What Trump wants… – TIME France

A month before the start of his second term, Donald Trump had raised on his Truth Social network, with his usual brutality, the idea that the United States would take back the Panama Canal, 25 years after ceding ownership to the country of the same name. In a single post, the billionaire shook a hitherto stable relationship between the two states to its foundations, thereby accusing Panama of charging exorbitant passage fees to American ships while deliberately allowing China to exercise ever greater influence over the commercial activity of the canal.

Seen with a little hindsight, this gesture by Trump of course augured the radical upheaval that he was preparing to bring to relations between his country and the rest of the world once in office. The maximalist threat addressed by the future American president had therefore put his foreign policy advisors in all their states. And a few days after his inauguration, a former member of the government confides to us, his military strategists were already working on ways to reconquer the canal by force. “We’re going to take it back, or something very powerful is going to happen,” Trump himself warned. Armed intervention was ultimately not necessary: ​​Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino promptly and discreetly agreed to make various concessions and notably agreed to reassess the nature of Chinese investments in his country’s economy.

But the intimidations of the tenant of the White House are not always simple negotiation tactics: in certain cases – as we saw not so far from Panama – they result in concrete actions. At the beginning of January 2026, after having spent several months increasing pressure on the regime of Nicolas Maduro, the ex-real estate magnate ordered the launch of a daring military operation aimed at capturing the Venezuelan leader – and with it, according to Trump, the drug trafficking which is plaguing this Latin American country -, as well as control over its enormous oil reserves. It had been several decades since the American army had produced such a show of force on the American continent. In the process, the president proved to the whole world that he had no problem acting unilaterally without struggling to bring together the coalition of international forces hitherto associated with United States interference.

Confounding brutality: this is what defines Donald Trump’s foreign policy when we look back at the feats of arms of the first year of his second term. Without firing a shot, he bombed Yemeni rebels and Iranian nuclear facilities, wrested a fragile ceasefire in Gaza, forced European leaders to increase their defense budgets, obtained economic and strategic commitments from his Chinese rival, and threatened almost all of its trading partners with imposing crippling customs duties. He also spent billions to save Javier Milei’s regime in Argentina, freed a Honduran president convicted of drug trafficking, and approved strike orders in the Pacific and Caribbean Sea on suspected traffickers’ boats, killing nearly 100 deaths and triggering war crimes charges.

This debauchery of activity without precedent for an American president of the contemporary era constitutes in fact the putting into action of the Trump doctrine: the power of the United States is wielded like an enormous lever, actuable on demand, capable of changing direction at the slightest whim, and no longer concentrated between the hands of institutions, but in the presidential hands, and only them.

Can we still speak of diplomacy as the president’s frenzy to transform US foreign policy resembles a solo show? So the State Department establishment seems to have been sidelined? And besides, how can we still talk about the establishment when any idea of ​​stability is thus undermined? Among the diplomats and elected officials interviewed for this article, many described to us an ever-shrinking circle of influence around the Oval Office, whose members are selected less for their expertise than for their loyalty.

 

Find the full article in the new issue of TIME France, available on newsstands.