Q&A With Dr. George Bogden: Looking at Trump’s First Year of Foreign Policy

Dr. George E. Bogden doesn’t traffic in abstractions. When he talks about trade policy, he’s drawing on a year spent inside U.S. Customs and Border Protection, helping implement some of the most consequential tariff changes in a generation. When he talks about the mechanics of alliance management or the failures of multilateralism, he’s speaking from experience in government, private legal practice, and years of academic research across three continents. That combination — practitioner, scholar, attorney — makes him a genuinely unusual voice in foreign policy discussions that tend to skew heavily toward one or the other.

The following is an edited transcript of questions posed to George Bogden during the National Association of Scholars panel “Trump 2.0 Foreign Policy: A First-Year Review,” held on March 10, 2025. The conversation ranged from trade and tariffs to Venezuela, NATO, Iran, and the question of whether the Trump administration has a coherent grand strategy at all. Dr. Bogden’s answers — characteristically direct, historically grounded, and at times deliberately provocative — are presented here in condensed form. They have been lightly edited for clarity and flow.

Q: How has the Trump administration’s approach to U.S. foreign policy shifted in the second term — including changes in trade, engagement with multilateral institutions, and the use of economic and military tools?

George Bogden: I want to break that into three pieces, because I think they’re distinct.

On economics and trade, the keystone document is the America First Trade Policy. If you want to think systematically about where the United States sits and which trade advantages and disadvantages it faces, that document is the real manifestation of thinking that evolved through Trump’s first term and now into his second. It sets out a stern challenge toward China, which has dominated the production of low-value goods, and makes a clear argument about where the United States needs to head to sustain its place in the global economy.

One element that’s caught many off guard is the tariff as a revenue source. There’s a classical understanding of what tariffs are for — protecting American industry, creating a less-than-competitive environment for some sector to grow. But the United States provides all sorts of positive public goods to the international trading system. The fact that you can navigate the high seas with a billion dollars of commerce on board has a lot to do with the security environment the United States creates. To the extent that the U.S. has to fund those endeavors to secure trade lanes, it makes sense to think about a revenue stream coming from the tariff. There’s also the question of transshipping and fraud at a global scale. How do you construct a tariff policy that captures all of that but also tries to prevent, reverse, and deter it? That’s what the America First Trade Policy is doing.

On security: the administration has laid down fundamental propositions about the importance of the Western Hemisphere. The return of our oldest national security strategy — the Monroe Doctrine — is central to how this administration thinks. And the administration is not putting off recurring security conundrums. It’s not engaged in the kind of strategic patience some predecessors preferred. To the extent that regimes like those in Iran, Cuba, or Venezuela are causing security problems for the United States, they’re going to be confronted quickly.

And thematically, I was in the administration when the significant restructuring of the bureaucracy was taking place. There’s an entrenched set of policy preferences among many government agencies that needed to change, or at least become open to change. Undertaking this broad set of policies was only possible if you dealt with those who had gummed up or prevented policy changes from taking place. That restructuring is a meta-theme of how things have changed.

Q: You’ve described the administration’s approach as “flexible realism.” What do you mean by that?

George Bogden: The word ‘flexible’ is doing real work in that phrase. It doesn’t mean anything under the sun. It means avoiding the determinism often associated with classical realism — this idea that power and might define everything and that the United States has no room to maneuver. Flexible realism is about how you move within the constraints the United States faces while also embracing the opportunities in front of it.

President Trump is exceptional at understanding where the power dynamic currently lies — not just between the United States and its adversaries, but also between the United States and allies who have laundered Chinese overcapacity or who’ve argued it’s never the right moment to confront Iran. That sense of leverage — where does it lie and how can we use it — is an important part of what I mean by flexibility.

The other element is avoiding what I call driving while looking through the rearview mirror. President Trump is looking out the front windshield. What lies before the United States is an increasingly hostile environment in which adversaries are watching whether we act on our threats and uphold certain principles. We can’t be bogged down by frameworks that emerged from the war on terror about how to confront countries like Iran. I’m struck by how many critics of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are now up in arms that the administration isn’t proposing some elaborate process for boots-on-the-ground regime change — as though the episode that presented the United States with an impossible set of goals now has to be replicated. Trump recognized that those forever wars created a long and painful lesson. We have to try a new method for confronting enemies and dealing with the threats they pose.

Q: What is the strategic logic behind the administration’s approach to Iran and regional security? Is it deterrence restoration, escalation management, or something else?

George Bogden: I’d rather draw together what I see as the emerging themes than put a single label on it. When we talk about what the administration is doing in Iran and the broader Middle East, I think the concept of flexible realism fits across all of it. The kinetic operations and the insistence that the tariff policy will return — these are examples of understanding where the U.S. has leverage and using it.

