World Politics After Trump's Second Term

Spoiler alert: it ain't good.

Photo by Lee Lawson on Unsplash

A few months ago the good folks at POLITICO asked me to sketch out what the world would look like in 2050 if Trump was elected to a second term this November. And I’m not gonna lie, the first thing that popped into my head was this scene:

However, I then took their assignment more seriously. Four thousand words later, they have run it in their “Department of the Future” section in honor of the upcoming NATO Summit in Washington, DC. If I had been given the ability to title it, I probably would have chosen some variation of “We’re All Fucked.” POLITICO’s editors, in their infinite wisdom, opted not to give me that power and entitled it, “Trump’s Impact on World Affairs Could Be Even Stranger Than You Think.”

You should obviously read the whole thing, as the bulk of the essay deals with the considerable foreign policy fallout from an unconstrained second-term Trump. The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World, however, thought it was worth stressing three things about this essay in particular.

The first is that I did not make any heroic assumptions in sketching out what Trump’s second-term foreign policy would look like — I merely assumed that Trump would attempt to fulfill his campaign promises:

I started with a few basic assumptions, the most important one being that Trump would do what he’s currently been promising on the campaign trail and to his political donors: cease all aid for Ukraine, withdraw the United States from NATO because allies aren’t meeting spending targets, implement across-the-board tariff increases, deport immigrants and militarize the immigration system, and use military force against drug cartels in Latin America. Oh, and impose plenty of corporate tax cuts. I also assume that if Trump is reelected he would benefit from GOP majorities in both houses of Congress.

Finally, and more generally, I assume that Trump and his supporters mean what they say when they rubbish the current U.S. security and economic architecture for the world.

Second, an understated theme in the essay is the cognitive dissonance between the now-mainstream GOP desire to return to their interwar foreign policy perspective — and the catastrophic results that foreign policy paradigm actually had on world politics:

The result would be a United States foreign policy and political economy that would bear a striking resemblance to the period between World War I and World War II — what’s usually called the interwar period. Key Trump supporters valorize this era in American history, and Trump himself borrowed the era’s “America First” slogan. During the 1920s, in the wake of an unpopular war and devastating influenza pandemic, the Republican Party opposed an activist foreign policy while supporting the highest tariffs and strictest immigration limits in American history.

For anyone familiar with the interwar era, the GOP nostalgia for this period of history is more than a little bizarre. Their preferred U.S. foreign economic policy contributed to a buildup of global macroeconomic imbalances that helped trigger the stock market crash of 1929. The economic isolationism behind the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff helped turn the 1929 financial crisis into a decadelong Great Depression — a well-known impact that Trump himself has tried to downplay. And, rather infamously, U.S. appeasement sentiment facilitated the rise of fascism across the globe in what became World War II….

Of course, this GOP nostalgia for isolationism, like most forms of nostalgia, is not entirely tethered to reality:

With the weakening of security commitments to both Europe and the Pacific Rim, the United States would instead focus on its own backyard. Remember, even though the term is directed at him a lot, Trump is not an isolationist — he is a mercantilist who prefers using force in this hemisphere.

This offers another parallel to the interwar era. Despite claims that Republicans disdained the use of force during this period, the U.S. Military Intervention Project Dataset reveals otherwise. Between 1921 and 1933, during the Harding, Coolidge and Hoover administrations, the U.S. deployed or supported military force to the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras (three times), Mexico, Nicaragua and Panama.

A reprise of this behavior under Trump is quite likely. Trump and other Republicans have already repeatedly and publicly supported the kinetic use of force in multiple Latin American countries in an attempt to stem inward flows of migrants and drugs like fentanyl. It is not difficult to envision Trump dispatching U.S. expeditionary forces across Central and South America to take on the drug cartels and disrupt migration northward. Fears of Chinese influence in Western Hemisphere countries like Cuba and Venezuela would only incentivize military action further. Indeed, the odds are excellent that this would be the branding of the Trump Doctrine: “Stay the hell out of our hemisphere!”

Finally, I consider the Trump foreign policy team’s convictions that credible commitments are for suckers and the liberal international order is shopworn and worth rubbishing — mostly to point out the abject absurdity of their convictions:

A long decade of U.S. foreign policy waffling would likely be enough to persuade most U.S. allies to more actively pursue hedging strategies and alternative security arrangements. Any attempt by U.S. officials to reassure allies would be undermined by the mass exodus of U.S. foreign policy personnel that Trump officials would encourage upon taking office. A second Trump administration’s tariff, investment and immigration restrictions — not to mention migrant internment camps and likely mass casualty events — would also make the U.S. a less attractive benefactor….

Trump Republicans like to talk about how they’re reconnecting the GOP to its prewar roots, and that the international order as we know it — the post-WWII set of international organizations and alliances that includes NATO — is showing its age after nearly 80 years. That may well be true, but it elides the disastrous results of interwar isolationism. It is true that institutions like NATO and the OECD represent the exception rather than the rule in world politics. It is also true, however, that the United States has been able to maintain that exception — and the significant benefits that have come with it — for more than 75 years with comparatively modest investments.

Walking away from the liberal international order because the world is a little perilous right now would be like a business declaring bankruptcy as a way of getting out of tough financial straits.

Wait, that sounds familiar…

There are a lot more predictions in the essay — nuclear proliferation among erstwhile U.S. allies! An end to dollar dominance! — so you should definitely read the whole thing.