Looking back on five-plus years of President Trump in the Oval Office, the picture has come into focus on what his overall objectives are. One observation is that he is hell-bent on tackling heretofore seemingly intransigent problems that have existed across multiple presidencies. And from his past public statements even decades ago, glimpses of his international and domestic concerns were made known to anyone who was listening. Some pundits appear surprised at his actions during his second term, but those who have paid close attention throughout his whole career know that he is problem-solver, and that he is applying those same skills as our president.
Let us examine four generational problems that he has tackled (some are still in progress).
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NATO FREE-RIDING: SEVEN DECADES OF UNEQUAL BURDEN-SHARING
From Eisenhower through Obama, every American president complained — some privately, some publicly — that European NATO allies were not bearing their fair share of collective defense costs. The 2006 NATO guideline of spending 2% of GDP on defense was widely flouted. In 2014, NATO heads of state formally reaffirmed the 2% target in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea — yet in 2025, all allies were only just expected to meet or exceed that pre-summit target, compared to just three allies who met it in 2014.
The core problem was that Europe had structurally outsourced its defense to Washington, allowing continental governments to spend heavily on social programs while the US paid for the security umbrella beneath them.
Why It Persisted
Previous administrations raised the issue but treated alliance solidarity as too important to risk over money. Unlike Trump, previous US administrations did not make continued transatlantic cooperation explicitly conditional on Europe’s financial commitments to NATO. Obama called European allies “free riders” — but behind closed doors. The diplomatic culture of NATO discouraged coercive pressure.
What Trump Did
At the NATO Summit in The Hague in June 2025, allies agreed to more than double their defense spending target from 2% to 5% of GDP by 2035 — described as the most decisive move from the alliance in more than a decade. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte gave Trump direct credit: “Donald, you have driven us to a really, really important moment for America and Europe, and the world. You will achieve something NO American president in decades could get done.” Northern and Eastern European countries like the Baltic States, Poland, Scandinavia, Germany, and the Netherlands have pledged to reach the new minimum by 2029 or sooner.
What It Means — and the Caveats
This is a genuine, measurable achievement. The shift in European defense culture is real: the combination of Russia’s Ukraine invasion and Trump’s pressure has moved the needle in ways decades of polite diplomacy did not. NATO countries have committed in increase their spending levels – a major change! However, several caveats matter.
First, to get to 5% requires $1.9 trillion in additional annual spending across NATO, and without structural reform, that surge risks driving inflation rather than capability — 155mm artillery shells that cost $2,000 before 2022 now exceed $8,000.
Second, Spain rejected the new target and recognizes only the previous 2% minimum, which it does not currently meet.
Third, pledges are not spending — the 2014 2% pledge was itself a formal commitment that went largely unmet for a decade.
And finally, Trump’s conditional approach to Article 5 — explicitly questioning whether the US would defend allies who don’t meet spending targets — risks creating a situation where disenfranchised allies may be less likely to provide the US Article 5 support in the future, as they offered in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. In short, this is a work in progress to which past presidents have only paid lip service.
ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION: A STRUCTURAL CRISIS
Illegal immigration at the US southern border became an accelerating structural problem across multiple administrations. Both parties talked about fixing it; neither did. Democrats preferred broad legalization paths; Republicans preferred enforcement of existing immigration laws; Congress could never reconcile the two. The result was decades of policy drift, growing backlogs in immigration courts, and periodic humanitarian crises.
A new report by the Federation for American Immigration Reform has estimated that “approximately 18.6 million illegal aliens reside in the United States.” This is a massive burden on states and the federal government, including in terms of crime and the spread of communicable diseases – all brought on by failed Democrat open border policies.
Why It Persisted
The political economy of immigration was deeply fractured. Business interests — strongly represented in the Republican coalition — wanted cheap labor. Humanitarian advocates — strongly represented in the Democratic coalition — opposed aggressive enforcement. Democrats also were able to camouflage illegal aliens to impact the 2020 US census, as well as to manufacture Democrat ballots through mail-in balloting and other “work-arounds.” Neither party had full incentive to solve the problem because each benefited politically from the issue remaining unresolved.
What Trump Did
The results are striking in scale. Illegal alien immigration at the US-Mexico border plunged during FY 2025, reaching about 444,000 migrant encounters — a sharp drop from 2.1 million encounters the prior year, the steepest decrease in a generation. Due to Trump’s immigration crackdown, the US had negative net migration in 2025 — the first time in at least a half-century. The administration deported more than 605,000 illegal aliens, with an additional 1.9 million self-deporting.
What It Means — and the Caveats
Three important qualifications apply. First, the Trump administration re-entered office with unauthorized arrivals already in significant decline, due to stepped-up enforcement by Mexican and US authorities as well as the Biden administration’s blocking of asylum access. The reason for this slightly downward trend was massive public pressure on the Biden administration and the sly intention of Democrats to influence voters going into the 2024 presidential election that there really was no “open border problem.”
Secondly for left-leaning Americans, the administration’s methods raised serious legal and constitutional questions: the administration entered uncharted territory by deploying the military for border enforcement, potentially redefining its traditional role. Several enforcement actions have been challenged in courts largely by activist Democrat judges. The longer-term question — whether border numbers will remain low, as they did not during Trump’s first term when they rebounded sharply after initial drops — remains open, but 2025’s net negative immigration is a great sign for the future.
