How Trump Will Change the World: The Contours and Consequences of a Second-Term Foreign Policy

4 comments

1. [SS from essay by Peter D. Feaver,  Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Duke University and the author of [Thanks for Your Service: The Causes and Consequences of Public Confidence in the U.S. Military.](https://www.amazon.com/Thanks-Your-Service-Consequences-Confidence/dp/0197681131) From 2005 to 2007, he served as Special Adviser for Strategic Planning and Institutional Reform on the staff of the National Security Council.]

   Agray rhino—a predictable and long-foreseen disruption that is still shocking when it occurs—has crashed into American foreign policy: Donald Trump has won a second term as president of the United States. Despite polls predicting a nail-biter, the final results were fairly decisive, and although we do not know the precise composition of the new order, we know Trump will be at the top of it.

   Trump’s win in 2016 was far more of a surprise, and much of the debate in the weeks after Election Day revolved around the questions of how he would govern and how dramatically he might seek to alter the United States’ role in the world. Owing to Trump’s unpredictability, erratic style, and less-than-coherent thinking, some of those same questions remain open today. But we have far more information now after four years of watching him lead, four more years of analyzing his time in office, and a year of witnessing his third campaign for the White House. With that data, it’s possible make some predictions about what Trump will try to do in his second term. The known unknown is how the rest of the world will react and what the ultimate outcome will be.

2. Actually a good read 👍

3. A very good article, especially this passage:

   >Trump and his team have made it clear that they prioritize loyalty above all. And they may have the simplest of loyalty tests: ask any individual in a position of authority whether the election of 2020 was stolen or whether the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol was an act of insurrection. As Trump’s running mate JD Vance has demonstrated, there is only one way to answer those questions that Trump will accept.

   >A litmus test like that could allow Trump to politicize the senior ranks of the military and the intelligence services by promoting only individuals he believes are “on the team.” Members of the civil service would enjoy more job security and insulation from political pressure, unless the Trump team pursues its plan to reclassify thousands of professional civil servants as political appointees who serve at the pleasure of the president, thus making them relatively easy to remove for political reasons.

   >The military and the civil service are unlikely to take any provocative action that would trigger, let alone justify, such a purge. They understand that they are not the “loyal opposition”—a role reserved for the minority party in Congress and watchdogs in the media and the policy commentariat. In accordance with their oaths of service and their professional ethic, professionals in the national security state will be preparing themselves to help Trump as best they can.

   >But Trump may decide he can get the cooperation or capitulation he seeks simply by leaving the threat of a purge hanging in the air—and he would be right. At a minimum, he is likely to fire some senior figures, in an echo of Voltaire’s advice to eliminate some French generals to strike fear into the hearts of others. The question is whether high-level career officials will follow the best practices of civil-military relations and give their candid advice to Trump and his senior political appointees even when that advice is unwanted. If they do, they can help him be the best commander in chief he is capable of being. If they do not, it may not matter whether they are purged or kept in place, since they will not be effective either way.

   In any case, the neoliberal post WWII world order is dead, and in its place is an increasingly mercantilist world order where trade is zero sum and comes at the expense of rival nations. This increases, not decreases, the likelihood of war since it reinforces adversarial competition with rival nations and moves it from solely military or geopolitical into geoeconomic dimensions.

   The Free Market capitalist oligarchs who benefited from the neoliberal world order will find that the economic freedoms they enjoyed that allowed them to benefit from a global system of trade will be curtailed as they have to increasingly subjugate themselves and their business interests to the will of the American state. The first big sign of this was Jeff Bezo’s choice not to overtly endorse any candidate within the Washington Post. You will soon see more oligarchs bend the knee to Trump in an effort to save their business empires.

   The best outcome for the world is that some within Trump’s administration put the country over the party and act within its best interests while still implementing guardrails like the ones that had been there in the past.

   The author’s description of Trump’s worldview as ‘magical realism’ is apt. His cabinet has a delusional, neo-isolationist worldview that traditional Republicans reject. Unfortunately, his camp has become increasingly MAGAfied and a rejection of the post-WWII alliance system seems increasingly on the table, even if it leads to more, not less war. Americans who voted for Trump may find East Asia incredibly difficult for America to extricate itself from, even with Trump in charge. And they will most likely find themselves disappointed with the results. The system that was in place actually maximized American security even if it increased America’s obligations. Forgoing those obligations will only forgo American security.

4. Being against tariffs makes sense if every country actually respected the rules of the WTO. But we now see that China (and India to a lesser extent) don’t care and will keep being openly mercantilist economies regardless of their development level. It doesn’t make sense for the West to run unabated state subsidized trade deficits with a major economy that is fully developed for decades on end. Unless you want to destroy the West, and in particular it’s middle class.

   I’m sorry but this whole neo-liberal “but it’s good for peace” mumbo jumbo is clearly built on the naive premise that “but they will reform as they get rich” that, time and again, has proven to be BS. In the end the post WW2 neo-liberal world order doesn’t help anyone anymore but the Totalitarian Communist Party of China and the top 1% in the west that has the power to outsource their production to China. Everybody else in the world is being shafted by these neo-liberal policies especially the voting middle class and the Chinese labor whose real wages are being artificially kept down by their own government.

   If you think Trump is an anomaly you are greatly disconnected with what has been happening in the West in the past 20 years. The middle class wants middle class jobs. And they don’t want to be replaced by third world workforce that will do the job for half the pay (whether imported or outsourced), while the billionaires, who have the ability to outsource both production and taxes, become trillionaires. Trump will put tariffs, and they will applaud him for it. He will close the border, and they will applaud even more. The same applies to the EU. This mercantilist push doesn’t come from Trump. It comes from the West’s middle class who is being bled dry for decades now.

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