Regardless of the outcome in November, U.S. foreign policy cannot square the circle of a decline in relative U.S. power in a multipolar, ever-more illiberal world.
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Originally published in Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.
( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – Approaching the consequential elections of 2024, the United States faces a stark debate over the role of the country in international affairs. The media has generally presented the two positions as the internationalism of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris versus the isolationism of Donald Trump. The current team in the White House touts the importance of international treaties like the Paris agreement on climate change while the former president spent much of his term in office trying to build a wall—and even a moat—along the southern border with Mexico to keep out undocumented immigrants. Both Biden and likely Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris have stressed that America “is back” in the international community. Trump has insisted instead that he will make America “great again,” regardless of what other countries might think or do.
But the two main candidates in the presidential election do not, in fact, have quite such clear-cut positions. Biden and Harris have assumed many of the so-called isolationist positions of Trump—higher tariffs, more hawkish border policies—and the Republican has staked out his own version of internationalism, though of an illiberal variety. Meanwhile, the candidates of both major parties are responding to a common anxiety that is stalking the foreign policy elite in the United States: how can the United States preserve its global hegemony when it is experiencing a relative decline in status?
The result of the presidential election will not likely hinge on foreign policy issues, however much the Gaza crisis currently dominates the headlines. Americans have tended to choose their president based on personal qualities and the state of the U.S. economy. But the results of the November election will necessarily have a major impact on the trajectory of U.S. foreign policy, notwithstanding the convergence of the two candidates’ positions on some key issues like trade and immigration.
A Pervasive Anxiety
The relative decline of U.S. power since the 1990s—as a result of the rise of China, the ascendance of Global South powers like India and Brazil, and the hardening of an illiberal bloc of countries informally led by Russia—has generated two crises in U.S. foreign policy. The first involves a debilitating anxiety within the “globalist” elite in Washington about the ability of the United States to remain primus inter pares within the liberal international order (and a related concern that this very order is at risk of collapse). This anxiety primarily affects the Democratic Party, though a diminishing slice of “traditional” Republicans and some independents share this concern.
The second crisis is about the ability of the United States to maintain its exceptionalist status in the world: its military preeminence, strict border controls, fossil fuel independence, and flouting of international laws. This anxiety has come to inhabit a Republican Party increasingly captured by Donald Trump, though versions of it can be found in earlier party leaders (Ronald Reagan) and would-be leaders (Barry Goldwater). Some hawkish Democrats, too, lean in this direction.
In an earlier era, the tug-of-war in the United States between these two orientations—globalist vs. exceptionalist, first among equals vs. just plain first—would boil down to a clear contrast between (liberal) internationalism and (parochial) nationalism. But the world has changed in the last two decades, and illiberal nationalism has come to dominate geopolitics. The government policies of communist countries like North Korea and China are now driven primarily by this variety of nationalism; so, too, are non-communist authoritarian regimes like Egypt and Azerbaijan and even quite a few formally democratic polities like El Salvador and Hungary. This illiberal nationalism now holds sway across a huge swath of the planet: Russia, China, India, much of the Middle East, portions of Africa and Latin America, and an increasing share of the European Union. The leaders of these countries emphasize their sovereign right to do whatever they please within the borders of their countries—against the preferences of interfering hegemons, international institutions, and liberal NGOs. The programs of these “sovereignistas” often mirror the demands of exceptionalist forces within the United States.
Thus, if Donald Trump wins in November, he won’t be an isolated nationalist railing at the international community but rather a new kind of internationalist working with his co-religionists around the world on a common project. He will have the option of joining hands with other soveriegnistas in a full-spectrum attack on the global order: the free trade regime, the laws governing asylum, the Paris climate agreement and other efforts to exit the fossil fuel era. His cooperation with other illiberal nationalists will face some obvious limits, just as far-right forces in Europe have had difficulty uniting across borders. There will be ideological differences (over Israel and Russia, for instance), trade frictions, and the general difficulty of rival exceptionalisms. But a shared desire to rewrite the rules of the post-World War II order may help these very different actors overcome their differences.
“In this Corner,” Digital, by Juan Cole, Dream / Dreamworld v 3 / IbisPaint, 2024.
