everything is political
How a second Trump term could reshape global politics
September 18, 2024
Trump balancing a burning world on his finger.
Jess Frampton
What if Donald Trump wins in November?
With less than 50 days to go until the US election and the former president now having near-even odds of taking back the White House, governments around the world are scrambling to work out what a second Trump term could mean for US foreign policy.
One thing’s certain: For better and worse, Trump is still the same charismatic, narcissistic, impulsive, transactional leader he was four years ago (albeit a little slower). But even though Trump the person hasn’t changed since 2020, the world around him has become dramatically more dangerous.
Some will point out that as president from 2017-2021, Trump was able to score some notable foreign-policy successes, including a revitalized North American free trade agreement, the Abraham Accords, fairer cost-sharing among NATO members, and new and stronger security alliances in Asia. It’s also true that this happened amid a generally benign and peaceful international environment, at least before the COVID-19 pandemic started near the end of his term.
Two major regional wars, intensifying great-power competition with China, serious instability threatened by emboldened rogue actors like Russia and Iran, a sluggish global economy strained by structural supply chain shifts and 20-year-high interest rates, and disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence will place entirely new demands on Trump’s leadership.
The more challenging and volatile geopolitical context means the stakes are much higher than they were in 2017 when Trump first took office. Combined with the former president’s immutable traits, this suggests that a second Trump term would likely deliver significantly more extreme foreign policy outcomes than his first term, the current Biden administration, and a Kamala Harris presidency.
On China, a second Trump presidency would take a harder line toward the rivalry, after the Biden administration finally managed to halt the three-year slide in relations. This would begin with the return of Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s hawkish trade czar, and a push for much higher tariffs on Chinese imports. (Trump would also rekindle old tensions with US allies like Japan and South Korea in his zeal to extract better trade terms from them, too, driving at least some into China’s arms – or encouraging them to hedge more.)
The success of Trump’s confrontational approach would depend almost entirely on how Beijing responds. President Xi Jinping might decide his strategy of engagement and conflict management has run its course and the US can never be a reliable partner. He would accordingly retaliate symmetrically wherever possible and asymmetrically where not, leaning further into economic decoupling and taking advantage of Trump’s disdain for allies to drive a wedge between them and America. By reducing US-China interdependence and therefore the cost of going to war, this Cold War scenario would also increase the risk of direct military confrontation – be that over Taiwan, the South China Sea, or whatever else.
But there’s an alternative: Xi could decide that China’s worsening long-term economic prospects demand a more conciliatory response to Trump’s escalation and instead present him with a “grand bargain” that he could sell at home as a win. That is, after all, what Trump cares most about: not Taiwanese sovereignty, not treaty allies, not the rules-based order, not US global leadership (all of which Xi believes Trump is less committed than Biden/Harris to defending), but claiming credit for reducing the bilateral trade deficit. Whatever happens, a second Trump term would create both bigger risks and bigger opportunities in relations with China than a Harris presidency.
In the Middle East, Trump could play a stabilizing role. The Abraham Accords, probably the biggest foreign policy achievement of his first term, normalized relations between Israel and several Arab countries, sparking hope for a more stable and prosperous region. (They also exposed the indifference that Arab governments feel toward the Palestinians, whose plight was largely decoupled from the agreements.) While Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attacks and the crushing Israeli response to them have put this hope – and the prospect that even Saudi Arabia might cut a breakthrough deal with Israel – on hold, Trump’s transactional nature and strong relationships with deep-pocketed Gulf leaders could revive this possibility (if a lame duck Biden doesn’t get there first…).
The flipside is that Trump’s lack of inhibition about using military force against Iran – remember his administration’s targeted assassination of Iranian defense chief Qasem Soleimani? – could also create wildcard risks, most notably inadvertent escalation from autonomous Iranian proxies or a desperate or emboldened Israeli government. But as the last several months have shown, Tehran itself has no interest in a dangerous direct war with either the US or Israel that it can’t win, particularly when a loss would destabilize the economy, jeopardize recently normalized relations with the Gulf Arabs, and precipitate a crisis at home. So even here, Trump’s risky approach is more likely than not to result in de-escalation and regional stability.
Trump has famously claimed that if elected, he will end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours by unilaterally forcing Presidents Volodymyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin to accept an immediate cease-fire on terms favorable to Russia. In the likely event that Zelensky, who he strongly dislikes, rejected his terms, he would cut off US military aid as leverage. But, to avoid appearing weak, he would ramp up aid to Ukraine if it was Putin who refused to negotiate.
While Trump’s deal would freeze Russian control over the presently occupied Ukrainian land, the fact remains that Kyiv doesn’t have the manpower to win it all back. It can, however, still end up in a stronger geopolitical position than it was before the invasion. NATO accession would be off the table under Trump, but if he was prepared to sign onto hard security guarantees for Kyiv as part of a breakthrough agreement, the onus would then be on the Europeans to fast-track EU integration and fund Ukraine’s reconstruction. The war would stabilize, and Ukraine would get about as good an outcome as it plausibly could. Absent security commitments or a cease-fire, though, Russia would continue to attempt to take more Ukrainian territory, while a desperate Ukraine would continue its drone and asymmetric warfare to retake its land.
Speaking of NATO, a second Trump term would weaken the transatlantic alliance. Despite increased defense spending across the continent (largely to the credit of Trump’s first-term threats), most European countries won’t be willing or able to meet Trump’s demands for more burden-sharing across the alliance. Whatever he may say, Trump is unlikely to unilaterally withdraw the US from NATO. But he may pull back troop deployments from member countries he believes are “ripping off” the US (whether on defense costs or bilateral trade) to get them to pay up.
American allies in Europe and enemies in the Kremlin will each have cause to doubt the Trump administration’s Article 5 commitment to defend NATO members under attack. A leaderless, divided, and fiscally challenged Europe will be unable to act on French President Emmanuel Macron’s call to bolster its “strategic autonomy,” shore up its collective defenses, and fill the US-shaped hole. Frontline NATO states closest to Russia’s borders – Poland, the Baltics, and the Nordics – are right to worry for their national security under a second Trump presidency.
North Korea’s Kim Jong-un would be happy to welcome back Trump, the only US president willing to bargain with him … while Trump remains intrigued by the enduring prospect of a deal he believes no other US president can get: North Korean denuclearization. That’d be bad news, of course, for South Korea and President Yoon Suk Yeol, who would have little say in what Trump offers Kim in exchange. Last time around, he canceled joint military exercises, questioned the US troop presence in South Korea, and undermined Seoul’s deterrent … without coordinating with Seoul in advance. Diplomacy would not only alienate the conservative Yoon administration, but also it may not be as attractive to Pyongyang now that North Korea is receiving support from Russia, Iran, and China as a member of the “axis of rogues.”
Finally, a second Trump administration would also attempt to cut deals with Mexico on both border security and trade yet again. Trump’s abrasive rhetoric and the scheduled review of the US-Mexico-Canada trade deal in 2026 might get relations with incoming President Claudia Sheinbaum off to a contentious start, but both sides know the US has all the negotiating leverage. Ultimately, there are more than enough vested interests in both countries to find mutually beneficial compromises here, setting Trump up for easy breakthroughs.
In short, Trump’s return at a time of heightened geopolitical turbulence would be more likely to precipitate both catastrophic breakdowns and improbable breakthroughs. Do you feel lucky?
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