It was only four months ago that President Biden invited America’s NATO allies to Washington to celebrate the 75th anniversary of their alliance, the symbol of an era of American global leadership that once was celebrated as a cornerstone of democracy and the best way to keep the peace among great powers.
President-elect Donald J. Trump has made no secret of his desire to oversee the destruction of that world order. In his first term, he really didn’t know how, and his moves were countered by an entrenched establishment.
Now, he has made clear, he has the knowledge, the motivation and a plan.
If Mr. Trump makes good on the promises of his campaign, the age of largely free trade will be replaced with tariffs — the “most beautiful word” in the English language, he argues, with no reference to the fact that the approach contributed to the Great Depression.
Some democratic allies may still fall under the protection of America’s nuclear umbrella, but it will be more a matter of the new president’s whims than any treaty obligations. During the campaign, Mr. Trump famously said he would “encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to NATO members that did not contribute enough. Even if the United States remains, on paper, one of the key members of the Atlantic alliance, Mr. Trump’s public musings on whether he will fulfill the treaty obligations Washington signed up to in 1949 could be enough to corrode the institution from the inside.
Moreover, the American mission that George W. Bush declared at his second inaugural, almost two decades ago, “to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture,” is now officially over.
For the past four years, President Biden has been arguing that the first Trump term was a blip in American history, not a turning point. At his first meeting of the nation’s closest allies, he declared that “America is back,” and promised to restore a world in which the United States could be relied upon.
In Mr. Biden’s telling, he proved the point as America rallied the West to stand up to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and rush to the defense of Ukraine.
But the election has proved that Mr. Trump was no aberration. Whether his America First ethos comes to define the era depends in large part on how he blends his isolationist rhetoric with his instinctual desire to be the central player of his time.
“During his first term, Trump often talked like he wanted to be through with the tradition of U.S. leadership,” Hal Brands, a Cold War historian at Johns Hopkins University, said. “He often acted as though he was recalibrating it. What concerns many U.S. allies is the fear that the second term will be the purer, unadulterated version of America First, with all the destabilizing consequences that would bring.”
The essential difference that Mr. Trump embodies is this: Presidents from Harry Truman to Mr. Biden have largely viewed America’s allies as a force multiplier. Mr. Trump views those alliances as a burden, often declaring that he doesn’t understand why the United States would defend nations with whom Washington has a trade deficit. He professed, in his first term, to reject the concept that Europe was a bulwark against the Soviet Union and, later, Russia. Or that Japan was America’s aircraft carrier in the Pacific; or that South Korea is key to containing North Korea.
When Mr. Trump left Washington on Jan. 20, 2021, seemingly in disgrace, Mr. Biden immediately declared that he was restoring America’s traditional role. His signature achievements mostly involved expanding the map of alliances.
“We start with the problem that we need to solve and we work back from there — assembling the group of partners that’s the right size and the right shape to address it,” Mr. Biden’s secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, explained last year.
There was a new partnership between Australia, Britain and the United States, built around a prospective fleet of nuclear-powered submarines, to contain an expansionist China. There was a bigger NATO, revived relationships with the Philippines and India, and a new partnership between Tokyo and Seoul, two American allies who barely spoke, much less planned joint military exercises.
Now the question is whether Mr. Trump will adapt any of those changes, taking them in as his own, much the way Mr. Biden tried — largely unsuccessfully — to expand the Abraham Accords in the Middle East, the one element of Trump foreign policy that his aides occasionally praised.
The first test will likely come in Ukraine. Mr. Trump and his running mate, Vice President-elect JD Vance, regularly hinted at cutting off the tens of billions of dollars in American aid, and Mr. Trump insisted that if there had only been “a deal” over land, the war never would have happened. Ukrainian officials fully expect Mr. Trump to try to force that deal — perhaps declaring that Mr. Putin can keep the 20 percent or so of the country he is already occupying. That may force President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to give up the territory — or risk a total cutoff of American military and intelligence aid.
If so, it would send a message across Europe that all international boundaries are negotiable. And no foreign leader would be watching more carefully than President Xi Jinping of China, who may well conclude that what worked for Mr. Putin in Ukraine would work for him on Taiwan.
Whatever he chooses, Mr. Trump will discover that he is operating in a far more complex era than four years ago. During the campaign, he uttered not a single word about the biggest change in geopolitics in the past few years: the growing and sometimes ominous partnership between Russia and China.
When Mr. Trump talks about the two countries, it is usually in the most simplistic terms. He speaks warmly about his relationship with Mr. Putin, with whom Mr. Biden has not spoken in nearly three years, and threatens China with crippling tariffs and declares that Mr. Xi won’t take Taiwan because he “respects me and he knows I’m crazy,” using an expletive for emphasis.
It is a mystery how Mr. Trump will deal with the relationship between the two men, who have spent hundreds of hours together in more than 50 meetings. But it is clear that both Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi think they can play to Mr. Trump’s vanities — Mr. Putin by praising his strength, Mr. Xi by dangling trade deals that he thinks will distract Mr. Trump from the scope of China’s military and technological investments.
“The essence of Trump’s approach to foreign policy — naked transactionalism — remains unchanged,” Peter Feaver, a professor at Duke University who served on the National Security Council during the Bush administration, wrote on Wednesday in Foreign Affairs. “But the context in which he will try to carry out his idiosyncratic form of deal making has changed dramatically: The world today is a far more dangerous place than it was during his first term.”
Mr. Trump’s campaign, he notes, was full of “magical realism: a set of fanciful boasts and shallow nostrums that refected no genuine understanding of the threats the United States faces.”
As Mr. Trump faces those issues, one thing is clear: 2025 will not be a repeat of 2017. When he first arrived in the White House, uncertain how to deal with the world around him, Mr. Trump reached for men — they were nearly all men — who he said looked like “they came out of central casting.” There was Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon Mobil chief executive, and Jim Mattis, the former general who attracted Mr. Trump because his troops had called him “Mad Dog.” (Mr. Mattis hated the moniker.) And there was a succession of four national security advisers, the first of whom lasted less than a month.
Most of these advisers hoped they could contain and channel Mr. Trump; they tried to modify his impulses and turn them into coherent policy. Most failed, most got fired and most denounced him during the recent campaign as unfit to be returned to office. (The most outspoken, the retired general John F. Kelly, who served as White House chief of staff, concluded that Mr. Trump met the definition of a fascist, and had no understanding of the limits the Constitution places on a president.)
This time around, Mr. Trump has made clear he has no intention of hiring establishment figures who might argue with him or slow-walk his demands. He wants loyalists who will serve his agenda, and will learn to roll with a president who believes his greatest power is convincing allies and adversaries alike that he could strike out in any direction.
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