If the Democratic ticket wins in November, the record of the first term of the Biden administration suggests that the foreign policy approach of likely nominee Kamala Harris will not diverge quite as much from Trump’s as the different ideological temperaments of the candidates might suggest. For instance, the Biden administration not only maintained Trump-era tariffs on China but increased them in 2024. Although Biden and Harris famously pushed through the largest clean-energy funding in U.S. history, their administration also facilitated the record-breaking production of oil and natural gas, something that Trump also championed. The Biden administration boosted military spending, provided military (and diplomatic) support to Israel in its confrontation with Hamas, and tightened the rules governing asylum at the border—all Trump-era objectives.
True, there were important distinctions between the Biden administration’s positions on these issues and how Trump would likely have responded. The Biden tariffs focused specifically on China while Trump favors a full-spectrum application of tariffs. The Biden administration support for fossil fuel production came in part as a response to the war in Ukraine and the imperative of providing European allies with “transitional” energy as they shift to renewables. The Biden administration didn’t provide the kind of unconditional support for the Netanyahu government in Israel that Trump offered during his tenure in office. And the administration’s new rules on immigration, suspending the processing of asylum claims if the number of border-crossers reaches more than 2,500 a day for a week, are both draconian and illegal (according to both U.S. and international law), but they are not as severe as Trump’s promises on various occasions to shut the border outright and deport 15-20 million undocumented people from the United States.
Ukraine and NATO
Other issues offer a greater divergence in policy. On Ukraine, for instance, the Biden administration portrays the conflict as a do-or-die defense of liberal democratic values on the edge of Europe while Trump and his allies argue that the United States, as Secretary of States James Baker once said of the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s, does not have a dog in that fight. The Ukraine war has also stimulated a revival of NATO that has won the support of even the European far right, from Poland (which was always NATO-friendly) to Italy (where Giorgia Meloni’s enthusiastic backing has been perhaps more surprising). Trump, meanwhile, continues to push a “burden-sharing” line, which has always had some support in more traditional foreign policy circles, particularly at times of belt-tightening in the United States).
Trump’s effort to get European countries to cover more of the defense expenditures for NATO operations is not just a cost-cutting maneuver. Trump famously said that for any NATO member that doesn’t ante up, he would encourage Russia “to do whatever the hell they want.” Trump’s “neutral” position in the war in Ukraine, like that of Central European leaders Robert Fico of Slovakia and Viktor Orban of Hungary, in fact conceals an ideological affinity for the illiberalism of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, who has emphasized unrestrained executive power, the suppression of opposition voices in politics and the media, and “pro-family” values that roll back advances in the rights of women and LGBTQ communities.
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led initiative to provide an incoming Trump administration with a blueprint for its four years in office, takes a somewhat more traditional approach to NATO and transatlantic relations. The authors, drawn from a variety of Trump-friendly enterprises, try to find a common ground among various Republican positions toward Europe: supporting burden-sharing, providing assistance to Ukraine, and addressing trade frictions with EU countries on a case-by-case basis. In a nod to post-Brexit realities, the authors also recommend that the U.S. government “be more attentive to inner-EU developments, while also developing new allies inside the EU—especially the Central European countries on the eastern flank of the EU, which are most vulnerable to Russian aggression.” Here, without spelling it out, the U.S. far right urges a new transatlantic alliance based on illiberal principles, those embraced by Fico, Orban, and the outgoing Law and Justice Party in Poland.
The prospect of Trump winning in November has led the current administration as well as other NATO powers to do what they can to “Trump-proof” assistance to Ukraine. This includes setting up a five-year $100 billion fund that would conveniently last the entire length of a Trump term in office and having NATO take over the leadership of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, the alliance coordinating aid to Ukraine currently run by the United States. NATO, too, has its internal differences, of course. The opposition of Hungary to anything resembling consistent, long-term assistance to Ukraine represents an obstacle nearly as large as a Trump presidency. But Hungary can’t block NATO policy quite the same way it has held up EU assistance packages.
