Illustration by ThiloRothacker

Donald Trump’s second term as president may well represent a turning point in the international role of the US. Global Insight assesses the implications.

Historians have called the post-war period the ‘American Century’. An ascendant United States took the lead in establishing multilateral governance through institutions such as the UN, NATO and the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

Donald Trump’s second term as US president may herald an end to that era. Former President Joe Biden’s purposeful renewal of American diplomacy – not always successful – may prove to have been an interregnum, a blip, an echo of a fading world power. What happens in the next four years is anyone’s guess, but at the very least Trump 2.0 is likely to be a turning point in the international role of the US.

President Trump issued 42 executive orders and policy memoranda on the first day of his presidency, including withdrawal of the US from the UN Paris Climate Agreement and from the World Health Organisation. Trump’s first orders assert an aggressive nationalism and reflect his view of the presidency as having unilateral authority to circumvent congressional mandates and constitutional norms.

Several orders sharply tighten US immigration rules, including a directive to the country’s military to develop a plan to seal America’s borders, a revocation of birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants and the escalation of enforcement actions against migrants. Trump issued a declaration of an ‘America First’ foreign policy and imposed a 90-day pause on delivery of foreign aid, pending reviews. He also ordered a series of international trade reviews targeting Canada, China and Mexico that would set the stage for the imposition of the future tariffs he has threatened. Further, he notably delayed the enforcement of a congressionally enacted ban on Chinese ownership of TikTok, the popular video sharing app.

Trump’s raft of executive orders put multiple policies of his ‘America First’ agenda into motion. Other programmes will take more time to develop and require action by Congress or US administrative agencies.

Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda, indeed the ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) movement in general, is evolving from a slogan into a political philosophy, says Ken Murphy, Immediate Past Chair of the IBA Bar Issues Commission. ‘It incorporates elements of nativism, libertarianism, isolationism and a desire for re-industrialisation among others’, he says. ‘It’s not exactly a coherent ideology. But it’s clearly a cocktail that has a powerful political appeal in America at present. It extends beyond the strong-man personality, enormous ego and ferocious willpower of Donald Trump.’

Expect to see renewed strains in relationships between the US and Canada, European allies and Mexico, accelerated great power competition with China and Russia, and awkward relations with the Global South, commentators tell Global Insight.

‘The shift to multi-polarity that we’ve been seeing over the last few years will be accelerated as the incoming Trump administration retreats from international institutions and multilateral framework’, says Federica D’Alessandra, Co-Chair of the IBA Forum for Government and Public Lawyers. The Trump administration, she adds, will probably take a selective approach to diplomacy, especially within the UN Security Council, and engage only when it suits their immediate strategic interests.

Trump is a deeply polarising political figure and a mercurial decisionmaker, which makes assessing what his second presidency means for the rest of the world difficult. Astute Trump watchers advise tracking what his administration actually does more closely than the provocative things he says. Sober assessment requires setting aside biases and preconceptions, says Steven Richman, Chair of the IBA Bar Issues Commission. ‘With the return of Trump to the White House, there are going to be some decisions that a lot of people are not going to like. Just as there were decisions by President Biden that half the country did not like.’

‘Lawyers need to take caution not to feed political narratives around the new Trump administration and avoid falling into the so-called “Trump derangement syndrome” by not exaggerating risks and fears about what Trump will do as president’, says Richman. He cautions against the politicisation of ‘rule of law’ arguments about Trump that can have negative implications for legal institutions, public trust and governance. Lawyers, as professional leaders, should resist partisan influences in exercising their role as guardians of the rule of law, says Richman.

Trump’s take on Europe

Many observers anticipate renewed strains in the relationship between the US and European allies, particularly as Trump seeks to make good on his campaign promises to quickly end the war in Ukraine. He now faces a difficult deal-making scenario that could well define his presidency’s foreign policy.

