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Could Trump 2.0 End the American Century?
Trump’s second term will almost certainly be one of imperial decline, increasing internal chaos, and a further loss of global leadership.
Nov 20, 2024
Some 15 years ago, on December 5, 2010, a historian writing for TomDispatch made a prediction that may yet prove prescient. Rejecting the consensus of that moment that U.S. global hegemony would persist to 2040 or 2050, he argued that “the demise of the United States as the global superpower could come... in 2025, just 15 years from now.”
To make that forecast, the historian conducted what he called “a more realistic assessment of domestic and global trends.” Starting with the global context, he argued that, “faced with a fading superpower,” China, India, Iran, and Russia would all start to “provocatively challenge U.S. dominion over the oceans, space, and cyberspace.” At home in the United States, domestic divisions would “widen into violent clashes and divisive debates… Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair, a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal.” But, that historian concluded, “the world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.”
Now that a “far-right patriot,” one Donald J. Trump, has indeed captured (or rather recaptured) the presidency “with thundering rhetoric,” let’s explore the likelihood that a second Trump term in office, starting in the fateful year 2025, might actually bring a hasty end, silent or otherwise, to an “American Century” of global dominion.
Making the Original Prediction
Let’s begin by examining the reasoning underlying my original prediction. (Yes, of course, that historian was me.) Back in 2010, when I picked a specific date for a rising tide of American decline, this country looked unassailably strong both at home and abroad. The presidency of Barack Obama was producing a “post-racial” society. After recovering from the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S. was on track for a decade of dynamic growth—the auto industry saved, oil and gas production booming, the tech sector thriving, the stock market soaring, and employment solid. Internationally, Washington was the world’s preeminent leader, with an unchallenged military, formidable diplomatic clout, unchecked economic globalization, and its democratic governance still the global norm.
Looking forward, leading historians of empire agreed that America would remain the world’s sole superpower for the foreseeable future. Writing in the Financial Times in 2002, for instance, Yale professor Paul Kennedy, author of a widely read book on imperial decline, argued that “America’s array of force is staggering,” with a mix of economic, diplomatic, and technological dominance that made it the globe’s “single superpower” without peer in the entire history of the world. Russia’s defense budget had “collapsed” and its economy was “less than that of the Netherlands.” Should China’s high growth rates continue for another 30 years, it “might be a serious challenger to U.S. predominance”—but that wouldn’t be true until 2032, if then. While America’s “unipolar moment” would surely not “continue for centuries,” its end, he predicted, “seems a long way off for now.”
Writing in a similar vein in The New York Times in February 2010, Piers Brendon, a historian of Britain’s imperial decline, dismissed the “doom mongers” who “conjure with Roman and British analogies in order to trace the decay of American hegemony.” While Rome was riven by “internecine strife” and Britain ran its empire on a shoestring budget, the U.S. was “constitutionally stable” with “an enormous industrial base.” Taking a few “relatively simple steps,” he concluded, Washington should be able to overcome current budgetary problems and perpetuate its global power indefinitely.
After the steady erosion of its global power for several decades, America is no longer the—or perhaps even an—“exceptional” nation floating above the deep global currents that shape the politics of most countries.
When I made my very different prediction nine months later, I was coordinating a network of 140 historians from universities on three continents who were studying the decline of earlier empires, particularly those of Britain, France, and Spain. Beneath the surface of this country’s seeming strength, we could already see the telltale signs of decline that had led to the collapse of those earlier empires.
By 2010, economic globalization was cutting good-paying factory jobs here, income inequality was widening, and corporate bailouts were booming—all essential ingredients for rising working-class resentment and deepening domestic divisions. Foolhardy military misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, pushed by Washington elites trying to deny any sense of decline, stoked simmering anger among ordinary Americans, slowly discrediting the very idea of international commitments. And the erosion of America’s relative economic strength from half the world’s output in 1950 to a quarter in 2010 meant the wherewithal for its unipolar power was fading fast.
Only a “near-peer” competitor was needed to turn that attenuating U.S. global hegemony into accelerating imperial decline. With rapid economic growth, a vast population, and the world’s longest imperial tradition, China seemed primed to become just such a country. But back then, Washington’s foreign policy elites thought not and even admitted China to the World Trade Organization (WTO), fully confident, according to two Beltway insiders, that “U.S. power and hegemony could readily mold China to the United States’ liking.”
