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 reelection, 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 skeptical 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.
This post is part of FP’s live coverage with global updates and analysis throughout the U.S. election. Follow along here.