What Will the Trump Revolution Mean for the World?

Lindsay: Hi, I’m Lindsay Shingler, Talking Policy’s host and the Associate Director of IGCC. Happy New Year. I hope your 2025 is going well so far. It’s become a tradition at IGCC to start the year by gathering the voices of our experts, to look back at the year just passed, and to look at the coming year.

Today is the day that Donald Trump assumes the presidency in the United States for the second time in a major political shift that will have implications around the globe. To get a sense of what the impact might be, I sat down with five of our experts to ask for their informed predictions of what we might see over the next few months and years. We recorded these interviews over the course of January 7th to January 17th. The views expressed are those of the individuals and don’t necessarily represent the views of their institutions or funders.

We wanted to think about the biggest global issues that are uncertain and shifting, where the stakes are high. So naturally, we started with China.

Tai Ming Cheung: “The issue is that Donald Trump doesn’t have a very clear vision for China… There is a sense that it’s gonna be a hard line on China, but I don’t see a clear strategy towards China. A lot of it is gonna be opportunistic, and a lot of it is gonna be transactional.”

Lindsay: Tai Ming Cheung is the director of the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, and a professor at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy. He is a long-time China expert. In our discussion, I asked him about Trump’s political appointments and what they suggest about how his China policy might be different this time around. 

Tai Ming Cheung: When you look at the different types of people that may have a say in China policy in the incoming Trump administration, there’s no clear model. There’s going to be sort of competing factions. The emphasis is that the ones on the national security side are hawks, who have taken a very, very strong approach against China, whether it’s to do with technology, to do with human rights, to do with Taiwan. But there’s also those on the economic side that are much more in terms of engagement. I mean, Elon Musk has major interests on China.

The issue for the Trump administration is the volatility in U.S.-China relations, and in terms of China and its role in the region and the globe, it’s gonna be even more volatile these next five years. We want to see a coherent team, but I don’t think it’s there yet. And until we have clearer identification who’s gonna be the defense secretary, and sort of other key figures, I think we’re still probably a couple of steps away before we can even begin to work out what the China approach will be for the Trump administration.

Lindsay: During his first post-election press conference, Trump said that the U.S. and China can solve anything together. Are we seeing the re-emergence of this G2 idea, which is a hypothetical informal grouping of China and the U.S.? Is this feasible or is this just talk?

Tai Ming Cheung: This is talk. China and the U.S., both sides, would be interested in a major way through, but domestically it’s very, very difficult. If any deals were to be made on the U.S. side, the deep distrust, the deep skepticism, the deep anti-China feelings and rhetoric that you get in Congress would make any ratification of any treaty or any deals would be very, very difficult. There is such a deep gulf between these two countries.

The key issue for the U.S. in dealing with China is less dealing with China, and it’s about how its allies and partners deal with China. There is a lot of concern that if the U.S. makes a deal with China, it would be a zero-sum game, where then the losers are the allies and partners that the U.S. has cultivated to come in dealing with China itself. And so there would be a lot of distrust, with the likes of the Europeans or the Japanese, who have come along and been sort of pushed by the U.S. to be even tougher. So if the U.S. takes a softer approach, then this leaves this international alliance that the U.S. has really built up in real difficulty. That’s one of the major issues with the Trump administration from a global context: when you deal with China, it’s not just about the U.S., but it’s a global constellation of interests that you have to deal with.

Lindsay: As a long-time analyst of China and U.S. relations, given the number of unknowns—as you said, we don’t know for sure what the Trump administration will do and Trump loves unpredictability and kind of relishes that—what in the first quarter of the new Trump administration will you be watching as potential clues to how things will take shape in the coming year?

Tai Ming Cheung: There’s a whole series of issues that a new administration has to [address] when they come into power. As we’ve pointed out already, who are the personalities who they will appoint at the very top levels? He’s nominated people, sort of, for the Secretary of Defense. We still don’t know whether they get past congressional scrutiny. That’s one issue. Who are the people in the next steps below who will be dealing with that? That’s important. 

