A Moral or Militarized American Foreign Policy?

As the world takes stock of the United States’ most recent military venture in South America, it seems an appropriate moment to consider the possible long-term implications of what will be wrought from the seizure of Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro and President Trump’s declaration that “we’re going to run the country.”

Americans historically have wrestled with balancing power politics and moral concerns in their approach to foreign policy. An accounting of the second Trump administration’s first year in office, however, suggests that those leading in Washington today are not all that concerned with such dynamics. This should cause concern, especially after the current military strike on Venezuela. As US foreign policy became less guided by moral ambitions in 2025, it became, perhaps inevitably so, more militarized.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, laying out the new administration’s priorities back in January 2025, mandated that US foreign policy should answer “three simple questions: Does it make America safer? Does it make America stronger? Does it make America more prosperous?” Nowhere in this guidance did Rubio speak of setting an example based on moral virtues, on values that might favor diplomacy over raw military power within the international arena.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the latest National Security Strategy, published in November, remained equally silent on morality’s role in defining American grand strategy. It did, though, state that the United States would “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere.”

Instead of a values-based foreign policy, what has come out of the Trump White House this past year, culminating with the attack on Venezuela, was a steady drumbeat of aggressive militaristic taunting, much of it threatening military violence and economic sanctions while politicizing the nation’s armed forces, both at home and overseas. These actions, of course, sit at odds with the president’s 2025 inaugural address in which Mr. Trump, evoking Richard Nixon, argued that his “proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.”

A chaotic year in, one might question that historical inheritance. Conjuring a near existential threat at the nation’s southern border, for instance, the president began his term by ordering the Pentagon send some 1,500 active-duty troops to assist with border patrolling and “alien” deportation missions.

Equally belligerent language targeted Denmark over the intent to take Greenland, with Trump declining to rule out the use of military force to achieve his aims. Nearly a full year later, the president is still arguing that the world’s largest island is “essential” to US national security, suggesting that forcible annexation of an ally’s territory is warranted as long as the commander-in-chief deems it so.

Closer to home, the administration also set its sights on the Western Hemisphere, claiming the United States’ command of the Panama Canal despite a 1977 treaty guaranteeing its neutrality. Then, with little restraint and less legal authority, the Department of Defense began attacking suspected drug-smuggling craft off the coast of Venezuela, escalating tensions throughout the second half of 2025 that led to a blockade of the South American country, the CIA carrying out drone strikes on its coastal port facilities, and now a unilateral, illegal invasion ostensibly aimed at regime change and command of the Venezuelan oil industry.

This devaluation of diplomacy is not new. It marked Trump’s first year in office, as the State Department abruptly paused all foreign aid and assistance with little to no warning soon after inauguration, with critics lamenting the impact such suspensions have had on global health programs over the course of 2025.

Such breakneck, unprincipled flexing of American power abroad this arguably was matched by a similar lack of moral concerns at home. The pardoning of domestic terrorists who attacked the US capitol on January 6th, 2020—with far-right extremist groups like the “Proud Boys” vowing revenge for their jail time—and the unlawful militarized policing of American cities were but just two examples of an administration acting with few self-imposed ethical guardrails.

But morals matter, both at home and abroad. They always have, even if the United States historically has not always lived up to its idealistic founding principles. Morality is not irrelevant to a nation’s foreign policy, despite noted State Department diplomat George Kennan once arguing that the “interests of the national society” such as “military security” and “the integrity of its political life…have no moral quality” of their own.

Of course, power matters, too. But power unhinged from ethical reasoning (and restraint) leads to a dark world in which military power becomes the inevitable answer to nearly any foreign policy question. Even a realist like Hans Morgenthau, author of the 1948 Politics Among Nations, counseled that the “aspiration for power” should, in some sense, be “in harmony with the demands of reason, morality, and justice.” As the famed political scientist put it, morality, mores, and law reinforced each other and offered “protection to the life of society and to the lives of the individuals who compose it.”

More recently, Joseph S. Nye, Jr. argued that we should consider the potential benefits of “maintaining an institutional order that encourages moral interests.” In short, the tension between morality and power has been healthy in our past debates over foreign policy. (Even if Morgenthau himself warned against the “intoxication with moral abstractions.”) Historically speaking, moral aims have set examples abroad, highlighted the values of human rights across the globe, and informed critiques against those who support more imperialistic and militaristic policies.

But what happens when the president of the United States, in both rhetoric and deeds, flaunts power and interests above all else? When morals are deemed an inconvenience at best, a threat to rational decision-making at worst? The likely result is the militarization of the nation’s foreign policy.

True, Mr. Trump has boasted that his deal-making has ended eight wars while complaining that he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. Yet motives matter when it comes to moral concerns. Was the president seeking peace or adulation? Moreover, Mr. Trump has seemed reluctant to wade into the details for achieving lasting peace in the Middle East or for holding Vladimir Putin to task for Russia’s unbridled aggression against Ukraine.

In a world deemed existentially dangerous, then only war and the threat of war, the flawed argument goes, will keep the nation safe when morals no longer matter. Seemingly, Mr. Trump sees the world this way. In his inaugural address, the president stressed his responsibility to “defend our country from threats and invasions…at a level that nobody has ever seen before.” Such martial rhetoric has been reinforced this past year by Secretary of Defense (“War”) Pete Hegseth who, in critics’ eyes, views military morality through the lens of “might makes right.”

In our heated, if not fractured, political moment, debating the value of morals guiding our nation’s foreign policy will be a difficult task. Indeed, even finding consensus today over what we mean by “moral behavior” seems a fraught enterprise. But the discussion is needed. Surely, President Barak Obama’s drone-based “targeted killing program” or Joseph Biden’s “unconditional” support of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s exterminationist policies against the Palestinians warrant examination, if not condemnation. So too the militarized actions of the Trump administration this past year. In short, effective American leadership is moral leadership, both at home and abroad.

Moreover, a nation broken free of its ethical moorings will engender only resentment and retaliation on the world stage. In such a scenario, a reliance on military force likely will grow as fears of America losing its “greatness” feed into themselves. If the Trump administration spies a dangerous world beyond its shores, then a foreign policy lacking in any moral principles hardly will dispel those threats, as real as they may be. Indeed, those threats will likely only escalate.

If we can agree with the proposition that power and morals can—and should—reinforce each other, then the opening year of the second Trump administration serve as a warning sign for the coming implications of a nation’s foreign policy bereft of moral criteria. Militarization surely will follow immorality.