THE CHINA TRADE RELATIONSHIP
Since China’s accession to the WTO in 2001, American administrations across both parties largely accepted Chinese mercantilism and illicit trade practices — intellectual property theft, forced technology transfer, massive subsidies to state enterprises, and sustained currency manipulation — in the hope that economic integration would moderate China’s political behavior. It did not. The US accumulated the world’s largest trade deficit, hollowed out its industrial base in key sectors (production literally transferred to China), and watched China become a near-peer competitor using technology, intellectual property, and capital partly acquired from the American economy.
Why It Persisted
Until relatively recently, the conventional wisdom in both parties held that open trade was net positive and that confrontation was too risky. Wall Street, multinational corporations, and academic economists consistently lobbied against tariffs and trade restrictions. “Free trade” was the standard, but the end result was a loss of middle class jobs and production capabilities to communist China (and the “rust belt” in the US upper Midwest was created), as well as a gargantuan trade imbalance with China. However, Wall Street investors made a lot of money despite those costs to American national security, and those interests backed free traders in Congress and the White House.
What Trump Did
President Trump broke fundamentally from this free trade consensus in both terms. In his second term, from January to April 2025, the overall average effective US tariff rate rose from 2.5% to an estimated 27% — the highest level in over a century. The administration used reciprocal tariffs as leverage to pursue several goals simultaneously. On fentanyl, there is some evidence that China’s actions are making an impact: fentanyl purity declined throughout 2024, consistent with indications that fentanyl production was being disrupted by difficulty obtaining key precursor chemicals, and fentanyl stopped at the border dropped precipitously in 2025. On the trade deficit, the US-China trade deficit narrowed to $202 billion in 2025 from $296 billion in 2024.
What It Means — and the Caveats
This is certainly one of President Trump’s more contested generational moves, as many people who were making bank through past China engagement policies are screaming the loudest about the tariffs. The strongest case for him is that he broke the policy consensus that had allowed China’s practices to continue unchallenged for 30 years, and that some combination of tariff pressure and strategic decoupling is necessary for long-term US competitiveness and security. The Biden administration agreed on this — it kept Trump’s first-term tariffs and added more.
Detractors argue that the Trump tariffs are described as the largest US tax increase as a percentage of GDP since 1993 although predictions of high inflation from those same people due to tariffs has not occurred. The US CPI has averaged 2.4 percent since January 2025.
The jury is still out on tariffs, as multiple federal courts ruled that Trump exceeded his authority under the IEEPA, with one finding that “the triggering emergency bore no rational connection to the trade measures imposed.” However, the US Supreme Court decision noted that there are other statutes that allow for the president to implement tariffs. The shift of statutory authority will be sorted out in 2026.
ARAB-ISRAELI NORMALIZATION: SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS OF REGIONAL PARALYSIS
Since Israel’s founding in 1948, the Arab world’s refusal to recognize the Jewish state was treated as an immovable geopolitical fact. The conventional diplomatic wisdom — enshrined in the “land for peace” framework — held that no Arab state would normalize relations with Israel absent a Palestinian state. This framework produced the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty and the 1994 Jordan-Israel treaty, then stalled for 26 years.
Why It Persisted
The Palestinian issue was treated by both Arab governments and Western diplomats as a necessary predicate to any wider peace. Arab leaders who publicly normalized with Israel risked domestic backlash and accusations of betraying the Palestinian cause. The US consistently deferred to this framework. Both Republican and Democratic administrations pursued the “land for peace” model without achieving broader normalization.
What Trump Did
In his first term, Trump’s team — led by Jared Kushner — jettisoned the Palestinian-state-first prerequisite and offered Gulf states a different bargain: security guarantees, weapons, and US backing, in exchange for normalization with Israel. The result was the Abraham Accords in 2020: the first formal normalization of Arab-Israeli diplomatic relations since Jordan in 1994, with the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan.
In his second term, the administration has been seeking to expand the Accords to include Syria, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia, and in November 2025 Kazakhstan formally joined.
What It Means — and the Caveats
The Abraham Accords are a genuine and durable diplomatic achievement — one that even skeptics concede has opened economic, military, and cultural channels that did not previously exist. The strategic concept — that Arab states’ interests had evolved away from the Palestinian issue — proved correct for the Gulf states. However, the bigger prize remains elusive, but progress is being made.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told Trump he is ready to work on normalization, but only if any agreement provides a clear path for a Palestinian state. Trump acknowledged this reality directly in Riyadh, telling the Saudis they would join the Accords “in your own time,” while Netanyahu’s refusal to accept any Palestinian state pathway remains the primary obstacle. The Trump administration sold Saudi Arabia major weapons including F-35s and granted it major non-NATO ally status without apparent requirements for normalization progress, leading experts to question whether the US gave away its leverage.
That said, the current Iranian crisis is bringing the GCC states, Israel, and the US together which will doubtless continue after the crisis.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
President Trump has genuinely moved the needle on all five of these generational problems — something few recent presidents can claim across such a range simultaneously. NATO burden-sharing has shifted in a decade-defining way. Illegal border crossings have hit historic lows. The China trade relationship has been structurally reordered. Arab-Israeli normalization has been advanced, with Saudi engagement active.
Whether these are historic turning points or costly gambits that created new problems while deferring old ones will depend heavily on what the next several years bring. That said, the trend on all four of these supposedly “intractable problems” is absolutely in the right direction. And it took someone outside the traditional realm of American politics to get it done!
Concurrently, President Trump is tackling the longstanding cartel problem in South America and resolving the long-delayed “Death to America” theocracy in Iran. There are other generational problems in his cross-hairs, too, for example the festering sore that is communist Cuba.
I trust the G.O.A.T.
The end.