Experts believe that former US President Donald Trump’s election victory marks the beginning of another rollercoaster ride in US foreign policy. The president-elect is poised to bring back the hallmarks of his first term: a trade war with China, a deep skepticism—even hostility—to multilateralism, a penchant for strongmen, and a transgressive, transactional diplomacy. Those close to him have leaked that President Trump will pursue a “peace through strength” approach.

But this second term will bring new challenges—not least the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, in which the United States is deeply involved. Trump has promised to end the war in Ukraine before he takes office, but he has yet to offer a detailed plan; his plans for Middle East peace are equally vague.

While Trump’s plans may be unclear, Foreign Policy delved into his track record, as well as his statements and those of his advisers, to provide clues about what the future of American foreign policy holds. As Trump’s first term showed, his own whims often clashed with his advisers’ agendas; this time around, he may have a tighter grip on the steering wheel as a second-term president, having supposedly learned a lot since taking office on January 20, 2017, particularly in selecting his foreign policy and national security staff.

Unless Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon are fully ended before Trump is inaugurated — which seems unlikely — one of the most pressing foreign policy issues on his desk will be the rising tensions in the Middle East, experts say. Trump has spoken of the need to end the war in Gaza, claiming last August that he told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “win” because “the killing has to stop.”

It is unclear what role, if any, the next administration will play in trying to end the war. Trump has criticized the Biden team’s call for a ceasefire, describing it as an attempt to “tie Israel’s hands behind its back” and saying a ceasefire would only give Hamas time to regroup.

During his first term, Trump verbally supported a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while keeping his thumb on the scale, and gave Israel a series of long-sought diplomatic prizes such as moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing occupied Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, cutting funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, UNRWA, and upending decades of U.S. policy by recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and declaring that Israeli settlements in the West Bank do not violate international law.

Trump has previously said he has “fought more for Israel than any president before,” and his administration’s role in brokering the Abraham Accords — a series of diplomatic agreements between Israel and a number of Arab states — was seen as one of his major foreign policy victories. The Biden administration has continued these efforts, working tirelessly to achieve normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel, which stalled or was frozen after October 7, 2023.

While Netanyahu and Trump had warm relations during his first term, things soured after the Israeli leader congratulated Biden on his 2020 election victory a day after the race was called, angering Trump. His tone toward Israel in recent months has been sometimes harsh, with Trump warning in April that Israel was “losing the PR war” over the devastation it is wreaking on Gaza.

Trump will also push forward with his so-called “deal of the century” plan, adopted at the White House in January 2020, which gives Israel more than 30% of the occupied West Bank, while calling on his allies like former (and possibly incoming) Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, his former ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, and others to allow Israel to annex the occupied West Bank.

Trump heads into a second term at a time when the wider Middle East has been engulfed in wars, with clashes between Israel and Iranian allies in Lebanon, Yemen and beyond. This year has seen Israel and Iran directly exchange missile and drone fire for the first time. While the Biden administration has sought to calm tensions, urging Israel not to strike Iranian nuclear and energy facilities in a recent wave of retaliatory strikes, Trump is likely to be less cautious, saying in October that Israel should “hit the nukes first and worry about the rest later.”

It is noteworthy that the first Trump administration had taken a tough stance towards Iran, withdrawing from the nuclear agreement, continuing the policy of “maximum pressure” on the regime, and assassinating the commander of the “Quds Force” of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Qassem Soleimani, in an air strike on December 3, 2020.

Speaking to reporters in September, Trump said he would be open to making a new deal with Iran to prevent the country from developing a nuclear weapon. “We have to make a deal, because the consequences are impossible. We have to make a deal,” he said, without offering further details about what such negotiations might entail.

While Trump has sought to scale back U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, he is not entirely averse to using U.S. military force to achieve clear goals, Robert Greenway, who served as senior director for the Middle East on Trump’s National Security Council, told Foreign Policy. That could include preventing Iran from joining the short list of countries with nuclear weapons. “The military option may be the only viable option left to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon,” Greenway said.

Policy towards China

On China policy, to some extent, President Joe Biden will pass the baton to Trump. The current Biden administration has inherited (and adopted) much of Trump’s more hawkish approach to China, and a second Trump term is likely to continue to define China as the United States’ foremost national security challenge. But on specific issues—and certainly the overall tone—a second Trump term will bring significant changes.

As in his first term, Trump has made trade his top priority. “Tariffs” is “the most beautiful word in the dictionary,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal in an October interview, and his most obvious priority when it comes to China is to restart the trade war he started in 2018.

