Trump’s new world order

Donald Trump’s ascension to his second presidency comes with a new cadre of followers and sidekicks, in the form of a cabinet built almost entirely from fresh faces. This is not a president interested in continuity, which he signaled early on, stating on social media that Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo — his erstwhile United Nations ambassador and secretary of state — would have no place in his second administration. The first name wasn’t a surprise, given the obvious tension he had with the woman who was his last challenger in the primary. The second was because Pompeo had been a dutiful supporter of Trump while in office, wrote a book defending their shared record on foreign policy and rejected the opportunity to run himself. But there was a clear signal Trump wanted to send: there’s a new crew in town. Frank Costello-style, he’s moving something with all new guys. It’s OK to be a little paranoid. Except the real truth is: this new world order is more normal than you think.

Most of these new guys aren’t new to the world of the politically engaged, but many certainly are to people who don’t follow such things. Within foreign policy and national security, the area where Trump’s reelection marks a particularly stark break with the powers that be in both parties for the past quarter-century and beyond, his nominations are recognizable and familiar. Trump rejected the flights of fancy spawned by his too-online sycophants and the relentless advocacy of paleocons — choosing Marco Rubio for secretary of state, Mike Waltz for national security advisor and John Ratcliffe as the head of the CIA. For UN ambassador, he chose Elise Stefanik, the moderate New York representative who made a name for herself battling antisemitism on college campuses. For secretary of defense, he chose Pete Hegseth — a decorated Iraq veteran with an Ivy League résumé and a lengthy record as a cable news host, but also a record of personal vice that may disrupt his nomination. For director of national intelligence, he nominated Tulsi Gabbard, another Iraq veteran and former Democrat with a drive for transparency in government and reform of our intel agencies. Much maligned by the media since she shifted right after shafting Kamala Harris on the debate stage in 2020, Gabbard’s critics are as much from the dregs of the neoconservative intelligentsia as they are on the left, but she fits with the Trumpian agenda for intel reform, and Senate Republicans — probably joined by a few Democrats — seem likely to confirm her.

What’s remarkable about this list is how it hits virtually every aspect of the Republican foreign policy spectrum. Gabbard is fond of describing herself as a “hawk when it comes to killing terrorists, and a dove when it comes to regime change wars” — and that seems to be a mindset consistent with Trump’s. But his list is also notable for the absence of some key names who seemed headed toward major roles. Colonel Douglas Macgregor is not on this list, despite his many appearances on podcasts and Russian television fomenting conspiratorial views of the Ukraine war. There is no Ric Grenell either, though the former DNI head and ambassador to Germany lobbied hard behind the scenes for the secretary of state job. And, surprisingly, there isn’t even Elbridge Colby, the realist Ukraine-war critic who wants a harder edge toward China. On foreign policy, being a regular on Tucker Carlson’s podcast is apparently the mark of Cain.

Assuming that the president is able to get the cabinet he wants, the challenge that will immediately confront him is close to home: the 47th president will no longer have the luxury of engaging the Western Hemisphere as did nearly the entire preceding century of commanders-in-chief — as an arena to be managed, mostly through soft power, vaguely if inconsistently aligned with the West and populated by (at least notional) republics of varying quality and some amiability toward the United States.

The Latin-American crises of the 1960s and the 1980s were the exceptions that illuminated the rule. The apotheosis of this framework was of course NAFTA, which admitted Mexico, the most populous Spanish-speaking nation in the world, to the upper tier of North American republics — if you looked at it with your eyes squinted, it pretty much looked like an equal contender. The future, said its economic and political proponents, was to involve Western Hemisphere republics pursuing trade and regional solidarity, under the implied aegis of the United States, and trending toward prosperity and liberality hand in hand with the integration of trade.

All that is over. The Western Hemisphere that confronts the incoming president fulfills none of the preceding hundred years of aspirations. American soft power, backed up by hard power, no longer dictates outcomes at the strategic level. Integration in trade has coincided with a decline in liberalization, as civil society in places such as Mexico, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Cuba is repressed by increasingly autocratic governments. The various republics have seen their constitutions fray and sometimes dis- integrate under the twin advances of surging left-populism and criminal cartels that surpass the powers of the states themselves — when they aren’t working as their proxies.

