2 presidents, 2 policies, 1 superpower: America in transition

Washington: The old adage about the interregnum between an election and an inauguration is that there is only one president at a time. Try telling that to the rest of the world now.

While one president, the one actually still living in the White House, attends international summit meetings and brokers a Middle East cease-fire to cap his tenure, another president, the one who has not actually taken office yet, is busy conducting a foreign policy of his own from his Spanish-tiled Florida estate.

Without waiting to be sworn in, President-elect Donald Trump effectively declared a trade war this week by announcing that he would impose tariffs on America’s friends, Canada and Mexico, as well as its rival China on Day One of his administration. The next day, President Joe Biden strode into the Rose Garden to announce an agreement to end more than a year of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.

This is America in the time of transition, making peace and declaring war, all in the same 24-hour news cycle — two presidents leading the country in two different directions, one officially, the other unofficially; one representing the past and present, the other the future. Whipsawed and maybe just a little confused, foreign leaders are left to calculate whether it makes sense to try to get something done with the outgoing leader or brace for the reality of his successor.

“Transitions always result in a momentum shift to the new team, but this time around feels more pronounced than any transition in recent memory,” said Suzanne Maloney, director of the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution in Washington and a former State Department adviser.

“Leaders in capitals around the world are trying to take advantage of the moment to try to curry favor with Trump himself at a time when it may still be possible to shape his agenda,” she added. And Trump’s “inner circle is dismissive of the traditional Washington protocols that might suggest some discretion during the transition.”

The tariff threats may just be an opening bargaining position as Trump seeks leverage to force trading partners to halt the flow of migrants and drugs, but they underscored how much has changed since the election. Before Trump’s arrival on the political stage, presidents of both parties had spent decades bringing down trade barriers, but the president-elect has made clear he intends to build them back up again.

In targeting Canada, Mexico and China, Trump picked America’s three largest trading partners, signaling a new period of friction at odds with Biden’s efforts over the past four years to get along. The announcements quickly scrambled economic calculations across the hemisphere and across the ocean, forcing foreign capitals to consider whether to negotiate or retaliate.

The consequences could be enormous. Tariffs are essentially taxes on imported goods and will largely be passed along to consumers. So if Trump follows through — and it is possible this is mainly a bluff to force trading partners to compromise — Americans still reeling from the inflation of Biden’s tenure could face a renewed round of inflation during Trump’s tenure.

Daniel M. Price, who was an international economics adviser to President George W. Bush, said Trump appeared to be using the tariff threats to extract concessions. “This isn’t a surprise, as it’s what he said on the campaign trail,” Price said. “He’s looking for offers of appeasement from his targets to mitigate any tariffs.”

Miriam Sapiro, an acting US trade representative under President Barack Obama, said Trump had an incentive not to wait until his inauguration. Trump’s narrow 1.6-percentage-point election victory with little coattails suggests that Republicans are in danger of losing one or both houses in the midterm elections if history is a guide.

“It’s unusual, but not surprising, that Trump wants to move quickly because he can’t run again, and he’ll have only two years of real power if Republicans lose control of Congress in 2026,” said Sapiro, who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “But telegraphing early what he intends to do when he takes office gives other countries, as well as US and foreign companies, more time to organize their moves.”

Trump is not confining his pre-inauguration international dealings to economics. He authorized his billionaire financial patron Elon Musk to open discussions with Iran, bypassing the current administration, which is laboring to manage a precarious standoff between the Islamic republic and Israel. Trump has vowed to end Russia’s war in Ukraine before the inauguration, a task that he says without embarrassment or explanation should take him a mere 24 hours when he gets around to it. By one account, he has even had a phone conversation with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, although the Kremlin denied it.

Rep. Michael Waltz, the Republican from Florida tapped to serve as Trump’s national security adviser, insisted that the incoming president was not trying to work in conflict with the current one, noting that he has met with Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser.

“Jake Sullivan and I have had discussions. We’ve met,” Waltz said on “Fox News Sunday” over the weekend. “For our adversaries out there that think this is a time of opportunity that they can play one administration off the other, they’re wrong and we are hand in glove. We are one team with the United States in this transition.”

But that moment of bipartisan solidarity did not last long. As soon as Biden announced the cease-fire that he brokered after months of painstaking negotiations, Waltz tried to claim credit for Trump, who had no role in the talks.

“Everyone is coming to the table because of President Trump,” Waltz wrote on social media. “His resounding victory sent a clear message to the rest of the world that chaos won’t be tolerated. I’m glad to see concrete steps towards deescalation in the Middle East.”

In fact, the Biden and Trump teams have had only glancing consultations since the election because the president-elect refused for weeks to sign memorandums of understanding on how to handle the transition with the federal government. In part because of that, Secretary of State Antony Blinken had spoken with Sen. Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who is Trump’s pick for that post, but had not been able to sit down in person.

Amos Hochstein, Biden’s envoy negotiating Middle East peace, briefed Trump’s aides on his talks to end the fighting in Lebanon shortly after the Nov. 5 election and then again this week when an agreement was imminent. He came away convinced that the Trump team supported the Biden administration’s approach, if only because it would benefit Israel, according to a senior administration official who insisted on anonymity to discuss conversations between the two camps.

Biden still hopes to use his remaining time in office to broker a similar cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. If that works, he still harbors a long-shot dream of sealing a long-sought agreement with Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel that would transform the region. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel may conclude that it is in his interest to hold out for Trump to get a better bargain.

Trump’s office finally signed a transition cooperation memorandum with the White House on Tuesday, opening the door to greater cooperation between the two teams. But it has still not signed such an agreement with the Justice Department permitting the FBI to do security clearances, meaning Biden’s team cannot share classified information with many of Trump’s advisers.

Trump’s efforts to begin reshaping America’s policy toward the rest of the world have raised questions about his intentions and the propriety of some of his actions. Musk, the world’s richest person, in particular has been at the center of some of the outreach.

Musk met with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations this month to discuss how to ease tensions between the two countries. On another occasion, during a conversation with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, Trump handed the phone to Musk, whose satellite network Ukraine relies on for its efforts to push back Russian invaders.

This is the kind of communication that made Trump furious when the shoe was on the other foot. After John Kerry, a secretary of state under Obama, met with Iranian officials during the Trump administration, Trump called that an outrageous interference with his foreign policy and repeatedly pressed Attorney General William Barr and others to prosecute Kerry. The Logan Act of 1799 prohibits private citizens from conducting U.S. foreign policy, but no one has ever been successfully prosecuted under the act.

Trump, of course, is no ordinary private citizen. The voters have chosen him to run foreign policy for the next four years, so if he chooses to get started before his inauguration, it is hard for Biden to object.

“You can’t stop it,” said John Bolton, who served as national security adviser to Trump and later became a vocal critic. “If he’s talking about what happens after the 20th of January, he’s perfectly within his rights to do it. In a responsible transition, if a call with Putin occurred, you tell the existing government. But we don’t have a responsible transition.”