Then, of course, there’s the issues about what the strategies are—what kinds of new defense strategies and new national security strategies [will be implemented]? So those are the things that we’ll watch for. How much of this will be continuity and how much of it will be a sharp turn?

The other sort of big question mark is in terms of tariffs. How much is this going to be driven by the economic statecraft side, and how much of it will be on these other issues of national security? What we would think most likely is that, given the Biden administration’s pretty tough approach toward China that dovetailed with Trump’s first administration, that there will be more of a continuity than a discontinuity. But a lot of it will come down to who these new personalities [are] that will be part of both the national security and the economic team under the second Trump administration, and how extensively tariffs will impact upon all these other parts of economic and security policies.

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Lindsay: As Tai suggested, much of the strategic competition between the U.S. and China is unfolding in the economic domain. Trump has taken a confrontational approach to global trade. To understand how the rhetoric will translate into action, I spoke with Caroline Freund, an expert in international trade and economic development, and dean of the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego.

Caroline Freund: Trump has proposed tariffs on all trading partners of 10 to 20 percent, on China up to 60 percent, on Mexico and Canada of 25 percent and then he’s also proposed reciprocal tariffs, so matching country tariffs. I think what people are most concerned about is that if you put tariffs on, the prices of the goods imported will go up. So in the short run, that’ll feed into inflation, but it’s a one-time price hit. 

I’m actually more concerned about the cost of production in the U.S. Some of the goods coming in feed into production here, so it makes us less competitive in the rest of the world. If you bring in a part, you pay 25 percent on it, and then build it into something else, and in another country they don’t pay that 25 percent for the part and component, we’ve made ourselves less competitive.

I’m also worried about bureaucracy and lobbying. There are always exceptions to these tariffs, and you have lots of that going on and there’s a whole process around it. So you end up with a lot of government activity around this kind of bureaucracy and lobbying. 

And then finally, perhaps the biggest concern would be, especially with something like universal tariffs on all our partners, is retaliation. Then, it hits our own producers, our own super strong companies who are exporting to the rest of the world.

Lindsay: With the Trump tariffs—if they are enacted, for example, with Canada and Mexico—how might that undermine efforts to nearshore? And with U.S. allies and partners, how might tariffs against their imports impact our efforts to, for example, build a coalition to compete with China? How do these things impact our broader kind of geopolitics? 

Caroline Freund: So in part, Trump is using tariffs as a threat and a negotiating tactic. So with respect to Canada and Mexico, threatening those tariffs is a way of getting them to cooperate on areas that are important to us, such as migration, fentanyl, and Mexico’s imports from China that the administration doesn’t want to be funneled through to the U.S. through NAFTA. So by threatening tariffs, the hope is Mexico cooperates more. 

The danger is if you actually enact those tariffs, you don’t get what you want, which is near-shoring and supply chains in North America, and you encourage Mexico to cooperate more with China if the negotiation breaks down. So it’s a dangerous strategy. It could help if it does bring Mexico to cooperate more. It could hurt if it pushes Mexico into Chinese arms. 

Lindsay: During his first term, Trump raised tariffs on a large share of imports from China, and you mentioned that on the campaign trail he has promised at least 60 percent tariffs on all imports from China. What are you most concerned about, broadly speaking, in our economic competition with China?

Caroline Freund: I’m actually most concerned about an ‘own goal’ with respect to our competition with China. So, what does that mean? That means we’re so enamored with China’s industrial policy and China’s protectionism and China’s lack of immigration, we think that’s the way to succeed. The way to succeed in the U.S. has always been free markets, letting the most productive companies grow and export, and not trying to steer government resources through industrial policy to specific sectors. That can work really well when you’re inside the frontier of technology. It works a lot less well when you’re at the frontier because you don’t know which technologies will be successful. I’d much rather have businesses, academics focus on technologies and expansion than have the government steering it. So, I’m actually most worried about us going protectionist and that not helping.

