On Dec. 16, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump nominated his former ambassador to Portugal, George Glass, to be his next ambassador to Japan—adding another China hawk to his team.

Glass founded and ran Pacific Crest Securities, an investment firm, until 2014. He then ran an Oregon-based real estate firm before taking up his Portugal ambassador post in 2017, which he held for the duration of Trump’s first term as president.

As the U.S. ambassador to Portugal, Glass fought against Chinese investments in the country. He told Portuguese leaders that they had to choose between the United States and China, and that they would face consequences for accepting Chinese telecom giant Huawei as a network provider. These warnings were not welcomed in Portugal.

A key U.S. ally in the era of competition with China, Japan hosts more than 50,000 U.S. troops. During his first term, Trump tried to push Japan to quadruple its contribution toward the costs of stationing the troops to $8 billion a year, but he ultimately failed to extract more from the country. The agreement is set to be renegotiated by 2026, when another five-year deal is expected.

At a press conference on Dec. 16, Trump said he’d be willing to meet with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, who has been seeking a meeting with the president-elect, before he takes office. Japan has a trade surplus with the United States, which could put it on the priority list for Trump tariffs.

In Europe, Trumpology is all the rage. Reminiscent of the Kremlinologists who studied Politburo seating plans to guess the state of affairs in Moscow, today’s Washington watchers seek to divine U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s likely policies by triangulating the comments and social media posts of his inner circle. The fact is that no one has a clue what Trump will do—most likely not even Trump himself. Instead of scrutinizing his and his team’s every utterance, European governments would be better off assessing their own strengths and vulnerabilities.

The picture is not pretty. For the European Union, the main risk under Trump 2.0 is that U.S. pressure—and the question of how to respond to it—will increase fragmentation among its member states. This analysis holds for the three most pressing economic topics: U.S. trade tariffs, EU-China relations, and Russia sanctions. If the Europeans do not manage to unite, they will struggle to cushion the Trump-2.0 blow, much to Beijing’s and Moscow’s delight.

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In recent days, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has announced a slew of new hires for his incoming administration. Here are the latest:

Ronald Johnson, ambassador to Mexico

Kimberly Guilfoyle, ambassador to Greece

Daniel Newlin, ambassador to Colombia

Peter Lamelas, ambassador to Argentina

Leandro Rizzuto, ambassador to the Organization of American States

Jacob Helberg, undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy, and the environment

Tom Barrack, ambassador to Turkey

Kari Lake, director of Voice of America

Michael Rigas, deputy secretary of state for management and resources

Ed Martin, chief of staff at the Office of Management and Budget

Dan Bishop, deputy budget director at the Office of Management and Budget

Matt Gaetz, who withdrew himself from consideration for the post of attorney general, is set to join One America News Network, a right-wing, pro-Trump cable channel, as an anchor.

Florida Rep. Brian Mast has been nominated by the House Republican Steering Committee to serve as the next chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

FBI Director Christopher Wray announced this week that he plans to step down before Trump takes office, clearing the way for the president-elect’s nominee, Kash Patel, to lead the bureau, pending confirmation.

President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to become secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, shows no signs of backing down. The author, speaker, Fox News television host, and former Army National Guard officer faces serious sexual assault allegations, as well as concerns that he lacks the basic expertise needed to run an organization as enormous as the Pentagon. He had to reverse himself on his statements opposing women in combat. And yet, as Hegseth told the press last week, “as long as Donald Trump wants me in this fight, I’m going to be standing right here in this fight.”

Senate Republicans appear to be turning in his favor. Intense pressure from MAGA supporters has moved crucial senators like Joni Ernst in a favorable direction. According to one of Trump’s allies granted anonymity in a Politico interview, Hegseth has become a “cause” for “the movement who is going apeshit for him.” Senator John Fetterman became the first Democratic Senator to announce that he would meet with the nominee.

Hegseth is just one of several controversial picks that Trump is sending to the Senate. Several other individuals will likely receive intense scrutiny, including vaccine opponent Robert Kennedy Jr., who might be secretary of health and human services, and Tulsi Gabbard, who is on deck to become the next director of national intelligence.

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In 2000, when he was contemplating a run for president under the banner of Ross Perot’s Reform Party, Donald Trump released a book on his plans if elected, titled The America We Deserve. The chapter on trade policy opened audaciously. “What I would do … would be to appoint myself U.S. trade representative,” he wrote. “Our trading partners would have to sit across the table from Donald Trump and I guarantee you the rip-off of the United States would end.”

Now, with the surprising decision to pass over his first-term chief trade negotiator Robert Lighthizer for a major role in his new team, Trump appears to have done just that. With a young and relatively inexperienced nominee for Lighthizer’s old post of U.S. trade representative (USTR) and an unlikely mix of trade hawks and traditional Republicans in senior economic positions, Trump has left himself firmly in charge of the trade portfolio. He has foreshadowed the likely result with wild threats to slap tariffs on Mexico and Canada, as well as some developing countries if they stop using the U.S. dollar: a far more chaotic and unpredictable approach than the first time around.

The issue for Trump’s second term is not the shopworn choice between free trade and protectionism; the free traders have decisively lost that battle in the United States. The question instead is what form protectionism will take in the new administration—and how difficult it will be for trading partners and companies to respond and adapt.

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Of all of Trump’s cabinet nominees, though, perhaps none have covered quite as much political ground as former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, whom Trump has tapped to serve as his director of national intelligence (DNI).

A surfer and combat veteran from Hawaii, Gabbard was once seen as a rising star of the Democratic Party, which, after leaving its ranks in 2022, she now describes as an “elitist cabal of warmongers fueled by cowardly wokeness.” In 2020, she endorsed then-presidential candidate Joe Biden; two years later, she spoke at the right-wing Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), where she said she was fighting against the “Biden-Clinton-neocon-neolib foreign policy.”

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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump will possess a sizable prize that very few of his predecessors since Richard Nixon have enjoyed in their first two years in office: united government.

Following his inauguration, Trump will step into the Oval Office with the benefit of having the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate under the control of a loyal GOP. Republicans will have control of 53 Senate seats and 220 House seats. While the Republican majority remains narrow—indeed, the smallest in in the House in American history—Trump will still have a massive window of opportunity.

Although these moments don’t last long, these are the months that offer presidents their most realistic path to legislative achievement of historic significance.

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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has tapped former Georgia Sen. David Perdue to be the next U.S. ambassador to China. Read about Perdue’s China views and where the rest of Trump’s cabinet picks stand in our roundup.

Read it here: Where Trump’s Cabinet Stands on China

With only a few weeks left in office, U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration recently launched new export bans designed to hit China’s semiconductor industry. In return, Beijing announced restrictions on critical mineral exports to the United States. These latest measures fit a pattern under the Biden administration of using narrowly targeted measures to contain China’s growing technological prowess. As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office in January, however, U.S. restrictions on China are likely to become far more dramatic.

The Biden administration’s approach to selectively cut economic ties to China masks a division within the West that Trump’s election victory will surely deepen. Over recent years, Washington’s closest geopolitical partners were able to labor under a happy delusion regarding their relations with China. Full economic and technological decoupling between China and the West was deemed impossible and even undesirable. Much of the policy focus was on reducing specific, narrow risks of dependency on and coercion by Beijing. To signal consensus and paper over their differences over the extent of separation, Western diplomats, including those in the United States, duly began talking about de-risking rather than decoupling.

Trump’s return to the White House makes it clear that this unity was a mirage. The United States is now promising a much more profound separation from China—potentially even decoupling in full.

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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has made it clear that trade is at the top of his agenda when he reclaims the White House in January, and at the top of that agenda is China. Last week, he said that he would immediately impose 10 percent tariffs on all Chinese goods. That may only be the start; on the campaign trail, he pledged to jack up tariffs on Chinese imports to 60 percent.

Trump has also threatened to take more sweeping action: rescinding the “permanent normal trade relations” (PNTR) status that the United States granted China more than two decades ago as Beijing prepared to enter the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Doing so would not only be a symbolic break, but it would also immediately put China in a different tariff bracket, substantially increasing the average tariff on Chinese imports from the current baseline in key sectors.

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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday announced that he had selected Daniel Driscoll, an advisor to Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, to be secretary of the Army. Driscoll, an Army veteran who deployed to Iraq, was Vance’s classmate at Yale Law School.

“As a former Soldier, Investor, and Political Advisor, Dan brings a powerful combination of experiences to serve as a disruptor and change agent,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.

