U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media as he arrives at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, U.S., May 20, 2026. REUTERS Evelyn Hockstein
President Donald Trump’s “alpha male” approach to foreign policy, which involves flexing America’s military strength and adopting a belligerent tone toward other countries, is in fact un-manly, at least according to one of the president’s critics hailing from the Republican Party.
“He loves [Russian President Vladmir] Putin,” The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson, an erstwhile Republican who has since emerged as one of the most prominent conservative critics of Trump, said in an X post on Tuesday. Wilson, who was talking to New York University historian Tim Naftali, then discussed Trump’s feelings toward the dictators in charge of China and North Korea. “He loves [China’s] Xi [Jin Ping]. He loves [North Korea’s] Kim Jong-un. He worships those people because they are antithetical to American values, and he kind of likes that about them.”
Naftali argued that Trump’s alpha male approach to foreign policy is doomed to fail.
“There's this fundamental flaw to the alpha male strategy of foreign policy,” Naftali told Wilson. “When you're up against another alpha male who has a much higher pain point than you do, you are going to lose. I don't care how often you beat your chest — you are going to lose.”
Wilson interjected, “We're watching it play out in Iran right now.” Naftali affirmed this, adding “we've seen him give away his pain point. One thing is, I'm not sure he plays poker…”
At that point both Wilson and Naftali said Trump’s tells are “all over the place,” with the main one being his fear of the stock market suffering because of his foreign policy.
“You look at one of the most successful Republican presidents in terms of diplomacy, and it's [American President George] H.W. Bush,” Wilson told Naftali. “He was willing to go in and be modest with other countries to get the big win of forming massive international alliances, to get the big win of ending the Cold War without a nuclear weapon going off somewhere — because it wasn't ‘I'm strong, you are weak, f- - - you, NATO.’ He was much, much more subtle, and got much more accomplished.”
Wilson and Naftali are not the only foreign policy experts who have challenged Trump’s handling of American diplomacy. Speaking to this journalist for Salon in 2019, former President Bill Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright expressed alarm about Trump’s desire to please dictators like those who run North Korea.
“When I was in North Korea [President] Kim Jong-il, the father of the current president there, said that he didn’t have any problems with us having our troops in South Korea,” Albright said. “I do think that what is worrisome to me is, in an effort to be flattered by Kim Jong-un, that he gives away something that might have a longer term effect for the next administration.”
Similarly Ambassador Michael McFaul, who represented the United States to Russia for former President Barack Obama, told me for Salon in 2019 that Trump’s theory of diplomacy is to cozy up to foreign dictators — and that this may not be in America’s best interest.
“President Trump has demonstrated that he has a theory about diplomacy — that is, if he says nice things about these dictators that’s going to make them feel better about him and, by implication, that’s going to be good for the United States,” McFaul said. “I would say so far the tangible, concrete outcomes that are good for America — good for our security interests, good for our prosperity — of that strategy is very thin.”
He added, “It just hasn’t resulted in things that make us better off. With Russia, it’s most certainly clear that happy talk with Putin hasn’t gotten him to leave eastern Ukraine, hasn’t got him to back away from [Syrian President Bashar] al-Assad, hasn’t got him to rethink the annexation of Crimea. There’s been none of that, right?”
Trump’s foreign policy has also been attacked as parodic in June by American Conservative contributor Anik Joshi. In that same month, The Wall Street Journal described Trump as being in “full retreat” against Iran in the war he waged earlier this year; the same newspaper, which is right-leaning, accused Trump of breaking his 2024 election campaign promise to not mire America in new wars.
