Elsewhere in the world, the reception was frostier. Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry posted a press release on X in the early hours of the morning in Riyadh, reiterating that its position on the need for an independent Palestinian state was “firm and unwavering” and noting that it “will not establish diplomatic relations with Israel without that.” Other regional governments quickly followed suit and rights groups denounced the plan as ethnic cleansing.

In the wake of Trump’s announcement, which some U.S. officials have since tried to walk back, Foreign Policy reached out to 10 writers to comment on what his plan would mean for Palestinians, the region, and U.S. national security. —Sasha Polakow-Suransky, deputy editor

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Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Mexico thwarts U.S. tariffs for now, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio takes his first tour of the region, and Buenos Aires gets creative to promote its taxi industry.

Trump Takes on North American Allies

Although last-minute deals this week delayed U.S. President Donald Trump’s plans to impose 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada for 30 days, his initial move shook assumptions in both countries about the United States.

Trump’s tariff proposal flies in the face of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) free trade pact, which he negotiated to replace a previous deal during his first term. The plan is also a direct contradiction of U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s claim that the Trump administration seeks an “Americas First”—note the plural—policy.

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After announcing sweeping new tariffs on the United States’ top three trading partners, U.S. President Donald Trump seems to have agreed to a 30-day pause on any new duties on Canada and Mexico while leaving those on China in place. The final outcome is still uncertain, and the drama that unfolded over the last week should not distract from the bigger picture: With his decrees on trade, Trump is making an unconstitutional power grab by using the declaration of a national emergency to grant himself authority he does not have. Congress, whose constitutional powers to regulate trade Trump has usurped, should act swiftly to retain its authority and bring back stability to U.S. trade policy.

In announcing the tariffs, Trump invoked the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which gives a U.S. president sweeping powers to regulate the economy during wartime or another emergency caused by a foreign threat. The law essentially grants a president extraordinary economic powers “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat” if he “declares a national emergency with respect to such threat.” The White House outlined its view of the current threat in Proclamation 10886, which on Jan. 20 declared a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, supposedly “overrun by cartels, criminal gangs, known terrorists, human traffickers, smugglers, unvetted military-age males from foreign adversaries, and illicit narcotics that harm Americans, including America.”

Trump expanded the emergency beyond the southern border to also cover “the public health crisis of deaths due to the use of fentanyl and other illicit drugs,” claiming insufficient action by Canada and China to interdict shipments. His response to these claimed threats was a 25 percent tariff on imports from Mexico, 25 percent on imports from Canada (except energy at 10 percent), and an additional 10 percent on imports from China. Since Chinese goods are currently charged with an average rate of 10 percent and most tariffs on Canada and Mexico are near zero, Trump’s decree would have imposed higher levies against them than against China, a U.S. adversary, and put a significant shock to North American trade. Experts have called these tariff actions “reckless” and a “self-inflicted wound to the American economy,” while companies have warned that widespread tariffs will further upend supply chains and stoke inflation.

Historically, presidential authority under the IEEPA has been used to impose an array of sanctions that hit U.S. adversaries directly, such as export embargoes and the freezing of foreign assets. But it has never been used to raise tariffs on imports into the United States—which U.S. importers and ultimately consumers, not the targeted countries, pay. Nor has the law ever been used to punish allies and partners, such as Canada and Mexico. The predecessor statute that the IEEPA replaced, the 1917 Trading With the Enemy Act, was used by U.S. President Richard Nixon to levy a 10 percent across-the-board import tariff to address a balance of payments crisis, with the intent of creating leverage to force Japan and West Germany to revalue their currencies, which Washington saw as giving their exporters an unfair advantage. The tariff was a temporary measure and soon lifted. Nixon’s loose interpretation of the old law and use against friendly countries in peacetime was, in fact, the precise reason Congress worked on tightening the statute and replacing it with the IEEPA.

The legal challenges that sprang from Nixon’s actions are instructive today. In United States v. Yoshida International, the U.S. Court of Customs and Patent Appeals ruled in 1975 that measures implemented by the president must have an “eminently reasonable relationship” with the declared emergency. In other words, there needs to be a causal link between the emergency and sanctions response. The court upheld Nixon’s action because the tariff “had a direct effect on our nation’s balance of trade and, in turn, on its balance of payments deficit and its international monetary reserves.” Today, by contrast, it is a stretch of the imagination to suggest that across-the-board import tariffs have an “eminently reasonable relationship” to the domestic problem of fentanyl use and concerns over organized crime in the United States.

The fact that U.S. deaths from synthetic opioids such as fentanyl began to decline in 2023 raises additional questions about Trump’s invocation of the IEEPA, which is restricted to emergencies that are both unusual and extraordinary. What’s more, one day after proclaiming his tariffs, Trump took to his Truth Social platform to suggest that trade with the United States is a form of subsidy to Canada and that Canada should become the 51st U.S. state. This range of statements and possible motivations further obscures the relationship between the claimed emergency and Trump’s tariff action.

Although a president has ample discretion to take broad actions in times of national emergency, there is little evidence that an emergency exists—or that the emergency as described is even loosely connected to the remedy being offered. Even the weak guardrails contained in the IEEPA should suffice for Congress to check the president’s actions. First, it could terminate the emergency through a joint resolution; that, however, would need a veto-proof supermajority. Terminating the emergency also rescinds any actions taken by the president linked to the emergency. Second, Congress should amend the IEEPA to clarify that it does not allow the president to levy tariffs, and legislation to this end has already been introduced. Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the express authority to regulate commerce with foreign nations. This is a perfect example of where Congress should take back its power and rein in presidential abuse of delegated authority.

If Congress fails to act, there is still the courts. Firms affected by tariffs can challenge Trump’s decree. Furthermore, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2024 landmark decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo overturned the previous practice of deferring to federal agencies—i.e. the executive branch—whenever vague language in the law left room for interpretation. Now, that final interpretation lies with the courts. This emphasizes the Supreme Court’s renewed skepticism towards broad statutory interpretations and lends persuasive power to the argument that the president is taking too much liberty with the IEEPA.

Trump is knowingly and unseriously using a fictitious emergency to attack U.S. allies in hopes of causing enough chaos to extract unrelated concessions. Solving the drug crisis is a domestic problem, not a trade issue. Trump has invoked security threats to address economic concerns in the past, such as when he imposed a 25 percent tariff on steel—mostly on U.S. allies—during his first term; at the time, lawyers at the U.S. Justice Department absurdly claimed that, hypothetically, peanut butter imports could be considered a national security threat and warrant sanctions. But unlike the statute Trump used to impose tariffs on steel, the IEEPA has far fewer guardrails and procedural requirements, meaning that there is little to check Trump’s interpretation of an emergency. While some of the tariffs are now on hold, there’s no guarantee that Trump won’t continue to abuse the IEEPA on these and other allies and partners. To use emergency powers as a tool of chaos and leverage in unrelated negotiations—and directed at U.S. allies and partners—is a blatant, unconstitutional abuse of power. Congress and the courts must act to stop it.

In his first term, the self-declared “tariff man” levied tariffs on a scale unseen since the 1930s, though he had fairly narrow goals: protect some favored industries like steel; focus on China, the U.S.’s biggest rival; and pressure allies to line up with U.S. political goals. His first sallies this time followed part of that playbook when he threatened tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and China over what he said were their lax policies on immigration and drug traffic.

But he has a bigger goal in mind for his second term with plans he is still cooking up. Trump seeks to remake global trade based on what he calls “reciprocity”—treating other countries, supposedly, in the same fashion as they treat the United States. China is not the target this time—or at least not the only one. He has his sights set on any country with which the U.S. has a large, persistent trade deficit, which in his mind means it is treating the U.S. “terribly.” Success would mean sharply reducing the trade deficit, no matter which country he hits or what other geopolitical goals it impedes.

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In the midst of shutting down USAID, making a deal to send American prisoners to El Salvador, and outlining a controversial proposal to redevelop Gaza, U.S. President Donald Trump made another announcement this week that is less controversial but still presents its own challenges.

In an executive order signed on Monday, Trump laid out a plan to create a sovereign wealth fund for the United States that will “promote fiscal sustainability, lessen the burden of taxes on American families and small businesses, establish economic security for future generations, and promote United States economic and strategic leadership internationally.” He directed the commerce and treasury secretaries to come up with a plan for such a fund within 90 days, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent subsequently telling reporters that the fund will be up and running within the next 12 months.

Sovereign wealth funds are state-run investment vehicles used by several countries around the world to maximize returns on government revenue. The funds can invest in stocks, bonds, and other financial assets both domestically and overseas, as well as more tangible assets such as real estate, commodities, or companies. The world’s top five sovereign wealth funds—led by Norway’s government pension fund—each have over $1 trillion in assets. The sixth and perhaps most well-known is Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), whose $925 billion has been used for investments in Uber, electric vehicle company Lucid Motors, Indian conglomerate Reliance, and Japanese tech investment firm SoftBank. Trump specifically called out the PIF during Monday’s announcement, describing it as “on the large side, but eventually we’ll catch it.”