Driscoll, a North Carolina-based businessman, unsuccessfully ran for a House seat in the Southern state in 2020. If confirmed as Army secretary, Driscoll would be the civilian leader of the largest branch of the U.S. military and would report to the defense secretary.

Driscoll’s nomination comes amid rising uncertainty over whether Trump’s pick for Pentagon chief—Fox News host and Army veteran Pete Hegseth—will be confirmed in the Senate.

Hegseth, who has no government experience, has been dogged by negative headlines in recent days related to allegations of past misconduct, including sexual assault, financial mismanagement, and being intoxicated on the job, raising concerns among some Republican lawmakers in Washington. Hegseth has denied all the allegations, and no criminal charges were ever filed against him related to the sexual assault allegation.

Inexperience has been a trend among many of Trump’s selections for key roles in his second administration. Trump also recently tapped John Phelan, a businessman with no military experience, to be Navy secretary. The president-elect said Phelan will “put the business of the U.S. Navy above all else.” Phelan, if confirmed in the Senate, would be the first person in 15 years to serve as Navy secretary without military experience.

Amid rising expectations of a negotiated end to Russia’s war in Ukraine, Russian President Vladmir Putin declared last week that “nothing has changed.” He reiterated his maximalist demands for a peace deal: Ukraine must cede additional territories to Russia, abandon all hope of joining NATO, demilitarize, and “denazify”—Kremlin code for replacing the current government. These demands, which are unacceptable to Kyiv, suggest that Putin is confident that the war is trending in his favor.

If U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is to succeed in brokering a peace deal, he must change Putin’s perspective that he has the upper hand, or Trump’s diplomacy will backfire. To go into talks with a strong hand, Trump will need to bolster U.S. and Ukrainian leverage. And he must do so quickly, without the torturous delays and self-imposed red lines that have characterized President Joe Biden’s support for Ukraine over the last three years. The Trump administration should therefore formulate a maximum pressure campaign to convince Moscow to accept a good and lasting peace deal. By keeping his promise to restore “peace through strength,” Trump can give himself the best possible chance of stopping the bloodshed for good.

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Imagine if the U.S. Federal Reserve based its monetary policy on cryptocurrency’s speculative hype—or the Defense Department bet its manufacturing future on the overexcitement for 3D printing in the 2010s that never panned out. As detailed in a memorandum on artificial intelligence released on Oct. 24, President Joe Biden’s administration was beginning to run a similar risk by staking the lion’s share of the United States’ AI strategy on uncertain projections about the progress of large-scale frontier models, like those that power ChatGPT.

As President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming tech czars craft a new AI agenda, they have the opportunity to be both more ambitious and more risk averse: turbocharging the progress of frontier models and accelerating alternative uses of the technology, specifically for national security, in equal measure. Such a diversified approach would better account for the inherent uncertainty in AI development. It would also put the United States on firmer footing to expand its lead over China in the most transformative technology in a generation.

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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has famously promised to end Russia’s war in Ukraine on his first day in office, but he has been characteristically vague on how he will do it. Stopping the war is, of course, anything but straightforward. Even if he manages to reach a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which is by no means a given, a deal without Ukraine and Europe on board may not mean much. It may not even mean the end of the war.

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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has now made nearly all of his key appointments, with the announcement of his pick for ambassador to China this week. He has stacked his cabinet with China hawks, with one notable exception in Elon Musk. The incoming Trump team’s track record on China offers some clues as to where the administration might take China policy come January, and where clashes might emerge.

Ambassador to China  |  David Perdue

Former Georgia Sen. David Perdue will be the next U.S. ambassador in Beijing, pending Senate confirmation. In his announcement, Trump highlighted Perdue’s experience as a Fortune 500 CEO and his business experience in Asia.

“He will be instrumental in implementing my strategy to maintain Peace in the region, and a productive working relationship with China’s leaders,” Trump wrote.

Before joining the Senate, Perdue served as an executive for a range of different companies, including a stint as the CEO of Reebok and two years working for the consumer goods company Sara Lee in Hong Kong in the early 1990s. While Perdue joins Musk and Scott Bessent in bringing an Asia business background to Trump’s team, that experience does not appear to have softened his views on the country.

As a senator from 2015 to 2021, Perdue was a member of the Foreign Relations Committee as well as the Armed Services Committee, where he chaired the Seapower Subcommittee. In a lengthy September op-ed in the Washington Examiner, he wrote that those posts gave him a close-up view of China becoming increasingly aggressive in fighting what he described as a “New War.” That war is existential for the United States, he wrote. “The CCP [Chinese Communist Party] firmly believes its rightful destiny is to reclaim its historical position as the hegemon of the world order—and convert the world to Marxism.”

Perdue compared this moment to the lead-up to World War II. “Imagine, in 1939, having our supply chain dominated by the Axis powers,” he wrote. Later in the piece, he added, “To protect ourselves, Americans first have to realize the CCP actually is at war with us. The combined economic and military strength of democratic capitalist countries is multiple times greater than authoritarian countries. To defend freedom, these free countries need to unite and create an allied front, not unlike World War II.”

The op-ed touches on just about every one of Beijing’s sensitivities, including Taiwan. “Democratic countries have to decide what they will do to protect democracy in Taiwan. Our ‘strategic ambiguity’ policy needs to be addressed with allies and clarified,” Perdue wrote. (It’s worth noting that Trump himself has signaled a desire to maintain strategic ambiguity.)

As for U.S. democracy, Perdue supported Trump’s false claims that the 2020 U.S. elections were rigged and unsuccessfully challenged Georgia’s election results.

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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has already waded into his future trade wars before taking office. His proposal of a steep import tax on all products from the country’s top trade partners gives a preview of exactly how his zero-sum approach to economics could quickly become zero-benefit for businesses and consumers.

Trump, who vowed during his campaign to slap tariffs on everything that moved, said on Nov. 25 that he would, on his first day in office, put a 25 percent duty on all imports from Canada and Mexico—the United States’ two biggest trade partners, all bound together by a trilateral, tariff-free trade deal that Trump himself wrote. For good measure, Trump also threatened a 10 percent tax on all imports from China. His demand was for those countries to take immediate steps to curtail U.S.-bound deliveries of drugs and migrants.

The response, at least from the country most directly targeted, was pointed: Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum told Trump in a letter, “Migration and drug consumption in the United States cannot be addressed through threats or tariffs,” and vowed the same kind of retaliation that the European Union and China have already promised if Trump makes good on his threats. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reportedly spoke with Trump sometime after he posted his statement online; Ontario Premier Doug Ford compared the threat to “a family member stabbing you in the heart.”

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The breadth of falsehoods circulating in the months and days prior to Election Day in the United States was breathtaking in both scale and creativity. It was, as the head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Jen Easterly said, an “unprecedented amount of disinformation.” Voters were treated to videos masquerading as FBI-generated or CBS reports that warned of security threats and voter fraud, while other videos falsely depicted mail-in ballots that favored Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump being destroyed, or an alleged Haitian immigrant voting in two counties. Fabrications about Democratic nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris drew from a seemingly bottomless well, ranging from false allegations that she was involved in a hit-and-run incident to her being allied with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. This was on top of saturation levels of preelection disinformation campaigns involving Haitian immigrants, hurricane relief efforts, and so much more.

Oiled and revved up in advance of the Nov. 5 election, though, the disinformation machine abruptly died that evening. Trump had urged voters to get him a win “too big to rig”—harkening back to his persistent lie that victory was stolen from him in the 2020 election—and voters delivered.

Now that there is a lull, we must ask some critical questions. First, does disinformation—while upsetting, annoying, or even amusing—matter in influencing outcomes? Second, with a second Trump term, what is the future of the disinformation machine? And if disinformation continues unabated and even flows across borders, what can be done about it on a national and transnational level?

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It is far too early to make bold pronouncements on what a second Trump administration portends for U.S. policy across a region as complicated as the Middle East. Still, one part of that conflict-ridden region stands out as more promising than the rest and has already drawn President-elect Donald Trump’s attention. Indeed, the Gulf’s the thing. For a president whose policies and approach to international affairs proved opportunistic, ad hoc, and transactional, it offers much: kings, crown princes, and emirs who offer flattery, money, hydrocarbons, future business opportunities, and perhaps even a Nobel Peace Prize.

