Behind the “America First” slogan lies a struggle among four competing centers of power. Vance wants to reduce America’s commitments, Colby is prepared to sacrifice Europe for the sake of China, Rubio is trying to preserve American global hegemony, while Kushner is turning diplomacy into a marketplace for major deals. President Trump never definitively chooses among them, and that is precisely why Washington itself is becoming the principal source of Washington’s unpredictability.
There is a paradox in U.S. foreign policy today that Washington’s allies increasingly have to treat as a strategic risk in its own right. The world is trying to understand what President Trump wants. But that is the wrong question.
What matters far more is understanding which of several competing Americas is speaking through him at any given moment.
One wants to end the endless wars, shift the burden of Ukraine onto Europe, and spend the money on America’s border. Another regards almost everything happening from the Baltic to the Persian Gulf as secondary to the coming confrontation with China. A third believes that abandoning global dominance would itself amount to an invitation to a major war. The fourth views international politics as a gigantic investment project in which peace agreements, real estate, sovereign wealth funds, technology, and diplomacy are all supposed to operate within a single commercial model.
All these groups exist within the same political administration. All appeal to Trump. All insist that they alone understand the true meaning of America First.
And all of them offer radically different Americas.
A typology proposed by analysts at the European Council on Foreign Relations divides the Trumpian foreign-policy universe into four camps: Restrainers, who advocate strategic self-restraint; Prioritizers, who favor a hard choice of priorities; Primacists, who defend American global supremacy; and Developers, who represent a transactional form of “developer diplomacy.”
The categories are not absolute. People move from one coalition to another, positions shift depending on the crisis, and President Trump himself can embrace arguments from several camps within the span of a few days. Yet this framework explains Washington’s foreign-policy volatility better than many official doctrines do.
The problem is no longer that America lacks a strategy.
The problem is that it has too many.
MAGA Is Split: One Slogan, Different Americas
From the outside, the Trump administration gives the impression of a tightly centralized system. The president sets the tone, the White House communicates the position, and the government bureaucracy executes the political will.
But behind that facade, an internal struggle is underway for a prize far more consequential than influence over the next decision on Ukraine, Iran, or Taiwan. The real question is what kind of superpower America itself should be in the twenty-first century.
The Restrainers believe that global leadership has turned from an asset into a liability for the United States. The Prioritizers answer that leadership remains essential, but resources are insufficient to dominate simultaneously in three parts of the world, so they must be concentrated on China. The Primacists believe that the very idea of choosing among Europe, Asia, and the Middle East leads to defeat: a superpower remains a superpower only so long as it can act everywhere at once. The Developers propose an entirely different formula: replace an expensive political and military architecture with a system of deals, investments, and intertwined interests.
Each school has its own politicians, media resources, donors, businesses, think tanks, and international partners.
The Restrainers draw support from the right-wing populist MAGA ecosystem, alternative media, and some technology billionaires.
The Prioritizers rely on Silicon Valley’s new defense wing.
The Primacists are backed by the traditional Washington establishment, the military-industrial complex, the old Republican guard, and pro-Israel organizations.
Kushner and his partners rely on Gulf capital and their unique access to the presidential family.
American foreign policy therefore appears inconsistent not necessarily because no one knows what to do.
Quite the opposite. Too many people know, and they know differently.
Vance Wanted to Keep America Out of Wars. Iran Shattered His Doctrine
Until recently, the Restrainers could plausibly claim to be the ideological core of a renewed MAGA movement.
Vice President JD Vance became the political symbol of a Republican generation that sees the wars of recent decades not as demonstrations of American power but as a succession of costly mistakes. Alongside him stood Tucker Carlson, one of the most influential figures in America’s right-wing media. Marjorie Taylor Greene and several of the most radical Trump loyalists in the House of Representatives were also associated with this wing.
Its intellectual infrastructure came from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and parts of the right wing of Heritage.
Its social base was clear: the working class of the Rust Belt, angered by the consequences of globalization; voters exhausted by wars; alternative-media activists; and right-wing populists. In their criticism of American interventionism, they unexpectedly found common ground with some left-wing anti-imperialists as well.
The program seemed perfectly straightforward.
Stop aid to Ukraine.
Make Europe pay for its own defense.
Reduce the American presence overseas.
Redirect billions of dollars to the southern U.S. border.
Use tariffs instead of missiles.
Turn America into an economically protected fortress that exerts pressure on the world primarily through the size of its market rather than the number of its military bases.
