U.S. President Donald Trump's foreign policy is often caricatured as a mass of contradictions. He rails against the dumb wars of his predecessors, but has yet to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria. He taunted and threatened North Korea's tyrannical leader, only to meet him later in Singapore for a lavish summit. Trump kisses up to Russia's autocratic president, but his government sells weapons to Russia's enemies and sanctions its senior officials.
There is some truth to these criticisms, but they miss a larger point. While it's hard to say there is a Trump doctrine, there has emerged a theme to his statecraft: American sovereignty.
This was the message Tuesday of Trump's address Tuesday to the United Nations General Assembly. "We will never surrender America's sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable global bureaucracy," he said, referring to the U.N.'s International Criminal Court.