The World of Trump 2.0

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Earlier this week, Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris in the U.S. presidential election, ushering in a new era of uncertainty at home and abroad. For a bonus episode, I spoke with Dan Drezner and Kori Schake on Wednesday, November 6 about what we might expect from a second Trump term on everything from wars in Ukraine and the Middle East to China and alliances to trade and immigration.

Dan Drezner is a professor of international politics at Tufts University. Kori Schake is director of Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and has served in senior jobs in the Defense Department, the State Department, and on the National Security Council. Together, they reflect on the lessons of Trump’s first term—and whether this time, he will take his “America first” agenda even further.

Kori Schake and Dan Drezner, thank you both so much for joining me.

KORI SCHAKE

It’s a great pleasure, my friend.

DANIEL DREZNER

Happy to be here, sort of.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Fair enough. I should say at the outset that we are recording this the afternoon of Wednesday, November 6, so it’s been under 12 hours, I believe, since the election was called for Donald Trump, and Kamala Harris just conceded a couple hours ago. So we are in the very early stages of trying to understand what this means for U.S. foreign policy and the world going forward, and I’m thrilled to have both of you here to do that with me.

I want to start by looking backwards and going back to Trump’s first term in office and the Trump foreign policy as it actually was. And that’s not as his campaign rhetoric has characterized it and as it’s, I think, been portrayed in political debates in recent months, which really comes down to this idea that the world was reasonably placid between 2017 and 2021, and that it’s been sort of messy and violent since then, whether that’s wars in the Middle East and in Ukraine or the effects of global instability as we’ve seen them in the United States.

But as you look back, and you’ve both studied and written for Foreign Affairs and elsewhere about the first term Trump foreign policy, how would you in fact characterize his record in that first term? And what do you think that suggests about what may be in store going forward? Kori, let’s start with you on that.

KORI SCHAKE

Well, what was true in the first term, and I believe will be true in the second term, is that we will pay an enormously high chaos premium for President Trump as commander-in-chief and as chief diplomat. And that makes it very difficult for adversaries to anticipate our reactions, which can be destabilizing, and it makes it very difficult for allies to align their policies effectively with our own. So I think that’s a really problematic legacy that’s likely to continue in the second term.

Three things in particular I think the Trump administration did well. First, they increased defense spending for the first two years of the administration, and that was overdue and is once again overdue. On a bipartisan basis, the Congress added $27 billion to the president’s [President Joe Biden’s] first budget, $48 billion to the second one and are poised to add between $21 and $43 billion to the third one. That was only the first two years of the Trump term though, and he flirted wildly with differences of over a couple hundred billion dollars in how he thought about defense spending in his last two years.

Second thing I think he did well was the Abraham Accords, which I think, were the main foreign policy success—bought, obviously, at the cost of support for an independent Palestine. But getting the states of the Gulf and beyond to acknowledge that they and Israel had common security concerns, and the basis for deepening cooperation I think was an important thing.

And the third was the stronger focus on China and the challenges China is posing for the United States and for others in the international order.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

We will pick up on all of that, but Dan, let me put that same question to you. How do you characterize the first term Trump foreign policy with a few years of distance?

DANIEL DREZNER

I mean, I think you have to think about this in terms of process and you also have to think about it in terms of substance. On process, the first Trump administration was just a total mess, in no small part because Trump didn’t expect to win when he did win. It was a very haphazard transition process, and as you well know, there was a lot of loose talk about when the people that he hired, particularly in the area of foreign policy, were viewed as the so-called adults in the room—think Jim Mattis or H. R. McMaster or John Kelly or, I suppose in a weird way, Rex Tillerson at least at the outset.

And the result was that these were people that frankly were very often pushing against what were Trump’s foreign policy impulses. And so the result was that really, particularly for the first two years, you could argue it wasn’t always obvious what Trump was doing in terms of foreign policy. There were a few things that I’ll get to that did sort of row on the same direction, but on dealing with NATO, on a whole variety of other multilateral initiatives, there was a lot of disagreement. And because Trump didn’t really understand the levers for power all that well when he started off, he would often say things and then have to backtrack or come down.

My personal favorite during the first term was when he announced the cooperation with Vladimir Putin for the cyber unit after a summit meeting that he, I think, managed to reverse by tweet within six hours of the announcement, which of course was just sort of perfect.