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U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposal to “take control” of Gaza and “clean out” its more than 2 million inhabitants has elicited international outrage because it is both illegal and immoral—in effect, a U.S.-sponsored plan of ethnic cleansing—but his ill-conceived vision would also be radically destabilizing.

The original dispossession of Palestinians following Israel’s creation in 1948—known in Arabic as the Nakba, or catastrophe—produced decades of violence and instability. A U.S.-sponsored second Nakba would ensure decades more of both.

Trump’s plan did not emerge in a vacuum and, in many ways, is the natural culmination of his predecessor’s policies—as well as years of dehumanization of Palestinians in U.S. political discourse.

Although former President Joe Biden would never have put forth such a proposal, his policies over the last 15 months effectively laid the groundwork for it due to his tolerance for Israeli excesses and disregard for Palestinian lives.

Trump’s characterizations of Gaza as a “demolition site” and a “hellhole” are not inaccurate. And with more than 90 percent of Gaza’s housing units, all its universities, most of its hospitals, 70 percent of its agricultural land destroyed, Gaza may well be uninhabitable.

But none of this was unforeseen, nor was it inevitable. Israeli leaders telegraphed their intentions virtually from day one, promising to “flatten” Gaza and turn it into “city of tents,” all while declaring that there are “no innocents” in Gaza. Barely a month into Israel’s massive bombing campaign, United Nations human rights monitors were already warning that Gaza was being rendered uninhabitable.

Despite such warnings and Washington’s own assessment that Israel’s bombing campaign was “over the top” and “indiscriminate,” Biden refused to place any meaningful constraints on Israel’s conduct and continued to arm, finance, and facilitate Gaza’s destruction at every stage.

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If there’s one issue on which the people of Egypt and their government overwhelmingly agree, it’s the rejection of U.S. President Donald Trump’s call to evacuate Gaza’s Palestinians to Egypt. Egyptians may have different grounds for this position, but they are equally outraged by Trump’s proposed plan—and by the mere fact that he dared to announce it publicly.

The Egyptian people have historically regarded Israel as a colonial power, one that repeatedly sought to seize Egyptian land. Most Egyptian households have members who fought against Israel in the 1956, 1967, or 1973 wars, and younger generations still remember what their ancestors fought for.

Since October 2023, Egyptians have followed news of the shocking humanitarian toll of Israel’s war on Gaza. They have launched a boycott campaign of corporations they regard as pro-Israel, including many U.S. brands. So great is Egyptians’ sympathy for Palestinians that a simple Egyptian street vendor threw his fruits onto Gaza-bound aid trucks—a moment captured in a video that went viral last year.

But Egyptians’ current outrage is not solely or unanimously based on support for the Palestinian cause. Many see Trump’s brazen statements as an attack on their country’s sovereignty. Some are motivated by a conservative, nationalistic-based fear of a flood of Palestinians crossing into Egypt and competing with citizens over limited resources, amid rampant inflation that has devastated the livelihoods of millions.

Egypt’s leaders realize that condoning Trump would test the Egyptian people’s patience. Even before Trump made his shock announcement on Tuesday, the foreign ministry had, on Jan. 26, categorically rejected any displacement of Palestinians, whether “temporary or long term.”

On Thursday, Cairo reaffirmed its “complete rejection of any proposal or concept aimed at … uprooting or displacing the Palestinian people from their historic homeland and its seizure, whether on a temporary or permanent basis.”

To the Egyptian state, this is a national security issue that would undermine its already shaky domestic support and open the door for a security crisis due to the importation of Gaza’s violence to its territory. It could also cause grave internal tensions.

Even if Trump offers Egypt significant benefits in return, such as economic aid or debt relief, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi would struggle to make any concessions on this issue. The stakes are very high.

I can attest, as a veteran U.S. diplomat specializing in the Middle East, that President Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States will “take over the Gaza Strip” is tantamount to a declaration of war. At least, that’s how it is seen across the Arab world.

The Trump administration has undermined its own early victory. It entered office taking credit for the Gaza cease-fire, which had begun to defuse tensions in the Middle East. Yet the announcement of a plan that would entail expelling Palestinians and a U.S. occupation of Gaza has again put a direct target on the United States’ back.

Arab leaders from across the region have firmly rejected the plan. Egypt and Jordan have both come out strongly against any forced relocation of Gazans, while Saudi Arabia issued a statement affirming that Palestinian statehood is a nonnegotiable; without it, there will be no Saudi normalization with Israel.

Trump’s assertion that Arab states can simply take in Palestinian refugees forcibly kicked out of Gaza would be implicating those leaders in Palestine’s ethnic cleansing—and that would be suicide for regimes across the Middle East.

Protests continue to erupt in many parts of the Arab world, from Morocco to Jordan, condemning regional leaders for not doing enough to protect Palestinian civilians. In countries that are already economically and politically volatile, this level of social unrest, combined with a forced influx of Palestinian refugees, would be extremely destabilizing and destructive. What Trump is suggesting has the potential to unleash revolutions and provoke state collapse in the Middle East.

This plan will not bring peace. It is a threat to U.S. national security and will only ensure a vicious cycle of violence for Israelis and Palestinians.

The only solution has always been and will remain diplomacy, an end to illegal occupation, and Palestinian self-determination in accordance with international law.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s background in real estate and construction has a lot to do with his shock announcement on Tuesday. His call for the relocation of Palestinians from Gaza is not driven by concern for Palestinian attachment to the land and a fear of expulsion from it, but by his perception of a straightforward problem of reconstruction in an environment where infrastructure has been largely destroyed and vast numbers of unexploded bombs litter a devastated landscape.

For him, reconstruction is not possible so long as Gaza is densely populated. His answer: Palestinians leave Gaza and are absorbed in Egypt, Jordan, and elsewhere in the region.

For Trump, it is common sense. For Palestinians and Arabs, it is a profound threat to the Palestinian national cause because they perceive it to mean that Palestinians are again being forced to leave a part of their homeland. (Something that is the dream of the extreme right in Israel, which has long believed the Palestinians can simply be wished away.)

Arab leaders understand that supporting what will be portrayed in the Middle East as a betrayal of Palestinian national rights could unleash great popular anger against them—potentially destabilizing their regimes and allowing Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas to recapture credibility by being prepared to resist such a betrayal.

That explains the quick rejection of the Trump proposal by the Egyptian, Jordanian, Saudi, Emirati, and Qatari governments—the very countries that Trump wants to host roughly 2 million Palestinians.

Their rejection may be understandable, but if they want to dissuade Trump, they cannot just come with calls for a two-state solution, which is little more than a slogan at this point. Just as the Arabs coordinated their public rejection of Trump’s plan for Gaza, they should coordinate a concrete counterproposal for what comes next in Gaza that goes beyond platitudes.

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U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Feb. 4  a return to the maximum pressure campaign on Iran, which is meant to starve the regime of cash as a way to curb its regional malfeasance and its nuclear program.

However—and this is becoming a pattern in everything Trump does, from his position on Ukraine’s real war to his self-inflicted trade wars—it’s not entirely clear what the president actually wants, how he means to achieve it, or even to what end.

On paper, the White House has taken a maximalist position against Iran, with the issuance of a presidential memorandum that highlighted all the bad things Iran does and ordered U.S. agencies and departments to do something about it. 

Trump himself, though, has been tendering an olive branch to Iran, proposing a negotiated peace. When signing the memo in the Oval Office on Feb. 4, Trump said that maybe “everybody can live together” and insisted he did not want to use the new authorities he just signed. He reiterated that sentiment the next day on Truth Social, saying, “I want Iran to be a great and successful Country, but one that cannot have a Nuclear Weapon.” He added that he would like to see a “Verified Nuclear Peace Agreement.”

This apparent mixed messaging has led to some confusion. 

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From “sheer lunacy” to “Netanyahu’s lapdog,” reactions here in the occupied West Bank to U.S. President Donald Trump’s “Gaz-a-Lago” plan have been characterized by ridicule, anger, and disbelief.

The U.S. proposal to take over Gaza, dubbed ludicrous and rejected by most Arab and European mediators, has confirmed long-standing Palestinian suspicions of U.S. complicity in Israel’s decades-long project to erase their presence. It echoed what many see as classic U.S. arrogance: Trump’s history of dictating the region’s future without consulting its people.

U.S. leaders have long treated Palestine as a laboratory for geopolitical ambitions, sidelining Palestinian aspirations for sovereignty to bolster the U.S.-Israel alliance. To many, Trump’s idea of displacing Gaza’s population—before the recent Israeli full-scale destruction, it was already trapped under a 17-year blockade, repeated assaults, and systemic human rights violations—felt like a grotesque extension of this legacy.

Meanwhile, there has been no cease-fire for Palestinians in the West Bank. As Israel’s Iron Wall operation entered its third week in the West Bank, troops tightened sieges on cities like Jenin, locked down refugee camps, and demolished homes under the pretext of security.

For Palestinians living amid these choking restrictions and ever-increasing settler attacks, Trump’s declaration of his plan to annex Gaza and ethnically cleanse its population seemed inextricably tied to Israel’s escalating violence.

