Donald Trump is back, only the second American president after GroverCleveland (1885-1889; 1893-1897) to win non-consecutive terms, and he ismaking a lot of people within and outside the United States nervous. Mostbelieve that Trump is bad news all round, someone who “made divisivenessthe calling card of his presidency”, as journalists Peter Baker and SusanGlasser put it in their book The Divider.

“The former president, twice impeached and twice acquitted, is the only chiefexecutive since the founding of the nation to obstruct the peaceful transfer ofpower,” they wrote in their 2022 book. “The Trump era is not past; it isAmerica’s present and maybe even its future.”

The Trump era is indeed the US’s future, at least for the next four years. Butfour years is a long time for someone who Republican Senator LindseyGraham had called a “wrecking ball” in 2015 and former president George W.Bush’s son Jeb Bush described as a “chaos candidate” who will be a “chaospresident.”

The US is in the moment of what went wrong, which means how and whyKamala Harris lost. As always, it is the proverbial tale of blindfolded menasked to describe the elephant by touching various parts of the animal’sanatomy. With too many variables to deal with and heuristics coming intoplay, it’s difficult to get the elephant right. Or maybe make it simple, as anAfrican-American analyst on CNN did: “Well, if America wants Trump, thenlet America have him.”

David Brooks, writing in the New York Times, went for a Marxian, class-clashanalysis (yes, in NYT, if you can believe it!) titling the op-ed, ‘Voter to Elites:Do You See Me Now?’ As he put it: “The great sucking sound you heard wasthe redistribution of respect,” made by those in the “bottom decile.”

Tom McTague at UnHerd.com was more snarky, though he too seemed to begrappling like everyone else to figure it out. “Trump horrifies many outsidethe United States, but like Tony Soprano or Walter White [from the series TheSopranos and Breaking Bad, respectively], all the more so because they seesomething in him that they recognise. He is a portent. Harris is little morethan her caricature on SNL [Saturday Night Live].” Gets marks for sarcasmbut doesn’t tell us much about why, even if we can get to the how.

“We are back in Trump’s world and we don’t yet know what he is going to dowith it,” says McTague though perhaps the more ominous bit should be aboutTrump becoming better at being Trump by knowing how to deal withWashington and its power elites, like “the velociraptors in the movie JurassicPark that proved capable of learning while hunting their prey, making theminfinitely more dangerous.”

And that brings us to how Trump will approach the external world. In Fear,the first of Bob Woodward’s Trump trilogy, Woodward told the reader thatWhite House Chief of Staff John Kelly referred to Trump as an “idiot” and“unhinged”, while Secretary of Defence James Mattis thought Trump had theunderstanding of “a fifth or sixth grader.”

His approach to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) and the USallies was roundly criticised, his boorish behaviour with world leadersprovided much acerbic ammunition to late night shows hosts, as was hisadmiration for strongmen like Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim JongUn.

The beltway pundits, raised on theories of international relations and thenuances of statecraft, thought he could not be dressed in any theoreticalrobes, that he was transactional, an isolationist, whose approach to statecraftwas antiquated and out of tune with the geopolitical realities of the 21stcentury. Or, as Wayne Barrett, the late investigative reporter who wrote adefinitive book on Trump’s real estate dealings, said, “Everyone else in themovie that Donald Trump is making with his life…is an extra.”

Narcissist he certainly is. But is Trump also inconsistent and whimsical?

Trump 2.0 and the world

In a January 2016 assessment for Politico, titled ‘Trump’s 19th CenturyForeign Policy’, Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institution sought to dispelthe impression that Trump’s views are confused. He argued instead that theyare consistent and have a long history.

“One of the most common misconceptions about Donald Trump is that he isopportunistic and makes up his views as he goes along,” wrote Wright. “But acareful reading of some of Trump’s statements over three decades shows thathe has a remarkably coherent and consistent worldview, one that is unlikelyto change much if he’s elected president.”

This was about a year before Trump took oath as the 45th president onJanuary 20, 2017. What was Trump’s overall message? That the liberalinternational order the US helped create and sustain gives America a raw dealand must go.

According to Wright, Trump “has three key arguments that he returns to timeand again over the past 30 years.” America is overstretched; US allies havetaken advantage of it; the global economy doesn’t serve America well. What’sthe fix? America needs a strong leader and, as the Republican slogan goes,“Trump will fix it.”

This might be a pre-WWII or even 19th century approach to interstaterelations, but it was Trump’s view as the 45th president and it will be his viewas the 47th, and this time he understands Washington. He isn’t arriving thereas a novice.

