The Real Challenge of Trump 2.0

Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s comments about NATO in early February provoked an unusually quick rebuke from leaders around the world. Speaking at a campaign rally in South Carolina, Trump said that, as president, he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to any member of the alliance that did not spend two percent of GDP on defense, a goal all NATO members agreed to in 2014. Charles Michel, president of the European Council, called the remark “reckless.” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said it “undermines all of our security.” U.S. President Joe Biden called it “un-American.”

The apparent invitation to war was shocking, but the underlying disdain for NATO was not particularly surprising: Trump has long made known his dissatisfaction with other NATO members. He also has a history of cozying up to authoritarian leaders—perhaps none more ardently than Russian President Vladimir Putin. Rather than marking some new outrage, then, Trump’s loose talk about NATO seemed to underscore a larger point about his possible second term in office: having gone through Trump 1.0, everyone has a pretty good idea of what could happen in 2.0, but since the conditions around Trump have changed, 2.0 will be a far more tumultuous experience.

Trump hasn’t changed his views much since he left office, but his environment, at home and abroad, has—and so, too, perhaps, has Trump’s understanding of how to wield executive power. Washington’s situation is considerably more dangerous than it was during the years of his administration, with multiple wars on its plate, intensifying great-power rivalry, and a fraying liberal order. Moreover, while out of power, Trump’s team has done the transition work it did not do the first time around; they will be empowered by a transformed Republican Party and come equipped with a very detailed list of friends and foes—and thus be better positioned to bend bureaucratic politics to their will. The states that would be poised to thrive under a second Trump term are U.S. rivals and adversaries such as China and Russia; those that would most likely suffer are traditional friends of the United States such as European countries, Japan, and partners in the Western Hemisphere.

Of course, the precise policies of a future Trump administration are impossible to predict, not least because they would bear the characteristics of a president who is emotional, undisciplined, and easily distracted. But there is good reason to think Trump 2.0 would be Trump 1.0 on steroids. His return would result in a more unilateral, more aloof, and sometimes more aggressive United States, less committed to upholding the geopolitical structures and liberal values that are already under growing pressure.

Barring a surprising surge for his sole remaining opponent in the primary campaign, Nikki Haley, Trump is on track to be the Republican nominee for president and is neck and neck with Biden in the national polls. Given that national security experts expend considerable effort every day trying to assess the consequences of potential geopolitical shocks that have a vastly lower likelihood, it is crucial to try to plan for another Trump White House and understand the challenges such an administration would pose to international affairs.

NO ADULTS IN THE ROOM

Trump’s general views of the world today are little different than they were during his first term in office. By all indications, he still believes that Washington’s global alliance network is a hindrance, not an asset; that tearing up global trade regimes is the best pathway to economic security and prosperity; that the United States has more to gain from diplomatic dalliances with dictators than from deep relationships with long-standing democratic allies; and that a unilateral, hypertransactional foreign policy is the best way to deal with enemies and friends alike. He also continues to conflate U.S. interests with his own interests, whether political or pecuniary.

What has changed is that the members of a new Trump administration will be far less likely to restrain his worst impulses. In Trump’s first term, many of the most important members of his national security team, as well as Republican allies on Capitol Hill, held more traditional Republican views. When Trump expressed a desire to go in a different direction, they had access and clout to explain why that might be a bad idea, and they often persuaded him. This is what played out, for example, in the Afghanistan strategy review of 2017. Just as important, for the many issues on which Trump simply did not engage, his traditional appointees were able to conduct a normal policy below his radar, as was the case with the 2018 National Defense Strategy. Finally, in the few areas where slow-rolling and end-running and other normal bureaucratic gimmicks were used to thwart a determined Trumpian policy flourish, the paucity of true-believing MAGA warriors at every level of the bureaucracy made it difficult for Trump to have his whims fulfilled. It is far from clear that there will be such guardrails this time around.

Trump has already developed plans to intimidate the bureaucracy by reclassifying employees so as to deny them civil service protections and make it possible to fire them en masse. His allies are talking about using the powers of the presidency to root out members of the military who do not show sufficient MAGA leanings. Trump certainly won’t repeat his first-term mistake of appointing senior officials and military brass, such as retired generals Jim Mattis and John Kelly, who were adamant about placing their loyalty to the Constitution ahead of personal loyalty to Trump. And many MAGA loyalists who did serve in the first administration now have a better understanding of the bureaucracies that once frustrated them—and will be better positioned to enact more radical changes if they regain power.

