President Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy is taking shape. Its essence is geographical, and the tools to facilitate it are economic, diplomatic, and military power. It eschews abstractions and sentiment in favor of Bismarckian realism. If Abraham Lincoln led a “team of rivals,” Trump leads a team of realists whose members understand that global stability and peace don’t emerge magically from idealism and crusades, but instead result from spheres of influence and the balance of power.

Trump’s team of realists include Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Security Adviser Michal Waltz, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard—combat veterans all. It includes Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who previously flirted with neoconservatism but now pursues realism with the zealousness of a convert. And, thankfully, it will include Elbridge Colby as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, who was recently confirmed by the Senate. Colby, who was the principal author of the 2018 National Defense Strategy in Trump’s first term, is a consummate realist in the mold of Henry Kissinger and George Kennan.

Geoeconomically, the realists include senior counselor for trade and manufacturing Peter Navarro and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who are the key strategists behind the recently announced reciprocal tariffs that have unsettled stock markets and stunned our trading partners whose tariffs on American goods helped produce the massive U.S. trade deficits, and DOGE’s Elon Musk who is leading the charge to reduce U.S. government spending by eliminating waste, fraud and abuse and by consolidating and streamlining government operations.

The most important foreign policy realist in the Trump administration, however, is President Trump. Trump’s realism likely stems from his decades-long business dealings and was further shaped and refined by his experiences during his first term as president. Trump is more of a doer than a thinker, but his foreign policy instincts are manifestly realist. He may not have read Machiavelli’s The Prince or Hans Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations, but he acts as if he had. His realism is reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s approach to the world—an approach that may have involved the most sophisticated diplomacy in our nation’s history. Time magazine’s legendary president watcher Hugh Sidey once described Nixon as “a man who understood the men, the ingredients, the glory, the brutality, the action and reaction of power as well as anyone else of our time.”