What Can You Expect From President Trump’s Foreign Policy?

Jan 14 2025
Financial Times columnist Ed Luce says President Donald Trump might love trade wars, but he’d rather not engage in military ones. While he acknowledges there’s a lot that’s unpredictable, Luce is cautiously optimistic that with unpredictability there can also be opportunity, including for peace deals. So, what might U.S. foreign policy look like over the next four years?

Trump Wants a Loyal FBI and Justice Department. Here’s How He Plans to Get it.

Narrated by: Peter L. Bergen
Jan 7 2025
Length: 31 mins
Podcast

In his first term, Donald Trump did more to politicize top U.S. law enforcement institutions than any U.S. President, according to journalist David Rohde. Through interviews with numerous people inside Trump’s term-one FBI and Justice Department, Rohde carefully documented the impact on the FBI and DOJ during Trump round one. Join us for a conversation about what he thinks is coming in round two.

Guantanamo at Twenty-Three: Explore the future of Guantánamo Bay Online event New America/ASU

Guantanamo at Twenty-Three
Explore the future of Guantánamo Bay as experts discuss its history, current challenges, and prospects for closure.
January 14, 2025
12 pm – 1 pm ET
Online

January 11, 2025, marked the 23rd anniversary of the opening of the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, which was established in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. When Biden took office, the prison held 40 people. As the days count down to the inauguration of President Elect Trump, the Biden administration has worked to reduce the population of the prison. On January 6th, the U.S. transferred 11 Yemeni detainees to Oman, dropping the prison’s population to 15 men. Among these men are three who the government has approved for transfer, three who have not been approved for transfer but also have not been charged with crimes, seven men currently facing charges, and two who were convicted. As Trump prepares to take office, the fate of the prison and the men who remain there is unclear. Trump previously halted efforts to close the prison, transferring only one prisoner, and even threatened to expand Guantanamo. What will happen to the prison and its detainees as the Biden administration’s first term comes to an end? Will the prison ever close?

Join New America’s Future Security Program as they welcome Karen Greenberg, Thomas B. Wilner, and Andy Worthington for a discussion about what is next for the prison. Karen Greenberg is Director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law and a fellow with New America’s Future Security program and a research fellow with ASU’s Future Security Initiative. She is the author and editor of many books, including Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump and The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First One Hundred Days. Thomas B. Wilner is the co-founder of Close Guantanamo, Of Counsel at Shearman & Sterling LLP, and was counsel of record to the Guantanamo detainees in two Supreme Court cases confirming their right to seek review of their detention in U.S. courts. Andy Worthington is the co-founder of Close Guantanamo and author of The Guantanamo Files.

Join the conversation online using #GTMOat23 and following @NewAmericaISP.

Participants:

Karen Greenberg
Editor, Our Nation at Risk
Director, Center on National Security at Fordham Law
Fellow, New America Future Security program
Research Fellow, Future Security Initiative, Arizona State University

Thomas B. Wilner
Co-Founder, Close Guantanamo
Of Counsel, Shearman & Sterling, LLP

Andy Worthington, @GuantanamoAndy
Co-Founder, Close Guantanamo
Author, The Guantanamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison

Moderator:

Peter Bergen
Vice President, New America
Co-Director, Future Security
Professor of Practice, Arizona State University

Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy legacy is far more complex – and successful – than he gets credit for, CNN.com

Analysis by Peter Bergen, CNN
6 minute read
Published 5:00 AM EST, Sat January 4, 2025

Early in his presidency, in May 1977, then-President Jimmy Carter gave a commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame that outlined a new approach to America’s role in the world: Carter said human rights should be a “fundamental tenet of our foreign policy.”

This was a sharp break from the foreign policy practiced by Carter’s predecessor, President Richard Nixon, who, during the Vietnam War, stepped up the secret American bombings of Vietnam’s neighbors Cambodia and Laos, causing untold misery in those countries. Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, successfully pushed to overthrow the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. Three years later, Kissinger also secretly gave a green light to the military junta in Argentina to carry out what’s known as the “Dirty War” to kill between 10,000 to 30,000 of its political opponents.

Carter wanted to end such American support for dictators and to emphasize US support for human rights, while also trying to bring peace to the Middle East. His record largely reflects this effort – but the Iran hostage crisis has tended to obscure that Carter was otherwise a successful commander-in-chief on the foreign policy front.

Within weeks of taking office, Carter wrote a letter of support to Andrei Sakharov, the leading Soviet dissident. While this angered the Soviet regime, it helped to sustain the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, knowing that they had the US president firmly in their corner.

Carter’s approach to American foreign policy based on rights and justice also informed his decision to return the Panama Canal to the Panamanians. More than half a century earlier, President Teddy Roosevelt had supported Panama’s secession from Colombia, which resulted in the Americans building and owning the canal that traversed Panama, which enabled ships to avoid traveling an additional several thousand miles around Cape Horn at the bottom of South America.