In an interview to Playboy magazine in 1990, Trump was asked what would aPresident Trump foreign policy be like. This is what he said: “He [Trump]would believe very strongly in extreme military strength. He wouldn’t trustanyone. He wouldn’t trust the Russians; he wouldn’t trust our allies; he’dhave a huge military arsenal, perfect it, understand it. Part of the problem isthat we’re defending some of the wealthiest countries in the world fornothing… We’re being laughed at around the world, defending Japan.”Fast forward 17 years, and that’s exactly what President Trump said andalmost did.

In her 2011 book, Leaders at War, Elizabeth N Saunders, professor ofpolitical science at Columbia University, argued that leaders’ beliefsdetermine how they operate. Although the book is about how “beliefs shapeintervention choices”, the argument can be said to hold true for much else theleaders do internally and externally, because “these beliefs influence” theirdecisions.

Beyond this, of course, are many other complexities and competing factorsthat weigh in on how decisions are ultimately made. But a predispositionevolved over many years is an important factor in how people and, in thiscase, a president will behave.

Trump’s domestic agenda is outside the scope of this article. Nonetheless, itshould be obvious that certain, if not all, of his actions at home — thetreatment of immigrants or racial and religious minority groups — couldimpact some of his foreign policy approaches.

For instance, a Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) exit pollindicates that Jill Stein got 53 percent of the Arab/Muslim vote, while Harrisand Trump secured 20 and 21 percent respectively. One could argue, as manyanalysts have, that Harris lost a big chunk of the traditional Arab/Muslimvote because of Biden’s “ironclad” support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.This is unlikely to impact Trump for two reasons: one, he is beginning histerm and has no election pressures; two, affected minority groups, unless athird political force can emerge in the United States, will be forced to vote oneway or another — or just sit it out.

Similarly, if Trump were to act on the recommendations contained in theHeritage Foundation’s nearly 1000-page report titled ‘2025 Agenda’, he couldend up reconfiguring the institutions of the US federal government in someradical ways. That could have a profound effect on how the governmentworks, or cannot, and whether the concept of checks and balances can bemaintained in the system.

While at the time of writing this the appointments hadn’t been finalised, itseems that, for cabinet appointments dealing with domestic affairs, Trump is“building a governing team in his own hardline MAGA image,” as reported byCNN, leading to “the modern age’s most right-wing West Wing [which] willtarget Washington elites and undocumented migrants [and] seek to shred theregulatory state.”

On the foreign policy and security side, however, “the president-elect’snational security picks so far suggest a more mainstream Republicanapproach to foreign policy.”

But it’s time to get to some specifics. I intend to flag three areas: Nato andEuropean security in the backdrop of the Russo-Ukraine war, peercompetition with China, and the Middle East wars.

Nato, EU and the Russo-Ukraine war

Back in April 2016, when Trump was looking to win primaries to get theRepublican nomination as the party’s presidential candidate, he told a smallrally in Milwaukee that he would be fine if Nato broke up.

He said, “That means we are protecting them [Nato allies], giving themmilitary protection and other things, and they’re ripping off the United States.And you know what we do? Nothing. Either they have to pay up for pastdeficiencies or they have to get out. And if it breaks up Nato, it breaks upNato.”

As the 45th president, Trump did not go to the extent of breaking up Nato,but he definitely did two things: he told the European allies that they have todo more to bear the expenses of the alliance, and he instilled a lasting fearthat he might just walk out.

Europe’s defence spending has, of course, gone up over the last decade, as arecent International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) report indicates. Thereport, launched at the Prague Defence Summit held on November 8-10, saysspending began to go up after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and has furtherpicked up after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In between, 2017-21 were theTrump years, when he pushed Nato 's European members to spend more on defence, up to and beyond two percent of their GDP, and to be less reliant onUS military cover.

But the IISS report also identifies investment problems and productioncapacities that raise a question mark over the sustainability of this trend. TheEuropeans have focused on systems needed by Ukraine and, in many cases,have provided support to Kyiv from their own inventories. That has,paradoxically, again forced them to rely on US support and military cover,despite enhanced defence spending.

Europe’s problem is best illustrated by Germany, where Chancellor OlafScholz’s coalition went under the same day Trump won the election. In 2022,three days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Scholz spoke at the Bundestagto deliver his “Zeitenwende” speech: “Februar 2022 markiert eineZeitenwende in der Geschichte unseres Kontinents [February 2022 marks awatershed (or turning point) in the history of our continent].” The speechspawned hundreds of analyses.

