Trump’s Tall Task: Overcoming Domestic Division to Project Strength Abroad

Charles A. Kupchan is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

President-Elect Donald Trump will have to steer a fractured America through a fractured world. These dual challenges go hand in hand. If the United States is to succeed abroad it must first get its own house in order. The steady and effective brand of U.S. statecraft that much of the world hopes Washington can provide will emerge only if the nation can get beyond its ongoing division and dysfunction. Good policy requires good politics; effective governance at home is the foundation of purposeful statecraft abroad. Washington should aim that statecraft at ending the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, safeguarding the global trading system, and adapting international order to the ongoing diffusion of power.

Strength Starts at Home

Trump’s top priority should be economic and political renewal at home. An American comeback begins with rebuilding the nation’s middle class, which will in turn ameliorate the polarization and division weakening the country. Indeed, Republicans and Democrats alike have pledged to get working Americans back up on their feet, resorting to tariffs and industrial policy to revive the nation’s manufacturing base. During the campaign, Trump promised to make the country a “manufacturing powerhouse.”

But in an era of digitization and automation, the scale of the manufacturing turnaround orchestrated by tariffs and industrial policy will not come even close to what would be required to bring a broad swath of working Americans back to the middle class. Instead, the U.S. government needs to work with the private sector to chart a course that will enable Americans to enjoy gainful employment even as automated production, artificial intelligence (AI), and other technologies evolve. Educational reforms and better worker retraining programs can help ensure that Americans are ready for the jobs of the future. The public sector should work with the private sector to fashion an education and employment ecosystem fit for the digital age. Much of this effort needs to focus on creating and filling well-paid jobs in the service sector, where most Americans will work.

Trump will also need to shoot straight with the American people about the nation’s perilously high debt. The costs of financing this growing debt will increasingly crowd out resources available for education, infrastructure, defense, research, and other important expenditures. The Social Security system is headed for insolvency within about ten years.

If the United States is to get its fiscal house in order, there is no alternative to closing the structural gap between spending and revenue. With spending poised to increase, the road ahead entails finding new sources of revenue, such as imposing tariffs, raising taxes, reducing tax loopholes and fraud, and boosting the retirement age. Failing to do so would leave the nation fiscally hobbled and irresponsibly put the burden of escalating debt on future generations.

Finally, Trump needs to work with Congress to overhaul the nation’s broken immigration system. The influx of migrants across the nation’s southern border has been a major source of both polarization and electoral discontent. It is past time to pass legislation that secures the border, puts in place an orderly and streamlined system for processing legal immigration, and lays out a humane pathway for resolving the status of millions of undocumented migrants.

A World of Challenges

Efforts to shore up the economic and political foundations of American democracy must begin now but will take years to come to fruition. In the meantime, Trump should focus on four foreign policy priorities.

Spur diplomacy to end the Russia-Ukraine war. Washington should orchestrate diplomatic efforts to stop Russia’s war against Ukraine. Neither Russia nor Ukraine has the wherewithal to achieve a military victory; this war will inevitably end at the negotiating table. To stanch the death and destruction and avoid what could become a wider war, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies should seek to broker a cease-fire. An end to the fighting would enable the remaining 80 percent of Ukraine that is under Kyiv’s control to focus on becoming a stable and prosperous democracy capable of defending itself over the long haul. Given that Ukraine has been up against nearly three years of relentless aggression from a much larger neighbor, that outcome would qualify as a success by any reasonable measure. Whenever the fighting ends, the United States and its allies should continue providing military and economic support to Ukraine, giving it the capability to deter and defeat any further bouts of Russian aggression. The West should also work to restore Ukraine’s territorial integrity using economic, diplomatic, and political tools, including by making the Kremlin pay a price for its occupation, for however long it lasts.

To be sure, Russia’s own willingness to negotiate and adhere to a cease-fire is highly uncertain. But it is worth testing the waters. Whatever Russian President Vladimir Putin’s illusions were when he began this brutal invasion, after almost three years of limited battlefield gains at an exceptionally high cost, even he now has to understand that negotiations are a question of when, not if. Should Moscow reject an offer to de-escalate, at least then it would be clear that Russia has no interest in peace. Such clarity would help maintain the current international coalition in support of Ukraine and could earn Ukraine the backing of more countries from the Global South, many of which have so far refused to take sides.

Galvanize peace and humanitarian efforts in the Mideast. Even as the fighting between Israel and the “axis of resistance” continues, Washington should work with Israel, the Palestinian Authority, willing partners in the Middle East, and European allies to end the violence and prepare for the “day after.” An immediate priority is alleviating the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip and fashioning a plan for rebuilding and governing the territory. Trump should also appreciate that crises provide opportunities; new strategic and political realities in the region open up the possibility of advancing the cause of stable peace. Washington should push the parties to generate a roadmap that would eventually bring about self-determination for Palestinians and normalization of relations between Israel and its neighbors.

Safeguard the global trading system. The United States and its allies need to continue to take steps to advance their economic security, including “friendshoring” supply chains and safeguarding critical technologies. Nonetheless, Washington should not allow de-risking to turn into the de-coupling and fragmentation of the global economy. Protective tariffs play well politically, but too much economic nationalism risks triggering trade wars that could dismantle a globalized international marketplace—with disastrous worldwide effects. Trump should not repeat the mistake that the United States made in 1930 when the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act triggered the fracturing of the global economy and the collapse of international trade.

Forge a new international order. Trump needs to begin moving toward a new global order that is fit for purpose in the changing world of the twenty-first century. Power is shifting from West to East and North to South, awakening geopolitical ferment as competition heats up over position, status, and influence. Yet a globalized and interdependent world cannot afford to slide toward increasing rivalry and fracture. Avoiding great-power war, averting a climate crisis, preventing nuclear proliferation, regulating AI and other new technologies, and advancing global health—these and other challenges will require sustained cooperation across ideological and geopolitical dividing lines.

Washington should start by teaming up with its traditional allies to build a vision of a new international order, but it will ultimately have to work with a broad range of countries to get global buy-in. That buy-in is essential to securing one of Trump’s top foreign policy aims – getting other countries to shoulder their fair share of the burden of providing public goods. The UN Security Council and other international institutions need to be reformed to provide the Global South more sway. The United States and China will need to complement competition with a significant measure of collaboration if they are to avoid the fracturing of the international system into competing blocs. As power diffuses across the globe in the coming decades, no power or region will enjoy ideological or material dominance. The next order, if it emerges, will of necessity rest on political pluralism and ideological diversity. Managing that world will require a level of collective leadership that is currently in dangerously short supply. 

As he sat in prison in 1930, the opening of a fateful decade, the Italian political theorist and activist Antonio Gramsci wrote, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” The world is now in a Gramscian interregnum—the old order is eroding and a great variety of morbid symptoms are appearing.  

It is time to begin birthing a new order, one capable of advancing peace and prosperity in a world of multiple centers of power and competing ideologies. Liberal democracy could prevail as history moves forward, but the democracies of the world first have to get their houses in order if they are to anchor the transition to a new order and ensure that they can outperform the illiberal and autocratic alternatives that are currently on offer.

This work represents the views and opinions solely of the author. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.