Many viewed the timing as deliberate—a political lifeline for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose grip on power relies on appeasing his far-right coalition, delaying his corruption trial, and quelling public anger over the unresolved hostage crisis in Gaza.

To Palestinians, the U.S.-Israeli collusion revealed a transactional pact: Netanyahu distracts from domestic turmoil and accelerates annexation, while Trump cements his legacy as a disruptor of international norms—erasing Palestinians’ futures under the guise of diplomacy.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s vision for Gaza, as laid out during his press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Feb. 4, threw a grenade into an already destabilized Middle East foreign-policy scene.

The idea of the United States taking over the Gaza Strip is so clearly unfeasible that it can’t be credibly regarded as an option any time soon.

Analysts and foreign-policy professionals will therefore be interested in figuring out whom Trump is trying to pressure by staking out such an extreme position that could move the goalposts and disrupt postwar planning for the Gaza Strip.

This is all happening as the negotiations for the second phase of the cease-fire and hostage deal between Israel and Hamas are being negotiated—a stage that begins to deal with more political and strategic issues related to Gaza’s future and recovery.

Trump is likely seeking to pressure Arab nations into doing more for Gaza through his threats of the United States taking over the Gaza Strip—signaling that he would reluctantly have to get involved if they don’t take the initiative.

This includes Gulf nations, which he hopes will finance Gaza’s recovery and reconstruction. Egypt and Jordan—while unable to take in displaced Palestinians for obvious geopolitical, economic, security, and social issues—may be expected to play a more significant security role in Gaza, with the ultimate goal of preventing Hamas’s monopoly on power and authority in Gaza.

Of course, regardless of Trump’s true intentions, his statements will nevertheless be extremely damaging to the United States’ international and regional standing, while adding to the widespread perception that the country has not been helpful throughout the war in Gaza.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s longtime ambitions of ushering in an artificial intelligence boom have only been supercharged by the emergence of Chinese start-up DeepSeek’s new AI model, which torpedoed markets last week and wiped hundreds of billions of dollars from AI chipmaker Nvidia’s market cap.

But the DeepSeek disruption has also underscored the deep uncertainty over just how much energy will be necessary to power Trump’s big AI push. The hulking data centers that underpin the technology are notoriously energy-hungry, prompting some predictions of explosive electricity demand in the coming years. 

The sudden emergence of DeepSeek’s new model, DeepSeek-R1, which the company says is built more efficiently than its U.S. competitors, reveals just how hazy that demand outlook actually is in the long run—adding yet another complication to the ongoing U.S.-China tech race.

“We’re really at the beginning of this journey with AI,” said Tanya Das, the director of AI and energy technology policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC). Das compared the current moment to the internet boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when fears arose that the internet would crush the energy grid. That, of course, never really happened. 

It’s “completely unclear where we’re going to land,” said Das, who served at the Energy Department during the Biden administration. “It’s unclear how much more efficient the chips are going to get and the algorithms and the software are going to get.”  

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It’s always tempting to dismiss Donald Trump’s wilder remarks as flights of fancy. But we should be clear that his suggestion in a press conference alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday that Gaza’s population, which numbers over 2 million, should simply be moved out of the territory so it can be redeveloped (presumably with Trump’s companies getting a big piece of the action) constitutes nothing less than advocating a crime against humanity.

Trump’s idea appears to have originated with—wait for it—his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who last year told a Harvard University audience (in a Middle East dialogues series at which I also spoke) that Gaza’s “waterfront property” was “very valuable” and suggested that Israel should remove civilians while it “cleans up” the strip.

Only somewhat less offensive than Trump’s advocacy of ethnic cleansing has been the cascade of “told you so” remarks from liberal pundits, most of whom offered little if any criticism of President Joe Biden for unconditionally backing 15 months of the Israeli slaughter that brought us to this point and who continually dismissed the potential impact of Gaza on the U.S. election (except, apparently, for the purposes of blaming pro-Palestinian voters for Trump).

Thus far, the response from Democrats has been muted. One might hope that, with a Republican now back in the White House, more of them might magically resubscribe to the belief that silence in the face of crimes against humanity is bad.

In any case, the more effective opposition will likely come from countries in the region, many of whose governments have already made clear that Trump’s proposal is a nonstarter. Trump and Kushner’s supposed close allies in Riyadh rejected the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza and reiterated once again that no peace and normalization with Israel will take place without the creation of a Palestinian state.

The promise of a Saudi-Israeli peace deal is ultimately what could put a brake on Trump’s apocalyptic daydream. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has made clear that he understands it would be political suicide for him to move forward with such an agreement in the absence of any path to Palestinian self-determination.

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The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has been immobilized in recent days as part of the Trump administration’s tumultuous effort to remake the federal government. 

The Trump administration on Monday said it is merging USAID with the State Department, a move that came amid days of turmoil at the agency and statements by tech billionaire and close presidential advisor Elon Musk that the agency was being shut down completely. 

Employees have been told to stay out of USAID’s headquarters in Washington, career staffers have been put on leave, contractors have been laid off, and international staffers across the globe have been ordered to return home. 

USAID is the U.S. government’s lead humanitarian and development agency, providing assistance to countries worldwide to help address poverty, disease, and other humanitarian crises as well as to promote democracy and other U.S. interests. 

Critics of the agency including Musk and President Donald Trump argue that it is rife with fraud and waste and that its expenditures don’t align with U.S. interests. But experts warn that the administration is moving to dismantle an agency that provides essential aid to millions across the globe and serves as a critical source of U.S. soft power, potentially opening the door for adversaries such as China and Russia to gain increased influence as Washington pulls back from the world.

Here’s what you need to know about what’s going on with the agency, why Trump and Musk want to dismantle it, and what’s at stake. 

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President Donald Trump’s call to “take over” Gaza, relocate 2 million Palestinians elsewhere, and build the “Riviera of the Middle East” under a U.S. “long-term ownership position” may never happen. However, simply suggesting it puts Americans directly in the gunsights of Islamist extremists—not just in the United States but around the world.

Research shows that foreign military occupation is the leading cause of the worst forms of terrorism—suicide attacks—and has also led to the rise of the terrorist groups that use these deadly tactics.

On Sept. 11, 2001, the United States suffered the deadliest terrorist attack in history, when 19 Islamist extremists recruited by al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden willingly gave their lives to kill nearly 3,000 Americans. Shortly thereafter, I compiled the first complete database of suicide attacks around the world to understand why. At the time, the world leader in suicide terrorism was the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a nonreligious majority Hindu group that carried out more suicide attacks than Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

What most suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel foreign occupiers to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Religion is rarely the root cause, although it is often used as a tool by terrorist organizations in recruiting.

In 1982, Israel’s military occupation of southern Lebanon spawned Hezbollah, which used suicide attacks to deadly effect. Israel’s increasing military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza led to the rise of Hamas. In the 1990s, the prolonged U.S. military presence on the Arabian Peninsula was the best recruiting tool for bin Laden’s campaign of suicide terrorism against the United States. And the data through 2022 shows that the close association of foreign military occupation and suicide terrorism has continued.

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So, a convicted felon and an indicted war criminal walk into a press conference. While this may sound like the start of a joke, it is precisely what took place at a joint press conference held by U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on Feb. 4, just before the U.S. president announced his plan to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip and have the United States take control of what he views as prime real estate.

Trump now adds Gaza—along with Greenland, Panama, and Canada—to the list of territories that he wants to take over. It may seem comical, but few in the region are laughing.

After 15 months of mass destruction by the U.S.-backed Israeli military in Gaza that—according to top international human rights organizations and scholars—amounts to genocide, the last thing countries in the region want to see is further displacement and dispossession of Palestinians.

In fact, Saudi Arabia’s government found it necessary to issue a 4 a.m. press release to reject Trump’s outrageous idea.

The Middle East has suffered decades of instability and conflict because of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that occurred in 1948 and the creation of an Israeli state—and the region certainly doesn’t want to continue down that road for the next century just to please a U.S. president who will only be around for a few more years.

By calling for such criminal policies, Trump is not only less likely to expand the Abraham Accords to include countries like Saudi Arabia, but if he tries to implement a takeover of Gaza, he might undo the foundational Arab-Israeli peace agreements that preceded the Abraham Accords—such as the one with Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994.

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From my 27 years of working in the official U.S. Arab-Israeli diplomacy business, I can say President Donald Trump’s Gaza gambit goes above and beyond the craziest and most destructive proposal any administration has ever made (and there have been some strange ones). In one fell swoop, standing next to an Israeli leader who looked like the cat that just swallowed a dozen canaries, the president let loose on a scheme that is not just impractical but dangerous.

Trump has now harnessed U.S. prestige and credibility to propose an idea that will be perceived as forced transfer or worse; validated the all-too-dangerous fantasies of the Israel right; undermined key U.S. partners Egypt and Jordan; made his own goal of Israeli-Saudi normalization that much harder; and for good measure sent an unmistakable signal to authoritarians everywhere that they have the right to assert control over other people’s territory.

