Beneath
the superficial calm, however, many global actors are anxious about the
2024 U.S. presidential election. Despite four criminal indictments,
Donald Trump is the runaway frontrunner to win the GOP nomination for
president. Assuming he does, current polling shows
a neck-and-neck race between Trump and Biden in the general election.
It would be reckless for other world leaders to dismiss the possibility
of a second Trump term beginning on January 20, 2025. Indeed, the person
who knows this best is Biden himself. In his first joint address to
Congress, Biden said that in conversations with world leaders, he has
“made it known that America is back,” and their responses have tended to
be a variation of “But for how long?”
To
understand international relations for the next 15 months, observers
will need to factor in how the possibility of a second Trump term
affects U.S. influence in the world. U.S. allies and adversaries alike
are already taking it into account. Foreign leaders recognize that a
second term for Trump would be even more extreme and chaotic than his
first term. The prospect that he could return to the White House will
encourage hedging in the United States’ allies—and stiffen the resolve
of its adversaries. Russian and Chinese officials, for instance, have
told analysts that they hope Trump is reelected. For Russia, Trump’s
return to power would mean less Western support for Ukraine; for China,
it would mean the fraying of U.S. alliances with countries such as Japan
and South Korea that help constrain Beijing. The Biden administration’s
best foreign policy move over the next year will not be a diplomatic or
military initiative—it will be to demonstrate that Trump is unlikely to
win in November 2024.
FENCES MENDED?
During
his first term, Trump scrambled the dense network of alliances and
partnerships that the United States had built over the previous 75
years. For long-standing allies in Europe, Latin America, and the
Pacific Rim, the United States suddenly exhibited a bewildering array of
capricious behavior. Trump blasted allies for not contributing enough
to collective security and for allegedly robbing the United States blind
on trade deals. He repeatedly threatened to exit previously sacrosanct
agreements including NATO, the World Trade Organization, the U.S.-Korea
Free Trade Agreement, and NAFTA. By contrast, although U.S. adversaries
also had to deal with the occasional tantrum from Trump, it was for them
in many ways the best of times. Trump bent over backward to ingratiate
himself with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi
Jinping, and the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. His administration
yo-yoed between coercing and accommodating these states, with the latter
tactic usually winning out. These autocrats happily pocketed gains from
the United States’ strained relations with allies. Xi could go to Davos
in 2017 and effectively declare that China, rather than the United
States, was the status quo power. Putin could bide his time while the
Trump White House withdrew the U.S. ambassador from Ukraine and withheld
Javelin weapons systems in an effort to coerce Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky into aiding Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign. There
was no need for Putin or Xi to act recklessly when their rival was
self-sabotaging.
Biden’s
victory over Trump in 2020 ended much of this bizarre behavior. Biden
has reasserted traditional alliances to an extent not seen since U.S.
President George H. W. Bush. As Richard Haass, the former president of
the Council on Foreign Relations, has put it, Biden has transformed U.S.
foreign policy “from ‘America first’ to alliances first.” Biden
consulted widely with European leaders in crafting the U.S. response to
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, resulting in a degree of transatlantic
cooperation that has surprised even Putin. Similarly, the administration
has garnered support from numerous allies to counter China: imposing
export controls in consultation with Japan and the Netherlands;
bolstering the Quad, a defense coalition made up of Australia, India,
Japan, and the United States; and developing the Indo-Pacific Economic
Framework, a U.S.-led talking shop of 14 countries, including Indonesia,
South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam. Public opinion polling conducted across a group of 23 countries as varied as Hungary, Japan, and Nigeria shows that much of the world holds more positive attitudes toward the United States under Biden than it did under Trump.
