大象传媒

On the campaign trail again: former president Donald J. Trump.

Despite former US President Donald Trump’s entanglement in various legal cases, he is still the favourite to be the Republican candidate for the next US presidential election in November 2024. With the result potentially coming down to close battles in swing states, there is a real possibility of a second term for this extremely controversial figure.

In Radio 4's The Briefing Room, David Aaronovitch finds out what impact a second Trump term could make on America's allies and adversaries in terms of trade and security.

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Trump had a zero-sum view of economic relations

In his first term as President (2017-2021), Trump used "unilateral trade actions" to extract concessions from other nations while also raising barriers to imports. Some of these actions had been on the statute book since the Cold War and they enabled Trump to enforce a blanket 25% trade tariff on China, still maintained by the Biden administration today. As a consequence, American businesses and consumers paid higher costs.

Trump also weakened multilateral trade institutions, causing “a lot of frayed relationships”, says Inu Manak, fellow for trade policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, and turning the international trading system into "the Wild West”.

“China would welcome a second Trump term.”

US allies are already scrambling to shore up deals with the Biden administration, anticipating a Trump return. Meanwhile, Trump has vowed to double down and impose a 10% tariff on all imports into the United States. Manak believes this will see the same cycle of price rises for business and consumers and an international fallout that could “spark the demise of the World Trade Organisation”.

The disarray and tension caused between US allies would mean, Manak believes, that “China is likely to welcome a second Trump term” anticipating, in particular, a weakening of the relationships Biden has tried to forge with Korea, Japan and Vietnam.

“He pitched himself as the ultimate negotiator...

In matters of foreign policy, Donald Trump drew upon his experience in business and, as 大象传媒 North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher says, “pitched himself as the ultimate negotiator”. Trump had a “general distrust of international institutions and multilateral relationships”, says Zurcher, preferring to build a rapport on a one-to-one basis with, among others, Kim Jong Un in North Korea, Xi Jinping in China and Vladimir Putin in Russia.

John Bolton: "They clashed from very early on."

… but he sometimes undermined his own bridge-building."

Trump courted Xi Jinping at his Mar-a-Largo residence in Florida, but putting tariffs on Chinese imports created tension. When Covid hit in 2020, Trump was vocal in blaming China for the pandemic and, inevitably, the relationship between the two superpowers worsened even more.

He put on a united front with Putin

When Trump was elected in 2016, relations between the US and Russia had been strained by Russia’s invasion of Crimea. However, Trump took a soft line on Putin. At a summit in Helsinki in 2018, Trump declared his trust for Putin, accepting his denial of the accusations of election-influencing that had surfaced over and above, as Zurcher reminds us, “the conclusions of his own national security and intelligence apparatus”.

Trump's foreign policy staffers dissented

When Trump brought in foreign policy advisors that had a differing viewpoint, he did so thinking they would ultimately be compliant, but they would sometimes find ways to compromise his wishes.

Some of Trump’s advisors were people he had seen on TV, for example diplomat, foreign policy hawk and Fox News pundit John Bolton, who was appointed as his National Security Advisor. The fit was not good. “They clashed from very early on,” says Zurcher, “and [Bolton] was ultimately run out of the White House.”

Trump doesn’t have to win to influence foreign policy

Professor Elizabeth Saunders, Director of Georgetown University, Washington's Mortara Center for International Studies, thinks that Trump doesn’t have to become President again to exercise influence on US foreign policy. “It's very clear that Trump's isolationism has taken so much root in the Republican Party that it is the mainstream view,” she says.

If Trump wins again, he will face obstacles to his foreign policy

Trump can’t expect any more compliance to his foreign policy objectives if he wins in 2024 than he got for his first term. “US bureaucracy, the 'deep state', as it were, is internationalist and will be at odds with the sort of characters that Trump may bring in, assuming he can find them,” says Sir Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King's College London.

Whoever Trump hires will have to hit the ground running, says Freedman. With Putin cheerleading for Trump, the handling of the war in Ukraine will require “some pretty hard rethinks”.

NATO “should panic”

While US allies facing up to a Trump second term will try not to panic, says Freedman, Saunders thinks that collectively, as NATO, “they should panic”. Trump has made no secret of his wish to withdraw the US from NATO, but Freedman says their response should dare Trump “to be responsible”.

That message, Saunders thinks, is falling on ever more deaf ears in the Republican Party as its “international wing” continues to shrink.

Trump will need allies to meet the challenge of China

The isolationist impulse of the Republicans changes when it comes to China. “There are a lot of people who worked for Trump in the first term who were down on Ukraine, not very interested in Europe, that do see the challenge with China as something that has to be addressed,” says Saunders. If Trump and his fellow Republicans want to meet that challenge, they will need allies. However, as Saunders points out, with his demand for increased payments for military protection Trump “didn't particularly manage the Japanese and the South Koreans well last time”.

The special relationship will be tested

The US Presidential election will, most likely, come hot on the heels of the UK election. “In the run up to the 2020 [Presidential] election,” says Freedman, there was a lot of effort in Downing Street trying to work out how to show a Biden administration that the UK would be a good ally. It would be the other way round potentially this time.”

However, Freedman thinks that the willingness to do that in Washington will suffer because of “Trump’s own personality”, adding that, “He's not interested. He's lazy. He's impetuous. He's narcissistic. All these things make it very hard for people to follow his policies with consistency.”