In theory, Congress could still constrain a destructive president. If the Democrats managed to retain control of the Senate, or to regain control of the House, they would be able to use the power of the purse to direct what the executive branch could or could not do. But these legislative tools are weaker than they appear. Congress has, for instance, passed a law making it harder for a president to withdraw formally from NATO. Yet the law is constitutionality dubious. And a president who simply disowns those alliances as a matter of policy—for example, by reducing to zero the number of U.S. troops deployed to NATO or by loudly insisting he will not come to the defense of countries if Russia attacks them—can effectively undermine the alliance even without a formal U.S. withdrawal. There is simply no good way for Congress to Trump-proof U.S. foreign policy, given the considerable powers of the executive branch. Trump would also face a Congress less inclined to impose such constraints, having established ideological mastery of the Republican Party, whose old-line elites can no longer claim that his agenda is aberrant and must be resisted.

But perhaps the greatest reason Trump 2.0 will be different from Trump 1.0 is the changes in the geopolitical environment abroad. If he returns to the Oval Office, Trump would be acting in a far more disordered world. In 2017, Trump took office as the post–Cold War era was ending. There were tensions with China and hot wars in the broader Middle East against the Taliban and the Islamic State, known as ISIS, but the situation is far more dire today. Now, he is running for a second term amid major hot wars in eastern Europe and the Middle East, a growing risk of conflict across the Taiwan Strait and in the South China Sea, escalating tensions with Iran and North Korea, and other crises. An unruly world demands more of the international engagement and leadership Washington has often provided since 1945—the opposite of what it will likely get if Trump returns.

MORE KABUKI, MORE CHAOS

The foreign policy of a second Trump administration will likely be an unusual mix of continuity and change. Some of his policies would, at first, seem to differ from Biden’s only by degree. Trump would surely intensify economic competition with China, albeit with a focus on cutting the bilateral trade deficit and onshoring critical supply chains. He might announce a Reagan-like “peace through strength” agenda that raises U.S. defense spending, a goal that could split hawks from doves within the Democratic Party just as aid to Ukraine now splits internationalists from neoisolationists within the Republican Party.

But such policies would come, of course, with a Trumpian spin. A military buildup would likely be accompanied by an aggressive politicization of the military, as Trump would seek to root out senior leaders that he believes showed inadequate loyalty to him in the past. Economic competition with China will likely go hand in hand with a renewed quest for a “historic” trade deal of the sort Trump sought but failed to achieve between 2017 and 2020. And in dealing with many adversaries, Trump will once again fall back on a strategy of kabuki competition—hot rhetoric and rising tensions, but without coherent policy or clear strategic purpose.

More important, Trump would likely pursue sharper versions of the policies of his first administration. As his campaign has already made clear, he seems certain to intensify his attacks on U.S. alliances, especially NATO: former National Security Adviser John Bolton has warned that Trump would have withdrawn from the alliance had he won a second term in 2020. Regardless of whether Trump goes that far, he could easily, on his own, attach more conditions to effective U.S. participation in NATO and U.S. partnership with treaty allies in East Asia, demand exorbitant financial tributes from other member states, or simply undermine relations within such multilateral groups by stoking tensions over such issues as climate policy and trade. Trump has already proposed a universal tariff, which would shred the existing international trade regime by unilaterally taxing all imports to the United States.

Some of Trump’s policies will differ from Biden’s only by degree.

Meanwhile, European states on NATO’s frontlines and Asian governments such as Taiwan and South Korea would have to contend with a more transactional, less committed United States. Trump has already mused about ending the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, and his first-term attempt to hold Ukraine’s security hostage to pursue a vendetta against Biden may indicate a readiness to impose an unfavorable peace deal on Kyiv. Trump would also be less committed to Taiwan’s security. If Beijing attacks the island, he once remarked, “there isn’t a fucking thing we can do about it.”

Broadly speaking, a Trump administration seems likely to step back further from the greater Middle East. Since Trump has no interest in providing U.S. security for the world, his administration would presumably be less willing to take steps, as the Biden administration has, together with the United Kingdom, to protect vital shipping lanes from Houthi attacks.

It is hard to imagine that the Trump administration would be as committed as the Biden administration to achieving a stable peace that addresses both Israeli and Palestinian interests. The desire for a big deal with Saudi Arabia might push Trump to address the Palestinian issue—something that was off the table in the Abraham Accords but cannot be ignored after the October 7 attacks and the war in Gaza. There are few plausible scenarios for a favorable outcome in the Middle East and none that would not require a significant U.S. commitment. So it is hard to see how Trump would be able to square his support for Israel with a desire to shed U.S. commitments in the Middle East.