Retired Lt General Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, has said a ceasefire could be achieved within the first 100 days of Trump’s term. Meanwhile, the President said at his Mar-a-Lago press conference in early January that he wants the fighting to end within six months. Trump is already pressuring European nations to take more responsibility for their own defence.

‘There’s probably going to be a lot of pressure on Zelensky to resolve the war in Ukraine in a way that Russia gets some of the territory it’s captured and the war ends’, says Matt Kaiser, Co-Chair of the IBA Criminal Law Committee. ‘It depends on how much Europe is willing to pick up America’s slack, and how much they can do.’

While there’s clearly a will to negotiate, at least in Ukraine, finding an acceptable framework of security guarantees and borders in the face of maximalist Russian demands will be difficult. Russian President Vladimir Putin rejected early proposals floated by Trump’s team to freeze battle lines and put off Ukraine becoming a member of NATO for ten years.

‘I expect a settlement to this war within the first two years of Trump’s second term, but it will be on terms that aren’t particularly good for Ukraine’, says D’Alessandra, who’s also a fellow with the Global Order and Institutions Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC. ‘Trump will have a fraught relationship with NATO member states and allies. But as a whole, the alliance will be forced to meet his demands, particularly when it comes to increased defence spending and playing a bigger role in European regional security. That’s going to be a problem’, she says.

One curious aspect of a strained US-European relationship could be an acceleration of the ‘Brussels effect’ in which European law and regulation carries more global weight than its US counterpart. ‘If Trump succeeds in having the Department of Justice pull out of its international work, and pull out of doing global enforcement, that could meaningfully change the nature of transnational white-collar practice’, says Kaiser, who’s a partner at Kaiser Law in Washington, DC.

‘It means there’s just going to be a lot more focus on EU compliance, UK compliance. A lot of that enforcement will shift to the EU, and the US legal market will then come to be less relevant’, says Kaiser. He adds that the importance of the US as a legal market will probably be diminished as the country’s role as a regulator on the global stage is reduced.

Trade wars amplified

During his first term in office, Trump used tariffs, or the threat of them, as a negotiating tool with longstanding allies – Canada, EU Member States, Japan and Mexico. He began a trade war with China, unilaterally imposing tariffs of up to 25 per cent on $350bn in Chinese imports to the US. Most of those tariffs remained in place under the Biden administration.

Biden expanded new restrictions on US exports to China of advanced semiconductors and artificial intelligence technologies. His administration also imposed 100 per cent tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) to protect US automakers that have lagged behind in EV development.

Raj Bhala, Special Projects Officer on the IBA International Trade and Customs Law Committee, identifies three themes in what he terms the ‘dizzying array of developments’ that we’re witnessing currently and will continue to see. ‘The first theme is disruption. We’re going to see disruption in the world trading system, both in terms of the theory of free trade and in terms of practice, trade links, trade connections among nations’, says Bhala, Professor of International Trade Law at the University of Kansas School of Law and author of 2024’s Trade War: Causes, Conduct, and Consequences of Sino-American Confrontation.

‘The second theme we’re going to see is disregard. That is, again, both in theory and practice, a disregard for international trade rules at the multilateral level, the WTO level’, Bhala says. ‘The third theme is decoupling, an increased separation between the US and China. There’s going to be increased delinking, more than de-risking – as the EU is sometimes fond of saying – but an outright decoupling’, he explains, referring to the concept of a complete separation of ties between two or more economies.

Trump has threatened to impose 25 per cent tariffs on Mexico and Canada – the largest trading partners of the US – and tariffs of 60 per cent or more on Chinese goods. Jamieson Greer, Trump’s nominee to be the US Trade Representative, has proposed that Congress revoke China’s permanent normal trade status, impose government controls on outbound US investments into the country and enhance trade remedies and sanctions laws aimed at China.