I think the best hallmark for what we’d expect to see for Trump’s second term was actually what happened after he lost in 2020, the sort of last three months, the transition, as it were, to Biden, where he got rid of a lot of people that he disagreed with—folks like Mark Esper, for example, or Bill Barr for that matter, attorney general—and really did try to execute a very radical sort of last minute series of steps in terms of foreign policy, withdrawing U.S. forces from Germany, from Somalia, from Afghanistan, and so forth. The difference this time around is going to be that there are no more adults in the room, or the adults in the room will be slavishly devoted to Donald Trump’s vision.

Substantively, I agree with everything that Kori said in terms of his priorities. The one I would add is on trade and foreign economic policy, which is, basically there is no barrier to inward flows that Donald Trump doesn’t like. So whether it’s immigrants coming in or imports coming in or what have you, with the exception of foreign direct investment, Donald Trump thinks it’s bad. And so even if he had lost this election, you could argue, Donald Trump really did have a sea change in the way that policymakers inside the beltway thought particularly about trade and migration. They have both shifted way to the populist right on this.

And, indeed, one of the interesting things when you look at things like tariffs or migration restrictions is not the differences with the Biden administration, but the continuities. The fact is, Biden kept most, not all, but most of Trump’s tariffs in place, particularly with respect to China. And on the border, Kamala Harris shifted ever rightward during the campaign. So in some ways, the victory that Trump won isn’t just for himself, it’s also for those policy ideas.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Kori, let me get you to pick up on that personnel point. I think probably, even more than for most presidents, personnel is policy in a Trump administration because of the extent to which key agency heads and national security leaders are able to shape some of the policy issues where Trump is not getting into detail. You can imagine you won’t have adults in the room in the sense that you might’ve in the first couple years of the first term, but there are scenarios where you have a fairly normal set of policymakers in some of the key jobs, whether that’s Robert O’Brien back at the National Security Council or Mike Pompeo, former secretary of state, being secretary of defense, Senator Bill Hagerty becoming secretary of state. Obviously that’s all just gossip at this point, but those are all people who are, if not within the 40-yard lines of American foreign policy within the 30-yard lines, if I’m getting that football analogy right. I mean, do you see major changes in terms of personnel and the priorities they will bring, or do you think we may be surprised in some sense this time around as well?

KORI SCHAKE

So, it seems to me too soon to tell. But I agree with Dan’s very good point that personnel appointments we saw in the last three months of the Trump administration, after President Biden had won the election, are probably the best indicator both of the types of people that the president will appoint. And with 52 to 53 seats in the Senate, he is likely to be able to get many of them confirmed in a way that he wouldn’t have in his first term. And also, he’s talking about the president’s ability to unilaterally give people top-secret security clearances without background checks. And so that, I think, suggests something about the kinds of people he is looking to appoint. But there are some solid choices he could make. I mean, Robert O’Brien, you mentioned, Senator Hagerty, you mentioned, Senator [Tom] Cotton for defense, you didn’t mention, but I hear very often.

The thing that I noticed from the first Trump term, though, is that the president does have fixed ideas on a lot of things about foreign policy. And Elizabeth Saunders wrote a great piece on this recently—that the president’s actually quite predictable on immigration, on trade, on allies. And the people he puts in senior positions may be able to affect that, but only on the margins. Where they will have greater effect is on the things the president doesn’t actually care about.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So let’s stick with a couple of those long-term priorities that Trump has been talking about, I think, since the 1980s in some cases, and Dan, you mentioned the trade issues. Trump has made various claims about putting 60 percent tariffs, I believe, on all Chinese goods, putting an across-the-board tariff of ten percent or 20 percent on all imports. Whether those specifics are right or not, this does seem like it’ll be a pretty central part of his international economic policy in a second term. What might that look like, and what kind of effects would that have globally and on the geopolitical consequences of that?

DANIEL DREZNER

Well, this is where I’m not entirely sure how it’s going to play out because part of the problem here is that, particularly during the second campaign, the way I would put it is that Donald Trump thinks about tariffs the way the father in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” thought about Windex—which is to say, he thinks it will cure everything. He’s talked about tariffs replacing taxes as the primary source of income; he’s talked about using tariffs to punish people if they diversify away from the dollar; he’s also talked about tariffs as a tool for getting better trade deals, while simultaneously also using tariffs as a way to create incentives for domestic production and inward foreign direct investment.

