Trump will end the U.S.-led order. The second term will make the first look like a “garden party.”

Daniel W. Drezner, “Bracing for Trump 2.0,” Foreign Affairs, 5 September 2023, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/bracing-trump-possible-return-allies-rivals.

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During his first term, Trump scrambled the dense network of alliances and partnerships that the United States had built over the previous 75 years. For long-standing allies in Europe, Latin America, and the Pacific Rim, the United States suddenly exhibited a bewildering array of capricious behavior. Trump blasted allies for not contributing enough to collective security and for allegedly robbing the United States blind on trade deals. He repeatedly threatened to exit previously sacrosanct agreements including NATO, the World Trade Organization, the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement, and NAFTA. By contrast, although U.S. adversaries also had to deal with the occasional tantrum from Trump, it was for them in many ways the best of times. Trump bent over backward to ingratiate himself with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. His administration yo-yoed between coercing and accommodating these states, with the latter tactic usually winning out. These autocrats happily pocketed gains from the United States’ strained relations with allies. Xi could go to Davos in 2017 and effectively declare that China, rather than the United States, was the status quo power. Putin could bide his time while the Trump White House withdrew the U.S. ambassador from Ukraine and withheld Javelin weapons systems in an effort to coerce Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into aiding Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign. There was no need for Putin or Xi to act recklessly when their rival was self-sabotaging.

Biden’s victory over Trump in 2020 ended much of this bizarre behavior. Biden has reasserted traditional alliances to an extent not seen since U.S. President George H. W. Bush. As Richard Haass, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, has put it, Biden has transformed U.S. foreign policy “from ‘America first’ to alliances first.” Biden consulted widely with European leaders in crafting the U.S. response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, resulting in a degree of transatlantic cooperation that has surprised even Putin. Similarly, the administration has garnered support from numerous allies to counter China: imposing export controls in consultation with Japan and the Netherlands; bolstering the Quad, a defense coalition made up of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States; and developing the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, a U.S.-led talking shop of 14 countries, including Indonesia, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam. Public opinion polling conducted across a group of 23 countries as varied as Hungary, Japan, and Nigeria shows that much of the world holds more positive attitudes toward the United States under Biden than it did under Trump.

At the same time, rivals such as Russia and China have had to adjust to a U.S. president who walks the walk as well as talks the talk on great-power competition. Trump ranted and raved and lashed out at China, but in the end, he was more interested in making deals than in advancing U.S. interests—demonstrated, for instance, by his push to finalize the Phase One trade agreement with China in early 2020 without pressing Chinese authorities about the emerging COVID-19 pandemic. His approach to Russia was mercurial; Trump himself has said that he was the “apple of [Putin’s] eye.” By contrast, the Biden administration has proved ready and willing to mobilize the federal government to counter both these autocracies—the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act are far more ambitious pieces of legislation than anything passed during the Trump years. These measures aim to accomplish what Trump only talked about: “home shoring” critical industrial sectors.

Biden has also been far more adept at attracting new allies and partners. NATO has expanded to include Finland and is soon likely to count Sweden in, as well. The trilateral partnership between Japan, South Korea, and the United States in Northeast Asia has been strengthened; the gathering of these countries’ leaders at Camp David in August would have been unthinkable during the Trump years. Biden will sign a strategic partnership agreement with Vietnam during a state visit to Hanoi in September, deepening ties between two countries wary of Chinese expansionism. The AUKUS pact with Australia and the United Kingdom has cemented security cooperation with these key allies. The United States has bolstered bilateral cooperation with Taiwan. Both Russian and Chinese firms are discovering that their ability to freeload off the liberal international order has been compromised.

As U.S. adversaries find themselves increasingly isolated, many elites in these countries are holding out hope for a future windfall—heralded by Trump’s return to the presidency in 2025. China watchers report hearing more mentions of Trump in their visits to Beijing than they do in the United States. Chinese officials hope that a new Trump administration will fray U.S. alliances again. As for Russia, policymakers in Europe and the United States agree that Putin is unlikely to change his tactics in Ukraine until after the 2024 election. An anonymous U.S. official told CNN in August: “Putin knows Trump will help him. And so do the Ukrainians and our European partners.” Allies in Europe are also contemplating—or, rather, dreading—a second Trump term.

Some observers argue that although Trump executed an unconventional foreign policy when he was president, he did not act on his worst impulses. He did not withdraw the United States from either the WTO or NATO, nor did he remove U.S. troops from across the Pacific Rim. These pundits hold that Trump’s second term would just reprise the bluster of his first term.

Such equanimity is misplaced. A second Trump term would transpire with countervailing institutions that are even weaker than they were in 2016. Trump would be supported by congressional Republicans who are far more Trumpish in their outlook than the old-guard GOP leadership of five years ago. According to The New York Times, Trump, if reelected, “plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as ‘the sick political class that hates our country.’” Trump’s own foreign policy team would likely feature hardly anyone with a significant record of leadership in diplomacy or the military that could put the brakes on his wildest ideas—in other words, there will no longer be any adults in the room. There will be no James Mattis, the secretary of defense under Trump’s first term, or even a John Bolton, a former national security adviser, to talk Trump out of his rash actions or persuade him that he cannot bomb Mexico or that he is incapable of ending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in a single day. Trump’s second term would most closely resemble the chaotic last few months of Trump’s first term, when the 45th president came close to bombing Iran and unilaterally withdrawing all U.S. troops from a variety of trouble spots such as Somalia and Syria. As one former German official told The New York Times, “Trump has experience now and knows what levers to pull, and he’s angry.” Another European official compared a second Trump to the Terminator of the second film in the franchise, which featured a cyborg assassin even more lethal and sophisticated than the original played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Throughout his first term, Trump frequently held U.S. foreign policy hostage to his own political whims. He has faced some consequences; his demands that Zelensky relay damaging information about Biden (regardless of whether it was true) in return for sending Kyiv arms resulted in one of his two impeachments. If Trump is reelected despite these two impeachments—and four fresh criminal indictments—he will feel truly unconstrained and unrepentant. A second Trump term would make the first one look like a garden party.