A second Trump term would also likely involve further policy incoherence in the Middle East, however, since he might also be willing to pair a retreat from the region with some dramatic military action on the way out the door. Given Trump’s order to assassinate Qasem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, in 2020—a risky move that many in the administration feared would set off an escalation spiral with Tehran—he may prove more willing than Biden has been to conduct lethal strikes against Iran and its proxies if they target U.S. personnel, or to return to what the Trump administration called a “maximum pressure” policy meant to deliver a better nuclear deal than the one he inherited in 2017.

A new Trump administration will also almost certainly further downgrade democracy and human rights as policy objectives. And just as Trump talked endlessly about migrants and building a wall on the Mexican border during his first term, he would likely take a more extreme approach in his second—namely, a more militarized border and more restrictive policies on refugees, combined with an intensified war on drugs.

HUGGING, HEDGING, AND OTHER HACKS

During the first Trump administration, many foreign leaders developed “Trump hacks” for dealing with this most unusual of presidents. The first approach consisted of hiding and hedging, a strategy that appealed to countries such as France and Germany that had the most to lose if Trump dismantled the American-led international order. Thus, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel both attempted to keep some distance from Washington to minimize points of friction with Trump, yet at the same time tried to fill the leadership vacuum in transatlantic institutions and assert a greater role for bodies such as the European Union. Although they avoided a full-blown transatlantic crisis, they could not prevent Trump from stirring up numerous diplomatic insults and skirmishes that were mitigated somewhat by reassurance from the more pro-ally factions within the Trump administration and by Republicans on the Hill. Moreover, they simply lacked the full range of tools—military, political, economic, and diplomatic—to compensate for Trump’s abdication of America’s traditional leadership role.

The second approach for dealing with Trump involved hugging and humoring, a strategy that appealed to leaders with personalities that were well matched to Trump’s. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson made a point of flattering Trump and stroking his ego to smooth relations. Likewise, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe went to extraordinary lengths to court Trump, even giving him a gold-plated golf club after his electoral victory in November 2016. These efforts paid dividends: Japan fared better than other U.S. allies in the Asia-Pacific during Trump’s presidency, and Trump did not give Johnson the bullying treatment he gave Johnson’s predecessor. Yet few other foreign leaders had the mix of chutzpah and domestic support to risk such an approach.

A third approach involved emulation and emoluments to get on his good side. This tactic appealed to leaders who shared Trump’s authoritarian inclinations and understood his need for seemingly spectacular achievements: Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, and even Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump’s most significant diplomatic achievement, the Abraham Accords, showed the possibilities and the limits of this approach. Netanyahu succeeded in getting the Trump administration to broker a deal—normalization between Israel and several Arab states—that was long imagined as a crucial part of a comprehensive Middle East peace settlement, but Trump’s variant did not involve Israel making any of the requisite concessions or even to acknowledge the Palestinian issue. That strategy seemed to work better than anyone had expected—until Hamas blew it up with its vicious October 7 terrorist assault on Israel. (Arguably, the emulation and emoluments approach held for Russia, as well, although in that case, it was clear that Putin was the leader being wooed and Trump was the one doing the wooing.)

Governments that adopted a hardball stance were often able to do business with Trump.

Finally, a fourth approach that some foreign leaders took was to maintain an adversarial posture and dare Trump to make good on his threats. The countries that caused Trump the most trouble (Iran, North Korea, Venezuela) all pursued this line to some extent. Although each received some of Trump’s most intense forms of coercive diplomacy—in Iran’s case, up to and including the targeted killing of Soleimani in January 2020—all ended Trump’s first term in a stronger position of defiance, having made no meaningful concessions to his demands. Arguably, this is the approach that China also relied on, especially once Trump started ratcheting up the tariff war.

Several lessons emerge from this record. Hugging, humoring, and emulating can be humiliating because Trump’s erratic behavior requires frequent flip-flops. Moreover, it may not work in the long run: Japan faced demands to quadruple the amount of money it paid to offset the cost of hosting U.S. forces, despite Abe’s ardent courtship of Trump. Hedging and hiding is a viable strategy only for states whose interests are not much affected by U.S. power or that can plausibly compensate for U.S. disengagement from existing alliance structures. At present, only China has the potential to fill a power vacuum left by the United States stepping back from playing its traditional geopolitical role as the focal point for alliances, but the U.S. economy remains too important to China’s prosperity to make a true hiding and hedging strategy viable. 