Trump’s campaign website calls for reducing U.S. dependence on China for all essential goods. But that’s just the beginning. Biden has maintained Trump’s original tariffs and added a few more; Trump is clearly prepared to go much further. By promising to impose tariffs of at least 60% on all imports from China, Trump will come close to the complete decoupling of the world’s two largest economies that some of his closest advisers have embraced.

Such a move, experts say, would further strain already tense bilateral relations and cost American families thousands of dollars a year and U.S. exporters one of their largest markets. But the effects of an aggressive trade policy toward China would also alienate other potential U.S. friends and allies.

Experts point out that China still relies heavily on exports to drive its growth, and measures designed to weaken that key growth driver, such as Trump’s tariffs, would also dampen Chinese demand for manufacturing requirements, including energy and metals. That would be bad news for U.S. neighbors like Peru, Chile and Mexico (all major copper exporters to China), U.S. ally Australia (a major iron ore and coal exporter), and U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, which is closely aligned with China and a major source of Chinese crude oil.

Beyond trade, Trump’s biggest starting point for a Biden administration could be Taiwan. During his campaign, Trump repeatedly cast doubt on the extent of future U.S. support, applying the same transactional approach he has taken with many (European) countries to the Taiwanese island. “Taiwan should pay us for defense,” he said in a July interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. “You know, we’re no different than an insurance company… Taiwan doesn’t give us anything.”

Such statements have led some China experts to believe that Trump will seek some kind of deal with Taiwan in exchange for more U.S. defense support.

Trump has shown admiration for Chinese President Xi Jinping, and likes to personalize relationships. “I have a lot of respect for President Xi,” he told Businessweek. “I’ve gotten to know him very well. I like him a lot. He’s a strong man, but I like him a lot.” Trump’s first term has shown him willing to buck his administration’s policies in favor of his own approach to Xi; that could happen again in his pursuit of a second trade deal.

Russia, Ukraine and NATO

Trump has criticized U.S. funding for Ukraine’s war effort and called on Europe to shoulder more of the burden of supporting Kiev. He called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “the greatest salesman on earth” for the amount of money he was able to extract for Ukraine from the Biden administration, though he added: “That doesn’t mean I don’t want to help [Zelensky], because I feel very sorry for those people.” However, he has expressed doubts about Ukraine’s ability to defeat Russia.

Trump has claimed that it would take him just 24 hours to negotiate an end to the war between Russia and Ukraine and that he would do so before his inauguration on January 20, 2024. But details on how he intends to end the war are scarce. In a July 2023 interview with Fox News, Trump suggested that he would force Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table by telling the Ukrainian leader that Kyiv would not get any more U.S. aid and telling the Russian leader that Washington would significantly increase its aid to Kyiv if no deal was reached.

Trump has said little about what a negotiated settlement might look like, except that he wants to “see a fair deal.”

Vice President-elect J.D. Vance has offered some details on what such a deal might look like. Although he said Trump would leave it to the two warring nations as well as Europe to hammer out the details of a peace agreement, Vance suggested it would likely entail establishing a demilitarized zone along current battle lines, allowing Ukraine to retain its sovereignty while forcing it to give up some of its territory currently in Moscow’s hands, as well as ensuring that Ukraine remains neutral—meaning it would not join NATO or other “allied institutions.”

Analysts have noted that this closely resembles Putin’s terms for a ceasefire, which Ukraine and many of its allies — including the United States, Italy and Germany — have rejected.

Experts say Trump is far from being NATO’s biggest supporter, as is outgoing President Joe Biden, and the alliance is no fan of him either. Trump has criticized NATO members who don’t meet the bloc’s minimum defense spending target, and even encouraged Russia to “do whatever they want” to countries that don’t meet the 2% defense spending target. Eight of the 32 countries in the bloc don’t meet that requirement.

Before the election, NATO tried to make the alliance immune to Trump. Fearing that a second Trump term would slow or halt aid to Ukraine, the alliance ramped up production of major weapons and equipment and worked to strengthen its authority over training and supplies to Europe. At this year’s NATO summit in Washington, the alliance affirmed that “Ukraine’s future is in NATO” but declined to invite Kyiv to join or set a timetable for membership.

From Russia’s perspective, experts say, a second Trump presidency could pave the way for friendlier relations between Washington and Moscow, where the Kremlin has long favored the Republican leader over his Democratic rivals. Yet even the Russians are hesitant about Trump’s promises to end the conflict immediately.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in September that such thinking was “in the realm of fantasy.” Since leaving office, Trump has reportedly spoken to Putin seven times. Trump has not confirmed the conversations, saying only that if he had had such conversations.

It is noteworthy that the Russian President did not congratulate Trump on his victory in the US presidency until the end of Wednesday, more than 24 hours after his victory.