But by the time Carter assumed office, the Panama Canal had become a symbol of US colonialism; Carter was determined to fix what he saw as a historical wrong, even if this was not an especially popular move politically in the US. Polling showed that half of Americans didn’t want to give up the canal, and an up-and-coming Republican politician named Ronald Reagan said of the plan: “I’m going to talk as long and as loud as I can against it.”

But in the end, Carter prevailed, getting the more-than-two-thirds vote in the US Senate necessary to ratify the Panama Canal treaties.

In recent weeks, President-elect Donald Trump has publicly mused about getting the Panama Canal back, but since the US Senate has ratified the Panama Canal treaties and the Panamanian government has said it has no interest in handing the canal back to the US, the possibility of this happening seems quite remote.

Peace between Israel and Egypt

Another success for Carter was the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, which had fought three major wars against each other. Israel’s Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, and Egypt’s President, Anwar Sadat, were bitter enemies when Carter brought them together at the US presidential retreat at Camp David in Maryland for 13 days of intensive peace talks in September 1978.

At Camp David, Carter cajoled the Israeli and Egyptian leaders into continuing to negotiate even when the talks broke down, and he brought to bear his own encyclopedic knowledge of the issues in the Middle East.

James Fallows was Carter’s chief speechwriter and stayed at Camp David during the negotiations. Fallows says the peace agreement simply wouldn’t have happened without Carter, who brought considerable focus to the details of the talks. Carter sat down with Begin and Sadat to examine maps of the Sinai region, which lies between Egypt and Israel, and Carter would be “drawing lines and saying, ‘What about this? And does the road go here? And what about the water supply?’ So, he was able to out-detail anybody,” Fallows told me in an interview for the Audible podcast “In the Room.”

The resulting peace agreement endures today, almost half a century later.

It was Nixon who first traveled to China to begin the normalization process between the communist regime and the United States, but it was Carter who formally recognized China and established diplomatic relations between the two countries, which set the foundations for the largest trade partnership in history.

And despite his peacenik image, it was Carter who started arming the Afghan mujahideen fighting the Soviets who invaded Afghanistan in December 1979.

Hostage crisis mars Carter’s legacy

And yet what defined Carter’s record as commander-in-chief for most Americans was the Iran hostage crisis when Islamist revolutionaries seized the American embassy in Tehran along with more than 50 Americans.

What precipitated the embassy takeover was the US providing refuge to the Shah of Iran, who the Iranian revolutionaries hated. Ironically, Carter had initially fiercely opposed letting the Shah into the US, but he was persuaded by Kissinger and other supporters of the Shah that the Iranian monarch was close to death from cancer and urgently needed medical treatment that only the US could provide. (The Shah’s medical prognosis was, in fact, better than was presented at the time).

Carter authorized a rescue operation in April 1980 to free the American hostages in Tehran. Operation Eagle Claw, sometimes called Desert One, was doomed almost as soon as it started. Several of the rescue helicopters encountered a fierce sandstorm, and one of them collided with an American transport plane during a refueling in the Iranian desert, killing eight American servicemen.

A Pentagon investigation found many problems with Operation Eagle Claw: The Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines all wanted to play a role in this important operation, even though they had never worked together before on this kind of mission. An overemphasis on operational security prevented the services from sharing critical information, and there was no full-scale plan rehearsal.

Something needed to be fixed. That fix was the creation in 1980 of the Joint Special Operations Command, which 31 years later would oversee the operation that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. However, the long-running hostage crisis that went on for 444 days and the failed rescue operation in Iran helped ensure that Carter was a one-term president.

At a press conference in 2015, Carter was asked what he wished he might have done differently when he was president. Carter replied, “I wish I’d sent one more helicopter to get the hostages, and we would have rescued them, and I would have been reelected.”

That seems like wishful thinking. The challenge of rescuing 52 American hostages held by fanatical revolutionaries inside the US embassy in downtown Tehran, a city of many millions of people, and then successfully getting them out of the country would have been formidable.

That said, Carter’s legacy as commander-in-chief cannot be judged solely by the US hostages held in Iran and the failed rescue effort.

Carter brokered a lasting peace between Egypt and Israel, opened US diplomatic relations with China, ended the colonial irritant of US control of the Panama Canal, and foregrounded human rights in American policy by, for instance, supporting Soviet dissidents while also taking a hardline when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979.

All in all, that’s a successful record for any commander-in-chief.

Was Jimmy Carter’s Foreign Policy Actually a Success?

Dec 31 2024
Length: 52 mins

The 39th president is remembered today with great affection. That hasn’t changed the popular perception of him as a failure while in office, weak and overwhelmed by events, and forever defined by the 444-day long debacle of the Iran hostage crisis. But is it time for another look—especially when it comes to the late president’s foreign policy record? Because with the passage of time, Jimmy Carter’s key initiatives abroad—from Central America to the Middle East, and with human rights at the center — are now looking more visionary by the day.

What does Trump’s pick to run the Pentagon believe? CNN.com

Analysis by Peter Bergen, CNN
6 minute read
Published 8:00 AM EST, Sun December 15, 2024

—
Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be secretary of defense, has an unconventional resume for the position, which in recent years has been held by retired four-star generals such as Jim Mattis and Lloyd Austin and by major Washington players like Leon Panetta and Robert Gates, both of whom had served as CIA directors.

