Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s election victory marks the beginning of another roller-coaster ride in U.S. foreign policy. The president-elect is poised to bring back the hallmarks of his first term: a trade war with China, a deep skepticism—even hostility—toward multilateralism, a fondness for strongmen, and an iconoclastic, tweet-from-the-hip style of dealmaking diplomacy. Trump’s advisors have said his “peace through strength” approach is what the country needs in this precarious moment.
This second term will bring new challenges, though—not least the two wars, in the Middle East and Ukraine, that the United States is deeply involved in. Trump has promised to end the war in Ukraine before he even takes office, but he has yet to offer any detailed plan; his plans for bringing peace to the Middle East are equally vague.
Unclear as Trump’s designs may be, Foreign Policy waded into his track record as well as his statements and those of his advisors to offer clues on what the future of U.S. foreign policy holds. As Trump’s first term showed, his own whims often contrast with his advisors’ agenda; this time around, he may have a tighter grip on the wheel as a second-time president likely staffed by a more loyal circle of advisors.
Here’s a glimpse into the Trump 2.0 future.
China
On China policy, to some extent President Joe Biden will just be passing the baton back to Trump. The current administration inherited much of the first Trump term’s harsher approach to China, and a second Trump term is likely to continue identifying China as the United States’ top national security challenge. But on specific issues—and certainly overall style—a second Trump term will bring significant changes.
As with his first term, Trump has set his sights first and foremost on trade. Trump told the Wall Street Journal in an October interview that “tariff” is “the most beautiful word in the dictionary,” and his clearest priority when it comes to China is relaunching the trade war that he began in 2018.
Trump’s campaign website calls for cutting the U.S. reliance on China for all essential goods. But that’s just the beginning. Biden maintained Trump’s original tariffs and added some additional ones; Trump is poised to go much further. With promised tariffs of at least 60 percent on all imports from China, Trump would get closer to the full decoupling of the world’s two largest economies espoused by some of his closest advisors.
Such a move would worsen the already tense bilateral relationship and cost American households thousands of dollars a year and U.S. exporters one of their biggest markets. But the knock-on effects of an aggressive trade policy toward China would also end up weakening other potential U.S. friends and allies.
China still depends overwhelmingly on exports to drive its growth, and measures designed to weaken that main motor of growth, such as Trump’s tariffs, would also weaken Chinese demand for manufacturing inputs, including energy and minerals. That would be bad news for U.S. neighbors such as Peru, Chile, and Mexico (all big exporters of copper to China), U.S. ally Australia (a big exporter of iron ore and coal), and U.S. frenemy Saudi Arabia, a big source of China’s crude oil.
In Trump’s first term, tariff leverage over China led to a bilateral deal that he deemed “the biggest deal anyone has ever seen.” It was meant to boost U.S. agricultural and energy exports to China, but it never came close to realizing its objectives. Reviving that Phase One agreement could be the starting point for a revamped deal under the new Trump administration, according to the America First Policy Institute, a think tank in Trump’s orbit.
If the purpose of the sky-high import taxes is to force China to overhaul its trade and economic practices—the ostensible and unmet goal of the first-term trade war with China—Trump’s other trade policies would make that much more difficult. The strong-arming of China would be undermined by similar treatment of friends and allies, as during his first term. Trump has promised tariffs as high as 20 percent on all other countries, including the European Union. That would not only bring instant and well-prepared reprisals on U.S. exports, further weakening U.S. economic prospects, but it would also dampen the prospects for a big-tent coalition of major economies that could bring coordinated pressure on Beijing to curb its most egregious trade abuses.
Beyond trade, Trump’s biggest point of departure from the Biden administration may be on Taiwan. During his campaign, he repeatedly cast doubt on the future extent of U.S. support, applying the same transactional approach he has taken with many countries to the island. “Taiwan should pay us for defense. You know, we’re no different than an insurance company. … Taiwan doesn’t give us anything,” he said in a July interview with Bloomberg Businessweek.
Such statements have led some China experts to think Trump will look to forge some sort of deal with Taiwan in exchange for further U.S. defense support. Taiwan’s military spending stands at some 2.6 percent of its GDP today; Trump may require the island to hike that number up, as former Trump National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien and senior defense official Elbridge Colby have proposed. TSMC, the Taiwanese semiconductor giant, has already invested more than $65 billion in new plants located in Arizona, but Trump may push for further domestic investment, Taiwan experts told Foreign Policy.