In the long run, this effectively meant dismantling a substantial part of the foreign-policy legacy built after World War II, including the Reagan-era understanding of Republican internationalism.
For old Washington, that was close to a revolution.
But by the summer of 2026, a fundamental weakness of the Restrainers had become apparent: they remain influential only until Trump himself decides that a war can deliver him a quick victory.
The U.S. military campaign against Iran became a political earthquake for this camp.
Tucker Carlson opposed the strikes, describing the White House decision as the result of Benjamin Netanyahu’s dangerous influence. The rupture became personal. Carlson said he regretted his previous support for Trump, distanced himself from the Republican Party alongside Marjorie Taylor Greene, and raised the possibility of creating an independent political force.
For Vance, the situation was far more complicated.
Unlike Carlson, a media figure operating in politics, the vice president is embedded in the machinery of government and is simultaneously regarded as a possible contender for the 2028 presidential nomination. He cannot openly wage war against his own president, but completely abandoning his isolationist legacy could destroy his political identity.
Vance therefore has to balance two imperatives: defend the administration’s decisions on Iran while maintaining some distance from the ideology of permanent intervention.
Trump responded to his critics in characteristic fashion, making clear that real MAGA supporters appreciate decisive action.
It was a blow not only to Carlson.
It was a warning to the entire isolationist wing: America First does not automatically mean America Alone.
Colby Is Prepared to Sacrifice Europe for Taiwan
If the Restrainers want America to engage less with the world in general, the Prioritizers want it to engage with the world extremely selectively.
That makes them potentially more dangerous for Europe than outright isolationists.
The central figure in this camp is Elbridge Colby, who took the influential position of under secretary of defense for policy. Along with Senator Josh Hawley, former congressman Mike Gallagher, analysts at the Marathon Initiative, and part of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s team, he represents a school whose central question is not “Should America remain a great power?” but “Where will America have to fight the decisive war?”
There is only one answer: China.
Colby’s logic is unforgiving.
The U.S. military and defense-industrial base do not possess unlimited resources. Aircraft carriers, missile defenses, precision-guided munitions, intelligence systems, logistics, and the most advanced weapons cannot all be concentrated simultaneously in Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific.
Therefore, choices have to be made.
For the Prioritizers, Ukraine is a tragic but secondary theater. Europe is a wealthy continent capable of financing its own defense. The Middle East is a source of dangerous distractions. China is the only adversary capable of challenging the very position of the United States as the leading power in the international system.
Hence their demand to freeze peripheral conflicts and shift aircraft carriers, air-defense systems, and scarce precision-strike capabilities toward the Taiwan Strait.
But the military dimension is only one part of the strategy.
The Prioritizers also advocate technological decoupling from China, restrictions on investment, and controls over artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and other dual-use technologies. Josh Hawley has pushed a hard line aimed at separating American and Chinese technological capabilities and prohibiting the transfer of critical technologies.
In effect, they are preparing not for a single war but for a prolonged systemic confrontation in which computing power, autonomous systems, satellites, software, drones, and artificial intelligence become decisive.
And here Colby has found a new industrial ally.
Not the old oil families, and not only Lockheed Martin and RTX, but a new kind of Silicon Valley: Peter Thiel, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, and technology entrepreneurs interested in a massive redistribution of defense contracts toward autonomous combat systems, artificial intelligence, and new platforms.
In this model, AUKUS, Japan, and Taiwan are valuable precisely to the extent that they are prepared to devote their own resources to containing China.
The European Union, by contrast, is increasingly viewed not as a sacred community of shared values but as an expensive partner that must be forced to take responsibility for itself.
This represents a fundamental break with eight decades of transatlantic policy.
An isolationist may leave Europe because he does not want to fight.
A Prioritizer is prepared to leave Europe because he wants to prepare for a much larger war.
Rubio Is Trying to Restore the American Empire MAGA Promised to End
The direct opposite of Colby is the Primacist camp, the advocates of American supremacy.
Their logic goes back to the classic Republican principle of “peace through strength.” If Washington retreats in one region, they argue, its adversaries will interpret that as a signal of weakness everywhere else.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has become the face of this school. Alongside him are Robert O’Brien, Mike Waltz, who moved from the National Security Council into diplomacy, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Michael McCaul, Mike Turner, and representatives of the traditional Republican foreign-policy establishment.
