This is not surprising and, in fact, characteristic of Trump. The Americans elected as their president a man who was always notorious for not paying his debts and trying to wriggle out of agreements. Apparently, in the the kind of business he was in, this did him not harm.
Foreign policy is not like this. Already the ancients, Greeks and Romans, understood the importance of keeping agreements. This was underscored by giving keeping agreements religious significance and solemn ceremonies accompanying their signing.
This was true of most cultures for most of human history. In later times, when growing secularisation made the religious motive unreliable, other means of ensuring that treaties are kept were created. The concept of “national honor” was one of them.
Although appeal to certain “collective emotions”, they have actually play an important role in bargaining, as described in books on strategy and game theory, such as Thomas Schelling’s “The Strategy of Conflict”. They involve a paradox typical of strategy: leaders and systems
without honor (or religion or ideology) enjoy a short term advantage but a long term disadvantage as others learn not to trust their promises.
Trump is entirely short-term. He has enormous personal pride, which actually means that he takes his own personal promises seriously
but has no sense of “national honor” or even any “national interest” beyond the duration of his own presidency.
This means that any guarantees or promises or threats he issues carry a clear expiration date.
This is know to all enemies and to all allies (increasingly only nominal). His disregard of alliances and even more of the general reputation of the United States is a natural consequence of this general lack of interest in the future
(alliances such as NATO and actually the entire “Western alliance” cannot be understood without a long term perspective, so naturally Trump can’t see in them any gain for the U.S. and telling him about how many allied soldiers died in Afghanistan makes no difference).
This also explains his attitude towards Ukraine, Russia, China, Qatar, Iran etc.
There are, of course, well known “rationalisers” always ready to construct alleged “strategies” behind Trump’s sudden policy turns,
which are actually never more than haphazard often emotionally motivated tactical moves, whose only aim is to bolster Trump’s own oversized ego.
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