While Trump may drive a hard bargain, it is unlikely that he would actually abandon support for Taiwan. Among his potential top advisors is former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who is a staunch supporter of Taiwan and has called for formally recognizing Taiwanese independence. In interviews, Trump has stuck with the long-standing U.S. policy of strategic ambiguity when pressed about whether the U.S. military would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack or blockade. Trump’s own personal unpredictability also provides its own layer of ambiguity, strategic or not. When asked that question in his October interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump responded, “I wouldn’t have to, because [Chinese President Xi Jinping] respects me and he knows I’m f— crazy.”
Which voices ultimately hold sway in Trump’s cabinet will also influence his administration’s China policy. As Foreign Policy previously reported, Republican China hawks are divided over how existential competition with China should be, along with other key questions, including how much to decouple the two economies. As with Trump’s first term, these battle lines will surely carry over into the White House.
Trump’s own guanxi—or personal relationships—will surely shape policy as well. The president-elect has repeatedly expressed admiration for Xi. “I very much respect President Xi. I got to know him very well. And I liked him a lot. He’s a strong guy, but I liked him a lot,” he told Businessweek. Trump’s first term showed his willingness to buck his administration’s policy in favor of his own brand of personal politics with Xi; that may well happen again in pursuit of a second trade deal.
—Lili Pike and Keith Johnson
Middle East
Unless Israel’s wars with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon are fully resolved before Trump is inaugurated—which seems unlikely—one of the most urgent foreign-policy issues on his desk will be the escalating tensions in the Middle East. The president-elect has spoken about the need to bring the war in Gaza to a close, claiming in August that he told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “get your victory” because the “killing has to stop.”
It’s unclear what role, if any, the next administration would play in trying to bring that war to a close. Trump has criticized the Biden team’s call for a cease-fire, describing it as an effort to “tie Israel’s hand behind its back” and saying a cease-fire would only give Hamas time to regroup.
During his first term, Trump rhetorically backed a two-state solution to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while putting his thumb on the scale, handing Israel a series of long-sought diplomatic prizes such as moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, cutting funding to the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, and reversing decades of U.S. policy by recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and declaring that Israeli settlements in the West Bank do not violate international law.
Trump has previously said he “fought for Israel like no president ever before,” and his administration’s role in brokering the Abraham Accords—a series of diplomatic agreements between Israel and a number of Arab states—was regarded as one of his major foreign-policy triumphs; the Biden administration has continued those efforts.
While Netanyahu and Trump had a warm relationship during his first term, things soured after the Israeli leader congratulated Biden on his 2020 election victory a day after the race was called, angering Trump. His tone toward Israel in recent months has also been critical at times, with Trump warning in April that the country was “losing the PR war” in Gaza.
Trump takes to the White House for a second term as the wider Middle East has been ignited by clashes between Israel and Tehran’s proxies in Lebanon, Yemen, and beyond. This year saw Israel and Iran directly trade fire for the first time. While the Biden administration has sought to de-escalate tensions, urging Israel not to strike Iran’s nuclear and energy facilities in a recent wave of retaliatory strikes, Trump is likely to be less cautious, saying in October that Israel should “hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later.”
The first Trump administration took a hard line on Iran, withdrawing from the nuclear deal, pursuing a policy of “maximum pressure” on the regime, and assassinating the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force, Qassem Suleimani, in an airstrike in January 2020.
Speaking to reporters in September, Trump said he would be open to striking a new deal with Iran to prevent the country from developing a nuclear weapon. “We have to make a deal, because the consequences are impossible. We have to make a deal,” he said, without offering further details of what such negotiations could entail.
While Trump sought to wind down the U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, he is not entirely averse to bringing U.S. military might to bear in pursuit of clear goals, said Robert Greenway, who served as the senior director for the Middle East on Trump’s National Security Council. That could include preventing Iran from joining the short list of countries with nuclear arms. “The military option may be the only viable option left to prevent Iran developing a nuclear weapon,” Greenway said.
Adding another wrinkle, the U.S. intelligence community has warned that Iran has plotted to assassinate Trump and will likely continue those efforts beyond Election Day. “Now it’s also personal. I wouldn’t discount that,” Greenway said.
—Amy Mackinnon
Russia-Ukraine and NATO
Trump has criticized U.S. funding for Ukraine’s war effort and called for Europe to assume more of the burden of supporting Kyiv. He labeled Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “the greatest salesman on Earth” for how much money he’s been able to get for Ukraine from the Biden administration, though he added, “That doesn’t mean I don’t want to help [Zelensky], because I feel very badly for those people.” Yet he has expressed doubt that Ukraine can defeat Russia.
