The American presidency is a strange beast. Seekers of the office routinely promise to focus their attention predominantly on domestic priorities if they win power. But those who ultimately get to sit behind the Oval Office desk quickly find themselves sidetracked by overseas entanglements. This happens because for over a century, the U.S. has played a unique role in the maintenance of world order.

Some presidents initially try to resist the external pull. No matter how hard they try, they eventually take the plunge because events force them to. No other head of state anywhere in the world is subjected to the kind of outside pressure that American presidents are regularly forced to deal with.

Candidate Trump was arguably the best recent example of someone who promised a laser focus on domestic matters if he became president. In his second inaugural address in January, he uttered the following words: “During every single day of the Trump administration, I will, very simply, put America first.” Later in the speech, he said that “We now have a government that cannot manage even a simple crisis at home while, at the same time, stumbling into a continuing catalogue of catastrophic events abroad.” Many people feared at the time that his overly inward-looking approach would soon bring about a dangerously chaotic world.

Trump has turned out to be a completely different president from what he promised on inauguration day. In his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month, Walter Russell Mead wrote this: “Not since Franklin D. Roosevelt has an American president been this powerful or this busy. In his hyperactive second term, Mr. Trump doesn’t merely walk and chew gum at the same time. He dances on tightropes while juggling chainsaws.” Mead adds that “This president isn’t retreating from the world. He aims to reshape it.”

Despite what he said before and on inauguration day, President Trump has been all over the global map since assuming office. The current wars in Europe and the Middle East are issues that any American president, no matter how isolationist they are, would spend time on. But some of President Trump’s actions overseas have left a lot of people scratching their heads. Two in particular stand out. Earlier this year, he signed an executive order freezing aid to South Africa due to his unhappiness with that government’s land policies that he says amount to persecution of white farmers. And then just a couple of weeks ago, he threatened military action against Nigeria, accusing the government there of failing to protect the country’s Christians.

How did a president who came into office promising to keep his attention narrowly focused on domestic matters end up casting his eyes so far and so wide? Do the enormous powers vested in that office tempt some presidents to do things they didn’t contemplate ever doing when they were on the outside? Or could this simply be a uniquely Trumpian tendency to use his force of personality to reshape the world, as Mead says?