AEI (American Enterprise Institute) Trump’s Worldview Isn’t as Unpredictable as You Think By Hal Brands Bloomberg Opinion December 15, 2024

 AEI (American Enterprise Institute) 

Trump’s Worldview Isn’t as Unpredictable as You Think

By Hal Brands

Bloomberg Opinion

December 15, 2024

What will the world, and America’s place in it, look like after another four years of President Donald Trump? Since Election Day, I’ve been asked that question by foreign diplomats, US officials, corporate executives and seemingly everyone else. The range of outcomes is enormous, because a volatile US president is about to collide with a volatile globe.

Trump’s volatility is real, even if his “unpredictability” is overstated. He racked up head-snapping policy reversals in his first term, while threatening to tear up treaties that had been cornerstones of US policy for decades. What’s different, this time, is that Trump is inheriting a plethora of hot wars, cold wars and potential wars. He can reasonably claim to be entering an uglier, more dangerous landscape than any president in decades.

At this point, Trump himself probably doesn’t know exactly how he’ll handle this upheaval. But there are five key scenarios worth considering: rejuvenation, rejection, defection, recalibration and confusion.

Trump is promising a historic American rejuvenation: A smarter, tougher superpower can start winning on all fronts. Critics warn that Trump might instead choose rejection or even defection: He might jettison US global leadership or make common cause with the autocrats attacking the American-led world. There are also two milder possibilities — one in which Trump manages a messy but productive recalibration of US strategy, and one in which pervasive confusion weakens America and creates a bigger global mess.

Anyone with a stake in the well-being of the democratic world should root for one of the better outcomes. Anyone familiar with Trump knows not to rule out the darker possibilities.

Trump isn’t as unpredictable as many analysts think. His basic views — transactionalism is good; America’s trade agreement and alliances are lousy bargains; democratic values and human rights are overrated — date back decades. Throughout the recent election campaign, he telegraphed his intention to raise tariffs, push for peace in Ukraine and squeeze allies on defense spending. But reading Trump is still a challenge.

Trump sees tactical unpredictability as a virtue that throws friends and enemies off balance. This is a president who started his first term threatening war with North Korea and soon enough was gushing over his new pen pal in Pyongyang, Kim Jong Un. Trump also personalizes policy like few other presidents, so his likes and dislikes — such as his toxic first-term dealings with then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel — cast a shadow over critical relationships.

Trump’s views, moreover, are often contradictory: He spent years railing against China while also railing against the allies the US needs to counter Beijing. His transactional nature means that a pivot to deal-making is always a possibility, even with adversaries. And if Trump has strong instincts, he has an even stronger aversion to systematic plans.

Ask Trump how he plans to solve some complex problem, and the answer is invariably a bumper sticker — such as ending the Ukraine war in 24 hours — followed by a total dearth of details. That style gives Trump flexibility. It also creates uncertainty about where, exactly, he is going, at a time when the world seems to be coming apart.

Ukraine is losing its war against Russia, which is sowing aggressive subversion throughout Europe and beyond. A near-nuclear Iran remains a fount of turmoil in the Middle East. Yemen’s Houthis are terrorizing commercial shipping and targeting US warships. The collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria has weakened Iran (a good thing), but may also empower extremists and create deadly, destabilizing regional spillover.

America and China are locked in a cold war; Beijing is tooling up for a potential real war over Taiwan. North Korea is sending troops to Russia while racing ahead with its nuclear and missile programs. Every president claims to inherit a world on fire. In Trump’s case, it’s true.

MAGA and the Military

For Trump, the solution is simple: Make America Great Again. Just as Xi Jinping pledges to restore China’s past glories, and Vladimir Putin tries to reclaim Russia’s global standing, Trump is promising a rejuvenation for the ages.

He will bolster American deterrence by rebuilding the US military and forcing deadbeat allies to pay for the common defense. He will end the war in Ukraine by dragging both parties to the negotiating table, and prevent new wars by making clear that Washington won’t tolerate them. He will halt Iran’s nuclear program, force Mexico to halt flows of drugs and migrants, and deter countries from ditching the dollar by threatening them with sanctions.

Likewise, Trump will use tariffs to revitalize American industry and force other countries to pay for their economic predation. He will propel the US toward energy dominance and artificial intelligence supremacy. Trump will even compel Hamas to make peace and free its hostages, by promising “hell to pay” if it does not.

The details of Trump’s MAGA message have changed over time, but the basic thrust hasn’t: If Washington wields its unmatched power more boldly, more coercively, it can create a new era of peace, prosperity and US dominance.

