England coach and Kiwi cricket legend Brendon McCullum after losing the Third Test Match in the 2025-26 Ashes Series between Australia and England at Adelaide Oval on December 21. Photo / Getty Images
A little over three years ago, the English cricket board took a colossal gamble when it appointed Brendon McCullum as head coach of the national men’s Test team.
A flamboyant, fast-scoring batsman during his own career, the New Zealander set out to make England great again by advancing a high-risk, high-reward strategy that prioritised aggression, spectacle, and a win-at-all-costs mentality – a style christened “Bazball”, after his nickname.
United States President Donald Trump’s foreign policy, particularly in recent weeks, bears more than a passing resemblance to it.
Reaching for an analogy to explain the inexplicable is always tempting. Pundits seeking to unpack the DNA of Trumpism have come up with labels aplenty.
Depending on who you ask, the US President is an isolationist, a primacist, or an imperialist; a grudge-bearing Jacksonian, a tariff-wielding McKinleyite, a polarising Nixonian.
In his desire to recreate a gilded age of America-first greatness, he has deployed chaos theory, madman theory, social dominance theory, or all three.
The desire for an answer is understandable. After all, how do you solve a problem like the Donald if you cannot explain him first?
“When I’m with her, I’m confused/Out of focus and bemused/And I never know exactly where I am,” the nuns sang of Maria von Trapp – a sentiment European leaders grappling with the Greenland crisis thrust upon them by their American ally will readily recognise.
For European leaders, however, it may be more useful to understand the methods of Trumpism than its rationale – surely a recipe for angst if ever there was one.
If Europe is to frame a response to a US foreign policy that seems as baffling as it is destabilising, it makes sense to examine its mechanics. And in this regard, Bazball may offer some useful clues.
It explicitly rejects orthodoxy, for starters. For generations, Test cricket had been governed by a set of supposedly immutable virtues: patience, restraint, technical correctness and mental fortitude.
Bazball dispensed with those niceties, using shock and awe rather than skill and patience to impose dominance and overwhelm opponents before they could settle.
Likewise, the Trump administration appears largely to have turned its back on the traditional virtues of US diplomacy practised by its greatest exponents – George Kennan, Dean Acheson and Henry Kissinger.
The Long Telegram, Kennan’s grand strategy for containing the Soviet Union, has given way to the all-caps, rapid-fire Truth Social post. Shock has replaced subtlety, just as speed supplanted strategy.
Like Bazball, Trump’s approach is explicitly designed to unsettle. Cricketing orthodoxy requires a batter to leave good balls alone and punish the bad. Bazball insists on hitting almost everything. The objective is to force the opposition to panic, abandon their plans and play on England’s terms.
Trump applies a similar logic to geopolitics, using a combination of brazenness and unpredictability to throw adversaries and allies alike off balance; establish psychological dominance, and compel them to react in panic, ensuring that the initiative remains with Washington.
Bazball is designed to be breathless. And since the publication of the Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) on December 4 – which reasserted US primacy in the Western Hemisphere under the strategy’s “Donroe Doctrine” – there is little doubt that what might be called “Bazball diplomacy” has moved into top gear.
Since Christmas Day, the US has carried out military strikes in Somalia, Syria, Nigeria and Venezuela, bombed boats in the eastern Pacific, seized tankers in the Caribbean and North Atlantic, and threatened military action against Iran, Colombia, and Denmark.
All this has unfolded against a frenetic domestic backdrop: a hardline immigration push, unrest in Minnesota and the settling of political vendettas.
Critics grumble that it has become almost impossible to keep up. How do you hold a president to account on one policy when he has already moved on to the next – and may already be doing something more provocative still?
Previous US presidents tended to concentrate their foreign policy firepower on a single theatre – Syria, Iraq or the Balkans, say.
Over the first three weeks of the year, by contrast, Trump has mounted chaotic initiatives on three different continents.