During his first term, Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner played a key role in brokering the Abraham Accords—the administration’s signal foreign-policy success, enriching themselves and the Trump Organization in the process. And both would love to see a sequel whose main event is an Israeli-Saudi normalization agreement. It’s a heavy lift, especially in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent war, which have changed the region drastically. And it will require some hard choices. But we suspect that Trump is almost certainly going to try.

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Conservative economist Oren Cass, the founder of the increasingly influential think tank American Compass, argues that tariffs are a price correction to incentivize domestic production. “The way we have to understand tariffs is as a recognition that making things does matter,” he explains.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has called tariffs “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” That is not how other world leaders and CEOs see it. If Trump follows through on his proposal to impose 60 percent tariffs on China and 20 percent on other countries, the potential for disruption and chaos is significant.

But beyond the short-term pain, is there a positive case to be made for tariffs? And if so, what would it be? Enter the conservative economist Oren Cass, the founder of the increasingly influential think tank American Compass. A cast of rising Republican figures, including Vice President-elect J.D. Vance and Secretary of State-designate Marco Rubio, have amplified Cass’s work diagnosing the harms inflicted on the American heartland through free trade and globalization. Cass also contributed to Project 2025, the conservative policy tome that looked to shape the Trump 2.0 agenda.

Cass doesn’t speak for Trump and doesn’t seem to be seeking a role in the next administration. But Trump’s disruption of the status quo has created room to elevate Cass’s ideas—especially as a new generation of Republican politicians step up to shape policy. I spoke with Cass on FP Live about Trump’s economic plans. What follows is a condensed and edited transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: I want to have a broad conversation about the American economy, but let’s start with tariffs. U.S. tariffs have consistently fallen from the 1940s to about 2016, when Trump was elected for the first time. Explain to us what the reversal of this trend is solving for.

Oren Cass: The problem we’ve seen over that full period, but really over the last 25 years or so—especially since China’s entry into the World Trade Organization [in 2001]—is that free trade has not worked at all how most economists predicted. There was a great deal of noise about how all economists unanimously predicted that free trade with China would be a wonderful benefit for the United States, its workers, and the strength of its economy. We lowered tariffs and lowered barriers on that basis. We have not seen the benefits that were promised. In many cases, we’ve seen the reverse. Certainly, we do have more cheap stuff in the United States, but I think the vast majority of Americans would rightly say it has not, on net, been beneficial.

And so we have this conflict now where a lot of economists are still using those exact same models from 25 years ago. And unsurprisingly, those models that say free trade is a wonderful benefit also say going in the other direction would have costs that exceed the benefits. Once you realize and admit that those previous models were wrong, that they got the trade-off backward, you can’t continue to use those models to argue against less free trade. You have to recognize that less free trade is going to benefit the people. We need to be focused on those who have been left behind.

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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has stirred controversy with most his cabinet appointments. His selections thus far are people who have made it clear that they will be totally loyal to the president and allow for little daylight between their agency and Oval Office. Furthermore, a number of them are individuals who have been openly hostile to the mission of the programs that they will now run.

Over the weekend, the president-elect announced that he will appoint Chris White, the CEO of fracking company Liberty Energy, to head the Department of Energy. Wright has been a staunch critic of the entire concept of a climate crisis. Former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin, taking over at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is not someone known for spending much time celebrating Earth Day. At the Department of the Interior and as head of the National Energy Council, South Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, known for championing oil and gas drilling, will likely be in charge.

These names and others follow the release of the now infamous 900-page Project 2025 plan published by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, which outlined a plan for gutting agencies of civil servants who are not subservient to the president.

Though some of Trump’s picks have been unusually controversial, the basic strategy behind these decisions is decades old. Conservatives have been filling key executive positions with leaders who are hostile to the programs that they oversee since the 1970s, when the modern conservative movement took form.

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Just hours after former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz withdrew his candidacy for U.S. attorney general, President-elect Donald Trump has nominated former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to replace him. 

Bondi is a close Trump ally who served as Florida’s attorney general between 2011 and 2019. During Trump’s first presidency, she served on his opioid and drug abuse commission. She is currently at the America First Policy Institute, where she is the chair of the Center for Litigation and a co-chair of the Center for Law and Justice. 

“Pam was a prosecutor for nearly 20 years, where she was very tough on Violent Criminals, and made the streets safe for Florida Families,” Trump said in a Truth Social post announcing Bondi’s nomination on Thursday. “Then, as Florida’s first female Attorney General, she worked to stop the trafficking of deadly drugs, and reduce the tragedy of Fentanyl Overdose Deaths, which have destroyed many families across our Country.”

“Pam will refocus the [Department of Justice] to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and Making America Safe Again,” he added. “I have known Pam for many years — She is smart and tough, and is an AMERICA FIRST Fighter, who will do a terrific job as Attorney General!” 

Bondi will require Senate confirmation before serving in her appointed role.

Matt Gaetz on Thursday took himself out of the running to be the next U.S. attorney general, a week after President-elect Donald Trump nominated the former Florida congressman to the position. Multiple allegations that Gaetz had sexual relations with minors had made his prospective confirmation in the Senate an uphill battle. 

In a post on X, Gaetz wrote that he had “excellent meetings” with several senators but added that “it is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition.” 

Trump echoed that sentiment in his own statement on Truth Social, the social platform that he owns, saying that Gaetz “was doing very well but, at the same time, did not want to be a distraction for the Administration, for which he has much respect.” 

Gaetz had been under investigation by the House Ethics Committee, which was examining allegations that he may have “engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, accepted improper gifts, dispensed special privileges and favors to individuals with whom he had a personal relationship, and sought to obstruct government investigations of his conduct.” 

One woman testified to the committee that she had sex with Gaetz when she was 17, sources familiar with the testimony told CNN. Two women also alleged that Gaetz paid them for sexual favors. Gaetz has denied all the allegations. His resignation from the House last week stopped the investigation in its tracks, but heightened the scrutiny of his bid to become attorney general. 

Starting in 2020, the Justice Department also investigated Gaetz as part of a sex trafficking probe. The department concluded its investigation in February 2023 without bringing charges against him. Gaetz also denied the allegations in that case.

Emerging powers in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East have showered U.S. President-elect Donald Trump with congratulations since he won the election. The general response from these countries—with a few notable exceptions such as Brazil and Mexico—has been much warmer than it was after outgoing President Joe Biden’s win in 2020.

“You are my favorite president,” Argentine President Javier Milei said in a call with Trump last week. Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto offered to fly to the president-elect to congratulate him in person. Meanwhile, Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar recently said, “I know today a lot of countries are nervous about the U.S. [election], ok—let’s be honest about it. We are not one of them.”

Other emerging powers have expressed optimism about future relations. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, “We expect our dear friend Trump to abandon the erroneous policies of the previous administration in his second term,” and Nigerian President Bola Tinubu stated that he believes Trump’s return to the White House will “usher in an era” of beneficial economic partnerships between the United States and Africa.

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This week’s South Asia Brief touched on how U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s foreign-policy cabinet picks could affect the next White House’s approach to South Asia.

Shortly after Trump’s victory on Nov. 5, Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar said that “today, a lot of countries are nervous about the U.S. … We are not one of them.” Among Trump’s cabinet picks are some of Washington’s biggest proponents of partnership with India—as well as China hawks and Pakistan critics.

Rep. Mike Waltz, Trump’s pick for national security advisor, co-chairs the India Caucus in the House of Representatives. His choice for secretary of state, Sen. Marco Rubio, introduced a bill in July that calls for deeper defense ties with India and mandates that the secretary of state track cases of Pakistan aiding anti-India militants.

Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, tapped to be director of national intelligence, has long expressed her support for India and is also Hindu—factors that likely prompted Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to take the unusual step of congratulating her before Senate confirmation hearings begin.

These picks bolster earlier predictions that his administration will embrace the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy, launched during Trump’s first term and intended to counter China. The next White House will likely accord relatively little priority to relations with Pakistan, though it may increase pressure on Islamabad to ease up on its alliance with Beijing.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January holds both promise and peril for Southeast Asia. On the one hand, the incoming administration appears poised to reinvigorate the Indo-Pacific strategy devised during Trump’s first term, which focused on countering China and included the strengthening of alliances and partnerships throughout the region. Several countries, namely the Philippines and Vietnam, will applaud this approach. Others, like Indonesia and Singapore, may worry about the potential for war in their neighborhood. But there will be a much broader welcome to Trump’s likely deprioritizing of promoting values—such as democracy and human rights—abroad in favor of a more transactional approach that strictly aims at achieving U.S. national interests, especially among authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes that comprise most Southeast Asian states. Overall, Trump’s likely policies could put the United States in a better position to compete long-term against China in the region.