These may be tempered by the influence of some of Trump’s allies, such as Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, whose company makes EVs in China. David Perdue, Trump’s nominee to be US Ambassador to China, served as Secretary of Agriculture in Trump’s first term and has experience as a business executive offshoring US manufacturing to China. Meanwhile, US allies Canada, the EU and Mexico are certain to impose retaliatory tariffs. These may be negotiated down in various rounds of deal-making, as happened in Trump’s first term.

US-China relations will be more difficult to manage. China is increasingly seen by US policymakers as a strategic threat and unfair economic player. ‘Trump has matured, and I’m sure learned from his first presidency. But also, China is a more confident country in its outlook and more savvy in anticipating and engaging with what may or may not happen’, says Asif H Qureshi, a professor of law at the Peking University School of Transnational Law in Beijing. ‘Both parties now are fairly pragmatic in their outlook in economic relations, and both are, in modus operandi, focused on reciprocal arrangements. There is that commonality, and therefore it doesn’t have to be a disastrous situation.’

Trade law practitioners are already obliged to master both US trade laws and the intricacies of multilateral trade rules under the WTO. With the US effectively applying a ‘superpower’ veto in the WTO and retrenching economically, competing trading systems will probably evolve in a newly multipolar world, Qureshi argues. ‘If there is this level of blatant disregard for WTO commitments, it is effectively the United States saying, “You know, we’re out of this system, out of this club.” But that club will remain and will continue with the remaining number of countries’, says Qureshi.

With or without the Trump team’s engagement, the multilateral trading system faces thorny questions. Can the WTO’s dispute settlement mechanism be reformed to prevent paralysis? Is there a path to creating international standards that ensure accountability for powerful states such as the US? What happens to global development goals in a world divided between trading blocs?

Trump’s new expansionism

After winning the presidential election, Trump established a new theme of US expansionism by talking about retaking the Panama Canal, absorbing Canada as the 51st US state and buying Greenland from Denmark. Foreign affairs analysts quickly labelled it a revival of Cold War-era doctrine, in which Washington viewed the Arctic, Canada and Latin America as a sphere of strategic influence.

‘Trump’s remarks suggest that unchallenged hemispheric dominance will be at the core of his “America First” approach’, according to Stewart Patrick, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He likened it to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which set out the US approach to Central and South America and sought to curb European ambitions in Western Hemisphere territories.

It’s hard to take Trump’s comments about Canada as anything other than an attempt to upset or irritate embattled Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. It was not without effect. Trudeau’s meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago after the latter threatened tariffs sparked an internal rift in his government that led to the Canadian premier announcing that he would resign later this year, once his party had chosen a new leader. In any case, there’s zero prospect that Canada would become a US state.

But Trump’s comments on the Panama Canal and Greenland have raised real fears. Speaking at a rally in Arizona in December, Trump told the crowd that the US was being ‘ripped off’ at the Panama Canal and complained it had been ‘foolishly’ given away. At a press conference in early January, Trump was asked if he’d rule out the use of US military force to reclaim Panama or seize Greenland. He refused to do so and said that the Panama Canal is ‘vital’ to the US and that Greenland is needed for ‘national security purposes’.

The US built the Panama Canal, which conveys ocean-going vessels from the Atlantic to the Pacific, in the early 1900s. The late US President Jimmy Carter returned it to Panama in 1977 under guarantees that it would be operated neutrally. Trump has complained about China’s influence, with the country having invested in maritime ports in Panama.

‘It’s not great diplomacy to threaten to go to war, or to say we’re not taking off the table going to war with Panama over the canal or Denmark over Greenland’, says Kaiser. ‘It destabilises all of those international relationships and just makes the US a less reliable partner, which compromises our ability to be a leader in the world.’

Indeed, Trump’s comments sowed concern in Latin American capitals. Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino responded on social media to state that every square metre of the Panama Canal and the surrounding area belongs to Panama and will continue to do so. Leaders from Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela, as well as the Organization of American States, rallied to support Panama.