Our group of historians, mindful of the frequent imperial wars fought when near-peer competitors finally confronted the reigning hegemon of their moment—think Germany versus Great Britain in World War I—fully expected China’s challenge would not be long in coming. Indeed, in 2012, just two years after my prediction, the U.S. National Intelligence Council warned that “China alone will probably have the largest economy, surpassing that of the United States a few years before 2030” and this country would no longer be “a hegemonic power.”
Just a year after that, China’s president, Xi Jinping, drawing on a massive $4 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves accumulated in the decade after joining the WTO, announced his bid for global power through what he called “the Belt and Road Initiative,” history’s largest development program. It was designed to make Beijing the center of the global economy.
In the following decade, the U.S.-China rivalry would become so intense that, last September, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall warned: “I’ve been closely watching the evolution of [China’s] military for 15 years. China is not a future threat; China is a threat today.”
The Global Rise of the Strongman
Another major setback for Washington’s world order, long legitimated by its promotion of democracy (whatever its own dominating tendencies), came from the rise of populist strongmen worldwide. Consider them part of a nationalist reaction to the West’s aggressive economic globalization.
At the close of the Cold War in 1991, Washington became the planet’s sole superpower, using its hegemony to forcefully promote a wide-open global economy—forming the World Trade Organization in 1995, pressing open-market “reforms” on developing economies, and knocking down tariff barriers worldwide. It also built a global communications grid by laying 700,000 miles of fiber-optic submarine cables and then launching 1,300 satellites (now 4,700).
By exploiting that very globalized economy, however, China’s industrial output soared to $3.2 trillion by 2016, surpassing both the U.S. and Japan, while simultaneously eliminating 2.4 million American jobs between 1999 and 2011, ensuring the closure of factories in countless towns across the South and Midwest. By fraying social safety nets while eroding protection for labor unions and local businesses in both the U.S. and Europe, globalization reduced the quality of life for many, while creating inequality on a staggering scale and stoking a working-class reaction that would crest in a global wave of angry populism.
Riding that wave, right-wing populists have been winning a steady succession of elections—in Russia (2000), Israel (2009), Hungary (2010), China (2012), Turkey (2014), the Philippines (2016), the U.S. (2016), Brazil (2018), Italy (2022), the Netherlands (2023), Indonesia (2024), and the U.S. again (2024).
Set aside their incendiary us-versus-them rhetoric, however, and look at their actual achievements and those right-wing demagogues turn out to have a record that can only be described as dismal. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro ravaged the vast Amazon rainforest and left office amid an abortive coup. In Russia, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, sacrificing his country’s economy to capture some more land (which it hardly lacked). In Turkey, Recep Erdogan caused a crippling debt crisis, while jailing 50,000 suspected opponents. In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte murdered 30,000 suspected drug users and courted China by giving up his country’s claims in the resource-rich South China Sea. In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu has wreaked havoc on Gaza and neighboring lands, in part to stay in office and stay out of prison.
Prospects for Donald Trump’s Second Term
After the steady erosion of its global power for several decades, America is no longer the—or perhaps even an—“exceptional” nation floating above the deep global currents that shape the politics of most countries. And as it has become more of an ordinary country, it has also felt the full force of the worldwide move toward strongman rule. Not only does that global trend help explain Trump’s election and his recent reelection, but it provides some clues as to what he’s likely to do with that office the second time around.
In the globalized world America made, there is now an intimate interaction between domestic and international policy. That will soon be apparent in a second Trump administration whose policies are likely to simultaneously damage the country’s economy and further degrade Washington’s world leadership.
As the world shifts to renewable energy and all-electric vehicles, Trump’s policies will undoubtedly do lasting damage to the American economy.
Let’s start with the clearest of his commitments: environmental policy. During the recent election campaign, Trump called climate change “a scam” and his transition team has already drawn up executive orders to exit from the Paris climate accords. By quitting that agreement, the U.S. will abdicate any leadership role when it comes to the most consequential issue facing the international community while reducing pressure on China to curb its greenhouse gas emissions. Since these two countries now account for nearly half (45%) of global carbon emissions, such a move will ensure that the world blows past the target of keeping this planet’s temperature rise to 1.5°C until the end of the century. Instead, on a planet that’s already had 12 recent months of just such a temperature rise, that mark is expected to be permanently reached by perhaps 2029, the year Trump finishes his second term.
