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What Trump’s Return to Power Will Mean for the World

Oliver Zinn

The White House from Washington, DC, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The White House from Washington, DC, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

President Donald Trump’s second term of office has just begun, yet his presence in the White House has already produced global reverberations. Partly as a result of his victory last November, Canada’s prime minister resigned, Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire in Gaza, and Bogotá almost entered into an ill-fated trade war with Washington. More interesting than these developments, however, remain the profound ways in which the world’s most powerful man will shape the international landscape from now until 2029. To imagine how this future will unfold, a summary of his first mandate as leader of the free world — buttressed with an analysis of his more recent behavior — should prove useful. 


Many have noted that, in contrast to most American statesmen, no single principle appears to guide Trump’s approach to international relations. Some have contended that there exists a tense antinomy between his isolationist and expansionist tendencies. According to this view, Trump’s foreign policy doctrine is inconsistent because he desires the acquisitions of Greenland and Canada but also bears responsibility for withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan as part of a larger effort to end what he calls “forever wars.” Since so many experts believe that Trump’s global vision lacks uniformity, it may prove useful to examine his policies on a country-by-country basis.


New World Policy 

Chief among Trump’s international concerns are the nations most proximate to the United States: Canada and Mexico. During his time in office, he enjoyed cordial relations with these states, despite them both possessing left-of-center governments. In the Canadian case, Trump may have gone too far in his efforts to foster friendly relations by informally lending Trudeau his personal phone number, only to be rebuffed by his more professional counterpart. Trump’s amicable relationship with President Obrador may have proved more reciprocal, but their friendly rapporteur only belied Trump’s hostile stance toward Mexico, whose people he once characterized as “rapists and drug dealers.” Trump made the putatively noxious impact of Mexican immigrants a centerpiece of his platform, championing the construction of a transcontinental wall to prevent such unwanted persons from entering the United States. Unable to force Mexico City to finance the wall or marshal the required political capital in Washington for that purpose, he failed to realize his grandiose construction designs for the U.S.–Mexico Border. Trump did create negative will between the United States and Latin America, nevertheless, by detaining migrants in a fashion that many observers considered inhumane. 


After leaving office, relations soured considerably. In 2022, Trump called Trudeau a “left-wing lunatic” in response to Ottawa’s handling of the “Freedom Convoy” protests. After winning reelection, he threatened to raise tariffs against Canada by 25%, prompting a fearful response from the governing Liberal Party, which culminated in Trudeau’s resignation. Trump’s rhetoric on Mexico became even more divisive: he blamed migrants south of the Rio Grande for “poisoning the blood” of the United States during his most recent bid for the presidency. Presently, Trump calls for mass deportations of every undocumented immigrant — over eleven million of whom reside within the United States. He has also suggested that the Pentagon deploy American troops to fight cartels within Mexico, a policy that has elicited considerable disapprobation from the country whose sovereignty such an intervention would necessarily violate. 


Trump has nevertheless sought to maintain an amicable relationship with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, although she leads one of the most left-wing governments in the Western hemisphere. Their disagreements concerning the Gulf of Mexico and tariffs notwithstanding, serious shows of animosity between the two North American leaders have not yet erupted. 


Conversely, Trump’s feelings about other Latin American nations appear completely dependent on the ideological persuasions of the parties that govern them. He has in the past set himself strongly against Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba—all of which exist under the governance of nominally socialist regimes. His hatred of these left-wing regimes persists — especially Havana, against which his secretary of state has just announced new sanctions. At the same time, Trump’s greatest friends within the Organization of American States have included Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former far-right president whom some have dubbed “the Trump of the tropics; Javier Milei, the anarcho-capitalist currently heading the Argentine Republic; Jeanine Áñez, an ultra-nationalist who overthrew the government of Bolivia in a 2019 coup and Nayib Bukele, the authoritarian rightist in charge of El Salvador. Because Lula De Silva, the doyen of the Latin American left, beat Bolsonaro at the polls in 2022, the new administration’s stance on Brazil has become far less pleasant, with one of its most prominent figures, Elon Musk, openly feuding with Brasília over the effect of its regulatory policies upon X. 


Much has been said about Trump’s recent threats to seize the Panama Canal from its eponymous owner as well as Greenland from the Kingdom of Denmark. These imperial designs, redolent of the era before Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy renounced American expansionism, could lead to hemispheric warfare, the likes of which the Americas have not known since the twentieth century. 


But no one can be certain of what will happen. Trump did quip about acquiring the world’s largest island during his first mandate, but he hardly lent such ideas the prominence they now enjoy. So one can only speculate about what Trump will do going forward since there remains no recent precedence for his new-found yen for expansionism.


If he should employ force to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal Zone, Trump will repeat a chapter in America’s history that unfolded nearly 130 years ago. It was the administration of William McKinley that waged war against a European nation, Spain, to obtain control over its territories in the Americas—namely Cuba and Puerto Rico. And it was McKinley’s successor, Theodore Roosevelt, who dismembered Colombia to create the nation of Panama and to ensure U.S. control over what became the Central American Isthmus’s sole waterway.

While it seems difficult to imagine a future in which the United States enters into armed conflict with Denmark and sends marines to Panama, economic coercion may prove itself sufficient in realizing the territorial desiderata of the world’s most powerful man. 


