A pro-Trump campaign sign across the street from the voting location in Benders Mennonite Church, in Pen Argyl, Pa., on Nov. 5.SAMUEL CORUM/AFP/Getty Images
Andrew Preston is a professor of American history at the University of Cambridge.
Donald Trump is guilty of a lot of political hyperbole but he was absolutely right when he declared in his victory speech that he led one of the most consequential political movements in American history. He was also correct in claiming that his victory is unprecedented. Added together, it leaves him with a clear mandate to enact his agenda.
This will mean big changes for the United States, but what does it mean for the rest of the world?
Aside from the Democrats gathering in Washington for a victory party that never happened, the biggest losers of the election are U.S. allies in Kyiv, Taipei and Seoul, who will now fear the removal of the American security umbrella. Other allies, in Brussels and Frankfurt but also in Mexico City and, yes, Ottawa, are in for uncertain economic times as Mr. Trump has vowed to impose steep tariffs. As any Canadian can tell you, there is no love lost in international trade, even between the closest of friends, and other trade partners are about to find out just how brutal that logic can be. A new round of Trump tariffs will be even worse for adversaries, particularly China.
In the Middle East, Tehran should now be extremely worried. When Benjamin Netanyahu calls Mr. Trump’s victory the greatest-ever political comeback, you know something historic has happened, and the two are closer kindred spirits than ever before. With no countervailing pressure from Washington to de-escalate, Israel will feel unleashed, and its next attack will aim to set Iran’s nuclear program back for decades, if not forever. Voters who wanted to punish Kamala Harris for the Biden administration’s support of Israel are about to find out just how much worse it can get for the Palestinians.
One of America’s closest allies, Britain, is actually in a decent position to weather the coming storm for the simple reason that its economy is already weak and doesn’t have much more to lose. In this sense, the colossal mistake of leaving the European Union means that Britain has already absorbed the kind of trade shocks others will feel in the coming years. If Britain’s anemic post-Brexit economy is any indicator, the rest of the world is in for some hard times.
Anyone worried about climate change should be even more worried. Tackling the climate crisis requires global solutions, but if the U.S. abandons its effort, and if doing so results in even faster economic growth, then others will be tempted to follow suit. Societies will only tolerate sacrifice over prosperity if others do likewise.
After Israel, the biggest foreign winner of the U.S. election is Russia. U.S.-Russian relations will never be smooth, no matter who occupies the White House, but Vladimir Putin stands to benefit from a U.S. withdrawal of military aid to Ukraine, sagging American support for NATO, and the probable lifting of Western sanctions, which simply won’t work without U.S. backing.
But Mr. Trump isn’t an ideological politician; his goal is always to maximize the immediate wants and needs of his country, his family and himself. In pursuing these ultimate goals, he’s intensely transactional. So if Mr. Trump is to pull back from Ukraine, perhaps even Europe, he’ll expect something in return.
Mr. Trump’s love of a deal – sometimes purely for the sake of the art of a deal – could mean that the next four years will be unexpectedly peaceful. It should surprise nobody if Mr. Trump tries to strike a grand bargain with allies and adversaries alike. He tried this with Kim Jong-Un in three stunningly unpredictable summit meetings, and though they failed it was audacious for Mr. Trump even to try. His basic architecture for a settlement in the Middle East was based on a deal between Israel and the Gulf states, eventually extending to Saudi Arabia. The same was initially true for China as well: It’s easy to forget, after years of sanctions and sabre-rattling, that Mr. Trump actually tried to come to terms with Beijing, even inviting Xi Jinping to visit Mar-a-Lago in 2017.
Thus a second term for Mr. Trump might actually look a lot like the statecraft of Richard Nixon, which led to the opening to China and détente with the Soviet Union, or Ronald Reagan, which resulted in the peaceful end of the Cold War. Mr. Trump is more than capable of an abrupt diplomatic pivot like these even – especially – if it catches everyone else off guard.
But there are three caveats here. First, both Mr. Nixon and Mr. Reagan had strategic and ideological principles to guide them that were larger than their own self-interest. Second, peace came at a high price: a wider, bloodier war in Southeast Asia under Mr. Nixon, and military tensions that almost resulted in World War III under Mr. Reagan. Without principles to guide his way, an initial phase of escalating tensions could end up running well ahead of Mr. Trump and tip the world into another great-power war. And third, even successful deals will inevitably result in losers as well as winners: Ukraine most obviously, but a deal with China could come at the expense of Taiwanese security.
The larger point here is that nobody knows what Mr. Trump will do in the world – at this stage, maybe not even Mr. Trump himself.
However, one thing is certain: Whether it’s war or peace, the long era of an American-led liberal internationalism is over. From Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush, most U.S. presidents built and maintained an order based on liberal values and the ever-increasing flow of people, goods, capital and ideas. The self-defeating wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya showed the limits of the U.S. military power that undergirded and enforced the liberal order. Even more damagingly, the forever wars weakened the legitimacy, not least among Americans themselves, that the liberal order needed to survive. Joe Biden tried to repair the damage, but his moment has passed. With Mr. Trump’s victory, a new world is emerging, though nobody yet knows what it will look like.