Now, I’m not sure tariffs are great at any of those things, but one of the things I’m quite certain of is they can’t do all of those things. And so the interesting question is how far does he go? One of the personnel we haven’t mentioned that is undoubtedly going to return in a second Trump term is Robert Lighthizer, who was Trump’s first-term U.S. trade representative. It wouldn’t surprise me if he goes to Treasury or heads the National Economic Council this time. And Lighthizer is also a huge booster of the idea of tariffs and other forms of protectionism as a way of getting more managed trade deals.

This goes to another issue in terms of Trump and predictability, which is, the paradox of Trump is that he is a predictable madman. Trump is a huge fan of the madman theory when it comes to bargaining. He really does believe that if he rants and raves and threatens to unleash fire and fury, or the economic equivalent of fire and fury in the form of tariffs, that—he wants his other bargaining partners to think that he’s crazy enough to do it in the hopes that he can then get concessions of some kind.

Now, we actually know how this went during the first term, and the answer was not well. Trump’s track record when it came to coercive bargaining is actually really bad outside of Mexico. He basically didn’t get anything he wanted in terms of the renegotiation of NAFTA. He didn’t get much in terms of the renegotiation of KORUS, the U.S.-South Korea treaty. He didn’t get a ton of concessions from Europe either. And this then leads to the real known unknown here, which is, will Trump actually follow through on a lot of these things because he likes tariffs anyway? Or the other trait that Trump shows sometimes is that he will bluster and threaten and stomp his feet, and the moment he gets any concession whatsoever, he will back down and claim, “I just got the greatest deal.”

And so the interesting question is going to be: To what extent do trading partners and/or adversaries come up with ways to give him deals where he can back down? Whether it’s a glowing orb or a sweet investment deal or whatever. And I do think that’s sort of a known unknown in the sense that I don’t think if the tariffs go through, he’s necessarily going to mind, but he might back down if he is given a sufficiently shiny concession.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

What’s the scenario in which he goes forward with them? Do you imagine a kind of retaliatory cycle that leads us to a very bad place? I mean, where does that end exactly?

DANIEL DREZNER

Yeah, we’re going to be in a very bad place. I mean, if he goes forward, we’ve seen the European Union already start to build up its list of what it wants to do in response. China, I assume, would retaliate as well. There might be countries like, let’s say, South Korea, that decide they’d rather be on the inside of the security umbrella and it would be worth it to make concessions. But by and large, I think you would just see ever-increasing amounts of trade restrictions.

The last time we had this, it triggered an industrial recession in 2019. In this case, I would expect it to trigger a relatively healthy bout of inflation when you combine what he wants to do on tax cuts, what he wants to do in terms of reducing the labor supply through deportation, and through tariffs.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And Kori, let me go to you on, I think, one of the other kind of fixed principles of Trump’s worldview, and that’s alliances and Trump’s skepticism about or antipathy towards alliances. I want to quote to you from a piece that you wrote with former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis in Foreign Affairs shortly after the 2020 election, you and Mattis wrote, “As capable as the U.S. military is, the United States’ principal adversaries are more constrained by its network of alliances than by its military might.” And you go on to note that failure to adequately invest in relationships with allies will allow, “a long-tended garden to become choked with weeds,” which would “result in the emergence of other competing networks.” Trump has maintained that antipathy towards or skepticism about alliances. You see allies in Europe and Asia starting to think through what the consequences of a second Trump term would be. What do you imagine their reactions would be, and what do you fear that might lead to? Is it the kind of scenario that you and Mattis sketched out a few years ago?

KORI SCHAKE

So I still think Jim and I are right both about the value of alliances and about the fact that the United States cannot get to the economy of scale of military, economic, or political power that we need to manage our challenges effectively without allied cooperation. And I do think it was true in the first Trump term and is likely to be true in the second Trump term that the president dramatically undervalues the magnetism of the United States’ security guarantees culture, and he overestimates just how much you can demand of allies.

So what I understand President Trump is telling people is that he’s just driving a harder bargain on burden sharing with Europeans. And by the way, he’s not wrong, right? Since Dwight Eisenhower was president, we have been complaining about burden sharing, and Europeans have done too little to address—especially in the last 20 years—a very obviously burgeoning American dissatisfaction.

But what I think President Trump and the people around him don’t take into account, and really ought to, is that by raising a question of whether the United States would carry out its security obligations to allies, it tempts bad guys to test our credibility. And better deterrence is preventing allies from testing your credibility. And so I think we’re likely to see a beauty contest among Europeans—Poland, Hungary, possibly even Finland, the Baltic states—the countries that are on the central front confronting Russian aggression are likely to make compromises to keep the United States engaged and willing, as Dan said, South Korea is likely to do.