On the domestic side of climate policy, Trump promised last September that he would “terminate the Green New Deal, which I call the Green New Scam, and rescind all unspent funds under the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.” On the day after his election, he committed himself to increasing the country’s oil and gas production, telling a celebratory crowd, “We have more liquid gold than any country in the world.” He will undoubtedly also block wind farm leases on Federal lands and cancel the $7,500 tax credit for purchasing an electrical vehicle.
As the world shifts to renewable energy and all-electric vehicles, Trump’s policies will undoubtedly do lasting damage to the American economy. In 2023, the International Renewable Energy Agency reported that, amid continuing price decreases, wind and solar power now generate electricity for less than half the cost of fossil fuels. Any attempt to slow the conversion of this country’s utilities to the most cost-effective form of energy runs a serious risk of ensuring that American-made products will be ever less competitive.
To put it bluntly, he seems to be proposing that electricity users here should pay twice as much for their power as those in other advanced nations. Similarly, as relentless engineering innovation makes electric vehicles cheaper and more reliable than petrol-powered ones, attempting to slow such an energy transition is likely to make the U.S. auto industry uncompetitive, at home and abroad.
Calling tariffs “the greatest thing ever invented,” Trump has proposed slapping a 20% duty on all foreign goods and 60% on those from China. In another instance of domestic-foreign synergy, such duties will undoubtedly end up crippling American farm exports, thanks to retaliatory overseas tariffs, while dramatically raising the cost of consumer goods for Americans, stoking inflation, and slowing consumer spending.
Reflecting his aversion to alliances and military commitments, Trump’s first foreign policy initiative will likely be an attempt to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine. During a CNN town hall in May 2023, he claimed he could stop the fighting “in 24 hours.” Last July, he added: “I would tell [Ukraine’s president] Zelenskyy, no more. You got to make a deal.”
Just two days after the November election, according toThe Washington Post, Trump reputedly told Russian President Vladimir Putin in a telephone call, “not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of Washington’s sizable military presence in Europe.” Drawing on sources inside the Trump transition team, The Wall Street Journalreported that the new administration is considering “cementing Russia’s seizure of 20% of Ukraine” and forcing Kyiv to forego its bid to join NATO, perhaps for as long as 20 years.
With Russia drained of manpower and its economy pummeled by three years of bloody warfare, a competent negotiator (should Trump actually appoint one) might indeed be able to bring a tenuous peace to a ravaged Ukraine. Since it has been Europe’s frontline of defense against a revanchist Russia, the continent’s major powers would be expected to play a significant role. But Germany’s coalition government has just collapsed; French president Emmanuel Macron is crippled by recent electoral reverses; and the NATO alliance, after three years of a shared commitment to Ukraine, faces real uncertainty with the advent of a Trump presidency.
America’s Allies
Those impending negotiations over Ukraine highlight the paramount importance of alliances for U.S. global power. For 80 years, from World War II through the Cold War and beyond, Washington relied on bilateral and multilateral alliances as a critical force multiplier. With China and Russia both rearmed and increasingly closely aligned, reliable allies have become even more important to maintaining Washington’s global presence. With 32 member nations representing a billion people and a commitment to mutual defense that has lasted 75 years, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is arguably the most powerful military alliance in all of modern history.
Yet Trump has long been sharply critical of it. As a candidate in 2016, he called the alliance “obsolete.” As president, he mocked the treaty’s mutual-defense clause, claiming even “tiny” Montenegro could drag the U.S. into war. While campaigning last February, he announced that he would tell Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to a NATO ally that didn’t pay what he considered its fair share.
Right after Trump’s election, caught between what one analyst called “an aggressively advancing Russia and an aggressively withdrawing America,” French President Macron insisted that the continent needed to be a “more united, stronger, more sovereign Europe in this new context.” Even if the new administration doesn’t formally withdraw from NATO, Trump’s repeated hostility, particularly toward its crucial mutual-defense clause, may yet serve to eviscerate the alliance.