As for Trump’s professed desire to render Canada the fifty-first state, there does not exist much reason to speculate on the question of how he will pursue that aim. It remains clear that Trump has only uttered such remarks as a way of ridiculing Trudeau—an enemy of his—for the simple reason that the United States lacks the capacity to absorb a country as populous and robust as Canada. So any future invasion of the Great White North lies beyond the serious boundaries of even Trump’s imagination. 


Ottawa need only fear the 25% tariffs that Trump has threatened to impose and is currently in the process of implementing; Mexico shares this concern. It remains to be seen, however, if the tariffs will last or if Trump will reverse course if they significantly damage the American economy—as many experts warn. In retaliation, Canada and Mexico have declared their intentions to respond in kind once the tariffs go into effect on Tuesday.


The second Trump administration’s immigration policy will also bear a tremendous impact upon the Americas. The president has initiated mass deportations, the targets of which mostly hail from Latin American republics. Against their will, migrants have ridden military planes chartered toward Brazil and Colombia, irritating both countries. In the Colombian case, the deportations almost led to sanctions because of President Gustavo Petro’s initial refusal to accept the returning migrants; Brasilía also expressed its dissatisfaction with Washington’s new immigration regime. Some have argued that this inhumane treatment of migrants will push Latin America closer to China and thus undermine American interests in the region.  


Old World Policy

Trump’s stance on the Indo-Pacific does not differ much from that of his Democratic predecessor or longstanding policy doctrine. During his first presidency, he sought to rally the traditional allies in the region around the aegis of U.S. power to confront China, as did Joe Biden. Trump only distinguishes himself from the latter in that his rhetoric bears an acidic, antagonistic tone and that he boasts a much more pronounced commitment to protectionism, going as far as to implement 10% tariffs on Chinese-made goods.


His European policies, however, clearly represent a volte-face when compared to that of Biden. Trump has consistently argued against arming Kiev and has done much to forge friendly relations with Moscow. The Ukrainian people can no longer expect the sort of military support they enjoyed during the Biden years. Trump will concomitantly place more pressure on NATO-member countries to contribute more of their resources towards European security; he has consequently demanded that every NATO member raise its military spending to match 5% of GDP. Continental Europe also faces severe tariff threats


Trump’s plans for the Greater Middle East, while more akin to standard U.S. policy, nonetheless possess singular characteristics worthy of note. During his time in office, he made two significant gestures toward the Jewish state that strengthened its legitimacy with respect to the occupied territories: the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital and of the Syrian Golan Heights as sovereign Israeli territory. He did the same for Morocco vis-à-vis Western Sahara and showed himself to be a consummate champion of Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen


While bolstering U.S. support for these traditional allies, Trump also tried to deepen their ties with one another. His diplomacy culminated in the Abraham Accords: a multilateral deal of mutual recognition between Tel-Aviv and several Arab countries — without any concessions to the Palestinians or any other preconditions that the Arab world has long demanded in exchange for normal relations with Israel. Trump wants to expand the Abraham Accords to include more Arab countries than its original signatories — Bahrain, Sudan, Morocco, and the UAE —so that he can bring a greater portion of Washington’s allies together into formal comity. 


His vision for the Middle East also entails greater hostility toward America’s main bête noir: the Islamic Republic of Iran. The first Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, to prohibit all immigration from Iran as well as several other Muslim countries, and to extrajudicially assassinate General Soleimani were all natural manifestations of this hostility. One can expect Trump’s return to the White House to further exacerbate tensions with the Islamic Republic.


Still, the pullout from Afghanistan did demonstrate the veracity of Trump’s stated aversion to the entanglement of American troops in military quagmires. His refusal to strike Iran after its bombing of Saudi oil refineries in 2019, coupled with efforts to meet with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to negotiate the easing of sanctions, indicates that a full-scale war between Washington and Tehran is unlikely to break out. 


With respect to Sub-Saharan Africa, Trump has almost no policy record to speak of. Save for his occasional military strikes against jihadist targets in countries like Somalia or Lyba, Trump has essentially ignored that part of the world. His ambivalence is by no means unique; most US presidents have spent very little time engaging with Sub-Saharan Africa. Even Barack Obama, the first person with African heritage to become president of the United States, evinced nugatory concern for the subcontinent of his ancestors, failing to make it a significant part of his legacy

One policy of Trump, however, will engender monumental changes for the nations of Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the world generally: his choice to dramatically reduce the foreign aid budgets of the State Department and the Agency For International Development. Critics of this initiative note that it will cause the deaths of many impoverished persons throughout the Global South who rely on American assistance for survival. The administration has nevertheless defended the policy, which it claims will end funding for frivolous aid deliveries that do not serve American interests. Especially irksome to Trump are the condom packages that he has falsely blamed Biden for sending to the Gaza strip. 


His decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords and The World Health Organization will also produce worldwide ramifications. Both rescindments demonstrate the returning administration’s determination to move the United States away from cooperative efforts meant to confront global diseases and climate change. 

 

This survey of Trump’s foreign policy record up until the present may give some idea of what the American people can expect throughout the next four years. But Trump’s mercurial disposition renders all attempts at prognostication flawed at best and wholly erroneous at worst. We will only know the character of his legacy on the world stage after he leaves the White House in 2029 and his second administration becomes another page in the history of the United States. At the present moment, however, one can only hope for the best.  

2 Comments


Jack Thomas
Jack Thomas
6 days ago

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Dawson Maska
Dawson Maska
6 days ago

A great analysis of the foreign policy of Trump and the implications of a second Trump presidency!

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