All that said about an unserious proposal from an unserious man, I think we may have missed the real takeaway from that presser. I couldn’t help but notice that Trump was reading from a script as he outlined his proposal. More than likely, he had talked some of it through with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or had perhaps been influenced by him, though Netanyahu often appeared as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

Far from laying down a marker or reading Netanyahu the riot act, Trump seemed detached from engaging on the matter of the cease-fire deal, asserting that he didn’t know whether it would be implemented and making clear that he’d met with Netanyahu to listen.

That all, of course, might change. Few things are guaranteed in Trump world except that things change. Nonetheless, Netanyahu left the White House as one of the happiest people on the planet. He now has talking points he can use with his far-right allies, arguing that his good friend in the White House sees Gaza the way they do—free of Hamas and tragically of Palestinians as well.

Getting to phase two of the cease-fire deal—ending the war; freeing the remaining hostages; and completing the withdrawal of the Israel Defense Forces from Gaza—already faced long odds before Tuesday. That head-exploding presser couldn’t have made Israeli-Palestinian dealmaking any easier.

Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the Defense Department to build an “Iron Dome” missile defense shield over the United States. Almost immediately, some experts expressed skepticism, comparing it to former President Ronald Reagan’s unrealized “Star Wars” plans in the 1980s and questioning whether it would be possible to design a perfect missile shield over such a large country.

But Trump is right. A U.S. homeland missile defense system is both technically possible and necessary to defend the country from 21st-century threats.

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On U.S. President Donald Trump’s first day back in office, he announced a 90-day freeze on all foreign aid. This sudden freeze caught one of America’s most successful and strategically vital global health programs in the crosshairs: the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).

PEPFAR was created in 2003 in a moment of crisis. AIDS was ascendent, and life expectancies across sub-Saharan Africa were in precipitous decline. In Botswana, life expectancy had declined from a peak of 62 to 51 that year; in Lesotho, from a peak 59 to 44. Nearly 3 million people died of AIDS in 2003, 76 percent of them in sub-Saharan Africa. And experts predicted that the death count could continue to rise, reaching perhaps 100 million by 2020.

Twenty years later, largely thanks to PEPFAR and other U.S.-led programs, the world is winning the war on AIDS. Deaths have dropped by 69 percent since 2004, and life expectancy in Botswana is at its highest-ever level. PEPFAR alone—costing less than 0.1 percent of the U.S. federal budget—is credited with saving 25 million lives. As Trump took office, some 21 million people received antiretroviral drugs, ARVs, through PEPFAR. ARVs are crucial to controlling the epidemic, as they disable the HIV retrovirus. People on ARVs have no symptoms of HIV, nor can they transmit it to others.

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One of the special privileges of being the president of the United States is that people have to take what you say seriously no matter how bananas. So it is with President Donald Trump’s suggestion that Washington facilitate the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip and then, when that task is accomplished, own the territory. The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians needs new ideas, and Gaza, in particular, presents a set of extremely difficult problems, but Trump’s proposal is not just morally bankrupt—it is sheer lunacy.

Where to begin?

The president insists that world leaders, and even those within the region, support such a plan. Who? The Saudis issued a statement not long after Trump appeared with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterating their support for a two-state solution. The governments in Egypt and Jordan categorically reject the idea of transferring Palestinians to their territory, even at the risk of U.S. largesse. Not even Israeli settlers would support this plan, if only because in their religious-nationalist messianism they want to resettle Gaza, not allow American developers to build high-end hotels there. Yet Trump persists, insisting that “people” support his plan. He might just be riffing off a late-night phone call with pals from Mar-a-Lago. The danger here is that in response to the well-deserved storm of criticism, Trump feels the need to prove everyone else wrong and make ethnic cleansing and neocolonialism a policy of the United States in the Middle East.

Then, of course, there is the question of feasibility. No doubt U.S. armed forces can take over the Gaza Strip, though it certainly would come at the costs of American lives.  Despite Israel’s best efforts, Hamas remains well-armed and lethal. Does the president expect Hamas’s fighters to go quietly into the Sinai Peninsula? That’s a rhetorical question.

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On Jan. 9, 1964, 200 Panamanian high school students marched peacefully to Balboa High School, located in the heart of the Canal Zone. Panamanians widely resented the U.S.-controlled district as a colonial enclave within their own country. The protesters sought to raise the Panamanian flag alongside the school’s lone U.S. flag, symbolizing a demand for national sovereignty and an end to U.S. rule.

U.S. police officers allowed only six students to proceed to the school, where they were met by a crowd of more than 2,000 Americans, who booed and verbally attacked the protesters and physically desecrated the Panamanian flag. As the students fled, they defended themselves with stones and were met with gunfire in response. News of incident sparked nationwide protests and clashes with U.S. police and military personnel. By the end of the crisis, Panama had severed its already strained diplomatic relations with the United States, and 21 Panamanians and four Americans had lost their lives.

These events, known as Martyrs’ Day, are remembered in Panama as a symbol of the fight for sovereignty. More than 60 years later, however, these old wounds are resurfacing.

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U.S. President Donald Trump announced a halt to U.S. assistance to South Africa over land reform. More than three decades after the end of apartheid, about 70 percent of South Africa’s farmland is still owned by white South Africans, who make up less than 10 percent of the population.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa last month signed an expropriation bill into law aimed at addressing the disparity by allowing land to be seized without compensation only in circumstances where it is “just and equitable and in the public interest.”

Much of U.S. assistance is in the form of foreign aid, which Trump has stopped with his South African-born ally, billionaire Elon Musk. PEPFAR-funded facilities for treating the country’s large HIV-positive population remained shut in South Africa, despite limited exemptions announced over the weekend, posing a danger to millions of South Africans dependent on antiretroviral medications.

“There is no other significant funding that is provided by the United States in South Africa,” Ramaphosa said. Gwede Mantashe, South Africa’s mineral and petroleum resources minister and African National Congress chair, said African nations should implement retaliatory measures on critical minerals. “They want to withhold funding, but they still want our minerals. … Let us withhold minerals. Africa must assert itself,” he told the Mining Indaba conference in Cape Town on Monday.

South Africa and eight other nations on Friday also formed the Hague Group to defend the rulings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the face of what they described as defiance of ICJ orders and attempts by U.S. officials to sanction the ICC. The alliance includes Belize, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, and Senegal, which vowed to boycott arms transfers to Israel.

U.S. President Donald Trump, who once called himself a “tariff man,” is making clear that his love of import duties is more than words on a social media post. The announcement last week that he was following through on his threat to place steep tariffs on China as well as two major trading partners—Canada and Mexico—unsettled financial markets and global leaders.

“We don’t want to be here,” said Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who warned Americans that there would be countermeasures that would make them feel pain in their pocketbooks and at the workplace. As stocks plummeted 600 points on Monday due to fears of trade wars, the United States and Mexico announced a one-month pause as they tried to work out a deal. Later in day, Canada announced the same.

Whatever happens with this round of tariff threats—as there are sure to be many more—all of this begs the question: How did presidents obtain so much power over tariffs?

This is not just a story about Trump. It is a story about presidential power. Under the U.S. Constitution, Congress maintains clear authority over taxes and foreign commerce, the twin issues that define tariffs. What allows Trump to take such an aggressive action without appearing to have to worry about Capitol Hill or the courts? Who vested so much authority in the  commander in chief to impact international trade relations?

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The Trump administration is careening down a path of attempting to merge the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) with the State Department, two entities that have operated as connected, but separated, agencies for decades. With the knives out on global aid worldwide, a merger is looking more and more likely. Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed on a trip to El Salvador that he is now USAID’s acting administrator, and Elon Musk announced early on Monday morning that President Donald Trump has “agreed” that USAID should be shut down in the wake of a massive and unprecedented aid freeze (though sources said not all of Trump’s advisors agreed with this plan). Meanwhile, Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy and others called the potential merger “illegal.”

For many U.S. allies, there is a sense of déjà vu in these events. Mergers of development and diplomatic agencies are growing increasingly popular. A merger in the U.S. could become the most consequential in a slew of similar mergers that have already unfolded worldwide.

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On Jan. 20, as U.S. President Donald Trump was being inaugurated in Washington, D.C., some 8,000 miles away in Dar es Salaam, the government of Tanzania was reversing prior denials and declaring that there was, in fact, an outbreak of Marburg virus. Marburg, a highly contagious hemorrhagic virus, is a cousin to Ebola with a case fatality rate as high as 88 percent, and it could bring the kind of global attention the Tanzanian government has long tried to avoid.

Using lessons from the West African Ebola outbreak that began in 2014, which took two years and more than $2 billion of U.S. funding to contain, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were mapping a way to stop the Marburg outbreak early.

The same day in the Western Hemisphere, officials were tracking a new outbreak of the extremely rare and Ebola-like Chapare hemorrhagic fever in Bolivia as they readied to prepare a response. But two weeks later, no plans have been executed, and the USAID leaders who would be responsible are on administrative leave as part of the new administration’s assault on foreign aid. None of the outbreaks have been contained.

