PoliticsJuly 29, 2024

The likely Trump-Vance approach to foreign policy and Europe

James Jay Carafano

Reading time: 10 min

American policy under a conservative president will focus on strategic alliances, emphasizing nuanced approaches in Europe to global challenges.

Claims that United States policy under a Republican president would presumptively abandon NATO or Ukraine are wrong. The outcome of U.S. national elections in November is often framed as a Manichean choice of turning away from Europe or maintaining business as usual. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Future American policy, particularly under a conservative presidency, is likely to be much more nuanced and consistent with U.S. vital interests in the fast-changing global scene.

Weight of strategy and reality

Now, of all times since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. can least afford to ignore its core strategic interests. The next president will be saddled with a massive public debt and the need to both lower inflation and deliver economic growth.

America’s most significant adversarial challenges have changed little over decades. Different as their demeanors and politics may have been, both Democratic and Republican presidents have all had to deal with the disruptive influence and actions of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea as the centerpieces of their national security policies, albeit using varied tools to meet these challenges.

Furthermore, the American presidency has the added difficulty of ensuring that Washington maintains a coherent and sustained strategy for dealing with the rest of the world. The next president will face no different a situation – a complex set of issues that cannot be adequately addressed simply through the lens of one-dimensional isolationist, neoconservative or globalist foreign policy.

The center of gravity of U.S. policy will be in countering China, and that context will significantly affect how the team of former President Donald Trump and U.S. Senator J.D. Vance would address all the regional challenges. At the core of disparate foreign policy issues is the reality that Europe, the Middle East, the Indo-Pacific and the pathways that connect them remain indisputably critical strategic ground for the U.S. None of them can be ignored.

Putting the presidency in perspective

The debate in the U.S. of withdrawing from some theaters to focus on others is vacuous, if for no other reason than that it has been tried before and failed. President Barack Obama first announced the U.S. pivot to Asia, yet he spent most of his presidency bogged down in dealing with Middle East issues.

President Trump also exerted an inordinate amount of effort pressing for NATO reform to ensure treaty partners were sufficiently funding the defense of the alliance.

In his first term, President Trump never seriously attempted to disengage from any of these theaters. In fact, he invested much effort in the Middle East, with maximum pressure on Iran, worked toward Arab-Israeli rapprochement through the Abraham Accords between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and between Israel and Bahrain, as well as the Israel-Morocco normalization agreement.

President Trump also exerted an inordinate amount of effort pressing for NATO reform to ensure treaty partners were sufficiently funding the defense of the alliance. President Joe Biden entered office with the intent of a lighter footprint in Europe and the Middle East, yet most of his presidency has been consumed by wars in both regions.

The most logical path for U.S. strategy in the next four years would be to remain consistent with President Trump’s first term and seek to stabilize the European and Middle Eastern theaters to free up resources for the Indo-Pacific region.

Understanding Trump policy through historical comparison

U.S. strategy during World War II offers an analogy for what is most likely to emerge from a Trump-Vance administration. While America’s ends are different (total victory then, deterrence now), and ways and means have evolved, there are striking similarities.

Like the contemporary situation, in World War II, the U.S. faced adversaries in multiple key theaters without sufficient resources to address them all fully and simultaneously. The predicament, then as now, was how to prioritize; the U.S. could not afford to abdicate its interests in any major region, as that would immeasurably increase American strategic vulnerability.

Read more on national security and foreign policy by James Jay Carafano

• The Quad eyeing Indo-Pacific security
• The U.S. perspective on Black Sea security
• The ebb and flow of the Three Seas Initiative
• The implications of America’s anti-China tech moves

The Allied strategy against the Axis powers then was to defeat Nazi Germany first. However, in the first year of U.S. participation in the war, America sent more resources and troops to Asia. The reason was that the Allies needed to stabilize that theater (prevent Tokyo from securing the first and second island chains) so that they could later return and defeat the Empire of Japan.