In the end, even Trump might not prove an obstacle on Ukraine policy. Despite the delay in getting the legislation to a vote, an overwhelming majority in the House supported the aid package to Ukraine, including a near-majority of Republicans (106 for, 112 against). Republicans now are finding more courage to stick up for Ukraine, with the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Michael McCaul (R-TX), aggressively pushing the Biden administration to lift restrictions on Ukraine’s use of U.S. weapons on Russian territory. McCaul’s performance suggests that even if Donald Trump wins in November, the mandarins of his party might still marginalize the MAGA caucus on the issue of Ukrainian assistance and join with Democrats to overcome any presidential vetoes.
Gaza and the Middle East
The United States has maintained a close relationship with Israel for decades. Donald Trump, however, turned this largely amicable relationship into a lovefest.
This no-exceptions support for Israel certainly owed much to the influence of son-in-law Jared Kushner and funders like the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. But it also stemmed from Trump’s ideological affinity with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The U.S. president crossed a number of informal red lines to give Netanyahu exactly what he wanted: U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital and the Golan Heights as Israeli territory, support for the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, withdrawal of the United States from the Iranian nuclear deal, and a broad push to win diplomatic recognition for Israel from Moslem-majority countries in the region.
Trump accompanied this pro-Israeli policy with an explicitly anti-Palestinian one. His administration cut funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), a budgetary item that every previous Republican and Democratic government had supported for 70 years. He shut down the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s office in Washington, DC. And he debuted a “peace plan” that abandoned any notion of an independent Palestinian state in favor of a truncated entity highly dependent on Israel. In addition to providing full-throated support for the Israeli state and military in its intervention in Gaza, Trump has also favored deporting students protesting on campus against the Israeli war.
The Biden/Harris approach to the conflict might at first glance seem to be some version of Trump Lite. The Biden administration has continued to provide assistance to the Israeli military, has continued to push the Abraham Accords to win diplomatic recognition for Israel (particularly from Saudi Arabia), and has generally provided support for Israel at the United Nations. But neither Biden nor Harris has a close ideological affinity for Netanyahu. The Biden administration tried to pressure the Israeli government to change its tactics in the war in Gaza and to accept first a temporary ceasefire and then a more permanent one. It also criticized Israeli policy on settlements in the West Bank. The Biden administration reestablished funding for UNRWA and at least laid out the conditions for the reopening of the PLO office in Washington. Kamala Harris has taken an even more critical stance toward the far-right policies of the Netanyahu government.
Democrats have been maneuvering to reduce the U.S. fixation on the Middle East by ending wars there, reducing the U.S. military footprint, and mending some fences (for instance, with Iran). Trump seems determined to keep the United States anchored in the region by amping up hostilities with Iran and doubling down on support for Israel. Project 2025 recommends that the new Trump administration initiate a full-court press on Iran, severing all U.S. ties to Iranian allies (Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine), while strengthening relations with autocratic regimes in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Egypt, and Turkey.
A Harris victory in November might herald a serious reexamination of the alliance with Israel, driven by a shift in U.S. public opinion. Given a choice between liberalism and Zionism, many Americans are giving up on the latter. Last year, Gallup revealed that sympathy among Democrats now favored Palestinians (49 percent) over Israelis (38 percent), a reversal never seen before in the polling. The gap within the Democratic Party is sharply generational. Among Democrats under the age of 35, 74 percent side with Palestinians compared to only 25 percent of those 65 and over. In an Ipsos poll, also from last year, when asked about a situation in which the West Bank and Gaza remained under Israeli control, a majority of Republicans (64 percent) and Democrats (80 percent) said that they would prefer a democratic rather than a Jewish state (if they had to choose). Even a committed Zionist like Harris may be pushed to embrace new strings on assistance to Israel—as well as more opposition to Israeli policies bilaterally and at the UN—if the Netanyahu coalition continues its anti-democratic, militarist transformation of Israeli policy.
Regardless of which direction U.S.-Israeli relations go, Democrats and Republicans are united in one geopolitical respect: the Middle East is no longer the center of attention it once was. The consensus in Washington is to focus instead on confronting China and rolling back its influence.
The “New Threats” in Asia
When Joe Biden took office in 2021, it seemed likely that he would roll back Donald Trump’s tariffs against China. When Trump announced those tariffs, Biden called the move “short-sighted.” He said that Trump “thinks his tariffs are paid for by China. Any beginning econ student at Iowa or Iowa State could tell you the American people are paying his tariffs.”