Now, Trump has ordered an ill-considered scheme that contravenes U.S. law, could tear apart the international aid infrastructure built with bipartisan support over decades, and which would mean many more outbreaks and other disasters worldwide.

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U.S. President Donald Trump’s statement that he wants to “clean out” Gaza raised alarm in many quarters, but perhaps nowhere more so than in Jordan. On a Jan. 25 call, Trump pressured Jordanian King Abdullah II to take in many more Palestinian refugees in what would amount to a de facto ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

For Jordan, this is not a new proposal, but it comes at a time of great uncertainty in the Middle East, with the potential to expose and heighten internal tensions in Jordan. What Trump may not realize is how detrimental destabilizing Jordan could be for U.S. interests.

The extent to which Trump will pursue forcing Palestinians out of Gaza remains unclear, but Jordan is taking the threat very seriously. Taking in Palestinian refugees has long been a major red line for the kingdom. Rather than a concrete objective, Trump’s statement may serve as an opening negotiating tactic for a broader U.S. Middle East peace plan.

Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi underscored in response that Jordan’s position on receiving Palestinian refugees would not change: “Jordan is for Jordanians, and Palestine is for Palestinians.” This message applies to Trump’s request for Gaza, but also potentially to displaced Palestinians in the West Bank who might be forced into Jordan as Israel escalates its attacks and raids in the occupied territory.

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The truck attack in New Orleans on Jan. 1, in which 15 people were killed and more than 50 injured, has raised new worries about transnational jihadist extremism. The man whom the FBI has identified as the perpetrator, a U.S. citizen named Shamsud-Din Jabbar, appears to have been a lone-wolf operator, inspired by the Islamic State and motivated in part by Israel’s conduct in the Israel-Hamas war. It was entirely predictable that harsh treatment of Palestinians at the hands of a U.S. ally—a central al Qaeda grievance—would reinvigorate jihadi terrorism targeting the United States. In this light, the attack could be part of a nascent resurgence, albeit one using trucks as bludgeons rather than airplanes as cruise missiles.

This possibility arises at an especially awkward time for the United States. Domestically, the transition from President Joe Biden to President Donald Trump, which Trump intends to be politically radical and structural in scope, is likely to purge key foreign-policy agencies of many of their most experienced and capable personnel. This will inevitably hinder responsiveness.

Internationally, Syria—where the Islamic State is still present—is in a delicate state following the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad by a coalition headed by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS). The Trump team is likely to consider the China and Ukraine challenges paramount and could well be inclined to sideline Syria, if not ignore it entirely.

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I swear: My plan was to write about something other than U.S. President Donald Trump this week, but the torrent of bad policies emanating from the White House is impossible to ignore. I’m supposed to write about things that are important, and the foreign policy of the world’s most powerful country is surely one of them, especially when it makes a sudden and far-reaching lurch into the bizarre. So I hope you’ll forgive me if I remain focused on the foreign-policy revolution the Trump administration is attempting to implement.

The key issue is the impact that Trump’s imposition of tariffs, his withdrawal from the World Health Organization, and his other recent initiatives are going to have on American lives. And part of the answer to that question depends on how the rest of the world reacts to Trump’s heavy-handed attempts to browbeat and bully them—starting with some of our closest allies. I wrote about this issue a few weeks ago, but today I want to explore the broader conceptual and theoretical issues that underpin it.

As I see it, what we have here is a clash of rival theories about how the world works. The first is my old friend balance-of-power/threat theory; the second is the theory of collective goods. Both perspectives tell you important things about how the world works; the question is which one provides the clearest insights into what is likely to happen now.

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Although much of the commentary about U.S. President Donald Trump continues to revolve around the ways that he upends traditional Republican Party politics, much of his success, in fact, stems from the opposite—the ways in which he champions policies that have been at the core of the GOP for decades.

It was not a surprise that Trump’s inaugural address included the words “drill, baby, drill,” a catchphrase that gained popularity with vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin in her 2008 campaign for vice president, eight years before Trump first ran. And when Palin injected the phrase into the popular bloodstream, it already reflected decades of Republicans shifting from environmental concerns and promoting higher rates of fossil fuel production.

Every time that Trump utters the phrase, he reminds Republicans that regardless of his behavior, much of what he is fighting for is exactly what they have desired since the 1970s. He is the party’s path to political power and achieving key policies, as he demonstrated with passage of a massive supply-side tax cut in 2017.

Trump is the battering ram that Republicans have been looking for in their efforts to weaken or dismantle the regulations that environmentalists have struggled to put into place over the decades. Whenever the president says “drill, baby, drill,” he offers a not-so-subtle reminder to Republicans that yes—he is, in fact, one of them.

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Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: How the impacts of the U.S. foreign aid freeze are being felt across Latin America, Emilia Pérez earns mixed reactions in Mexico, and Ecuador prepares for an election.

Have feedback? Hit reply to let me know your thoughts.

Trump’s Aid Freeze May Be an ‘Own Goal’

Though a war of words between U.S. President Donald Trump and Colombian President Gustavo Petro over deportations captured attention in Latin America last week, another U.S. measure fueled further uncertainty across the region and shook governments’ confidence in partnership with Washington.

Last Friday, the U.S. State Department ordered a temporary freeze on foreign assistance projects worldwide. A 90-day review will eventually restore funding to initiatives that make the United States “safer, stronger, and more prosperous,” the State Department said.

Waivers were announced Tuesday for “life-saving humanitarian assistance,” but the Trump administration might judge a vast range of U.S.-funded activities in Latin America to fall outside of that category, including programs to integrate refugees into host countries, protect rainforests, and promote transparency.

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U.S. President Donald Trump did not, as promised on the campaign trail, manage to broker an end to the war in Ukraine on day one of his return to the White House. But during his first week in office, Trump and the presidents of Russia and Ukraine continued to stake out their negotiating positions ahead of a widely anticipated U.S.-led push to end the conflict. 

At the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appeared to channel Trump when Zelensky berated European leaders for not investing more in the continent’s defense, later saying that it would take a 200,000-strong European peacekeeping force to deter Russia from attacking again in the wake of a settlement—a contingent roughly the same size as the entire active-duty personnel in the French Armed Forces. 

For his part, Trump threatened to impose “high levels” of taxes, tariffs, and sanctions on Russian imports if a deal isn’t reached soon. The war’s instigator, Russian President Vladimir Putin, said on Friday that he was “ready for negotiations” and suggested meeting with Trump in person, describing his relationship with the U.S. leader as “businesslike, pragmatic, and trustworthy.”

Despite the conciliatory tone, experts and former Russian and U.S. government officials say they see no sign that Putin is ready to climb down from his ultimate goal of permanently bending Ukraine to his will. For the U.S. president who pitches himself as the dealmaker-in-chief, brokering a sustainable end to the war could prove to be his most difficult deal yet. 

“I’ve seen no public evidence, or heard from anyone that I trust who knows Putin well, that indicates he is ready to negotiate,” said Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador to Russia. 

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Colombia and the United States nearly went to war last weekend, but if you blinked, you might have missed it. Piqued by Colombia’s refusal to accept U.S. military flights bearing shackled detainees, U.S. President Donald Trump on Sunday posted on social media a blistering broadside of threats, including 25 percent tariffs on all Colombian exports, later upped to 50 percent after another heated exchange with Colombian President Gustavo Petro. Tucked away at the very bottom of the list, however, was an item that deserves more attention than it received. Briefly, it reads “IEEPA [International Emergency Economic Powers Act] Treasury, Banking and Financial Sanctions to be fully imposed.”

The implications of these words are easily missed. Most attention focused on the tariffs on popular Colombian exports such as coffee and cut flowers, which are easy for the average person to understand. Additional threats to restrict (or revoke) visas for members of Colombia’s government, and to conduct rigorous entry shakedowns for visiting Colombian nationals, were measures that would usually be aimed at a long-standing adversary, such as China, over some deep-seated dispute—as opposed to an economic and military partner, such as Colombia, raising a limited objection.

But the proposed banking sanctions went a giant leap further, toying with what, in economic policy, has often been called the “nuclear option.”

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Thomas Jefferson envisioned an American society in which the most talented people—rather than the richest and most well connected—shaped and implemented policy. To Jefferson, the United States should be a meritocracy, unburdened by the aristocratic ways of old Europe.

Unfortunately, leadership of today’s public institutions—especially national security agencies—fail to reflect Jefferson’s ideal of a natural aristocracy. Instead, advancement within today’s institutions is largely determined by whether a candidate attended one of the expensive feeder schools along the northeastern D.C.-Boston corridor. Securing national security jobs and building professional networks needed to stay informed about openings, enhance resumes, and excel in interviews is often tied to socioeconomic advantages. Students from privileged backgrounds benefit from financial support and parental safety nets, easing their transition to Washington for internships and early careers. Most students from working-class families opt out, limiting socioeconomic and geographic representation in national security agencies.

Misguided approaches to diversity that hyper-focus on race, ethnicity, gender, and visible differences have done more to divide and weaken U.S. institutions than to unite and strengthen them. These efforts, meant to address past injustices, instead harmed current and future generations of Americans by fostering hypocrisy through discrimination, lowering standards of excellence, and stifling dialogue. At the same time, public faith in government is at an all-time low. And based on the 2024 election results, Americans feel it’s time for a change.

