November 06, 2024

How Trump Will Change the World

By: Peter Feaver

A gray rhino—a predictable and long-foreseen disruption that is still shocking when it occurs—has crashed into American foreign policy: Donald Trump has won a second term as president of the United States. Despite polls predicting a nail-biter, the final results were fairly decisive, and although we do not know the precise composition of the new order, we know Trump will be at the top of it.

Trump’s win in 2016 was far more of a surprise, and much of the debate in the weeks after Election Day revolved around the questions of how he would govern and how dramatically he might seek to alter the United States’ role in the world. Owing to Trump’s unpredictability, erratic style, and less-than-coherent thinking, some of those same questions remain open today. But we have far more information now after four years of watching him lead, four more years of analyzing his time in office, and a year of witnessing his third campaign for the White House. With that data, it’s possible to make some predictions about what Trump will try to do in his second term. The known unknown is how the rest of the world will react and what the ultimate outcome will be.

Trump has won the chance to determine U.S. national security policy and will wield the impressive power embodied in the men and women now waiting to work for him.

Two main things are clear. First, as in Trump’s first term (and as in all presidential administrations), personnel will shape policy, and various factions will jockey for influence—some with radical ideas about transforming the administrative state and American foreign policy, others with more conventional views. This time around, however, the more extreme factions will have the upper hand, and they will press their advantage to ice out more moderate voices, hollow out the ranks of civilian and military professionals they see as “the deep state,” and perhaps use the levers of government to go after Trump’s opponents and critics.

Second, the essence of Trump’s approach to foreign policy—naked transactionalism—remains unchanged. But the context in which he will try to carry out his idiosyncratic form of dealmaking has changed dramatically: the world today is a far more dangerous place than it was during his first term. Trump’s campaign rhetoric painted the world in apocalyptic terms, portraying himself and his team as hard-nosed realists who understood the danger. But what they offered was less realism than magical realism: a set of fanciful boasts and shallow nostrums that reflected no genuine understanding of the threats the United States faces. Whether Trump can in fact protect American interests in this complex environment may depend on how quickly he and his team jettison the campaign caricature that persuaded a little more than half the electorate and instead confront the world as it really is.

Read the full article on Foreign Affairs.

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