While Hegseth served honorably in the US military, he retired as a major, and his most recent gig was as a Fox News anchor. Given Hegseth’s relative lack of relevant experience to manage the Pentagon, one of the globe’s biggest organizations and the most powerful military in the world, an important question to try to address is: Does Hesgeth’s understanding of the state of the American military correspond with reality?

A good place to delve into Hegseth’s core beliefs about this is his most recent book, “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free,” published in June.

Pete Hegseth, President-Elect Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of Defense, speaks to reporters after meeting with Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-SD) on Capitol Hill.

Hegseth’s book is an odd mix of slogans and unsupported assertions about the purportedly “Marxist” and “woke” US military. It is 228 pages long and has no footnotes and few facts to back up its claims, some of which are dubious at best.

Hegseth spends a chapter of his book dumping on the “trans” troops in the US military, whom he portrays as a key plank of the Pentagon’s purportedly “woke” agenda.

This is a sizable red herring. A 2016 study by RAND estimated there were between 1,320 and 6,630 transgender people on active duty and between 830 and 4,160 in the reserves. Let’s take the high-end estimates, and that’s 10,790 people. Around 2 million people serve on active duty and in the reserves, so even using the high-end estimate, roughly 0.5% service members are trans. So, for much of the US military, it is unlikely they will serve with someone who is trans.

Yet, Hegseth says that because of the “woke” and “Marxist” agenda underlined by the presence of trans soldiers in the US military, it’s been hard to attract recruits to serve in uniform. In fact, the real recruiting problem is not down to a small number of trans soldiers. It is impacted more by prosaic factors such as the declining number of qualified Americans of military age and the fact that amid low unemployment, the military is just one of many jobs young Americans can take.

A record number of Americans of military age — 77% — don’t qualify for the US military as they are obese, have taken drugs, have a criminal background or have medical problems, according to a 2020 study by the Pentagon. There are also fewer recruits because there are fewer people in the appropriate age cohort to serve in the US military, the result of falling American birth rates, which is why the United States is also seeing declining numbers of students applying to colleges.

All these factors have nothing to do with Hegseth’s claims that the US military is wokeness central and has embraced, in his words, “trans lunacy.”

Additionally, Hegseth says, “Lots of people need to be fired” at the Pentagon. A particular object of Hesgeth’s anger is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown, who is Black. Hegseth portrays Brown as a general officer obsessed with diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI.

Because of the purportedly “woke Marxist” military, Hegseth cites an anonymous US Army officer who told him that “overall readiness is in serious crisis,” referring to the ability of US military units to deploy quickly for combat. In fact, the readiness rates are higher now than in years. “Currently, 60% of our active force is at the highest states of readiness and could deploy to combat in less than 30 days,” the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Mark Milley, testified before a congressional committee last year.

CNN asked the Trump transition for comment on the claims made in Hegseth’s book.

In his book, Hegseth is very exercised about the role of women in combat because he says women are less effective fighters. It is certainly the case that few women have passed the “Q” course to become US Special Forces soldiers.

Yet, women play many key roles in the US military — just as they do in the Israeli army — something Hegseth seemed to publicly acknowledge Wednesday when he told reporters, “We support all women serving in our military today who do a fantastic job across the globe, in our Pentagon, and deliver critical aspects, all aspects, combat included, and they have … for quite some time.”

Like other Republicans, Hegseth wants answers to who is responsible for the shambolic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021. Hegseth blames the US military when it was simply following orders issued by the Biden administration to withdraw all troops, and when it was, instead, the State Department that had no plan for an orderly evacuation until it was too late.

Hegseth also claims that “coastal elites” hold military service against those who serve. This is an odd claim when 18% of the 118th Congress are veterans, while the Census Bureau estimates 6% of the overall US population are veterans. It seems that military service is something that voters around the country appreciate.

Hegseth writes eloquently about his time serving in the Iraq War, which was a marked contrast to his previous job at Bear Stearns in New York City, crunching “numbers on an Excel spreadsheet for boring meetings with really rich bankers.” Hesgeth’s account of fighting in Iraq, when the war was at its height and where he earned the first of his two Bronze Stars, is the least polemical and the most interesting part of his book.

But a decade and a half later, his military career was over. Hegseth claims he was deemed to be a possible Christian nationalist extremist because of his tattoo of a Jerusalem cross and was prevented from serving in his National Guard unit in Washington, DC, protecting the January 2021 inauguration of President Joe Biden (which came only two weeks after the riot by Trump’s supporters at the US Capitol). Though, according to the Associated Press, it was a different tattoo, one reading “Deus Vult” (Latin for “God wills it” and an expression associated with the Crusades) that led military leaders to tell him to stay home.

Hegseth seems quite bitter about this experience, which resulted in him putting on his uniform for the last time a couple of months later.

Hegseth’s book is a diatribe against supposed wokeness in the US military and the spinelessness of military leaders like Gen. Brown who are purportedly implementing the woke agenda. Should Hegseth become secretary of defense, this may set up a fight between him and top American generals, particularly over the issue of transgender troops.