In the Asia-Pacific region, the American presence rests on three sets of overlapping alliances: the AUKUS entente with Australia and Britain, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (with Australia, India, and Japan), and a chain of bilateral defense pacts stretching along the Pacific littoral from Japan through Taiwan to the Philippines. Via careful diplomacy, the Biden administration strengthened those alliances, bringing two wayward allies, Australia and the Philippines that had drifted Beijing-wards, back into the Western fold. Trump’s penchant for abusing allies and, as in his first term, withdrawing from multilateral pacts is likely to weaken such ties and so American power in the region.
Although his first administration famously waged a trade war with Beijing, Trump’s attitude toward the island of Taiwan is bluntly transactional. “I think, Taiwan should pay us for defense,” he said last June, adding: “You know, we’re no different than an insurance company. Taiwan doesn’t give us anything.” In October, he toldThe Wall Street Journal that he would not have to use military force to defend Taiwan because China’s President Xi “respects me and he knows I’m f—— crazy.” Bluster aside, Trump, unlike his predecessor Joe Biden, has never committed himself to defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack.
Should Beijing indeed attack Taiwan outright or, as appears more likely, impose a crippling economic blockade on the island, Trump seems unlikely to risk a war with China. The loss of Taiwan would break the U.S. position along the Pacific littoral, for 80 years the fulcrum of its global imperial posture, pushing its naval forces back to a “second island chain” running from Japan to Guam. Such a retreat would represent a major blow to America’s imperial role in the Pacific, potentially making it no longer a significant player in the security of its Asia-Pacific allies.
A Silent U.S. Recessional
Adding up the likely impact of Donald Trump’s policies in this country, Asia, Europe, and the international community generally, his second term will almost certainly be one of imperial decline, increasing internal chaos, and a further loss of global leadership. As “respect for American authority” fades, Trump may yet resort to “threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal.” But as I predicted back in 2010, it seems quite likely that “the world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.”
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What Will US Wars Look Like in Trump's Hands?
The team that Trump has assembled seems to offer some hope for an end to fighting in Ukraine, but little to none for peace in the Middle East and a rising danger of a U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.
Nov 13, 2024
When Donald Trump takes office on January 20th, all his campaign promises to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours and almost as quickly end Israel’s war on its neighbors will be put to the test. The choices he has made for his incoming administration so far, from Marco Rubio as Secretary of State to Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor, Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense and Elise Stefanik as UN Ambassador make for a rogues gallery of saber-rattlers.
The only conflict where peace negotiations seem to be on the agenda is Ukraine. In April, both Vice President-elect JD Vance and Senator Marco Rubio voted against a $95 billion military aid bill that included $61 billion for Ukraine.
Rubio recently appeared on NBC’s Today Show saying, “I think the Ukrainians have been incredibly brave and strong when standing up to Russia. But at the end of the day, what we’re funding here is a stalemate war, and it needs to be brought to a conclusion… I think there has to be some common sense here.”
On the campaign trail, Vance made a controversial suggestion that the best way to end the war was for Ukraine to cede the land Russia has seized, for a demilitarized zone to be established, and for Ukraine to become neutral, i.e. not enter NATO. He was roundly criticized by both Republicans and Democrats who argue that backing Ukraine is vitally important to U.S. security since it weakens Russia, which is closely allied with China.
Any attempt by Trump to stop U.S. military support for Ukraine will undoubtedly face fierce opposition from the pro-war forces in his own party, particularly in Congress, as well as perhaps the entirety of the Democratic Party. Two years ago, 30 progressive Democrats in Congress wrote a letter to President Biden asking him to consider promoting negotiations. The party higher ups were so incensed by their lack of party discipline that they came down on the progressives like a ton of bricks. Within 24 hours, the group had cried uncle and rescinded the letter. They have since all voted for money for Ukraine and have not uttered another word about negotiations.
Any attempt by Trump to stop U.S. military support for Ukraine will undoubtedly face fierce opposition from the pro-war forces in his own party, particularly in Congress, as well as perhaps the entirety of the Democratic Party.
So a Trump effort to cut funds to Ukraine could run up against a bipartisan congressional effort to keep the war going. And let’s not forget the efforts by European countries, and NATO, to keep the U.S. in the fight. Still, Trump could stand up to all these forces and push for a rational policy that would restart the talking and stop the killing.
The Middle East, however, is a more difficult situation. In his first term, Trump showed his pro-Israel cards when he brokered the Abraham accords between several Arab countries and Israel; moved the U.S. embassy to a location in Jerusalem that is partly on occupied land outside Israel’s internationally recognized borders; and recognized the occupied Golan Heights in Syria as part of Israel. Such unprecedented signals of unconditional U.S. support for Israel’s illegal occupation and settlements helped set the stage for the current crisis.
