Donald Trump’s rapid fire of appointments to key posts in his new cabinet over the last few days suggest he is an old man in a hurry.
While he wants to shake things up at home, it is his foreign policy promises – or threats – of forcing a quick end to conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East that not only raise hopes but also fears, not least among America’s allies.
Everyone remembers pictures of Trump pushing aside other leaders at his first Nato conference in 2017 so he could get into the centre of the picture.
Then, allies feared that Trump was in awe of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.
While the Kremlin seems sceptical about how easy it will be for Putin to gull Trump or accept his peace plan (whatever it may be), Washington’s European partners are visibly alarmed by the US election result, and scrambling to fix their future relations with Russia before the president-elect does a deal over their heads once he’s back in the White House.
German chancellor Olaf Scholz telephoned Putin on Friday. Ukraine’s president spoke scornfully about Berlin’s outreach to the Kremlin – but he was appreciative of Trump’s promise to stop the war soon and implicitly dismissive of Joe Biden’s strategy.
Forty-five years ago, Jimmy Carter, shepherded a peace deal between old enemies Egypt and Israel. Will Trump be able to bring Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky to Camp David to sign a similar unlikely peace? Russia’s military pressure and waning Western backing puts acute pressure on Ukraine to accept the least bad deal Trump can cobble together.
But don’t expect Putin to go as a supplicant to Washington. Leaving aside the war crimes charges at the Hague tribunal which would put the Russian president in jeopardy of arrest, the Russian leader will want to see Trump come to the Kremlin as a sign of victory – and to drag Zelensky there too, in humiliation.
The theatrics of summit diplomacy appeal to Trump. Remember his dramatic walk alone across the Demilitarized Zone to shake hands with North Korea’s “rocket man”, Kim Jong Un, in 2019. Getting a deal which both Putin and Zelensky can accept is one thing, but choreographing the signing ceremony could well be the stumbling block.
In the Middle East, Trump’s election has seen a sudden and strange silence from Iran about its threatened retaliation against Israel for the recent attack. Even my imagination cannot stage a Trump-Ayatollah Ali Khamenei summit. But secret negotiations, in which Iran dropped its support for Shiite anti-Israeli groups like Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthis, and agreed to a nuclear deal in return for sanctions relief, are not as unlikely as the war of words suggests.
A compromise like that might actually weaken the ayatollah’s regime more than international pressure. But would Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel find it unsettling? Other American allies, too, could be discomforted by Trump’s America First agenda, even more than some foes.
Those two conflicts make it easy to overlook that Trump’s new administration also faces the growing challenge of America’s declining influence in the global South.
Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has a particular interest in Africa as the arena of rising Chinese economic and strategic interest, along with the insertion of Russian forces – ex-Wagner mercenaries – into the sub-Saharan region.
The USA’s Latin American backyard is also likely to see a reversal of the “benign” neglect for the last four years.
Last week’s Apec summit in Peru marked Joe Biden’s first visit to South America as US president. But the key development for South America was Xi Jinping’s visit to Peru to inaugurate a huge new port complex that would link China’s global Belt and Road Initiative with regional networks.
Every country from Panama southwards does more trade with China than the USA – an economic revolution in the last generation. Trump’s promise to hike tariffs will hit every Latin American country apart from Mexico and Chile, which have US free-trade agreements. Those two already relabel Chinese imports as their own exports to the USA. Stopping that would mean ripping up those agreements.
While European allies’ attention is monopolised by the crisis zone stretching in an arc from Russia to Libya and the Sahel countries in northern Africa, Donald Trump’s attention could be grabbed by the southern hemisphere whether he likes it or not.