Trump has claimed that it will take him just 24 hours to negotiate an end to the Russia-Ukraine war and that he will get it done before his inauguration in January. But details on how he intends to end the war are scant. In a July 2023 interview with Fox News, Trump suggested that he would force Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table by telling the Ukrainian leader that Kyiv will get no more U.S. aid and telling the Russian leader that Washington will dramatically increase aid to Kyiv if a deal isn’t made.
Trump has said even less about what a negotiated settlement would look like beyond that he wants “to see a fair deal made.”
Vice President-elect J.D. Vance has offered a bit more specifics on what such a deal might look like. Although he said Trump would leave it to the two warring countries as well as Europe to work out the details of a peace agreement, Vance suggested that it would likely entail the establishment of a demilitarized zone along current battle lines, allowing Ukraine to retain its sovereignty while forcing it to give up some of its territory currently in Moscow’s hands, as well as a guarantee that Ukraine will remain neutral—meaning it won’t join NATO or other “allied institutions.”
Analysts have noted that this is very similar to the terms that Putin has laid out for a cease-fire, which Ukraine and several of its backers—including the United States, Italy, and Germany—have rejected.
Trump is far from NATO’s biggest supporter, and the alliance is no fan of him, either. Trump has chastised NATO members that do not meet the bloc’s minimum defense spending goal, even encouraging Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to countries that don’t hit the 2 percent target. Eight countries in the 32-nation bloc do not meet this requirement.
Ahead of the election, NATO tried to Trump-proof the alliance. Fearing that a second Trump term would slow or halt aid to Ukraine, the bloc ramped up production of key weapons and equipment as well as worked to consolidate authority over training and provisions to Europe. At this year’s NATO summit in Washington, the alliance reaffirmed that “Ukraine’s future is in NATO” but declined to extend an invitation for Kyiv to join or set a timeline for membership.
From Russia’s perspective, a second Trump presidency might pave the way for friendlier relations between Washington and Moscow, as the Kremlin has long preferred the Republican leader over his Democratic opponents. Yet even the Russians are hesitant about Trump’s promises to immediately end the conflict. This sort of thinking falls within “the realm of fantasy,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in September.
Since leaving office, Trump has reportedly spoken to Putin as many as seven times. Trump has not confirmed these conversations, saying only that if he did have them, then “it’s a smart thing.” In September, Trump met with Zelensky in New York. The president-elect has a fraught history with the Ukrainian leader, having been impeached in 2019 for pressuring Zelensky to dig up political dirt on Biden and the Democrats to help Trump try to win the 2020 election; at the time, Trump was withholding nearly $400 million in U.S. military assistance to Ukraine.
—Alexandra Sharp
Africa
U.S. Africa policy didn’t make much of a splash on the campaign trail this year, with neither Trump nor Democratic nominee Kamala Harris offering many—if any—details on what their plans would be on taking office. But Trump’s first term offers some clues about what his future approach might look like.
Trump’s signature regional initiative, known as “Prosper Africa,” focused on boosting trade and deepening U.S. companies’ business ties on the continent. Yet he often spoke of U.S. Africa policy in a dismissive, even racist way, perhaps most famously when he disparaged what he called “shithole countries” in Africa—all while never once stepping foot on the continent.
Further complicating matters is the fact that Trump consistently framed U.S. Africa policy in the context of the wider U.S.-China contest, frustrating African leaders who have grown tired of being treated as an afterthought in U.S. policy circles or, alternatively, seen solely as pawns in geopolitics.
Trump “very much framed the U.S. interest in Africa as a competition with China and, to a lesser degree, Russia,” said Cameron Hudson, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). “The Biden administration has learned not to frame our interest in those terms because they realize that it doesn’t get us very far with African governments.”
U.S. engagement in Africa was mentioned in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page conservative policy playbook that has deep links to Team Trump—even though Trump himself sought to distance himself from it on the campaign trail. Yet many of the foreign-policy interests outlined in Project 2025—including the continent’s growing population size, ample supplies of critical minerals, and vicinity to key shipping routes, as well as countering terrorism there—resemble the Biden administration’s priorities, as Hudson noted in a CSIS report. Project 2025 also stressed the importance of countering “malign Chinese activity on the continent” through public diplomacy.
One of the big questions going forward, Hudson said, is whether Trump will be able to stay on message and resist making the kinds of derogatory remarks about Africa that he did during his first term, which heightened tensions and impeded diplomacy. “Will he be able to refrain from those kinds of flip remarks that he’s frankly known for?” Hudson said. That’s a “big kind of wild card.”
—Christina Lu
Immigration
Trump’s first term was marked by a hard-line immigration agenda that included his highly controversial family separation policy and travel ban on people from certain Muslim-majority countries. This time around, Trump has promised a more dramatic overhaul of U.S. immigration policy, vowing to carry out the “largest deportation operation in American history.”
