The Trump Era Archive

No matter who was elected president on Nov. 8, there was going to be a pause in U.S. trade policy. During the campaign, neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiated and signed by President Barack Obama. But Trump said he would go much further, threatening to impose new tariffs of up to 45 percent on Chinese imports over Beijing’s currency manipulation and other unfair trade practices, while promising to withdraw from trade agreements that are not renegotiated to his satisfaction. As with other issues, there is uncertainty about what Trump will actually do once in […]

The irony of Fidel Castro’s death is that, in addition to closing the symbolic book on the Cold War, it accentuates the feeling that we are living through the closing moments of the post-Cold War period. While that period has already been declared over at various times over the 15 years since 9/11, it now seems clear that those pronouncements were premature. Certainly America’s unipolar moment has passed, signaling the end of “the end of history.” But though shocking, the attacks of 9/11 and their aftermath—the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the war on terror—as well as the transformational effects […]

Despite Donald Trump’s tough talk about the Iran nuclear deal during the presidential campaign, there have been some signals since the election that his administration may walk back his threat to cancel the accord. But hostility to Iran seems rampant among Trump’s advisers, meaning the spirit, if not the letter, of the agreement will likely be violated. The costs of reverting to a confrontational approach to Iran would include more regional instability, and doing so would raise serious questions about Trump’s commitment to some international norms and practices. What to do about Iran is one of the prominent foreign policy […]

The surprise election of Donald Trump as America’s 45th president has upset long-standing assumptions about America’s role in the world. It also calls into question the country’s future trajectory as the guarantor and administrator of the international order, a position that has been so carefully built and nurtured by Washington since the end of World War II. America’s European friends and allies are among those most worried about the future U.S. role in Europe, at a time when the continent is surrounded by instability and faces an increasingly aggressive Russia to its east. This unease is understandable if one considers […]

The Brexit referendum and the U.S. presidential election have offered clear examples of how emotion and affect increasingly drive political behavior. In both cases, resentment and anger over unaddressed grievances, combined with fear and anxiety over radical disruptions to the economy and national identity, won out over reasoned arguments in favor of the status quo. But emotion and affect don’t disappear with the counting of the ballots. Election victories always create euphoria among the winners and despair among the losers. The nature of President-elect Donald Trump’s insurgent candidacy and his upset victory magnify both reactions. The election outcome calls into […]

MEXICO CITY — On the morning after the U.S. election, the front pages of Mexican dailies responded to Donald Trump’s win with shock. Given that Mexico found itself in Trump’s crosshairs throughout the race, Mexicans’ fears aren’t unfounded. But the U.S. president-elect might not be able to make good on every threat he made on the campaign trail. Consider the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border. Trump will face plenty of challenges to building the infamous wall that was a centerpiece of his candidacy. First off, physical obstacles abound, including the Algodones Sand Dunes in southern California; the Coronado National Forest in […]

European and Asian political analysts are reacting quite differently to Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election. Many European public policy intellectuals are deeply worried about the new team in power in Washington and they see the election outcome as a sign of the decline of the liberal international order. Some distinguished Asian thought leaders, in contrast, see an opportunity to build a new order—one in which Asian powers will be more prominent in setting the rules. In any event, the consensus seems to be that the Trump win will result in the further redistribution of power to regional […]

Russia featured prominently in the 2016 presidential campaign. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton depicted alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s email servers and other high-profile political targets, including her own campaign staff, as evidence of a Kremlin plot to harm her candidacy and promote her Republican opponent, now President-elect Donald Trump. Trump consistently dismissed Clinton’s allegations as desperate political mudslinging and put forward a very different set of ideas for U.S. relations with Russia. One early Russia-related dustup came in response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ambiguously translated comment that Trump was a “bright” or “colorful” candidate. Trump, in […]

When Donald Trump won the Republican nomination for the presidency of the United States, many in Latin America started watching U.S. politics with a sharper interest. The tone, the content, the flamboyance and the egomania that Trump put on display during the campaign had a familiar ring. That’s because Latin Americans had seen similar personalities take the stage before—and seen them win. In the United States, populist politicians are new to most voters. In Latin America, they’re old hat. After Trump’s surprising upset in the Nov. 8 election, many Venezuelans, in particular, cast knowing glances at the U.S. electorate. Trump’s […]