Biden’s economic reading was sound. According to one estimate, the bill to consumers for Trump’s tariffs was $48 billion, with half paid by manufacturers. Lifting those tariffs would be a win for American consumers, farmers, and workers in industries hit with Chinese counter-sanctions.
But the administration did little to reverse the Trump policy toward China. In fact, Biden one-upped Trump by announcing, in May 2024, additional tariffs against Chinese products, including steel and aluminum and a fourfold increase in tariffs on Chinese electric cars. At one level, the move was clearly political, a bid to win the votes of workers in Rust Belt swing states. At another level, Biden was simply swimming in the direction of the current, which has been increasingly protectionist and anti-China.
The containment of China that has become part of bipartisan consensus is not only economic. The Biden administration has continued the Quad structure that Trump introduced to coordinate security policies among the United States, India, Australia, and Japan. The administration has also continued to grow the Pentagon budget, an increase driven by “strategic competition” with China, as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has said. The Pacific Deterrence Initiative, for instance, increased by 40 percent in the latest budget request to over $9 billion. Indeed, the bulk of the Pentagon’s budget is China-directed, including increased spending on naval forces, the expenditures on R & D, and the maintenance of U.S. force posture (including bases) in the Pacific region.
A Trump administration won’t alter that calculus. If anything, his second term would shift from the containment of China to a roll back of its influence. On the economic side, the Project 2025 blueprint argues that “engagement with China should be ended, not rethought.” On the security side, it urges that the United States move from “defensive” to “offensive” capabilities in space and cyber operations.
North Korea, a close ally of both China and Russia, represents one of Trump’s exceptions. He has a soft spot for ruthless dictators, and he figured during his tenure in office that he could match his archenemy Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize by negotiating a peace between the United States and North Korea. In three bilateral meetings with Kim Jong Un, Trump demonstrated little more than his naivete and lack of knowledge about the Korean peninsula. Despite these abortive efforts, he is ready to try again, this time with a plan to allow North Korea to keep its current arsenal of nuclear weapons and provide financial incentives for it not to build any more.
For the foreign policy apparatus in Washington, such a plan is anathema. But a breakthrough with North Korea along realist grounds would be an important step forward in the region. Getting Japan and South Korea to agree won’t be easy. Even China is not thrilled with North Korea’s nuclear capability. But this is one of the few cases where Trump’s heterodox views (or, at least, impulses) could make a positive contribution to geopolitics (though he’s unlikely to get a Nobel for it).
The Future of U.S. Policy
Biden and Harris have been committed to shoring up the institutions of the international community. A second Trump administration would be ever more determined to undermine and even destroy those institutions.
Of course, the Biden administration has its exceptionalist impulses, with its nods toward protectionism, toward the maintenance of U.S. military supremacy, toward denouncing international organizations (e.g., the ICC) or refusing to endorse international statements (e.g., the Safe Schools Declaration). And a future Trump administration might not be quite as MAGA as it promises (given the realities of Congress or the foreign policy apparatus in Washington).
But in broad strokes, U.S. foreign policy does face an inflection point in November. A Trump victory could embolden the camp of sovereignistas to follow the trajectory of the Euroskeptics in switching from a position of destroying global(ist) institutions to plotting to take them over. The international community would live on, but increasingly in the spirit of illiberal nationalism. A Democratic victory would mean a continuation of some form of liberal internationalism, with Harris perhaps moderating some of the more illiberal stances that Biden had adopted for political reasons in the last year or two of his term. There might even be the possibility for a more radical approach that would include an accommodation with China, more acceptance of climate justice policies in the Global South, and further rejection of neoliberal elements in free trade.
Trump, in other words, promises radical disruption, while Harris offers continuity with some tweaks. Neither candidate, however, fundamentally addresses the twin anxieties that pervade the U.S. foreign policy establishment concerning the place of the United States in the world. U.S. hegemony is increasingly fragile, while U.S. exceptionalism is increasingly unsupportable. Regardless of the outcome in November, U.S. foreign policy cannot square the circle of a decline in relative U.S. power in a multipolar, ever-more illiberal world.
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