To secure public trust and excellence in the federal workforce, President Trump rightly ended diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies across the federal government. Authentic representation of America and its interests is best achieved by leveraging the underutilized and undervalued talent found in America’s forgotten communities: individuals from working-class families. Now, it is time to rebuild these institutions.

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Amid all the anxiety in Europe over Donald Trump’s return as U.S. president, essential differences have emerged between various countries’ approaches to managing what promises to be a tumultuous relationship. These cleavages will make it harder for Europe to define and defend a single common policy on the United States. But the fact that there is more than one European approach to transatlantic relations may help European security in the end. The best hope is that a smaller group of hardheaded, defense-minded countries—Poland, the Nordic countries, and the Baltic states, perhaps joined by Britain—will promote European security interests vis-à-vis Trump 2.0.

There are four distinct groups of European countries in terms of their relations with Trump. First, there are the enthusiasts: a small handful of right-wing populist leaders who share his worldview and mimic his style, such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico. Second, there are the engagers: Poland, the Nordic countries, and the Baltic states, most of which rank among NATO’s highest per-capita spenders on defense and are making a pragmatic effort to build a functioning relationship. Third, there are the moralizers, such as outgoing German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose relationship with Trump is poisoned by mutual contempt. All by themselves in a fourth category are the French: opportunists who, like President Emmanuel Macron, see transatlantic acrimony under Trump as the chance for Paris to claim leadership of a post-American Europe.

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U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced that he plans to sign an executive order instructing the departments of Defense and Homeland Security to prepare an existing migrant detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to house tens of thousands of migrants.

“We have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,” Trump said at the White House. “Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back, so we’re going to send them out to Guantánamo.”

Guantánamo Bay, the site of a U.S. naval base, is perhaps best known as the location of the infamous detention camp where the United States has held foreign terrorist suspects for more than two decades. Rights groups have called for the facility’s closure for years due to its association with indefinite detention and torture. The prison camp has housed nearly 800 men—many of whom were never charged with a crime—since its inception in 2002. Over the course of the Biden administration, the population dropped from 40 to 15, but U.S. President Joe Biden failed to fulfill his stated pledge to shut the prison down.

In addition to the prison, Guantánamo is also home to a separate, lesser-known facility that the United States, under both Republican and Democratic administrations—including the Biden administration—has used since the mid-1990s to detain migrants intercepted at sea as they attempted to reach the United States. Advocacy groups have called for the U.S. government to stop the practice and shutter the facility, which is known as the Migrant Operations Center.

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Despite widespread concern in Ukraine, Europe, and part of Washington that U.S. President Donald Trump would take a conciliatory approach to Russia over its war in Ukraine, Trump and many key members of his administration have signaled a willingness to seriously ratchet up the economic pressure on Moscow to force a negotiated end to a war entering its fourth year.

The big questions concern what more the United States can do to crimp Russia’s economy that it hasn’t already tried, and how to do so without causing economic blowback that would imperil Trump’s stated goals of lower prices and faster growth.

Trump himself launched a rhetorical broadside at Russia last week, warning the Kremlin that if it didn’t work toward a negotiated peace, he would drop the hammer on an economy that is already struggling.

“If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries,” he posted on Truth Social. 

Trump’s threats about greater economic pressure—part of an avalanche of threatened tariffs on countries around the world—have been echoed by others in his administration, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and special envoy to Ukraine Keith Kellogg.

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Not long ago, Americans and Chinese mostly liked each other. In 2011, polls showed that most people in each country viewed the other favorably. Economically, the United States and China seemed inseparable. The term “Chimerica” captured this dynamic: China produced and saved; America consumed and borrowed. The relationship was celebrated as the engine of global growth, helping the world recover from the 2008 financial crisis.

Today, Chimerica is long forgotten. A 2024 Pew survey shows that 81 percent of Americans view China unfavorably, with 42 percent viewing it as an “enemy” of the United States. The turning point came in 2012, when presidential candidates Barack Obama and Mitt Romney blamed China for job losses to court swing voters in Ohio.

China has lost America. U.S. President Donald Trump did not cause the rift between Washington and Beijing, but so far, he has shown little interest in fixing it.

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U.S. President Donald Trump has invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House early next week, a White House official told Foreign Policy on Tuesday. Though Netanyahu’s office announced that the meeting is scheduled for Feb. 4, the White House official said details on the date and time will follow once finalized.

Netanyahu is now set to be the first foreign leader to visit the White House since Trump’s inauguration. The two men have much to discuss. Their meeting will occur at a precarious moment in the Middle East, as negotiators struggle to maintain and prolong a tenuous 42-day cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. The six-week pause, which began on Jan. 19, provided the territory with a much-needed reprieve after 15 months of brutal fighting. Talks on the second phase of the truce aimed at reaching a permanent cease-fire are scheduled to begin on Feb. 3.

Trump and Netanyahu were close allies during the U.S. president’s first term, with Trump taking several steps that aligned with the Israeli leader’s agenda—such as moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and recognizing Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights. With Netanyahu’s invitation, Trump is signaling that maintaining strong ties with the Israeli leader will continue to be a top priority.

While Trump’s Middle East agenda is still taking shape, there have already been signs that he will again embrace policies favored by Netanyahu. Trump over the weekend scrapped a Biden-era hold on providing 2,000-pound bombs to Israel; Netanyahu promptly praised the president for giving Israel “the tools it needs to defend itself.”

Trump has also proposed a plan to “clean out” Gaza that would see its Palestinian residents moved to Jordan and Egypt, an idea that was praised by far-right Israeli politicians. The governments of Jordan and Egypt, as well as Palestinian leaders, have been clear that they fundamentally oppose Trump’s proposal.

U.S. President Donald Trump celebrated an apparent victory on Sunday when he coerced Colombian President Gustavo Petro to allow the resumption of U.S. deportation flights to the country. Petro had previously announced on X that he had turned away two U.S. military flights carrying deported Colombians, writing that the United States “must establish a protocol for the dignified treatment of migrants before we receive them.”

Trump and Petro sparred on social media for hours. But the Colombian president was forced into submission after his U.S. counterpart announced retaliatory tariffs of 25 percent on all Colombian goods, set to rise to 50 percent after one week, in addition to sanctions and travel bans on Colombian officials. Crude oil is Colombia’s biggest export to the United States; the South American country is the United States’ second-biggest source of coffee and top provider of cut flowers. A trade war would have been highly detrimental to the Colombian economy—especially ahead of Valentine’s Day.

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With every new president comes the inevitable discussion of the first 100 days. “The Hundred Days — as they are called,” radio broadcaster George Sokolsky wrote in 1961, “are any President’s grand opportunity to create the atmosphere for himself to establish leadership.” In April 1981, Roger Mudd anchored a prime time documentary on NBC News, entitled “Reagan: The First 100 Days,” where he called the president’s time—which included an assassination attempt—“a period unlike any other in almost 50 years.”

In recent years, the metric has been extended into discussions of second terms as well. “Shock and awe,” is how Sen. John Barrasso described what he predicts is on the horizon for President Donald Trump, who ramped up expectations further with promises about day one, let alone the first 100. In a moment of reality television politics during his inaugural festivities, Trump sat on stage at the Capital One Arena, with the cameras rolling, signing one executive order after the other.

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During his first term as the U.S. president, Donald Trump occasionally floated the idea of buying Greenland, but few took it seriously. Now Trump is repeating the calls, backed with threats against Denmark, and nobody is chuckling anymore.

The Nordic nation is facing the prospect of a close ally taking Danish territory by force. But despite only having a small army and navy, Denmark has no shortage of economic leverage with which it can try to reason with—or, if necessary, pressure—the U.S. president.

Indeed, there are several Danish multinational companies without whose products and services Americans would feel immediate pain.

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Implementation of week two of the Israel-Hamas cease-fire deal has gone according to plan, more or less. But anyone who seriously believes that there’s smooth sailing ahead for the three-phased accord should lay down and wait quietly until the feeling passes.

This isn’t an agreement between the United States and Switzerland. It’s the grudging result of 15 months of bitter, bloody conflict between two combatants seemingly pledged to the other’s destruction. One of those parties—Hamas—engaged in the willful and indiscriminate killing of civilians; serial sexual violence; the taking of hostages; and is designated by the agreement’s principal mediator as a foreign terror organization. The other—Israel, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose overriding goal is to stay in power—would prefer the war in Gaza continue, and thus is in no hurry to reach the agreement’s second stage, which imagines the end of the war and the withdrawal of Israeli forces.

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U.S. President Donald Trump’s strident demand that the semi-autonomous island territory of Greenland come under U.S. “ownership” has set off a firestorm of consternation across the Atlantic. Although geographically part of the North American continent, the frozen island nation—more than three times Texas’s size, with 60,000 inhabitants—has been under European control for centuries.

