Trump’s Obama Doctrine

On questions of war, NATO, Russia, Ukraine, and Asia, the worldviews of the 44th and 47th presidents are more similar than either man would like to admit.

There are uncanny and, for people in the liberal interventionist camp, uncomfortable parallels between Obama and Trump: There’s the proclaimed belief in retrenchment, restraint, isolationism—whatever you want to call it—and the conviction that America can’t be all things to all countries, or the world’s policeman. Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

Julia Ioffe

May 1, 2025

It’s been 100 days of Trump, and the administration is, as another strongman of history once wrote, “dizzy with success.” The U.S. government is now deporting American citizen children with cancer; American universities are losing multibillion-dollar grants for life-saving research under the threadbare guise of fighting antisemitism; measles are back and burning through the country; the stock market has had its worst 100 days of any presidency since Gerald Ford took office; and G.D.P., ruddy and robust in January, is now officially shrinking.