There could also be a battle over the question of “Who lost Afghanistan?” — which Hegseth squarely blames the generals for.

In his book, Hegseth is silent on the big issues that a future secretary of defense might have to face, such as the Chinese possibly invading Taiwan. The CIA’s chief assesses that Chinese leader Xi Jinping has told his military to be ready to take the island by 2027. For Hegseth’s views on those kinds of issues, we will likely have to wait for his confirmation hearing, which, for the moment, appears to be on track given Trump’s strong continued backing.

Snatching Mega-Yachts and Blacklisting Banks: Do Sanctions Actually Work?

Narrated by: Peter L. Bergen
Dec 10 2024
Length: 34 mins

American Presidents have been addicted to international sanctions for much of the modern era, as a way to influence the behavior of other countries. Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Syria – all have been subject to U.S. sanctions over the past four decades. But these regimes remain as defiant of U.S. geostrategic goals as ever. This week we explore Russian yacht snatching, the impact of sanctions on the Iranian people, and how a once-obscure office inside the Treasury Department ended up putting a chokehold on national economies all over the world.

Who is the leader of Syria’s rebels and what does he want? CNN.com

Analysis by Peter Bergen, CNN
5 minute read
Published 12:08 PM EST, Mon December 9, 2024

CNN
—
The US State Department is advertising an up to $10 million reward for information leading to the capture of Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, who the agency first designated as a terrorist more than a decade ago, saying his group had “carried out multiple terrorist attacks throughout Syria.” Yet, Jolani is also the leader of the rebel forces that just toppled the tyrannical regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in a fast-moving offensive that surprised the world.

As a result, Jolani is now the de facto leader of more than 23 million Syrians and the several million Syrian refugees who are outside of their country, many of whom will surely want to return home now that Assad is gone.

So, who is Jolani, and what does he want? As a Syrian “foreign fighter” in his early 20s, Jolani crossed into Iraq to fight the Americans when they invaded the country in the spring of 2003. That eventually landed him in the notorious US-run Iraqi prison, Camp Bucca, which became a key recruiting ground for terrorist groups, including what would become ISIS.

Freed from Camp Bucca, Jolani crossed back into Syria and started fighting against the Baathist Assad regime, doing so with the backing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who would later become the founder of ISIS.

In Syria, Jolani founded a militant group known as Jabhat al-Nusra (“the Victory Front” in English), which pledged allegiance to al Qaeda, but in 2016, Jolani broke away from the terror group, according to the US Center for Naval Analyses.

Since then – unlike al Qaeda, which promoted a quixotic global holy war – Jolani’s group, now known by the initials HTS (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham), has undertaken the more prosaic job of trying to govern millions of people in the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib, providing basic services, according to the terrorism scholar Aaron Zalin who has written a book about HTS.

Same old jihadist wine in a new ‘inclusive’ bottle?

Jolani rarely gives interviews to Western news organizations, but on Thursday, he spoke with CNN’s Jomana Karadsheh. In that interview, Jolani was at pains to distance himself from Sunni terrorist groups like ISIS and al Qaeda, saying, “People who fear Islamic governance either have seen incorrect implementations of it or do not understand it properly,” and he tried to reassure Syria’s minority Alawites and Christians by saying, “These sects have coexisted in this region for hundreds of years, and no one has the right to eliminate them.”

Jolani, now 42, also told CNN that he has matured since he was fighting the Americans in Iraq two decades ago: “A person in their twenties will have a different personality than someone in their thirties or forties, and certainly someone in their fifties.” It’s hard to assess the veracity of Jolani’s recent mollifying statements and what they might mean over the longer term, although his men have not carried out ISIS-style sectarian massacres when they have seized Syrian cities.

From a US perspective, a positive indicator would also be if Jolani helps to find Austin Tice, an American journalist who disappeared in Syria a dozen years ago and who President Joe Biden said on Sunday he believed was still alive.

So, is Jolani simply the same old jihadist wine repackaged in a new “inclusive” bottle? Or is he more in the mold of an Islamist leader like Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, while no liberal democrat, won’t unleash sectarian cleansing on his population?

It’s worth recalling that the Taliban positioned themselves as a kinder, gentler Taliban 2.0 before they seized all of Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, and they are now ruling with an iron misogynic fist just as they did the last time they were in power before the 9/11 attacks. And when ISIS seized much of Iraq a decade ago, the terrorist army ruthlessly suppressed pretty much every ethnic and religious group other than the Sunnis. So, Jolani’s treatment of the Alawites and Christians that he now rules over will be an important indicator of his true colors.

For its part, the Biden administration is taking no chances over whether Jolani has the capability to manage the threat from ISIS. US Central Command announced on Sunday that it had carried out more than 75 strikes at suspected ISIS camps and operatives in central Syria.

On Saturday, President-elect Donald Trump posted about Syria in all caps: “THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!” But the US is already involved in Syria, with nearly 1,000 US troops deployed there on an anti-ISIS mission. American forces have been in Syria a decade now, and during his first term, Trump went back and forth about withdrawing all of them. What to do about those US forces in Syria is a decision that Trump will likely face as he assumes office.

