Woodrow Wilson refashioned the relationship of the United States to the outside world. One could say that he created modern American foreign policy. He presided over an emerging superpower that—by 1917—was willing to enter a world war very far from American soil. Too many US interests converged on a Europe awash in war, Wilson believed, and too many US interests converged on the peace that would follow the war. That peace, thought Wilson, would set the course of twentieth-century geopolitics, and, to a great extent, it did. When the war ended, Wilson made the first presidential trip abroad. He stayed for several months in Paris, where he articulated a vision of democracy and liberty, a Jeffersonian dream of making the world “safe for democracy” and of “ethnic self-determination” for Central and Eastern Europe.  

Wilson elaborated a language about and an approach to Europe that lasted for about a century in American politics. An ardent Wilsonian and someone who served in the Wilson administration, Franklin Roosevelt closely watched Europe’s descent into fascism and then into war; he did not wish to escape the consequences of this descent. The Cold War presidents were preoccupied with Europe—all of them. Harry Truman created the NATO alliance. Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy worried nervously about the status of Berlin. An iconic moment in Ronald Reagan’s presidency occurred in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate in 1987, when he called on Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down” the Berlin Wall. After the Cold War, Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden made memorable trips to Europe. They shared Woodrow Wilson’s presumption that Europe was as essential for the promotion of democracy as it was for solidifying the national security of the United States.

Donald Trump first broke from this pattern in his 2017 inaugural address. Unsentimental about Europe, he lingered over the “America first” motif from his presidential campaign. “America first” resurfaced in Trump’s 2025 inaugural address, though there is a key structural difference between 2017 and 2025. In 2017, Europe was seemingly at peace. Fighting would occasionally break out on the line of contact between Ukrainian and Russian soldiers in Eastern Ukraine, but turmoil in Ukraine was far from the headlines. If one wished to believe that the conflict that had raged in 2014 and 2015 was subsiding, it was easy to do so. 

In 2025, a sprawling three-year war now stretches across Ukraine. It is a war in which almost every European state is somehow involved, most through the direct provision of weapons to Ukraine. The war’s ripple effects of inflation and heightened instability are felt across the globe. 

It was therefore striking that the word “Ukraine” did not appear in Trump’s second inaugural address.

This absence invites two separate explanations – one is fairly obvious, and the other far more subtle. The obvious explanation portends a paradigm shift for American foreign policy. With multiple references to the nineteenth century (to President McKinley, who arrived at the White House in 1897, and to “Manifest Destiny,” the religiously inflected project of westward expansion) Trump seemed to place the Western hemisphere at the core of his agenda. This reorientation underscores the prominence of the Southern border in Trump’s political imagination. Together with the proposed incorporation of Greenland into the United States, it implies a set of security and commercial interests that are not global and that are not rooted in Europe. Given Trump’s outspoken criticism of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and his frustration with low levels of defense spending in Europe, Trump’s hemispheric turn (which is hardly the same as an inward turn) should not be much of a surprise.

Another explanation might be a lack of interest in Europe on Trump’s part. Yet this is hard to reconcile with the hard evidence of Trump’s first term, when he welcomed two new countries into NATO and increased the US security commitment to Europe (in the form of both troops and money). Breaking from the calculus of the preceding Obama administration, Trump furnished Ukraine with lethal military assistance—assistance that proved significant when Russia invaded in February 2022. Trump’s Europe policy in his first term makes an abrupt disengagement from Europe hard to imagine today, amid a large-scale war. Trump has repeatedly positioned himself as a peace- and dealmaker for this war, and it would be strange to initiate negotiations by signaling disinterest in the region. Although Trump had little to say about China in his second inaugural address, it is also inconceivable that China would be a foreign-policy footnote in his second term.

The best explanation for Trump’s resonant silence on Ukraine is that he is readying his administration for a round of diplomacy on the war. In his speech, he could have used empty phrases to describe the war. Or he could have outlined a distinct position and even pronounced a preferred end state for the war. He could have advocated for Ukraine’s membership in NATO, or he could have announced immediate withdrawal of US support for Ukraine. But any of these gestures would have built public expectations about US actions and agendas. It would have tipped his hand, which is a constraint when it comes to diplomacy. 

After giving his address, Trump did make a series of Oval Office statements about Russia’s need to negotiate, though here too he avoided signaling US priorities, giving no indication of what the US negotiating position would be.

Trump’s reticence about Ukraine is likely the prelude to a frenetic round of diplomacy directed from Washington, which may concern Europe’s security architecture as well as the war’s termination. Rhetoric reticence can—counter-intuitively, perhaps—be a marker of foreign-policy ambition. Trump might personally prefer to concentrate on the Western hemisphere and to scale back the costs of the US commitment to European security, but preferences are not always decisive. 

If his presidency is dominated by Europe, which is quite possible, Trump will join the company of Woodrow Wilson, with whom Trump has so little in common otherwise. Wilson campaigned in 1916 on not going to war in Europe. Other presidents found themselves drawn into conflict in Europe, whether willing or not. Franklin Roosevelt used the Pearl Harbor attack to justify US participation in World War II; prior to the attack he kept American forces out even as Nazi Germany waged war for two years throughout Europe. Bill Clinton trumpeted a peace dividend from the Cold War’s end in 1992 and reduced the US military presence in Europe—only to contend with several wars in the Balkans in the late 1990s. Barack Obama wanted to pivot to Asia: then came Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, which drew his focus back on Europe. The Biden administration contemplated “parking” Russia in early 2021, hoping to render the US-Russian relationship more predictable and free up bandwidth on managing the pandemic and competition with China. Then came Russia’s massive invasion of Ukraine in 2022. 

Perhaps Trump’s refusal to mention Ukraine in his second inaugural address is not just a signal of a pivot to the Western hemisphere. Nor must it mean that on his watch Europe will bear the primary responsibility for ensuring peace and stability in Europe. Perhaps it is a sign of just how pivotal Europe will be in Trump’s second term.

The opinions expressed in this article are those solely of the author and do not reflect the views of the Kennan Institute.