The defining photo of the recent White House Ukraine summit will likely turn out to be one depicting five European leaders plus the leaders of the European Commission and NATO smooshed in around the Resolute Desk, seemingly listening to a soliloquy by the unseen President Donald Trump.

The photo was impossible for observers not to compare to an iconic one from Trump’s first term, showing a group of G7 leaders led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel hovering over Trump. (France’s Emmanuel Macron is the only one that appears in both.)

These two photos feel quite symbolic in the way EU leaders have approached Trump in his first Vs his second term pic.twitter.com/aEaHpblVXs

If in the earlier image Trump looks like a petulant child being lectured by exasperated adults, in the latter, he’s clearly where he wants to be: at the center of attention, surrounded by people, powerful in their own right, who are there to listen to him. Trump clearly relished the moment, posting, “A big day at the White House. We have never had so many European Leaders here at one time. A great honor for America!!!”

He later told reporters, “They jokingly call me the president of Europe.”

The moment encapsulated something that is often missed in attempts to diagnose and define Trump’s foreign policy. For all his America First rhetoric and vilification of “globalists,” Trump clearly sees himself as a global leader who plays an indispensable role on the world stage and is responsible for solving other countries’ problems — not only America’s. The fact that he carries out this role in a very different way from any of his predecessors shouldn’t distract from the fact that he’s leaned into this tendency even farther in his second term in office.

As Trump recently told The Atlantic, during the first term he was just running the country. In his second, as he sees it, “I run the country and the world.”

Trump has never really been an “isolationist,” though he has frequently been described as one, and some of his rhetoric makes it easy to understand why. He has charged previous presidents with overextending America’s resources, “rebuilding other countries while weakening our own.” He frequently attacks “nation builders” and “interventionists,” including in a May speech in Saudi Arabia, where he argued that “far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins.”

He’s frequently unimpressed by international organizations and institutions, and he often views US allies as free-riders taking advantage of American largesse. He is plainly uninterested in upholding any “rules-based international order.”

In his second term, Trump has eviscerated America’s foreign aid system and drastically downsized the State Department and National Security Council, doing potentially permanent damage to the traditional tools of American foreign policy.

Trump’s critics, both Democrats and disaffected Republicans, frequently charge Trump with abandoning America’s global leadership role. The late former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, who coined the term “indispensable nation” to describe the United States in the 1990s, charged Trump during his first term with promoting a “doctrine of “every nation for itself,” and staking out “isolated positions on trade, climate change and Middle East peace.” The neoconservative scholar Robert Kagan has called Trump’s America First doctrine an “invitation to global anarchy, a struggle of all against all.” After President Joe Biden took office in 2021, he used his first speech to an international audience to declare, “America is back,” implying that it had left the world stage for four years during Trump’s first term.

Trump is absolutely not a liberal internationalist or a neoconservative, but he probably wouldn’t disagree with Kagan that American leadership is vital for preventing the world from falling into violent anarchy. He just thinks it’s his leadership that’s needed.

© Vox