Lessons from history

In 2003, the Americans toppled another Baathist dictator, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and then fired as many as 30,000 members of the Baath party who were running the country. They also disbanded about half a million members of the Iraqi armed forces. This simultaneously collapsed the government of Iraq while also creating a large cadre of angry, armed, trained men, some of whom joined the insurgency fighting US forces. Jolani was fighting against the Americans in Iraq then, so he is presumably aware of this instructive history.

In Libya in 2011, a US-led NATO bombing campaign contributed to the fall of another brutal secular dictator, Moammar Gadhafi. Thirteen years later, Libya is still embroiled in a civil war with countries like the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Russia, Turkey and the US all backing or attacking various factions in the war.

Perhaps Jolani may be able to pull off the neat trick of bringing order to Syria while keeping many of Assad’s bureaucrats in place, so the country continues to be governed while simultaneously pursuing a “big tent” strategy of protecting all of Syria’s religious minorities.

Jolani won the war against one of the 21st century’s nastiest dictators. Now the hard part begins.

How different a commander in chief will Trump be? CNN.com

Analysis by Peter Bergen, CNN
18 minute read
Published 5:30 AM EST, Sun November 17, 2024

CNN
—
“When America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold” is a saying used to describe how the massive American economy can affect global businesses, but it also applies to foreign policy in the Trump era.

President-elect Donald Trump’s electoral mandate gives him considerable leverage when he is in office to implement his “America First” policies. Officials in capitals around the globe are now trying to game out what will change once Trump is inaugurated.

On the face of it, there are sizable differences in foreign policy between Trump and President Joe Biden. Trump’s isolationist instincts mean that he will build walls around the US — whether physically, at the southern border, or by using tariffs to raise the prices of imports of foreign goods into the country. Trump will also likely take a skeptical line on alliances such as NATO, pull out of international agreements negotiated with dozens of other countries such as the Paris Climate Agreement, and ration or even end US support for Ukraine in the war with Russia.

Yet — surprisingly, perhaps — on some critical foreign policy issues, Trump and the Biden administration are on the same page, and Trump 2.0 will likely see some important continuities with the Biden approach when it comes to China, the Middle East and the withdrawal of US troops who are posted overseas.

China

In his first term, Trump inaugurated a far more combative approach to China, abandoning the fantasies of previous US administrations that Beijing would, as it grew economically, also liberalize politically. Instead, the Trump administration started treating it as a potential rival, for instance, increasing “freedom of navigation” exercises in the South China Sea, much of which China claims as its own. The Trump team also slapped a wide range of tariffs on thousands of Chinese goods.

When Biden got to the White House, he kept Trump’s more hardline approach to China in place, holding on to Trump’s tariffs and going even further by slapping a 100% tax on Chinese electric vehicles and banning investments in China by US companies that might benefit the Chinese military. The Biden administration shored up its alliances to contain Beijing, such as the 2021 agreement between the US, the United Kingdom and Australia known as AUKUS, which provides nuclear-powered submarines to the Australians.

It’s reasonable to assume that in his second term, Trump won’t stray much from the playbook his first administration inaugurated, a playbook that was amplified by Biden.

There could be differences between Trump and Biden on the fate of the democratically governed island of Taiwan, which the Chinese have long claimed is part of China and which is also a US ally. Biden, in 2022, publicly said that the US would defend Taiwan if China invaded, abandoning the US policy of “strategic ambiguity,” which was supposed to keep the Chinese guessing about how the US might respond if they invaded the island.

An invasion of Taiwan is a problem Trump might have to deal with during his second term; the CIA believes that China’s President Xi Jinping has told his People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade by 2027. (The Chinese could alternatively mount a naval blockade of Taiwan and slowly strangle the island to get the Taiwanese to agree to a deal that would make them a quasi-autonomous territory of China.)

What Trump might do if the Chinese invaded Taiwan or blockaded Taiwan is anyone’s guess. In July, Trump said, “Taiwan should pay us for defense,” which doesn’t suggest that he would be in any hurry to send American troops to defend the island if the Chinese invaded or blockaded it.

Last year, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, mounted a war game of a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan. Running the war game 24 times, it concluded, “The United States and its allies lost dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and tens of thousands of service members.” Given Trump’s isolationist instincts, that’s a price he may not want to pay when he is president

The Middle East

In the Middle East, there will likely be a high degree of continuity between Biden and Trump. Despite Biden’s occasional chastising of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the civilian casualties caused by the Israeli military in Gaza, Biden has given Netanyahu more or less a free hand to do what he wants to do in Gaza against Hamas and in Lebanon against Iran-backed Hezbollah.

After the Israelis killed a top Iranian general in Syria in April, the Biden administration assembled an international coalition to protect Israel when Iran fired hundreds of drones and missiles against Israel, strikes that didn’t cause significant damage in Israel. In October, the Biden administration again helped to intercept a barrage of around 200 Iranian ballistic missiles, which also caused minimal damage to targets in Israel.