Behind them stands a very different America: Lockheed Martin, RTX, a significant portion of the defense-industrial complex, the intelligence community, traditional Republican institutions, and powerful pro-Israel organizations, including the Republican Jewish Coalition. In the broader lobbying arena, AIPAC also retains considerable influence.
Their argument is simple: global leadership cannot be exercised selectively.
If the United States withdraws from Europe, Russia gains strategic space, while China concludes that American guarantees to Taiwan are weak.
If Washington abandons pressure on Iran, regional allies begin searching for alternative security guarantors.
If America demonstrates an inability to control its own geopolitical environment in the Western Hemisphere, its claims to leadership in Asia become less credible.
The Primacists therefore demand that the United States maintain a military presence simultaneously in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
Members of this school were among the most consistent advocates of a military approach toward Iran and tough U.S. action in Venezuela in early 2026.
They support Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel, favor pressure on Tehran, regard NATO as a strategic asset, and at the same time demand that Europeans sharply increase defense spending and assume most of the practical cost of defending their own continent.
This is no longer the old liberal internationalism.
Washington is prepared to retain command, but it no longer wants to pay for the entire system.
In this respect, Rubio is much closer to Trump than he may appear. Both demand that allies pay. The difference lies in the ultimate objective.
Trump sees those payments as proof that the deal is worthwhile.
Rubio sees them as a way to preserve the American system of global dominance at a lower cost.
For the Primacists, the sudden death of Senator Lindsey Graham on July 11, 2026, shortly after his latest, tenth visit to Kyiv, was a painful blow.
Graham was especially valuable not only because of his consistent support for Ukraine and NATO and his advocacy of maximum pressure on Iran. What made him unique was his ability to translate classical neoconservative arguments into language Trump could understand.
He defended Ukraine not only in terms of democracy and international law but also by pointing to its lithium, titanium, and other strategic resources, which, in his view, could not be allowed to fall into the hands of Moscow and Beijing.
His years of “golf diplomacy” gave traditional hawks a rare channel of direct influence on the president.
Before his death, Graham had managed to coordinate a new package of anti-Russian sanctions with the White House.
That channel is now gone.
And that shifts the balance within the Republican system far more profoundly than it may appear from the outside.
Kushner Is Not Building a New World Order. He Is Building a Global Business Plan
The fourth camp is harder to fit into traditional political science because it barely thinks in ideological terms at all.
This is the team of Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff.
It can be described as a school of transactional geopolitics, but an even more precise term would be developer diplomacy.
Here, relations between states are treated almost like negotiations over a complex real estate project: identify the interests of each party, devise a financial structure, attract investors, package the political risks, and sign the deal.
Kushner’s formal appointment in February 2026 as special envoy for peace institutionalized the influence of a group that had previously operated largely through personal channels.
Steve Witkoff combines the Middle East portfolio with negotiations with Moscow.
The team’s key external resource is the Gulf monarchies and their sovereign wealth funds, above all Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, linked to the strategy of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Capital from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar also plays an important role.
For these players, Kushner and Witkoff are useful precisely because they speak the familiar language of capital.
Instead of an abstract “international order,” investments.
Instead of a diplomatic process lasting for years, concrete packages.
Instead of international institutions, consortiums.
Instead of guarantees based exclusively on an American military presence, a system of mutual financial dependencies in which war becomes prohibitively expensive for every interested party.
This philosophy is most clearly visible in the Middle East.
Through channels in Doha and Oman, the Kushner-Witkoff team is involved in efforts to lock in the parameters of agreements with Iran. Following the ceasefire reached in June 2026, they focused on preserving the technical negotiating process in Qatar and preventing the region from sliding back into a permanent exchange of strikes.
At the same time, discussions are underway over the postwar reconstruction of Gaza, where the developer logic is especially explicit: the devastated territory is viewed not only as a humanitarian and political problem, but also as a potential site for enormous infrastructure and investment projects.
This is where old-school diplomacy ends and the political economy of the new Trumpism begins.
Yet the model has a vulnerability as large as the White House itself.
By mid-2026, the assets of Kushner’s Affinity Partners had exceeded $6 billion, with a substantial share of the money tied to foreign state capital whose representatives are simultaneously involved in negotiations with the United States.
Congressional Democrats and the organization CREW have pointed to a conflict of interest.
Witkoff, meanwhile, has faced criticism for promoting the World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency project, which is linked to Trump’s sons, among Middle Eastern investors.
To Kushner’s critics, this is no longer diplomacy but a dangerous fusion of state power, family interests, and international capital.