On the other hand, governments such as China that adopted a hardball negotiating stance were often able to do business with Trump to their benefit. This was because Trump proved to be so eager for a deal that he undermined his own bargaining leverage: the agreement that Trump was desperately trying to finalize with China in early 2020 would have offered little benefit apart from a short-term increase in soybean exports. Finally, leaders who openly defied Trump endured a lot of tension but usually emerged with their interests intact. This was especially true for states that shared Trump’s disdain for the liberal international order. Even the terrorist group ISIS saw positive results from hanging tough: Trump abruptly ended the counter-ISIS fight before a decisive victory was achieved, the equivalent of spiking the ball on the five-yard line.

AVOIDING A ROUT

For U.S. allies, there are many reasons why it will be harder to cope with Trump during a second term than during his first. For one thing, it will be much more difficult to make the case that Trump is an aberration from the traditional pattern of U.S. leadership. At the same time, most liberal democratic allies will find it unpalatable to wrap good policies in bad but exigent emoluments to get Trump to go along with them. Since far fewer traditional Republicans would serve in key posts, foreign governments would have few advocates and partners within the administration to help them mitigate Trump’s anti-ally impulses. That would leave many liberal allies scrambling to preserve as many of the benefits of the old rules-based international system as possible—without U.S. power underwriting them. As a result, a second Trump presidency could deepen regionalization, including, for instance, greater cooperation between Japan and Australia or between the United Kingdom and eastern European countries—but without the United States as the diplomatic and military connector. France and Germany may well try to revive some version of Macron’s vision of a European-led security system despite prospects that are no better than before.

Paradoxically, if Trump’s diagnosis of the international order is correct—that is, if all the benefits of the U.S.-led order could be preserved without U.S. leadership if the allies stopped free-riding—then the consequences of a Trump restoration would be manageable. It is possible that some combination of other middle powers stepping up and pursuing prudent hedging could be enough to hold the existing order together, at least for a time. But a Trump-led U.S. retreat could quickly turn into a rout with the collapse of the order that has provided relative global prosperity without a great-power conflagration for nearly 80 years. Much would depend on how much advantage traditional adversaries such as China and Russia seek to gain, and how fast.

As in the first Trump presidency, the greatest beneficiaries of a second one are likely to be U.S. adversaries because they will be given a host of new opportunities to disrupt the existing order. China might exploit the fact that Trump does not care about defending Taiwan and pursue quick action to recapture the “rebellious” province. Chinese leader Xi Jinping might just sit back and let Trump torch U.S. alliances in Asia to China’s benefit later. Putin might play along with Trump’s proposed “peace” deal on Ukraine as a way of getting the West to sanctify his gains at Ukraine’s expense. He could also stonewall in the hope that Trump would cut off Ukraine aid altogether, leaving Russia free to march on Kyiv once again. Regardless of which path they choose, adversaries will likely be able to count on Trump as a useful tool in their efforts to undermine the traditional U.S.-led alliance system, which has long served as the primary constraint on their power.

Yet another basket of states, backsliding allies and hypertransactional partners, will likewise welcome a Trump rerun. If Israel’s beleaguered Netanyahu is still clinging to power after Trump’s inauguration, Trump’s pledge of unconditional support for Israel may serve as the lifeline Netanyahu needs to avoid accountability for his catastrophic mishandling of Israeli security. The Arab regimes that helped deliver the Abraham Accords would likely welcome the return of transactional diplomacy, even if they may be much less likely to pursue further normalization deals in the absence of a viable Palestinian peace plan. Populist leaders in Argentina, Hungary, and perhaps even India would also welcome the cover provided by a new Trump presidency in their efforts to resist international pressures to uphold minority rights.

Taken together, these various responses to Trump’s return to the White House would result in a highly volatile international system, one marked by an extraordinary amount of geopolitical instability and a power vacuum at its center. Amid a chaotic U.S. retreat, Washington’s traditional allies and partners would mostly be left without viable approaches for managing their relations. And traditional adversaries would enjoy the upper hand in their dealings with the United States. One of the more interesting questions in contemporary international relations is how much resilience is built into the existing international order—how long it can continue functioning without the active, constructive engagement of the world’s strongest power. Since 1945, the answer to that question has been unknowable. If Trump wins in November, however, the world may quickly find out.