Europe has progressively loosened its control of Greenland over time. And there’s no reason to think that it wouldn’t further loosen that hold to allow the United States to pursue policies of mutual trans-Atlantic interest, including the expansion of mining and the U.S. military presence.

The greatest hurdle to that process might, in fact, be Trump’s own public bullying. Greenland is an ideal project for the trans-Atlantic allies to pursue together, in consultation with native Greenlanders.

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If you only listened to the Trump administration’s pronouncements or only read the deer-in-the-headlights accounts provided by assorted legacy journalists, you might conclude that the new administration has already built up an irresistible head of steam. Given Trump’s monarchical pretensions, he’d undoubtedly like us all to think he is unbound by limits and that resistance is futile. That is not the case, however, and we should not mistake Trump’s bombastic return and far-reaching early initiatives for unstoppable momentum. On the contrary, we are more likely to look back on this period as the highwater mark of Trumpian hubris. Making lavish promises is easy; delivering positive results is a whole lot harder.

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Stretched thin by a mountain of crises worldwide from Gaza to Ukraine to Sudan, many aid groups are now grappling with another challenge: the return of U.S. President Donald Trump. 

Trump, who was sworn into office on Monday and has vowed to advance an “America First” agenda, doesn’t directly determine the U.S. foreign aid budget—Congress does. But he has a long track record of targeting the sector, stoking anxiety and alarm among aid groups that had already been scrambling to cobble together the funding to meet the immense global need.

The U.S. leader sent shock waves across aid circles on his first day in office by issuing an executive order halting all U.S. foreign assistance for a 90-day period, pending further review. He also signed an order to yank the United States out of the World Health Organization, building on earlier threats from his first presidency, and announced a suspension to the U.S. refugee resettlement program, even canceling flights for thousands of refugees whose travel plans had already been approved. 

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U.S. President Donald Trump took office this week and inherited the most secure southern border in decades, with recorded illegal crossings plummeting over the past year despite a strong U.S. economy that continues to be a magnet for foreign workers.

So, what did Trump do on day one? He declared a national emergency at the southern border and ripped up most of the Biden administration initiatives that had brought it under control. Amid a slew of executive actions on Trump’s first day, those on immigration stand out. The new president’s approach will bring back the very crisis that he claims he was elected to resolve.

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U.S. President Donald Trump announced his intention to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization (WHO), renewing an effort begun in 2020 but blocked after the election of Joe Biden. Trump’s decision invites two questions: First, has the United States actually, legally quit WHO? And second, are other actors powerless to prevent the country’s withdrawal or, if it occurs, shape how it affects global cooperation on health? On both fronts, the answer is no. Trump’s executive order is only the beginning of a complex legal and geopolitical struggle that could have unanticipated global effects.

The United States helped create WHO in 1948, not out of altruism but because it understood the overwhelming benefit WHO could provide to the country. Upon joining, President Harry Truman declared it was in hopes international cooperation “spares us the haunting fear of devastating epidemics.” Since that time, WHO has had both significant successes, such as smallpox eradication, as well as failures, like the early response to AIDS in the 1990s, learning from each.

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On Jan. 19, the first phase of the Israel-Hamas cease-fire agreement began. After 15 months, Israel’s war in Gaza is, presumably, on pause. It’s all thanks to a deal that was reportedly on the table since December 2023, but was finally signed last week after Donald Trump intervened, just before his inauguration. The question is: Is this really a cease-fire, or is it simply a truce that will fall apart in the next few weeks?

A cease-fire is usually envisaged to be permanent, with the clear and stated intention of not returning to hostilities. A truce is quite the opposite.

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The moment made for compelling TV, but it also underscored the complications that will bedevil Europe as it confronts a more assertive United States under Trump. Macron is just one voice of a divided continent; he is also in a profoundly weakened position at home, given a populist surge that has roiled European politics. And his comments pointed to Europe’s own economic drift and sluggish growth, exacerbated by the energy shock caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and an ongoing slowdown in China, the European Union’s third-largest export market after the United States and United Kingdom. It all makes striking a more independent European path quite a tall order.

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Europe believes it is ready for Donald Trump 2.0. Having survived one Trump administration, European policymakers believe they have a recipe for navigating a repeat. Their confidence, however, is unwarranted. Focused on the wrong goals and distracted by political crises, Europe is far from equipped for the challenges of Trump’s second term as U.S. president.

Most significantly, European bureaucrats have yet to internalize the urgency and extent of the changes that will be required in military spending and strategy. Bribes and flattery may mollify Trump temporarily, but neither is likely to derail his plans to shift U.S. military commitments away from Europe. Europe may soon find itself exposed, lacking both the U.S. security blanket and a viable alternative of its own.

For Trump and his advisors, European complacency poses a challenge to one of their core objectives: shifting Europe’s defense burden onto NATO allies. But the new administration does have some levers it can use to force Europe out of its reverie and signal the seriousness of its intentions: reducing the U.S. military footprint in Europe decisively early in his term and pushing security responsibilities onto European Union member states.

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Fear of another trade war during U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term has many on edge.

On Tuesday, Trump announced that he was considering a 10 percent duty on all Chinese imports, beginning next month, to punish Beijing for allowing the flow of opiate fentanyl into Mexico and Canada. These come in addition to his threats of 25 percent tariffs on Washington’s North American neighbors, starting Feb. 1, that would also be aimed at combating fentanyl trafficking as well as curbing undocumented migration.

“We always believe that there is no winner in a trade war or tariff war,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning warned Trump on Wednesday.

The president has indicated that cracking down on trade that does not benefit his America First strategy will be a top priority for his new administration. For more on Trump’s tariff policies, check out FP’s newsletter World Brief.

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s South Asia Brief.

The highlights this week: A few of U.S. President Donald Trump’s initial moves could provide an early indication of his approach to South Asia; the region is well represented at the World Economic Forum summit in Davos, Switzerland; and Sri Lanka signs a landmark investment deal with China.

4 Things to Watch From the Trump White House

U.S. President Donald Trump has said little about South Asia since taking office on Jan. 20, and his foreign-policy priorities are likely to focus elsewhere as he begins his second term. However, some of his initial moves—including four outlined below—will provide an early indication of how he might approach relations with countries in the region.

Tariffs. India’s protectionist policies and a trade imbalance with the United States in India’s favor have long made it a prime potential target for tariff hikes under Trump. Last week, industrialist Shalabh Kumar, a Republican donor, suggested that Trump could impose 10 percent tariff increases on India during his first days in office.

Such a move would inject tensions into U.S.-India commercial relations, especially if Trump is uninterested in maintaining the strategic trade dialogue launched with New Delhi in 2023. At the same time, tariffs or the threat of them could spur the two sides to begin talks on an economic partnership deal.

India isn’t the only country in the region affected by tariffs. The United States is a top export destination for all of South Asia, including Bangladesh and Pakistan. Given the fragility of those two economies, U.S. trade penalties could deliver economic and diplomatic blows.

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It remains an open question whether the Trump administration is interested in making an offer to purchase the island of Greenland from Denmark, but speculation about the potential price is already starting to circulate. According to one back-of-the-envelope calculation, a fair bid could be anywhere from $12.5 billion to $77 billion. That’s based on similar purchases of territory in the past and Greenland’s own economic potential.

How did Denmark acquire Greenland in the first place? Why does Greenland remain underdeveloped? And why don’t countries buy territory anymore?Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.

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In farewell remarks to the State Department last week, then-U.S. President Joe Biden declared that Iran “is weaker than it’s been in decades.”

Biden’s comments typified current assessments on Iran from the United States and Israel, and there are growing signs that the latter is considering exploiting Tehran’s tenuous position with strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. This comes as more hawkish figures in the Iranian government have called for modifying the country’s nuclear doctrine in the event of an existential threat—publicly flirting with the prospect of weaponization.

But just how weakened is Iran, and does it truly have intentions of making a dash for the bomb? These are key questions for the Trump administration to consider as its foreign policy begins to take shape.

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U.S. President Donald Trump, newly ensconced in the White House, has offered Chinese-owned social media app TikTok a 75-day extension to find a buyer. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law demanding its parent company, ByteDance, sell the platform; it went into effect on Jan. 19.

TikTok went offline in the United States late on Jan. 19 and resumed service less than 24 hours later on Inauguration Day, with a message of thanks to Trump. What matters now isn’t TikTok’s decisions, but those of ByteDance—and ByteDance, as a Chinese company, can’t make independent decisions on a matter of geopolitical import by itself.

That means that TikTok’s future is up to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and how China’s leaders respond could offer some important clues for the near-term future of the U.S.-China relationship.

So, what happens next? One scenario is that a deal is put together in the next 75 days, and ByteDance sells TikTok to a U.S. company or another foreign buyer. This would be the smartest approach on China’s part, and it would also mean that Beijing is able to take advantage of Trump’s cupidity in a way that it wasn’t during his first term. Trump has always been open to deals, but China made no offers amid the downward spiral of the bilateral relationship post-2016.

