Everyone is talking about unity, as tradition demands after a bitter election, but Wednesday’s rhetorical flourishes are more improbable than usual. In his victory speech early Wednesday morning, Donald Trump called on his fellow citizens to “bind the wounds of division,” pledged to be “president for all Americans” (adding, “This is so important to me”), and said of Hillary Clinton, “We owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country.”
To buy any of this—after his repeated jabs at “Crooked Hillary,” Mexican rapists, and various screeds against women, Muslims, black people, and anyone who dares criticize him, including leaders of his own party—is to believe either that sudden ascension to high ennobles a flawed mortal or that his whole campaign has been nothing but theater. Neither theory is plausible.
In the realm of foreign and military policy, his election has hurled U.S. officers and allied leaders into shock, and with reason. He has, over the past year, dismissed NATO as an obsolete entity and said America shouldn’t defend its member-nations from attacks if they hadn’t paid their proper dues. He has advocated withdrawing troops from Asia and shrugged at the possibility that Japan and South Korea might react to the abandonment by going nuclear. He’s talked about nuclear weapons with alarming nonchalance. He’s spoken of banning Muslims from American borders, unaware of the propaganda victory such a move would hand jihadis everywhere. He says he’d “bomb the shit out of” ISIS, clearly unaware what this would mean on an urban battlefield. By his own admission, he has read no history and, partly as a result, has no understanding of international politics, war, or diplomacy.
This wouldn’t necessarily be disastrous if Trump were aware of his limitations and turned for advice to those versed in the subjects. But he has said that national security is one of his strengths, that he knows more about negotiating than the diplomats and more about ISIS than the generals. He is that most dangerous individual who aspires to power: a man who doesn’t know how much he doesn’t know. And now he’s heading to the White House as the leader of a party that controls both chambers of Congress and, very soon, a majority of the Supreme Court.
As the election returns spilled his way in the wee hours Wednesday morning, some commentators assured their anxious colleagues that the Republican establishment would rein in Trump’s baser impulses. But few of these Republicans stood up to him during the campaign; many who spoke out against him, like House Speaker Paul Ryan, still endorsed him, and now, in the wake of his victory, they’re praising him as a party savior, perhaps out of fear that Trump will either sic them with a challenger in the next primary or personally remove them from their leadership posts.
We will learn much about the direction the nation will soon take when Trump announces his Cabinet, especially his national security team. This is a man who has long valued loyalty and, when circumstances allow, has long punished betrayal. Most members of the Republican foreign-policy establishment spoke out against him long ago. Among those who have prominently stuck with him, Newt Gingrich and John Bolton have been mentioned as possible secretaries of state, retired Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn as national security adviser or director of national intelligence, and Rudy Giuliani as attorney general or secretary of homeland security. These are all nightmare specters—arrogant advocates of strong state power who brook no dissent, have never seen an arms-control treaty they support, and harbor resentments toward anyone who ever passed them over.
Michael Steele, the former head of the Republican National Committee, said on one of the cable-news shows Tuesday night that the names commonly tossed about aren’t necessarily those who will be appointed; that a transition team, staffed with professionals, has been vetting possible candidates. Maybe. But the head of this transition team is New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (who is known to crave a top job, perhaps attorney general), with heavy assistance from Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, one of the most right-wing denizens on Capitol Hill.
It’s possible that President Trump will sober up with power, sense the complexities of the problems before him, and implore a crew of stalwart establishment experts to help him steer the ship of state. Jimmy Carter did this to some degree, as did Bill Clinton. But this seems unlikely; it doesn’t fit the profile of the man we’ve seen up close in the last year—or that many in the New York business world have warily watched for the last few decades.
So what difference will any of this make? Plenty. We can expect, in the next few weeks or months, that many of the world’s leaders will try to chum up to Trump. He is the president-elect, after all; the United States, though not the superpower it once was, remains an essential power. In their psychological profiles of the new American leader, the analysts in foreign intelligence agencies have no doubt advised their bosses to treat the man with all the courtesy and respect they can muster. They’ve no doubt learned some lessons about which of Trump’s buttons to push from his mistaken belief that Vladimir Putin called him “brilliant,” when, in fact, the Kremlin leader’s description of the man—zharkii—is more accurately translated as colorful. Maybe for a while Trump will respond to their compliments in kind. (This president of Estonia, he might think, is worth defending after all.)
But it’s doubtful Trump’s deep nativism might be so easily dislodged. Again, unless he turns more establishment than anyone would now predict, here are a few things that are likely to happen in the early weeks or months of his presidency:
Allies will start looking elsewhere for protection and deals. The Baltics and Ukraine might have to scale back their Western-leaning ambitions and make an arrangement with Moscow. The other European countries are less likely to keep up sanctions against Russia, which their business leaders are already eager to drop. Asian allies may react more swiftly. Already, President Putin is planning a December trip to Japan to discuss settling territorial disputes left over from World War II. South Korea will likely turn to China for a security arrangement, especially if Seoul’s current scandal-ridden government falls. The rest of the region might follow Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte’s drift toward China, especially in the wake not only of Trump’s isolationist (or unilateralist) tendencies but also of the utter collapse of the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty—which, contrary to Trump’s rantings, would have strengthened America’s leverage in the region and reduced China’s.
Trump voters (and many other Americans) may regard all this as abstract stuff about faraway countries, but the clichés about global interdependence are true. Some trade agreements do have dislocating effects on certain sectors of the American economy, but many of them are, on balance, beneficial. Exports make up a huge share of gross domestic product; imports have a calming effect on inflation.
Hard as this may be to imagine, the Middle East is likelier to get messier still. American leadership—political, diplomatic, and military—hammered together the ramshackle coalition that’s currently pushing ISIS out of Mosul in Iraqvand Raqqa in Syria, and it will take even more persistent American leadership to maintain the peace afterward. Trump will not be eager, or remotely able, to make the effort.
As for the Iran nuclear deal, one of President Obama’s shining achievements, it’s unclear what Trump means when he says—and he’s said this over and over—that he’ll tear it up on Day 1. First, it’s a multinational accord, signed not just by the United States and Iran but also by the European Union nations, Russia, and China. If Trump pulls out, that doesn’t mean the deal is off. He might re-impose sanctions against Iran, but the other signatories are already doing business there and aren’t likely to go along. If U.S. banking sanctions require that they go along, then Iran may well respond by restarting its nuclear program. Either way, the hard-liners will be strengthened and the Western-leaning modernizers will be forced out. (For those who doubt that Iranian politics is beset with factions, please read Laura Secor’s Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran.) If that happens, will Trump bomb Iran—as some of his advisers (and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who wants to meet with the president-elect ASAP) have long wanted to do? If that happens, we are seriously screwed. When Robert Gates first became George W. Bush’s secretary of defense, he told some Israeli officers that they might do well the first few days after such an attack—but then the terrorists would launch strikes, the Straits of Hormuz would be cut off, every Muslim nation that had been warming up to Israel would have to back off, and then, a few years later, Iran would resume its nuclear program, this time with little foreign opposition.
Starting today, President-elect Donald Trump begins receiving the same highly classified daily intelligence briefing that President Obama receives. We can all hope (and I join in this hope) that he pays close attention to these sessions and to the many other briefings offered by Obama and his security team. We can hope that he’s sobered by their insights and realizes that we face problems not because “we’re led by stupid people” (as he’s said in campaign rallies) but because the world is a complicated place. We can hope that he then appoints, as Cabinet secretaries and advisers, people of quality who can help him deal with these complexities.
But everything we’ve learned about Donald Trump splashes not just buckets but tidal waves of doubt on this transformation having the slightest chance of happening.
