At 2:26 a.m. on Nov. 6, 2024, Joe Biden’s claim to sole U.S. presidential authority ended. At that moment, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban became the first foreign leader to congratulate Donald Trump on his electoral victory, commending the president-elect for his “enormous win” in a message on X. He was followed swiftly by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and French President Emmanuel Macron, before the floodgates opened. By dawn, a range of world leaders had joined in the plaudits.
Then came the phone calls. Some, such as the five-minute call with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, carried promises of follow-up meetings. Others lasted longer as foreign leaders sought assurances about the president-elect’s policy intentions. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reportedly came away from his 25-minute call somewhat reassured, despite Trump’s prior pledge to end Kyiv’s war with Russia before he took office.
Netanyahu, overseeing a multifront war of his own, claimed on Nov. 10 to have already spoken with the president-elect three times and said they had seen “eye to eye” on the threat posed by Iran. All told, Trump said on Nov. 7 that he had spoken to “probably” 70 world leaders, each of whom will have sought to influence his thinking about their most pressing priorities.
This flurry of activity is the most visible indication that during a presidential transition, there is not, in fact, “one president at a time,” nor a single U.S. foreign policy. The roughly 11-week interregnum—unusually long by global standards—may be a relic of a bygone era in which the sheer logistical feat of tabulating and certifying votes across a vast country took considerable time.
Yet it is also a period in which two sets of hands steer the ship of U.S. diplomacy. As foreign governments jockey for the attention of the incoming administration, the president-elect’s every word and deed are placed in the spotlight.
In 2024, with wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East and profound political and policy differences between the incoming and outgoing administrations, Trump’s approach to handling diplomatic contacts poses serious challenges for the coherence of U.S. foreign policy during the transition.
The initial contacts between a president-elect and foreign governments may not appear to constitute substantive diplomacy. Yet their timing and form are treated as significant sources of prestige.
To be among the first foreign leaders to speak to the president-elect is an important marker of status. When then-British Prime Minister Theresa May found herself only ninth in the list of those who spoke with Trump after his election win in 2016, the low ranking triggered what then-Ambassador to the United States Kim Darroch later referred to as a “meltdown” in London, which was accustomed to higher spots usually reserved for traditional U.S. allies. And eight years earlier, then-U.S. President-elect Barack Obama was criticized for calling the Pakistani president before the Indian prime minister.
Yet phone calls are just one means through which foreign governments try to engage the president-elect. Direct meetings are the real prize. Occasionally, foreign heads of state will be afforded an audience with the president-elect.
In 1953, for instance, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill apparently invited himself to visit President Dwight Eisenhower in New York to underline the importance of the Anglo-American “special relationship”—and obtain footage to show for it. Prior to the passage of the 20th Amendment, which shortened the formal transition period by roughly six weeks, it was not unknown for presidents-elect to travel abroad and be received in a manner befitting a sitting president. Herbert Hoover even embarked on a lengthy “goodwill tour” after his election in 1928 to strengthen diplomatic relations with 10 countries in Latin America.
More typically, diplomatic communications take place through intermediaries, often involving individuals expected to serve in the new administration. Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s ill-fated conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak may be the most prominent case in recent times to come to light.
But it is far from unprecedented. Multiple administrations have maintained back channels with Russian officials during transitions, with one Soviet intelligence officer even managing to convince then-incoming National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger to include a line in President Richard Nixon’s inaugural address declaring that the United States would maintain open lines of communication to its communist adversaries.
There is good reason to think that Trump’s diplomatic communications during this transition will be unusually significant. After all, as the first president elected to serve a non-consecutive term since Grover Cleveland, he occupies a rare position of having prior relationships with many foreign leaders.
Many of them—including Zelensky, Netanyahu, and Orban—already established contact with him during the campaign. Whether the Japanese prime minister brings along another gift like the gold-plated golf club that his predecessor gave to Trump in November 2016 remains to be seen, but his was not the only meeting request under consideration, with Argentine President Javier Milei visiting Mar-a-Lago this week.
Trump has also broken with traditional customs in other ways. A president-elect’s transition team would typically liaise with the State Department to facilitate international contacts and provide interpreters, protocol guidance, and secure communications. In 2016, by contrast, international outreach was mainly handled by Trump himself and his inner circle of advisors. This resulted in Trump making at least 32 calls with foreign leaders before consulting with the State Department, including one apparently arranged by a prominent lobbyist for Taiwan and another by an Australian golf pro.
Four years later, Trump’s initial unwillingness to accept Biden’s victory and provide official support to the incoming administration forced Biden’s team to operate independently. In 2024, Trump has again avoided relying on the support of U.S. officials, and his inclusion of tech mogul Elon Musk in at least part of his call with Zelensky indicates his continued comfort breaking with orthodox practices. The unusual speed with which Trump has announced his nominees for senior cabinet positions also expands the number of voices to whom foreign governments will be attuned for clues of a future shift in policy.
Even under normal circumstances, the increased attention afforded to incoming administrations poses a challenge to outgoing presidents, many of whom have long to-do lists in the realm of foreign policy. The problem that these so-called lame ducks face is not a lack of ambition, but authority: They lack the credibility required to make commitments that outlast their presidency. While foreign governments may still go through the motions of diplomacy, they tend not to take the sitting president seriously as they seek eleventh-hour embellishments to their foreign policy legacies.
