Author: Harsh V. Pant
Originally Published Mint
Published on Jan 22, 2025
Trump may spring surprises but there exists a broad outline that other policymakers could go by
The era of Trump 2.0 has begun and everyone is busy trying to decipher the multiple meanings of the policy arrows that US President Donald Trump has unleashed from his quiver ever since winning the presidential contest in November. There are his appointments, there are his statements, there are his pronouncements on social media, and now we have his Executive Orders. If there is a method to this madness, no one is quite sure, but for global policymakers who are already battling a turbulent phase in global politics, managing Trump’s shake-ups will be a key policy objective in the coming months.
In one of his most important public interventions where he outlined his foreign policy agenda for his second term, he harked back to the era of territorial conquest and spheres of influence, while rejecting the constraints of allied partnerships and economic complementarity. He underlined his willingness to wrest control of the Panama Canal and Greenland through the use of force, even as he threatened Canada with obliterating its sovereignty. It was a remarkable statement of intent by a US policymaker in contemporary times as such a pronouncement by any other country would have led to the label of “rogue” being slapped on it by Washington itself.
For full article, please open the link:
https://www.orfonline.org/research/bracing-for-trump-2-0
IRSEA IS PARTNER OF ORF. Professor Harsh V. Pant is Honorary Member of the Romanian Institute for Europe-Asia Studies – IRSEA.
* Professor Harsh V. Pant is Vice President – Studies and Foreign Policy at Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. He is a Professor of International Relations with King's India Institute at King’s College London. He is also Director (Honorary) of Delhi School of Transnational Affairs at Delhi University. Professor Pant has been a Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore; a Visiting Professor at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi; a Visiting Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania; a Visiting Scholar at the Center for International Peace and Security Studies, McGill University; a Non-Resident Fellow with the Wadhwani Chair in US-India Policy Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC; and an Emerging Leaders Fellow at the Australia-India Institute, University of Melbourne. Professor Pant's current research is focused on Asian security issues. His most recent books include India and Global Governance: A Rising Power and Its Discontents (Routledge), Politics and Geopolitics: Decoding India’s Neighbourhood Challenge (Rupa), America and the Indo-Pacific: Trump and Beyond (Routledge), New Directions in India’s Foreign Policy: Theory and Praxis (Cambridge University Press), India’s Nuclear Policy (Oxford University Press), The US Pivot and Indian Foreign Policy (Palgrave Macmillan), Handbook of Indian Defence Policy (Routledge), and India’s Afghan Muddle (HarperCollins). Professor Pant writes regularly for various Indian and international media outlets including the Japan Times, the Wall Street Journal, the National (UAE), the Hindustan Times, and the Telegraph.
The opinions expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position or view of IRSEA