Policy wonks love to mock this is the kind of kick-ass approach. Yet it rests on a real insight: America’s economic and military capabilities, and its centrality in the international system, give it tremendous leverage. So a US that really gets tough — one that threatens free-riding allies with abandonment, exerts excruciating economic pressure on its rivals, and makes everyone guess about what it might do next — can surely squeeze more out of these relationships.

It’s entirely possible that Trump can use economic sanctions and the threat of Israeli military action to batter Iran and make it rein in its nuclear program. He can probably cajole the North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies, who are desperate not to lose US protection, into coughing up more euros for defense: Indeed, the alliance is already talking about setting higher spending targets and filling capability gaps in critical areas like air defense.. But don’t go toasting the new age of American greatness just yet.

Some issues aren’t amenable to quick, clean solutions. Peace in Ukraine won’t come easily as long as Putin is convinced he is winning. Threats of tariffs or force won’t end the tide of migrants and narcotics from Mexico. In other cases, Trump’s priorities — strangling Iran while avoiding Middle East wars, building up the US military while slashing federal spending — could be at odds.

More broadly, even for a superpower, it is hard to win all the time: Trump’s first-term pressure campaigns didn’t deliver either North Korean denuclearization or a diplomatic cave-in by Iran.

If anything, Trump will encounter a world more resistant to US influence, because America’s autocratic enemies are now making common cause. Trump may find ways of improving on President Joe Biden’s performance. But if making America great again was easy, someone would have done it by now.

Rejecting the World Order?

If Trump pledges rejuvenation, his critics fear rejection: that Trump will walk away from the world America has led. In this scenario, Trump might quit NATO and withdraw US troops from South Korea. He might exit existing trade deals or use high, broadly applied tariffs to make them dead letters. The US might stop supporting frontline states like Ukraine; it would certainly cease promoting democratic values and human rights. Trump might pull US troops out of a post-Assad Syria and wash his hands of a chaotic, sordid situation. The US would still be a very great power. It just wouldn’t be upholding a liberal world order anymore.

This scenario is extreme but not unthinkable: In some ways, it simply requires taking Trump at his word. The president-elect has long inveighed against US alliances; he once wrote that “trade is bad.” He has dismissed Ukraine as a charity case and Taiwan as an economic competitor. He has mused publicly about taking every one of the aforementioned steps.

During his first term, Trump was constrained from doing these things by his more mainstream advisers. But now he has recast the Republican Party and made ideological and personal loyalty the watchwords of his new administration. Perhaps Trump 2.0 will feature a purer version of America First.

That would be an awful outcome: If the US quits the international-order business, an unstable world could spin out of control. Fortunately, Trump will still have reasons not to go fully down this path.

Withdrawing from NATO would bring a bloody fight with internationalist Republicans in the Senate. (Last year, secretary of state-designate Marco Rubio co-sponsored a measure meant to Trump-proof that alliance by making it harder for a president to pull out.) A breakdown of international trade would hurt other countries, but it would also hurt Trump’s voters — and the stock market — quite a bit. Most fundamentally, Trump’s go-to diplomatic gambit is threatening to shoot the hostage. Once he actually fires, by leaving NATO or upending other key relationships, there’s no ransom to be had.

Coddling Dictators

Rejection is a dark outcome, but not the darkest. That would be if Trump ends up siding with the autocracies assailing the international order rather than the democracies defending it. That’s not to say Trump is some Russian agent — he isn’t. But some of his inclinations aren’t so different than those of America’s rivals.

Trump, like Xi and Putin, envisions a world where great powers (and great leaders) can act with impunity. The man who tried to overturn an election has scant regard for democratic values. The leaders he most consistently praises are autocratic strongmen — Xi, Putin, Kim, Viktor Orban of Hungary — rather than free-world democrats.

In a defection scenario, Trump might force Kyiv to accept a peace deal that results in Russian dominance — not far removed from what some of his followers have proposed. He might sell out Taiwan, by refusing to defend it in a crisis, in exchange for economic concessions from Beijing. And as part of a divide and rule strategy in Europe, Trump could cheer on Orban and other illiberal populists who are all too cozy with Putin.

Trump would also become, as he was before, a role model for leaders who mimic his antidemocratic tactics. If he does even half the things he has threatened to do — shutting down hostile media outlets, jailing political opponents, deploying the military against domestic enemies — he would badly damage the institutions that underpin America’s soft power and its support for democracy in the world.