Cuba was not a major issue in the 2016 presidential campaign, but U.S.-Cuban relations may be collateral damage of Donald Trump’s stunning upset victory. Trump’s campaign was never heavy on policy details, and over the months, he expressed contradictory views about President Barack Obama’s policy of engagement with Havana. At first, he supported the opening, though he said he would have gotten a better deal. Later, he seemed to embrace a more traditional Republican stance of hostility. The language in the Republican Party’s platform was reminiscent of the darkest days of the Cold War. It denounced Obama’s policy as “a […]

Could the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States presage an unexpected boost for United Nations mediators and peacekeepers? It seems an improbable proposition. During the election campaign, Trump frequently criticized the U.N., and he looks likely to disrupt multilateral diplomacy on issues from climate change to human rights. Why should he be any kinder to the organization’s envoys and the blue helmets? The answer is that, having laid out an utterly incoherent vision of international security in his campaign, he may need the U.N. to help fill some of the biggest gaps. Previous Republican leaders have […]

When U.S. voters chose Donald Trump to be their president, they entrusted him among other things to handle what two months ago I characterized as the top three threats that currently require international cooperation: climate change, nuclear proliferation and terrorism. Expect the new president to sound a lot different on these issues than President Barack Obama. On terrorism and preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, the changes may be more rhetorical than real. On climate change, if the U.S. walks away from its leadership role, the consequences will be grave. As a candidate, Trump expressed strong views on each of […]

Now that the initial shock of Donald Trump’s U.S. presidential election victory has begun to fade, it is possible to think more clearly about the implications of his presidency. For those who believe in an America committed to its highest values of inclusiveness, pluralism and equality under the rule of law, and embedded in a rules-based, liberal global order, the task is twofold. First, vigilance and scrutiny with regard to Trump’s administration at home and abroad, to prevent the most worrisome instincts he displayed during the election campaign from installing themselves durably in the American body politic and damaging America’s […]

Egypt’s general-turned-strongman, Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, was the first foreign leader to call Donald Trump and congratulate him on his surprising election as president of the United States. Read into that what you will. Back in September, Trump met with el-Sisi in New York during the United Nations General Assembly and didn’t bring up Egypt’s grim human rights record in the three-plus years that el-Sisi has been in power. In her own meeting with Egypt’s president, Hillary Clinton did. Under el-Sisi, tens of thousands of political dissidents and regime opponents have been thrown in Egyptian jails. According to the Trump campaign’s readout […]

In the most shocking political upset in American history, Donald Trump has won the presidency. Now there are major questions about whether someone who has never held elected office or exercised leadership in a system based on consensus-building and a division of power can learn to do so on the job, at a time when so much is at stake. Trump’s learning curve will be particularly crucial in the realm of national security strategy, where the president faces fewer checks and balances, and where mistakes can have a cost in blood and even precipitate outright disaster. It is hard to […]

Donald Trump’s surprise presidential election victory was a result, in part, of his success tapping into growing populist sentiment across much of the United States. That follows a global trend that has seen populist leaders come to power in Latin America, Europe and Asia. For all the attention on populism, though, what is it? Jan-Werner Müller explained it this way in a December 2014 article for WPR on the threat populism poses to liberal democracy: Contrary to conventional wisdom, populism is not simply a matter of irresponsible policies or appeals to the downtrodden. Populism is an anti-elitist but, crucially, also […]

Historians and politicians will mine the astonishing 2016 U.S. election for years to come, drawing countless lessons about voter dissatisfaction, political acrimony and resistance to social change, among many other mostly domestic problems brought to the surface by the tumultuous campaign. But one of the unexpected mileposts marked by America’s electoral exercise this year lies in the use of a new weapon in global power politics: weaponized social media as an aggressive tool of foreign policy. If war is politics by other means, as the 19th-century military strategist Carl Von Clausewitz famously said, the U.S. election demonstrated that in the […]