A perfect example is immigration where that has been a superpower of the U.S. We can source talent from 8 billion people, because we’re open, rather than the 300 plus million in the U.S. That’s huge, being able to bring in talent. China doesn’t have that. So, really, I’m most concerned about our own policies ultimately hurting us with respect to our competition with China. 

Lindsay: At the start of Trump’s first administration in 2017, you wrote that Trump was bringing a highly confrontational approach to trade policy and that the biggest danger was that that would unravel global cooperation, which we need so desperately in so many areas.

Trump’s approach remains highly confrontational and transactional. Who will this approach help and who will it hurt? 

Caroline Freund: Yeah, so Trump has a very confrontational approach to trade policy, and not everyone is hurt by it. So if we look at the tariffs on China, it has been a boon for countries like Vietnam, Mexico, Thailand, India, Korea, and others who now can displace China in the U.S. market. There was already a bit of a shift of manufacturing out of China because wages were rising, and it’s really accelerated that shift. So it has been good for some.

It’s obviously bad for the target of the policy. The bigger danger, and the tariffs I guess I would be most afraid of, are broad-based, because those are most likely to, I think, set off a more global trade war, where then everybody starts raising tariffs and you end up in a worse place for global growth and global allocation of resources and production.

The thing about trade that I think people don’t realize is that it makes us as a world use our resources more efficiently. The U.S. is really good at high tech production, and other countries may be really good at manufacturing. When I was in graduate school, we talked about trading computer chips for potato chips. However you want to think about it, but if you can specialize and produce what you’re most efficient at producing relative to the rest of the world, then you can produce more of everything using fewer resources, and it’s better for the world. 

There are a lot of global challenges we face right now, and these are things that are best solved together. Climate change is always the perfect example of an area where countries need to work together, because even if one country shifts completely to renewables, it actually reduces the price of oil for the rest of the world l, which continues to mean that fossil fuels are going to be used and carbon emissions are going to increase. So we need to work together in order to change the trajectory. And trade, historically, has been a great way to lock in countries; You can give trade deals—And in exchange, you cooperate with the U.S. on other issues. And clearly, those levers are being tried now with the threat of tariffs, rather than the promise of competition. But again, it’s a dangerous strategy because it can unravel all the progress we’ve seen so far. 

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Lindsay: A key area in the global economic and technological competition between great powers is in the domain of energy policy. I spoke with Nic Wittstock, a postdoc fellow at IGCC who studies the politics of technological change, especially as they relate to renewable energy, to understand what the Republican sweep of the White House and Congress might mean for clean energy, and for the broader goal of addressing climate change. I started by asking him what Trump’s political appointments so far suggest about the trajectory of his policy in this area. 

Nicolas Wittstock: The first person that comes to mind is the nomination of Chris Wright for the Department of Energy Secretary. Chris Wright is the CEO of a shale gas company—that suggests that oil and gas is going to remain an important part of the GOP constituency, and that they’re going to have an important voice in this administration. The other person that comes to mind is former House Representative Lee Zeldin, who is at least announced to be heading the Environmental Protection Agency and who has articulated that he is going to be rolling back regulations, especially those relating to electric vehicles, fuel-efficient hybrid vehicles, and stuff like that.

In conjunction with the EPA appointment, there’s North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, who is going to be an energy czar. It’s unclear what that’s going to mean, but he’s also going to be, or is apparently, the pick for the Department of the Interior. North Dakota is a very big fossil fuel state, and he has articulated also that he’s going to restart federal permits for LNG export terminals, which suggests there will be more production there as well. So I think if you take these personnel choices together, it does appear that the incoming administration is going to change climate and energy policy quite significantly more toward fossil fuels.

I think there’s a lot of people that are panicking right now, and there might be good reason for that, when you come at this from a renewable energy or clean energy transition perspective. It’s reasonable to assume this next administration is going to be far less hospitable to that, or at the very least it’s going to be more pro-fossil fuels. But if you compare to the first Trump administration, you also have to realize that Trump was very, very strong in favor of coal on the campaign trail, super critical of renewables, and ultimately did drop out of the Paris Climate Agreement. But at the same time, by the end of his administration, coal was really not directly  competitive with solar. Solar energy project costs had diminished so much that solar became cost-competitive with coal. The solar industry even made significant inroads during his presidency. So, it’s not necessarily said that this is going to be a massive disaster for the renewable energy industry.

