What does Trump 2.0 mean for the world?

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

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

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

According to Wright, Trump “has three key arguments that he returns to time
and again over the past 30 years.” America is overstretched; US allies have
taken advantage of it; the global economy doesn’t serve America well. What’s
the 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 interstate
relations, but it was Trump’s view as the 45th president and it will be his view
as the 47th, and this time he understands Washington. He isn’t arriving there
as a novice.

In an interview to Playboy magazine in 1990, Trump was asked what would a
President Trump foreign policy be like. This is what he said: “He [Trump]
would believe very strongly in extreme military strength. He wouldn’t trust
anyone. He wouldn’t trust the Russians; he wouldn’t trust our allies; he’d
have a huge military arsenal, perfect it, understand it. Part of the problem is
that we’re defending some of the wealthiest countries in the world for
nothing… We’re being laughed at around the world, defending Japan.”
Fast forward 17 years, and that’s exactly what President Trump said and
almost did.

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

Beyond this, of course, are many other complexities and competing factors
that weigh in on how decisions are ultimately made. But a predisposition
evolved over many years is an important factor in how people and, in this
case, a president will behave.

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

For instance, a Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) exit poll
indicates that Jill Stein got 53 percent of the Arab/Muslim vote, while Harris
and Trump secured 20 and 21 percent respectively. One could argue, as many
analysts have, that Harris lost a big chunk of the traditional Arab/Muslim
vote 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 his
term and has no election pressures; two, affected minority groups, unless a
third political force can emerge in the United States, will be forced to vote one
way or another — or just sit it out.

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

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

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

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

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

He said, “That means we are protecting them [Nato allies], giving them
military 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 past
deficiencies or they have to get out. And if it breaks up Nato, it breaks up
Nato.”

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 to
do more to bear the expenses of the alliance, and he instilled a lasting fear
that he might just walk out.

Europe’s defence spending has, of course, gone up over the last decade, as a
recent International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) report indicates. The
report, launched at the Prague Defence Summit held on November 8-10, says
spending began to go up after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and has further
picked up after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In between, 2017-21 were the
Trump 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 on
US military cover.

But the IISS report also identifies investment problems and production
capacities that raise a question mark over the sustainability of this trend. The
Europeans 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 Olaf
Scholz’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 Bundestag
to deliver his “Zeitenwende” speech: “Februar 2022 markiert eine
Zeitenwende in der Geschichte unseres Kontinents [February 2022 marks a
watershed (or turning point) in the history of our continent].” The speech
spawned hundreds of analyses.

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

Germany is just one example. The idea of “Europe” as a collective noun is
unravelling along several fault-lines: domestic politics of member states, the
approach to the Russo-Ukraine war, dealings with China and, to a lesser but
not insignificant extent, the Israel-Palestine issue.

Trump, already predisposed to pulling the US back from its imperial
overstretch, will be encountering a Europe where much has changed since he
was last in the Oval Office. His approach to Nato and the Russo-Ukraine war
would be two important factors that, in combination with the domestic
politics of European states and rising economic problems, could determine
the 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 the
problem of paying for Europe’s defence.

In 2020, at the World Economic Forum, Trump told European Commission
President 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 bars
any president from unilaterally withdrawing from Nato, a measure aimed at
establishing “Congress’s commitment to the Nato alliance that was a target of
former President Trump’s ire during his term in office.” The bill stipulates
that any withdrawal from Nato requires an Act of Congress.

But it’s the US president that determines whether or not to commit American
military power in any conflict. That’s not Congress’ remit. Article 5 of the
Nato Treaty, while establishing the concept of collective defence, maintains
that every member state can take such “action as it deems necessary,
including the use of armed force…” That gives Trump much space to decide
what action to take. Also, whatever action is to be taken becomes binding only
after 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, a
former US ambassador to Nato, has noted in a piece for Politico, “What
makes a security alliance effective isn’t some legal diktat… it’s the trust that
allies have in each other, that they will come to each other’s defence, and the
credibility of that commitment in the eyes of their adversaries.” In that
important respect, Europe doesn’t trust Trump, and for good reasons.

But what about the Russo-Ukraine war, a post-Trump’s first presidency
crisis? Shouldn’t he be worried? Doesn’t that make Nato unity ever more
important? 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,” Kremlin
spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said at a press conference on November 6, in
reference 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 President
Vladimir Putin congratulated and praised Trump and said “Moscow was
ready for dialogue with the Republican president-elect.”

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

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 is
even more openly opposed to US support for Ukraine, has indicated scaling
back US weapons supply to Kyiv, getting the two sides to freeze the territorial
status quo, create a demilitarised zone roughly along the Dnipro River and
getting 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 and
known is the fact that, without active US military and financial support, Kyiv
cannot sustain the war. The Trump White House is likely banking on a
rational calculus by Kyiv that, without US support, Ukraine cannot manage
Russia and might lose more territory if the current status quo is not frozen
through a deal.

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 and
imposed tariffs that went as high as 25 percent on Chinese imports coming
into the US. On the campaign trail this time, he suggested the tariffs could go
as high as 60 percent, even more.

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

When Biden got elected, China thought that he might approach the issue
differently and reverse some of Trump’s actions. That did not happen. Biden
continued with Trump’s policies, adding a further dimension to it: taking
measures 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 on
China. If anything, he would double down on the policy he began and Biden
continued. As he said at the Economic Club of Chicago, “To me, the most
beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff. It’s my favourite word. It needs a
public relations firm.”