Trump seems as unlikely as Biden to cut U.S. weapons to Israel, despite public opinion polls favoring such a halt and a recent UN human rights report showing that 70% of the people killed by those U.S. weapons are women and children.
Meanwhile, the wily Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is already busy getting ready for a second Trump presidency. On the very day of the U.S. election, Netanyahu fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, who opposed a lasting Israeli military occupation of Gaza and had at times argued for prioritizing the lives of the Israeli hostages over killing more Palestinians.
Trump seems as unlikely as Biden to cut U.S. weapons to Israel, despite public opinion polls favoring such a halt and a recent UN human rights report showing that 70% of the people killed by those U.S. weapons are women and children.
Israel Katz, the new defense minister and former foreign minister, is more hawkish than Gallant, and has led a campaign to falsely blame Iran for the smuggling of weapons from Jordan into the West Bank.
Other powerful voices, national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is also a “minister in the Defense Ministry,” represent extreme Zionist parties that are publicly committed to territorial expansion, annexation and ethnic cleansing. They both live in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
So Netanyahu has deliberately surrounded himself with allies who back his ever-escalating war. They are surely developing a war plan to exploit Trump’s support for Israel, but will first use the unique opportunity of the U.S. transition of power to create facts on the ground that will limit Trump’s options when he takes office.
The Israelis will doubtless redouble their efforts to drive Palestinians out of as much of Gaza as possible, confronting President Trump with a catastrophic humanitarian crisis in which Gaza’s surviving population is crammed into an impossibly small area, with next to no food, no shelter for many, disease running rampant, and no access to needed medical care for tens of thousands of horribly wounded and dying people.
The Israelis will count on Trump to accept whatever final solution they propose, most likely to drive Palestinians out of Gaza, into the West Bank, Jordan, Egypt and farther afield.
Israel threatened all along to do to Lebanon the same as they have done to Gaza. Israeli forces have met fierce resistance, taken heavy casualties, and have not advanced far into Lebanon. But, as in Gaza, they are using bombing and artillery to destroy villages and towns, kill or drive people north and hope to effectively annex the part of Lebanon south of the Litani river as a so-called “buffer zone.” When Trump takes office, they may ask for greater U.S. involvement to help them “finish the job.”
The big wild card is Iran. Trump’s first term in office was marked by a policy of “maximum pressure” against Tehran. He unilaterally withdrew America from the Iran nuclear deal, imposed severe sanctions that devastated the economy, and ordered the killing of the country’s top general. Trump did not support a war on Iran in his first term, but had to be talked out of attacking Iran in his final days in office by General Mark Milley and the Pentagon.
Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, recently described to Chris Hedges just how catastrophic a war with Iran would be, based on U.S.military wargames he was involved in.
Wilkerson predicts that a U.S. war on Iran could last for ten years, cost $10 trillion and still fail to conquer Iran. Airstrikes alone would not destroy all of Iran’s civilian nuclear program and ballistic missile stockpiles. So, once unleashed, the war would very likely escalate into a regime change war involving U.S. ground forces, in a country with three or four times the territory and population of Iraq, more mountainous terrain and a thousand mile long coastline bristling with missiles that can sink U.S. warships.
But Netanyahu and his extreme Zionist allies believe that they must sooner or later fight an existential war with Iran if they are to realize their vision of a dominant Greater Israel. And they believe that the destruction they have wreaked on the Palestinians in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, including the assassination of their senior leaders, has given them a military advantage and a favorable opportunity for a showdown with Iran.
By November 10, Trump and Netanyahu had reportedly spoken on the phone three times since the election, and Netanyahu said that they see “eye to eye on the Iranian threat.” Trump has already hired Iran hawk Brian Hook, who helped him sabotage the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018, to coordinate the formation of his foreign policy team.
So far, the team that Trump and Hook have assembled seems to offer some hope for peace in Ukraine, but little to none for peace in the Middle East and a rising danger of a U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.
Trump’s expected National Security Advisor Mike Waltz is best known as a China hawk. He has voted against military aid to Ukraine in Congress, but he recently tweeted that Israel should bomb Iran’s nuclear and oil facilities, the most certain path to a full-scale war.