Chris Wright is also an investor in geothermal drilling startups, geothermal being a low-carbon energy source. Lee Zeldin was also a member of the Conservative Climate Caucus as well as the Bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, both of which are expressly very supportive of innovation in alternative energy technology. Doug Burgum recently announced a voluntary net-zero pledge for North Dakota and he’s a very outspoken supporter of carbon capture technology. So I think it’s not outside the realm of possibility that this administration is going to be both pro-fossil fuels and pro-renewables in some way. So I think the way that people have been thinking about this is that Republicans are generally pro-fossil fuels and anti-renewables. But I think with this administration, it’s not said that pro-fossil fuels means anti-renewables necessarily. I think it’s no longer that black and white. 

Lindsay: What progress was made during the Biden administration in terms of addressing climate change/clean energy transition, and how easy or hard will this be to reverse? 

Nicolas Wittstock: To start, maybe, what has been the progress under the Biden administration? I think it’s very clearly the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), but also the Bipartisan Infrastructure and Investment Law, and the CHIPS and Science Act to a certain extent. But I think the IRA really has been important in focusing very strongly on massive public investments in clean energy technology in general, manufacturing capacity in that space, but also actual deployment of clean energy systems.

So the important thing here, when you ask how easy is it going to be to undo this or to reverse course here… so this has passed without Republican support. Trump has specifically criticized the IRA. And part of the way in which this was funded was through loans and grants—a lot of those have been spent—but the other, big policy instrument of the IRA have been tax credits. They could be under threat because they represent an ongoing cost, and it’s possible to block through executive action. Now you could also legislatively repeal the entire or parts of the IRA . Because they were passed through a funding bill, they can be reversed or repealed through a simple majority in the House and Senate. And Republicans have that majority, so, in principle, it would be possible and, let’s say, relatively easy.

Now, how likely that is to happen is a different question. The IRA has been crafted to be politically bulletproof, if you will, by channeling a significant portion of investments into Republican districts. A lot of the states that have the fastest growing clean energy industry, in terms of jobs, are states that have Republican senators. So it’s unclear whether or not there is going to be a united front on the part of the Republican Party to oppose or repeal the IRA entirely, because this is an enormous amount of money that is being funneled into their districts. It’s more likely that there will be a targeted attack on certain provisions of the IRA. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has talked about using a “scalpel” rather than a “sledgehammer,” so I think that really goes into that direction where the idea is to take out certain provisions but not necessarily repeal the whole thing. 

What is the least likely to change is the general economic trend which has been a shift toward much more renewable energy resources, because that is, in large part, no longer driven because of governmental policy. The market generally favors renewable energy sources because they’re cheaper at this point. They’re not perfect, and we’re not somehow now in a place where there’s no reason to worry about anything anymore, but there has been an enormous amount of technological progress and economic progress, so the investment patterns are very positive for renewable energy.

Lindsay: What will you be watching over the next couple of months that will provide some clues about where things are headed in the U.S. in terms of climate and energy policy?

Nicolas Wittstock: I suppose it depends, a little bit on how you define climate policy—is it anti-fossil fuels or is it pro-renewables, or pro-alternatives? The United States has been very pro-alternative energy technology and has been very strongly focused on technology push in that area. 

The Department of Energy has been pretty successful in generating an enormous amount of invention. But Europe was faster in implementing incentives to deploy clean energy across the economy, and China has ultimately been much more aggressive and successful in deployment and scaling of a domestic manufacturing base around a specific set of technologies in the clean technology space.

Looking forward, I think the big question really is what is going to happen to the Department of Energy budget? What is going to happen to some of these different technology initiatives? How much disruption is there really going to be because of this ‘governmental efficiency’ drive? What are going to be the technology priorities of the Department of Defense? How far is this administration really going to move towards fossil fuels? And how much of a plank in the industrial policy strategy of the Trump administration is really going to be focused on innovation specifically, on plugging holes in the domestic innovation ecosystem? How much is that really going to be a clear-eyed and constructive productive focus?

