Slate: The Most Reckless Trump Foreign Policy

[Dennis Donovan]

Slate - The Most Reckless Trump Foreign Policy

By Mark Lawrence Schrad
Jan 06, 202510:00 AM

Jan. 20, 2025, will mark the second inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the United States. Coincidentally, it will also mark my 20th year of teaching international law. Since many of my international politics students—now college juniors and seniors—were still in middle school during Trump’s first inauguration, they are largely unsure of what to expect from a second Trump administration. If history is any guide, the primary target of his foreign policy ire will be not China, Russia, Mexico, or Iran, but rather the system of international law itself.

Trump’s reelection has forced me to tear up my international law syllabus, just as I did every semester during the first Trump administration, when virtually every subfield and topic came under direct assault. His track record affirmed that, rather than using international law as a tool to advance American interests, the Trump administration actively subverts the very system of international laws and institutions that the U.S. had largely created since World War II. Alarmingly, this is not simply a matter of changing tack on particular policies—climate change, international trade, security, or human rights—but instead takes a sledgehammer to the respective international institutions so that they cannot function as intended for anyone.

International environmental law is the most obvious example. A priority of a second Trump administration (much like the first) is to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris climate accords. Rather than binding emissions reductions of its Kyoto Protocol predecessor, Paris is a flexible framework of voluntary greenhouse gas reductions to stave off climate catastrophe.

Trump is now poised to take a “wrecking ball” to a Paris Agreement that is already fatally susceptible to an American withdrawal. But simply leaving Paris (again) is not enough: A second Trump administration is weighing the contentious process of abandoning the entire 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which provides the legal foundations for negotiating future international climate accords. This would effectively hamstring any subsequent administration from rejoining the rest of the world, since reratifying the FCCC would require a two-thirds majority in a deeply divided U.S. Senate, which has been unable to ratify even the shallowest international agreements.

This pattern continues in the world of international trade law, which reduces the deadweight losses from tariff and nontariff barriers to facilitate international commerce. Declaring that “trade wars are good and easy to win,” in 2018 Trump launched ill-conceived tariffs at China. Shocking no one, it backfired: slowing growth, freezing investment, bankrupting farmers, and raising prices, amounting to “one of the largest tax increases in years.” It cost the U.S. economy $317 billion, and $1.7 trillion in lost stock value, while ballooning the trade deficit and gifting China permission for domestic suppression and foreign aggression. And when the World Trade Organization ruled that the tariffs were in violation of WTO laws—regulations the U.S. helped write—Trump, predictably, not only contested the ruling but undermined the institution itself by blocking the appointment of new judges, rendering the organization’s binding dispute-settlement body impotent to rule on future issues.

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[Lonestarblue]

1. Trump will take a wrecking ball to every agreement we have.

By the end of four years, we will have a little of rubble, t hough I’m not sure he or his billionaire friends will give up rule in four years.