Worst of all, the Western Hemisphere isn’t even necessarily part of the West now: States such as Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Venezuela all engage with America’s enemies as major trade partners, and sometimes as willing patrons and strategic balancers. The relationship with the United States has become more like an unreliable ex, not a confident and trustworthy partner. And the consequences for the country have been dire, and may get much worse in the coming years.

In short, on January 20, 2025, President Donald J. Trump will confront a Western Hemisphere in which decades of fundamental assumptions have been overturned, in which major American strategic assets from the Panama Canal to a constellation of bases have been forfeited, in which America is no longer a leading power and indeed in which America now faces a strategic theater of threat and action potentially as challenging as those in Europe, the Pacific and the Middle East.

That’s the bad news, and it is very bad. The good news is that the United States has been here before — during Soviet attempts to subvert the region from the 1950s on, in German attempts to convert Mexico into a base of anti-American action and in French efforts to supplant American regional hegemony with its own. Trump’s nominees — Rubio, Waltz and Ratcliffe in particular — know this history, and they understand it. This gives the new administration the opportunity to do something that others have been too weak or too distracted for: to engage in a real foreign policy shift to define an American Western Hemisphere.

The last couple of centuries suggest two lessons for 2025 and beyond. The first is that when America chooses to act, its natural advantages in the region surpass those of any extra-hemispheric competitor. The second is that the republics of the Americas, notional and actual alike, may have varying views of US hard power, but they all respect it — and they pay attention when America is led by those who seem likely to use it.

Most of the uncertainty in US policy in the Western Hemisphere can be left at the feet of previous policymakers who decided that hard power was no longer needed, or that it was needed to secure the borders of nations other than the United States. The new administration must prioritize the restoration of American hard power within the hemisphere as the prerequisite for all else. This means putting US Southern Command on a level equal to INDOPACOM, EUCOM and CENTCOM, recognizing that America faces serious threats in four strategic theaters — only one of which is at our doorstep. Although reclamation of the Panama Canal is a political impossibility, SOUTHCOM ought to prioritize Canal control and access and general hemispheric sea-lane control through an aggressive pursuit of basing and port agreements with the remaining friendly governments in the region. Both Ecuador under Daniel Noboa and Argentina under Javier Milei offer possibilities. Mexico should be moved into SOUTHCOM Area of Responsibility (AOR), as part of a general reassessment of American relations with that nation, whose political leadership has mostly failed to act as a good neighbor (and certainly not as a mature democracy) with its toleration and even promotion of criminal cartels, human trafficking, and ever-closer ties with the PRC and the Russian Federation.

We must understand that we no longer have the luxury of playing pretend about the state of our southern neighbor. The fanciful wishcasting that Mexico is a friendly polity which may be drawn closer through trade must be brought to a close, ending the same way as the experiment with the People’s Republic of China. The Mexican state, having consciously ceded sovereignty over its own territory to criminal cartels, and government elements that profit from them, must understand that the United States will respect Mexican sovereignty to the same degree that the state does ours. What this means in practical terms is a militarized border and American self-defense — a new reality should be made clear in advance to the Mexicans, who may make the equally conscious choice to avoid or embrace these outcomes. Donald Trump got along with former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador — Claudia Sheinbaum is still a question mark, but they seem unlikely to come up with a similar bro-fest.

The United States needs to recognize a positive responsibility to govern where local republics won’t, and to be prepared to use force in the interests of the American people. They have been poisoned, defrauded, bankrupted and even murdered at the hands of intrusive, border-crossing crim-inal elements for far too long. A Trump administration that sets its mind on ending this will receive all the same slings and arrows as last time — but will also receive thanks and praise from the people who voted the dangerous man into office once again.

We can take a step back from the team Trump has named and assess it as more united than not. His picks are consistently China hawks, wanting to create a hardened rim of allies to prevent expansion of the PRC’s influence. They are anti-communist and pro-democracy, though their ideas about how to effect those ends differ. All want a wind-down of the war in Ukraine, but the terms will almost certainly be something Trump determines alone. All want dramatic reforms of the intelligence agencies, though the degree to which they are willing to knock out the keystones will be tested. All told, though, they represent a remade American right, one where neoconservatism has no home — even as the pro-Israel lobby is more powerful than ever. Wait until the Middle East gets a load of Ambassador Mike Huckabee — this is Southern Baptist sausage-gravy Zionism like you’ve never seen before. These Republicans love Israel so much, they want the space lasers to be Jewish. Welcome to the new world order. It could change everything.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s January 2025 World edition.