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For years, there has been an increasingly bitter foreign policy fight between two factions of the Republican Party. On one hand, you have the GOP hawks like Sen. Lindsey Graham (SC) who want the United States to impose its will on the world by force. On the other, you have the “America First” crowd — like Tucker Carlson and Vice President JD Vance — who want the US to withdraw from international commitments and refocus its attention on domestic concerns.

The big question, as always, is where President Donald Trump lands. If Trump says that the MAGA foreign policy is one thing, then that’s what it is — and the rest of the party falls in line.

On one read, Trump’s early response to the Israel-Iran war settles the debate in the hawks’ favor. After months of opposing an Israeli strike, Trump rapidly flipped after the attack looked more and more successful. Since then, his rhetoric has grown increasingly heated, opening the door to possible US involvement. And he has publicly attacked Carlson for criticizing the war, writing on Truth Social that “somebody [should] please explain to kooky Tucker Carlson that, ‘IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!’”

And yet, I think the factional debate remains far less settled than it seems. In fact, I believe it will remain unsettled as long as Trump is in power.

Trump’s own foreign policy thinking does not align neatly with either of the two main camps. The president does not do systematic foreign policy, but rather acts on the basis of a collection of impulses that could never amount to anything so grandiose as a doctrine. Those gut instincts include a sense that the United States should look out for itself only, ignore any rules or norms that might constrain it, use force aggressively without regard to civilian casualties, and seek “deals” with other states that advantage the United States and/or make Donald Trump look good personally.

It looks, in effect, like an internationalized version of Trump’s approach to New York real estate in the 1980s and 1990s.

This isn’t a new observation: I’ve been making versions of this case since his 2016 campaign, and it’s been well-supported by both his first term and early second-term record.

But its significance for US policy is widely underappreciated. His lack of ideology does not mean that he can be permanently persuaded by one faction or the other, but rather produces volatility. The president has teetered back and forth between interventionism and isolationism, depending on the interplay between Trump’s idiosyncratic instincts and whoever he’s talking with on a particular day.

Given the near-dictatorial power modern presidents have over foreign policy, this will likely produce something worse than ideological rigidity: an incoherent, mutually contradictory policy that ends up undermining itself at every turn. At a........

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