To Trump, it is an almost ideal model.
Kushner can translate geopolitics into a language the president understands instinctively: money, assets, investment, profit, leverage, and the deal.
That is why his influence is protected by something neither Rubio nor Colby nor even Vance possesses.
Family.
But that strength is also the group’s weakness.
A developer can negotiate the price of an asset. It is far more difficult to negotiate with a state that regards territorial control, military victory, or historical influence as a matter of national survival. Commercial rationalism works poorly when the parties are willing to absorb losses in pursuit of political objectives.
This is particularly evident in relations with the Kremlin, where the hope of trading geopolitics for economic incentives collides with the hard logic of power, territory, and imperial legacy.
Iran Became an X-Ray: It Revealed Who Really Runs Trump’s Foreign Policy
Crises are what expose the real balance of power inside an administration.
Iran proved to be an almost perfect stress test.
The Restrainers saw the new military campaign as a betrayal of the promise to end endless wars.
The Prioritizers saw yet another diversion of missiles, air defenses, aircraft, intelligence resources, and political attention away from China.
The Primacists saw confirmation that they had been right all along: America can and should use force to preserve the system of deterrence.
The Developers saw an opening for a new deal that could follow the military phase.
And every camp was able to claim that events had validated its own doctrine.
That is the defining feature of Trumpian foreign policy.
Trump rarely settles ideological disputes once and for all. He uses competing schools of thought as a toolbox.
When it is necessary to mobilize the electorate, Vance’s rhetoric about endless wars and free-riding allies becomes useful.
When China is under discussion, Colby’s arguments about scarce resources become almost impossible to dismiss.
When an opportunity arises for a dramatic military operation, the president gravitates toward Rubio’s language.
When there is a chance to sign a headline-making deal, it is Kushner and Witkoff’s turn.
Critics see chaos in this.
Supporters call it strategic unpredictability.
Both assessments are probably correct.
The problem begins when unpredictability stops being a tactical advantage and becomes a systemic feature of a superpower.
An ally needs to know whether a treaty will still hold tomorrow.
An adversary needs to understand the price of escalation.
The military needs to know which theater takes priority.
Industry needs to know which weapons to produce.
Investors need to know which sanctions will remain in place.
But if the answers depend on which faction has won the latest argument inside the White House, strategic uncertainty begins to work not only against America’s adversaries.
It begins to work against the United States itself.
Taiwan, Ukraine, Israel, Mexico: Four Camps, Four Wars of the Future
These schools are most revealing not where their positions are obvious, but where coalitions unexpectedly shift.
Consider, for example, possible strikes against Mexican drug cartels.
At first glance, a classic isolationist should oppose the use of force outside the United States. Yet Vance’s camp could support such an operation because it regards the cartels as a direct threat to American territory and the U.S. border.
Rubio’s Primacists would join them, but for an entirely different reason: to them, a military operation in Mexico would demonstrate Washington’s control over its own geopolitical space.
Colby, by contrast, would find such a campaign irritating. Not because of pacifism, but because it would tie down special operations forces, intelligence assets, aircraft, and logistics that he would rather see deployed in the Indo-Pacific.
The same strike can therefore win support from two camps that despise each other while provoking resistance from a third camp that is considered hawkish on other issues.
The same pattern emerges around Israel.
Rubio and his allies see Israel as a strategic partner in the struggle against Iran and as a pillar of America’s Middle Eastern architecture.
Kushner also favors close cooperation with Israel, but places it within a broader project of normalization, Saudi capital, and regional economic integration.
Colby takes a far colder view of Middle Eastern involvement: every Patriot system, every missile, every ship, and every hour of American strategic attention spent there is potentially unavailable in Asia.
The Carlson wing of the Restrainers goes even further, accusing Netanyahu of trying to use American power to drag the United States into regional wars.
The same logic appears in the regulation of artificial intelligence.
For Colby’s team, AI is a weapon for a future war with China. Defense startups therefore need maximum freedom, while Beijing must be cut off from American technology, capital, and advanced semiconductors.
For Kushner, artificial intelligence is simultaneously a gigantic market capable of attracting billions of dollars from Saudi and Emirati sovereign wealth funds and supporting the construction of enormous data centers.
National-security hawks see a danger in this: the critical infrastructure of the new technological age could become too closely tied to foreign state capital.
Kushner sees an opportunity.
Colby sees a vulnerability.
The difference between them is not technical.
