The political essence of the Trump Administration’s decision-making processes toward NATO

Abstract

The election of Donald Trump, in 2016, raised a large number of questions about how his government would deal with international commitments made in past administrations. With a rethoric strongly hostile against the current international order, Trump had as his preferred target the NATO, a military alliance led by U.S. and created at the beginning of the Cold War. During the Trump Administration, the permanence of his criticism and his detachment from leaders of countries historically close to America have forged, in the Political Science, a debate between those who anticipated a drastic break in the American foreign policy and those who highlighted the institutional consistency of the international conduct of Washington. This study is part of this debate, in order to highlight the complexity of the decision-making processes within the American government, underscoring the political essence of a game which is established with the participation of several actors and whose achieved result portrays a temporary correlation between domestic political forces. Considering the leading role of the heads of State in managing the foreign policy, this research uses the governmental politics model to understand the decisions made as a result of long political battles between different groups with varying influences over the policy in question. This analysis on the Trump Government focuses on understanding how the main strategic documents of its foreign policy towards NATO were both influenced by the disruptive voluntarism of the President himself and by the pragmatic continuity of the American establishment.