Trump’s new UN ambassador, Elise Stefanik, has led moves in Congress to equate criticism of Israel with anti-semitism, and she led the aggressive questioning of American university presidents at an anti-semitism hearing in Congress, after which the presidents of Harvard and Penn resigned.
So, while Trump will have some advisors who support his desire to end the war in Ukraine, there will be few voices in his inner circle urging caution over Netanyahu’s genocidal ambitions in Palestine and his determination to cripple Iran.
If he wanted to, President Biden could use his final two months in office to de-escalate the conflicts in the Middle East. He could impose an embargo on offensive weapons for Israel, push for serious ceasefire negotiations in both Gaza and Lebanon, and work through U.S. partners in the Gulf to de-escalate tensions with Iran.
But Biden is unlikely to do any of that. When his own administration sent a letter to Israel last month, threatening a cut in military aid if Israel did not allow a surge of humanitarian aid into Gaza in the next 30 days, Israel responded by doing just the opposite–actually cutting the number of trucks allowed in. The State Department claimed Israel was taking “steps in the right direction” and Biden refused to take any action.
We will soon see if Trump is able to make progress in moving the Ukraine war towards negotiations, potentially saving the lives of many thousands of Ukrainians and Russians. But between the catastrophe that Trump will inherit and the warhawks he is picking for his cabinet, peace in the Middle East seems more distant than ever.
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What to Expect From Trump’s Foreign and Military Policies: Old and New Dangers
What do we really know about Trump’s foreign and military commitments, about his acolytes who are jostling for position and influence, and what do we think the tyrant will actually do?
Nov 11, 2024
On the morning of November 6, many of us woke to the reality that what we thought of as our nation was even more corrupt and dangerous than we had realized. Manipulated by oligarchs and frustrated by status quo Democrats, a majority of the U.S. electorate embraced and voted for a fascist, racist, rapist, convicted felon, compulsive liar, insurrectionist, would-be dictator.
Understandably, in the first days after the election of a man who pledged retribution against his enemies, promised the deportation of undocumented immigrants, and who told supporters that this was the last time they would need to vote, discourse and debate focused on a postmortem of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’ defeat. Yet, as we debate how best to protect people threatened by deportation and racist attacks, democratic values, culture, and institutions, Donald Trump’s return to power has enormous global ramifications. There are the not so small questions about how to keep the narcissist’s finger off the nuclear button? How best to win cease-fires and just peace negotiations in Gaza and Ukraine? And how to prevent avoidable wars with China, Russia, and North Korea?
Fears abound. Trump’s admiration of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Xiaoping have Ukraine, Europe, and people across the Indo-Pacific region facing an uncertain future. Trump will not be able to end the Ukraine War within 24 hours as he promised, but under Putin’s escalating attacks, now augmented by fresh if ill-trained North Korean troops and swarms of attack drones, we again face the question of how much of Ukraine he will seize? Will Trump’s expressed doubts about the U.S. commitment to NATO and his threatened tariffs lead to a profound disruption in U.S.-European relations and renewed European commitments to create a fourth military superpower? Will Trump’s embrace of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s racist Gaza genocide facilitate complete ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank and join attacks on Iran’s nuclear and oil production infrastructures? Will the killing of North Korean forces with U.S. weapons in Kursk reignite the Korean War? And could a Russian victory in Ukraine lead China, in time, to invade or blockade Taiwan?
With such an escalation in U.S. military spending, we can forget financing climate resilience, or the housing needed by Trump’s working-class base.
In this uncertain time, what do we really know about Trump’s foreign and military commitments, about his acolytes who are jostling for position and influence, and what do we think the tyrant will actually do? An August 2024 Foreign Policy article named contending voices among Trump’s key “national security” advisers along with thumbnail sketches of their backgrounds and policy commitments. The article began with Elbridge Colby, an arrogant hardline deputy assistant secretary of defense in the last Trump administration. Colby is perhaps the “loudest” voice seeking “a complete shift from Europe, NATO, and Russia and toward the growing challenge from China.” Fred Fleitz, once a protégé of the notorious John Bolton, is among the most ideologically right-wing MAGA figures in Trump’s national security orbit. Ric Grenell was Trump’s ambassador to Germany and was closely aligned with neo-fascist European leaders including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Marine Le Pen, and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. He once threatened to withdraw all U.S. forces from Germany (something that many in the German peace movement would applaud), and as special envoy to the Balkans he was accused of engineering the collapse of the Kosovo government. Robert Lighthizer and Peter Navarro (the latter just released from prison) are the leading trade war and tariff advocates, with China their number one, but not only, target.
