Which Side is Trump On?

Will the incoming president be more focused on external enemies or "the enemy within"?

French President Emmanuel Macron and U.S. President Joe Biden in 2022. (Amaury Laporte/Creative Commons 2.0)

Soon after taking office in 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden met with French President Emmanuel Macron and told him that "America is back." Macron countered, "For how long?"

This anecdote, which Biden has oft repeated, illustrates how many countries now relate to the United States. Allies feel that they can't rely on the U.S. because its foreign policy approach is changing every four years. Biden adopted a conventional post-World War II approach to U.S. foreign policy, emphasizing strong relationships with U.S. allies in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He has framed the world as being engaged in “a battle between democracy and autocracy.” On one side, there are democracies which are content in being a part of the current post-Cold War global order, such as Germany, Canada, the U.K., and Australia. On the other side, there are revisionist autocracies like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, which seek to overturn this U.S.-led order. In the middle are countries in the Global South, the largest of which is India, which are trying to play these blocs off of each other. 

In his first term as U.S. president, Donald Trump scrambled this framing with his unpredictability, which he sees as an asset in foreign affairs. Deploying flattery unprecedented for a U.S. leader, he developed friendly relationships with autocrats like Vladimir Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China, and Kim Jong Un of North Korea. He alienated traditional U.S. allies like Germany, Australia, and Mexico. Trump showered Hungary, a revisionist member of the EU and NATO, with praise, while Ukraine, then trying to fend off a looming Russian full-scale invasion, had a weapons shipment delayed because of the president's request to dig up dirt on Biden's son; this episode was the focus of Trump's first impeachment.

Now, as Trump plans his return to the White House in January after his victory in the November elections, Macron's question lingers: which side will the U.S. be on? The answer is not clear. While using the "L" word with autocrats, Trump adopted a confrontational posture against China -- which Biden continued -- and gave Ukraine lethal weapons that the Obama administration had declined to give. Continuing with the aggressive approach against revisionist powers, Trump has vowed to institute massive tariffs on China and increase sanctions on Iran.