Trump made innumerable, often contradictory, promises on the 2024 campaign trail. In foreign policy, he interspersed strong rhetoric against U.S. enemies with promises to end “forever wars” and bring peace to both Ukraine and Gaza within days—indeed, a day—of entering office. Nominations to his foreign policy team painted a similarly convoluted picture, with hawks, doves, conspiracists, pivoters-to-Asia, and a handful of converted neoconservatives populating key positions.

With Mike Waltz’s ouster as National Security Advisor close to the 100-day mark of Trump’s second administration, a less hazy outline of the 47^th president’s approach to foreign policy is taking shape. While Ionut Popescu has posited that Trump is operating from a realist framework, Valerie Hudson contends that Trump’s attempt to carve out a coherent doctrine—restoring “great power spheres of influence, that is, a true multipolar world that relies on regional policemen, not one global policeman, to keep the peace internationally”—falls into incoherence when confronted with Trump’s actual policies in the Middle East and the Taiwan Strait. Others argue that the Trump doctrine essentially entails “unrestrained strength,” capricious opportunism, or a revival of conservative American nationalism. While each of these interpretations highlights an important dimension of Trump’s geopolitical disposition, none clearly identifies the strategic logic linking the president’s global actions to his domestic political considerations.

This essay offers a much simpler heuristic for analyzing Trump’s global actions in a way that accommodates many of the perspectives referenced above. This time around, despite his admiration for William McKinley, it’s McKinley’s successor, Theodore Roosevelt, that serves as the model for Trump’s foreign policy, which could be summarized as a twist on TR’s famous phrase: “Speak loudly and carry a big stick.”

In contrast to Roosevelt’s advice to “speak softly,” the adage “speak loudly” comprises a central pillar of Donald Trump’s foreign policy. His bellicose, bullying style characterizes his approach to virtually every transaction on the world stage, from denouncing EU “freeloaders” to acerbic White House press conferences to threatening to ratchet tariffs up to economically crippling levels when confronted by defiant foreign leaders. This impulse to deploy oversized, overheated rhetoric does more than send a signal to other countries that Trump does not value agreements, alliances, or amity for their own sake. Rather, its purpose is to convey to the American people that Trump seeks to project U.S. strength above all else. Trump’s rhetoric only makes sense when understood primarily as a tool of negotiation and a domestic signaling device to reinforce his “America First” narrative to the electorate. Trump Doctrine 2.0 is nothing if not focused on cultural transformation first.

“Carry a big stick” stands as the other cornerstone of Donald Trump’s foreign policy. This principle is evident in his steadfast refusal to mandate significant defense spending cuts, abrasive use of tariffs as a negotiating tool, and vigorous promotion of U.S. conventional weapons exports, even to the point of circumventing congressional oversight of arms deals. Rather than embracing austerity in military budgeting, Trump has discussed elevated appropriations for ships, aircraft, and advanced munitions as essential to national security and the revival of American manufacturing; he has simultaneously worked aggressively to open new markets for U.S.-made armaments, pitching the purchase of weapons from American defense companies as a way for foreign nations to cut their trade deficits with the United States. Beyond its basic military applications, the purpose of the “big stick” approach is to help shift perceptions of U.S. power for global and domestic audiences.

Whereas in TR’s day the United States demonstrated its military might by sending the “Great White Fleet” on international tours of friendly harbors, Trump employs extensive airstrikes against Yemeni Houthis—a callback to the cruise missile attacks against ISIS during his first dinner with Xi Jinping eight years ago— to convey the image of overwhelming American military power backed with economic heft.  With its heavy ordnance expenditure and robust defense outlays, Trump’s “big stick” approach to foreign policy is meant to back up his loud speech with foreign leaders by translating martial strength abroad into political capital at home, all while subordinates revel in Trump’s apparent revival of national resolve. The consequence is a political drama that commands mass cultural attention even as the economic impacts of the tariff negotiations catalyze public opinion against Trump.

Viewed comparatively, the doctrines of Theodore Roosevelt and Donald Trump share a common reverence for power projection anchored in Roosevelt’s reverence for the “big stick.” From the Great White Fleet’s world tour to contemporary airstrikes against American adversaries, both Roosevelt and Trump believed in leveraging military strength to signal national vigor. Yet where Roosevelt balanced martial assertiveness with measured diplomacy, “speaking softly” to cultivate friendships, deter aggression, and build international goodwill, Trump’s pugnacious unilateralism risks fracturing the very alliances needed to hold America’s enemies at bay.

It (almost) goes without saying, but it is questionable whether alienating allies in an increasingly dangerous world is a wise policy. While “speak loudly and carry a big stick” might make internal sense as a means to wage cultural battles and reinvigorate a sense of national pride at home, internationally, it comes with the high price of weakening key relationships. Roosevelt’s personal clout enabled him to negotiate the Treaty of Portsmouth ending the Russo-Japanese War, earning him both a Nobel Peace Prize and unparalleled status as a mediator on the global stage—both prizes Trump obviously covets. The value of those relationships was revealed by their absence under Woodrow Wilson, whose inaction and diplomatic impotence during and after World War I planted the seeds for World War II. Trump risks retracing this path with his current approach as the very real risks of war loom.

To be clear, most U.S. allies ought to spend more on defense and take more responsibility for helping maintain the international order, and Trump is often unfairly harangued for being more belligerent rhetorically than in practice. But the contrast with Roosevelt reveals the potential dangers of needlessly alienating friends in a newly dangerous world. Roosevelt’s nuanced approach harnessed American influence to build enduring partnerships, secure hemispheric order, and foster international order. While Trump’s doctrine underscores domestic messaging and transactional leverage, Roosevelt’s blend of restraint and resolve remains the more coherent and successful model for advancing U.S. interests on the world stage. Perhaps Trump—or at least those around him—could benefit from stealing a page from TR’s book and learning to speak a little more softly.