Report By Michael A. Cessna, Military Affairs Correspondent
Summary by Paul Gordon Collier, Editor
Originally published June 13, 2025 for our Mid-Month Issue of Mindful Intelligence Advisor. Subscribe to get semi-monthly issues.
“We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order, a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations. When we are successful, and we will be, we have a real chance at this new world order, an order in which a credible United Nations can use its peacekeeping role to fulfill the promise and vision of the U.N.’s founders.” –George H.W. Bush after an Iraqi Airstrike, January 17, 1991
INTRODUCTION
Donald Trump’s return to the presidency has marked one of the most dramatic foreign policy transformations in recent American history.
The 47th President’s approach to international relations during this critical period has demonstrated a deliberate departure from conventional diplomatic norms, employing what leftist observers, like Emma Ashford, termed a “move fast and break things” approach to foreign policy that prioritizes rapid, often chaotic transformation over incremental change.
Unlike traditional Presidential transitions that prioritize continuity and measured change, Trump entered his second term with an unprecedented burst of executive actions, signing at least 142 executive orders in his first 100 days, more than any other U.S. president in their first 100 days in office.
As Editor Paul Gordon Collier noted in Part One of our Second 100 Days report, “Donald Trump has signed more executive orders in the first 100 days than any other U.S. President in history, with 152. The list includes 3 Democrats in positions 2-4 before Trump shows up again in 5th for his first term’s first 100 days (with 33 executive orders). Second place is Franklin D. Roosevelt with 99 executive orders, third place is Harry S. Truman with 57 executive orders, and fourth place is Joe Biden with 42 executive orders.
Of those executive orders, 44 have been blocked by the judiciary, mostly at the District Court level. The number of reverses of those blocking orders is disputed, but somewhere between 2-5 are the numbers most often given.
This writer does not assume every executive order by Trump is constitutional, though those executive orders might not even be the ones that have been struck down and/or challenged.
The sheer volume of executive orders, however, is astounding. Given the fact he wrote 50% more executive orders than one of the most far-left authoritarian Presidents of all-time, FDR, one should be sobered by that high number.”
This “assertive” approach has fundamentally altered America’s relationships with allies and adversaries alike, while pursuing an expansionist vision that challenges international norms established by the 1945 UN Charter (something many Americans probably voted for), to break the old “new world order” set by Bush I.
A. THE CURRENT SITUATION IN THE UKRAINE: PROMISES AND REALITIES
Trump entered office with hopes of producing a ceasefire in Ukraine in “one day.”
Reaching a ceasefire agreement during the first 100 days of the second Trump presidency, let alone a peace deal, has arguably proven much harder than the President might have expected. Trump himself eventually acknowledged this difficulty, saying he was joking about the one-day timeline.
While that timeline has proven overly optimistic, Trump’s shift towards Russia from adversarial to conversational counters the Uniparty consensus on Russia.
However, the administration’s diplomatic efforts began immediately, with Trump announcing he had called Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss a possible ceasefire deal on February 12, marking the first known conversation between the presidents since Trump assumed office in January.
Despite multiple rounds of negotiations mediated through various channels, including meetings in Saudi Arabia and Istanbul, substantive progress remained elusive. By late May, Trump said after his call with President Vladimir Putin that Russia and Ukraine would immediately start negotiations for a ceasefire, but the Kremlin said the process would take time, with Trump indicating reluctance to impose additional sanctions on Moscow.
The signs of an entirely different approach to Ukraine were starkly laid out on February 28, 2025, when Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy held a highly combative bilateral meeting televised live in the Oval Office that was meant to discuss a Ukraine-U.S. mineral resources agreement.
During the meeting, Trump bluntly told Zelenskyy, “You’re not winning this. You have a damn good chance of coming out okay because of us” and “You don’t have the cards. You’re buried there.”
The meeting ended abruptly without signing the planned agreement, and Trump canceled a planned news conference. Media outlets described it as an unprecedented public confrontation between an American president and a foreign head of state.
The practical implications have been significant. Trump also said he had been in “serious discussions with Russia” and had “received strong signals that they are ready for peace” while simultaneously pressuring Ukraine through aid suspensions and public criticism.
When negotiations stalled, Trump’s frustration became evident. The United States will walk away from efforts to broker a Russia-Ukraine peace deal unless there are clear signs of progress soon, U.S. President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in April, with Rubio emphasizing, “We need to determine very quickly now, and I’m talking about a matter of days, whether or not this is doable in the next few weeks.”
B. MIDDLE EAST COMPLEXITIES: GAZA AND REGIONAL AMBITIONS
The President came into office with big radical visions for the Gaza Strip, proposing what he termed a “freedom zone” for the territory.
His most controversial suggestion, timed with the arrival of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – the first world leader to arrive at the White House on February 4, signaling the administration’s strong support for Israel – involved the idea that the U.S. might “take over” and “own” the Gaza Strip, envisioning long-term U.S. control and the relocation of Palestinians to neighboring countries, turning Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
However, the administration has also pursued unexpected diplomatic openings. Trump hosted Netanyahu again in April to inform him of the U.S. decision to enter nuclear talks with Iran, a move that reportedly blocked Israeli plans for military action against Iran’s nuclear program. Jerusalem worries that Trump will accept an agreement with Tehran that fails to contain the regime’s nuclear ambitions. As of right now, that block is not in place as Israel has struck a major blow against Iran that is still ongoing even as I write this.
