The World Is Getting Used to Trump
January 21, 2025
When Donald Trump first won the presidency, the world had a bit of a freak-out. The French ambassador to the US melted down on social media. Germany’s Angela Merkel fretted that Washington was abandoning the international system it had built. The global elites of Davos lauded China’s Xi Jinping when he promised, risibly, to be the defender of an open, cooperative world.
Now, Trump is back, and he certainly hasn’t mellowed. Yet this time, much of the world is more calmly, even optimistically, awaiting his second term. That moderated reaction speaks volumes about how the world’s expectations of America have changed over the past eight years — and how the world itself has gotten more Trumpy.
For insight, consult new polling by the European Council on Foreign Relations. Most European populations still dislike Trump. Still, Trump has encountered little of the overt hand-wringing or resistance diplomacy that characterized his first time around. Rather, European leaders — including French president Emmanuel Macron and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte — have rushed to engage with Trump even before his inauguration. And if most European elites seem resigned to Trump redux, other parts of the world are downright welcoming.
Publics in key states — including India, Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, Brazil, Turkey and Indonesia — think Trump will be more good than bad for their countries. On balance, the world expects he will help rather than hurt the chances for peace in Ukraine and the Middle East. Even Ukrainians themselves are more bullish than bearish. What exactly is going on?
Trump’s critics would argue that Russia and China like the incoming president because he’ll take a wrecking ball to the US-led order, while America’s closest allies in continental Europe, the United Kingdom, and South Korea fear him for that same reason. That’s true, to an extent. Whatever losses China suffers in a Trump 2.0 trade war, it could recoup — and then some — from the damage he might do to the US alliances that have long constrained Beijing.
Yet that’s just one of several dynamics at work.
In some ways, foreign leaders are more restrained because they’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. Allied leaders who clashed openly with Trump after 2017 rarely benefited: Merkel nearly saw one-third of the US troop contingent removed from Germany. Allies that fared better, such as Japan and Poland, typically flattered Trump and touted their ability to support his political and geopolitical agenda. That’s a commentary on Trump’s almost juvenile tendency to personalize key relationships. Yet it’s a reality US partners can’t ignore.
There’s also global frustration with the world Joe Biden left behind. If Ukrainians are Trump-curious, that’s because Biden saved their country from losing its war of survival quickly in 2022 — only to put it on the road to losing that war slowly in the years thereafter. The Saudis hope Trump can finally end a grinding, regionally consuming war in Gaza: The nascent ceasefire he helped broker can only encourage that belief. More broadly, Biden’s foreign policy was cool and mostly competent, yet the world is still more violent, more chaotic than it was four years ago. So just as voters punished incumbents nearly everywhere in 2024, the world seems to be looking for change in Washington, too.
The change that’s coming, moreover, won’t be such a surprise this time. In 2016, so many leaders found it hard to believe that America, long the protector of the liberal order, had elected a president who openly loathed that project. Now, presumably, they see Trump’s return as part of a larger shift in which the US takes less responsibility for global order and becomes more nakedly transactional in its dealings with the world. Whatever the consequences of that shift — and they may not be pretty — it’s counterproductive to act as though Trump represents an aberration anymore.
Most fundamentally, the world is less horrified by Trump because it has become more like him. The ideas that Trump rode to power — hostility to migration and globalization, an emphasis on national identity and sovereignty — now animate political debates and political disrupters across multiple continents. Populists and strongmen are enjoying a global moment: Trump has counterparts in India’s Narendra Modi, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammad bin Salman, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, Italy’s Georgia Meloni and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. There is a generalized sense, moreover, that entrenched establishments have failed their citizens — which is why countries throughout the democratic world are experiencing such pronounced political weakness and upheaval.
A warning: Those looking forward to a Trump presidency may come to regret it, if he governs by abandoning Ukraine, tearing up a global trading system that benefits so many countries, and stoking rather than suppressing the geopolitical chaos. For the moment, however, the international response to this transition shows we’re already living in Trump’s world.
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