What Trump’s victory means for the rest of the world
The newly re-elected US president will take office at an uncertain and unstable time – some of it of his own making.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025, combined with a Republican-led US Senate and possibly also House of Representatives, was widely feared among allies and will be cheered by some of America’s foes. While the former put on a brave face, the latter find it hard to hide their glee. But how much difference will a Trump administration really make in some of the world’s crisis hotspots and how much change will it bring to the key foreign relationships that the US has?
If Trump is true to his word, he will move swiftly on trying to end the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Neither will be easy or straightforward, and both will come with potentially high costs for some of the parties involved.
On the war in Ukraine, Trump is likely to try to force Kyiv and Moscow into at least a ceasefire along the current frontlines, and possibly a permanent settlement that would acknowledge Russia’s territorial gains, including the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the territories occupied since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
It is also likely that Trump would accept demands by Russian president Vladimir Putin to prevent a future Ukrainian Nato membership. Given Trump’s well-known animosity to Nato, this would also be an important pressure on Kyiv’s European allies. Trump could, once again, threaten to abandon the alliance in order to get Europeans to sign up to a deal with Putin.
When it comes to the Middle East, Trump has been a staunch supporter of Israel and Saudi Arabia in the past. He is likely to double down on this, including by taking an even tougher line on Iran. This aligns well with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current priorities.
Netanyahu seems determined to destroy Iranian proxies—Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis—and severely degrade Iranian capabilities. By dismissing his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, a critic of his conduct of the Israeli campaign in response to the attacks by Hamas on October 7, 2023, Netanyahu has likely laid the ground for a continuation of the war in Gaza, a widening of the offensive in Lebanon, and a potentially devastating strike against Iran in response to another Iranian attack on Israel.
Trump's election will embolden Netanyahu to act. And this in turn would also strengthen Trump’s position vis-à-vis Putin, who has come to depend on Iranian support for his war in Ukraine. Trump could offer to restrain Netanyahu in the future as a bargaining chip with Putin in his gamble to secure a deal on Ukraine.
Trump is unlikely to seek the kind of half-hearted moderation that the Biden administration has pursued. A two-state solution, officially a Trump policy, is likely going to be kicked into the long grass. This will allow Netanyahu to stick to his commitment to oppose the creation of a Palestinian state, while giving Saudi Arabia and its regional allies an opportunity to pretend one is still on the cards.
While Ukraine and the Middle East are two areas in which change looms, relations with China will most likely be characterised more by continuity than by change. Perhaps the key strategic foreign policy challenge for the US, the Biden administration continued many of the policies Trump adopted in the first term, and Trump is likely to double down on them in a second term. A Trump White House is likely to increase tariffs -- and he has talked a great deal about using them to target China. But Trump is also just as likely to be open to pragmatic, transactional deals with Chinese president Xi Jinping.
Just like in relations with his European allies in Nato, a serious question mark hangs over Trump’s commitment to the defence of Taiwan and other treaty allies in Asia, including the Philippines, South Korea, and potentially Japan. Trump is at best lukewarm on US security guarantees.
However, as his on-and-off relationship with North Korea in his first term has demonstrated, Trump is, at times, willing to push the envelope dangerously close to war. This happened in 2017 in response to a North Korean test of intercontinental ballistic missiles. The unpredictability of the regime in Pyongyang makes another close brush of this kind as likely as Trump’s unpredictability makes it conceivable that he would accept a nuclear-armed North Korea as part of a broader deal with Russia, which has developed increasingly close relations with Kim Yong Un’s regime. Doing so would Trump also give additional leverage over China, which has been worried over growing ties between Russia and North Korea.
Friends and foes alike are going to use the remaining months before Trump returns to the White House to try to improve their positions and get things done that would be more difficult to do once he is in office.
An expectation of a Trump push for an end to the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East is likely going to lead to an intensification of the fighting there to create what the different parties think might be a more acceptable status quo for them. This does not bode well for the humanitarian crises already brewing in both regions. Increasing tensions in and around the Korean peninsula are also conceivable with the North Koreans likely to want to boost their credentials with yet more missile, and potentially nuclear, tests.
A ratcheting-up of the fighting in Europe and the Middle East and of tensions in Asia is also likely to strain relations between the US and its allies in all three regions. In Europe the fear is that Trump will likely make deals with Russia over the head of its EU and Nato allies and threaten them with abandonment. This would undermine the longevity of any deal with Moscow—the still relatively dismal state of European defence capabilities and the diminishing credibility of the US nuclear umbrella could not but encourage Putin to push his imperial ambitions further one he has secured a deal with Trump.
In the Middle East, Netanyahu would be completely unrestrained. And yet while Arab regimes might cheer Israel striking Iran and Iranian proxies, they will worry about backlash over the plight of Palestinians. Without resolving this perennial issue, stability, let alone peace, in the region will be all but impossible.
In Asia, the challenges are different in that this will be a major focus of US foreign policy under Trump. Here the problem is less US withdrawal and more an unpredictable and unmanageable escalation. Under Trump, it is much more likely that the US and China will find it impossible to escape the so-called Thucydides trap—the inevitability of war between a dominant but declining power and its rising challenger. This then raises the question of whether US alliances in the region are safe in the long term or whether some of its partners, like Indonesia or India, will consider re-aligning themselves with China.
At best, all of this spells greater uncertainty and instability—not only after Trump’s inauguration but also in the months until then. At worst, it will prove the undoing of Trump’s self-proclaimed infallibility. But by the time he and his team may come to realise that geopolitics is a more complicated affair than real estate, they will have ushered in the chaos that they have accused Biden and Harris of. Rather than having made America great again, they will have presided over its decline as a great power.
An earlier version of this article was published by The Conversation on 6 November 2024.
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Such a clear, if depressing article, Stefan. Many thanks. Sigh…