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Analysis
President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with House Republicans at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Washington, DC, on Nov. 13, 2024.
For months on the campaign trail and in a crescendo last week at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump has made promises to American voters. On foreign policy, this list includes everything from ending the war in Ukraine within six months of taking office and imposing “all hell” if the Israeli hostages are not released before Inauguration Day (with a ceasefire deal coming into view) to his more recent discussions about taking control of the Panama Canal.
In anticipation of Trump’s return, the world has been packing their go-bags and considering how best to prepare. The Trump administration the world has been preparing for, however, may not be the one it gets. It is becoming increasingly clear how distinctly different Trump’s current worldview is than what came before him – including what he envisioned during his first term.
Differing tactics
Unlike the administration of Joe Biden, which leaned heavily on consensus building, non-binding partnerships like the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue and negotiations ad infinitum, Trump’s tactics have always been different. The businessman-president trades in grievances. He looks for the points of disparity and deploys (largely economic) tools like tariffs and sanctions to bring his “adversaries” closer to his preferred position – and to advance what he sees as America’s best interests. During his first term, for instance, Trump walked back a threat to impose tariffs on Mexico’s goods only after its government agreed to a deal stemming the flow of migrants along the southwestern border.
From his post-election personnel decisions, policy proposals, and posts on Truth Social, it seems clear Trump will continue to deploy these tactics in his second term. But what is also emerging is a Trump foreign policy agenda that’s radically different from Trump 1.0. Then “America First” focused on immigration, bringing jobs and manufacturing home, with a significant focus on reorienting global supply chains. With the exception of the January 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani, Trump largely avoided telegraphed security operations.
An aspirational agenda
Now, Trump has seemingly set his sights on a much more ambitious set of priorities. In 2025, Trump is speaking of the dawn of “the golden age of America.” Making America Great Again looks less like an isolationist story and more like a no-stone-uncovered one. As Trump scans the horizon looking for the angles, he has put his neighborhood, Europe, and the world on notice that almost nowhere will go unconsidered.
To the North, Trump’s December announcement that he would impose 25% tariffs on Canada set off a chain reaction that ultimately led to an already-fragile Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s resignation. Trump’s repeated barbs about Canada becoming the 51st US state and musings about removing the “artificial line” separating the two countries have continued to destabilize the political landscape. Canadian officials are reportedly drawing up their own list of American products to tariff should Trump make a move. To the South, Mexico has also been forced to respond to Trump's tariff and border vows. After he suggested renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, President Claudia Sheinbaum went tit-for-tat with Trump proposing to call the US, America Mexicana.
Across the Atlantic Ocean, headline-grabbing claims about acquiring Greenland initially generated chuckles in Europe. His threat to tariff Denmark at a very high level to open the door for negotiations over Greenland is Trump 1.0. His articulated vision of needing Greenland for national security purposes (and ultimately access to the Arctic’s resources) while refusing to rule out the use of military coercion are hallmarks of the emerging new Trump foreign policy.
In Trump 2.0, anywhere is up for grabs (a real estate deal), and economic tools of national security will be backed up by more traditional force posturing. The lesson of the moment appears to be that the best countries can hope for is to stay out of Trump’s crosshairs. America’s EU allies, for their part, have responded by taking Trump’s ideas increasingly seriously. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot issued reminders of the inviolability of European borders, but European capitals are rattled.
In his news conference last week, Trump speculated that “since we won the election the whole perception of the whole world is different.” It is not just the case that the US and its voters may see themselves differently since Trump’s reelection, but the world has somehow been changed by it.
Still, according to Trump, “big problems remain that need to be settled.” The president-elect has spent the post-election period throwing up dozens of foreign policy trial balloons to clarify how he would like to see these problems settled. As the clock winds down to his inauguration, Trump’s more grandiose foreign policy vision may soon move many targets into the eye of the storm.
Lindsay Newman is a geopolitical risk expert and columnist for GZERO.
On Monday, the US Commerce Department announced new export controls on advanced chips used to train and run artificial intelligence, the latest in a series of increasingly tough restrictions enacted by the Biden administration in the past few years. It’s primarily a mechanism for maintaining American dominance in artificial intelligence while also cutting off adversaries — first and foremost China — from access to the chips they need to level the playing field commercially and militarily.
Under the new export regime, the US will use a three-tier system: Companies from the US and 18 close allies, including the UK, Germany, and Japan, are fully free to buy these chips. Those from countries subject to US arms embargo, such as China and Russia, are completely cut off from acquiring high-powered chips. And countries from every other country will face a set cap restricting the number of AI processors they can buy each year without special permission. This latter group even includes strategic partners such as Mexico, Switzerland, and Israel.
