Exquisite Americana

Donald Trump​’s return as US president can’t match the shock of his ascent in 2016. But it does force a permanent change in historical perspective. In 2020, Joe Biden’s victory was treated by Trump’s domestic and international opponents as though it were deliverance from a bout of delirium. In 2024 it is Biden’s single term that looks like a Covid-induced interruption in the Trump era. Where foreign policy is concerned Trump has always caused confusion. Was he, first time round, a threat to the US-led global order or a revelation of its true face? And what exactly would he have done had his whims not so often been thwarted by the national security bureaucracy and his own incompetence?

Writing about Trump often descends into psychopathology, which is all right as far as it goes. Trump at Mar-a-Lago might be easier to take were he more like Tiberius on Capri. But far from being a debauched libertine Trump is a roaring teetotaller uninterested in much except power and fame. That predilection leads to talk of fascism and Europe in the 1930s, or of a transplanted Oriental despotism. It was always lazy to try to see Trump as part of an international group of autocratic rulers (Modi, Erdoğan, Orbán, Duterte), each of whom was in fact defined more by specific national conditions than any global trend. In reality, Trump is an exquisite figure of Americana. His appeal is to a distinctively American form of mercantile nationalism tempered by grift. His closest contemporary analogues – and they’re not that close – are in Brazil and Argentina. But he has always had more in common with his domestic opponents than they like to admit.

What will a second Trump term mean for the world beyond the US? Predictions are difficult given Trump’s erratic nature and recent transformations in the American political system. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are really political parties in the 20th-century sense: they are more like shifting collections of performing entrepreneurs. The currency of the court at Mar-a-Lago, with its cronies, goons, sidekicks, clans and lumpen billionaires, is attention. Trump’s prospective chief of staff, Susie Wiles, who ran his election campaign and heads the ‘Florida mafia’ faction of hangers-on, will have a good deal of say over who gets Trump’s ear. But his thinking is an unstable concoction. Trump is an enthusiastic trade warrior who occasionally indulges in anti-war rhetoric. His anti-empire talk may be as insincere as the ‘foreign policy for the middle class’ of Biden’s patrician national security adviser, Jake Sullivan. Both nod to sentiments they can’t comprehend. After all, an anti-war position would imply less power, or less use of power. And, if he is for anything, Trump is for max power.

Like Biden before him, Trump sets the tone of the court more than he runs the practical business of government. In these conditions cabinet appointments take on greater importance. Some of his nominations are conventional enough. His choice for national security adviser, Mike Waltz, is a Floridian soldier who wouldn’t have been out of place in George W. Bush’s team. Waltz has spent much of the last few years raging about the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, which he believes will lead to ‘al-Qaida 3.0’. On Russia and the war in Ukraine he complained not of the cost to the US but of Biden’s ‘too little too late strategy’. For secretary of state Trump has nominated Marco Rubio, another member of the orthodox neoconservative faction who once co-wrote an article with John McCain in the Wall Street Journal claiming that the overthrow of Gaddafi would lead to ‘a democratic and pro-American Libya’. Rubio is preoccupied with schemes to destabilise Cuba, Venezuela and Iran. As late as 2022 he was criticising Trump’s ‘unfortunate’ praise of Putin’s intelligence. An internal Republican vetting dossier (almost certainly obtained and leaked by Iranian hackers) noted that ‘Rubio appears to have generally postured as a neocon and interventionist.’

If Trump has nominated second-tier establishment types for powerful positions that is partly because so many of the more accomplished practitioners have migrated to the Democrats. Kamala Harris was endorsed by most of George W. Bush’s national security team, including Michael Hayden, James Clapper, Robert Blackwill and Richard Haass – a who’s who of the foreign policy establishment. This has led to some barrel-scraping on the part of the Republicans. For director of the CIA, Trump has chosen John Ratcliffe, his final director of national intelligence in his first term, who has been selected for political loyalty over any other quality. In Pete Hegseth there is the prospect of a secretary of defence who believes Israel’s wars are a fulfilment of biblical prophecy and that American soldiers should not be punished for committing ‘so-called war crimes’. Hegseth is a representative of the frothing at the mouth Fox News contingent. He is also a reminder that many of these people are unlikely to last, if they succeed in being confirmed in the first place. The choice of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence irritates centrist commentators and European politicians thanks to her insufficiently critical views of Putin’s Russia. She is also an excuse to pretend that Trump’s return is the result of a Russian ruse rather than a phenomenon for which the Democratic establishment may share responsibility. Overall, Trump’s nominations show no repudiation of the national security establishment. The logic of the choices appears to follow tributary loyalty more than anything else.

