The United States only has one president at a time. Until January 20, that’s Joe Biden. But President-elect Donald Trump and his skeleton foreign policy team are waiting in the wings, plotting policy behind the scenes on issues — Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, Middle East peace — that have stymied the Biden administration for the last year. In fact, Trump is already influencing the respective calculations of allies, partners and adversaries before he even steps foot in the Oval Office. And Biden’s advisors seem perfectly fine with it.
Trump fancies himself as a master negotiator, somebody who’s inherently skilled at poking, pressuring and sweet-talking the opposite side of the table until he gets what he wants. Despite this characterization, there weren’t all that many groundbreaking deals during his first term. His nuclear summitry with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, while certainly historic, ended in infamy after the two walked away empty-handed in Hanoi in 2019. Trump’s desire to get a new nuclear agreement with Iran, one that would be stronger and more comprehensive than Barack Obama’s, went nowhere. There weren’t any arms control or strategic stability accords with Russia — if anything, there were less by the time he left office. The Abraham Accords, which normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and four Arab states, weren’t anything to sneeze at, but its regional impact atrophied as soon as the war in Gaza erupted.
But that was then; this is now. Trump’s second term will be a fresh slate. The geopolitical situation has changed drastically in the four years since he was last sitting in the big chair. Hundreds of thousands of Russian forces are pummeling Ukraine’s defensive lines in Donetsk at the same time Ukrainian troops are trying to hold the Russian territory they captured in August. Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia and political party, is weaker today than it was in 2020 after a three-month Israeli air campaign in Southern Lebanon. Iran and Israel have exchanged fire with each other twice. Syria’s civil war is heating up again after four years in which the frontlines were relatively static. Gaza is now a wasteland.
Technically, all of these issues are still under Biden’s purview. But let’s be honest: regardless of what his top foreign policy advisors may say during the TV interviews and Q&A sessions, he’d rather be eating ice cream with his grandkids than dealing with any of this. The likelihood is high that Trump will come back to the White House with all of these problem-sets still intact, ready to be solved or at least managed.
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Events on Grand strategy
