The Transactional Turn: US Foreign Policy After Venezuela | Danube Politics

 2026 got off with a bang, some sirens, several subsequent explosions. The were of helicopters, the AK of gunfire and the crisp patting of waves against a destroyer class warship. Three days into the new year, Venezuela's dictator Nicholas Maduro found himself boat bound for New York, where he was paraded through the streets before being arraigned at a district court on charges of narco terrorism.

The capture of Majuro seems to have marked the advent of a new era in foreign policy. Some have called it multipolarity, some have called it. You can just do things, but the key point is that we can no longer rely on the post 1945 architecture of the global world order. The biggest gorilla in the room is flexing its muscles, thumping its chest, and grabbing bananas from here on out.

Nations must calibrate their policy to the ages they wish to be under. They must know their place. For some, this is a story of unraveling the gloom that comes from a centre that can no longer hold. For others, this is an exciting time, a moment when the real work of ordering and shaping the international system can re-begin after a long stasis.

 Father Mario Portella is by nature an optimist. He sees the Trumpist foreign policy that is emerging as a chance to set up win-win deals by thinking of foreign policy in the language of the market. Not that of the political plenary. He points to this as a distinction from the previous US eras, times of Nation building, the Post 1945 era, in particular when communism was opposed by strengthening Capitalism and then the less successful post-Cold War era, which threw up a range of follies committing troops to Iraq being the most notable.

Father Portella is a priest of the Cathedral of Santa Maria Del Fre in Florence, Italy, where he served as Archdiocese chancellor. He's also a visiting professor of Canon law at ITI Catholic University, and a visiting fellow here at the Danube Institute.

Lately he's published a piece in the Hungarian Conservative, which points to the long continuum within American diplomacy that encloses Trump's instincts.

He writes of Teddy Roosevelt and Cuba in 1906 of Calvin Coolidge in Panama in 1926, and of the original transactional foreign policy, Thomas Jefferson's corporate takeover of the Louisiana Purchase. America, he says, has always done best when it has done business. He calls this the transactional approach.

If the transactional approach is indeed the new paradigm, how will the next few years play out? How can smaller countries like Hungary make deals that don't feel like muggings? What indeed is the future for Greenland under the stars and bars?