The MAGA Republicans like to think of themselves as different from the traditional Washington national security clerks. But are they? In July, Eliot Cohen, Iraq War enthusiast and co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, described Trump’s policy platform as ‘boilerplate, and not especially scary boilerplate at that’. According to Trump’s former national security adviser Robert O’Brien there was never a Trump Doctrine, since Trump adheres ‘to his own instincts and to traditional American principles that run deeper than the globalist orthodoxies of recent decades’. If there was a unifying theme, O’Brien insists it took the form of a ‘reaction to the shortcomings of neoliberal internationalism’. O’Brien, who has not been offered a job in this administration, came up with the description of the Trump ethos as ‘peace through strength’. He likes to say the phrase comes from a slightly longer quote, which he incorrectly attributes to the emperor Hadrian: ‘peace through strength – or, failing that, peace through threat’. That phrase is actually from a commentary by a modern historian. And like so much about Trump, ‘peace through strength’ is the legacy of a past US president: Ronald Reagan.

Trumpian foreign policy has distinctive features, but they are hardly aberrations. The MAGA Republicans are for swinging their weight around in Latin America. Like the Democrats, Trump’s allies believe that the US is in the middle of a second Cold War with China. The major exception to the continuity between Trump and Biden may be Ukraine. Some, though not all, Trump-adjacent figures have been critical of US support for Ukraine, mostly on the grounds that it is expensive. Whether Trump will terminate that support is probably the question of greatest strategic import. Under Biden and Sullivan, the US has treated the war in Ukraine as an opportunity to weaken Russia, and cared little that the price for this is paid in Ukrainian dead. Trump has claimed he will end the war ‘before I even arrive at the Oval Office’. But what form he imagines this taking, if he has imagined it at all, is unclear. He is likely to approach Nato in the same manner he did in 2018, with bluster and threats but no dénouement. Threats are likely to be a much used diplomatic tool, whatever their efficacy.

As for the Middle East, one member of the transition team has said that Trump is ‘determined to reinstitute a maximum pressure strategy to bankrupt Iran as soon as possible’, though it should be said that Biden never attempted to improve relations with Iran. Trump, like Biden, is committed to Israel as an asset or even an expression of American power in the world. Scorched-earth atrocities in Gaza are the best testament to the hideous consequences of the American political consensus on Israel. For much of the world, the destruction of Gaza will be the defining memory of Biden’s presidency. But under Trump it would have been no different. The problem with painting Trump as the harbinger of the end of an enlightened international order is that it prompts the question of what that order is really like. In Lebanon there are 3500 dead and counting, to add to the tens of thousands killed in Gaza. The US has supported Israel as it tells UN peacekeepers to leave Lebanon and even attacks their bases. After the presidential election, Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, Ron Dermer, visited both Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state, in Washington and Trump at Mar-a-Lago to discuss Israel’s Lebanon operations. On 15 November, the speaker of the Lebanese parliament, Nabih Berry, confirmed that officials in Beirut were studying a purported ceasefire plan proposed by the US. The same day, an Israeli airstrike on Tayouneh on the outskirts of the city flattened an eleven-storey residential building. Over Lebanon, as over Gaza, the US has posed as an aloof mediator while in practice supporting vicious aggression.

The neoconservative descendants of Reagan who staff so many US institutions sometimes criticise Trump’s foreign policy not on the basis that it is a withdrawal from the world, but because it is a withdrawal of the justificatory ideology of American power. When you give up on the dishonest profession of respect for norms, rules and order you give up the game itself. Whether the US ever really bound itself to rules of any kind is treated as an academic question at best. The reality in Gaza and Lebanon is more easily ignored than defended. In this respect Trump is attacked for restoring the US to historical normality. As Hal Brands, the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins University, puts it, under Trump the US acts ‘in the same narrowly self-interested, frequently exploitative way as many great powers throughout history’. Trump is not an isolationist, to the extent the term has any useful meaning, and does not propose a withdrawal from world power. On the contrary, Brands writes, on some issues, his administration ‘might be more aggressive than before’.

More than any other American politician, Trump came to be associated with the turning of American imperial attention to China. But to say that his second administration will be full of China hawks misses the extent of the transformation that has taken place in Washington since 2016. On China, the Biden administration picked up all Trump’s talking points and added some of its own. In June, the Council on Foreign Relations convened its China Strategy Initiative to discuss the future of US-China relations. Most of the China-gazing foreign policy establishment attended. In the keynote address, Kurt Campbell, a senior China policy official in both the Obama and Biden administrations, stressed that ‘there is largely bipartisan agreement about the essential features of the American strategy in the Indo-Pacific.’ Proof of the effectiveness of this strategy, he said, was that China and Russia ‘view our cross-continental partnerships with growing concern’. Trump is likely to approach China the same way Jake Sullivan has, only more so – the wrong way, but faster.

If Trump has been consistent about any foreign policy question it is tariffs on China and protectionism in general. He has been issuing ill-informed statements about the US trade deficit for decades. The plan is for a 60 per cent tariff on Chinese imports and 10 to 20 per cent on everyone else (up from zero on most imports). The US is a continental-scale economy and is much less oriented towards international trade than countries like the UK, Germany or China. It can consider drastic measures that others can’t. But trade tariffs on a single state are often difficult to enforce because transnational supply chains can be modified to circumvent them. Skilled economic warriors such as Robert Blackwill, who served under George W. Bush and wrote a major study on ‘geoeconomics’, for the most part supported Harris and aren’t currently available to help. Perhaps some will come in from the cold when the loyalist courtiers inevitably mess things up. Robert Lighthizer, the US trade representative during Trump’s first term, may well reprise the role.