C. GLOBALIST INSTITUTIONAL DISMANTLING AND A BUREAUCRATIC REVOLUTION
One of Trump’s most dramatic foreign policy moves involved the systematic dismantling of America’s international engagement apparatus. The administration has shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Millennium Challenge Account, Voice of America, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
The scale of these cuts was unprecedented, with at least 121,000 workers fired from federal agencies, including 10,000 employees fired from the Agency for International Development (USAID), where 100 percent of the jobs were culled.
This institutional dismantling extended beyond foreign aid agencies. On January 20, his first day in office, Trump signed 26 executive orders, which included withdrawing from the World Health Organization and renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. The broader pattern reflected what globalist critics described as an assault on the foundations of American global leadership. MAGA voters would call this the dismantling of the globalist world order, from without and from within.
By the end of those first 100 days, the Trump World Order has replaced the old agreements.
D. TRUMP’S WORLD ORDER EMERGES
- TRUMPOLARISM – President Trump came out the gates calling for Canada to become the fifty-first state, proposing to buy Greenland, and taking action to retake control of the Panama Canal. The President appears to be done with the global order’s way of doing things and has opted for unipolarism over globalism.
- ALLIANCE RE-ALIGNMENT – Trump’s approach to traditional alliances during his first 100 days demonstrated a fundamental shift in American foreign policy priorities. Trump has forced a rethink of the U.S. commitment to NATO, creating ruptures with transatlantic allies while simultaneously challenging the European Union in myriad ways: withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, imposing sweeping tariffs on European countries, and telling them to take care of their own security.
The impact on traditional alliances has been paradigm-shifting. Trump’s aggressive stance toward Canada has completely upended what was traditionally a close relationship, with Trump telling reporters, “Canada only works as a state. We don’t need anything they have.”
3. MILITARY POWER – In contrast, Trump’s military deployments against various factions in the Middle East presented a reminder that, even given the somewhat dilapidated state the U.S. armed forces found themselves in after the four years of the Biden administration, the United States still packs a massive punch when it decides to deploy it.
Trump’s most significant military action during his first 100 days was Operation Rough Rider, a large-scale campaign against Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis launched on March 15, 2025. The operation marked the biggest U.S. military operation in the Middle East since Trump took office, targeting the group over their serious disruption of Red Sea shipping traffic since October of 2023.
The campaign began with strikes on 30-plus targets at multiple locations, including terrorist training sites, drone infrastructure, weapons manufacturing capabilities, and command-and-control centers.
The strikes killed at least 53 people and wounded almost 100 others, including “multiple” Houthi leaders, according to U.S. national security adviser Michael Waltz.
Unlike the Biden administration’s limited and ineffectual approach, Trump granted broader authority to operational commanders and showed less reluctance about potential casualties. The campaign hit 1,000 targets and killed hundreds of Houthi fighters over nearly two months.
The operation concluded on May 6, 2025, when Trump announced the U.S. would stop bombing the Houthis after the group agreed to halt attacks on shipping lanes, though the Houthis indicated they would continue targeting Israel.
- REMOVING THE CANCER WITHOUT KILLING THE HOST
The administration’s approach to great power competition revealed internal contradictions, or, perhaps more accurately, conflicting concerns. While some policies appeared designed to counter Chinese influence, the administration has been willing to accept the risk of ending USAID and VOA so suddenly that it creates opportunities for America’s enemies to move in.
Trump is dismantling America’s soft power machine, but if the administration is right in its assumptions that much of this apparatus serves the globalist agenda, not the America First agenda, the damage these tax-funded institutions can continue to do is far more than the damage done by immediately terminating them.
It does open the door for China (and it already has), but it also immediately shuts the door on the insurrectionists within the government.
Beyond bilateral relationships, Trump has sought to completely dismantle the leftist-captured bureaucratic apparatus working aggressively against his “America First” policy.
In so doing, some cuts may have been too hasty. For instance, Trump dismantled some of America’s most essential cyber programs, including more than $175 million in grants and contracts for partner capacity building through USAID cuts.
These moves, then, reflect Trump’s broader skepticism about the nature of these government programs that seem to push anti-American and/or leftist values over American ones. It also appears to reflect his preference for direct, bilateral engagement over multilateral institutions with their own foreign policy agendas and lack of accountability (until now).
E. LATIN AMERICA AND IMMIGRATION DIPLOMACY
President Trump followed through with his promise to begin mass deportations in his first 100 days. This has put Latin America to the fore of U.S. foreign policy. This has led to unprecedented cooperation mechanisms, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio making his first international trip to the region, visiting Panama, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic.
The approach has been effective in achieving stunning cooperation. The United States later transferred illegal aliens to El Salvador, with many Liberal and anti-Trump hawkers alleging that they weren’t gang members at all.