On Iran, the Biden team made some early efforts to resuscitate the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with the Iranians, but in the end the Biden administration did not renew the agreement.

In the past year, the Biden team has also repeatedly authorized strikes against the Iranian-supported Houthis in Yemen.

In support of Hamas, the Houthis are routinely firing drones and missiles targeting shipping along the critical Red Sea global trade route.

It’s hard to imagine Biden’s “bear hug” of Israel and his administration’s tough line on Iranian proxies like the Houthis changing much under Trump.

After all, when he was in office, Trump ignored Israel’s much-expanded settlement-building in the West Bank. At the same time, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner negotiated the Abraham Accords, which established diplomatic relations between Israel and some Arab states but gave nothing to the Palestinians. Trump also ordered the assassination of the top Iranian general, Qasem Soleimani, when he was visiting Iraq in 2020.

Before the effort was derailed by the October 7, 2023, massacre by Hamas in Israel and the war in Gaza, the Biden administration was in the process of trying to extend the Abraham Accords, brokering a deal where Saudi Arabia recognized Israel for the first time.

In short, there isn’t much to distinguish Biden and Trump on their overall policies in the Middle East, even if some of Trump’s supporters have claimed that Biden is weak on Israel and Iran.

However, the nomination of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to be Trump’s ambassador to Israel — Huckabee has claimed there is “no such thing as a Palestinian” — might indicate more sympathy in a Trump administration than in the Biden administration for the annexation of parts of the West Bank by Israel. Indeed, during Trump’s first term, his ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, said the Trump administration could support Israel if it annexed parts of the West Bank.

Also, the indictment last week of an Iranian who was allegedly trying to assassinate Trump will surely not endear the Iranians further to the incoming president. Once Trump is in office, we can expect to see his team ramping up sanctions on Iran, including trying to curtail its oil sales. The US has been sanctioning the Iranian regime for decades with negligible effects on the regime’s behavior. After the Trump administration in 2018 pulled out of the nuclear deal with Iran, which was preventing the Iranians from enriching uranium anywhere close to weapons grade, the Iranians now have enough fissile material for several nuclear weapons, according to the US Defense Intelligence Agency.

Bringing US troops home

In 2020, the Trump administration signed a US withdrawal agreement from Afghanistan with the Taliban. Biden went through with that plan in the summer of 2021, withdrawing the 2,500 US troops that remained in the country and enabling the Taliban to seize power once again in Afghanistan.

Similarly, the Biden administration has been negotiating the withdrawal of an unspecified number of the 2,500 US troops in Iraq who are there to fight what remains of ISIS. Given that Trump has long been skeptical about the US military presence in the Middle East, this agreement is likely to continue to go forward.

The big changes coming: Personnel is policy

“Personnel is policy” was a mantra of the Reagan years. Now that Team Trump is heading back into office, they understand how the foreign policy and national security apparatus works, which they didn’t at the beginning of Trump’s first term. They plan to change that at the senior level and possibly at the level of career foreign service officers and intelligence officers. In 2021, JD Vance — now vice president-elect — advised Trump during a podcast appearance to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

In the first Trump term, some top officials, such as his second national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, influenced Trump to make sensible decisions, such as reversing Trump’s inclination to pull all US troops out of Afghanistan. But after McMaster was pushed out of office in 2018, the Trump administration negotiated with the Taliban the withdrawal agreement of all US forces from Afghanistan. There will likely be very few independent voices like McMaster’s in the incoming administration.

Loyalty is, of course, the supreme virtue in the Trump universe. Trump publicly nixed his former UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, and his former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, from any of the top jobs in his administration. Haley ran against Trump in the GOP primary, and Pompeo considered whether he would make a presidential run. Trump is looking for a team of ultraloyalists, such as senior House Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, whom he has offered the role of UN ambassador.

Loyalty to the president is standard practice for members of the cabinet, and simply because an appointee is loyal to Trump doesn’t mean that at least some aren’t well qualified for a cabinet role.

Take Trump’s pick to be his national security adviser, Republican Rep. Mike Waltz of Florida. Waltz is a retired Special Forces colonel who served in the reserves with multiple tours in Afghanistan. He has also run a small business; written two books; served for the past five years in Congress, where he has been an active member of the House Armed Services Committee; worked in a policy role at the Pentagon; and worked in the White House during the George W. Bush administration as a policy adviser on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

All in all, Waltz is about as qualified to be national security adviser as anyone who had the job in the past, having both fought on the battlefields of Afghanistan and having a deep understanding of the ways of Washington, on the Hill, in the Pentagon and at the White House. (Disclosure: I have known Rep. Waltz for the past decade and half.)

On the other hand, the nomination of Pete Hegseth — a Fox News host who had served in the US military, retiring as a major, with no experience of running much of anything other than a small nonprofit — to lead the Pentagon’s close to 3 million employees is perplexing.

