The world has questions, America.
The magnitude of the second Trump presidency could create a geopolitical earthquake.
This week, from Gwinnett County, Georgia, I had a bit of air time on TV and radio in Africa, India and Europe with international newscasters asking me what happened and why it happened, as well as requesting my geopolitical forecast about the potentially stormy weather ahead.
There are dozens of online magazine essays and Substack columns you can read regarding the what and why of the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. As for the future, I am not a fortune teller so I hesitate to make prognostications. However, there was one prediction I was willing to offer: With both chambers of the U.S. Congress run by the Republicans, combined with a sympathetic Supreme Court and Donald Trump’s desire to test the bounds of executive power (“only be a dictator for one day”), the 47th president’s predominance could rival that of any of his predecessors.
Those who voted for him (73.4 million people) will likely cheer that assessment. You can imagine the angst among the 69 million citizens who cast their ballots for Vice President Kamala Harris, the nominee of the now depleted Democratic Party.
I’ve spent the majority of the latter half of my reporting career abroad, thus I have a better grip on international relations than domestic policy.
Returning Stateside in 2016, I covered the tail end of the Obama administration and was then inside the White House for nearly the entirety of the 45th presidency and the first year of that of the 46th. I traveled extensively with Secretary of State John Kerry in the latter part of 2016 and on many of the international trips on Air Force One undertaken by President Trump.
I watched Trump, on his first international trip as president, shuffle in a sword dance in Saudi Arabia and subsequently shake hands in Singapore and Vietnam with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. I was in the room when he pushed aside, on the NATO stage in Brussels, the prime minister of Montenegro, Dusko Markovic. I witnessed Trump standing beside Russian President Vladimir Putin for an extraordinary joint news conference in Helsinki, immediately after the two met privately with just interpreters present.
As the White House traveling pool radio reporter for numerous bilateral meetings in foreign countries, including India, Israel, Japan and South Korea, I asked Trump and his hosts questions and sometimes got answers. And there were the countless visits by heads of government to the Oval Office during which I was also briefly among the inquisitors.
(This and more recounted in my 2024 book, ‘Behind the White House Curtain.’)
Those experiences equipped me to answer some of the questions from the nervous news anchors abroad who are wondering what Trump 2.0 means for their country’s relationship with the United States and how priorities will shift in Washington in regards to the rest of the world.
Trump, on the campaign trail, this year was explicit and repetitive in mentioning immigration, as well as the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Central American countries may already be bracing for a forced return of many of their citizens who went north for better opportunities, although U.S. law enforcement — and perhaps the military — will likely face personnel, logistical and legal hurdles to attempt to quickly deport millions of people, as Trump has vowed. He has also made it clear Ukraine should not expect many more billions of dollars for its defensive war against Russia. Any ceasefire or agreement in which Trump appointees are the interlocutors likely stands to favor Moscow over Kyiv, predict numerous analysts.
One of the more substantive foreign policy efforts of the previous Trump administration was the Abraham Accords. It is unlikely the president-elect’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, will return to the White House for an encore. But Trump, no doubt, will be burning up the secure phone line with his buddy in Jerusalem, Benjamin Netanyahu. This could result in an IDF even more unrestrained in trying to eliminate Hamas and Hezbollah and, in the process, weaken Iranian influence in the Middle East — an outcome that would be quietly cheered in some Sunni Muslim countries. Any diplomat in Tel Aviv, Cairo, London or Washington, most likely will tell you that, regardless of the direction of the hostilities, it will be the Palestinian civilians who will continue to suffer the most.
Trump has said the most beautiful word in the dictionary is ‘tariff.’ That certainly does not translate positively into Mandarin. On the campaign trail, journalists attempted to discover whether Trump really understood that tariffs are paid by the importer, not the exporter. Whose economy will suffer more: America’s or China’s? To what extent does China retaliate? What will be the ramifications for EU economies and the so-called free trading system? I have more questions than answers in the trade arena.
The program hosts in Nigeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe with whom I interacted this week wanted to know about Trump’s likely approach towards Africa. While I shouldn’t have been surprised by the question, I figured the answer was evident from the activities of the State Department under Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo. What little heed is paid to Africa in the next four years is likely to stem from a transactional approach: We know what we could do for Africa but what can Africa offer us? A year into his presidency, Trump made clear he regarded El Salvador, Haiti and all the nations on the African continent as “shithole countries.”
As someone who spent a quarter century in Asia, I am especially focused on America’s strategic relationship with allies Japan and South Korea, as well as our commitments to defend others in the region, especially the Philippines and Taiwan. Just as Trump exhorted NATO allies to pay their dues (certainly something any golf club owner wants from members), in his first term as president he wanted Tokyo and Seoul to pay billions of dollars more to host U.S. military bases.
“Why would we defend somebody? And we’re talking about a very wealthy country. But they’re a very wealthy country and why wouldn’t they want to pay?,” Trump said in a Time magazine interview this year, speaking about South Korea.
The Japanese and Koreans have had an uneasy relationship. Japan was a colonizer of the Korean peninsula. Some of that traditional mutual animosity is easing as China is increasingly viewed as the common long-term existential threat. (China, in past centuries, considered Korea and to a lesser extent, Japan, as vassal states.)
And Taiwan, in Beijing’s view, is of course a rogue province with which there will be “reunification.”
How will the U.S. military responds to escalated and more serious provocations by the PLA in the Indo-Pacific region during a second Trump presidency? That has become, since Wednesday, an agonizing question in Asian capitals.