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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright as energy secretary has been both widely celebrated and condemned because of the latter’s views on oil, gas, and climate change. The Wall Street Journal summed up the appointment with the headline: “Trump’s Choice for Energy Secretary Is a Fracking Booster and Climate Skeptic.” The coverage is consistent with post-election commentary on the energy implications of Trump’s return to power that has focused almost exclusively on his push to deregulate oil and gas production and his promise to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement for a second time. Yet if Trump wants to keep his promise to cut energy costs, bolster the U.S. economy, and respond to voter anxiety about inflation, his administration should focus less on oil and gas and more on something less polarizing: modernizing and expanding the country’s aging electric power system.

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President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday named Howard Lutnick, the businessman helming his presidential transition team, as his candidate for commerce secretary. Lutnick, the chief executive of financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, has been a vocal backer of Trump’s plan to impose tariffs on a large swath of U.S. imports. Speaking at a Trump rally in New York City last month, Lutnick harked back to the early 20th century as a time when, in his view, America was great: “Our economy was rocking. … We had no income tax, and all we had was tariffs.” 

In a post announcing Lutnick’s appointment on Truth Social, Trump said the Wall Street executive will “lead our Tariff and Trade agenda, with additional direct responsibility for the Office of the United States Trade Representative.” The U.S. trade representative and commerce secretary have traditionally been two separate roles—respectively held by Robert Lighthizer and Wilbur Ross during Trump’s first term—and it’s unclear whether Trump means to now combine them under Lutnick. The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for clarification from Foreign Policy. 

“We know who you are, and we’re going to come and find you,” said Thomas Homan one day after President-elect Donald Trump named him as the incoming administration’s “border czar,” responsible for border security and the removal of unauthorized migrants. Homan has promised to carry out “the biggest deportation operation this country’s ever seen.”

If he succeeds, it will reshape migration for a generation or longer—not just in the United States but in much of the world.

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Competition with China has become the biggest through line of a highly polarized Washington over the past decade, and a bipartisan commission that advises U.S. lawmakers on China is calling for some drastic measures to help the United States win that competition.  

Among the 32 recommendations from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission’s annual report to Congress, published on Tuesday, are revoking China’s bilateral free trade privileges; barring the import of technologies, including “autonomous humanoid robots,” from China; and creating a Manhattan Project to achieve artificial intelligence capable of surpassing human cognition. 

The commission argues that those measures, along with a further tightening of export controls on Chinese technology and increased restrictions on outbound U.S. investment into China, are vital to winning a conflict that it says the Chinese Communist Party under President Xi Jinping will inevitably escalate. “With few remaining avenues for dissent and a political system that demands absolute loyalty to the individual leader, it has become unlikely that anyone could dissuade Xi should he decide to take actions that risk igniting a catastrophic conflict,” the report says. 

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Donald Trump will be the next U.S. president, but it’s less clear how he’s going to lead the new ideological coalition that the Republican Party now represents. Trump is famously more interested in short-term advantages in both foreign policy and economic policy than any kind of long-term strategic thinking. But he will be presiding over a government comprising various different kinds of ideological partisans. The meaning of Trumpism will partly be determined by who wins out in the resulting conflicts.

How intense could the Trump administration’s protectionist trade policies get? How long will the U.S. dollar continue to rise? And what are the economic effects of a major deportation policy?

Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.

Cameron Abadi: If we were to take a look at the potential protectionist policies that will be put into place—how intense could this all get? And who would the main victims then be?

Adam Tooze: Everyone right now is just trying to puzzle this through and figure it out, and the short answer is, we don’t know. But what has been mentioned is a blanket tariff of 10 percent or possibly 20 percent on all of America’s foreign trade and then more specifically a 60 percent tariff on Chinese trade. What we don’t know is whether this is just a plan and it won’t actually go anywhere; whether this is actually a matter of negotiation, so whether you slap this tariff on with a view to negotiating with foreign partners; or indeed whether this is really just the way of opening the door to corruption at home, with all the inside lobbying that will go on in Washington.

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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed “tariff man,” campaigned on the promise of ratcheting import duties as high as 60 percent against all goods from China, and perhaps 20 percent on everything from everywhere else. And he might be able to do it—including by drawing on little-remembered authorities from the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, the previous nadir of U.S. trade policy.

Trump’s tariff plans are cheered by most of his economic advisers, who see them as a useful tool to rebalance an import-dependent U.S. economy. Most economists fear the inflationary impacts of sharply higher taxes on U.S. consumers and businesses, as well as the deliberate drag on economic growth that comes from making everything more expensive. Other countries are mostly confused, uncertain whether Trump’s tariff talk is just bluster to secure favorable trade deals for the United States, or if they’ll be more narrowly targeted or smaller than promised. Big economies, such as China and the European Union, are preparing their reprisals, just in case.

What makes it hard for economists to model and other countries to understand is that nobody, even in Trump world, seems to know exactly why tariffs are on the table. Trump himself has suggested using tariffs as a replacement for the entirety of U.S. federal income tax revenue; at the very least, Trump and his braintrust are relying on enhanced tariff revenue to offset the falling revenues that will come from a renewal of his 2017 tax cuts, which are set to expire next year and are an early priority for the incoming administration. Congress could include its own tariffs as part of the tax bill, or it could defer to Trump and his own authority to raise tariffs.

Either way, they appear to be coming.

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There are few circumstances under which inflation can be comforting. But in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in the U.S. presidential election, one of them appears to be when it serves as an alibi for an electorate’s sharp turn toward meanness, selfishness, and a hard-edged type of identity-centered nationalism.

Many Americans have used inflation to explain away the country’s embrace of radical political change. Yet this ignores basic facts about the U.S. economy. Before the election, I wrote a column highlighting some of these remarkable statistics, noting that the country has recently far outpaced its G-7 peers in economic growth and brought unemployment down to nearly historic lows; that inflation, after briefly surpassing 9 percent in 2022, has plunged to 2.6 percent; and that gasoline prices, one of the most important pocketbook issues for Americans, are relatively low.

Even George F. Will, a dean of conservative columnists in Washington, indirectly laid bare the ridiculousness of this explanation. As he wrote this week, Trump “ran promising to increase living costs” due to the large tariffs he has vowed to impose on imports.

But to fully understand why the inflation explanation doesn’t add up, one must examine the broader nature of Trump’s program—specifically, its retrograde racial politics. After all, Trump was explicit about his policy priorities during the campaign, and the president-elect’s staffing moves and statements since Nov. 5 have reaffirmed his intentions.

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Some of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s nominees to serve in top national security jobs in his next administration have received a mixed reception among the restraint wing of the Republican Party, who see them as foreign-policy hawks whose views fly in the face of the isolationist currents that have gained ground in the party in recent years.

The president-elect’s selection of Sen. Marco Rubio as secretary of state and Rep. Mike Waltz as national security advisor has been met with concern among the sizable wing of Trump’s supporters who have been frustrated by U.S. military interventions, including in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The MAGA-world restrainers are reeling,” said Jacob Heilbrunn, the editor of the National Interest. “They’re dumbfounded.”

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Is U.S. President-elect Donald Trump the accomplished dealmaker he boasts to be, with the Russia-Ukraine war about to come to a peaceful end? We should take him on his word when he says he’s not keen on starting any new wars—but that’s not at all the same as crafting a settlement in an ongoing conflict.

During his first term, Trump faced three situations that might offer some clues to his practical peacemaking skills.

The first was his aim to strike a deal with “rocket man,” his moniker for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Trump first threatened to obliterate Kim and his country, then expressed love and respect for him in two highly publicized meetings, and finally just walked away from the entire issue after achieving nothing. Today, the North Korean nuclear program is far more advanced than when Trump made his effort to stop it.

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TikTok’s time is running out, but the U.S. presidential election might have delivered it an unlikely savior.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump led the initial charge to ban the hugely popular video-sharing app during his first term, primarily over concerns that its ownership by Chinese tech giant ByteDance would lead to private user data falling into the hands of the Chinese government. That ban, carried out via executive order, was overturned by President Joe Biden in 2021 after multiple courts blocked Trump’s order. 

You could be forgiven for feeling a sense of déjà vu (albeit with a role reversal) this year. 

