The world cannot hedge against Donald Trump
You can get insurance for almost anything nowadays. It is next to impossible, however, to insure against Donald Trump’s return to the White House. The time for America’s allies to hedge against Trump 2.0 is today. A year from now, when Trump could be president-elect, would be far more expensive. Unfortunately, there are no easy or foolproof ways of doing that.
The starting point is to accept that Trump’s return would be far worse for the “global west” than his first term. In 2020 Joe Biden campaigned on the theme that Trump was an aberration; he did not reflect America’s true values. That article of faith would be drained of meaning with a Trump second term. America would have re-elected him with its eyes wide open.
There is no point in pretending that a man who believes that any election he loses is rigged, that the judicial system is rotten and corrupt, and that his political enemies belong in jail, is a believer in democracy. As Robert Kagan persuasively sets out in the Washington Post, Trump would come into office with a plan and a team to execute it. His aim is dictatorship.
If the courts and the free media could not hold Trump to account after he was turned out of power, they would have scant hope of doing so once he had regained it. Short-term hedges would not do. The world would have to assume that America had permanently changed course.
The only decent insurance is based on the worst-case scenario. On that basis, we have to assume that Trump’s victory would be taken as a green light by Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping to make big advances in their agendas. The US would pull out of Nato. Ukraine would be left to its own devices. Allies and friends in Asia would have to adjust to a world in which the US no longer underwrites their security. Meanwhile, the US would abandon efforts to tackle global warming, uphold human rights and at least pay lip service to the rule-based international order. Trump’s plan for a 10 per cent tariff on all imports would make the open world trading system a distant memory.
The most worrying hedge against Washington’s exit from Pax Americana would be a rush for the nuclear threshold. Among America’s allies, Japan, South Korea and Australia are each technically capable of going nuclear within months. It would be politically harder for Japan to cross that line given its unique history as the only target of nuclear attack. But the de facto removal of America’s nuclear umbrella would probably outweigh that moral legacy.
For similar reasons, it would be a deep wrench for Germany to go nuclear. Since Berlin decided to abandon civil nuclear power in 2011, that threshold would also take longer to cross. Where there is a will, however, there is a way. A resurgent Putin gaining territory in Ukraine while threatening Poland, the Baltics, Romania and Moldova could transform the nature of Germany’s debate.
Going nuclear is one form of hedging against a permanently Trumpian US. Such a Gadarene stampede, however, would not be confined to America’s friends. Iran is within roughly a year of nuclear breakout. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt are all capable of joining the bandwagon. Stopping Iran from crossing that threshold is one war to which Trump probably would sign up.
Another option for America’s allies would be to move closer to the revisionist powers. Given Germany and France’s history of attempting to accommodate Russia, such a shift cannot be ruled out. Indeed, default appeasement of Moscow is likelier than a European defence union in the near future. Germany embraced its Zeitenwende — a historic turning point — after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. But the U-turn is incomplete and went against decades of German diplomacy. If the US walked off the chessboard, it is not hard to imagine a German reverse Zeitenwende.
Among the large European powers, only the UK could be relied on to stick with Ukraine. In America’s absence, however, Britain lacks the resources to shoulder the burden. Italy has been firmly pro-Ukraine under Giorgia Meloni’s premiership. That would change overnight if Trump returned to the White House. The Baltic states and Poland would become lonely bulwarks against Russia’s westwards creep.
The sooner the west confronts the spectre of Trump’s return, the likelier it is to choose more principled forms of insurance. European states have far deeper habits of co-operation with each other than is true of their Asian counterparts. It would also be easier to resist Russia than China. But these are straws in the wind. If Trump wins, everything changes.
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