It is a clash between two philosophies of power.
2028 Has Already Begun: The Fight Is Over Trump’s Legacy
This bureaucratic struggle is becoming especially fierce because, in reality, it has already moved beyond Trump’s second presidency.
The factions are preparing for 2028.
Vance is trying to turn the vice presidency into a mechanism for inheriting MAGA and gradually reshaping the party machinery. But Tucker Carlson’s conflict with the White House struck directly at the political constituency that was supposed to provide Vance with ideological legitimacy among the movement’s most radical supporters.
Rubio has the opposite opportunity.
For moderate conservatives and some independent voters, he remains the embodiment of a more traditional, institutional, and predictable foreign policy. His advantage lies in bureaucratic competence and his ability to work through the machinery of government.
Vance has stronger access to the MAGA core, but at the same time provokes far more intense rejection among centrist voters.
Carlson can influence millions, but his political capital is primarily media-based. He is more a creator of political atmosphere than a conventional candidate.
Colby is virtually unknown to the mass electorate, and that is precisely why his influence may prove far more durable than that of many politicians. His task is not to win an election but to turn a China-first strategy into a bureaucratic consensus capable of outlasting any president.
That distinction is crucial.
Presidents change.
Doctrines embedded in the Pentagon, defense budgets, procurement plans, and alliance structures can survive for decades.
Kushner is playing an entirely different game. His influence is directly tied to Trump, so his group operates on a shorter time horizon. Its objective is to lock in as many agreements and commercial structures as possible before the political era changes.
This creates a striking asymmetry.
Vance is fighting for the party.
Rubio is fighting for the state apparatus.
Colby is fighting for the doctrine.
Kushner is fighting for the deals.
And each of them wants to outlast Trump in his own way.
The Winner Is Already Visible. But That Does Not Mean He Will Win the White House
If the camps are judged not by how loudly they speak but by their ability to turn ideas into durable government policy, the Prioritizers emerge as the most interesting faction.
The reason is simple: China has become one of the few issues on which Washington has developed a broad bipartisan and institutional consensus.
Russia can be debated.
Ukraine can be debated.
Israel can be debated.
Iran can be debated.
NATO can be debated.
But the proposition that China represents a systemic challenge to American power has long since moved beyond the boundaries of either political party.
That is why Colby does not need to become a household name. If his logic becomes embedded in the National Defense Strategy, the structure of military procurement, fleet deployments, export controls, and alliance commitments, it could outlast both Trump and the next president.
The Primacists possess formidable bureaucratic power, but they face a deeper problem: American society is becoming increasingly unwilling to finance global hegemony indefinitely in its traditional form.
The Restrainers are highly attuned to electoral frustration but are far less effective at translating protest into complex government policy.
The Developers are capable of producing spectacular agreements, but their model depends too heavily on personal relationships, the political moment, and financial conditions.
The central conflict within Trumpism may therefore ultimately turn out not to be a struggle between isolationism and globalism.
The real battle is between two models of American power.
The first argues that the United States must remain the only power capable of simultaneously shaping the balance of power in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
The second responds that the era in which America could afford such luxury is ending and that the country will have to decide where its true adversary lies.
If the first model prevails, Washington will demand more money from its allies but will remain deeply involved in the global order.
If the second prevails, Europe will confront the necessity of genuine strategic autonomy, the Middle East will become significantly less predictable, and the Indo-Pacific will become the undisputed center of American military strategy.
That is why what is happening inside the White House today cannot be dismissed as an ordinary struggle among advisers competing for the president’s attention.
It is a debate over whether the United States will remain a global power of the old type or evolve into a superpower defined by hard choices.
Trump has not yet provided an answer.
From Vance, he takes America’s frustration with wars.
From Colby, China.
From Rubio, force.
From Kushner, the deal.
From these incompatible elements, the president is building his own foreign policy, one in which a tariff can be followed by a missile strike, a threat to abandon an alliance can turn into a demand for higher defense spending, and military escalation can give way to an offer of an investment agreement.
In the short term, such unpredictability can indeed give Washington an advantage at the negotiating table.
In the long term, however, a far more dangerous question arises.
A superpower can force its adversaries to guess its intentions.
But it cannot indefinitely force its own allies, generals, diplomats, and industries to do the same.
Because at some point, strategic uncertainty stops being a weapon and becomes a weakness.
And then the central question for the world will no longer be what President Trump will do.
It will be which America wakes up in Washington tomorrow.