“This policy will help build a trusted technology ecosystem around the world and allow us to protect against the national security risks associated with AI, while ensuring controls do not stifle innovation or US technological leadership,” US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said in a press release.
But the chip industry isn’t happy — particularly America’s most important chip designer, Nvidia, which said that the rules are “misguided.”
“While cloaked in the guise of an ‘anti-China’ measure, these rules would do nothing to enhance US security,” Ned Finkle, Nvidia’s vice president of government affairs, wrote in a statement. “Rather than mitigate any threat, the new Biden rules would only weaken America’s global competitiveness, undermining the innovation that has kept the US ahead.” The Semiconductor Industry Association criticized the timing — just days before the presidential transition.
Tinglong Dai, a professor at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, said that US companies are increasingly aligned with national security concerns and “face ever greater challenges to making a profit or even operating in China.” In that way, he said he expects that short-term discomfort will give way to companies falling in line with national security priorities.
Xiaomeng Lu, director of geo-technology at Eurasia Group, expressed concern about implementation. “Under this regime, only a small number of trusted allies have unrestricted access to high-end semiconductors,” she said. “Data centers located in over 100 countries will have to apply for licenses through an onerous process, even if they are owned and operated by US cloud service providers.” She added that the rules could discourage many countries from buying US products.
“This rule is not just about China, but it may make China’s chip smuggling efforts more difficult,” said Jacob Feldgoise, a data research analyst at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. “The regulation could hurt American businesses, including AI chip companies and cloud service providers, but perhaps more importantly, the rule may hurt the United States’ relationship with a set of allies to which the rule didn’t give preferential treatment.”
Jeremy Mark, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center, said that China is deeply embedded in the semiconductor supply chain, such as supplying important rare earth metals to chip makers. In this way, the US is risking a “serious trade conflict” in further cutting off China.
But there may be more to the story. “There has been clear, bipartisan support in Washington for export controls, and that has empowered several government agencies to act,” Mark said. “However, it’s not clear how much the latest initiatives have been driven by a White House decision to hand Trump a fait accompli.”
Trump won’t want to appear weak on China, but he also doesn’t want to alienate important industry players. Dai said he expects Trump to maintain a tough stance on China and to “tweak the current export rules — because he’s Trump after all.” The rule doesn’t go into effect for companies until May 15, Feldgoise noted, giving Trump time to revise the rules if needed.
As for China, the country is forging ahead even without access to the top chips. Recently, the Chinese startup DeepSeek released an open-source large language model that has impressed outsiders. This development proves it’s “possible to build a quality model with less advanced chips,” Lu said. Meanwhile, the new Commerce Department restrictions will “undermine US companies’ competitiveness in the face of robust competition from China,” she adds.Buildings lie in ruin in North Gaza, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, as seen from Israel, January 13, 2025.
It’s been three months since Israeli forces killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in a Gaza raid. Since then, his younger brother Mohammed has taken the reins.
What is known about him? He is believed to be about 50 and to have been a member of Hamas since his youth. According to reports, he isn’t nearly as familiar to the Israelis as Yahya, who spent decades in Israeli prisons before his 2011 release as part of a hostage swap deal with Hamas. Israeli security officials refer to Mohammed as “the Shadow.”
Why it matters: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged to destroy Hamas as a prerequisite for ending the military campaign and allowing the formation of a new Gaza government. Hamas, for obvious reasons, rejects these conditions.
But after 15 months of war – which has reduced Gaza to rubble, displaced some 2 million people, and killed tens of thousands – that goal is elusive. A crippled Hamas remains active, especially in Northern Gaza, which Israel claimed earlier to have rid of the group.
Ceasefire, you say? The waning days of the Biden administration have seen a whirlwind of diplomacy to secure a deal that releases the remaining hostages held by Hamas, but key differences remain over the phasing of a ceasefire and conditions for Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza. Incoming president Donald Trumphas warned that unless a deal is reached ahead of his inauguration, “all hell will break loose.”
An aging, visibly infirm president is about to hand off power to an authoritarian-minded successor with a mandate to restore “order” and “sovereignty.”
Sound familiar? Da. It’s New Year’s Eve 1999, and a bloated, barely intelligible Boris Yeltsin is handing the Kremlin over to a shifty young spook named Vladimir Putin. “Take care of Russia,” he famously said before staggering out of the room.
When Vladimir Vladimirovich first took power 25 years ago, the world was a different place. Cell phones weren’t smart yet. Lou Bega was burning up the charts with “Mambo Number Five.” The most feared hacking group in the world wasn’t called “Fancy Bear” or “Salt Typhoon” but “Napster.”