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Lindsay: In a totally different technology area, as president, Trump will have sole authority over use of nuclear weapons and will shape U.S. arms control and deterrence policy. I asked Rupal Mehta, a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, about what a second Trump administration might mean for the future of arms control.

Rupal Mehta: I believe that the prospects for arms control under a second Trump administration are not great. I think that comes from a variety of factors, including President Trump and his administration’s sort of reticence about arms control, as well as from the weakening architecture of arms control in the international system, which comes from a variety of countries, but especially Russia and China.

This is a broader systemic problem, and I think a lot of it also comes from the changing dynamics among the major world powers about what their vision for the international system could be. I think there’s been a lot of dissatisfaction with the sort of U.S.-led world order, as Russia and China view it. International treaties, like the INF treaty, New START, like the Iran nuclear deal, in their estimation, resemble the continuation of the U.S.-led world order, and they’re not really happy with that. So I think there’s going to be a fair bit of concern from the broader arms control and security communities about the prospects for arms control in the future, not just from our corner of the world, but also from some of these other areas.

Lindsay: You mentioned the U.S.-led global order and how that might be changing. In that vein, there seems to be renewed attention among U.S. allies and partners around developing their own nuclear deterrent. This is particularly true about South Korea, but there’s also pressure in Japan, Taiwan, and even Germany to revisit this issue. What are the dangers if countries go their own way?

Rupal Mehta: Broadly speaking, one of the primary goals of an extended deterrent agreement, is if the United States or another nuclear patron extends deterrence, that ally or partner forgoes developing their own nuclear weapon. And that’s been sort of the architecture of extended nuclear deterrence since the 1950s when these agreements first came about. 

To that degree, the United States has been quite successful in encouraging our allies and partners not to develop nuclear weapons by promising them that the United States would provide that support and defense as needed if they were attacked by a foreign adversary or foreign aggressor. And that relationship has been pretty successful, I think, until the mid-2010 era, where President Trump and his first administration started to question the value of those extended deterrent relationships, and I think, in part, argued that he felt—and members of his party and administration felt—that those allies were not bringing enough value, were not compensating the United States enough for the costs associated with extended deterrence.

So, as part of the first administration, there were a lot of questions raised about: Would these alliances persist? Could we figure out a way to get allies to be more aggressive in burden sharing, so sharing the costs associated with extended deterrence? And as part of that, there were some questions raised about whether or not it made sense for some of the allies that we were extending this protection to, to maybe consider developing their own nuclear weapons. President Trump’s view, at least what he articulated during the first administration was that if the cost would be reduced for the United States, if the alliance would benefit from a country developing their own nuclear weapons, maybe it made sense for them to do that.

One of the reasons why the United States has encouraged allies not to develop their own nuclear weapons, is because there is a long debate about whether or not more nuclear weapons make the world more dangerous. It might make the world more dangerous because of intended use. It might make the world more dangerous because of accidental detonation. And of course, there’s always the risk of theft.

This conversation has largely come down on the side of: Nuclear weapons tend to make the world more dangerous, and so we should try our best, as part of an international community that is focused on reducing danger and increasing security, to encourage states to either give up their nuclear weapons programs or not to develop them in the first place.

It’s not clear to me what way this will go. I think there’s reason to suspect that South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, even Germany might be more interested in developing nuclear weapons than they were historically. I don’t think it’s such an easy decision that’s going to happen in the first year of 2025 or in 2026, but what I do think that this suggests is the historic restraints that the international system and the United States have been able to use on proliferation are weakening and the incentives for developing nuclear weapons are rapidly increasing. And I think what that might mean is we might see the expansion of the nuclear club in the future. 

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Lindsay: Finally, in 2024, a record number of democratic elections took place, but it was also a year that saw the growing influence of illiberal and autocratic regimes. To understand what Trump’s election means for democracy and human rights I spoke with Steph Haggard, a distinguished research professor at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy and Research Director for Democracy and Global Governance at IGCC. 