The other thing I would point out, though, is that there are a lot of American friends and allies who were unhappy with the Biden administration. I mean, India—Prime Minister [Narendra] Modi is quite contented with President Trump’s reelection. Many American allies in Asia were more comfortable with a Trump administration and have been complaining that Biden said he would show up for Asia, and he didn’t physically show up. Moreover, they feel like he’s been unduly provocative without building either the political or the economic basis for Asia-wide allied cooperation.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Dan, do you share that relatively sanguine view of the effect of Trump on alliances and partnerships globally?

DANIEL DREZNER

What I would say is that, actually, the region that Kori omits, which is important, is the Middle East. And you can argue it is the Middle East that actually most missed Trump, for a variety of reasons. They wanted to see a United States that took a harder line on Iran, and in the case of Israel, a harder line on the Palestinians. So among the leaders that are probably happy that Trump has been reelected is Benjamin Netanyahu, is Mohammed bin Salman. And it’ll be interesting to see what the foreign policy moves there.

And in fact, the bedrock of U.S. foreign policy since the end of the second World War has been the notion of credible commitments. It’s the idea of: we have signed treaties, we have signed agreements, and by doing so we are going to back them up. And therefore the power of deterrence is we never actually have to do anything hopefully. In other words, if deterrence works, you never actually have to go to war.

What is interesting about Trump is that he clearly believes in a much more transactional foreign policy. And there are foreign policy actors in the rest of the world that are perfectly happy to have that kind of relationship with the United States, whether it’s Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, or let’s say Serbia, or even Russia and China, potentially. These are countries that, often, when they conduct their foreign policy, are engaging in mutual back-scratching, that are not based on institutions but based on enriching elites. And that is Donald Trump’s wheelhouse. So there’s a way in which what we would expect to see might be a somewhat more sedate foreign policy, but also at the same time a more corrupt foreign policy.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let’s dig in to some of the specific issues that will, I think, be front of mind for whoever is on that Trump foreign policy team when they do come into office in January. The first of those that I want to get your thoughts on is Ukraine. Trump has said that he wants to quickly end the war, that he’s able to make a deal with Putin that will somehow end the war, though he hasn’t been exactly specific about what that is. Some of his advisors and his vice presidential candidate, JD Vance, have been, I think, more skeptical of the Ukrainian cause—some in kind of openly Putin-sympathetic ways, some in just kind of a more cold-blooded realist way, but there are a lot of people around him who clearly see this as a bad investment for the United States and would like to cut our losses and focus on China.

Kori, what do you think it will mean to want to end the war quickly once Trump is in office? How do you imagine that playing out in policy terms to the extent that there are clear ideas of what that might mean?

KORI SCHAKE

Well, I really worry that we will abandon Ukraine in the Trump administration. And it’s not just President Trump and the people around him who will bear responsibility for that. The Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, has said he has no appetite for more aid to Ukraine, so you are unlikely to have Republicans in Congress as a counterweight to the White House wanting to drop it. Moreover, the current president had more than two and a half years to be able to assist Ukraine, and the timidity with which we were willing to run risks in order to help Ukraine succeed, I think, also bears some consideration as we assess the blame—none of which makes it any easier to watch Ukraine’s heroic resistance potentially falter for lack of support.

But it does seem to me possible that President Trump could be persuaded that the terms he set out, which is Ukraine’s got to be willing to negotiate, but Russia’s got to be willing to negotiate, and if Russia won’t come to a deal that he will arm Ukraine even more than the Biden administration had. Those of us who believe in Ukraine’s cause of restoring its internationally recognized territory ought to try and hold the incoming president to that.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Dan, how do you imagine Ukraine policy will play out?

DANIEL DREZNER

So I guess the way I would put it is that there is no denying that Trump, and to a larger extent his MAGA coalition—there is a Russophilia there. And obviously Trump’s hostility to Ukraine dates back to his first impeachment, and don’t underestimate the role that will play in terms of how Trump thinks about this. That said, it’s also worth noting that Trump felt compelled to meet with Volodymyr Zelensky when he came to visit Kamala Harris. And the fact that he even thought that that meeting was important is in and of itself interesting.

