The Return of Trump

NOV 05 2024 · 12:00

Official portrait of Donald J. Trump, 47th President of the United States, sworn in on 20 January 2025. Place: United States; the second-term West Wing Figures: Donald J. Trump, 45th and 47th President · J.D. Vance, Vice President · Marco Rubio, Secretary of State · the European chancelleries, recalibrating Repeated, Not Reversed On 5 November 2024 Donald Trump wins the presidency with 312 electoral votes to Kamala Harris's 226 and, for the first time in his three campaigns, a national popular-vote plurality. The Republican Party takes the Senate 53-47 and holds the House narrowly. The transition is orderly. He is sworn in on 20 January 2025. The relevant fact for the chronicle of Westphalia is not the personality but the structure: this is the first major Westphalian power since 1945 to repeat a populist-retrenchment turn after a previous correction. The 2016-to-2020 turn could be read as an aberration. The 2024 return cannot. Within four months the administration imposes a tariff regime broader than 2018's, withdraws from the Paris Agreement again, signals a renegotiation of US contributions to NATO, opens direct talks with Moscow over Ukraine that initially bypass Kyiv and Brussels, and restructures parts of the federal civil service by executive order. The pace surprises the European chancelleries, which had spent the campaign assuming a return would mean a slower-motion version of the first term. The Underwriter Becomes Conditional The post-1991 international order has rested on an American underwriting nobody quite wrote down. The US dollar was the world's reserve currency. The US Navy guaranteed Pacific and Atlantic sea lanes. The US nuclear umbrella covered Europe and East Asia. US troops sat in Germany, Italy, the UK, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, the Gulf. NATO's Article 5 had been invoked exactly once, by Washington's allies on Washington's behalf, after 9/11. The arrangement was so taken-for-granted that it was rarely named. What 2024 makes explicit is that the arrangement is conditional and the conditions are now being renegotiated in public. Europe begins planning, in early 2025, for a credible conventional and possibly nuclear defense without American underwriting. Japan and South Korea reopen debates on sovereign nuclear options that had been closed for decades. The Westphalian system survives the absence of an underwriter (it predates one by three centuries); the liberal version of that system, which assumed an American underwriter, is the version in question. Whether what follows is a multipolar Westphalia, a regional-bloc system, or something with no clean precedent, is the question the second hal Video: The Associated Press calls the 2024 presidential election for Donald Trump in the early hours of 6 November 2024, the first defeated incumbent to return to the White House since Grover Cleveland in 1892.