What Trump’s Second Term Could Mean for the Rest of the World

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, ANCHOR: Well only months after Biden hosted the 75th anniversary of the NATO alliance, the conversation turns now to how Trump’s foreign policy will affect the United States role in the world. In his latest piece for The New York Times, David Sanger argues that Trump’s win ends a post-World War II era of U.S. leadership, and he joins Walter Isaacson to discuss.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Bianna. And, David Sanger, Welcome to the show.

SANGER: Great to be back with you, Walter.

ISAACSON: It’s been 75 years since America has led a world order that was sort of based on defensive alliances like NATO, but also gradually decreasing tariffs, more free trade, more free movement of people. Does this election of Donald Trump for the second time mean the end of that world order?

SANGER: Walter, it may well. You know, in the days when — after President Biden was elected four years ago, he went around telling American allies, the British, the French, the Japanese, the South Koreans, America is back. And what he meant by that was that the four years of Donald Trump, his first term, were an aberration. They were the blip in the system. And he represented the return of traditional alliance building. After all, President Biden was, in many ways, the sort of last warrior of the old Cold War. He had come to age in the United States Senate during that time. He ran the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and he had, of course, been vice president during one of the most critical periods of the post-Cold War era. Now, with President Trump’s re-election, the real question is, was Biden the blip? Could President Biden be viewed by history later on as sort of the last gasp of that old order? One marked, as you noted, by building alliances, relying on NATO, building up alliances in the Pacific, which was really a hallmark of Biden’s four years in office, free trade, or at least freer trade, the concept of 100 percent, 200 percent, 400 percent tariffs, as now President-Elect Trump talked about during the campaign, you wouldn’t have heard that come very easily out of Joe Biden’s lips.

ISAACSON: Well, Joe Biden said, this is not who we are, he kept saying that when talking about it. But let’s look at American history. I mean, from the time of Washington and Jefferson and warning against entangling foreign alliances, we’ve generally been skeptical about, you know, going abroad for monsters to slay. Is this sort of a natural thing that America has felt and that’s one of the reasons Trump got elected?

SANGER: That cycle of history has been a part of the fabric of the United States, as you know, throughout its history. People have written many a book about when these cycles come into play. Samuel Huntington wrote about how they happened every 70 years. Others saw particular triggers in American society for it. But the fact of the matter is it’s a recurrent theme. It was certainly a theme in this election, although I don’t think the dominant theme. I think what got Trump elected over Kamala Harris was, as you would expect, much more domestic issues, inflation, the social wage issues that Trump kept pressing. You saw him take out a lot of ads on TV and you saw them on social media about trans issues. You didn’t see many about NATO issues.

ISAACSON: President Putin of Russia congratulated Trump. And I think he said — he praised Trump’s desire to restore relations with Russia and to end the Ukraine crisis — Ukrainian crisis. Do you think there’s a possibility, and is it a good thing or bad thing, that Trump will work with Putin and end the Ukrainian war?

SANGER: He may well end the Ukrainian war, and I know many people both within Trump’s circle and some outside who think that with Trump coming in, that war may be over within a year or so. I’m not sure I fully sign on to that. It’s not only a question of whether the war ends, it’s a question of how it ends. So, the Biden bywords here were nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine, which was to say, we’re not going to go negotiate around your back with Vladimir Putin and decide the lines between Russia and Ukraine. You’ve never heard those words from Donald Trump. And when he says that he will end the war in 24 hours, many believe that what he’s really saying there is that he will end the war by calling Putin saying, OK, what deal do you need? What’s the deal we can strike? Putin will say, well, why don’t we start with the 20 percent of Ukraine that I now basically occupy? At which point, the theory goes, he would then call Zelenskyy and say, do I ever have a deal for you? All you have to do is give up 20 percent of your territory, and this war will be over, and you won’t suffer these awful casualties.

ISAACSON: And what happens when Zelenskyy says no?