Germany was to allocate a €100 billion one-off sum for its armed forces andthe money was to be used “for necessary investments and armamentprojects.” Close of three years from that speech, Scholz’s finance minister,Christian Lindner, has been fired and a report by the German Council onForeign Relations’ Action Group Zeitenwende says the policy has failed and“Germany now needs a comprehensive strategic reset — and bold leadershipin domestic as well as foreign policy — to arrest its decline and ensure itssecurity, prosperity and democracy.”

Germany is just one example. The idea of “Europe” as a collective noun isunravelling along several fault-lines: domestic politics of member states, theapproach to the Russo-Ukraine war, dealings with China and, to a lesser butnot insignificant extent, the Israel-Palestine issue.

Trump, already predisposed to pulling the US back from its imperialoverstretch, will be encountering a Europe where much has changed since hewas last in the Oval Office. His approach to Nato and the Russo-Ukraine warwould be two important factors that, in combination with the domesticpolitics of European states and rising economic problems, could determinethe EU’s and Nato’s future, the shape of Europe and cross-Atlantic relations.Would Trump withdraw from Nato? Maybe not. Could he let it fade away?Possible. One thing is sure: he doesn’t like Nato and that’s more than just theproblem of paying for Europe’s defence.

In 2020, at the World Economic Forum, Trump told European CommissionPresident Ursula von der Leyen, “By the way, Nato is dead, and we will leave,we will quit Nato.”

On December 14, 2023, the US Congress approved a bipartisan bill that barsany president from unilaterally withdrawing from Nato, a measure aimed atestablishing “Congress’s commitment to the Nato alliance that was a target offormer President Trump’s ire during his term in office.” The bill stipulatesthat any withdrawal from Nato requires an Act of Congress.

But it’s the US president that determines whether or not to commit Americanmilitary power in any conflict. That’s not Congress’ remit. Article 5 of theNato Treaty, while establishing the concept of collective defence, maintainsthat every member state can take such “action as it deems necessary,including the use of armed force…” That gives Trump much space to decidewhat action to take. Also, whatever action is to be taken becomes binding onlyafter all member states agree to it and invoke the Article 5 commitment.In the end, none of the legal-treaty provisions really matter. As Ivo Daalder, aformer US ambassador to Nato, has noted in a piece for Politico, “Whatmakes a security alliance effective isn’t some legal diktat… it’s the trust thatallies have in each other, that they will come to each other’s defence, and thecredibility of that commitment in the eyes of their adversaries.” In thatimportant respect, Europe doesn’t trust Trump, and for good reasons.

But what about the Russo-Ukraine war, a post-Trump’s first presidencycrisis? Shouldn’t he be worried? Doesn’t that make Nato unity ever moreimportant? Not necessarily. Trump has already said he could get it resolved in“24 hours.”

“It is not possible to end the Russia-Ukraine war overnight,” Kremlinspokesperson Dmitry Peskov said at a press conference on November 6, inreference to Trump’s statements. But Peskov also said that Russia has“repeatedly said that the United States can help end the conflict in Ukraine.”Meanwhile, at the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi, Russian PresidentVladimir Putin congratulated and praised Trump and said “Moscow wasready for dialogue with the Republican president-elect.”

This is smart play by Putin. He knows Trump doesn’t like wars (it’s quiteanother thing that his Israel-Middle East policy is largely responsible for thecurrent crisis in the region, a point discussed later). Putin also believes Trumpis more concerned about stymieing China’s growth than he is in kneecappingRussia.

While Trump hasn’t given a blueprint on how he would end the Russo-Ukraine war in “24 hours”, his Vice-President-designate, JD Vance, who iseven more openly opposed to US support for Ukraine, has indicated scalingback US weapons supply to Kyiv, getting the two sides to freeze the territorialstatus quo, create a demilitarised zone roughly along the Dnipro River andgetting a multinational European force to man that DMZ. Most tellingly,Ukraine’s Nato bid will be struck down.

Whether Ukraine accepts this formula is anybody’s guess. What is clear andknown is the fact that, without active US military and financial support, Kyivcannot sustain the war. The Trump White House is likely banking on arational calculus by Kyiv that, without US support, Ukraine cannot manageRussia and might lose more territory if the current status quo is not frozenthrough a deal.

Competition with China

This one’s easier in some ways because not much is going to change on China.Trump started an unprecedented trade war against China in July 2018 andimposed tariffs that went as high as 25 percent on Chinese imports cominginto the US. On the campaign trail this time, he suggested the tariffs could goas high as 60 percent, even more.

But the US-China peer competition is more than about Trump’s gut andtariffs. It is a structural issue, what political scientist John Mearsheimerdescribed as the “tragedy of great power politics.”

