Stepping to the side
Trump as Kramer, turning the US into a minor character in the global story
The distinguished Dan Drezner is not a man to be trifled with. And his excellent exercise in envisioning weirdness in a world where Trump returns to power should be read carefully. No seriously, just go read it, I’ll wait here.
Thanks, and welcome back.
Particularly at a moment when the Democratic Party continues to self-immolate, considering what would happen on the international front should DJT take the mantle again as the John Roberts-approved Once and Future King is important. The stakes of this election matter, and Drezner lays out scenarios that could definitely happen, focusing on major powers — a global troika of US, Europe, and China. It’s Saturday, and so I’ll be brief — saying just a few words about the rest of the world and a changing climate.
Drezner, appropriately, takes Trump literally and seriously. While of course there’s a lot of volatility in Trump’s rhetoric (and governance, as we all saw during Trump I), DJT is relatively consistent in calling for tariffs, backing away from Ukraine specifically and NATO broadly, and using the military to deal with immigration issues. Domestically, this will harm immigrants and raise prices. I worry a bit about how far Trump could march the US into true banana republicdom by printing money to pay for tax cuts (another constant in Trumpland), inflationary spirals, and the ways in which that might shake out for the world financially. Drezner imagines Larry Kudlow helming the Fed, and it’s hard for me not to think that hyperinflation might not quickly follow.
But Drezner is a scholar of international relations, and that’s where his essay spends most of its time. Intriguingly, he suggests that rather than fall apart and continue to acquiesce to American bullying-as-leadership, Europe might finally get its strategic autonomy act together. The mechanism here is quite straight-forward. Ukraine will almost certainly have to sue for peace with Russia in the wake of Trumpian withdrawal of military and other assistance. This allows Putin to legitimate his full-scale invasion, and has other small European states wondering if they too have always been part of Russia in the mind of the Moscow murderer. Backs stiffened, an additional slice of the continent’s economic might will be directed to the machines of war. One hopes this spending keeps Putin at bay.
A newly autonomous Europe might also turn away from its doting friendship with Washington, with both trade wars with the US (Trump’s delusional tariff panacea acting up again) and a turn towards China real possibilities. This is in addition to the allies that China would gain with a Trumpian America closing its borders to people and goods from abroad. A chaotic Western hemisphere with the US military tramping around trying to solve the economic problems of development in central and South America leaves the whole rest of the planet — almost 7 billion people — looking elsewhere.
Drezner’s piece breaks from much of the foreign policy conversation in not framing things in “Cold War 2.0” terms. And as such the idea that non-aligned states might stand to gain by operating on the edges of the US-China rivalry is muted. The US is really just absent from the stage.
While Biden’s solipsistic claim that he’s “running the world” obviously overstates reality, the United States is clearly a leading presence in the world, whereas under Trump 2.0, the country would likely just be absent most of the time though occasionally slide in and make some wacky pronouncements. The US becoming Kramer instead of Seinfeld. Given where the US is and isn’t today [Gaza/Israel, Sudan, Kenya], many may not mind the idea of a US that retreats back to its own apartment.
Drezner doesn’t dwell or even mention any of these locations, and while clearly Trump will spend precisely zero time thinking about the African continent even if he stays in office for a decade, it does seem important to note that violence in the Middle East would likely escalate under his watch. Trump has criticized Biden’s even talking about pausing arms shipments to Israel, and while most of his bile on the subject is about rounding up US protestors, it’s hard to see how Netanyahu wouldn’t see a Trump win as a further green light to pursue maximalist visions.
Drezner’s depiction of the world makes a lot of sense and for all of its “weirdness” does not feel unlikely to me, with one glaring exception: climate change and the incredible reconstruction of modernity that mitigating and adapting to it will entail are the main story of the 21st Century. I just finished Jake Bittle’s The Great Displacement about the ways that Americans are already being dislocated due to climate change: hurricanes in Florida, fires in California, deluges drowning Houston, river flooding in North Carolina, the bayou disappearing in Louisiana, droughts in Arizona, and sea level rise claiming Norfolk. One may be reluctant to accept that a Polycrisis wracks the globe, but civil and interstate conflicts are increasingly tied to crop failures, migration flows, and tight budgets exacerbated by weird weather and hot temperatures. When imagining the future of the international stage, it is imperative that we remember that the stage is on fire.
But it isn’t that simple. Doom and gloom have a place, but we’re far from smoked. The fossil energy systems that have changed the atmosphere to such an extent have felt unavoidable unless one wanted to fall into the delusion of degrowth, which fails as a political platform even in Europe, let alone the rest of the world. The incredible price declines of solar, wind, and batteries make a clean energy transition increasingly likely, and so estimates of warming are topping out at the merely miserable 2.5C rather than the civilization destroying 4C.
What complicates the energy transition from an international relations perspective is that China is the dominant producer and deployer of all of these technologies. It is the vanguard here. Trump 2.0 would likely push the US into even more of a backward position vis-a-vis the transition, leaving us vulnerable to being pilloried for our historical emissions and addiction to dirty fossil fuels, heavy SUVs, and huge houses.
So, the stakes of the election are real, but remember character that matters most is the climate.