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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
How different a commander in chief will Trump be?
Analysis by Peter Bergen, CNN
Updated:
5:30 AM EST, Sun November 17, 2024
Source: CNN
“When America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold” is a
saying used to describe how the massive American economy can affect
global businesses, but it also applies to foreign policy in the Trump
era.
President-elect gives him considerable leverage when he is in office to
implement his “America First” policies. Officials in capitals
around the globe are now trying to game out what will change once Trump
is inaugurated.
On the face of it, there are sizable differences in foreign policy
between Trump and President Joe Biden. Trump’s isolationist instincts
mean that he will build walls around the US — whether physically, at
the southern border, or by using tariffs to raise the prices of imports
of foreign goods into the country. Trump will also likely take a
skeptical line on alliances such as NATO, pull out of international
agreements negotiated with dozens of other countries such as the Paris
Climate Agreement, and ration or even end US support for Ukraine in the
war with Russia.
Yet — surprisingly, perhaps — on some critical foreign policy
issues, Trump and the Biden administration are on the same page, and
Trump 2.0 will likely see some important continuities with the Biden
approach when it comes to China, the Middle East and the withdrawal of
US troops who are posted overseas.
China
In his first term, Trump inaugurated a far more combative approach to
China, abandoning the fantasies of previous US administrations that
Beijing would, as it grew economically, also liberalize politically.
Instead, the Trump administration started treating it as a potential
rival, for instance, increasing “freedom of navigation” exercises
in the South China Sea, much of which China claims as its own. The
Trump team also slapped a on thousands of Chinese goods.
When Biden got to the White House, he kept Trump’s more hardline
approach to China in place, and going even further by slapping a on
Chinese electric vehicles and in China by US companies that might
benefit the Chinese military. The Biden administration shored up its
alliances to contain Beijing, such as the 2021 agreement between the
US, the United Kingdom and Australia known as AUKUS, which provides
nuclear-powered submarines to the Australians.
It’s reasonable to assume that in his second term, Trump won’t
stray much from the playbook his first administration inaugurated, a
playbook that was amplified by Biden.
There could be differences between Trump and Biden on China ion the
fate of the democratically governed island of Taiwan, which the Chinese
have long claimed is part of China and which is also a US ally. Biden,
in 2022, publicly that the US would defend Taiwan if China invaded,
abandoning the US policy of which was supposed to keep the Chinese
guessing about how the US might respond if they invaded the island.
An invasion of Taiwan is a problem Trump might have to deal with during
his second term; the CIA believes that China’s President Xi Jinping
has told his People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade by 2027.
(The Chinese could alternatively mount a naval blockade of Taiwan and
slowly strangle the island to get the Taiwanese to agree to a deal that
would make them a quasi-autonomous territory of China.)
What Trump might do if the Chinese invaded Taiwan or blockaded Taiwan
is anyone’s guess. In July, Trump said, “Taiwan should pay us for
defense,” which doesn’t suggest that he would be in any hurry to
send American troops to defend the island if the Chinese invaded or
blockaded it.
Last year, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a
Washington-based think tank, of a Chinese amphibious invasion of
Taiwan. Running the war game 24 times, it concluded, “The United
States and its allies lost dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and
tens of thousands of service members.” Given Trump’s isolationist
instincts, that’s a price he may not want to pay when he is president
The Middle East
In the Middle East, there will likely be a high degree of continuity
between Biden and Trump. Despite Biden’s occasional chastising of
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the civilian casualties
caused by the Israeli military in Gaza, Biden has given Netanyahu more
or less a free hand to do what he wants to do in Gaza against Hamas and
in Lebanon against Iran-backed Hezbollah.
After the in Syria in April, the Biden administration assembled an
international coalition to protect Israel when Iran fired hundreds of
drones and missiles against Israel, strikes that didn’t cause
significant damage in Israel. In October, the Biden administration
again helped to intercept a barrage of around 200 Iranian ballistic
missiles, which also caused minimal damage to targets in Israel.
On Iran, the Biden team made some the Obama administration’s nuclear
deal with the Iranians, but in the end the Biden administration did not
renew the agreement.
In the past year, the Biden team has also repeatedly authorized strikes
against the Iranian-supported Houthis in Yemen. In support of Hamas,
the Houthis are routinely firing drones and missiles targeting shipping
along the critical Red Sea global trade route.
It’s hard to imagine Biden’s “bear hug” of Israel and his
administration’s tough line on Iranian proxies like the Houthis
changing much under Trump.
After all, when he was in office, Trump ignored Israel’s
much-expanded settlement-building in the West Bank. At the same time,
Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner , which established diplomatic
relations between Israel and some Arab states but to the Palestinians.
Trump also ordered the assassination of the top Iranian general, Qasem
Soleimani, when he was visiting Iraq in 2020.