The president-elect’s advisors have laid out a plan that would see U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement conduct sweeping workplace raids and arrests in order to deport millions of undocumented immigrants every year. The administration would build “vast holding facilities,” likely in Texas near the U.S. southern border, in order to detain the immense number of immigrants expected to be awaiting deportation, according to Stephen Miller, Trump’s former immigration czar and current advisor. Trump also envisions halting the U.S. refugee program and reinstating some of the more contentious policies from his first presidential term, such as implementing another variation of the Muslim travel ban.
The implementation of those plans is estimated to cost upwards of billions of dollars; the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit advocacy group, put the total sum at $88 billion per year over more than a decade. Beyond those upfront costs—and the massive human toll of such a policy—economists have warned that conducting mass deportations on the scale that Trump has proposed would deal a painful blow to the U.S. economy.
An analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that Trump’s proposed mass deportations—which would target a key labor force that is difficult to replace—would drive up inflation, lower the U.S. GDP, and reduce employment. The report noted that agriculture would be the hardest-hit sector.
Trump’s proposed overhaul won’t be easy to implement, as it will likely face political, legal, and logistical obstacles, said Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, a policy expert at the Migration Policy Institute. “Domestically, it will be very difficult for the Trump administration to receive the congressional support needed to actually conduct mass deportations,” he said. “Logistically, it is difficult to try to identify migrants, detain them for long periods of time without violating the current U.S. law, and then return them to a country that they may have not been to for a while.”
Yet Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric and pledges are set to instill considerable fear among immigrant communities. “Whether they’re practical or implementable or not, these policy consequences will have real effects on people,” Soto said, who said there was a significant “chilling effect” under Trump’s first term.
—Christina Lu
India
The U.S. relationship with India has for decades been touted as bipartisan and almost leader-proof on both sides. Trump’s first term was no exception, at least in terms of optics. Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi—who was elected to a third term this year—established a relationship that seemed more personal and political than diplomatic. This was perhaps best exemplified by the “Howdy, Modi” rally that took place in Houston in September 2019 and the “Namaste Trump” rally that occurred in Ahmedabad, India, five months later.
There is thus far no reason to believe the two leaders won’t just pick up where they left off. But Trump’s transactional worldview also caused a degree of friction, with his “America First” doctrine clashing with Modi’s “Make in India” policy. On immigration (the topic closest to Indian hearts as the largest group of applicants by far for U.S. work visas), Trump imposed multiple restrictions on the H-1B visa program that thousands of Indians use to enter the United States every year. While Biden maintained some of those H-1B restrictions early in his administration, he has subsequently eased many of the immigration restrictions Trump put in place. Trump has slammed the H-1B program in the past as unfair to U.S. workers but has thus far not indicated how he would approach it this time around.
Washington and New Delhi are now in a markedly better place, with Biden and Modi having significantly deepened the two countries’ technology, trade, and defense relationship and with a mutual concern around China’s rise driving the two countries even closer together. That dynamic is likely to continue under Trump, with opposition to China boosting U.S. relations with other countries in South Asia and the broader Indo-Pacific region as well. India’s increased purchases of U.S. defense equipment may also get the country into Trump’s good books, but his distaste for multilateralism could hurt groupings such as the Quad.
“I think India is pretty confident that it can deal with either of the administrations,” said Sushant Singh, a lecturer at Yale University and frequent Foreign Policy contributor, speaking shortly before the election—even if a Trump administration “can be highly unpredictable and inconsistent.”
—Rishi Iyengar
Technology
Given technology’s centrality in today’s geopolitics, Trump’s handling of the industry both domestically and from a national security standpoint will have big global ripple effects. His approach on the former is less clear—much of Silicon Valley enthusiastically supported his campaign, including Elon Musk, but Vance has also praised Biden’s Federal Trade Commission chair (and Big Tech’s nemesis), Lina Khan.
On the latter, however, Trump could bring more continuity than people might expect. After all, Biden’s semiconductor export controls were preceded by Trump’s Huawei crackdown, and Trump’s ban on TikTok in his first term was undone only for Biden—spurred on by Congress—to resurrect it. Actually kicking out the Chinese-owned app remains an open question, however, considering it may remain tied up in court for several more months and Trump on the campaign trail expressed a degree of previously unseen ambiguity on following through on a ban.
But in terms of curbing China’s technological rise and bringing tech manufacturing back to U.S. shores, Trump will likely continue what he started and what Biden furthered.
—Rishi Iyengar
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