The other thing that we should bear in mind is, to put it gently, remember, Joe Biden’s numbers started going into negative territory when Afghanistan fell. If Trump cuts Ukraine off, you’re going to see a version of Afghanistan or Vietnam, but with white people. And that I’m not sure is going to play very well in the United States. I think the question is: Will Vladimir Putin actually be willing to make any meaningful concessions? And so far the evidence is that he’s not. I mean, he’s illegally annexed the territories that he’s conquered. Unless Ukraine recognizes that, there’s no point in talking about negotiation. So it is possible that we wind up in a weird status quo where, as Kori says, Trump, because he didn’t get anything from Putin, has no choice but to arm Ukraine even more.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let’s turn to the other truly major conflict zone, or one of the other major conflict zones now, which, Dan, you mentioned earlier: the Middle East. Trump has similarly said that he wants to wrap up the war in Gaza quickly. They’ve talked about being tougher on Iran. There are clearly some major players in the region, including Prime Minister Netanyahu and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, who seem to be happy with the results of last night’s election.

Dan, let me start with you, what do you imagine a Trump approach to the various conflicts in the Middle East might look like, and how much of a change will that really be from what we’ve seen under the Biden administration?

DANIEL DREZNER

I think the change in terms of dealing with Israel is going to be, if there is pressure from Trump, it’s pressure in a different direction. Biden, to the extent that he tried to restrain Netanyahu—not that he succeeded all that much—was basically trying to enforce the laws of war and trying to push for a ceasefire in Gaza as well as tamp down conflicts with Hezbollah and with Iran. I think Trump wants to see them accelerated. He will have no problem with Israel annexing the West Bank, he will have no problem with Israel annexing parts of Gaza or creating new settlements there. The only thing he will be concerned about there is literally the public relations of it. Because it’s not going to look pretty—it’s going to look awful. You’re going to have horrific images of Palestinian suffering.

And to be blunt, I’m not sure the Saudis are going to be all that upset about what happens to Hamas. The West Bank might be a somewhat different issue, and they might try to get Trump to constrain Netanyahu somewhat there. But I also think that Trump is perfectly happy to have Israel be its proxy in terms of combating Iran. And this is one of the other issues of trying to figure out a way to box in Iran.

And the conservative position on this has always been that the problem with the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] was that while it dealt with a nuclear issue, it gave Iran a freer hand in the region leading to all kinds of destabilization. It wouldn’t surprise me if you see Trump starting off, though, with the use of military force, potentially against the Houthis because he’ll want to see Red Sea shipping open up again. I don’t know if there’s any actual viable strategy where that happens, but that’s never stopped Trump before. And you’ll see efforts to try to create a sort of Sunni coalition that continues to put the screws on Iran.

I honestly think the real open question here is if there really is a rapprochement with Putin, to what extent does that affect what I like to call the coalition of the sanctioned—which is Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China? Because Trump’s enmity for Iran is pretty real, and particularly those of his advisors. If there is one country that gets Mike Pompeo very exercised, it’s Iran. And so the question becomes: If he pushes on Iran, to what extent does that create difficulties in terms of trying to build a relationship with Putin?

KORI SCHAKE

I just want to add two quick things to Dan’s excellent assessment. One is that the pressure on Iran coupled with Israel’s ongoing wars put enormous strain on the government of Jordan, and I think we are underestimating just how much Jordan could totter and potentially fall. So I think we’re not worried enough about Jordan.

And the second thing, on Iran, what really made the sanctions effort that drove Iran into negotiating the nuclear limits was European participation, right? And when we withdrew from the JCPOA, Europeans stopped wanting to be helpful to us on constraining the problem. And I think that’s likely to be a significant problem for a Trump administration, which is going to want to take a very hard line on Iran. But it’s difficult to see how to make that effective since Russia and China aren’t going to help—they’re Iranian allies these days—and Europeans are likely to be freaked out by a Trump administration generally, and are going to have their hands full trying to help Ukraine and trying to have more defense cooperation among the EU states.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Dan, did you want to respond to some piece of that?

DANIEL DREZNER

Well, I think that the issue with sanctioning Iran, I mean, the European buy-in was important, but it’s actually worth noting that the sanctions that the Trump administration imposed after it withdrew from the JCPOA were actually more punishing on Iran’s economy. The issue wasn’t just the sanctions, the issue was what the demands were.