The Biden administration has gotten progressively more hawkish on China over the last four years, spurred on by a Washington consensus that sees halting China’s technological advancement as imperative. TikTok once again became the prime target of that consensus this year, with more than 80 percent of lawmakers across both chambers of Congress voting to ban the app in April unless it was sold to a U.S. company. Biden signed that bill into law, though the nine-month deadline for ByteDance to divest itself of TikTok ensured the app’s fate wouldn’t be sealed before the Nov. 5 election.

That deadline is set to expire on Jan. 19, the day before Trump takes office. But TikTok’s legal challenge to the ban is still with the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and could potentially make its way up to the Supreme Court, kicking the can several months into Trump’s second term. 

That is likely good news for TikTok, considering Trump’s opposition to the platform appears to have dissolved. Multiple Trump allies told the Washington Post this week that he would halt the ban, and Trump said on the campaign trail that he would “save TikTok”—in a video posted to his TikTok account that now has more than 14 million followers. 

TikTok and its 170 million-plus U.S. users face a now familiar wait for the app’s fate, though perhaps with a bit more optimism than they might have previously had.

Then came the phone calls. Some, such as the five-minute call with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, carried promises of follow-up meetings. Others lasted longer as foreign leaders sought assurances about the president-elect’s policy intentions. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reportedly came away from his 25-minute call somewhat reassured, despite Trump’s prior pledge to end Kyiv’s war with Russia before he took office.

Netanyahu, overseeing a multifront war of his own, claimed on Nov. 10 to have already spoken with the president-elect three times and said they had seen “eye to eye” on the threat posed by Iran. All told, Trump said on Nov. 7 that he had spoken to “probably” 70 world leaders, each of whom will have sought to influence his thinking about their most pressing priorities.

This flurry of activity is the most visible indication that during a presidential transition, there is not, in fact, “one president at a time,” nor a single U.S. foreign policy. The roughly 11-week interregnum—unusually long by global standards—may be a relic of a bygone era in which the sheer logistical feat of tabulating and certifying votes across a vast country took considerable time.

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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of two outspoken critics of China’s crackdown on Uyghurs to serve in top foreign-policy roles in the next administration has been welcomed by Uyghur advocates. But it could also serve as a future flash point with the president-elect.

Sen. Marco Rubio, Trump’s nominee to serve as secretary of state, and Rep. Mike Waltz, his national security advisor, have both sought to use their clout as lawmakers to condemn China’s persecution of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in its northwestern Xinjiang region.

“Having engaged with both offices, I’m hopeful for the future,” said Rayhan Asat, a human rights lawyer as well as a senior legal and policy advisor with the Strategic Litigiation Project at the Atlantic Council. Asat is of Uyghur heritage, and her brother, Ekpar Asat, is imprisoned in China. “Their strong records in leading and sponsoring legislation on Uyghur rights speak for themselves.”

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If anyone believes that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is “just bluster,” they are deluding themselves. Trump usually says exactly what he wants to achieve and then fights with hammer and tongs to make it happen. Nowhere has this been truer than with immigration.

From the day that he started his political journey in June 2015, going after immigrants—“rapists” who are “bringing crime,” as he stressed on the infamous escalator in Trump Tower—has been his signature theme. Throughout the 2024 election, Trump continued to emphasize this issue. In February, he went so far as to pressure House Republicans into killing a bipartisan border deal that would have given the GOP almost everything that the party has been asking for, just so that he could have an issue to run on.

During his campaign against outgoing President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump dramatically escalated his rhetoric. He promised militarized roundups of migrant workers and a massive deportation program. All of these policy promises were sold through dehumanizing rhetoric aimed at both documented and undocumented immigrants, most famously with unfounded stories of Haitians eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio.

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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has flooded the zone with nominations for key national security positions that raise questions even among longtime Republican foreign-policy hands about the U.S. approach in a second Trump administration.

Trump campaigned on promises to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, to start a global trade war, to use the U.S. military in controversial and even illegal ways to enforce his immigration plans at home, and to use the Justice Department to settle personal scores. His early picks for top posts bear out plans to make those promises reality, and some of them have sparked concern even in a Washington that will be entirely in Republican hands.

“The basic problem is that [Trump] can’t tell the difference between the national interest and his personal interest,” said John Bolton, who served as national security advisor for a time during the first Trump administration and has warned about the risks of a repeat since. “As Louis XIV used to say, ‘l’état, c’est moi.’”

Having served with Trump before, in addition to decades of experience in previous Republican administrations, Bolton has seen how the next president’s limited grasp of international relations weakens his ability to be an effective advocate for U.S. interests. “He has a very limited appreciation of what is at stake in international affairs. He can’t be an effective bargainer, because he often has no idea what he is giving up,” Bolton said, recalling Trump’s unilateral offer to curtail U.S.-South Korean military exercises to curry favor with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

“Hard men like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin know what their national interests are, whereas Trump is just being taken for a ride,” Bolton said.

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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump announced on Wednesday that he has selected Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz to serve as attorney general and former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard to serve as director of national intelligence. 

Gaetz is a polarizing figure and close Trump ally who is currently the subject of a House Ethics Committee investigation into allegations that Gaetz may have “engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, accepted improper gifts, dispensed special privileges and favors to individuals with whom he had a personal relationship, and sought to obstruct government investigations of his conduct.” Gaetz has denied the allegations.

Last year, the Justice Department also investigated him in a sex trafficking probe. The department concluded its investigation in 2023 without bringing charges against Gaetz. Gaetz also denied the allegations in that case.

“Matt is a deeply gifted and tenacious attorney,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social social media platform. “Matt will end Weaponized Government, protect our Borders, dismantle Criminal Organizations and restore Americans’ badly-shattered Faith and Confidence in the Justice Department.”

Once a Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii who ran for president as a Democratic candidate in 2020, Gabbard left the Democratic Party in 2022 to register as an independent and has since become a staunch Trump supporter. She deployed to Iraq from 2004 to 2005 as a major in the Hawaii National Guard and is now a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves, but she has little direct intelligence experience. If confirmed by the Senate, Gabbard would oversee the U.S. intelligence community.

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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio as his nominee for secretary of state means that Latin America could play a prominent role in U.S. foreign policy over the next four years. Rubio, who is Cuban American, is known for hawkish positions on countries including China, Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela.

If confirmed, Rubio would be the first Latino to become Washington’s top diplomat. Although Trump has promoted an isolationist foreign-policy agenda that could see the United States withdraw from global engagement, it might not extend to the Western Hemisphere.

For Foreign Policy, Oliver Stuenkel, an associate professor of international relations at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, argued that “at least in the case of Latin America, Trump’s return to the White House would lead to a far more interventionist U.S. foreign policy”—in part due to competition with China and the salience of immigration in U.S. political discourse. In Rubio, Trump seems to have found a champion for this approach.

Read it here: Trump Has His Own Monroe Doctrine

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has spent the week since his election victory filling out his cabinet and key policy personnel, with a few surprising names thus far. One particular announcement on Tuesday, however, was less surprising.

“I am pleased to announce that the Great Elon Musk, working in conjunction with American Patriot Vivek Ramaswamy, will lead the Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”),” Trump wrote in a statement shared on his social media platforms. DOGE—a thinly veiled reference to one of Musk’s favorite meme cryptocurrencies—has been formed to slash government spending and drastically reduce federal budgets.

“To drive this kind of drastic change, the Department of Government Efficiency will provide advice and guidance from outside of Government, and will partner with the White House and Office of Management & Budget to drive large scale structural reform,” Trump added. 

Musk, the world’s richest man, had floated the idea of creating such a department as early as September, and he repeatedly mentioned it while supporting Trump on the campaign trail. At a preelection rally in New York City last month, Musk said that he would cut as much as $2 trillion from the federal budget. (The U.S. government spent $6.75 trillion in fiscal year 2024.)

There is little clarity on how Musk might do so without cutting key government expenditures such as social security and defense spending, and he appeared to acknowledge that the strategy might cause severe short-term economic upheaval.

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This week, China Brief covered how U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and his allies will approach Beijing in the four years ahead. In my view, three key questions remain about China policy in the next White House:

Can the administration’s China policy can be reconciled with its domestic economic needs? Trump’s oft-stated preference for tariffs on China set at 60 percent may lead to significant inflation.

How much leverage does Beijing get from business holdings in China among Trump allies? Trump has shown that he can be persuaded when it comes to Chinese business interests if spoken to directly.

Is the United States facing down China out of ideological principle, or is it doing so out of a need for geopolitical primacy? These differences would significantly affect U.S. positions on Taiwan.