There is a host of other America Firsters who may be visited upon the world, including a raft of nuclear weapons and war planners in the nation’s think tanks who have been competing with one another to publish the most hawkish revisions of U.S. nuclear war planning.
That said, Robert C. O’Brien, Trump’s last national security adviser, may prove to be the most influential of Trump’s foreign and military policy advisers. There is a tradition of senior advisers to presidential aspirants outlining their foreign and military policy commitments in the pages of Foreign Affairs, and this year that honor fell to O’Brien.
In the July/August edition of Foreign Affairs, O’Brien published an article titled “The Return of Peace Through Strength: Making the Case for Trump’s Foreign Policy.” Having been tapped, but not yet confirmed, to become either Trump’s next national security adviser or secretary of state, we would do well to take O’Brien’s observations and commitments seriously. Here is a summary of what O’Brien tells us.
First and foremost, O’Brien reports that “Trump adheres not to dogma but to his own instincts.” Trump is given to whims, and his transactional approach to deal making, which makes it impossible to precisely predict what Trump will do. As The New York Times also reported, “He has often said that keeping the world guessing is his ideal foreign policy.”
Even as Trump has denigrated U.S. alliances, O’Brien reminds us that “Trump never canceled or postponed a single deployment to NATO. His pressure on NATO governments to spend more on defense made the alliance stronger.”
Trump’s goal in the Middle East may be the same as Biden’s: a Saudi-Israel entente, targeted against Iran, and backed by a new U.S.-Saudi military alliance complimenting the one already in place with Jerusalem.
Further O’Brien asserts that “Ameria first is not America alone.” From this perspective, Trump’s threat to “encourage” the Russians “to do whatever the hell they want” to nations that fail to meet NATO’s 2% of GDP military spending goal can be read as simply a coercive fundraising strategy. Worth noting too is that under pressure from a second Trump administration, 2% could become a very taxing 3%, resulting in still greater reductions in spending on essential social services.
Addressing the Ukraine War, O’Brien pledges that Trump will continue to support lethal aid but insists that it must be paid for by Europeans, while keeping the door open for diplomacy with Russia. Out-manned and out-gunned, European support may enable Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to hold out against Russian advances for up to a year, but the longer Zelensky holds out with his overly ambitious demands before initiating a cease-fire and returning to peace negotiations, the greater the danger for all Ukrainians. Trump will not have Zelensky’s back, even as conservative Poles warn Trump that Warsaw is next on the Kremlin’s menu.
O’Brien’s answer: NATO will rotate ground and air forces to Poland, and “the alliance will defend all its territory from foreign aggression.”
Contrary to the ostensible U.S. tradition of valuing human rights, and with little regard for the company the United States keeps, O’Brien advises that “the administration undermines its own putative mission when it questions the democratic bona fides of conservative elected leaders in countries allied with the United States.” For example: Jair Bolsonaro (formerly of Brazil), Orban (Hungary), Netanyahu (Israel) and Andrzej Duda (Poland.) By this same logic, Vladimir Putin can point to his election as Russia’s president, even if it came by way of assassinations and rigged national polls. And Xi Xiaoping can point to his apparent, if enforced, national popularity.
Consistent with all of Trump’s foreign and military advisers, President Joe Biden’s national security strategy, and congressional China hawks, is O’Brien’s warning that China is “a formidable military and economic adversary.” Xi, O’Brien believes, “is China’s most dangerous leader since the murderous Mao Zedong. And China has yet to be held to account for the Covid-19 pandemic.” It is “pablum,” O’Brien states “to believe that China is not truly an adversary.” Therefore, the United States should “focus its Pacific diplomacy on allies such as Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea... [and] traditional partners such as Singapore and emerging ones such as Indonesia and Vietnam.” Washington, O’Brien urges should also “seek to decouple its economy from China’s” with a 60% tariff on Chinese goods and tougher export controls on technology. Since the publication of O’Brien’s article, Trump has threatened tariffs of up to 200%, which would punish U.S. consumers far more than China’s economy.