Stephan Haggard: In talking about the effect of the 2024 election on democracy in the world, we need to divide what might happen in the United States, which is a very open question, from what will happen abroad as a result of Trump’s foreign policy. And on that score, I would just make two points.

The first is that Donald Trump has never taken a particular interest in the human rights issue. It’s not a term he likes to use, it’s not a cause he likes to advance, and he’s not going to play the role of supporting groups in autocratic countries or backsliding countries by meeting, for example, with civil society leaders.

And then, of course, the second question is his penchant to embrace autocrats, and there I don’t know exactly what I think is going to happen. If Putin is seen as losing in the Ukraine conflict, it’s possible he may end up providing more support to Ukraine than we thought. And, of course, there’s hostility and enmity with Xi Jinping around a whole series of policy issues, even if he has a personal fascination. So I think it’s likely to be a very mixed picture, but certainly, the pro-democracy efforts of the Biden administration are not likely to continue.

Lindsay: The U.S. has been a long-time leader in advancing global democracy, supporting fledgling democracies, and advancing human rights at the institutional level around the globe. Do you see this second election of Donald Trump as evidence that the leadership role has changed and that the U.S. has lost some of that influence or is no longer interested in playing that role globally?

Stephan Haggard: So, the death of Jimmy Carter reminds us that there is a tradition in American foreign policy of really working to advance the causes of democracy and human rights. But clearly, there is a disaffection with those efforts that takes two somewhat different forms, I think.

One is that this is just an extraordinarily costly and complicated thing to do, and so cases like Afghanistan raise the question of whether this is something the United States should be involved in, and to what extent, and at what cost, and what it’s willing to pay.

But there’s also, I think, a “come home” vibe to this election. Trump talks about America First, but in a way, he’s an isolationist or really argues for a foreign policy characterized more by restraint. And that means a lack of interest in exercising leadership in these issues—he’s certainly hostile to multilateral organizations, but just as preoccupied with completely different things. There’s plenty on his plate that will take up his time, that’s not related to issues of democracy and human rights.

Lindsay: Do you think that there’s a risk that the U.S. will abandon multilateralism and global cooperation? And can you remind us, what happened last time he was elected?

Stephan Haggard: One of the things we’re going to be watching here at IGCC is Trump’s posture with respect to multilateral organizations. We certainly know he expressed hostility to a number of agreements the United States had reached. Some of them were formal membership in international organizations, some of which the United States crafted, like the World Health Organization. Others were more informal presidential agreements, like the Iran nuclear deal, and treaties, and so on. It’s clear that he spent a fair amount of time going after multilateral institutions.

I think the first test case we’re going to see on this is the World Health Organization. In 2020, as the pandemic was gaining force, he initiated a process to withdraw from the WHO. Biden reversed that, and now Trump has promised to reverse that reversal and take the United States out of the WHO, as he put it, on day one. This organization was founded in the post-war period with the United States playing a central role. It’s an organization devoted to advancing public health, both by providing support for countries to bolster their health systems where needed, mostly in the developing world, but also managing the inevitably  transnational nature of global health threats like pandemics. 

So the budget of the organization is about $7 billion, the United States contributes around 15% of that, so let’s call it $1 billion pulled from that budget. That’s a lot of money to find on short notice. Perhaps the Europeans can step into that breach, and the Japanese, and other advanced industrial states, but that’s clearly going to force quite substantial adjustments in the organization, unless that threat is being used for policy purposes, and we just don’t know that yet.

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Lindsay: If there’s one thing that these interviews, taken together, suggest, it’s that the world is changing, and no one knows for certain what’s ahead. Does Trump’s election mark a revolution in how the U.S. will engage with the world? What would that mean for global cooperation, which is so desperately needed to address the shared challenges that will shape our future? 

These are questions that the Talking Policy podcast will be thinking about this year, with our experts from across the University of California. Until our next episode, from all of us at IGCC, I wish you a good start to 2025.

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