situation.”

No theater illustrates the risk more sharply than Iran. Despite administration claims that Tehran’s military forces have been substantially degraded, the president has yet to restore the pre-war condition of an open, freely navigable Strait of Hormuz. Iranian leadership appears to be positioning for another round of hostilities. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Tehran exploited a lull in full-scale fighting to accelerate production of missiles and drones, suggesting the next escalation may arrive sooner than Washington’s planners assume.

The South Korea rebuke, meanwhile, was never purely an East Asian matter. By Trump’s own account, his anger at Seoul was triggered by the unfinished war in the Middle East — a reminder that, under this administration, every alliance is held hostage to whatever crisis the president is currently fixated upon. For allies from Busan to Muscat to Ottawa, the lesson of the past week is uncomfortable: the guarantee of American protection now carries a price tag, a mood dependency, and an expiration date that no treaty language can control.