SANGER: Then he says, you know, I’m not really sure we can continue supporting you at the level we’ve been supporting you.

ISAACSON: And what’s the danger of that? I mean, should we — why is it better to keep this war going on for another five years?

SANGER: It may not be better but the question is, is the message that you send around the world that Putin can be rewarded for invading another country and ending up with some of his territory. Or if you view it the way I think President Trump and many of his advocates view it, do you say, look, all wars end with a negotiated settlement. Zelenskyy’s been incapable of getting that negotiation going. We’re going to help him along in that process.

ISAACSON: Well, wait. Tell me what your view on that is.

SANGER: Well, my view on that is that at the end of the day, my guess is this war will only end with territory either being given to Russia or Korea like being in dispute. That is to say that there’s an armistice of some kind and an agreement to negotiate on territory at some point in the future. Now, in 1953, this looked terrible to the South Koreans because they were saying they’ve lost territory of their own that used to be theirs. If you had been able to say to the South Koreans back then, you know, in 70 years plus, you will be one of the world’s largest economies and you will be able to travel — your citizens will be able to travel the world and you’ll be among the most admired manufacturing countries in the world and a high-tech country to boot, making products that even the United States, in some cases, is having a hard time making, I think the Koreans would have taken that deal. There’s no way to make that guarantee to the Ukrainians, but it is possible given the talent that we’ve seen the Ukrainians have that they should think about rebuilding the country and that that is a bigger issue than territory. I’m not sure Zelenskyy thinks that way, and giving away territory might be the end of him politically. But, you know, this is what happens at the end of long, slogging wars where it becomes clear that the Ukrainians, in this case, are unlikely to be able to defend all their territory.

ISAACSON: In your book, “New Cold Wars,” you talk about how General H. R. McMaster is working with Trump, national security adviser, said that Trump felt he could break through with Putin on a personal level and McMaster said, don’t go down that path. That’s not going to be a good idea. What happened? And from — can you take from the first term and do you think he will try to have a personal relationship in the second term?

SANGER: Oh, I’m certain he will. I mean, first of all, one of his critiques of President Biden is that Biden and Putin only met once they met in June of 2021. That was over cyber-attacks that emanated from Russia and hit the American oil and gas pipelines. It was not largely about Ukraine. They barely communicated since, never met in person during that time. I am quite certain that President-Elect Trump believes that what works in diplomacy is in what he would call great man diplomacy, that he can talk to Vladimir Putin, that he can talk to Xi Jinping, that they’re scared of him, that Xi would not dare to take Taiwan because he thinks that Trump is blanking crazy, that’s what he told The Wall Street Journal, right? So, he is very much of the belief that the personal diplomacy is the key to all of this. I think that can be a bit of a trap because the Chinese learned how to play President-Elect Trump by dangling trade deals. Putin seemed to develop a relationship with him that put very few limits on the Russians. But I’m sure that Trump believes that he can bring about peace in Ukraine and the end to the new Cold Wars through the strength of his personal diplomas.

ISAACSON: One of the biggest shifts in the past five, six, seven years has been the growing alliance between Russia and China. You’re teaching there at the Kennedy School with Graham Allison, of course, and you certainly know the Bismarck and Metternich warnings about letting your two adversaries get closer to each other than they’re to you. Is this a huge mistake in foreign policy, and what can Trump do to reverse that growing alliance between Russia and China?