At
the same time, rivals such as Russia and China have had to adjust to a
U.S. president who walks the walk as well as talks the talk on
great-power competition. Trump ranted and raved and lashed out at China,
but in the end, he was more interested in making deals than in
advancing U.S. interests—demonstrated, for instance, by his push to
finalize the Phase One trade agreement with China in early 2020 without
pressing Chinese authorities about the emerging COVID-19 pandemic. His
approach to Russia was mercurial; Trump himself has said that he was the
“apple of [Putin’s] eye.” By contrast, the Biden administration has
proved ready and willing to mobilize the federal government to counter
both these autocracies—the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation
Reduction Act are far more ambitious pieces of legislation than anything
passed during the Trump years. These measures aim to accomplish what
Trump only talked about: “home shoring” critical industrial sectors.
Biden
has also been far more adept at attracting new allies and partners.
NATO has expanded to include Finland and is soon likely to count Sweden
in, as well. The trilateral partnership between Japan, South Korea, and
the United States in Northeast Asia has been strengthened; the gathering
of these countries’ leaders at Camp David in August would have been
unthinkable during the Trump years. Biden will sign a strategic
partnership agreement with Vietnam during a state visit to Hanoi in
September, deepening ties between two countries wary of Chinese
expansionism. The AUKUS pact with Australia and the United Kingdom has
cemented security cooperation with these key allies. The United States
has bolstered bilateral cooperation with Taiwan. Both Russian and
Chinese firms are discovering that their ability to freeload off the
liberal international order has been compromised.
Foreign leaders recognize that a second term for Trump would be even more extreme and chaotic than his first term.
As
U.S. adversaries find themselves increasingly isolated, many elites in
these countries are holding out hope for a future windfall—heralded by
Trump’s return to the presidency in 2025. China watchers report hearing
more mentions of Trump in their visits to Beijing than they do in the
United States. Chinese officials hope that a new Trump administration
will fray U.S. alliances again. As for Russia, policymakers in Europe
and the United States agree that Putin is unlikely to change his tactics
in Ukraine until after the 2024 election. An anonymous U.S. official
told CNN in August:
“Putin knows Trump will help him. And so do the Ukrainians and our
European partners.” Allies in Europe are also contemplating—or, rather,
dreading—a second Trump term.
Some
observers argue that although Trump executed an unconventional foreign
policy when he was president, he did not act on his worst impulses. He
did not withdraw the United States from either the WTO or NATO, nor did
he remove U.S. troops from across the Pacific Rim. These pundits hold
that Trump’s second term would just reprise the bluster of his first
term.
Such
equanimity is misplaced. A second Trump term would transpire with
countervailing institutions that are even weaker than they were in 2016.
Trump would be supported by congressional Republicans who are far more
Trumpish in their outlook than the old-guard GOP leadership of five
years ago. According to The New York Times, Trump, if
reelected, “plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State
Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has
vilified as ‘the sick political class that hates our country.’” Trump’s
own foreign policy team would likely feature hardly anyone with a
significant record of leadership in diplomacy or the military that could
put the brakes on his wildest ideas—in other words, there will no
longer be any adults in the room. There will be no James Mattis, the
secretary of defense under Trump’s first term, or even a John Bolton, a
former national security adviser, to talk Trump out of his rash actions
or persuade him that he cannot bomb Mexico or that he is incapable of
ending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in a single day. Trump’s second term
would most closely resemble the chaotic last few months of Trump’s
first term, when the 45th president came close to bombing Iran and
unilaterally withdrawing all U.S. troops from a variety of trouble spots
such as Somalia and Syria. As one former German official told The New York Times,
“Trump has experience now and knows what levers to pull, and he’s
angry.” Another European official compared a second Trump to the
Terminator of the second film in the franchise, which featured a cyborg
assassin even more lethal and sophisticated than the original played by
Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Throughout
his first term, Trump frequently held U.S. foreign policy hostage to
his own political whims. He has faced some consequences; his demands
that Zelensky relay damaging information about Biden (regardless of
whether it was true) in return for sending Kyiv arms resulted in one of
his two impeachments. If Trump is reelected despite these two
impeachments—and four fresh criminal indictments—he will feel truly
unconstrained and unrepentant. A second Trump term would make the first
one look like a garden party.