With the JCPOA, the Obama administration made it clear, “Look, what we want to do is have these concessions on the nuclear issue, and then we will lift the sanctions.” When you look at what Mike Pompeo wanted in terms of the demands listed, it was a much larger set of demands that was, frankly, it was never in any way realistic that Iran would even consider complying. And so you’re likely to see that play out again, where you have a maximum pressure campaign on Iran, but Iran’s not going to concede in any way whatsoever. Indeed, if anything, what it might do is accelerate their development of a nuclear weapon.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Kori, let me just get you to expand on this question of what a hard-line policy in Iran might look like. I’ve asked this question to various advisors to Trump, including former and perhaps future national security advisor, Robert O’Brien, who—they all talk about a much tougher Iran policy, but what that actually looks like at this point, when Iran is sitting a few days away from having enough highly enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon, is not exactly clear. What are the options there short of military action, U.S. military action, to go after Iranian nuclear facilities?

KORI SCHAKE

So I think the problem with Iran policy across the last four administrations, at least, is that the administrations are actually unwilling to carry out their declaratory policy that they will destroy the Iranian nuclear infrastructure if Iran doesn’t concede Western demands. And so it’s possible that restoring credibility more broadly might affect Iranian choices, but I’m skeptical of that.

I think the Iranian leadership is ever more entrenched, ever more reliant on the Iranian guards, the IRGC, for remaining in power, and they’re in control of the economy. And so it’s hard for me to see what, short of either destroying the program or having the kind of credibility that Iran thinks you would, could get much done.

But one possible turn of the kaleidoscope is that Israel’s wars have punctured the sense of Iran having an effective strategic depth through the use of its proxies. I mean, the ease of destruction of Hezbollah in particular, I think, might be consequential in brushing the Iranians back.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let’s move on to I think what will be the biggest focus of American foreign policy in a Trump administration and would’ve been in a Harris administration as well, and that’s China. In my conversations with Chinese scholars and government officials in the last year or two, you kind of get two different views on whether Trump or Biden or Harris would be better from a Chinese perspective.

On the one hand, they see the effect that Trump will have on allies and partners and the lack of credibility that American commitments will have in Asia and in Europe being a boon to Chinese interests. You also see some degree of anxiety about tariffs and about just the sheer degree of unpredictability you would get in a Trump administration and what that could mean for Chinese economic development especially.

Dan, to put it in a slightly unfair but crisp way, if you’re Xi Jinping, do you think you’re happy or sad about the result of last night’s election?

DANIEL DREZNER

I think that my favorite phrase about the Chinese perspective on the election was that it was choosing between two bowls of poison. And with Harris representing a situation where she’s predictable, but the problem would’ve been that one of the things she wanted to do was build alliances out there. Trump, obviously, much less predictable, which is a problem, but on the other hand, far more willing to let the alliances in the area degrade.

I think if there has been a pattern for how Trump has dealt with Xi Jinping during his first term, it was simultaneously the ratcheting up of tariffs and other forms of economic pressure on China, and at the same time, Trump constantly sending signals that he wanted some kind of grand bargain and that he was willing to basically trade away everything except China buying more U.S. goods.

So if you recall when China cracked down on Hong Kong—and by the way, it’s interesting that we don’t mention that this happened under Trump’s watch—Trump made it clear that he was willing to not criticize China on this in return for a better bilateral relationship. Same with harsh labor treatment in Xinjiang; to a lesser extent, same in terms of Chinese moves towards Taiwan.

So I think what we’re going to be seeing is Trump desperately trying to create a phase two trade deal, willing to trade anything that is geopolitical in return for that better economic deal. I also am not terribly persuaded that Xi Jinping is going to go for it for a variety of reasons. Among other things, he can recognize a desperate interlocutor when he sees one. And this is also an area where I would say that Trump’s foreign policy team is going to be sprinkled between people who legitimately believe that China is the greatest threat and people who believe that the trade deficit is the biggest threat. And so that is an area where I think you are going to see persistent tensions within the administration in terms of what to do. I think the result is going to be an inchoate set of policies.

KORI SCHAKE

I very much agree with Dan’s assessment. The only thing I would add is that I do think a Trump administration is more likely than a Harris administration would’ve been, or than a Biden administration was, to increase U.S. defense spending and defense industrial production in a way that might affect Chinese judgments.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Kori, the other piece I would ask you about in the Indo-Pacific is the network of new groupings, the work on alliances and new kinds of partnerships that I think even people in the Trump camp would acknowledge as an achievement of the Biden administration. Some of this is stuff that started under previous administrations like the Quad, but there’s also AUKUS, the agreement between Australia and the United States and the United Kingdom. There’s the rapprochement between Japan and South Korea, and the various ways that those alliances as well as that with the Philippines have been strengthened. Do you see any of that eroding in a Trump administration simply because of the general attitudes that Trump with some of the people around him have, or do you think that will continue?

