Stephen M. Walt
Foreign Policy / November 8, 2024
What to think about Trump 2.0.
Movie fans know that sequels are rarely any good, and they often take a darker turn than the original. The first instalment of Trump as President was disappointing to many and fatal for some, which explains why he lost the 2020 election. The remake is going be worse—here are the top 10 implications of the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
U.S. politics is a mystery. If it wasn’t clear already, it is now crushingly obvious that nobody understands how U.S. electoral politics works and that much of the conventional wisdom on the subject is dead wrong. Polls aren’t reliable, truisms about the importance of a “ground game” don’t apply, and all the smart people who thought they knew what would happen weren’t just wrong but off by a lot. As in 2016, I suspect former U.S. President Donald Trump and his team were as surprised as the rest of us. My crude take is that U.S. elites are still underestimating how much white-hot anger and fear is out there in the body politic, much of it directed at them. There will be reams of post-hoc analysis explaining what went wrong for the Democrats and why the experts missed it yet again, but these same “experts” have had eight years to figure this out and are still at sea.
Trump will be unpredictable. Well, duh. Trump sees unpredictability as an asset that keeps others off balance, and his well-deserved reputation for erratic behaviour makes it harder to criticize him for being inconsistent. For this reason, nobody—including his supporters—should be confident that they know exactly what he’ll do. It’s a safe bet that he won’t do anything that isn’t in his personal political and financial interest, but how that translates into policy is impossible to fathom. He said a lot of crazy things during his campaign, but how much of it was bluster and bluff and how much was sincere remains to be seen.
Furthermore, there are important divisions within the Republican Party on some key issues, most notably China. The realists want to disengage from Europe (and maybe the Middle East) to focus on Asia and strengthen the U.S. commitment to Taiwan, while isolationists and libertarians want to disengage almost everywhere and focus on dismantling the administrative state back home. And some of these people have rather frightening ideas about using nuclear weapons in Asia. Keep an eye on who gets which jobs, but even knowing this won’t tell you everything because both factions will be present inside the administration and Trump might simply ping-pong between them.
It’s also unclear how much attention Trump intends to give to foreign affairs. Will he focus primarily on enacting revenge on his Democratic rivals and pursuing the radical domestic agenda described in the infamous Project 2025, or will he try to transform U.S. policy all over the world? Your guess is as good as mine. But remember: Trump is also a man whose energies and ability to focus are visibly fading (and they weren’t that impressive during his first term). His appointees will have a lot of latitude until something goes awry and they have to take the fall. Bottom line: No one should be confident that they know what Trump will do, including me.
Liberal hegemony is dead. U.S. President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Vice President Kamala Harris, and the rest of their team tried to revive and tweak the strategy of liberal hegemony that has guided U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. Their attempt was no more successful than the earlier versions, and voters have now delivered a decisive rejection. The people who voted for Trump aren’t interested in spreading democracy, don’t care about human rights, are deeply sceptical about free trade, want to keep foreigners out of the country, and are wary of global institutions. They know that Trump is either indifferent to all these things, if not openly hostile, and that’s just fine with them.
Given that I’ve repeatedly criticized both Democrats and Republicans for sticking with this failed strategy, you might think I’d be pleased by the election results. I’m not, because I believe Trump’s approach to foreign and domestic policy will leave Americans even poorer, more divided, and more vulnerable. Just because things are bad now doesn’t mean they can’t get worse.
Beware the coming trade war. It’s possible that Trump’s campaign talk about imposing 1930s-era tariffs on everyone was just bluster or bluff and that more knowledgeable people will talk him out of such a precipitous and self-destructive step. Again, it’s hard to know, and a lot depends on whether he delegates the issue to protectionists like Robert Lighthizer or if he listens to his new tech-bro pals who depend on relatively open markets and global supply chains. Trump has never demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of how modern economies work, so I expect a lot of unintended negative consequences if he launches a serious trade war (i.e., rising deficits, bond-market pressures, inflation, and so on). He’ll have no one to blame but himself, but I’m sure he’ll find a convenient scapegoat somewhere.
Europe is screwed. Trump doesn’t see the United States’ European allies as a strategic asset, and he’s long been openly hostile to the European Union. He has referred to the EU as an enemy in the past and thought Brexit was a terrific idea because he understood that the EU could speak with one voice on economic issues and was therefore harder for the United States to push around. The GOP is dead set against most, if not all, forms of regulation, and people like Elon Musk oppose Europe’s more stringent rules on digital privacy. Look for Trump to ignore Brussels, focus on bilateral relations with European countries where the United States is in a much stronger position, and do whatever he can to weaken or divide the EU itself. It’s possible that this danger will lead Europeans to band together in opposition (as French President Emmanuel Macron keeps advocating), but it’s more likely that every nation will look out for itself.
As for NATO, Trump could decide to opt out entirely, although the organization is still popular with most Americans and a formal withdrawal would receive a lot of pushback from the Defense Department and some Republicans in Congress. It’s more likely that he’ll remain within the alliance while continually berating Europeans for not doing enough and pushing them to spend more defense dollars on U.S. weaponry. He wouldn’t be the first U.S. president to take that approach. After the warm bath of the Biden years, Trump 2.0 will feel like a cold shower to the United States’ European partners.
