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LONDON − Bomb Oman. Abandon South Korea. Pull out of NATO. Seize Greenland. Maybe Canada, too.
Order U.S. special forces to snatch a troublesome Latin American dictator. Then grab that country's oil reserves.
For the best part of a decade since he first entered the disorderly world of global diplomacy, President Donald Trump has played fast and loose with U.S. foreign policy. He's repeatedly threatened traditional American allies. He's spent large amounts of time courting and flirting with unpredictable adversaries like North Korea and Russia.
The U.S. foreign policy establishment has bristled at this approach, which appears to make allies of foes, and foes of allies. Markets, which crave certainty, don't like it either. U.S. international partners have struggled to adapt to it.
But is there a defensible logic to this turn-on-your-friends, win-over your-foes strategy? Or is it simply hastening the decline of American power at a time when China is matching, if not surpassing, the U.S. in various hyper-competitive fields from technology to military advancements, from scientific research to extending the reach of its soft power?
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Some political scientists and former government officials say the answer is Yes and No. Sorta. Somewhat. Alliances are shaking up, resetting, reordering. But it's unclear if it's a permanent, irreversible and wholly unprecedented shift.
And, they say, it may not be all for the bad.
"The establishment is apoplectic. In my career, I've never seen them so downcast and so convinced that our leader is making mistake after mistake," said Lyle Goldstein of the reshuffling of the longtime American overseas playbook. He's the director of the China Initiative at Brown University’s Watson School of International and Public Affairs.
"I do agree Trump's making a lot of mistakes. However, I have some sympathy for his skepticism of alliances. It's obvious that one reason the United States has fallen behind in so many indicators of living standards is that we are carrying much more of the burden than other countries," said Goldstein, who also serves as director of the Asia Program at the Washington think tank Defense Priorities, which argues for a smaller global U.S. military footprint.
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Goldstein said Trump's apparent disdain for international institutions such as NATO and the United Nations that have been the main venues for western cooperation and security since the end of World War II is gradually forcing a new world order that he calls "complex multipolarity." That's where power could eventually be spread among several major nations or regions rather than being concentrated in the hands of two superpowers: the United States and China.
Still, Daniel Fried, former U.S. ambassador to Poland and a fellow at the Atlantic Council, an international affairs think tank based in Washington, said he is not yet ready to say that Trump is entirely remaking the world order.
To change the world order, Fried said, "you’ve got to have some structure as an alternative." Fried also worked as a special assistant to former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
"I’m not sure there is one in mind or that the Trump administration has settled on what it wants. And I’m not sure how much will be lasting after the end of this administration."
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Trump seems to be focused more on consolidating American power than remaking the international order, said Dan Hamilton, a foreign policy expert at the Washington-based Brookings Institution’s Center on the U.S. and Europe.
“He believes that international rules are simply constraining,” Hamilton said. “If you’re the biggest power in the world, then everybody is trying to tie you down, and you don’t like it.”
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The scope of what the Trump administration has sought to achieve on the world stage has been wide-ranging and the pace relentless. It started in Trump's first term when he expressed deep skepticism of multilateralism, deploying a barrage of executive orders that pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, withdrew it from an Iran nuclear agreement and left the global-health-promoting World Health Organization in the U.S.'s rear-view mirror.
Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital and moved the U.S. embassy there in defiance of decades of U.S. practice to be sensitive to Palestinian political aspirations.
He also started his assault − accelerated during his second term − on free trade by exiting the Trans-Pacific Partnership with 12 Pacific Rim nations and replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which is currently toiling in a half-dead state because his administration has neither renewed nor killed the pact.
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What's clear, said Robert Muggah, cofounder of Canada-based geopolitical risk and security consultancy SecDev Group and the Igarapé Institute, a Brazil-based think tank, is Trump approaches alliances as explicit transactions.
"He has aggressively pressed some of America’s closest partners including Canada, Japan, South Korea and European countries for concessions on trade, defense and market access," he said.
"He sees dependence on the United States as leverage. Countries that rely heavily on the American market or security umbrella have more to lose from a rupture. That gives Washington considerable room to exert pressure."
And unrelenting pressure, and what appears to be genuine enthusiasm for personal diplomacy with leaders such as Russia's Vladimir Putin, China's Xi Jinping, and North Korea's Kim Jong Un, has been the name of Trump's game since he returned to the White House. He's intimidated NATO ally Denmark by floating the idea of annexing its Greenland territory for its natural resources and to ward off seaborne national security threats from China and Russia. He's mulled, in an informal fireside-chat way, about doing a "friendly takeover" of Cuba.
Over and over again he's talked down the utility of the 77-year-old "paper tiger" NATO military alliance.
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"Kim Jong Un has always treated me with great respect, and we’ve met on numerous occasions, actually, two primary occasions − spoken and spent time. I understand him. He understands me,” Trump said after announcing he'd ordered the Pentagon to scale back military exercises with South Korea.
The drills with South Korea are designed to help prepare Seoul for a possible war with Pyongyang, its secretive and volatile nuclear-armed rival and neighbor.
For decades, security on the Korean Peninsula has rested on a single assumption, wrote Ju Hyung Kim, a specialist in the region, in a recent article in 38 North, a North Korea-related analysis
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