The planned 60 per cent tariff is the latest manifestation of a more general US strategy towards China, which the Democrats have characterised as a competition for the 21st century. In China it is seen as containment. The ideologues in Trump’s orbit are generally more bellicose on this question than those closer to the Democrats. Still, in the spirit of Campbell’s bipartisan consensus, they are not fundamentally at odds. Trump hasn’t yet selected his China team, but his intention to expand the economic Cold War is dangerous. O’Brien argues that a second Trump term will bring more containment measures, including ‘stepped-up presidential-level attention to dissidents and political forces that can challenge US adversaries’. That would not bode well for the future of Sino-American relations, which are already poor. In the Biden years, according to the national intelligence annual threat assessment, China started reorienting its nuclear posture towards strategic rivalry with the US, partly out of concern over the increased ‘likelihood of a US first strike’. China doesn’t yet possess nuclear forces capable of matching the US, but that state of affairs may not last. Trump’s instability makes managing this problem much more fraught.

In Europe, Trump’s return was received with the same sense of baffled panic as his victory in 2016. On 6 November the main headline in Le Monde was ‘La fin d’un monde américain’. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung went with ‘Trumps Rache’ – ‘Trump’s Revenge’. The Italian left-wing daily Il Manifesto led with ‘Il tallone di ferro sugli Stati uniti’ – ‘America under the Iron Heel’. Rumours of a plan for the war in Ukraine that would involve the freezing of the front line in exchange for Ukraine’s giving up on Nato membership for at least twenty years – sweetened by a compensatory guarantee that American weapons will still flood in – are not looked on sympathetically. Still, no one believes Trump will actually dismantle the US military position in Europe, which was recently reinforced with a new missile defence station in Poland staffed by the US navy. The European Commission is no doubt scrambling for ways to protect European economies from the fallout from Trump’s tariffs. But the Pavlovian reaction has been to use the moment to argue for more military spending, which hardly helps with the productive investment the EU needs.

A second Trump term is clearly a disaster for the scant existing international effort to co-ordinate climate response. Under Biden, the US took climate diplomacy almost seriously. In the Inflation Reduction Act it passed climate legislation that went beyond that of any past US government. It is easy to overstate such achievements, which are so insufficient as to be negligent. But Trump’s position – drill, baby, drill – is certainly distinct. There is every chance that he will issue a series of executive orders dismantling the limited energy transition measures currently in place in the US. In May, Wood Mackenzie, one of the main research and consulting firms to the energy industry, published a paper saying that his re-election would ‘push the US even further away from a net zero emissions pathway’. The US team at COP29 (the second successive climate summit held in a major hydrocarbon state) appeared dejected.

In Britain, one might expect Trump’s impending return to provoke some questioning of the extent the country has tied itself to the US. The tariffs are obviously detrimental to British commercial interests. On 11 November, the chair of the House of Commons business and trade committee, Liam Byrne, described them as a ‘doomsday scenario’. Byrne’s proposed solution was that Britain should bargain with Trump for an exemption from the tariffs by offering to move even further towards the US position on China. A more interesting reaction came from Martin Wolf in the Financial Times, who agrees with Byrne that the government should try to ‘persuade the new administration that, as a close ally and a country with a structural trade deficit as well, it should be exempt’. Wolf’s proposed offer to Trump is a further rise in military spending. It might not work, but ‘Trump would surely enjoy the grovelling.’

Wolf recognises that Trump’s return implies more serious problems for Britain. Since the Second World War, he argues, the UK has believed that ‘the US would remain the great bulwark of liberal democracy and co-operative multilateralism. Now all this is more than just a little in doubt.’ Where was this bulwark of democracy in the unbroken international violence that is the American record since the Second World War? If millions dead in Vietnam, Korea and Iraq didn’t bring Britain’s strategic alignment with the US into doubt, why would the second election of Donald Trump? Is Gaza evidence of the co-operative multilateralism Wolf has in mind? In the end it doesn’t matter, because for him ‘there is no substitute for the US security alliance.’ Even now, even after Gaza, the reality of a world shaped by American power, often Democratic American power, is met with denial. The British government has refused to end the use of British bases in Cyprus to support Israel’s attacks on Gaza, or to end the sale of F-35 components to Israel. To do so, according to the defence secretary, John Healey, would ‘undermine US confidence in the UK’.

Trump’s potentate style will alter the mood at G7 and G20 summits, where the façade of dutiful co-operation survived the razing of Gaza City. The reaction to his victory is a reminder of the reason devils and demons were named after foreign deities in antiquity: your devil is your neighbour’s god. Trump is a convenient demon. But his victory won’t make very many countries reconsider their relations with the US. Tactical differences aside, the traditional sites of American preoccupation will remain Eastern Europe, East Asia, the Middle East. The underlying theme for US foreign policy remains elite consensus. In his use of the machinery of American empire and the ideology of perpetual primacy, Trump shares much with his predecessors. Maximum power, maximum pressure – without consoling illusions.

22 November