Similarly, the U.S. will now find that the only way it can muster significantly more resources for the Indo-Pacific theater is to stabilize the European and Middle Eastern fronts.

A defensible Europe

The first key task in Europe is to create a stable and better-armed eastern front of NATO territory that can deter Russian conventional aggression. Much of this effort is expected to come not from a change in U.S. posture, but through strengthening European defenses.

Due to developments within the alliance in the last three and a half years, President Trump, in a second term, will find a more defensible NATO frontier with more strategic depth than when he was first president. On NATO’s eastern flank, Russia now faces an alliance including Finland and Sweden, a rearming Poland and Romania, and a heavily engaged Ukrainian military reinforced by NATO members’ contributions in materiel, training and funds, which have also been supplied by Japan, South Korea and other like-minded states.

At the same time, Russia’s capacity for conventional military operations, even with the support of China and Iran, is under stress. Pavel Luzin, an expert on the Russian military, stated that “at the current rate of combat losses, the capacity to repair tanks and infantry fighting vehicles taken from stockpiles will be exhausted in about a year, by the second half of 2025.” At the same time, more European nations are investing in their militaries and defense procurement, as Mr. Trump and other U.S. presidents have long insisted.

Europe needs economic health to fund defense outlays

A second requirement for a defensible NATO eastern flank is reviving European economies so they can afford defense spending and deter malicious Russian and Chinese influence.

That will require, in particular, assuring reliable, abundant and affordable energy supplies. A Trump-Vance administration would aim to contribute to this. President Trump’s policies would prioritize U.S. gas and oil production and exports and provide support for the energy projects of friends and allies, such as those proposed by the Three Seas Initiative in Central Europe.

In addition, a second Trump administration would eschew policies that the president believes promote the green transition only superficially, contributing little to improved environmental outcomes while undercutting economic growth and productivity. In general, the Trump-Vance policy will steer the transatlantic community away from strategic dependencies on China and Russia.

Stemming the import of crises to Europe

To stabilize NATO security and prevent problems of the Middle East and Africa from spilling over and threatening Europe, a Trump-Vance administration would almost assuredly, as one of their first foreign policy initiatives, move to revise U.S. policy on the Middle East. That would entail shifting to aggressive containment of Iran, stronger partnering with Israel and reenergizing lost momentum from the Abraham Accords, following the cooling of Arab-Israeli relations in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel and the resulting conflict in Gaza.

Furthermore, the Trump-Vance team will seek pragmatic actions to address security and economic challenges in Africa and will seek European and regional contributions to this end.

Politics of U.S. support for Ukraine

Ukraine has decidedly not been a top-tier issue in the presidential campaign, and that is unlikely to change in the months ahead. The central point of contention on this topic among conservatives is how the Biden administration has managed support for Ukraine. Many conservatives believe President Biden is just throwing taxpayer money at the problem without a plan or a clear and suitable end objective. Some fear that Mr. Biden’s policies might actually lead to a broader war.

Supporters of Mr. Trump and Republican members of the U.S. Congress expect, above all, not just a commitment from President Trump to do better but also deliver a plan that safeguards the vital interests of the U.S. There is, however, no consensus on a specific strategy yet. They will expect the Trump administration to come up with one.

Formulating clear end goals for the conflict in Ukraine would allow the administration both flexibility and political support in choosing its next steps in other areas of foreign policy. There is no groundswell among U.S. conservatives to walk away from Europe. However, neither is there an interest in direct U.S. military involvement or a prolonged muscular response from the next president.

For industry-specific scenarios and bespoke geopolitical intelligence, contact us and we will provide you with more information about our advisory services.

Sign up for our newsletter

Receive insights from our experts every week in your inbox.

Email*

Subscribe

Agreement GDPR

We may inform you about events and products by e-mail or other electronic means.

Information about what personal data we collect about you and how we process it (including information about how we personalize our website for you and deliver content tailored to you) can be found in our privacy policy.