Trump Claiming New World Order In First 100 Days

Trump may inaccurately hype up China's role in the Panama Canal, but Beijing has unquestionably increased its (mostly economic) footprint in Latin America. A Chinese-funded deep-water port in Peru has raised US security concerns.

Chinese investment in Mexico has created an important back door into the US market, and contributed to the fact that Mexico is now the largest trade partner for the US. In 2024, Mexican exports of goods to the US stood at just under US$467 billion, compared with China's $401 billion.

Trump is likely to dial up the pressure in the Western hemisphere using a mixture of threatening rhetoric, tariffs and political pressure.

In an early demonstration of how seriously the incoming administration takes the issue, his allies in Congress have already introduced a bill in the House of Representatives to“authorize the President to seek to enter into negotiations with the Kingdom of Denmark to secure the acquisition of Greenland by the United States”

The second feature of the emerging Trump foreign policy doctrine is the scaling back of US involvement in regions the administration considers of secondary importance. The two main areas in this context are Europe and the Middle East.

Trump's promised deal with Russia to end the war in Ukraine is one key component of his strategy to free up US resources to focus on China and“un-unite” Russia and China.

His simultaneous insistence that US allies in NATO step up their defense spending, however, is an indication that the incoming administration continues to place value in transatlantic security.

It just does not want to be the one mostly paying for it. And Trump has a point: Washington currently shoulders 68% of all NATO expenditure, compared with European members' 28%.

Trump's approach to the Middle East is underpinned by the same calculation of US-brokered deal-making that protects US interests while enabling a scaling down of commitments.

With a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas now in place that will facilitate the release of Israeli hostages, a much clearer path to normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia exists. This is still contingent upon an Israeli nod towards Palestinian statehood, but when this materializes, Israel's relations with the rest of the Arab world will also improve.

This will then shift the burden of containing Iran to a probably more effective and capable coalition of US allies in the region, and allow Washington to resume its maximum-pressure campaign against Tehran.

While Trump's approach to the Western hemisphere and to Washington's future relations with Europe and the Middle East is reasonably clear, there is an abundance of questions about his China strategy. His national security team is generally considered hawkish on Beijing – with the exception of Musk, who has significant business interests in China.

Trump himself oscillates between aggressive and conciliatory rhetoric. Alleged Chinese control of the Panama Canal is one of his justifications for seeking to reassert US control of the strategic waterway. But he also name-checked Chinese President Xi Jinping as being able to help with a Ukraine deal and even invited him to his inauguration.

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Trump may be open to a deal with China – and China, in turn, has signaled interest in this as well. While Xi will not attend the inauguration, his vice-president, Han Zheng, will .

Trump and Xi also have a track record of deal-making, even though their 2020 agreement did little more than stop an escalating trade war. That deal took two years to negotiate and left many of the tariffs imposed by Trump early in his first term in place, albeit in some cases at a reduced rate.

Something similar could happen again now, with Trump fulfilling one of his campaign pledges for higher tariffs on Chinese goods while simultaneously starting negotiations on a new deal with Beijing.

In all likelihood, this is Trump's last term as president. For the next two years, at least, he controls both the Senate and the House of Representatives . He has every incentive to make good on his promises – and faces few, if any, restraints. He sees himself as a disrupter, and his MAGA base expects him to be just that. Instability is all but guaranteed.

What is not clear, though, is whether Trump's vision of an ultimately more stable international order with clearly defined spheres of influence for the great powers of the day – the US, China and possibly Russia – will emerge, let alone whether such an outcome would be desirable.

Stefan Wolff is a professor of international security at the University of Birmingham .

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

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