Before the effort was derailed by the October 7, 2023, massacre by
Hamas in Israel and the war in Gaza, the Biden administration was in
the process of the Abraham Accords, brokering a deal where Saudi Arabia
recognized Israel for the first time.
In short, there isn’t much to distinguish Biden and Trump on their
overall policies in the Middle East, even if some of Trump’s
supporters have claimed that Biden is weak on Israel and Iran.
However, the nomination of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to be
Trump’s ambassador to Israel — Huckabee has claimed there is “”
— might indicate more sympathy in a Trump administration than in the
Biden administration for the annexation of parts of the West Bank by
Israel. Indeed, during Trump’s first term, his ambassador to Israel,
David Friedman, said the Trump administration could support Israel if
it of the West Bank.
Also, the indictment last week of an Iranian who was will surely not
endear the Iranians further to the incoming president. Once Trump is in
office, we can expect to see his team ramping up sanctions on Iran,
including trying to curtail its oil sales. The US has been sanctioning
the Iranian regime for decades with negligible effects on the
regime’s behavior. After the Trump administration in 2018 pulled out
of the nuclear deal with Iran, which was preventing the Iranians from
enriching uranium anywhere close to weapons grade, the Iranians now
have enough fissile material for several nuclear weapons, according to
the US Defense Intelligence Agency.
Bringing US troops home
In 2020, the Trump administration signed a from Afghanistan with the
Taliban. Biden went through with that plan in the summer of 2021,
withdrawing the 2,500 US troops that remained in the country and
enabling the Taliban to seize power once again in Afghanistan.
Similarly, the Biden administration has been negotiating the withdrawal
of an unspecified number of the 2,500 US troops in Iraq who are there
to fight what remains of ISIS. Given that Trump has long been skeptical
about the US military presence in the Middle East, this agreement is
likely to continue to go forward.
The big changes coming: Personnel is policy
“Personnel is policy” was a mantra of the Reagan years. Now that
Team Trump is heading back into office, they understand how the foreign
policy and national security apparatus works, which they didn’t at
the beginning of Trump’s first term. They plan to change that at the
senior level and possibly at the level of career foreign service
officers and intelligence officers. In 2021, JD Vance — now vice
president-elect — advised Trump during a podcast appearance to
“fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the
administrative state, replace them with our people.”
In the first Trump term, some top officials, such as his second
national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, influenced Trump to
make sensible decisions, such as reversing Trump’s inclination to
pull all US troops out of Afghanistan. But after McMaster was pushed
out of office in 2018, the Trump administration negotiated with the
Taliban the withdrawal agreement of all US forces from Afghanistan.
There will likely be very few independent voices like McMaster’s in
the incoming administration.
Loyalty is, of course, the supreme virtue in the Trump universe. Trump
publicly nixed his former UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, and his former
secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, from any of the top jobs in his
administration. Haley ran against Trump in the GOP primary, and Pompeo
considered whether he would make a presidential run. Trump is looking
for a team of ultraloyalists, such as senior House Republican Rep.
Elise Stefanik, whom he has offered the role of UN ambassador.
Loyalty to the president is standard practice for members of the
cabinet, and simply because an appointee is loyal to Trump doesn’t
mean that at least some aren’t well qualified for a cabinet role.
Take Trump’s pick to be his national security adviser, Republican
Rep. Mike Waltz of Florida. Waltz is a retired Special Forces colonel
who served in the reserves with multiple tours in Afghanistan. He has
also run a small business; written two books; served for the past five
years in Congress, where he has been an active member of the House
Armed Services Committee; worked in a policy role at the Pentagon; and
worked in the White House during the George W. Bush administration as a
policy adviser on Afghanistan and Pakistan.
All in all, Waltz is about as qualified to be national security adviser
as anyone who had the job in the past, having both fought on the
battlefields of Afghanistan and having a deep understanding of the ways
of Washington, on the Hill, in the Pentagon and at the White House.
(Disclosure: I have known Rep. Waltz for the past decade and half.)
On the other hand, the — a Fox News host who had served in the US
military, retiring as a major, with no experience of running much of
anything other than a small nonprofit — to lead the Pentagon’s
close to 3 million employees is perplexing.
Hegseth is also an odd choice for secretary of defense when you compare
him to some other recent secretaries, such as the retired four-star
generals Lloyd Austin and Jim Mattis, or Robert Gates, who had worked
in various US government roles for decades, including as the director
of the CIA. It will be interesting to see how Hegseth’s nomination
fares in the Senate, where Republicans have a slim majority.
US Civil Servants to become ‘at will’ employees?
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which was largely put
together by Trump administration alumni and the Trump-aligned America
First Policy Institute, outlines plans to ensure loyalists are
appointed at every level in critical national security agencies.