Finally, staffing choices matter. Some figures in Trump’s orbit have shown a commitment to human rights in China, including his pick for national security advisor, Rep. Mike Waltz. Sen. Marco Rubio, who has played a prominent role in human rights work, is also broadly in this camp. (On Monday, it was reported that he is Trump’s likely pick for secretary of state.)

Yet Trump has also praised Xi for ruling “with an iron fist” and for his abolition of presidential term limits.

Read it here: Where Does China Stand With the Next White House?

U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping will hold a long-telegraphed meeting on Nov. 16 on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Peru, according to senior U.S. administration officials. 

This will be the first convening of the two leaders since last November, and it is expected to be the last of the Biden presidency. The U.S. officials, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity under terms set by the administration, said no major new deliverables are on the table; instead, the two leaders will discuss the agenda they set out at their meeting on the sidelines of last year’s APEC summit in California. 

In the year since, the United States and China have managed to forge new stability through increased diplomatic contact. They have used that stability to push forward cooperation on military-to-military communication, climate change, fentanyl, and artificial intelligence, even while both countries have continued to take assertive actions in other areas, from technology restrictions to Taiwan. 

With President-elect Donald Trump taking office in January, though, that careful balance of cooperation and competition is all but guaranteed to be cast aside in exchange for a more mercantilist approach. 

The Biden administration’s priority at this weekend’s meeting seems to be keeping relations as smooth as possible until then. “We’ll expect to try to continue to ensure that we’ve got those channels working—law enforcement and [military-to-military] in particular—which we see as critical to underpinning stability in the relationship in the period ahead,” a senior administration official said. 

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has picked former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), several outlets reported on Tuesday. Zeldin, a four-term Republican congressman who lost the New York gubernatorial election in 2022, confirmed his selection in a post on X and stated a novel priority for the EPA to make the United States the “global leader” of artificial intelligence.

Vivek Chilukuri, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security who has written critically on U.S. tech decoupling from China in Foreign Policy, observed: “It’s a strong signal the Trump administration will target existing environmental permitting for data centers and energy infrastructure as part of its strategy to boost American AI.”

Zeldin’s attention to data centers echoes Jared Cohen, the president of global affairs at Goldman Sachs, who argues that the next phase in AI competition will focus on where the data centers that power the technology will be built. In an October piece for Foreign Policy, Cohen wrote that the United States faces “significant bottlenecks” with building data centers—which in turn “presents an opportunity for governments and enterprises to practice data center diplomacy.”

Read it here: The Next AI Debate Is About Geopolitics

Arab and Muslim Americans in Michigan, especially in the city of Dearborn, shifted away from the Democratic Party and toward President-elect Donald Trump in 2024. The Biden-Harris administration’s unwavering military assistance to Israel—and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s willingness to continue this policy—drove Arab American voters in Michigan away from a party that the community had consistently supported since the early 2000s. Trump won the state by  more than 80,000 votes after losing it to outgoing President Joe Biden by more than 150,000 votes in 2020.

Trump won Dearborn, where more than half the population is of Middle Eastern or North African descent, by capturing 42 percent of votes to Harris’s 36 percent; the Green Party’s Jill Stein also took a substantial 18 percent of the vote in the city. In neighborhoods within the city where Arab Americans are the majority, such as eastern Dearborn, Harris performed even worse.

For example, in 2020, Biden beat Trump in eastern Dearborn by nearly 10,000 votes. On Election Day this year, the Detroit Free Press reports that Trump defeated Harris in eastern Dearborn by nearly 3,700 votes, accumulating 45 percent of the vote in 2024 after receiving only 18 percent in 2020 resulting in a 27 percent swing toward Trump that demonstrates how the Democrats’ refusal to restrain Israel as it destroyed Gaza likely pushed Arab Americans to the right.

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As G-20 leaders gather next week in Rio de Janeiro, Donald Trump’s big win in the U.S. election has raised questions about the future of multilateralism. With his “America First” message, Trump is anything but a poster boy for the cause. And a new administration will take the helm against a backdrop of increasing paralysis at hallowed international organizations such as the United Nations and World Trade Organization. Multilateralism seems to be in big trouble.

But this distrust of multilateralism also comes in the context of decreasing unipolarity in the international system. Taken together, these factors may open the door to a revitalized G-20. It will take a new bargain between the United States and the global south to get there.

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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has chosen former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to serve as U.S. ambassador to Israel. A close Trump ally and staunch supporter of Israel, Huckabee will take up the role at a critical time for the Middle East as Israel wages a multifront war against Iran’s proxies and as Gaza teeters on the brink of famine. 

An ordained Southern Baptist pastor who served as governor of Arkansas from 1996 to 2007, Huckabee has never served as a U.S. diplomat overseas.

Huckabee regularly travels to Israel, leading tours popular among evangelical Christians, and has repeatedly spoken in favor of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and advocated for Israel to annex the territory. 

Huckabee’s nomination comes as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also nominated a strong supporter of settlements, Yechiel Leiter, to serve as ambassador to the United States. On Monday, Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said he hoped Israel would push to annex parts of the West Bank in 2025, raising the prospect that the Israeli government may seek a green light from the United States to formally annex the Palestinian territory during Trump’s second term. 

“Mike has been a great public servant, governor, and leader in faith for many years,” Trump said in a statement announcing his choice of Huckabee. “He loves Israel, and the people of Israel, and likewise, the people of Israel love him. Mike will work tirelessly to bring about peace in the Middle East!”

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has promised to stop the war in Gaza, ending over a year of fighting that has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, devastated the region, and spread to Lebanon, Yemen, and other countries nearby. Even if Trump is serious about keeping his promise, the chances of ending Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza are low and fighting is likely to continue.

Israel believes it is riding high, and even if Hamas offered a hostages-for-withdrawal deal—the core of cease-fire proposals in the past year—on favorable terms to Israel, it is unlikely that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would agree. Israel has decimated Hamas’s leadership and disrupted much of its military capacity. Although it has not destroyed Hamas completely, as Netanyahu has vowed, the group is on its heels, and Netanyahu contends that a cease-fire would allow the group to recover. Israel appears to have settled for a grinding conflict in Gaza with the goal of keeping Hamas weak, even if it prevents any larger political deal in the strip that would end the suffering there.

On the Palestinian side, making peace—and enforcing it—is difficult. Israel has killed Ismail Haniyeh, Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, and other Hamas leaders, as well as numerous low-level commanders. The result is a leadership vacuum. This is particularly pronounced in Gaza, and it is unclear if external leadership has any influence over the Hamas fighters remaining in the strip. Any leader in Gaza who tries to consolidate control there is likely to end up on the receiving end of an Israeli missile strike.

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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has reportedly tapped Florida Sen. Marco Rubio as his secretary of state. If Rubio were confirmed, it would make him the first Latino to hold the nation’s senior cabinet position.

Rubio, who has been in the Senate for 14 years, should not face any confirmation headaches. Even temporarily losing his seat with a handpicked Republican replacement, the GOP should have an easy 52-vote majority in the upper chamber. 

Rubio ticks nearly all the boxes for a future Trump foreign policy: He is hawkish against all the usual suspects. He is suspicious of, if not belligerent, toward China, hostile to Iran, not keen on Venezuela, rueful of the Cuba his parents left, and indifferent toward Gaza and Ukraine. The only problem with Rubio, from Trump’s point of view, is that he might be too hawkish.

Trump campaigned on a pledge to end wars. He did so messily in Afghanistan, and he has vowed to do so in Ukraine. He called off a large-scale attack on Iran during his first term and alternated between berating China and selling it soybeans. The big question is whether Trump’s vision of an “America First” foreign policy has enough room for the small diplomatic wars—a fresh recourse to sanctions on Iran, redoubled pressure on Venezuela, or an overhaul of U.S. policy toward Cuba—that Rubio’s worldview would encompass, or whether Rubio would have to set his sights exclusively on China.

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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Monday asked Florida Rep. Mike Waltz to be his national security advisor, according to multiple reports, filling another key cabinet position as his future administration takes shape. Waltz, who served 27 years in the U.S. Army Special Forces (also known as the “Green Berets”) and U.S. National Guard before retiring as a colonel, was elected to Congress in 2018 in the seat previously held by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. 

Waltz has been one of the most vocal China critics in Congress, serving on the China Task Force and sponsoring legislation to restrict government funding from U.S. universities with ties to China. He also serves on the Armed Services Committee and Foreign Affairs Committee.

