US foreign policy under Trump’s second term appears erratic and contradictory, from Venezuela to Iran and from Europe to East Asia. Yet beneath the shocks lies a stubborn geographical logic: America remains an east–west power, constrained less by presidential whims than by a century-old map that still structures global influence, writes Carsten Nickel, Bennett School affiliated researcher.
When United States (US) forces captured Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro, it was hard not to see this as an immediate manifestation of the National Security Strategy of December 2025. Many observers read the operation as proof that Washington is aggressively refocusing on its own hemisphere – which may include Greenland, too.
In parallel, however, speculation about another US strike on Iran seemed to point in the opposite direction: renewed entanglement in the Middle East, far from America’s shores. Add the ebb and flow of tariff threats on Europe and Asia, as well as talk about abandoning Ukraine and Taiwan, and the picture looks chaotic. Is the United States retreating from the world or doubling down on it?
The temptation is to treat the Trump administration’s often erratic moves purely as evidence of a volatile, improvisational foreign policy, driven by personalities. But there is another way to make sense of them: by focusing not on individual decisions, but on the map that continues to structure American power. For analysts and policymakers, this perspective offers a way to distinguish between currently ubiquitous noise and structure. A closer look at the first year of President Trump’s second term underscores this point.
The geography that won’t go away
For more than a century, US foreign policy has been organised around a west-east orientation. From North America, Washington has projected power across the Atlantic into Europe and the Middle East and across the Pacific into East Asia, creating a latitudinal corridor underpinning US geostrategy.
This was not accidental. There is currently much debate about the 1823 Monroe doctrine, but ever since around 1900, geostrategists such as Alfred Thayer Mahan argued that America’s security depended on preventing any rival power from dominating the large Eurasian landmass. Control of sea lanes and alliances across Europe and Asia were part of this logic.
That mindset survived two world wars, the Cold War, and globalisation. To this day, it has also shaped expectations – among allies and adversaries alike – about where and how the US will act. NATO, the US role in the Middle East, and dense economic links across the Atlantic and Pacific are all institutionalised expressions of this east–west orientation.
What makes today’s geopolitics seem so unstable is not that this geography has disappeared, but that it is being challenged in the short term, while remaining stubbornly influential on a more structural level.
Iran and the “non-debatable“ Middle East
Consider Iran. Talk of restraint or disengagement resurfaces regularly in Washington, yet the Middle East remains a region where US military intervention has occurred even under an administration that liked to brand itself as isolationist. Trump’s 2025 strike on Iranian nuclear facilities fit a pattern that goes back over a century: sustained US involvement in a central belt of Eurasia which already Mahan had singled out as decisive for global power.
Importantly, allies and adversaries continue to act as if the potential for US engagement along these familiar lines remains a given, from Israel and the Gulf states to Iran itself. These expectations, in turn, feed back into US decision-making, narrowing the range of viable options in the short term. The result is geostrategic continuity disguised as situational surprise.
Europe: threatened rupture, practical constraint
The rupture appears much greater in Europe. Harsh rhetoric about allies, merely conditional support for Ukraine, as well as tariff threats have revived fears of the US withdrawing into its own hemisphere, potentially taking Greenland along with it. Yet here too, latitudinal structures continue to exert a powerful pull.
Decades of shared security architecture and economic and financial interdependence constrain how far Washington can disengage. While European militaries rely heavily on US technology and operational capabilities, European economies help underpin the depth of US capital markets. When the US announcement of “liberation day” tariffs rattled not only stock markets but also US Treasuries and the dollar, this fallout exposed the depth of transatlantic trade, forcing Trump to delay and moderate his stance.
As such, moments of rupture often end in renegotiation rather than exit. Greater burden sharing agreed at the 2025 NATO summit, European procurements of US military equipment for Ukraine, and minerals agreements with Kyiv all update the terms of engagement, thereby preventing a quick retreat. Europe remains a key Eurasian “rimland” (Nicholas Spykman, 19 44) in America’s east-west strategy, even when day-to-day politics turns confrontational.
East Asia and the paradox of deglobalisation
Nowhere is the persistence of latitudinal thinking clearer than in East Asia. The region has long been viewed as – in Zbigniew Brzezinski’s words – the most economically productive end of America’s Eurasian arc, from the Pacific wars of the 20th century to today’s rivalry with China. Here, even calls for disengagement ultimately reflect fears of losing primacy.
Trade wars against key regional allies, fast-changing technology export controls, and security signalling regarding Taiwan are often erratic but also display a continued spatial focus across the Pacific. For instance, even speculation about radical proposals such as a “reverse Kissinger” – courting Russia to balance China – presuppose continued American involvement across Eurasia rather than a retreat from it.
The upshot is ironic. Domestic backlash against globalisation – much of it linked to economic integration with Asia – has intensified political attention on the region rather than diminishing it. The Trump administration badly overplayed its hand: its tariffs on China backfired as Beijing imposed a crippling ban on its rare earth exports. Yet this volatility occurred amid a continued geographical focus on Asia.
The illusive longitudinal turn
What, then, of Venezuela, Greenland and renewed talk of the Western Hemisphere? Throughout the 20th century, visions of a north–south, or longitudinal, world order have often been advanced by rivals of the US, from imperial and Nazi Germany to Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, and even Gaullist advocates of European strategic autonomy.
In contrast, US hemispheric rhetoric has usually functioned more as leverage, pressuring latitudinal allies from a consolidated longitudinal base. The Venezuela operation fits this pattern. What seemed to signal a shift away from Eurasia was quickly followed by the seizure of a Russian vessel in the North Atlantic, speculation about Moscow’s reduced energy-based leverage in talks over Ukraine, and expectations of greater US influence within OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries).
World maps and world power
Seeing US foreign policy through the lens of latitudinal geography does not eliminate uncertainty, but it changes its meaning. Volatility often reflects tension between disruptive short-term policies and entrenched spatial commitments.
True strategic change would, therefore, require the steady re-engineering of supply chains, financial flows, and security arrangements that have accumulated over generations. The experience with the Trump administration might well incentivise key allies to move in that direction over the medium term.
Until then, the US remains an east–west power, even when it wants to be something else. In a world fixated on shocks and personalities, the most enduring force shaping US geopolitics may still be the map America made.
Read the paper: Latitudinal geostrategy: Mapping US geopolitics in times of turbulence
The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy.