Greenland, meanwhile, is a sparsely populated autonomous territory of Denmark, a NATO ally and EU Member State. ‘Greenland is an incredible place, and the people will benefit tremendously if, and when, it becomes part of our Nation’, Trump posted on social media the same day his son Don Jr arrived there for a visit. Trump threatened ‘very high tariffs’ on Danish products if Copenhagen doesn’t ‘give [Greenland] up’.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenland’s Prime Minister Múte Egede met in Copenhagen on 10 January to discuss Trump’s public gambit. Afterwards Egede vowed that ‘Greenland is for the Greenlandic people’. Behind the scenes Danish officials reached out to Trump’s transition team to address US security concerns, according to reports. The US already has a military base on the island.

Outgoing US Senator Ben Cardin from Maryland noted that Trump’s expansionist comments were reminiscent of statements he has made previously about pulling out of NATO. ‘These are treaty obligations which our allies rely upon, and it raises serious concerns about whether America will be there for them’, Cardin said.

Other observers worry that Trump’s expansionism would inadvertently encourage Russia’s assertion of regional dominance in Eastern Europe and China’s ambitions in the Asia-Pacific. ‘If the US entrenches itself in regional dominance, it gives other great powers licence to assert their own spheres of influence’, says D’Alessandra.

Retreating from human rights

One consequence of a US withdrawal from global cooperation and diminished alliances will probably be a broad decline in the protection of human rights, advocates say. ‘Since Trump has made it very clear that he does not respect the rule of law, human rights will face a decline in protection’, says Anne Ramberg, Immediate Past Co-Chair of the IBA’s Human Rights Institute. ‘We have to remember that the main task for the rule of law is to protect human rights.’

Ramberg, who’s also a former Secretary General of the Swedish Bar Association, believes the US will lose its role as a democratic leader and champion of human rights. ‘That will have a negative effect on US capacity to influence democracies in decline’, she says. ‘The US has unfortunately already lost much of its authority and credibility.’

Trump’s nominee to be the US Ambassador to the UN is Elise Stefanik, a member of the US House of Representatives from New York. She will be a combative advocate for long-standing criticisms of the UN made in some quarters, amid threats by Trump to cut back on critical US funding for the organisation. ‘America continues to be the beacon of the world, but we expect and must demand that our friends and allies be strong partners in the peace we seek’, Stefanik said when accepting the nomination.

The Trump administration is expected to further retreat from human rights institutions such as the International Criminal Court (ICC) and UN bodies. ‘I entirely expect the Trump administration to withdraw from Geneva-based human rights structures and disengage from promoting civilian protection through the UN’, D’Alessandra says.

Already, the new US Congress is advancing legislation to impose sanctions on the ICC to punish it for issuing an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which the Court issued alongside those for former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant and a Hamas commander, Diab Ibrahim al-Masri. A bill passed through the House in early January with bipartisan support, aiming to impose economic and travel sanctions on ICC officials and persons who assist the Court. Brian Mast, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the law was being passed because ‘a kangaroo court is seeking to arrest the prime minister of our great ally, Israel’. The ICC has condemned the bill, and Democrats in the Senate

The bottom line may be that Trump’s foreign affairs leadership style is transactional – he asks what’s in it for him and questions what’s in it for the US. After Trump won the election in November dozens of foreign leaders sought meetings or phone calls to curry favour with the unpredictable new US president.

‘President Donald Trump is nothing if not a disruptor. He rejoices in being a disruptor and therefore we should anticipate disruption’, says Murphy, who’s a former Director General of the Law Society of Ireland. ‘The inclination would be to believe that he would at least begin to do many of the things he said he would do. How far he will push them is the really interesting question.’

What will probably emerge is a new set of norms and practices in the international arena as other nations race to fill the gaps left by American withdrawal.

William Roberts is a US-based freelance journalist and can be contacted at wroberts3@me.com