Hegseth is also an odd choice for secretary of defense when you compare him to some other recent secretaries, such as the retired four-star generals Lloyd Austin and Jim Mattis, or Robert Gates, who had worked in various US government roles for decades, including as the director of the CIA. It will be interesting to see how Hegseth’s nomination fares in the Senate, where Republicans have a slim majority.

US Civil Servants to become ‘at will’ employees?

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which was largely put together by Trump administration alumni and the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute, outlines plans to ensure loyalists are appointed at every level in critical national security agencies.

Trump has publicly disavowed Project 2025, but as CNN reported, at least 140 people who had worked with him also worked on the project. Tellingly, Project 2025 produced an 887-page report that includes separate chapters on the State Department, the intelligence community, the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon, all written by officials with senior positions in the first Trump administration.

These chapters seem to be predicated on the belief that a fifth column of State Department foreign service officers and US intelligence officials would stymie a conservative president like Trump at every turn, so they should be replaced with loyalists.

The America First Policy Institute goes further in its policy recommendations, advocating that civil servants become “at-will” employees effectively. It states, “Agencies should be free to remove employees for any non-discriminatory reason, with no external appeals.”

If this were implemented, every American agency would be staffed with political loyalists, which would go back to the 19th century before the US had a merit-based professional civil service standing ready to serve presidents of either party.

Also, why join the State Department or the CIA and go through all the trouble of learning difficult languages or mastering arcane disciplines like arms control negotiations if you could lose your job any time a new president comes into office?

If the Trump team attempts to remove career foreign service and intelligence officers, expect to see federal unions fighting in court. Also, there may be significant resignations in some agencies if officials feel that their expertise in foreign affairs or work in intelligence is being seriously undermined.

Nonetheless, the incoming Trump administration seems intent on resurrecting Schedule F, an executive order issued in the last months of the first Trump term. Schedule F would turn the typical number of around 4,000 political appointees at the top of every federal agency and instead appoint as many as 50,000 political appointees, the vast majority of whom would presumably replace career civil servants.

This seems like a particularly bad idea when it comes to the US intelligence community, which is paid to tell the president news he may not want to hear or that doesn’t fit with his preconceptions about the world. For precisely this reason, typically there are just four political appointees at the CIA, and similarly small numbers at the other US intelligence agencies.

The nomination of Trump loyalist former Rep. John Ratcliffe of Texas to run the CIA has not generated much criticism, since he is a known quantity to the US intelligence community, having served on the House Intelligence Committee and during the first Trump term as the director of national intelligence, who oversees the 18 American intelligence agencies. But the nomination of former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii to be the next director of national intelligence will surely encounter headwinds, given her past support for American rivals like Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Syrian dictator Basher al-Assad, both of whom are key intelligence collection targets for US spy agencies.

Ukraine and the future of NATO

Trump has said he could get a deal done to end the war in Ukraine in a day. That seems implausible since Russia and Ukraine have already been fighting for a decade.

Still, given Trump’s desire to be seen as a great negotiator, perhaps he could get a deal now that Ukraine is beginning to lose the war to the Russians. According to a report by the US Congressional Research Service last month, the average age of Ukrainian soldiers is 40, a figure that speaks for itself. The Ukrainians also know that the Republican-controlled Congress will likely not support spending billions more to fund their war.

Meanwhile, the fact that the Russians are deploying North Korean soldiers to fight their war against the Ukrainians suggests that Putin doesn’t want to order the kind of mass mobilization in Russia that would be unpopular. So he may have his own interests in winding down the war on terms he deems favorable.

The overall contours of a deal that could end the fighting could be that Russia keeps Crimea, which it seized in 2014, and Ukraine gets back some of the territories in eastern Ukraine that Russia has taken. In return, Ukraine doesn’t get to join NATO, but it does get security guarantees from the US of the kind that Japan has. Neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians will be happy with elements of this deal, but the alternative is a forever war in which already around a million people on both sides have been killed and wounded.

When it comes to NATO, Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, told me in 2023 for the Audible podcast “In the Room” that Trump “would fundamentally reexamine the premise of NATO, which is the predicate for what I think he would do in a second Trump term, which is withdraw the United States from NATO itself.” But earlier this year, the US Congress made it harder for an American president to pull out of NATO, ensuring that it would take a supermajority vote in the US Senate, or an act passed by the full Congress to pull the US out of the alliance.

Yet, Trump can greatly undercut NATO and the reason for its existence, which is collective self-defense, with his public statements because he is the commander in chief of the most important country in the alliance. In February, Trump said he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO member country that didn’t spend 2 percent of its GDP on its defense.

Earlier this month, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said that Putin’s ambitions are greater than just conquering Ukraine: “Russia is conducting an intensifying campaign of hybrid attacks across our allied territories, interfering directly in our democracies, sabotaging industry, and committing violence. … This shows that the shift of the frontline in this war is no longer solely in Ukraine. Increasingly, the frontline is moving beyond borders to the Baltic region, to Western Europe.”

Given Trump’s odd bromance with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russia will likely feel empowered to continue these efforts to undermine NATO countries, knowing Trump may not push back.