Dean Acheson, a former secretary of state, thus recalled in his memoir Present at the Creation how foreign officials “treated us with the gentle and affectionate solicitude that one might show to the dying, but asked neither help nor advice nor commitment for a future we would not share with them.” The coherence and effectiveness of U.S. foreign policy during a presidential transition, therefore, depends on the degree to which the outgoing president can cooperate with their successor.
The most prominent means of doing this is the once-ubiquitous face-to-face meeting between incoming and outgoing presidents. When Biden invited Trump to the Oval Office this week, he afforded the president-elect an opportunity that he had been denied in 2020, when their roles were reversed. While few details of what they discussed have emerged, foreign policy usually features on the agenda of these meetings, with incumbents typically using the opportunity to warn their successors about the threats that they would likely face in office.
Eisenhower’s advice to then-President-elect John F. Kennedy about the importance of denying a communist victory in Southeast Asia has been taken by historians as a defining moment in the United States’ path to war in Vietnam. In 2016, Obama’s warning to Trump that North Korea’s nuclear program was likely to rank among his most pressing foreign-policy concerns appears to have resonated, even if the way that Trump handled the issue with promises of “fire and fury” was likely not what Obama had in mind.
Yet overt efforts by a sitting administration to co-opt the president-elect’s power to shore up the outgoing administration’s waning authority can backfire, particularly when there is political and personal animus involved.
When Eisenhower met outgoing President Harry Truman in 1952, for instance, he was asked to issue a statement supporting the incumbent’s position on armistice negotiations in Korea. The president-elect demurred, following advice from Republican advisor Harold Stassen that doing so would be a “great mistake” that linked his first foreign-policy decision to a “discredited Truman administration.” With hopes of securing peace dashed, Truman had little positive to say about his successor’s behavior, privately commenting that his advice “went into one ear and out the other” and later claiming that he “acted as if I were his enemy” in an essay published posthumously and titled “Why I Don’t Like Ike.”
Indeed, a failure to reconcile competing foreign-policy positions of outgoing and incoming administrations can be particularly problematic in times of war and financial crisis. During the 1932-33 transition, President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt’s flat refusal to cooperate with the Hoover administration in resolving the war debt crisis in Europe led to an effective paralysis in U.S. foreign policy and panic abroad.
Clarity in messaging can also be crucial in signaling to allies and adversaries alike whether campaign rhetoric will be translated into actual policy. President-elect Warren Harding’s criticisms of the League of Nations in 1920, for example, and his advocacy for its replacement by an “association of nations,” raised many international fears of U.S. isolationism at a formative moment for the league when U.S. support was deemed critical. Yet Harding did not have a clear policy in this area, and hoped—unsuccessfully, as it turned out—to use the transition to arrive at one.
Marshalling the president-elect’s diplomatic position in support of the incumbent’s policies is made easier when there is basic agreement on the issues at stake. Having pledged “a substantial amount of continuity” with the foreign policies of the Ford administration in 1976, President-elect Jimmy Carter permitted his secretary-of-state designate to join Kissinger and the Chinese ambassador for lunch, where he endorsed the 1972 Shanghai Communique.
Four years later, by contrast, Carter officials slammed comments made by incoming President Ronald Reagan’s transition team anticipating a “fundamental change of course” away from Carter’s emphasis on human rights as an effort to undermine the sitting president’s policies in Latin America.
While several stories of presidential candidates actively sabotaging the policies of an incumbent abound, perhaps the clearest documented example during a transition dates back to 1968, when Kissinger used his back channel with the Soviets to scupper outgoing President Lyndon Johnson’s efforts to convene an arms control summit, for which Nixon would later take full credit.
In 2024, the ingredients of a cordial and cooperative transition in foreign policy do not appear to be present. Biden’s decision to grit his teeth and offer Trump a preelection meeting speaks to his belief in the importance of a smooth transition, but does not mask the bad blood between two individuals who publicly sparred over which was the worst president in U.S. history. The visions of Washington’s role in the world offered by each during the campaign leave little common ground.
And while the president-elect’s transition operation has been far more organized than his 2016 effort, it has thus far refused to participate in the normal handoff process, raising questions about the willingness of lower-level officials to cooperate on issues outside of the political spotlight.
The Biden administration is therefore in a tight spot as it pursues its remaining foreign-policy goals. Efforts to rush its last designated $6 billion of security assistance to Ukraine prior to Inauguration Day indicate that some levers may still be available to maximize the shelf life of its commitments. But there are limits to this, and it remains unclear whether Trump will heed the warning that Biden was expected to deliver this week about the risks of walking away from Ukraine.
Conflicting reports of a call between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, in which the president-elect warned the Russian leader against escalating his country’s military campaign in Ukraine, underscore the risk of mixed messaging in the position of the United States toward critical priorities.
In the Middle East, Biden faces a similar challenge. According to Israeli officials, Netanyahu told Trump and Jared Kushner that Israel was rushing to advance a cease-fire deal in Lebanon with the aim of providing a “gift” to Trump. And while U.S. officials insisted that work on a potential deal was still being done by Biden’s team, it was notable that Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s minister of strategic affairs, made Mar-a-Lago the first stop of his U.S. tour before briefing members of the sitting administration.
If history is any guide, we are in for a bumpy ride.
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