What concerns me in foreign policy commentary is the habit of evaluating current challenges through outdated frameworks. The suggestion that unless you’re comfortable with the administration’s logic it is therefore irrational or erratic — that’s a flawed way to interpret what’s going on. Dean Acheson once observed that conducting American foreign policy is like playing poker with your cards face up while everyone else holds their cards close to their chest. We live in a democratic society where we want open discussion, but that transparency isn’t the same as incoherence.

Q: How central is Greenland — and the broader question of Western Hemisphere defense — to the administration’s national security strategy? And is there a role for multilateral structures like NATO in that picture?

George Bogden: I have a rightful hesitancy, which I think this administration shares, about relying on the multilateralism of the past. When I would ask someone connected to German foreign policy what the German interest was on a given issue, they would say back to me: multilateralism. Not a strategic objective. A process. To the extent that multilateralism has become a means for countries to avoid expressing their true interests — or to hide behind it — that’s a problem.

A useful example: I was a Fulbright Fellow in Kosovo, and there’s no secret the United States was deeply involved in helping Kosovo secure its independence. The UN mission there, UNMIK, continues to exist not because it serves Kosovo, but because Russia won’t allow its budget to be zeroed out. That’s one example of how a country in adversarial disposition with the United States undermines our foreign policy through bureaucratic maneuvers inside multilateral institutions.

That said, it’s foolish to say NATO should be abolished or becomes irrelevant. That’s not even on the horizon. The question is whether NATO serves its purpose in Europe without damping down into a dependency on the United States. Germany and France have to answer for themselves whether they’re going to be serious about security concerns — not just about Russia and missiles, but about China and supply chains. More important than any multilateral institution is alliance management. And the hardest part of alliance management is delivering messages an ally doesn’t want to hear. The metric by which we should assess Trump’s presidency is whether our allies emerge from this period more aligned with the United States than before.

Q: What is the administration’s policy toward Venezuela really about — democratic governance, energy security, great power competition, or some combination? How does Venezuelan oil factor into the broader strategy?

George Bogden: Those looking for a single, clean explanation are barking up the wrong tree. All the factors you mention have played a part. But I want to point out a dimension that’s been overlooked: Venezuela was a foothold for America’s adversaries in the Western Hemisphere. If China wanted to do something nefarious, if Iran wanted to do something nefarious, Venezuela was an open one-stop shop for everything they needed. So to the extent this administration is trying to secure the Western Hemisphere and create supply chains that make the hemisphere safe for our economy and our technological aspirations — Venezuela is very much part of that.

The specifics of the timing were brought about by a confluence of events. Maduro was uniquely positioning his country to play a nefarious role toward the United States. His openly transactional foreign policy with China created a great deal of urgency. But again — if you’re looking for a single world image that governs everything President Trump does even in the case of one country, you’re asking the wrong questions. The mechanism of foreign policy at play here is not a doctrine in the old sense. And perhaps usefully so.

Q: Does the Trump administration have a grand strategy? And if so, what is it?

George Bogden: Grand strategy is one of those concepts a lot of people like to fit their own ideas under. But if you broadly define it as taking a comprehensive assessment of your means and trying to apply them to your ends, then yes — in a significant way, President Trump has dealt an important bolstering blow to a foreign policy establishment that had backed off from the idea that the United States has a set of national interests it is responsible for pursuing first and foremost.

In the past, the pretense that the United States is supposed to be doing good in the world, operating as a pillar of a multilateral order, had come to supplant the pursuit of national objectives that serve the American people — the people who foot the tremendous bill of maintaining this big footprint in international affairs. That’s changing. And the debate happening inside the administration about means and ends is itself moving us toward a new equilibrium in how the United States understands its national objectives.

To the recurring critique that this is all chaos — that the administration is deciding on a moment-to-moment basis with no straight path — I’d recall what Dean Acheson said about American foreign policy: it’s like playing poker with your cards face up while everyone else holds theirs close to their chest. Of course we want open democratic debate. But the suggestion that unless you’re comfortable with the administration’s logic it is therefore irrational — that’s a flawed interpretation. Reality always wins. And to the extent President Trump has forced American foreign policy elites to come to terms with that phrase, that’s what I’d take away from this moment.

Dr. George E. Bogden is Senior Counsel for Trade at Continental Strategy. In 2025 he served as Executive Director of the Office of Trade Relations at U.S. Customs and Border Protection. He holds a D.Phil. in International Relations from Oxford University and a J.D. from NYU School of Law. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, War on the Rocks, and Lawfare.