The Myth of Trump's transactional foreign policy—and Canada's response
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the beginning of Trump's first presidency in 2017, his foreign policy has been characterized by scholars and journalists as “transactional.” According to this view, he has prioritized short-term economic gains over promoting principles and has been indifferent to other countries’ political systems when dealing with them. This paper argues, however, that since becoming president in 2025, Trump's foreign policy has shifted from a transactional approach to a tributary one—an attempt to create an international system that harkens back to the historic East Asian international system, when other countries had to come to China's capital and pay tribute to the emperor. This paper shows that Trump's tariffs lack a sound economic logic, and that, in contrast to the indifference that characterizes a transactional foreign policy, Trump's approach has favoured autocratic states over democratic ones. It concludes by suggesting that Canada and other traditional allies need to recognize this tributary nature and stiffen their resistance to Trump.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.020 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".