Although less of a bolt from the blue than his first win in 2016, Donald Trump’s victory in this year’s US presidential election could be much more consequential. Trump 2.0 will begin with more political power than Trump 1.0: this time, Trump won the popular vote and his party has a majority in both houses of Congress. The US electorate chose Trump with its eyes wide open and in greater numbers.
Trump’s presidency will have huge reverberations for international policy. We don’t yet know to what degree his administration will follow through on threats of pursuing an isolationist, transactional foreign policy. But strategies can be devised to counter the worst consequences.
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After the Second World War, the United States was a chief backer of today’s rules-based international order. In commerce, that approach is reflected in the World Trade Organization. Other organizations promote international cooperation in sectors such as science, finance, investment, aviation, shipping and development assistance.
International agreements are rarely enforced, but they work because governments and investors think it is more important to align their behaviours to the agreements’ rules than to skirt these norms. For decades, members of global trade regimes nearly always followed the rules — for instance, to avoid self-serving tariffs — because, with open markets, almost everyone gets bigger benefits than they would if nations just followed their narrow self-interests.
Solar panels are inexpensive and ubiquitous today because innovations made anywhere have quickly been scaled up into new products that can be sold worldwide. But triumphs of globalization are contributing to its undoing, as supporters of open markets that are losing out are, like Trump, seeking to favour their local industries instead.
Many countries’ support for global order is already wavering. And Trump’s presidency will put those political drivers on steroids. His proposal to impose stiff tariffs on all Chinese imports, for example, would drive up costs in the United States and reduce the ability of US firms to gain access to innovations, including those needed to cut industrial greenhouse-gas emissions.
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The dangers of these nationalist approaches can escalate quickly as governments and firms lose confidence that their interactions are governed by rules, not raw power and transaction. For similar reasons, the economic shocks of the 1920s and 1930s caused a global economic depression and eventually a war. The current climate is not yet the same, because the global economy is more diverse and ideas move more quickly and are harder to control than in the past. But history is beginning to rhyme.
Threats similar to those in commerce also imperil other areas, such as the Paris climate agreement, in which cooperation is essential. Trump 1.0 pulled out of the Paris agreement (although his successor, President Joe Biden, rejoined it). Trump 2.0 will probably do so again, perhaps on Trump’s first day in power.
Whether this exit breaks or merely bends the Paris agreement will depend on how the rest of the world responds. Countries that remain aligned with the Paris agreement must band together to show what ‘we are still in’ means in practice. Rather than giving thumping speeches, they should lay out concrete actions with observable outcomes.
This time, a united front will be harder to achieve. The international climate-policy agenda is focused on topics, such as climate finance, that are already at risk of diplomatic deadlocks. Few donors are willing to pay into big climate funds; few nations have concrete plans detailing how best to use that funding or engage with private investors so that the impact of donor funds can be amplified.
It will be easy to blame diplomatic failures on the US exit when the bigger problem is the lack of workable guidance for how these funds can be used effectively and how to increase involvement from private investors. The countries that support the Paris agreement should focus not on pointing fingers, but on how to deliver climate finance.
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Frankly, given the likely effects of Trump 2.0, a US exit from the Paris agreement could be beneficial — it would remove US diplomats from the meetings, preventing their political briefs and their nation’s refusal to cooperate with the rest of the world from sowing chaos.
In the United States, political activists should greet the Trump presidency with ways to compromise across the ideological spectrum — for example, by emphasizing nuclear power, solar energy and carbon capture as technologies that might garner support across political divides. Forging coalitions can help to make US climate policies durable.
Trump’s election also necessitates thinking about ways of international cooperation that emphasize actors beyond the federal government — in the individual states and the private sector — that can take outsized roles when Washington turns away from global agendas. Within days of the election, California governor Gavin Newsom called a special session of the state’s legislature to plan its countermoves. Other states will probably follow.
What happens in climate policy will need to be replicated in other areas, including science. A pragmatic approach on climate change can provide a road map — and leave a potentially hostile administration on the sidelines until the political climate changes once again.
Competing Interests
The author declares no competing interests.