Despite accusations of human rights violations by DNC operatives and their allies, many Latin American leaders are happy to facilitate these deportations – and not only those who seek a close relationship with Trump.
- THE EL SALVADOR PRISON DEAL – One of the Trump administration’s most controversial foreign policy innovations involved an unprecedented agreement with El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele to accept criminal deportees.
Under this arrangement, El Salvador’s government receives about $6 million to imprison 300 alleged members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang in the country’s notorious mega-prison known as the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT).
The program relied heavily on Trump’s invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to justify deportations in an effort to cut the criminals off from getting what the Trump administration would characterize as “undo due process,” or “due process not granted to illegal alien criminals by the constitution.”
Since March, Washington has transferred at least 200 mostly Venezuelan alleged gang members and violent criminals to El Salvador. Unfortunately for the Trump administration, it would be determined that one person, a person the DNC criminal press called a “Maryland resident,” was deported in error.
The Trump Administration conceded to the courts, sort of. They had the illegal alien, Kilmar Abrego García, extradited back to the U.S. to face charges in Federal court for human trafficking, including of children.
Trump further expanded the scope of this partnership by expressing interest in sending U.S. citizens convicted of violent crimes to Salvadoran prisons, telling Bukele, “The homegrowns are next, the homegrowns. You’ve got to build about five more places.”
Legal experts described the concept as “obviously unconstitutional, obviously illegal,” since the U.S. government cannot forcibly remove citizens from the country for any reason.
In making these statements, Trump continued to pursue his apparent strategy of getting his political opposition to fly into near-hysterical rage, taking Trump literally at his word, despite the obvious silliness of his statements.
While this may be technically seen as “buffoonery,” it does seem to be working, as both Democrat politicians and Left-wing commentators repeatedly show themselves as both foolish and childish… This, of course, calls into question the veracity of the previously quoted polls.
The first 100 days of Trump’s second presidency thus established a pattern of maximum disruption combined with uncertain outcomes – an approach that prioritized the destruction of existing frameworks over the construction of viable alternatives, leaving both allies and adversaries struggling to adapt to an increasingly unpredictable American foreign policy.
SUMMARY
Written by Editor Paul Gordon Collier
More than any other aspect of the second first 100 days of the Trump administration, the entanglement of globalist far-left activism with America’s primary means of “soft power,” power projected through social and cultural influence, presents the most challenging problem.
On the one hand, the Trump administration NEEDS these institutions to do the work of American foreign policy; on the other hand, getting these institutions to carry forth with his policy was going to be nearly impossible as they existed on his second first day in office.
As many leaders will tell you, if you want to get “big things” done, do it as quickly as possible. The longer you wait, the less likely you will have the political capital to ever move so dramatically, so suddenly again. Taking office, he had tremendous political capital, capital he might never have again.
A second major conflicting issue is the nature of the American alliance, which has devolved to the point where America’s “allies” took it for granted that America would continue to meet the obligations of the old agreement, the Bretton Woods Agreement, without having to meet theirs.
This agreement essentially made it clear that America would give its allies favorable trade deals, provide for their defense, and keep the global trading lanes, especially the ocean ones, open. All they must do is simply go along with American foreign policy.
It was intended to contain Russian influence by offering the world prosperity over war. But since that agreement was first signed, in 1944, one part of the agreement has continued: America’s obligation. The second part, America’s allies’ obligations, have been met less and less until, at this point, the “alliances” serve the globalist agenda.
More insidiously, this globalist agenda works against the sovereignty of the nations in this same American-centered alliance (which worked against America’s interests, not for it). The UK, Northern Ireland, France, and Germany are all in this alliance, and they’re all heading towards state failure because they follow the same globalist, not American, foreign policies.
Trump must have understood going in that the old agreements were existential threats to American sovereignty and power. To his enemies, the loss of “respect” from allies is a testament to his failures; to Americans, the nations being served notice that America is now working in its own best interests, not the world’s, is a moment they’ve been wanting to see for at least two decades now.
Yet Trump hopes to ultimately keep these same allies, or at least most of them (including Canada and the UK), if they choose to reject the old new world order and embrace the Trump World Order.
This means he must balance out the need to preserve with the need to cull, knowing he has little time to make an impact that his successor cannot easily undo.
I am not sure there is anyone short of God who could hit the right balance between culling and preserving, but I will say this writer believes it is better, at this point, to ere on the side of culling too much than preserving too much, for a little leaven leavens the whole lump.
An America left with a little leftism is not an America that can survive anyway.
Cull away, Trump; let the chips fall where they may.
ED: NOTE: The last part of our report, on Tariffs, is being delayed until the End-Month Issue of MIA this June 27 (barring more urgent breaking news). It has been moved up to make space for our report on the ICE Raid Riots (see pg. 2).
FURTHER RESOURCES:
The Bretton Woods GATT System – Orin Kirshner
An Introduction to the WTO Agreements – Bhagirath Lai Das
The New World Order – A. Ralph Epperson
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to The New World Order – Alan Axelrod
