Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Theories in international relations are to understand what has happened and somehow predict what may happen in the future. Donald Trump, being elected as the president of the United States, makes many of the scholars of political science in awe, both by how he could be elected and by how he is going to deal with the world. This paper applies the models of foreign policy decision-making to the US decision-making process by asking how does Trump views other states. How is the decision-making process working in the Trump administration? What is Trump’s foreign policy doctrine? This paper uses Allison’s model of decision making by applying it to the decisions of Trump during his first four months. The study extracts a Trump doctrine with regards to foreign policy decision making. This paper argues that pure selection of one model is not any more applicable to the foreign policy doctrine of Trump; yet, a mixture of bureaucratic model and rational actor model should be designed. During the Trump era this mixture has its most of the weight in the rational actor model.