How different a commander in chief will Trump be?
Analysis by Peter Bergen, CNN
(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 Donald Trump’s electoral mandate 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 wide range of tariffs on thousands of Chinese goods.
When Biden got to the White House, he kept Trump’s more hardline approach to China in place, holding on to Trump’s tariffs and going even further by slapping a 100% tax on Chinese electric vehicles and banning investments 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 said that the US would defend Taiwan if China invaded, abandoning the US policy of “strategic ambiguity,” 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, mounted a war game 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 Israelis killed a top Iranian general 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 early efforts to resuscitate 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 negotiated the Abraham Accords, which established diplomatic relations between Israel and some Arab states but gave nothing 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 trying to extend 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 “no such thing as a Palestinian” — 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 annexed parts of the West Bank.
Also, the indictment last week of an Iranian who was allegedly trying to assassinate Trump 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 US withdrawal agreement 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 nomination of Pete Hegseth — 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 CNN reported, 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 policy recommendations, 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 resurrecting Schedule F, 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 run the CIA 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 Rep. Tulsi Gabbard 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 end the war in Ukraine 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 Audible podcast “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 Congress made it harder 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 “whatever the hell they want” 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 than 3,000 migrant children 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 mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. According to Department of Homeland Security 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 report issued last month 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 interview with NBC News. “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 tariffs 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 changing his mind 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 “love letters” 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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