Some post-election catastrophism notwithstanding, the US won’t become a full-blown autocracy in Trump’s four years in office. But it could become a superpower with increasingly illiberal tendencies at home and abroad.

The Next Nixon?

Those first three scenarios are dramatic, even revolutionary. But revolutions, for better or worse, are hard to carry off. If Trump neither destroys nor redeems US policy, perhaps he’ll recalibrate it instead.

Washington has led the world since 1945, but the style of that leadership has changed over time. During the 1970s, Richard Nixon discarded the gold standard and moved toward a floating exchange rate system that reduced America’s hegemonic burdens. He said goodbye to Asian land wars and hello to covert interventions. Washington sought détente with the Soviet Union and reconciliation with Mao Zedong’s China. These were all jarring diplomatic dislocations. But they ultimately reenergized a postwar project that was losing steam.

A charitable interpretation might be that Trump did something similar in his first term. He made an overdue change from engagement to competition with China, even as he chased an illusory grand bargain with Beijing. He redirected America’s Middle East policy away from the quixotic pursuit of peace between Israel and the Palestinians and toward closer integration between Israel and its Arab neighbors. He recognized the limits of globalization and put new emphasis on economic security. He shocked US allies out of their complacency on defense.

All of these changes were messy. All shifted US strategy in productive ways.

In a second term, Trump’s threats of tariffs and abandonment could conceivably yield a new transatlantic bargain: Washington stays committed to the continent in exchange for higher European defense spending and greater economic alignment vis-à-vis China. A review of the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement could close China’s back door into the US market.

Trump won’t totally rebuild the US military, but he could usefully confront a defense industrial complex that produces too little, too slowly, at too great a cost. And if Trump doesn’t go too far, a shift away from Biden’s democracy-versus-autocracy rhetoric could facilitate the dirty deal-cutting — with the likes of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey — a delicate geopolitical moment requires.

None of this will magically restore US primacy. But it could better position Washington for the dangerous period ahead.

The challenge is that recalibration demands discipline and subtlety. It requires being disruptive enough to shake up old arrangements, without being so disruptive as to shatter them entirely. That may be tough for Trump, who often seems ambivalent about whether the US-led order is worth sustaining, and whose next four years could still become a total wreck.

Ball of Confusion

That’s our final scenario: pervasive, crippling confusion.

Yes, Trump is surrounding himself with loyalists: Even Rubio and Mike Waltz, the incoming national security adviser, have shifted their views on Ukraine to stay in line. That doesn’t mean the second term will be smooth.

The potential sources of drama are many. Trump’s advisers will be divided on key issues: Iran hawks like Rubio and Waltz will clash with “no more wars” types like Tulsi Gabbard, chosen to be director of national intelligence. Most of Trump’s appointees have little or no experience managing big bureaucracies; some seem to have been picked in hopes they will go to war with the departments they run.

Then there is Trump himself: a president whose short attention span and chronic indiscipline have played havoc with efforts to forge coherent policies in his name. He certainly doesn’t seem to have become sharper or more focused since 2016.

In this scenario, America’s Middle East policy could be an incoherent mess, because a divided administration can never decide what goals, or how much involvement, it seeks. Trump could act very tough with China, until he turns and tries to cut the deal of the century with Beijing. Efforts to get the Pentagon ready for conflict with China could be hindered by culture wars waged from the top — just the sin Trump accuses Biden of committing. Battles to reshape the federal bureaucracy could cause administrative chaos that makes the hard work of policy execution even harder. Trump’s ceaseless domestic controversies could consume precious time and attention.

Trump’s opponents might root for this outcome, in hopes that a hapless administration can’t do much damage. But if the US can’t get its act together, global turmoil will only get worse.

Known Unknowns

The purpose of scenario planning isn’t prediction: If we knew what would happen, we wouldn’t have to consider different outcomes. The point is to help us prepare for the unknown by understanding the varied paths the future could take.

Trump’s presidency could strengthen America’s position. It could weaken the current world order. Or it could do both simultaneously if his policies end up featuring elements of all of the above. The current moment feels so freighted, so precarious, because the universe of plausible outcomes is so incredibly broad under Trump — and because the most powerful country is, once more, the biggest source of uncertainty in a world at risk.

Those risks are only increasing as Trump’s inauguration nears. Serious analysts are warning about the possibility of global war or autocratic ascendancy. Great-power rivalries are reshaping the global economy and affecting every region. There are real reasons to worry that Trump’s America may not meet the challenges of this moment. All those who think that a pretty good international order is worth preserving should hope that it can.

Hal Brands 

Senior Fellow

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