When Biden got elected, China thought that he might approach the issuedifferently and reverse some of Trump’s actions. That did not happen. Bidencontinued with Trump’s policies, adding a further dimension to it: takingmeasures to deprive China’s tech industry of cutting-edge semiconductors.

The Biden administration called it the “small yard, high fence” strategy.China, as an emerging power, challenges the US, the existing hegemon.

The structural bind being the driving force, Trump will not change course onChina. If anything, he would double down on the policy he began and Bidencontinued. As he said at the Economic Club of Chicago, “To me, the mostbeautiful word in the dictionary is tariff. It’s my favourite word. It needs apublic relations firm.”

The argument by mainstream economists that tariffs actually amount to a taxon American consumers and make the economy less efficient doesn’t impressTrump. He believes that “tariffs are misunderstood as an economic tool.”

It’s not possible to go into the details of how Trump will approach theAustralia-India-Japan-US Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) and Aukus[Australia, UK and US security partnership] arrangements, but doubts havealready surfaced about whether Australia will have full control of the Virginiaclass submarines or even, as former Australian prime minister MalcolmTurnbull said in July this year at the Australia Institute, Australia will getthose submarines, given that the US Navy is short of its own requirementsand the Aukus legislation says Australia will get these submarines only if the“US president can certify that their Navy doesn’t need these submarines.”

There’s tension here between Trump’s approach to China and his “Americafirst” approach. So far, he has reconciled it by hobbling China’s economythrough sanctions and tariffs. It will be interesting to see if he would also gofor cordoning China through Quad and/or Aukus and take a more aggressive,militaristic approach.

The greater Middle East

Trump has often said he doesn’t like wars. Presenting the comprehensivereview of his administration’s Afghanistan strategy on August 21, 2017, hesaid, “My original instinct was to pull out — and, historically, I like followingmy instincts.” He went along with his generals at the time, nonetheless. Later,he would call his generals “idiots.”

But in the Middle East, Trump followed a policy that, in many ways, led to theOctober 7 Hamas attack, even as he thought he was executing acomprehensive peace strategy by pushing for and facilitating deals such as theAbraham Accords, which pushed normalisation of bilateral relations betweenIsrael and the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. Here’s what he did wrong.

Trump assumed that by getting the Arab states to normalise with Israel, hewould reduce the chances of any conflict, even as conflicts raged in Syria andLibya, Egypt remained an oppressive military dictatorship, Iraq continued tosuffer instability and Iran was pushed to the wall by the US when Trumpwalked out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and slapped a new setof sanctions on Tehran. But most importantly, he wittingly prescinded thePalestinians from his supposed grand peace initiative, allowing Israel to carryon with its slow, structured violence against them.

With his hand placed on a glowing orb, what one analyst called a “mysteriousspheroid”, and standing with the Saudi King and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi,Trump thought the Middle East could be steered without having any viablepolicy regarding internal wars and by burying the Palestinian cause. That wasnot to be.

Trump recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved the US embassythere, essentially upending America’s decades-old policy and inflamingpassions. He closed down the Palestinian Liberation Organisation’s office inWashington and allowed Israel to annex the Golan Heights. With his son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, running point on his policy, Israel went on aspending spree to build more settlements.

Trump’s former US ambassador to Israel and a certified Zionist, DavidFriedman, was fully on board and consorting with the likes of far-right Israelipolitician Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s Minister for National Security since 2022.Friedman’s daughter ‘made aliyah’ (moved to Israel) during this period.Result: “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood”, as Hamas called the October 7, 2023attacks.

The settler-minister Ben-Gvir has already welcomed Trump’s election victory,saying that “this is the time for sovereignty, this is the time for completevictory.” As Trump 2.0 starts next year, he will have two choices: he couldeither go back to what he started in 2017 and give the Israeli right the“complete victory” it is looking for or, as he told the Muslim leaders, “stopNetanyahu’s war” and start a genuine political process whose centrepiece isthe Palestinian question.

Going by his previous approach, it seems that he will allow Israel a free handto resettle Gaza by exterminating more civilians and going on a settlementspree in Occupied Palestinian Territories, including encroaching on thePalestinian Authority’s already dwindling control of Area A. The policy wouldlikely be pegged on the assumption that Israel has already decimated Hamasand degraded Hezbollah and it will take many years for the groups to regainthe capacity to attack Israel. In the meantime, they might resort to smallattacks but Israel has the capacity to deal with that.

The presumed “success” of this policy would require a complete surrender bythe Arab states, which Trump — like previously — would aim to securethrough lucrative defence and commercial deals. How this policy mightunfold is of course unknown and in the future, but some trend lines arevisible.

