The American elections have left us all with two obvious questions. The first is: What do the elections mean for American foreign policy? The second: What do the elections tell us about America today?
Despite wild speculation by pundits, often enunciated with equally wild confidence, the first question is remarkably difficult, for a number of reasons. Most obviously, President-elect Trump did not campaign on and does not seem to possess any clear, coherent, conceptual vision of the international system or of America’s role in the world. In his past policies and more recent policy pronouncements, it is hard to perceive any larger vision of the goals he seeks to accomplish – any broad, intellectually coherent account of what “winning” would mean for America or the world – apart from the amorphous notion of “making America great again.” Even retrospectively it is difficult to discern any consistent overarching strategy into which his tactical engagements with foreign policy fit.
We do know that he views the world outside America’s borders as a dangerous terra incognita and that he is intensely suspicious of anyone who gives the impression of taking seriously the idea of an international “community” -- and that he seems to prefer to interact with leaders whom he perceives as hard-nosed and hard-headed businessmen. Arguments that shared values or long-term interests might outweigh zero-sum calculations of immediate costs and benefits do not generally seem to resonate with him. His focus tends to be both overwhelmingly on the short term and on the purely transactional nature of the immediate issue.
We also know that Mr. Trump is deeply suspicious of America’s own foreign policy institutions and even of his own advisors. All evidence suggests that he prefers to trust his own somewhat mercurial instincts, to prefer his own flexible interpretation of “facts” over those which might cast him or his actions in a poorer light, to be influenced by whomever has spoken to him most recently, and to sometimes speak or act without much reflection – as when he famously suggested drinking bleach to cure covid. His knowledge of American history (much less of world history) is, at best, limited, and his interpretation of the bits of history he does know is, most scholars would agree, somewhat idiosyncratic. He lacks the intellectual grounding – either sophisticated or intuitive – in American political theory (classical republicanism, Enlightenment liberalism, and New World views on democracy) which virtually all prior presidents have possessed: He is simultaneously both supremely self-confident and deeply insecure, aware that liberal elites at home and abroad have always regarded him as a nouveau riche buffoon.
Given all this, perhaps the only thing that can be said with certainty is that the next four years will be an eternity in either hell or purgatory for American and European diplomats. The precise character of that this hell/purgatory will take, however, is indeterminate. We will get a little better picture over the coming months when we get a better reading on the rate at which Mr. Trump’s physical and cognitive health is in fact declining, as we learn who will be on his starting team, and as we get announcements about which of his promised initiatives – inter alia, mass deportations, dramatically higher tariffs, elimination of large parts of the governmental bureaucracy, ending the war in Ukraine, and bringing peace to the Middle East – are given primacy.
Pessimists on both sides of the Atlantic are predicting the worst -- or, if not predicting the absolute worst outcomes that the human mind could imagine, nonetheless predicting things that are very, very bad indeed. The pessimists may very well be right. They usually are.
Three points are worth noting, however. The first is that we really don’t know what Mr. Trump will end up attempting to do. For trans-Atlanticists, this may not grounds for much optimism, but it is certainly grounds for being cautious in making predictions. The second is that even with a reasonably clear vote of confidence like the one Mr. Trump has received, presidents often find themselves frustrated. Only in his own imagination, and that of fevered conspiracy-theorists, does a U.S. president have unlimited power. And the third is that, while the United States may indeed be the elephant in the world’s living room, European states do possess agency of their own.
The second question – what the elections told us about America in 2024 – is far clearer. Here there is not only no need for a crystal ball, there is not even a need for prescription reading lenses. Most American elections are hard to parse or are open to multiple plausible interpretations. This one was not.
A solid majority of Americans are angry and unhappy. They are angry and unhappy about two things. First, they are unhappy about a long-term transformation of the American economy, from an industrial one to a post-industrial one, an economic transformation which does not appear to offer them the possibility of matching or improving on their parents’ standard of living. Second, they are unhappy about changes in American society which devalue the personal accomplishments or characteristics which traditionally would have yielded social standing – qualities, for example, associated with traditional notions of masculinity (or femininity) or with traditional racial or religious hierarchies.
This anger and unhappiness is directed at the government, which they see as largely or entirely responsible for driving these changes. In this understanding, the “progressive” agenda seem to leave ordinary Americans out in the cold. Adding insult to injury, from this perspective the progressive narrative seems to blame ordinary Americans -- and the values and beliefs that they grew up with and hold dear -- for all of America’s problems. Not only (in their minds, at least) has government given their jobs away, made buying a home and joining the traditional middle class an impossible dream, and left them without status or respect in the community, it is also telling them that they should be ashamed of themselves for being racists, sexists, religious bigots, abusers, repressors, and generally horrible human beings.
Although the anger and unhappiness is also felt by older folk and by women, it is felt particularly strongly by young men. The transition to a post-industrial society and the new social norms giving greater social status, power, and authority to women (and non-binary-gendered and homosexual individuals) hit young men particularly hard. Thus, in addition to the broad backlash against the progressive, post-industrial socio-economic agenda, a widening gender division in American politics is perhaps the most striking feature of the 2024 election.
Where does this leave America? Is America about to blow apart, or rip in two along its social seams? The answer would seem to be a clear “no.” There is no civil war on America’s horizon, just normal political sniping.
A close look at the election suggests that what has happened is that the progressives in America’s political elite -- most of whom are affiliated with or are supportive of the Democratic Party -- have gotten too far in front of America’s mainstream and are seen as too willing to use the tools of government power to try to transform American society. It would be utterly misleading to describe Kamala Harris’s agenda as “revolutionary” (though some right-of-center politicians and commentators have in fact made this claim). But a majority of Americans do see the progressive agenda that she appeared to embody as pushing the evolution of American society too far, or at least too fast. More significantly, progressivism of this sort is seen by many, perhaps even most, Americans as using state power and government diktat to achieve changes that should occur only through organic social evolution.
Perhaps the final point worth noting is that there is no clear or necessary logical connection between this answer to our second question – that the election reveals that a clear majority of Americans want to put the brakes on government-led domestic social transformation – and what America’s foreign policy will be, except insofar as a consequence of their reaction against progressivism the American people have elected the highly idiosyncratic Mr. Trump. The 2024 election was not a referendum on foreign policy. That it may indeed have consequences for American foreign policy and for trans-Atlantic relations is just one of those oddities of fate that we are sometimes called upon to deal with.
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Edward Rhodes is a professor of Government and International Affairs at George Mason University. Rhodes is best known for his research into the philosophical and cultural roots of American foreign and national security policy. Rhodes served for six years on the U.S. State Department’s Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation, the Congressionally mandated, nonpartisan body that reviews and certifies the official, published account of American foreign policy for completeness and accuracy.
