Daddy’s Home: Trump’s "Transactional" Foreign Policy Is Anything But Retreat

The critics cry “isolationism,” but Trump is making the U.S. more dominant than ever — by turning dependent allies into strong partners.

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by Rod D. Martin
August 13, 2025

When NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte joked at this year’s summit that the alliance needed “Daddy” Trump back, it was more than an icebreaker. It was an unguarded confession: Europe knows exactly who set it straight.

What it wasn’t was the unending “America is withdrawing from the world” refrain of our neoconservative friends.

Rutte, a Dutch globalist to his bones, knew exactly who had dragged NATO out of decades of complacency, who had forced Europe to stop coasting on American protection and start taking its own defense seriously. He was acknowledging, in public, that the man so often accused of undermining NATO had in fact saved it from irrelevance.

Trump casts his foreign policy as “Commerce Not Chaos”, and that’s certainly the positive side of it. …