Tremors from this week’s political earthquake are already shaking the world. Donald Trump does not emerge from the same political tradition as most Republicans and Democrats in Washington. Any other president-elect could have been relied upon to keep American foreign policy fundamentally unchanged. Trump is a wild card. The world may be in for some shocks.
Trump will come to office as the United States faces three major geopolitical challenges: the Gaza war, the Ukraine war, and the rise of China. Might our approach toward them change substantially under Trump? No, yes, and nobody knows.
Gaza is the foreign policy issue on which there seemed to be the least difference between Trump and his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. She repeated the familiar mantra about American support for Israel being “ironclad” and struggled to express sympathy with Palestinian victims. Trump didn’t even try. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has called Trump the “best friend that Israel has ever had in the White House.” Last month Trump reportedly gave him pithy advice about how to conduct his bombing of Gaza: “Do what you have to do.”
A potentially serious sideshow to the Gaza war is Iran. During the campaign, Harris absurdly called it America’s greatest adversary. In reality it is an impoverished regional power with a hollowed-out military. The easy path for Trump would be to embrace thebipartisan view that Iran is a major threat to global stability. But Trump’s impulse for deal-making might tempt him to rebel against the Washington consensus. If Trump wants to make a world-altering deal somewhere, Iran offers intriguing possibilities.
The course of the war in Ukraine, by contrast, may change quickly. Trump has promised to end that war “in a day.” He hasn’t said how, but a peace formula for Ukraine is much easier to imagine than one for Gaza. President Biden refused to pronounce the one sentence that might have prevented this war: “Ukraine will not join NATO.” Trump would have no trouble saying that. He might even pick up the phone and call Vladimir Putin for a round of what Churchill called “jaw-jaw.” That could be followed by rapid-fire negotiations for a treaty in which Ukraine would guarantee its neutrality and agree never to host foreign troops on its territory. Russia would end up with control of regions it now holds. Relations between the two countries would be something like the US-Mexico relationship since we seized California, New Mexico, and Arizona in the 1840s: The smaller country can rule itself as long as it doesn’t threaten the security of its superpower neighbor.
Europe is likely to be the continent that Trump’s victory alters most substantially. Unlike nearly everyone else in Washington, he’s no fan of NATO. What was originally called the “Atlantic Alliance” was founded in 1949 to keep the Soviets from invading Western Europe. It succeeded. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has been in desperate search of a role. It now includes an unwieldy 32 countries, carries out operations as far away as the South China Sea, and is the principal instrument through which the United States exercises global power. From Trump’s perspective, that’s too much.
A straightforward deal underpins NATO. Americans guarantee European security and pick up the tab for whatever military costs the Europeans don’t want to pay. In exchange, European countries support American foreign and security policy. Trump thinks that guarantee should have expired with the end of the Cold War. He may seek to “renegotiate” it. That could lead European countries to begin taking more responsibility for their own defense and long-term security.
The most important relationship the United States has is the one with China. But that relationship is in a terrible state. A hypernationalist Trump who considers “tariff” to be “the most beautiful word in the dictionary” might make it even worse. Trump the dealmaker could take a different tack. No one, probably not even Trump himself, can know which of his identities will emerge as he sets policy toward China.
The most profound impact of this election on America’s role in the world may not be felt immediately: the emergence of Vice President-elect JD Vance. He is more assertively outside Washington’s foreign policy consensus than anyone who has held national office in living memory — and he now embodies the future of the Republican Party.
Vance rejects what he calls “a foreign policy of hectoring, moralizing, and lecturing.” That is the policy Washington calls liberal internationalism, democracy promotion, the freedom agenda, or expanding the zone of peace. It aims to secure American global primacy. If Vance dedicates himself to reversing it, he will be seeking to reshape the world.
Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