KORI SCHAKE

I do think that the erosion of the alliance network in Asia is a real cause for concern. You’ll remember in the Trump administration, he wanted to triple the cost to Japan of stationing U.S. forces and moved to reduce them in both Japan and Korea. I think it will be a very hard sell to President Trump why we should care about the Philippines or more marginal security partners.

Australia probably has the easiest sell because they’re buying a bunch of American submarines, but that would be weighted against AUKUS being a major diplomatic achievement of the Biden administration, which may just touch off disinterest in a Trump White House.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Dan, another really central piece of the China policy under Joe Biden has been the work on technology and the centrality of technology. Some of that has been about export controls, which have gone beyond what we ever imagined. We certainly talk about export controls more in these kinds of conversations than we ever did before, some of it’s about other efforts to control the flow of technology to China.

You wrote a great piece in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs called “How National Security Became Everything and Everything Became National Security,” which got at the ways in which this has become, really, the center of the American foreign policy discussion. Do you see that being carried out as effectively or differently under a Trump administration? Is that just a new feature of the American national security state that will be sustained under almost any president?

DANIEL DREZNER

Yeah, I think that would’ve continued under a Harris administration as well, so that’s an area where there’s continuity.

Economic security is now part and parcel of what U.S. foreign policymakers are going to be thinking about, and so that’s going to play out in the form of greater export controls. I think the way that’s also going to play out is also in terms of people. You might see restrictions put on Chinese students coming to study in the United States. It would not surprise me if there were other restrictions on U.S. students studying in China, for example, or either sort of reciprocity there. So yeah, this is a new normal that we’re going to have in terms of foreign policy.

Of course, the other interesting question is that there’s going to be a point after which these export controls don’t matter as much. China eventually is going to indigenize its production, and to some extent has found work arounds around some of the export controls. And so this is a policy that I think generates short-term gains for the United States, and over the long term, I’m not sure how viable it’s going to be. But will Trump continue it? Absolutely.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Kori, let me raise another relationship that is incredibly central to U.S. economic interests and security interests—that’s the relationship with Mexico. Migration is of course going to be a major focus of the early days of a Trump administration that could involve deportations or hardening of immigration policies that would have pretty serious effects for Mexico. You could imagine that relationship becoming fraught in various other ways. How do you see that playing out? What are the risks there? What are the potential upsides?

KORI SCHAKE

Yeah, so I do think the biggest foreign policy opportunity the United States has been missing is consolidation of North America as a labor platform, as an energy platform, in all sorts of ways. And I think we are certain to continue missing that opportunity in a Trump administration.

I do think the reaction, not just of Mexico, but of other countries in the region of mass deportations, is likely to be poisonous to any positive agenda we or they would want to have. I also think the Mexico relationship is going to get more complicated anyway because of the policies—the democratic backsliding going on in Mexico itself.

DANIEL DREZNER

Dan, you started off by talking about how Trump likes to say that everything was stable in his first term and that he didn’t start any new wars, whereas Biden wound up getting broiled in both the Middle East and Ukraine. And I think there’s often pejoratives cast about Trump about how he’s an isolationist. I think that’s a mischaracterization. Trump is not an isolationist, he’s a mercantilist who wants to bomb different countries, and the countries he wants to bomb are all in Latin America. He has been very forthright about this, about using military force to deal with either coyotes or criminal gangs or fentanyl shipments. And by the way, this is also an area where it’s not just Trump saying this, it’s most of the GOP also saying this. So it would not surprise me if during his second term you see at least one or two military strikes either in Mexico or in Central America as a way of showing that he’s getting tough with these criminal gangs.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Kori, let me get at one other issue that you’ve raised in various articles and in various contexts over the years, and that’s the risk of the politicization and misuse of the military, of the intelligence service, of law enforcement to some degree. When you look at that set of risks, what worries you and what do you imagine we’re likely to see in the first months of the new Trump administration?

KORI SCHAKE

Well, President Trump has threatened to fire all the woke generals on day one, and so if he, for example, fires the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the service chiefs, that will create quite some consternation, probably with Congress as well as with the Defense Department.

I do think there are real causes for worry about the president wanting to invoke the Insurrection Act to get around the 1878 restriction on the use of the American military for law enforcement purposes.

