Understanding Donald Trumps inconsistent foreign policy through psychological assessments: the case of North Korea

Abstract

This thesis is dedicated to an analysis of the Trump administration's foreign policy, which is widely understood as inconsistent and incoherent. In order to understand these characteristics, I hypothesize that the Trump administration's foreign policy was inconsistent and incoherent because it was deeply influenced by the president's personality. To build this analysis, I first outline the absence of a Trump Grand Strategy or a Trump Doctrine, or any type of guiding principle that could comprehensively explain the Trump administration's foreign policy. Out of the few distinguishable patterns in Trump's international behavior, this thesis explores his populist approach and his centralization of decision-making processes, strengthening the argument that Trump's personal traits might have played an important role in his foreign policy. To test the outlined hypothesis, I draw on Leadership Trait Analysis' assumptions and methods, assessing Trump's personality through at-a-distance content analysis. Drawing on the literature on leadership styles, I draw hypotheses about Trump's foreign policy decisionmaking behavior from his personal traits and compare these with his actual behavior regarding North Korea, which was the selected case for analysis. Results show that the hypotheses drawn from Trump's personality are consistent with his actual foreign policy behavior in U.S diplomacy towards North Korea, which allows us to understand Trump's personal characteristics as causal mechanisms in his decision-making process in this case. In that sense, the inconsistency and incoherence of his foreign policy could be understood as the result of a sum of foreign policy issues that were not strongly defined by ideology or strategy, but were highly influenced by the president's personal characteristics.