This article was written for and published in Spanish in esglobal.

We can argue all we want about the nature of Donald Trump's presidency, but one thing that's clear is his dogged pursuit of his campaign promises. When he was first elected, many analysts mused over whether his campaign rhetoric was nothing more than theater and that he'd tack towards a more conventional foreign policy once in office. Not a chance.

So, before he was elected, we actually knew quite a lot about Trump's worldview, even if we didn't dare to accept it as something that would turn into presidential policy. In a prescient piece published in Politico in January of 2016, Brookings Institution scholar Thomas Wright argued that Trump's views were consistent, despite their confusing appearance. He based this argument on an analysis of Trump's statements made about foreign policy going back to the 1980s. Not only did they center around some steady themes but we can now see that his words and deeds in office have been in line with these themes. While most U.S. presidents have learned from office and evolved their views, Trump has doubled down on his campaign pledges as he governs for the people who elected him. He means what he says and we've got more then 3 decades worth of his words.

Underpinning Trump's views is an unnerving combination of knowing very little about the world and its history, his well-known impatience with policy details and an unwavering belief that the presidents who have gone before him have been naïve and overly trusting of the rest of the world. This goes even further with Obama, because Trump seems to be obsessed with undoing every last bit of his presidential legacy. Trump sees politics as a zero-sum game where there are 'winners' and 'losers' which helps explain his penchant for 'strong' and 'tough' leaders such as Vladamir Putin.

Even if Trump doesn't express it in these terms, the overarching theme of his foreign policy grievances is the liberal world order. Trump believes that the U.S. has been taken advantage of by our allies, both in terms of military alliances and trade. This is not some sort of recent revelation, but something Trump has been talking about for decades. We've all heard his claims that “the world is laughing at us” and “our country doesn't win anymore.” And as far back as 1988, he told Oprah Winfrey“I do get tired of seeing the country get ripped off (…) we're really making other people live like kings and we're not.” In that same interview, he also speculated on a Trump presidency, predicting that “the United States would make a hell of a lot of money from those nations that have been taking advantage of us.”

This belief that the world is laughing at the U.S. while it pays for everyone else's security is evident in Trump's actions abroad and July's NATO summit was no different. We can start with some Spanish newspaper headlines that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago: “Los aliados temen que Trump pacte con Putin a sus espaldas”, “Las presiones de Trump enrarecen el ambiente en la cumbre de la OTAN” o “Trump contra todos”. It's not unlike the adversarial tone between Trump and America's allies that was in play just a month earlier at the G7 summit in Canada. And, like in Canada, when Trump left to go meet with North Korea's Kim Jong Un, the NATO summit was followed with a meeting with Russia's Vladamir Putin.

A worldview that opposes the U.S. led international world order is unsettling in a U.S. president, to say the least. At the very center U.S. foreign policy since World War II, for both Democratic and Republican presidents alike, has been the maintenance and expansion of the world order, the network of nations interconnected primarily through common defense and trade. The transatlantic alliance is at the very core of this order, which has meant that while the U.S. and Europe might have quarrels, like family, they will always hang together against any outside threat.

I can't think of any way to understand Trump's view, without going back to his lack of historical knowledge, and a lack of understanding of why NATO was created and why the U.S. took such a leading role on defense in the post-World War II era. Perhaps nothing illustrates this better than thefull page ad he ran in 1987 in the New York Times with a letter that was highly critical of Japan and other wealthy countries, complaining that the U.S. should not pay for their defense.

Generally, the men who have aspired to and ultimately won the U.S. presidency have spent a lifetime honing their worldview and in this sense, we can see that Trump is no different. The difference comes with his unwillingness to learn from advisors and other experts as well as his inability to explain his worldview and the why behind it. And he doesn't have to explain these views in any depth to his base of voters, who happily accept what seems like common sense to them. Why should the U.S. pay for the world's defense?