Deportations

The announcement last weekend that Tom Homan, an immigration hardliner who was Trump’s acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during his first term, will serve as “border czar” shows that the incoming Trump administration will take a tough line on deportations. Making the Homan announcement, Trump tweeted that he “will be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin.”

When Trump was last in office, his administration separated more than 3,000 migrant children from their families. At a CNN town hall last year, Trump indicated this policy could return, saying, “When you say to a family that if you come, we’re going to break you up, they don’t come.”

Trump, of course, has even bigger plans for his second term, including the mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. According to Department of Homeland Security estimates from 2022, about 11 million unauthorized migrants were living in the US. The actual number could be much higher, and Trump has mentioned a figure of 15-20 million illegal immigrants that he plans to deport.

The Trump team will likely begin by deporting those unauthorized migrants charged with a crime, according to CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, but removing all unauthorized migrants will involve significant logistical, financial and legal hurdles.

The American Immigration Council, a liberal policy group, estimated in a report issued last month that it would cost almost a trillion dollars over the next decade to remove the many millions of illegal immigrants in the US. Where will this funding come from? Trump said last week in an interview with NBC News. “It’s not a question of a price tag. It’s not — really, we have no choice.”

The Supreme Court has ruled that migrants living in the US are entitled to due process before they are deported. Migrants awaiting legal proceedings will need to be held somewhere. Rounding up millions of migrants and holding millions of hearings will necessitate the hiring of many immigration agents and judges, not to mention that new detention facilities will need to be built. To give you a sense of the scale required, the US Bureau of Prisons said in 2022 that there were around 1.2 million prisoners in the US.

After Trump won the election, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey said that she would not allow her state police to be used to deport residents.

Stephen Miller, Trump’s choice to be deputy chief of staff for policy, has said in the past that the National Guard could be used in deportations in states where there are uncooperative local governments. Earlier this year, Trump also told TIME that he would have “no problem using the military, per se,” for deportations.

TV images of American soldiers detaining and deporting men, women and children would likely not play well with many Americans.

Tariffs

Both Trump and Biden imposed tariffs on goods that are made in China, such as shoes and luggage, and Biden went a step further by putting 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs, but Trump has a plan to go even bigger on taxing imports, promising to put 60% tariffs on all Chinese goods and 10% tariffs on goods imported from anywhere else in the world. Let’s see what comes of this, since tariffs are a tax on ordinary American consumers and are inflationary since they drive up prices. Also, it’s unclear whether Trump could impose tariffs on imports from every nation, since only the US Congress has the power to tax, while the president can impose tariffs on countries like China only if they are engaged in unfair trade practices, according to an analysis by the Washington Post.

Climate change

Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement a few months into his first term and, while he was president, told CBS’s “60 Minutes” that climate change will “change back again” and “I don’t know that it’s man-made.” Don’t expect anything different in his second term, even though 2024 is on track to be the hottest year on record, and the US is the world’s largest oil and gas producer and its second-largest carbon emitter.

A predictably unpredictable commander in chief

Trump is predictably unpredictable; early in his first term, his then-national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, for instance, persuaded Trump to stay the course and not pull all US troops out of Afghanistan. Then Trump changed his mind and authorized his team to make a withdrawal deal with the Taliban, at one point even inviting Taliban leaders to Camp David and then changing his mind and disinviting them.

It’s not out of the question that Trump, who sees himself as a great dealmaker, could try to reach an agreement in the Middle East that would normalize relations between the Saudis and Israelis in exchange for a genuine two-state solution. Trump could also try to end the war in Ukraine — if not with a formal peace deal, at least with the kind of armistice that has prevented conflict on the Korean Peninsula since the end of the Korean War in 1953.

It’s worth recalling, however, that despite all the much-ballyhooed summits and “love letters” that Trump exchanged with the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, the great dealmaker couldn’t make a deal that eliminated or even slowed down North Korea’s nuclear program.

What is likely is that Trump will keep in place the tougher policies on China that he initiated, and that Biden inherited and amplified. In the Middle East, Trump will largely follow the playbook he followed when he was president: Israel gets what it wants, a policy Biden has also followed. On two of the most significant issues facing the United States, its competition with China and the future course of the Middle East there will likely be considerable continuities between the two administrations.

Where Trump will clearly depart from Biden is he that may find ways to undermine NATO; he will oversee mass deportations of illegal immigrants possibly involving the US military; he will undercut efforts to slow climate change; and he might get into a serious trade war with the world’s second-largest economy, with all the knock-on effects that might have on the global economy. In short, it will be an isolationist “America First” approach to the world enforced by Trump loyalists at all of his agencies.

Fasten your seatbelts!

Defund or Unleash: What Does Effective Policing Look Like?

Dec 3 2024
Length: 40 mins

In recent years, several high-profile abuses of power have fractured public trust in police and created a false tension between police accountability and public safety. But somewhere between a blanket defense of the police and “defund the police” lie effective solutions. Peter talks with three thoughtful, accomplished people who have worn the badge to find out what they’ve learned about what is broken in American policing, how to fix it, and whether some types of police work might be better left to someone else. (This episode contains strong language.)