On January 3, US forces conducted a lightning raid to capture President Nicolas Maduro, neutralising Venezuela’s airspace, killing dozens of his Cuban bodyguards and extracting the President and his wife in an operation whose ruthlessness and efficiency shocked even Washington’s allies.
Images of the Maduros paraded like captives at a Roman triumph were meant to send a message. Yet within days, the world had moved on – because Trump already had.
As protests erupted in Iran, the US President promised to “come to the rescue” of the demonstrators, explicitly encouraging them to “keep protesting” and warning Tehran that the US was “locked and loaded”. “Help is on its way,” he declared.
But, days later, even as reports emerged of thousands killed, Trump pivoted again, this time to Greenland, announcing tariffs on Britain and seven of its European allies for opposing US control of the territory.
As with Bazball, the ambition is not incremental change but wholesale transformation. Long-standing conventions are discarded, old restraints shredded. The international order – built on institutions, rules and norms largely designed by the US itself – is being replaced by an unapologetic assertion of hard power.
Senior officials make no attempt to disguise this.
Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and chief ideologue, told CNN: “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties. But we live in a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.
“We’re a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.”
The inversion of norms and the sheer velocity of Bazball diplomacy have left Europe visibly wrong-footed.
Allies have discovered that the principal difference between friend and foe is that Trump appears to enjoy taunting his friends more.
Domestic critics, too, struggle to land blows. Distraction becomes a strategy in itself: by constantly shifting the focus, Trump denies opponents the chance to build sustained pressure. By the time outrage coheres, attention has already moved elsewhere.
Yet, for punch-drunk European leaders, the Bazball story may offer guidance, too.
In cricket, England’s early success came largely against weaker sides, overwhelmed by tempo and audacity. But as opponents adapted, Bazball’s limitations became apparent.
India and Australia, disciplined and confident in their own methods, exposed its vulnerabilities, inflicting chastening defeats on touring English sides.
There are, broadly, two clear ways to counter Bazball.
The first is to out-Bazball it – to meet aggression with aggression.
India did this on the cricket pitch. China did it on the economic battlefield, matching Trump tariff for tariff until he eventually blinked.
This has encouraged voices in Europe – notably Emmanuel Macron, the President of France – to argue for confrontation, using the European Union’s “trade bazooka” to restrict US firms’ access to the single market and thereby stare down Trump.
But Europe is not China. It lacks comparable leverage. The US outmuscles Europe militarily, financially and technologically.
Moreover, an enraged Trump could cut intelligence sharing with Kyiv and prevent Europe buying US defence equipment for Ukraine, crippling it on the battlefield.
Yet meek capitulation had been proven not to work either.
Trump may enjoy flattery, but he appears to despise those who offer it.
In recent days, he has gone out of his way to humiliate leaders who court him, releasing private messages from Mark Rutte, the Nato Secretary-General, Jonas Store, the Norwegian Prime Minister, and Macron himself – seemingly to demonstrate how contemptuously he regards their entreaties.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has fared no better. Despite careful British diplomacy and the pageantry of last year’s state visit, today Trump seized on Britain’s decision to cede the Chagos Islands to legitimise his actions in Greenland.
The Prime Minister will be all too aware that Trump’s eye may one day wander from Greenland to the Falkland Islands, which fall squarely within the Donroe Doctrine’s logic.
In such an eventuality, the US President would be likely to present Britain’s actions over Diego Garcia as justification for why the islands should belong to Washington.
That leaves a third path – one that Australia adopted against England. Rather than matching fire with fire, the Australian team retained the Ashes by dousing the flames of Bazball with a dogged, disciplined and patient display of cricketing orthodoxy.
Increasingly, European diplomats believe this is the only viable course.
Flattering Trump has failed. Antagonising him is unlikely to succeed.
The answer, therefore, is steadiness – refusing the goad, maintaining unity and clinging to the unfashionable virtues of old-fashioned statecraft.
It may fail. But there is at least the hope that Trump – a master of distraction – will eventually distract himself, lose interest and move on.
After all, a week is a long time in Trumpian politics.
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