It was also a world in which the US was at the pinnacle of its post-Cold War triumphalism. The disputed elections, disastrous wars, and crippling financial crises of the 21st century were still – just barely – in the future.
History had ended, or at least been paused. Uncle Sam had won the Cold War. Free markets, free trade, and liberal democracy were on the march globally, gloriously, and inevitably. So too, it seemed, was NATO, which began expanding eastward in the 1990s.
Putin did not like this world. From his perspective it was a world that treated Russia either as an afterthought or as a charity case. He resented the high-handed moralizing from the West about “democracy.” He dreamed of a “multipolar” world where the US couldn’t boss Russia around or humiliate the Kremlin and its friends.
Now, five US presidents, three Russian invasions, and countless predictions of his demise later, Putin is still standing. And as a result, he has lasted long enough to witness the return of Donald Trump to the White House – this time not with an asterisk but with a mandate.
In a way, Trump’s return means Putin has finally won. Not because of the silly notion that Trump is a “Russian agent” – but because it closes the door, finally and fully, on the post-Cold War era that Putin confronted when he first came to power.
Trumpism is, at its core, a rebuke to all the pieties of that era: that globalism would trump nationalism, that free trade and open societies had an inherent appeal, and that there were international “norms” that the US was responsible for policing.
Trump, whether you like him or not, isn’t interested in a high-handed foreign policy based on abstract “values.” He doesn’t care whether Russia is a democracy or an empire. He questions the net benefit of decades-old US alliances like NATO. He has already blown apart what Robert Lighthizer, his first-term trade czar, calls the “free trade theology” that held sway in Washington for decades.
His worldview is a zero-sum, mercantilist, hyper-nationalistic one. Putin, in many ways, can relate. When Trump talks about using force to take over the Panama Canal, Greenland, or Canada because these things would be in America’s national interest as a hemispheric power, for example, he is speaking a political language from before the “end of history.” This is a language Putin speaks fluently. Panama isn’t quite Crimea, but you get the idea.
At his annual marathon press conference a few weeks ago, Putin reflected on the past quarter century, telling BBC’s journalist Steve Rosenberg that he was proud to have “pulled Russia back from the abyss,” after inheriting a deeply indebted, politically fragmented, and listless country from Yeltsin.
Perhaps that’s true, but Russia today is a country locked in a costly conflict of Putin’s choosing, with a shrinking and aging population, a war-warped economy, and a flagging technological base. Shorn of its traditional partners in Europe, Moscow is increasingly dependent either on rogue pariahs like North Korea and Iran, or a superpower China that dwarfs Russia in economic and military capacity.
Over the past 25 years, Putin outlasted the “post-Cold War” world that he resented. But it’s less obvious that he has “taken care of Russia” well enough for it to thrive and prosper over the next quarter century of whatever comes next.
Justin Trudeau is leaving you, Donald Trump is coming for you.
The timing couldn’t be worse. The threat couldn’t be bigger. The solutions couldn’t be more elusive.
Canada and the US are headed for a serious and economically dangerous trade war in less than two weeks, and President-elect Donald Trump, seeing Canada in a vulnerable leadership moment, smells blood.
In politics, as in most things, there is no opponent more powerful than time and, after nine years in power, time crushed Justin Trudeau’s political career. The “Sunny Ways” majority government of 2015 for Trudeau gave way to the medieval darkness of his current minority government, beset by dire polls, recurring scandals, and painful internal betrayals. What happened?
In short, there were no new policy ideas to bring back the light. The list of victories that Trudeau mentioned in his resignation speech (some genuinely transformative, others still deeply divisive) — the Canada Child Benefit that lifted over 300,000 children out of poverty (child poverty rates in Canada are now going back up), the first G7 country to put a price on carbon, renegotiating NAFTA, leading the country through the pandemic, legalizing cannabis and medically assisted dying, negotiating a health accord with the provinces, bringing in universal daycare — all these were, in the end, not nearly enough. Politics is all about tomorrow, not yesterday, and the tomorrow promise of Trudeau, once his brand, was gone.
Since the pandemic, Trudeau has been, like incumbents around the world, on his back foot on the trinity of core issues galvanizing populist support: inflation, immigration, and housing prices. His policies to address these were reactive, well behind the instincts of the leader of the official opposition, Pierre Poilievre. It didn’t help that the fiscal guardrails Trudeau had set up were blown. The Liberals were more than CA$20 billion past their target ahead of the fall fiscal update, an update his finance minister was set to give on Dec. 16. Instead, she dropped a radioactive resignation letter that very morning, pointing to Trudeau’s fiscal strategies as “costly political gimmicks” — and laying bare the internal divisions within the Cabinet. He was out of supporters, out of ideas, and looked out of touch.