Trump has publicly disavowed Project 2025, but as , at least 140 people
who had worked with him also worked on the project. Tellingly, Project
2025 produced an 887-page report that includes separate chapters on the
State Department, the intelligence community, the Department of
Homeland Security and the Pentagon, all written by officials with
senior positions in the first Trump administration.
These chapters seem to be predicated on the belief that a fifth column
of State Department foreign service officers and US intelligence
officials would stymie a conservative president like Trump at every
turn, so they should be replaced with loyalists.
The America First Policy Institute goes further in its , advocating
that civil servants become “at-will” employees effectively. It
states, “Agencies should be free to remove employees for any
non-discriminatory reason, with no external appeals.”
If this were implemented, every American agency would be staffed with
political loyalists, which would go back to the 19th century before the
US had a merit-based professional civil service standing ready to serve
presidents of either party.
Also, why join the State Department or the CIA and go through all the
trouble of learning difficult languages or mastering arcane disciplines
like arms control negotiations if you could lose your job any time a
new president comes into office?
If the Trump team attempts to remove career foreign service and
intelligence officers, expect to see federal unions fighting in court.
Also, there may be significant resignations in some agencies if
officials feel that their expertise in foreign affairs or work in
intelligence is being seriously undermined.
Nonetheless, the incoming Trump administration seems intent on , an
executive order issued in the last months of the first Trump term.
Schedule F would turn the typical number of around 4,000 political
appointees at the top of every federal agency and instead appoint as
many as 50,000 political appointees, the vast majority of whom would
presumably replace career civil servants.
This seems like a particularly bad idea when it comes to the US
intelligence community, which is paid to tell the president news he may
not want to hear or that doesn’t fit with his preconceptions about
the world. For precisely this reason, typically there are just four
political appointees at the CIA, and similarly small numbers at the
other US intelligence agencies.
The nomination of Trump loyalist former Rep. John Ratcliffe of Texas to
has not generated much criticism, since he is a known quantity to the
US intelligence community, having served on the House Intelligence
Committee and during the first Trump term as the director of national
intelligence, who oversees the 18 American intelligence agencies. But
the nomination of former of Hawaii to be the next director of national
intelligence will surely encounter headwinds, given her past support
for American rivals like Russian President Vladimir Putin and the
Syrian dictator Basher al-Assad, both of whom are key intelligence
collection targets for US spy agencies.
Ukraine and the future of NATO
Trump has said he could get a deal done to in a day. That seems
implausible since Russia and Ukraine have already been fighting for a
decade.
Still, given Trump’s desire to be seen as a great negotiator, perhaps
he could get a deal now that Ukraine is beginning to lose the war to
the Russians. According to a report by the US Congressional Research
Service last month, the average age of Ukrainian soldiers is 40, a
figure that speaks for itself. The Ukrainians also know that the
Republican-controlled Congress will likely not support spending
billions more to fund their war.
Meanwhile, the fact that the Russians are deploying North Korean
soldiers to fight their war against the Ukrainians suggests that Putin
doesn’t want to order the kind of mass mobilization in Russia that
would be unpopular. So he may have his own interests in winding down
the war on terms he deems favorable.
The overall contours of a deal that could end the fighting could be
that Russia keeps Crimea, which it seized in 2014, and Ukraine gets
back some of the territories in eastern Ukraine that Russia has taken.
In return, Ukraine doesn’t get to join NATO, but it does get security
guarantees from the US of the kind that Japan has. Neither the Russians
nor the Ukrainians will be happy with elements of this deal, but the
alternative is a forever war in which already around a million people
on both sides have been killed and wounded.
When it comes to NATO, Trump’s former national security adviser, John
Bolton, told me in 2023 for the “In the Room” that Trump “would
fundamentally reexamine the premise of NATO, which is the predicate for
what I think he would do in a second Trump term, which is withdraw the
United States from NATO itself. But earlier this year, the US for an
American president to pull out of NATO, ensuring that it would take a
supermajority vote in the US Senate, or an act passed by the full
Congress to pull the US out of the alliance.
Yet, Trump can greatly undercut NATO and the reason for its existence,
which is collective self-defense, with his public statements because he
is the commander in chief of the most important country in the
alliance. In February, Trump said he would encourage Russia to do to
any NATO member country that didn’t spend 2 percent of its GDP on its
defense.
Earlier this month, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said that
Putin’s ambitions are greater than just conquering Ukraine: “Russia
is conducting an intensifying campaign of hybrid attacks across our
allied territories, interfering directly in our democracies, sabotaging
industry, and committing violence. … This shows that the shift of the
frontline in this war is no longer solely in Ukraine. Increasingly, the
frontline is moving beyond borders to the Baltic region, to Western
Europe.”
Given Trump’s odd bromance with Russian President Vladimir Putin,
Russia will likely feel empowered to continue these efforts to
undermine NATO countries, knowing Trump may not push back.