Corollary: the Middle East will remain unstable and poised for further flare-ups. A lot will also depend on how Trump approaches Iran. If he goes alongwith an Israel attack and further weakens Iran, the region will become evenmore unstable.

Epilogue

Our broad picture so far has been that, ideally, Trump would like to pullAmerica back from its global overstretch. He doesn’t like global trade andmultilateral trade arrangements. For instance, he pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which included 11 other Pacific Rim countries,including Japan. Most trade experts in the US believe America is still payingfor it.

According to a Cato Institute assessment citing a study by the USInternational Trade Commission, the arrangement would have resulted in “areal US GDP increase of $42.7 billion through 2032 as a result of TPPmembership, while a Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE)working paper foresaw gains to US real incomes of $131 billion through2030.”

Trump did the same with the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement or Nafta,calling it the “worst trade deal ever made.” Nafta, signed in 1994 between theUS, Canada and Mexico, had “contributed to an explosion of trade betweenthe three countries and the integration of their economies, but was criticisedin the United States for contributing to job losses and outsourcing.” Trumpforced the other two countries to renegotiate the deal as the United States-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement.

Some would call it quintessential Trump strategy. Bull in, talk tough and get adeal which is presumably (or should one say ‘Trumpuably’) better forAmerica. Put another way, “Though this be madness, yet there is method init.” The idea is less about pulling out of multilateral arrangements and moreabout forcing other states to fall in line.

Another lesser-known example is the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement orKorus. Journalist Bob Woodward opens his book, Fear, by telling us that, “Formonths, Trump had threatened to withdraw from the agreement, one of thefoundations of an economic relationship, a military alliance and, mostimportant, top secret intelligence operations and capabilities.”

He had even written a one-page draft letter to the president of South Korea.Gary Cohen, his top economic adviser, was “appalled” and decided to

remove “the letter draft from the Resolute Desk”, and place “it in a blue foldermarked ‘KEEP’.” Trump said he had told the South Koreans, “We’ll eitherterminate or negotiate. We may terminate.”

And this brings us to Trump’s apparent belief in the Madman Theory, outlinedby economists Daniel Ellsberg and Thomas Schelling, though he has perhapsnever heard of it formulated thus. In a 2023 paper for Security Studies, titled‘Madman or Mad Genius? The International Benefits and Domestic Costs ofthe Madman Strategy’, political scientist Joshua Schwartz writes that Trumphas “seemingly incorporated elements of the Madman Theory into hisbroader negotiation philosophy.”

Schwartz presents two examples: In a discussion with top cabinet officialsregarding the US-South Korea trade deal, Trump reportedly told then USTrade Representative Robert Lighthizer, “You’ve got 30 days, and if you don’tget concessions then I’m pulling out.”

“Ok, well I’ll tell the Koreans they’ve got 30 days,” Lighthizer replied. “No, no,no,” Trump interjected. “That’s not how you negotiate. You don’t tell themthey’ve got 30 days. You tell them, this guy’s so crazy he could pull out anyminute… You tell them, if they don’t give the concessions now, this crazy guywill pull out of the deal.”

He managed to force South Korea through a number of measures, includingsweeping tariffs on steel imports and getting Seoul to open its market for USpharmaceuticals. The details don’t matter. What matters is Trump’s style ofnegotiating from a position of presumed or real strength.

The strategy didn’t work with North Korea. Trump began by threatening to“totally destroy” North Korea and bring on Pyongyang “fire and fury like theworld has never seen.” Kim Jong Un didn’t blink and Trump changed tack byreaching out to Kim. The “problem” hasn’t gone away because it is structuraland can’t vanish by a friendly meeting at the Korean Demilitarised Zone.Schwartz’s paper argues that the Madman Theory doesn’t work. He traces itback to Richard Nixon, who told his Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman: “I want theNorth Vietnamese to believe that I’ve reached the point that I might doanything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘For God’ssake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain himwhen he is angry — and he has his hand on the nuclear button’ — and HoChi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days, begging for peace.”

Trump did the same with his Nato allies. With Russia, he could begin with thesame approach, or start by telling Russia to negotiate and then put pressureon the Kremlin.

But his most complicated challenge will be the Middle East. Last time, hewalked out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) or the Irannuclear deal. That move has actually pushed Iran closer to the bomb. If heratchets up the pressure or, worse, goes along with Israel’s Iran policy, he willbe pushing the Greater Middle East into a big flare-up.

The writer is a journalist interested in security and foreign policies. X: @ejazhaider

Header image: Donald Trump at an election night watch party on November 6, 2024: certain, if not all, of Trump’s actions at home — the treatment of immigrants or racial and religious minority groups — could impact some of his foreign policy approaches | AP