While Waltz has broadly been supportive of U.S. aid to Ukraine in its fight against Russia, he has more recently criticized what he called the “blank check” approach and called on European countries to shoulder more of the burden.

Waltz is the latest addition to Trump’s cabinet, with Reps. Elise Stefanik and Lee Zeldin named as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, respectively. Waltz’s fellow Florida lawmaker Marco Rubio is also set to be named secretary of state. 

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has 70 days until he takes office, but his foreign-policy decision-making has already begun.

1. The United Nations. On Monday, Trump nominated New York Rep. Elise Stefanik to be the United States’ ambassador to the United Nations. Stefanik is a longtime critic of the international body. She has accused the U.N. of antisemitism for criticizing Israel’s settlements in the West Bank, and in October, she called for the “complete reassessment of U.S. funding of the United Nations.” Her appointment suggests that the incoming Trump administration intends to more aggressively defend Israel on the world stage.

2. Israel-Hamas war. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that he has spoken with Trump three times since the U.S. election last Tuesday and that the two men “see eye to eye on the Iranian threat in all its components and the danger it poses.”

It is unclear if Trump’s administration will help mediate cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas. The president-elect has expressed support for Netanyahu’s efforts to achieve “total victory” and has argued that a truce deal would only allow Hamas to regroup, but he has also stressed the need for the war in Gaza to end.

3. Russia-Ukraine war. The Washington Post reported on Sunday that Trump had spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin last Thursday to urge Moscow not to escalate its war against Ukraine. The Kremlin dismissed the report on Monday as “pure fiction” and said there were no concrete plans yet to connect with the president-elect. Trump (alongside billionaire Elon Musk) spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last Wednesday.

Trump has touted his ability to end the Russia-Ukraine war within 24 hours, but the details for how he plans to do that remain vague.

As Week 2 of the presidential transition begins, President-elect Donald Trump’s list of key policy personnel is starting to take shape. 

Two big names moved out of the “rumored” column on Monday. 

Trump named New York Rep. Elise Stefanik as his ambassador to the United Nations, a post occupied in his first term by Nikki Haley. (Trump had said earlier that Haley and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo would not be asked to join Trump’s new administration.) 

The second Trump appointee is Tom Homan, the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Homan will be in charge of U.S. border policy and will oversee “all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin,” Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform Truth Social. 

That’s in addition to Susie Wiles, Trump’s co-campaign manager whom he named White House chief of staff last week. Wiles will be the first woman in U.S. history to serve in that role.

Trump is expected to tap Stephen Miller, a key ally and immigration advisor in his first administration, as deputy chief of staff for policy, CNN reported. 

Two Republican governors—Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Doug Burgum of North Dakota—are reportedly being considered for the role of secretary of the interior. Burgum is also believed to be a candidate for energy secretary, as is former Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette. 

Other positions in the incoming Trump administration—including all the members of his cabinet—are yet to be confirmed, but here are some of the names we outlined in our Situation Report newsletter last week:

Brian Hook, who served as the director of policy planning and special envoy for Iran in the first Trump administration, is expected to lead the transition team at the State Department, CNN reports.

Former Veteran Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie is running point on the Defense Department’s transition team, Politico reports.

Former Democratic Rep. Peter Deutsch has expressed interest in becoming the next U.S. ambassador to Israel, Jewish Insider reports.

Sen. Tom Cotton has said he would not accept a cabinet position offer, despite being a top contender, Axios scoops.

Politico reports that Sens. Marco Rubio and Bill Hagerty and former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell have been mentioned as potential contenders for secretary of state.

Other names that we’re hearing as likely contenders for senior positions include: Rep. Mike Waltz; Keith Kellogg, a former chief of staff on the National Security Council; Kash Patel, a former chief of staff at the Pentagon; former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe; former National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien; and former Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary Elbridge Colby.

In recent weeks, North Korea deployed troops to Russia to reinforce Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. This is only the latest example of the increased collusion among the new Axis of Aggression: China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.

How can the new Trump administration address this challenge?

While the Trump 2.0 National Security Strategy has yet to be written, a major part of the answer will center on the president-elect’s promise to bring a quick end to the war in Ukraine.

The interlinkages among this Axis of Aggression are not as deep and robust as some might think. Rather, almost all of the ties revolve around the other dictators supporting Putin’s war against Ukraine.

North Korea is providing troops and munitions. Iran is providing drones. China is providing enormous economic support short of lethal military assistance, including the heavy-duty trucks and excavation equipment that are allowing Putin to literally dig in to Russian-occupied Ukraine. In exchange for this largesse, it is rumored that Russia is providing advanced military assistance related to nuclear weapons and space technology.

Apart from backing Putin’s war against Russia, however, the ties among these dictators are sparse. To be sure, there would remain a general antagonism to the U.S.-led, post-World War II international system, but the near-term, life-or-death incentives for urgent military collaboration would be removed.

Bringing the war in Ukraine to a quick and decisive conclusion, therefore, as Donald Trump has promised to do, would remove many of the incentives for autocratic collaboration.

This would provide time and space for the natural enmities among these dictators to emerge, providing Washington and the free world with the opportunity to develop a coherent long-term strategy to counter, deter, and if necessary defeat the Axis of Aggression at the same time.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is set to nominate New York Rep. Elise Stefanik to serve as his ambassador to the United Nations, multiple outlets report. Stefanik has accepted the offer, according to the New York Post. 

The position of U.N. ambassador is often seen as a proving ground for rising stars of the party in power. The news will come as little surprise to those who have tracked Stefanik’s ascension through GOP ranks over the past decade, serving most recently as chair of the House Republican Conference. 

Known for her prosecutorial style of questioning in House hearings, most memorably when questioning the heads of elite colleges about allegations of antisemitism on their campuses, she is likely to produce made-for-TV moments at the U.N. Security Council. She is widely expected to serve as Trump’s enforcer at the international body. 

She was first elected in 2014, making her the youngest woman ever to win a seat in Congress at the time. A once-proud moderate, she has become a Trump acolyte—even joining the attempt to try and overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. 

In 2022, I profiled Stefanik in search of answers as to what her rise and political evolution could tell us about how the Republican Party has changed since Trump was first elected. Her nomination as U.N. ambassador further cements her role in the party’s future.

Read it here: Elise Stefanik Is Most Likely to Succeed 

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s desire to end Russia’s war against Ukraine is sincere. But it is understandable that Ukraine and its supporters may have concerns about how, exactly, the “deal” promised by Trump during his campaign will look. If it does not include ways to guarantee Ukraine’s ability to defend itself, the fighting may only stop temporarily; history shows that Russia will return in a few years to finish what it started. The war would not truly end—it would merely be frozen.

But these same supporters of Ukraine must also be honest and recognize that a Harris administration would have posed its own challenges, albeit for different reasons. Vice President Kamala Harris would likely have continued President Joe Biden’s tepid policy of doing just enough to help Ukraine to survive but never enough to succeed.

Long delays in providing key weapon systems, the illogical restrictions placed on those systems, and the slow drip of aid far short of what Biden had the legal authority to deliver have caused immense frustration among Ukrainians. These policies often seem to defy basic principles of military strategy and practice. As Ukraine endures daily attacks from Russian missiles, North Korean artillery, and Iranian drones—and with more than 10,000 North Korean soldiers now deployed on the Russian side—many Ukrainians see the Biden team’s self-imposed limits to military aid as an open invitation to the Kremlin to keep escalating its brutal war.

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 U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s congratulations for U.S. President-elect Donald Trump this week signals his pragmatic willingness to forge a working relationship with the incoming president. Starmer, striving to bridge differences, finds himself in the unenviable position of balancing his party’s distaste for Trump with the U.K.’s long-standing strategic reliance on the United States. Starmer’s outreach may smooth over initial tensions, but when Trump returns to power, maintaining this fragile connection may prove difficult.

Starmer finds himself on the more conciliatory end of his party. David Lammy, now the foreign secretary, has described Trump as a “racist KKK and Nazi sympathiser” and a “neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath” and sought to make him the first U.S. president denied a state visit to the U.K. Parliament. He has compared Trump consistently to Adolf Hitler.

It has been widely reported that this history might sour relations. In the run-up to the vote, Woody Johnson, the former U.S. ambassador in London and a Trump ally since at least the 1980s, warned that Trump “will remember” Lammy’s remarks. Trump has a habit of paying close, almost neurotic attention to the negative things that people say about him, especially online.

