Donald Trump’s triumphant electoral success will have a major internal and external impact. Domestically, his political position has been greatly strengthened by his sweeping the electoral college, winning the popular vote and the Republicans gaining control of the Senate and the House.
Trump has won in a highly polarised political atmosphere in the US. The Democrats had tried to disqualify him from running for the presidency by dragging him through legal processes with the Department of Justice and the FBI, among others, as instruments. Now that he has won, there will be inevitable score settling.
Already, Trump has laid out his agenda. He has declared war against the Deep State, disregarding those who had cautioned him in his first term against challenging the intelligence agencies. He is seeking resignations of all those in the bureaucracy who manoeuvred against him, the Big Tech companies that used censorship tools to undermine him, the media outlets involved in disinformation campaigns against him, and so on.
In a stinging rebuke to wokeism, he has threatened criminal proceedings against doctors or withdrawal of federal financial support to hospitals involved in sex change operations on minors. He has boldly stated that only male and female genders exist in humankind, which inflicts a big blow to liberal efforts to mainstream transgenders, if one were to recall the scene of transgenders hosted by the White House dancing on its lawns during Biden’s presidency. In brief, he intends to roll back the excesses of the liberal agenda on gender issues. He imputed the emergence of these woke ideas to the far Left elements in academia.
On immigration issues, Trump will double down on controlling it, as this was a major plank in his election campaign. Mass deportations that he threatens may not be achievable because of legal, economic and humanitarian constraints but the massing of immigrants on America’s southern border encouraged by the more open immigration policies of the Democrats may now be over.
All this portends a continuing confrontation in American society between the conservatism of the forces that elected Trump and the liberal values that the Democrats espouse. This will be a bruising battle because the US society is divided. The Democrats may have lost the electoral battle but the democratic space they have in the US system based on checks and balances will be available to them to challenge Trump. The governor and the attorney general of California are already threatening to oppose Trump’s agenda. The mainstream media and the academia will continue their guerrilla warfare against Trump.
Externally, Trump’s re-election has caused jitters in Europe. Even during Trump’s first term, his questioning the continued relevance of NATO, the pressure on the Europeans to spend more on their defence and reduce the burden on the US to protect Europe’s security, his supposed links with Russia, his anti-EU posture and support for Brexit, had created trans-Atlantic rifts, to the point of Chancellor Angela Merkel saying at that time that Europe and Trump’s America no longer shared the same values.
The general expectation in Europe was that the Democrats would win. President Emmanuel Macron is quoted to have said that his information was that Trump would not. The most pressing concern for Europe is Trump’s boasts during his campaign that if he had been president, the Ukraine war would not have started, and that if he won he would quickly resolve the conflict. He has been critical of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, calling him a salesman who returned with billions of dollars each time he came to the US. Trump also cold-shouldered Zelenskyy when the latter called on him just prior to the election.
Europe has aligned itself fully with the US policy of imposing draconian sanctions on Russia, supporting a proxy war on the latter through Ukraine, seeking a strategic military defeat of Russia, and escalating the conflict continually by supplying increasingly lethal weapons to Ukraine. Strengthening Ukraine’s military position on the ground so that when any peace negotiations began Ukraine would have cards to play has become European policy too. The UK and some European countries have questioned US caution in not giving a green light to Ukraine to use its NATO supplied long-range missiles to hit targets deep into Russia. Europe, with some exceptions like Hungary and Slovakia, has followed the Biden administration in closing all doors to dialogue and diplomacy with Russia.
Europe is in no position to bear the burden of the conflict without US support. The rhetoric, especially that of Macron, in the wake of Trump’s election, that Europe must have strategic autonomy and build its own defence capability to protect its own security is an expression of frustration. European leaders have gone too far in claiming that if Russia won in Ukraine Europe itself will be threatened by Moscow’s revived imperial ambitions.
Trump may have his ideas of ending the conflict but those ideas have to be acceptable to Russia, and even to Ukraine, as Zelenskyy’s own future would be threatened if he made major territorial compromises. Russia will not be bulldozed into a solution by Trump, as it would want its declared bottom lines to be satisfactorily addressed. Putin has most recently at the Valdai Forum meeting in Sochi stated that Trump’s thinking on finding a solution merits attention. The stakes for all concerned are very high: Trump wants to put an end to US involvement in military operations abroad, the future of NATO will become uncertain if the US ceases to fund and arm Ukraine and, this in turn, will cause serious internal strains in Europe, especially when the German economy is in trouble.
Trump has threatened China with 60 per cent tariffs on all its exports to the US. The fall out of this on the Chinese economy and the ripple effect of that globally, including on the WTO, would be unpredictable. Trump has appointed Robert Lighthizer, a trade hawk, to define US trade policy. If Trump does not want the US to start new wars, the confrontation with China might be primarily economically oriented, not military over Taiwan or Chinese bullying tactics in the South and East China Seas.
This does not preclude that the Indo-Pacific strategy, the Quad and the US alliance system in the western Pacific would not be used as deterrent instruments against China. However, the current Japanese Prime Minister’s call for extending NATO responsibilities to the western Pacific would not fit with Trump’s thinking on NATO, even in Europe. How China, with its current economic problems and its strategy of preserving its lead position and dominance in key technological areas like electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries, solar chips, semiconductors, etc, which the US seeks to counter, will deal with the Trump challenge would be important to monitor. In this regard, the role of Elon Musk who is building a large new factory in China would be worth watching.
A lot will hinge also on the team that Trump builds around him. He will seek this time to build a team of loyalists, unlike during his first term, when he now says he had people in his team who were not loyalists and worked against him from within. In this second term Trump will be his own man, with the experience of his first term to guide him. As he is impulsive, mercurial and narcissistic, the rest of the world could be faced with unpredictable challenges.
Kanwal Sibal is a former Indian Foreign Secretary. He was India’s Ambassador to Turkey, Egypt, France and Russia. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.