TRUMP-PROOFING THE WORLD ORDER
It
is worth remembering that the foreign diplomatic corps believed that
Trump would be reelected in 2020. U.S. allies feared that Trump would do
what he tried to do during his lame-duck period in late 2020: withdraw
U.S. forces from the world. Unless and until it becomes manifestly
obvious that Trump will lose, it would be malpractice for the rest of
the world to discount the threats and opportunities posed by a second
Trump term. If anything, the stakes are higher now than four years ago.
The responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s economic rise
have more closely enmeshed U.S. and allied foreign policy. If Trump were
to take over the helm of U.S. foreign policy, the result would be a
much broader unraveling. U.S. allies have no choice but to craft hedging
strategies for the next year, in case wartime sanctions against Russia
are disrupted or Trump wants to be best friends with Kim Jong Un again.
This explains why some eastern European countries and France are also pushing allies
to admit Ukraine into NATO sooner rather than later, anticipating that
Trump might turn his back on Kyiv as the war with Russia rages on.
At
the same time, countries such as Russia, China, and North Korea have
every incentive to resist U.S. pressure in the hopes that a second Trump
term will offer them foreign policy salvation. It will therefore be
highly unlikely that China will allow for a warming of bilateral ties or
that Russia will provide any indication that it is interested in
serious peace negotiations before the election. It is arguably in
Beijing’s and Moscow’s interest to do everything in their power to make
it seem as though the world will be on fire if Biden is reelected.
The
Biden administration can respond to these behaviors by
institutionalizing as much of the United States’ current foreign policy
as possible. As the sanctions against Russia become the new normal, the
United States would be wise to develop a new organization akin to the
Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls—also known as
CoCom—that existed during the Cold War to manage the strategic embargo
of the Soviet bloc. Such a structure might also prove useful in
coordinating the export controls the United States wants erected against
China. The more congressional buy-in that the Biden administration can
secure, the harder it would be for Trump to reverse course.
Trump frequently held U.S. foreign policy hostage to his own political whims.
Biden
can also exploit the possibility of Trump’s return to bargain with
recalcitrant allies and long-standing adversaries. Trump’s hostile
rhetoric toward Mexico might make it easier for Biden to pressure
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to allow accommodations in
handling migration and narcotics trafficking. Faced with a choice
between acceding to Biden’s wishes that Mexico cooperate on migration
strategies and the threat of Trump deploying the U.S. military on Mexican soil,
Mexican authorities might find the former option more palatable.
Similarly, Trump’s demonstrated hostility toward Iran might enable Biden
to jump-start nuclear negotiations with the theocrats in Tehran in a
manner that makes it more costly for Trump to pull out of a deal
again—for instance, by transferring frozen Iranian assets to third
parties such as Qatar in advance of any deal, which would help insulate
negotiations from White House whims.
But
the best move the Biden administration can make in response to the
possibility of a second Trump term is to reduce the odds that Trump will
be reelected. As long as there is a chance that Trump or someone like
him will win the presidency, the rest of the world will doubt the durability of any U.S. grand strategy. The current administration needs to defeat Trumpism as well as Trump.
This
does not mean using nefarious means to stay in power; the surest route
to U.S. decline is for Trump’s political opponents to adopt Trump’s
tactics. Rather, the Biden team needs to use the campaign trail to
remind Americans of the chaos of the Trump years while stressing the
tangible accomplishments of Biden’s more traditional foreign policy
approach. Under Biden, NATO is stronger than ever, as are America’s
Pacific Rim relationships. Biden’s approach to China is multilateral,
not unilateral—and polling demonstrates that most Americans like it when
the United States acts with multilateral support. If Biden defeats
Trump a second time while running on a foreign policy platform of
liberal internationalism, allies could trust more ambitious forms of
cooperation with the United States. Adversaries would recognize that
they cannot simply hold out and hope U.S. policymakers change their
minds. Echoing William Jennings Bryan’s three presidential defeats a
century ago, Trump’s third loss of the popular vote in 2024 would send a
powerful signal that isolationist and populist sentiments in the United
States are trending toward remission.