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President-elect Donald Trump’s post-election call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday included tech billionaire and staunch Trump ally Elon Musk, according to multiple reports. Zelensky described the call as “excellent” in a post on X (the platform that Musk owns) shortly after it took place, but he did not reference Musk’s involvement. 

Musk has been a key player both in Ukraine’s war against Russia and in the Trump campaign. The Starlink satellites operated by Musk’s company SpaceX have provided internet connectivity to Ukraine’s war effort. Yet Musk has also clashed with Zelensky over the former’s controversial peace proposal, which would see Russia retain control over Crimea, which it illegally annexed in 2014; Ukraine drop its bid to join NATO; and other measures that Zelensky opposes.   

Musk’s donation of more $100 million to Trump’s election campaign and appearances with him at rallies appear to have gained him Trump’s ear and a seat at the table during the presidential transition period. (Trump has previously hinted at giving Musk a formal role in his administration.) The billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO reportedly also joined Trump’s call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan this week. 

A Trump campaign spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Foreign Policy on Musk’s role in those calls and what was discussed.

Kenyan President William Ruto took longer than many African leaders to congratulate Donald Trump for his victory in the U.S. presidential election. Ruto had become a close ally of President Joe Biden’s administration, much to the chagrin of Kenyans, who held monthslong protests against Ruto’s economic policies and alleged corruption in his government. During that time, Biden designated Kenya a major non-NATO ally and secured its involvement in the Haiti peacekeeping mission.

In his congratulatory message to Trump on Wednesday, Ruto affirmed Kenya’s commitment to its long-standing partnership with Washington on “trade, investment, technology and innovation, peace and security, and sustainable development.”

Yet Ruto’s critics have called attention to the delayed messaging. “Trump win is bad news to the ruto administration. Trump abhors foreign aid as a means of developing africa . He will not meet ruto to dish out free sanitary towels and mosquito nets,” Kenyan MP Caleb Amisi wrote in a post on X. “Kenya will now be forced to work hard and stop over reliance on Western economic bloc!”

A trade and investment partnership with Kenya was slated to be finalized by the Biden administration next month, including investments in agriculture, climate resilience, and improving governance. The deal replaced formal trade negotiations undertaken by the first Trump administration in 2020 that emphasized U.S. access to Kenya’s wheat market and cooperation with small businesses.

It’s unclear whether Trump will revert to his more transactional trade proposal. Kenyan Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi on Friday sought to dampen fears. “American policy generally doesn’t change much whether the White House is held by a Republican or a Democrat,” Mbadi said. “Our current engagement is more at the multilateral level. The U.S. supports the World Bank, from which we receive assistance.”

Movie fans know that sequels are rarely any good, and they often take a darker turn than the original. The first installment of Trump as President was disappointing to many and fatal for some, which explains why he lost the 2020 election. The remake is going to be worse—here are the top 10 implications of the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

U.S. politics is a mystery. If it wasn’t clear already, it is now crushingly obvious that nobody understands how U.S. electoral politics works and that much of the conventional wisdom on the subject is dead wrong. Polls aren’t reliable, truisms about the importance of a “ground game” don’t apply, and all the smart people who thought they knew what would happen weren’t just wrong but off by a lot. As in 2016, I suspect former U.S. President Donald Trump and his team were as surprised as the rest of us. My crude take is that U.S. elites are still underestimating how much white-hot anger and fear is out there in the body politic, much of it directed at them. There will be reams of post-hoc analysis explaining what went wrong for the Democrats and why the experts missed it yet again, but these same “experts” have had eight years to figure this out and are still at sea.

Trump will be unpredictable. Well, duh. Trump sees unpredictability as an asset that keeps others off balance, and his well-deserved reputation for erratic behavior makes it harder to criticize him for being inconsistent. For this reason, nobody—including his supporters—should be confident that they know exactly what he’ll do. It’s a safe bet that he won’t do anything that isn’t in his personal political and financial interest, but how that translates into policy is impossible to fathom. He said a lot of crazy things during his campaign, but how much of it was bluster and bluff and how much was sincere remains to be seen.

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The United States has chosen former President Donald Trump as commander in chief once more. Here’s what we know about Trump’s plans for the Pentagon during his second term in office.

Domestic deployment? Trump has repeatedly spoken about using the U.S. military on domestic soil for a host of law enforcement purposes, including securing the southern border with Mexico, policing civil unrest, cracking down on crime in cities such as Chicago, and even pursuing his political opponents. 

A long-standing law known as the Posse Comitatus Act bars federal troops from participating in almost all civilian law enforcement roles, but the 1807 Insurrection Act offers some exceptions if needed to quash a rebellion. 

An American Iron Dome. On the campaign trail, Trump spoke repeatedly about building an Iron Dome missile defense shield—which was also included in the Republican Party platform this year. 

But critics of Trump’s proposal have noted that building such a system to defend the entire United States would cost a fortune, and it would be of little use intercepting medium- and long-range missiles fired by Russia or North Korea.

Schedule F. Trump had vowed on the campaign trail to revive efforts to strip job protections from thousands of federal civil servants in policymaking roles, which will also expand to the Pentagon. Trump’s promise to pursue “rogue bureaucrats” has raised fears that the move could be used to politicize the federal workforce. 

Goodbye DEI. During a campaign event in October, Trump said he would create a task force to monitor “woke generals” and eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion training. He is also likely to reinstate a ban on transgender people serving in the armed forces and has promised to restore Confederate names to U.S. military bases. 

Washington is deep in the throes of its favorite parlor game—trading gossip on who is set to serve in the second Trump administration.

Here’s a look at who is confirmed, rumored, and vying for a top job—and who has turned them down. A word of caution: Two days after the election, almost everything is informed speculation at this point.

Brian Hook, who served as the director of policy planning and special envoy for Iran in the first Trump administration, is expected to lead the transition team at the State Department, CNN reports.

Robert Wilkie, the former Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, is running point on the Pentagon’s transition team, Politico reports.

Peter Deutsch, a former Democratic U.S. representative from Florida has expressed interest in becoming the next U.S. ambassador to Israel, Jewish Insider reports.

Sen. Tom Cotton has said he would not accept an offer of a cabinet position, despite being a top contender, Axios scoops.

Politico reports that Sens. Marco Rubio and Bill Hagerty and former acting National Intelligence Director Ric Grenell have been mentioned as potential contenders for secretary of state.

Other names that we’re hearing as likely contenders for senior positions include the following: Florida Rep. Mike Waltz, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former chief of staff on the National Security Council Keith Kellogg, former chief of staff to the acting Defense Secretary Kash Patel, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, former National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, and former Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary Elbridge Colby.

U.S. voters have given President-elect Donald Trump a mandate to govern the United States, but his policies are certain to influence the entire world. It’s possible to speculate on the potential effects based on Trump’s first term as president. But his agenda is now more extreme, and his power less restrained.

Is Europe any more prepared than it was eight years ago to contend with a Trump presidency? What does another Trump administration mean for global climate policy? And what is China’s view on the U.S. election?

Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.

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The clearest change that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is likely to make on foreign policy is in Ukraine. Republican support for spending more on sending weapons to Kyiv has been declining, and Trump will probably follow through on his promise to seek a peace deal. 

The problem is that peace will likely come at terms that do not favor Kyiv. Now, Ukraine’s military losses have begun to mount, and the practical barriers to continued support to Ukraine—declining Western stockpiles, Ukraine’s significant manpower and corruption problems—have increased. Trump has a popular mandate to seek a settlement, even though Europeans might object. 

What, then, would a settlement in Ukraine look like? The territorial question will be settled by facts on the ground: Russia’s recent gains suggest that this will be worse for Ukraine than it would have been a year ago. The Kursk incursion could give the Ukrainians some leverage, but only if they can succeed in holding it.

Then there are the bigger strategic questions. Kyiv insists that any peace deal must include a security guarantee, ideally via NATO; Russia isn’t likely to tolerate this. Despite what Ukrainian leaders say publicly, a minimum acceptable deal for Kyiv might look more like Ukrainian sovereignty, the ability to arm itself with Western help, and economic integration into Europe. 

Trump is well placed to put pressure on Kyiv, but he and his advisors should be under no illusions that they can force Kyiv to the negotiating table. 

It’s possible that whatever deal is negotiated—particularly if it is negotiated over the heads of Ukrainians—would be politically unacceptable to the Zelensky government. Kyiv might opt to keep fighting and seek European support instead.

For the Trump administration, the choice would be whether to continue to support Ukraine or to step back and drop the problem on Washington’s European allies.