Deportations
The announcement last weekend that Tom Homan, an immigration hardliner
who was Trump’s acting director of Immigration and Customs
Enforcement during his first term, will serve as “border czar”
shows that the incoming Trump administration will take a tough line on
deportations. Making the Homan announcement, Trump tweeted that he
“will be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their
Country of Origin.”
When Trump was last in office, his administration separated more from
their families. At a CNN town hall last year, Trump indicated this
policy could return, saying, “When you say to a family that if you
come, we’re going to break you up, they don’t come.”
Trump, of course, has even bigger plans for his second term, including
the of undocumented immigrants. According to estimates from 2022, about
11 million unauthorized migrants were living in the US. The actual
number could be much higher, and Trump has mentioned a figure of 15-20
million illegal immigrants that he plans to deport.
The Trump team will likely begin by deporting those unauthorized
migrants charged with a crime, according to CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez,
but removing all unauthorized migrants will involve significant
logistical, financial and legal hurdles.
The American Immigration Council, a liberal policy group, estimated in
a that it would cost almost a trillion dollars over the next decade to
remove the many millions of illegal immigrants in the US. Where will
this funding come from? Trump said last week in an . “It’s not a
question of a price tag. It’s not — really, we have no choice.”
The Supreme Court has ruled that migrants living in the US are entitled
to due process before they are deported. Migrants awaiting legal
proceedings will need to be held somewhere. Rounding up millions of
migrants and holding millions of hearings will necessitate the hiring
of many immigration agents and judges, not to mention that new
detention facilities will need to be built. To give you a sense of the
scale required, the US Bureau of Prisons said in 2022 that there were
around 1.2 million prisoners in the US.
After Trump won the election, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey said that
she would not allow her state police to be used to deport residents.
Stephen Miller, Trump’s choice to be deputy chief of staff for
policy, has said in the past that the National Guard could be used in
deportations in states where there are uncooperative local governments.
Earlier this year, Trump also told TIME that he would have “no
problem using the military, per se,” for deportations.
TV images of American soldiers detaining and deporting men, women and
children would likely not play well with many Americans.
Tariffs
Both Trump and Biden imposed on goods that are made in China, such as
shoes and luggage, and Biden went a step further by putting 100%
tariffs on Chinese EVs, but Trump has a plan to go even bigger on
taxing imports, promising to put 60% tariffs on all Chinese goods and
10% tariffs on goods imported from anywhere else in the world. Let’s
see what comes of this, since tariffs are a tax on ordinary American
consumers and are inflationary since they drive up prices. Also, it’s
unclear whether Trump could impose tariffs on imports from every
nation, since only the US Congress has the power to tax, while the
president can impose tariffs on countries like China only if they are
engaged in unfair trade practices, according to an analysis by the
Washington Post.
Climate change
Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement a few months into his
first term and, while he was president, told CBS’s “60 Minutes”
that climate change will “change back again” and “I don’t know
that it’s man-made.” Don’t expect anything different in his
second term, even though 2024 is on track to be the hottest year on
record, and the US is the world’s largest oil and gas producer and
its second-largest carbon emitter.
A predictably unpredictable commander in chief
Trump is predictably unpredictable; early in his first term, his
then-national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, for instance, persuaded
Trump to stay the course and not pull all US troops out of Afghanistan.
Then Trump changed his mind and authorized his team to make a
withdrawal deal with the Taliban, at one point even inviting Taliban
leaders to Camp David and then and disinviting them.
It’s not out of the question that Trump, who sees himself as a great
dealmaker, could try to reach an agreement in the Middle East that
would normalize relations between the Saudis and Israelis in exchange
for a genuine two-state solution. Trump could also try to end the war
in Ukraine — if not with a formal peace deal, at least with the kind
of armistice that has prevented conflict on the Korean Peninsula since
the end of the Korean War in 1953.
It’s worth recalling, however, that despite all the much-ballyhooed
summits and that Trump exchanged with the North Korean dictator, Kim
Jong Un, the great dealmaker couldn’t make a deal that eliminated or
even slowed down North Korea’s nuclear program.
What is likely is that Trump will keep in place the tougher policies on
China that he initiated, and that Biden inherited and amplified. In the
Middle East, Trump will largely follow the playbook he followed when he
was president: Israel gets what it wants, a policy Biden has also
followed. On two of the most significant issues facing the United
States, its competition with China and the future course of the Middle
East there will likely be considerable continuities between the two
administrations.
Where Trump will clearly depart from Biden is he that may find ways to
undermine NATO; he will oversee mass deportations of illegal immigrants
possibly involving the US military; he will undercut efforts to slow
climate change; and he might get into a serious trade war with the
world’s second-largest economy, with all the knock-on effects that
might have on the global economy. In short, it will be an isolationist
“America First” approach to the world enforced by Trump loyalists
at all of his agencies.
Fasten your seatbelts!
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