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

It’s not possible to go into the details of how Trump will approach the
Australia-India-Japan-US Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) and Aukus
[Australia, UK and US security partnership] arrangements, but doubts have
already surfaced about whether Australia will have full control of the Virginia
class submarines or even, as former Australian prime minister Malcolm
Turnbull said in July this year at the Australia Institute, Australia will get
those submarines, given that the US Navy is short of its own requirements
and 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 “America
first” approach. So far, he has reconciled it by hobbling China’s economy
through sanctions and tariffs. It will be interesting to see if he would also go
for cordoning China through Quad and/or Aukus and take a more aggressive,
militaristic approach.

Trump has often said he doesn’t like wars. Presenting the comprehensive
review of his administration’s Afghanistan strategy on August 21, 2017, he
said, “My original instinct was to pull out — and, historically, I like following
my 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 the
October 7 Hamas attack, even as he thought he was executing a
comprehensive peace strategy by pushing for and facilitating deals such as the
Abraham Accords, which pushed normalisation of bilateral relations between
Israel 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, he
would reduce the chances of any conflict, even as conflicts raged in Syria and
Libya, Egypt remained an oppressive military dictatorship, Iraq continued to
suffer instability and Iran was pushed to the wall by the US when Trump
walked out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and slapped a new set
of sanctions on Tehran. But most importantly, he wittingly prescinded the
Palestinians from his supposed grand peace initiative, allowing Israel to carry
on with its slow, structured violence against them.

With his hand placed on a glowing orb, what one analyst called a “mysterious
spheroid”, and standing with the Saudi King and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi,
Trump thought the Middle East could be steered without having any viable
policy regarding internal wars and by burying the Palestinian cause. That was
not to be.

Trump recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved the US embassy
there, essentially upending America’s decades-old policy and inflaming
passions. He closed down the Palestinian Liberation Organisation’s office in
Washington 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 a
spending spree to build more settlements.

Trump’s former US ambassador to Israel and a certified Zionist, David
Friedman, was fully on board and consorting with the likes of far-right Israeli
politician 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, 2023
attacks.

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 complete
victory.” As Trump 2.0 starts next year, he will have two choices: he could
either 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, “stop
Netanyahu’s war” and start a genuine political process whose centrepiece is
the Palestinian question.

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

The presumed “success” of this policy would require a complete surrender by
the Arab states, which Trump — like previously — would aim to secure
through lucrative defence and commercial deals. How this policy might
unfold is of course unknown and in the future, but some trend lines are
visible.

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 along
with an Israel attack and further weakens Iran, the region will become even
more unstable.

Our broad picture so far has been that, ideally, Trump would like to pull
America back from its global overstretch. He doesn’t like global trade and
multilateral 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 paying
for it.

According to a Cato Institute assessment citing a study by the US
International Trade Commission, the arrangement would have resulted in “a
real US GDP increase of $42.7 billion through 2032 as a result of TPP
membership, while a Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE)
working paper foresaw gains to US real incomes of $131 billion through
2030.”

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 the
US, Canada and Mexico, had “contributed to an explosion of trade between
the three countries and the integration of their economies, but was criticised
in the United States for contributing to job losses and outsourcing.” Trump
forced 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 a
deal which is presumably (or should one say ‘Trumpuably’) better for
America. Put another way, “Though this be madness, yet there is method in
it.” The idea is less about pulling out of multilateral arrangements and more
about forcing other states to fall in line.

Another lesser-known example is the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement or
Korus. Journalist Bob Woodward opens his book, Fear, by telling us that, “For
months, Trump had threatened to withdraw from the agreement, one of the
foundations of an economic relationship, a military alliance and, most
important, 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 folder
marked ‘KEEP’.” Trump said he had told the South Koreans, “We’ll either
terminate or negotiate. We may terminate.”

And this brings us to Trump’s apparent belief in the Madman Theory, outlined
by economists Daniel Ellsberg and Thomas Schelling, though he has perhaps
never heard of it formulated thus. In a 2023 paper for Security Studies, titled
‘Madman or Mad Genius? The International Benefits and Domestic Costs of
the Madman Strategy’, political scientist Joshua Schwartz writes that Trump
has “seemingly incorporated elements of the Madman Theory into his
broader negotiation philosophy.”

Schwartz presents two examples: In a discussion with top cabinet officials
regarding the US-South Korea trade deal, Trump reportedly told then US
Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, “You’ve got 30 days, and if you don’t
get 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 them
they’ve got 30 days. You tell them, this guy’s so crazy he could pull out any
minute… You tell them, if they don’t give the concessions now, this crazy guy
will pull out of the deal.”

He managed to force South Korea through a number of measures, including
sweeping tariffs on steel imports and getting Seoul to open its market for US
pharmaceuticals. The details don’t matter. What matters is Trump’s style of
negotiating 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 the
world has never seen.” Kim Jong Un didn’t blink and Trump changed tack by
reaching out to Kim. The “problem” hasn’t gone away because it is structural
and 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 it
back to Richard Nixon, who told his Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman: “I want the
North Vietnamese to believe that I’ve reached the point that I might do
anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘For God’s
sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him
when he is angry — and he has his hand on the nuclear button’ — and Ho
Chi 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 the
same approach, or start by telling Russia to negotiate and then put pressure
on the Kremlin.

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