SANGER: Well, first of all, this alliance barely showed itself during the first Trump term. And early in the years that Biden was in office, he didn’t even acknowledge that it was likely to happen. I asked him at a press conference about a year into his presidency, did he believe that the Russia-China partnership, I wouldn’t call it a full alliance, is a real thing, and he said, no, I don’t think these two countries can get together. By the time he did his last press conference, which was after the NATO summit in the summer, he admitted that he had a program to try to get between the two countries to try to stop this, the way Nixon and Kissinger, as you wrote in your Kissinger biography, tried to design the opening to China to keep the Chinese and the then Soviet Union from coming together. Now, Biden would not describe the elements of that strategy, and my guess is that a good deal of it was covert, and a lot of it was aimed at stopping the flow of technology from China to rebuild the Russian military. But the fact of the matter is that there has been a policy of trying to get in the way of this relationship, not terribly successfully. We never heard during the campaign, Walter, not once, any reference to this. The biggest change in geopolitics, I think, in the past four or five years during the campaign, we never heard it come out of Vice President Harris’ mouth, we never heard it come out of President-Elect Trump’s mouth. And so, we don’t know whether or not he will try to interfere in that relationship. My guess is he’s so transactional that he believes that he can sort of negotiate side deals with each one of them and that that alone will sort of weave in the way of this. I don’t think he’s going to look at this in a sort of grand strategic Kissingerian way.

ISAACSON: Amid all the turmoil in the Middle East right now, what effect will Trump’s election have, especially on Israel’s war against Hezbollah, Hamas, and for that matter, against all Iranian proxies and perhaps even Iran?

SANGER: So, if you’re Netanyahu, your strategy has just paid off. Netanyahu, from early in the year, was basically waiting out the administration. He’d get these letters from Secretary of State Blinken or Secretary of Defense Austin saying there are legal restrictions on the way that you can use American provided weaponry. And if you don’t allow aid into Gaza or you’re using those weapons against civilians, there will be restrictions. And he basically tossed them aside and said, let’s wait for the election, because he knows that the Trump view — in fact, we believe President Trump said this to him in a conference to Netanyahu, in a conversation a few weeks ago, is do what you need to do. And so, the era of restrictions is going to be over. And, you know, that was the message that Harris was trying to send out in Michigan, to the Arab populace and others who were very unhappy with the way she dealt with the war against Hamas in Gaza. And her answer was, at least we’re pushing Netanyahu a bit, Trump wouldn’t push him at all.

ISAACSON: Former Defense Secretary Panetta said that Trump would give Netanyahu a blank check. Is that sort of true? And if so, what will happen?

SANGER: I think that probably is true. I don’t think you’re going to see President Trump put any restrictions. I think the place where the rubber will hit the road on this, Walter, will be on Iran itself. You’ll remember that during the first term, President Trump talked a very tough line against Iran, but he pulled back once or twice when there were opportunities to get into a deeper conflict with them. He did order the killing of General Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force, one of the most elite military commanders in Iran, but he pulled back from opening up a broader war with them. We don’t know what his view is now. But the Iranians have, of course, we believe, sent out, or at least tried to order up, hit teams against Trump when he was candidate. They’ve denounced him. Their cyber operations in the United States were anti-Trump, even while the Russians were pro-Trump. So, my guess is that Trump comes into office with a much hardened view about Iran and may well not stand in the way of Netanyahu if he decides to go after Iranian nuclear facilities, for example, and so forth. I don’t know that Netanyahu is going to do that. He’s hesitated himself a few times. But certainly, that was a big concern of the Biden administration just in the last few months.

ISAACSON: One of the successes of Trump’s first term in the Middle East was the Abraham Accords, and there has been a sense that he would like to have a growing alliance with Saudi Arabia, some of the Gulf states, Israel, all as part of an alliance against Iran. Do you think that is a strategic shift that could happen in a second Trump term?

SANGER: I do. And you know, that was a line of consistency between the Trump administration and the Biden administration. Joe Biden and his aides did not have very nice things to say about Trump foreign policy, except when it came to the Abraham Accords, where on that issue and the issue of supporting U.S. technology against China, they praised the way Trump went about it. And of course, they were trying to reconstruct the Saudi Arabia deal in the days before the October 7, 2023 attacks. They hope that might come back this year. It did not. I think it’s very possible that Trump may push in that direction. And if he did, I think that could actually change the diplomatic complexion of the Middle East.

ISAACSON: David Sanger, thank you so much for joining us.

SANGER: Great to be with you, Walter.