Bolstering these alliances, which may be tested by “America First” arrogance, values, and financial burden-sharing demands, O’Brien argues that the Navy should move an aircraft carrier from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and move the “entire Marine Corps to the Pacific” (later clarified to be operational troops, not administrative forces). The Navy should increase its ambitions to creating a 355-ship fleet, adding more stealthy nuclear armed Virginia class submarines and Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines. Congress should fund all 100 planned B-21s, as well as 256 strategic bombers he believes are needed to continue containing China. With such an escalation in U.S. military spending, we can forget financing climate resilience, or the housing needed by Trump’s working-class base.
Over the next two-and-a-half months, Biden could, but will not, do much to limit the damage Trump will wreak.
Not to be forgotten is Trump’s urging of Netanyahu to finish the job in Gaza. So too the Trump family ties to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, and Trump’s hatred of Iran that led to his sabotaging the JCPOA nuclear deal with Teheran. O’Brien writes that in the Middle East, the U.S. should exert “maximum pressure” on Iran. “The truest source of the Palestine-Israel conflict” he argues is not the dispossession and oppression of Palestinians, but Iran. He informs us that the Trump administration will “[b]ack Israel to eliminate Hamas, not pressure Israel to return to negotiations for a long-term solution.” Trump’s goal in the Middle East may be the same as Biden’s: a Saudi-Israel entente, targeted against Iran, and backed by a new U.S.-Saudi military alliance complimenting the one already in place with Jerusalem. But as Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken learned, this agenda has its contradictions. The vast majority of the Arabian people identify with and support Palestinian resistance to the genocide. And the Saudi monarchy believes that it could be overthrown if it officially recognizes Israel before credible processes are in place for a two-state solution to the century-old conflict.
If there was little discussion about foreign and military policies during the election campaign, there was even less said about their nuclear dimensions. The reality is that we are facing the greatest danger of nuclear war since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Leading the way has been the Kremlin’s nuclear saber rattling and its reduction of its threshold for nuclear weapons use. The past few weeks have seen back-to-back U.S. and Russian nuclear war games and a demonstration North Korean ICBM missile test. The U.S., its allies, China, and Russia are continuing provocative and confrontational military exercises in the South and East China Seas and around Taiwan in which an accident or miscalculation could easily escalate to the unthinkable. If this weren’t sufficient reason for concern, all of the nuclear weapons states are upgrading their nuclear arsenals and delivery systems—the U.S. at a cost of $1.7 trillion. And militarist forces in Iran, Japan, and South Korea are all pressing for their nations to become nuclear powers.
The Trump response? Pour more oil on the fire. O’Brien says that the U.S. should be “test[Ing] new nuclear weapons for reliability... in the real world” and resuming “production of uranium 235 and plutonium 239.” O’Brien also reminds readers that we came much closer to nuclear war during Trump’s 2017 Fire and Fury Korean threats than most people understand.
And then there is the climate emergency. Trump will further endanger this and future generations by again withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement, burning fossil fuel regulations, and defunding green energy initiatives. This will further isolate the United States from the civilized world while it will ironically provide a powerful boost to China’s soft power diplomacy.
Over the next two-and-a-half months, Biden could, but will not, do much to limit the damage Trump will wreak: He could order revision of the U.S. nuclear weapons and war doctrine by ordering a No First Use doctrine. He could halt weapons deliveries to Israel unless Netanyahu agrees to cease-fires and negotiations for Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. He could insist that Ukraine revise the legitimate but unachievable demands it makes of Russia before reengaging in cease-fire and peace negotiations. A neutral Ukraine with credible international security guarantees and putting resolution of the territorial disputes on the diplomatic shelf for future resolution remains possible. And like President George H.W. Bush did with the Soviets at the end of the last Cold War, he could take limited unilateral actions like reducing the almost daily provocative military exercises in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, and in relation to North Korea to engender common security reciprocal actions.
Of course, Donald Trump and his minions could reverse any such initiatives, but the geopolitical landscape would be transformed, with heavy political and diplomatic lifting required to put Trump’s foreign and military ambitions back on track.
In this new time, we will need to be thoughtful, and much more strategic—thinking more critically about our assumptions and campaigning—and we must keep our eyes on the proverbial prize as we create new ways to defend people, the climate, and democratic values and culture.
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