He will not take office until January 20, but Donald Trump is already acting as if he were president, laying the foundations for a non-interventionist foreign policy from Ukraine to Syria, in a world that has become, according to him, “a little crazy “.
• Also read: More than 75 Nobel Prize winners say they oppose the choice of “RFK Jr” as Trump’s health minister
• Also read: Trudeau flew to Mar-a-Lago ’15 seconds after our call,’ Trump says
As usual, he breaks with a well-established tradition that there is only one president of the United States at a time.
But the next president doesn’t care and openly interferes in the country’s foreign policy, with posts on his Truth Social platform, placing the outgoing Biden administration in a delicate position.
This is “perhaps unusual” compared to what other presidents-elect have done during the transition period of power, “but it is entirely consistent with his own conduct in the past,” comments for AFP Brian Finucane, specialist in American foreign policy at the International Crisis Group.
“It is less a question of tying the hands of the Biden administration than of compromising its efforts,” he adds, while noting the existence of contacts between the Biden team and that of Trump, including the future adviser to national security, Mike Waltz.
For Colin Clarke, research director at the Soufan Group, “it is not at all surprising that Trump is already seeking to play shadow president”, especially since “most other world leaders are ready to move to the post-Biden and start trying to figure out how to deal with the arrival of the Trump administration.
Do not “meddle” with Syria
It is no longer even shadow diplomacy.
Donald Trump made his big return to the international scene by going to Paris this weekend to attend the reopening of Notre-Dame Cathedral, his first trip abroad since his victory in the presidential election on November 5.
There he met French President Emmanuel Macron and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
He also received a number of foreign leaders at his residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, including NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, and even spoke on the telephone, according to the Washington Post, with Vladimir Putin. , which he refused to confirm. The Kremlin denied this.
During his first term from 2017 to 2021, Donald Trump always claimed to be the president who would end the United States’ wars, advocating a more isolationist line, and had notably signed an agreement with the Taliban for the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan.
Now, and in the same spirit, he is strong in wanting to put an end to the war in Ukraine, taking the Biden administration on the wrong foot, and calls on it above all not to “meddle” in Syria, qualifying the situation in this “brothel” country where “the United States should have nothing to do with”.
In doing so, he pretends to ignore that the United States has some 900 special forces members in Syria.
Above all, he reacted well before President Joe Biden, who only spoke on Sunday on the fall of Bashar al-Assad.
Brian Finucane recalls in this regard that during his first term, Donald Trump had “attempted on several occasions to withdraw American forces from Syria, but had resigned himself not to do so under pressure from his advisers”.
“It remains to be seen whether, during his second term, he will withdraw all or part of these forces,” he said.
“It’s a sort of continuation of a neo-isolationist or realist view of foreign policy, which is that the United States should have nothing to do with Syria,” adds Colin Clarke.
Customs duties and expulsions
Regarding Ukraine, Mr. Trump called on Sunday, also on his social network, for an “immediate ceasefire” and negotiations to end the conflict, at a time when the Biden administration instead intends to accelerate his help to kyiv before handing over.
He added by saying in an interview broadcast on Sunday, but recorded the day before his meeting on Saturday with MM. Macron and Zelensky in Paris, that Ukraine should “probably” expect less aid from the United States when it returns to power.
Elsewhere in the world, Donald Trump is just as clearly setting the tone.
Thus the return to an ultra-protectionist policy, when he promised, for example, to impose customs duties of 25% against Canada and Mexico, two of the main trading partners of the United States.
And while he advocates mass expulsions of immigrants who entered the United States illegally, he has also, according to media reports, compiled a list of countries he would like to see welcome migrants, such as the Bahamas, Panama, Grenada and the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean.
The Bahamas has already responded with a refusal.