Political scientists rarely associate Donald Trump with neoclassical realism. More often, he is described as a nationalist, a populist, or a disruptor unconstrained by theory. Yet if neoclassical realism is understood as a framework that explains foreign policy outcomes through the interaction of systemic incentives and domestic-level intervening variables, especially leader perceptions, state institutions, and societal factors, then Trump’s presidency offers a particularly vivid illustration of its core claims. His defining political impact has not been the rejection of structural constraints as such. Rather, it is the distinctive way in which he filtered systemic pressures through domestic political institutions and personal executive interpretation.

Neoclassical realism begins with a structural premise originating from structural realism (neorealism): the international system is anarchic and imposes constraints and incentives on states based on relative power distribution. Yet, systemic pressures do not translate directly into foreign policy outputs. Instead, they are mediated by domestic institutions, bureaucratic politics, and leaders’ perceptions. As Gideon Rose, who coined the term neoclassical realism, famously argued, “the scope and ambition of a country’s foreign policy is driven first and foremost by its place in the international system and specifically by its relative material power capabilities… [however] the impact of such power capabilities on foreign policy is indirect and complex, because systemic pressures must be translated through intervening variables.” In other words, structure matters, but only through the intervening variables of state power extraction, elite consensus, and leader cognition.

Trump’s presidency offers an unusually clear demonstration of this logic. Whether one approves or disapproves of his policies, it is difficult to deny that he reinterpreted America’s position in the international system in ways that dramatically shift from post–Cold War elite consensus. Yet from a neoclassical realist perspective, this divergence does not reflect the absence of structural constraint. Rather, it represents a different reading of relative decline, burden-sharing asymmetries, and the costs of global overstretch as filtered through a particular domestic political prism.

Domestically, Trump’s greatest impact was the reconfiguration of the domestic political transmission belt linking systemic pressures to foreign policy outcomes. For decades, bipartisan elite consensus in the United States translated post–1945 structural dominance into an expansive internationalist strategy: alliance maintenance, institutional leadership, and support for the liberal economic order. This consensus was reinforced by bureaucratic agencies, think tanks, and transnationally oriented economic sectors. Trump disrupted this equilibrium not by escaping systemic constraints, but by mobilizing a domestic coalition less committed to translating American power into global order maintenance.

The American presidency itself has become a central intervening variable in this process. Neoclassical realism places significant weight on leader perceptions, especially under conditions of informational uncertainty and bureaucratic contestation. Trump’s executive style centralized foreign policy interpretation in the presidency, reducing the filtering influence of........

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