It comes as no surprise that Trump's disdain for the international world order also affects his famously negative views on trade. He believes that the current framework of trade agreements put the U.S. at a disadvantage. Trump railed against free trade agreements during his campaign, from NAFTA “the worst trade deal ever agreed to, signed I the history of the history of the world” to TPP 'this will be a disaster,' setting them up to his base of voters as the reason why their jobs have gone away. Among the first things he did in office was to withdraw the U.S. from the Transpacific Partnership (TPP) which not only was a renegotiation of his much maligned NAFTA (which, having been signed in 1994 was due for an update) but also a move towards deeper trade alliances in Asia that pointedly left China on the sidelines. More recently, Trump has kept his promises to raise tariffson Chinese products, which he has indeed done.

Finally, Trump like likes 'tough and 'strong' leaders. The Trump-Putin 'bromance' was on display throughout the campaign. It was an odd moment when Putin praised Trump—something that no normal presidential candidate, Republican or Democrat welcomes—but Trump was no normal candidate. He embraced it on national TV and when the show's presenter noted that Putin is a leader that kills journalists and invades other countries, Trump's answer was “Well, I think that our country does plenty of killing, too, Joe.” More substantially, Trump's opposition to the world order, especially NATO and U.S. trade alliances benefits Russia and China, who might have different approaches to the world order, but are still mostly on the outside of it looking in.

While it's indeed been challenging to recognize and accept that a president of the United States wants to buck the basis of U.S. foreign policy going back to the end of World War II and destroy the international world order, what's made his foreign policy seem so haphazard is communication. Rhetoric without context or explained reasoning, belligerent early-morning tweets with questionable grammar and all too common disconnects with what his own advisors and foreign policy team all provide a muddled and seemingly haphazard impression.

The July NATO summit provided us with continuing examples of this. On Thursday, July 12, news alerts buzzed out to smart phones everywhere that Trump had threatened to leave NATO if members didn't immediately meet higher military spending targets. Of course, the need for NATO members to meet their 2% military spending target isn't new, Obama was calling for it as well. However, Trump called for a 4% increase during the summit, then demanded it be immediate along with the threat to leave. But later, he signed a statement that reaffirmed existing NATO commitments and gave a speech stating: “I believe in NATO.” Despite signing that statement, he said that NATO countries had agreed to spend significantly more on defense, so he was happy, thinking he got a 'winning' deal. All this caused confusion in the press and among his advisors who reportedly went scrambling to explain Trump's statements as they unfolded.

This is not the first time Trump has claimed a win with nothing committed to pen and paper. It's what makes it very difficult if not impossible to asses how much damage he will be able to do to the international world order during his four, possibly eight years. Contributing to this confusion are his tweets, the stuff of communication advisor nightmares. Even if his tweets from the NATO summit don't align with reality, they indeed matched what he's been saying for years: “Presidents have been trying unsuccessfully for years to get Germany and other rich NATO Nations to pay more toward their protection from Russia. They pay only a fraction of their cost. The U.S. pays tens of Billions of Dollars too much to subsidize Europe, and loses Big on Trade!” But it's the style, the random capitalized letters and bluster that are so jolting to see come from a U.S. President.

But without a doubt, the most illustrative and jaw-dropping of all of this was the joint press conference he held after meeting with Vladimir Putin for several hours behind closed doors in July 16. His statements that the U.S. is to blame for tensions between the two countries, believing Putin's denial of meddling in the 2016 election over the evidence from the U.S. intelligence agencies and generally and embracing rather than standing up to this autocrat drew sharp criticism from the U.S. press and both Democrats and Republicans alike. Yet, it is very much in keeping with this emerging doctrine that pushes away America's traditional allies while drawing the world's strongmen closer.

A senior White House official described the Trump doctrineas “We're America, bitch.” Just like the president himself, the phrase is belligerent, crude and cringe-inducing. Yet it does us no good to expect anything different from this man. It's time we start taking Trump at his word, no matter how boorish or uninformed it is.