It finally ended on Monday, an icy Ottawa day with the kind of cold that you can almost grab with a gloved hand and snap over your knee. The prime minister stood alone in front of the cottage where he had done so many press conferences during the pandemic and where I recall sitting to interview a gray-bearded version of him on a similarly frigid winter day back in 2020. Now, he was notably different. Stripped of the pretense and dramatics that sometimes characterized his tenure, he presented a more authentic version of the man most Canadians had long ago lost sight of, telling them that he was resigning as leader and prime minister.
For a boy born on Christmas Day, the pathetic fallacies that marked Justin Trudeau’s life had one last small signal to send. Just before he left the shelter of the cottage to make his resignation announcement, a gust of wind suddenly blew his speech off the podium, papers scattering into the January air. It was over.
For his party, Trudeau’s departure could not come soon enough, and while Liberal Party leaders are still dithering on the rules for a leadership race, the math is cruel. Parliament is prorogued — suspended — until March 24, on Trudeau’s orders. There will be a confidence vote soon after, so expect a Canadian federal election to kick off immediately and run into May. In other words, Trudeau gave the next leader a short runway — more like a cliff. The next PM will barely have time to find the bathrooms and grab a cup of coffee before they will have to hit the hustings and try to climb out of the political hole that finds them 25 points behind the Conservatives.
For Canada, this could not come at a worse time. In less than two weeks, Trump will be sworn in as US president, and he has promised to slap Canada with 25% tariffs and use “economic force” to try to absorb the country as the 51st state.
As I wrote last year, Trump’s threat to absorb Canada as the 51st state has gone from a joke to a trial balloon — and it is quickly becoming a policy goal.
Trump the Isolationist has looped inside out and become Trump the Expansionist, with designs on Greenland, Canada, and Panama. His foreign policy for Central America is basically now the famous palindrome: a man, a plan, a canal, Panama.
Is he serious?
Yes.
Always take the president of the United States seriously, especially when he says he’s being serious. He may be using aggressive rhetoric as a negotiating tool to get better deals, but the threats are very real. Trump believes in tariffs like a priest believes in God.
When Trump threatens to beggar Canada with the economic force of 25% tariffs, it is the ONLY THING THAT MATTERS.
Canadian industry is bracing for a dramatic, painful economic shock. From. Its. Closest. Biggest. Trading. Partner.
All this lines up perfectly with the Top Risks of 2025 that our parent company, Eurasia Group, released this week, as you have read about. Risks such as Trumponomics — high tariffs on all allies and foes — mixed with the risk of The Rule of Don, a mercurial leader who has destroyed norms and wants the rule of the jungle over the rule law, is a lethal combination for a middle power country like Canada.
The rules-based international order is the architecture of the multilateral world, one that the US built in its own image after World War II and, until now, has been the backstop. This order has led to incredible prosperity for both the US and Canada, and billions of others. It is now disappearing faster than the fact-checkers at Meta.
As Trump throws economic bombs, Canada will have to muddle through the next three to five months without a leader who has a national mandate, leaving premiers like Ontario’s Doug Ford to lead the fight. And credit to him: Ford, so far, has done a superb job defending his province and speaking out.
Trump is coming for Canada and wants it to be the 51st state, in part or in whole — and if there was ever a time for someone to prove they have the stuff for leadership in a time of crisis, it is now. To twist an old expression, it is the 51st or fight.
Canadians better be up for a fight.
Is international order on the precipice of collapse? 2025 is poised to be a turbulent year for the geopolitical landscape. From Canada and South Korea to Japan and Germany, the world faces a “deepening and rare absence of global leadership with more chaos than any time since the 1930s,” says Eurasia Group chairman Cliff Kupchan during a GZERO livestream to discuss the 2025 Top Risks report. Kupchan highlights that the US is at the heart of it. He warns that it is a country that has “abdicated its throne,” which has created a dynamic that is “very prone to vacuums and misperceptions.” With no other country willing or able to take the reins and lead, the world is left in a vulnerable position facing unprecedented geopolitical risks.
Take a deep dive with the panel in our full discussion, livestreamed on Jan. 6 here.
It has been a long time since the United States got any bigger.
In the 19th century, the American governing class believed in Manifest Destiny — that the country should govern the whole continent, spreading democracy and capitalism — and the young republic acquired Alaska and much of Mexico. Recently, though, Americans have seemed happy with their territorial limits.
