Noah Feldman, Columnist

Pros and Cons of Trump's Random Foreign Policy

Unpredictability makes sense in a world where all you have are enemies.

March 18, 2018 at 2:00 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

It's hard to know which way to turn.
Photographer: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

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Suppose President Donald Trump’s foreign policy is random. I mean really random: Like random luck, designed only in so far as to fluctuate wildly between different, opposing strategic views.

In this thought experiment, it’s not a bug but a feature that the U.S. is pulling away from a nuclear nonproliferation agreement with Iran even as it seeks to negotiate one with North Korea. Similarly, it’s an intentional accident that Trump might replace the realist National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster with the conservative idealist John Bolton.