I also think President Trump in his prior term tried very hard to marginalize the chain of command, and by reaching past them into the rank and file and by pardoning people convicted by courts-martial, for example, to create a personal sort of praetorian loyalty with the military. And that’s a dangerous thing, a dangerous authoritarian tendency that the president has. And well, I think there would be a lot of resistance to those things in the military leadership. Fire enough people, and at some point you’re going to find people who will carry out instructions.

And it is a common fallacy that the American military has no responsibility to obey immoral orders. The American military has a responsibility to refuse to obey illegal orders, but we do not want a military where every major or lance corporal is determining for themselves whether the president’s policy is appropriate. So this could get messy in lots of ways that would do lasting damage to the American public’s relationship with its military.

DANIEL DREZNER

I would just add to Kori that the problem is not limited to the military—it extends the entire foreign policy establishment. Recall that, again, this happened during the end of Trump’s first term, the creation of Schedule F, which was a list of employees, civil service employees in various cabinet departments that were deemed sufficiently important that they could actually be fired as political appointees. This was a key plank of Project 2025 that was put forward and orchestrated by the Heritage Foundation. I have no doubt that Trump is going to institute Schedule F when he is inaugurated on January 20.

So the word “purge” is a little strong, but I think you’re going to see a purging of a whole variety of foreign policy professionals, ranging from State to Treasury to the intelligence community to the Department of Energy and so forth, that is going to fundamentally weaken the U.S. foreign policy apparatus.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Are there any other discontinuities or dangers of a second Trump term that we haven’t talked about today that either of you is focused on?

DANIEL DREZNER

The one thing I would say is corruption. I think we’ve underestimated—I mean, even within the first term, Jared Kushner worked in the White House, and then after leaving the White House mysteriously got $2 billion worth of investment from Saudi Arabia, and no one has explored that relationship. Ric Grenell is involved in a variety of real estate deals in the Balkans along with Kushner.

It would not surprise me if some of the people that wind up getting appointed have private sector interests that they will want to see addressed. And this goes to a point that Kori mentioned earlier, which is, there are reports that the Trump administration is just going to bypass the FBI completely in terms of doing background checks—that they might outsource it to the private sector, which is a polite way of saying they’re not really going to do them at all. And so you’re going to have some potentially very compromised people in positions of power, and this is easy prey for countries like Russia and China.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let me close by going back to things that each of you has written in Foreign Affairs in the last few years. Dan, starting with you, you wrote a piece in September 2023 looking at the prospect of a return of Trump to the presidency in which you argued that the Biden administration should institutionalize, “as much of the United States current foreign policy as possible.” Has the administration managed to do any of that? Will it be able to over the next few months?

DANIEL DREZNER

No, simply put. There is no multilateral regime to deal with export controls on China. While it has created international groupings, these are almost entirely executive agreements that can be revoked by the next president, which Trump may or may not do depending on the grouping. We’re obviously going to pull out of the Paris climate change accords, for example.

And this is an increasing pathology, by the way, I would add, of U.S. foreign policy, which is the reluctance of any Congress in a polarized era to ratify a president’s foreign policy accomplishments if it’s from the opposition party. So no, most of the Biden administration’s foreign policy is not institutionalized. They’re not going to be able to do it in the 90 days, or less than 90 days, before the transition.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And then, Kori, let me go back to a piece that you wrote for us in the run-up to the 2020 election in which you argued that, “If Trump is reelected, his ‘America first’ foreign policy will have been validated, and the result will be an America snarling into decline” and “a new order that excludes the United States.” Are we in the “snarling into decline” era of American foreign policy now?

KORI SCHAKE

I do absolutely worry about it. I am, however, taking solace in the reflection of the great American poet Robert Pinsky, who wrote in 2002 in a beautiful book about poetry and democracy that “American culture as I have experienced it is so brilliantly and sometimes brutally in motion, that standard models for it fail to apply.” So I am taking solace in the fact that the United States is so crazy risk tolerant and dynamic that we may find a way to thread this needle. But I worry.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

That is a great note to end on. Kori and Dan, thank you so much for all of the work you’ve done for Foreign Affairs over the last few years and that I imagine you will be doing in the coming days and weeks and months. And thank you so much for joining me for this conversation just hours after the election was called.

DANIEL DREZNER

Thank you very much, Dan.

KORI SCHAKE

It was a pleasure.