On Tuesday, Donald Trump signaled that this may be about to change. In a news conference at Mar-a-Lago, the soon-to-be president expressed the desire to acquire Greenland, reacquire the Panama Canal — by force, if necessary — and use “economic force” to acquire Canada.
Observers do not think he can seriously intend to absorb his northern neighbor, but it’s hard to be entirely confident.
Trump has been teasingly calling Justin Trudeau “governor” for weeks and cracking jokes about making Canada the 51st US state, but his tone on Tuesday was different. He sounded serious.
Trump referred to the Canada-US border as an “artificially drawn line” and complained about the cost of the relationship with the United States.
“We don’t need their cars,” he said. “You know, they make 20% of our cars. We don’t need that. I’d rather make them in Detroit. We don’t need their cars. We don’t need their lumber. We have massive fields of lumber. We don’t need their lumber. We don’t need their dairy products. We have more than they have.”
Trump said he would impose “very serious tariffs on Mexico and Canada,” and complained about drugs and migrants crossing both borders.
Since Trump first threatened to hit both countries with tariffs in November, Canadians have shown signs of distress. Premiers, fearing the impact on exports to the United States, have urged Ottawa to cooperate on the border, and Trudeau flew down to Mar-a-Lago to kick-start talks. Canada rushed to present a border plan. But even as they sought to placate Trump, the president-elect increased the intensity of his rhetoric.
Snowball’s chance …
After Tuesday’s news conference, Canadian leaders responded by telling Trump that Canada is not interested in joining the United States — an idea that is just not that popular.
“There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States,” Trudeau tweeted.
“Canada will never be the 51st state,” tweeted Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre. “Period.”
“Cut the crap, Donald,” tweeted the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh. “No Canadian wants to join you.
Canadian commentators also expressed that they were shocked and appalled by Trump’s suggestion.
South of the border, though, Trump’s supporters were cheering him on. Matt Walsh, Jack Posobiec, and Jesse Waters all want to conquer Canada.
It is hard to know how seriously to take any of this.
How serious is he?
Trump’s complaints about Canada seem manufactured. Little fentanyl comes across the northern border. The $100 billion trade deficit that Trump gripes about is largely the result of oil and gas exports, which help keep US gas prices low at the pumps. If the Americans don’t want it, Canada could find other markets. Imposing tariffs would wreck the Canadian economy, but it would also damage American interests, especially if Canada imposed retaliatory tariffs on, for example, Florida orange juice.
But some well-connected people are rattled by Trump’s talk. Could he plan to wreak havoc with the Canadian economy? Will he try to divide and conquer by offering oil-rich Alberta the chance to join its biggest market, creating a Donbas on the 49th parallel? Utah GOP Sen. Mike Lee joked that the United States might like to take Alberta and leave the rest.
But it doesn’t seem like the MAGA movement would want Canada. Its left-leaning voters would make it hard for any future Republican to win the presidency. English Canadians have been struggling to accommodate prickly French Canadians since the country was founded.
What does MAGA want? So this doesn’t look like a practical proposal, and in the same news conference, Trump sounded unhinged, opining that windmills are driving whales crazy, for example.
The best-informed observers doubt that he is serious about annexing Canada.
“I think he is rattling cages so that he can expand the boundary of acceptable outcomes,” says Eurasia Group Vice Chairman Gerald Butts, who, as a senior adviser to Trudeau, negotiated with Trump. “Something like, sorry we screwed up your auto industry and dairy market, but at least you still have a country.”
“Trump’s threats against Canada seem less than serious as of now, though his comments about Panama and Greenland should not be dismissed,” says Clayton Allen, Eurasia Group’s US director. “Those are a clear effort to expand the range of potential actions and have in-built strategic benefits which Trump or those in his orbit view seriously.”
“He’s negotiating like a real estate developer negotiates,” says Jamie Tronnes, executive director of the Center for North American Prosperity and Security. “He sees a bunch of land and thinks it would be really cool to have his name on it, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
“Trump is softening his targets up for negotiations to come,” says Graeme Thompson, a senior analyst with Eurasia Group. “He’s obviously serious about getting concessions on trade issues and the border, and he’s very happy to continue poking where he finds weakness.”
He has found it in Ottawa. Trudeau, who announced his resignation on Monday, could not be weaker. For the next few months, most of his best people will be occupied by the race to succeed him, and then whomever they choose will likely lose an election to Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.
Until then, Trudeau is an unpopular lame duck. The last time Trump was president, Trudeau managed to drive a hard bargain as the two countries negotiated the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement.
This time, Trump should have an easier time getting whatever it is he wants, and Canadians had better hope that does not include their sovereignty.