Read more in today’s China Brief: TikTok Debate Could Stir White House Clash

U.S. President Donald Trump hit the ground running for his first day in office on Monday, signing 26 executive orders and issuing a slew of other promises prioritizing Washington’s interests on the global stage. “The golden age of America begins right now,” Trump vowed at the start of his inaugural address.

The new administration aims to tackle immigration, foster an America First foreign-policy agenda, and promote business interests over climate protections. Among his biggest presidential actions, Trump declared a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, signaled his intention to withdraw from the World Health Organization and the 2015 Paris Agreement, and instructed the U.S. attorney general to delay enforcement of the ban on popular social media app TikTok for 75 days.

However, Trump’s aggressive first day—complete with the rescinding of 78 policies made by former U.S. President Joe Biden—did not accomplish everything on his initial to-do list. The Russia-Ukraine war still rages on, despite Trump promising to end the conflict by his inauguration. He did not issue sanctions on Iran, nor did he expand his controversial U.S. travel ban. And he has yet to impose sweeping 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, though he has said those will begin on Feb. 1.

For more on Trump’s Day 1 executive orders, read today’s edition of FP’s newsletter World Brief.

U.S. President Donald Trump unleashed a raft of executive orders targeting immigration and border security on his first day in office, laying the groundwork for what he has promised will be “the largest deportation effort in American history.”

In addition to declaring a national emergency at the U.S. southern border and calling for the end of birthright citizenship, a 14th Amendment right—igniting a sweeping legal battle—the returning U.S. leader also issued an executive order that designates drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) and specially designated global terrorists.

“The Cartels have engaged in a campaign of violence and terror throughout the Western Hemisphere that has not only destabilized countries with significant importance for our national interests but also flooded the United States with deadly drugs, violent criminals, and vicious gangs,” the order said, adding that they “pose an unacceptable national security risk to the United States.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other officials have 14 days to make their recommendations, the order added.

Trump previously floated designating cartels as FTOs during his first presidency, although he ultimately backed off the idea. Cartels already face U.S. economic sanctions. But with an FTO designation, Washington would also be able to penalize any entity that “knowingly provides material support or resources” to the cartels in question—potentially impacting migrants, farms, U.S. gun dealers, and more. 

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Most discussions in Washington about the Trump administration’s approach to global affairs relate to Ukraine, China, the Middle East, and most recently Greenland; there is little talk of the Western Balkans. Nonetheless, shifts in U.S. foreign policy in the region could upset the fragile status quo prevailing there. The Western Balkans’ current state of affairs and delicate geopolitical equilibrium have prevented Bosnia and Herzegovina from sliding back into civil war while keeping the Serbia-Kosovo conflict frozen for the past 26 years.

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On his first day back in office, U.S. President Donald Trump took the first step toward possibly renewing the sanctions that he imposed against senior International Criminal Court (ICC) personnel during his first presidency. The last time, Trump incurred public outrage but nothing more. This time, he could find himself criminally charged—creating a headache and risk almost every time that he travels internationally.

During his first term, Trump froze the bank accounts and restricted travel of the chief ICC prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, and a deputy. With great forbearance, they largely turned the other cheek. President Joe Biden lifted the sanctions after he assumed office.

But in his flurry of executive orders on Inauguration Day this week, Trump reversed Biden’s actions, enabling new sanctions to be imposed.

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Ignore the conventional wisdom in Washington and New Delhi that the U.S.-India trade relationship is likely to deteriorate during U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term: The two countries in fact have a huge opportunity to expand trade and a realistic path forward for doing so.

Though U.S.-India economic ties have grown steadily in the 21st century, this cooperation has underperformed relative to the extraordinary advances in virtually every other aspect of the bilateral relationship. Over the years, the United States has accumulated a growing trade deficit in goods and services with India, reaching more than $45 billion in 2022. India’s high barriers to trade led Trump to label the country the “king” of tariffs. Indeed, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has used high tariffs to protect domestic industries, attract foreign investment, and promote his “Make in India” policy.

As Trump proclaims his own fondness for tariffs, skepticism has set in among U.S.-India experts about the prospects for bilateral trade. Trump has promised to impose a 10 to 20 percent tariff on all imports and to hit a select group of countries—including India—with even higher tariffs. If he goes forward with this pledge, some might respond with retaliatory tariffs. These circumstances might make one question whether the United States and India can negotiate a substantial trade agreement—something that they have never done before—in Trump’s second term.

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In U.S. President Donald Trump’s avalanche of day-one executive orders, he did not drop the gauntlet on the start of the next trade war, much to the temporary relief of markets and currency traders, as well as Canada and Mexico, which received almost an eight-hour reprieve before he threatened them, too.

But his sweeping executive order on trade did lay the groundwork for all and more that he promised on the campaign trail, prompting agency reviews and investigations that are the necessary precursor for the broad tariffs on China and the rest of the world. With an April 1 deadline for nearly all the reviews and investigations, the clock is already ticking for early administration action on Trump’s punitive trade agenda.

The executive order basically breaks down into China and the rest of the world. But there’s one interesting difference from many of the other actions Trump took that explicitly rolled back Biden-era rules, regulations, and mandates: Some of the planned trade measures maintain and build upon trade actions that the Biden administration took, including to combat China’s unfair trade practices and bolster U.S. export controls.

Parts of the executive order go after a particular obsession that Trump and his trade braintrust have: searching for a problem for which they already have the solution (more tariffs, of course).

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On Feb. 4, 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden traveled the short distance from the White House to Foggy Bottom to address a beleaguered government department. His goal was to help restore self-belief and resource to the State Department, which had endured a torrid four years under then former President Donald Trump:

“Investing in our diplomacy isn’t something we do just because it’s the right thing to do for the world. We do it in order to live in peace, security, and prosperity. We do it because it’s in our own naked self-interest.”

Biden’s speechwriters were smart in characterizing diplomacy as a means to advance “naked self-interest.” In terms of public messaging, stripping altruism from U.S. diplomacy made the State Department appear vital and ruthless, the nation’s first line of defense. But the president’s primary purpose was therapeutic: to reassure that State would be accorded respect and reenergized under his watch.

Trump’s first term was brutal for the State Department. Because of sharp proposed budget cuts—mitigated to some extent by Congress but injurious to morale—a hiring freeze, and career professionals bolting for the exits, the department experienced a 10 percent staff reduction during Trump’s presidency. Indignity was piled on indignity, with little respite across the four years. Before he was even inaugurated, Trump’s transition team communicated that all of President Barack Obama’s noncareer ambassadors (mainly Democratic fundraisers) had to vacate their embassies by Inauguration Day, breaking with the tradition of affording ambassadors a grace period.

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Forty years ago, another prominent Republican who had won reelection delivered a landmark inaugural address. Ronald Reagan, a pillar of the modern conservative movement that took form in the 1970s, enjoyed a political victory lap one January morning in Washington. The ceremony allowed him to use his time in the spotlight to affirm a distinct rightward vision of society that would continue to define Republican politics through today. As with Trump, Reagan also was forced to hold the event indoors as a result of unusually cold weather.

Whether Trump can replicate Reagan’s success at entrenching a governing ideology that outlasts his own time in power remains to be seen. But the 1985 speech provides an important roadmap as to how transformative leaders have used these addresses as part of their means of achieving that goal.

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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s negotiating style is often less about winning friends and influencing people and more about wielding a big stick—though arguably, he hasn’t mastered the art of speaking softly. Late last month, Trump began using his social media platform, Truth Social, to antagonize some U.S. allies, namely Canada, Denmark, and Panama.

That rhetoric will likely complicate the role of Rep. Elise Stefanik, Trump’s nominee for ambassador to the United Nations. The New York Republican’s confirmation process is scheduled to begin with a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Jan. 21.

Eight years ago, Trump’s nominee for U.N. ambassador, then-South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, was confirmed four days after his inauguration. Stefanik’s confirmation is likewise expected to go smoothly compared with some of Trump’s other cabinet-level nominees, who have faced questions about their qualifications or integrity.

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As U.S. President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office again, European nations are scrambling to address his threats to withdraw support for the NATO alliance unless Europe spends significantly more on defense. To that end, more than 60 senior trans-Atlantic defense leaders—including the authors of this article—have outlined a new NATO deal for the United States. The proposed Atlantic Charter 2025 prepared under the auspices of the Alphen Group aligns with Trump’s contention that European defense contributions are wholly inadequate to meet the continent’s current and future needs.

The charter, which was formally presented to senior NATO officials in Brussels last week and is now being circulated informally to European governments and the incoming Trump team, offers a detailed prescription for how European nations might meet the incoming administration’s likely expectations on defense. It proposes ways to significantly accelerate Europe’s ability to execute defense plans already developed for the alliance recently by the supreme allied commander Europe. This would go a long way toward reducing NATO’s current excessive dependence on the U.S. military.

The deal inherent in the proposed charter is that in exchange for a significant European defense buildup, the United States would continue to deploy troops in Europe at about the current level. But with this European buildup, U.S. reserve forces that were once earmarked for a conflict in Europe would be able, if necessary, to shift their attention more to Asia. If both sides of the Atlantic agree, it could represent an early win for the Trump administration while sustaining U.S. commitments to NATO.

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