Ukraine is really screwed. I believe Harris would also have pushed hard for an end to the fighting in Ukraine had she been elected, and the best possible deal would still have been pretty unfavourable for Kyiv. But she would’ve tried to use the prospect of continued U.S. support to get Ukraine somewhat better terms and would’ve provided some residual security assistance after the deal with Russia was struck. Trump is much more likely to cut off U.S. aid and tell Europeans that Ukraine is their problem. He certainly won’t spend a nickel of political capital trying to persuade Congress to vote for another big aid package. Public opinion will support him, and his only concern might be that Russia might overrun the rest of the country and make him look feckless, weak, and naive. But if Russian President Vladimir Putin accepts a permanent division and what’s left is a damaged Ukraine that is nominally independent but no longer headed for NATO membership, most Americans will turn the page and move on. Trump will then take full credit for ending the war.
Middle East strife will continue. Biden and Blinken’s mishandling of the Middle East hurt Harris in the election, as did her unwillingness to distance herself from a policy that was both inhumane and ineffective. Among other things, this position undercut her attempts to portray Trump as a dangerous extremist who didn’t care about human rights, democracy, or the rule of law. But nobody should be under the illusion that matters will improve with Trump in the White House. He gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu everything he wanted during his first term, walked away from the deal that was keeping Iran from getting nuclear weapons, and will shed not a single tear for the tragic losses that innocent people in Gaza, Lebanon, and the occupied West Bank are facing. He might balk at helping Israel attack Iran (and especially if his pal, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, advises him not to), but otherwise Israel will continue to have a green light to eradicate or expel Palestinians.
One might imagine Trump casting himself as a grand peacemaker and pursuing some sort of supercharged grand bargain along the lines of the failed Abraham Accords. I could even imagine him announcing he’d be happy to meet with Iran’s new president or even its supreme leader, the same way he met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during his first term. But because Trump has neither the patience nor the bandwidth to conduct a real negotiation, nothing would come from any of this but a lot of publicity—full of sound, fury, and signifying nothing.
China unbound. As noted above, Trump’s advisors don’t agree on how to handle China, which makes it impossible to know exactly how he’ll deal with it. He’ll almost certainly play hardball on trade issues, and I find it hard to believe he’d roll back the restrictions on chips and other forms of technology transfer to Chinese firms. Hostility to China is perhaps the one bipartisan issue left in Washington, and that makes a grand bargain between Washington and Beijing harder to imagine.
Unfortunately, Trump is also likely to pick fights with the United States’ Asian allies, and he has already sowed doubts about whether he’d come to Taiwan’s support if it were directly threatened or attacked. Because standing up to China depends on Asian partners—for the obvious reason that the United States is an ocean away—Trump’s approach contains a deep, inner contradiction. Chinese officials might be somewhat ambivalent about Trump’s re-election, as they undoubtedly worry about facing stiff new tariffs. But they also know that Trump is an impulsive and incompetent manager whose approach to Asia during his first term was incoherent and ineffective. His second term is likely to reverse some of the gains that Biden and Blinken made in Asia (which was their greatest foreign-policy accomplishment), and that’s a development Beijing will welcome.
The climate crisis. This one is easy but still alarming. Trump remains sceptical about climate change, believes the right energy policy is to “drill, baby, drill” for fossil fuels, and isn’t concerned about the consequences because, by then, he’ll be safely dead. Global progress on this issue will slow, efforts to accelerate the green transition in the United States will be reversed, and long-term efforts to secure humanity’s future will give way to short-term profits. This approach might also cede the high ground of green technologies to China and others, as well as weaken the United States’ long-term economic position, but Trump won’t care.
Unified power in a divided society. Some observers might see Trump’s victory as a sign of national unity, an indication that most Americans are fully behind him. This view is seriously misleading. Democrats aren’t going to embrace the MAGA agenda—especially at home—and the measures outlined in Project 2025 will sow even greater divisions with the body politic. Going after his political opponents, making abortion largely impossible by banning mifepristone, putting a vaccine opponent in charge of a critical public health institution, trying to deport millions of people, and attacking other independent institutions of civil society aren’t going to unify the country.
At the same time, the Republican Party’s long-term campaign to create a unified executive is now close to fruition, with full control of the White House, Supreme Court, Senate, and—it’s all but confirmed—the House of Representatives. The problem with unified and unchecked power is that it is hard to detect mistakes and correct them in time. Mechanisms of accountability are already weaker than they should be in the United States, and this election promises to undermine them further.
Apart from the domestic consequences to public health, safety, women’s rights, central bank autonomy, etc., deepening polarization also threatens the government’s ability to conduct effective foreign policy. When the pendulum keeps swinging so wildly, no country can count on the United States to do anything it has promised for longer than one term. When the government is preoccupied with rooting out domestic enemies, deporting millions of residents who are gainfully employed, and replacing experienced public servants with loyalists and hacks, its ability to conduct a sensible approach to the outside world inevitably weakens. A deeply divided United States is precisely what its adversaries want to see, and there’s no reason to think that Trump will do anything but exacerbate it.
Given the United States’ outsized global role, Americans and the rest of the world are about to participate in a vast social experiment, one conducted entirely free of human subject controls. I would like to believe the experiment will yield a few positive results, but I fear that whatever modest gains are realized will be swamped by a series of self-inflicted wounds. Winter is coming. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Stephen M. Walt is a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University
