Trump upending global politics a month before taking office

By Josh Wingrove

His second term doesn’t start for a month, but Donald Trump is already sending shock waves around the world.

His trade threats helped set off a cabinet crisis in Canada that has Prime Minister Justin Trudeau teetering. In Europe, tariff fears have weakened already wobbling governments.

Allied leaders are racing to find ways to keep up support for Ukraine as Trump drives for a quick deal to end Russia’s invasion.

The prospect of talks has both sides pushing on the battlefield, with Moscow using its most sophisticated missiles and Kyiv taking the fight to the Russian capital with the brazen assassination of a general.

In the Middle East, the Trump-friendly leaders of Israel and Turkey are pressing for advantage as Iran, a perennial target of the incoming president, reels from setbacks for its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas and the abrupt fall of the dictator it backed in Syria.

China, which has largely avoided Trump’s post-election social media spotlight so far, is shoring up its trade defences ahead of what’s expected to be an onslaught from the new administration.

“We’re on Trump time and we want to get stuff done in a hurry,” Keith Kellogg, the retired general Trump has named as his special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, told Fox Business on Dec. 18 as he prepared for his first trip to the region - even before the inauguration. “He made promises on the campaign trail and we’re going to fulfil those promises.”

While it’s not unusual for political leaders at home and abroad to jockey for the ear of an incoming president, the scale of Trump’s pre-inauguration influence is vast.

“There’s new light all over the world, not just here,” Trump claimed in a Phoenix speech Sunday.

That came after he’d warned Panama that the US objects to rates to use the Panama Canal and is concerned about growing Chinese influence over the conduit — going so far as to say he might demand its return to American control. Panama’s president retorted that his country’s sovereignty over the canal is non-negotiable.

Domestically, he spent the last week steering talks on a spending bill to avoid a government shutdown. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said policymakers are beginning to factor in some of the president-elect’s potential moves, such as tariffs.

The US stock market and Bitcoin have rallied since the election, something Trump likes to take credit for. President Joe Biden, meanwhile, has all but vanished from the stage.

For the world, the turmoil is a taste of what the new Trump term is likely to bring, as the incoming president pushes his “America First” agenda without many of the guardrails that constrained his first term. Populist forces are on the rise in many countries, with Trump allies challenging establishment leaders.

Fresh from a tweet storm that influenced the spending-bill talks in Washington, billionaire Trump confidant Elon Musk Friday turned his attention to Europe, endorsing the far-right AfD party as the only way to “save Germany.”

That earned him a rebuke from embattled Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who faces snap elections in February with support for his party dropping amid deepening economic woes. Musk stepped up the pressure Saturday, calling on Scholz to resign after a deadly attack on a Christmas market.

In the UK, Trump’s ascent has emboldened Nigel Farage of the populist Reform UK party, who met with Musk at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate last week. UK lawmakers are weighing changing donation rules to prevent Musk from barging in.

The stakes are possibly highest for Ukraine, where Russia’s full-scale invasion is nearly three years old and allied support for Kyiv is showing signs of flagging.

Trump isn’t promising to deliver a deal to end the fighting even before he takes office as he did on the campaign trail, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has already given up his earlier demand that Russia cede all the land it’s taken as part of any ceasefire deal.

Germany’s Scholz held his first direct talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in two years last month, drawing fierce criticism from Zelenskiy. Until now, it’s largely been Hungary’s Viktor Orban — a Putin sympathizer whom Trump is fond of - seeking to act as an intermediary.

On Sunday, Trump himself left the door open to meeting the Kremlin leader, who he claimed “wants to meet me as soon as possible.”

Scholz said this month he’s “confident that we can develop a joint strategy for Ukraine.” He has continued to decline to provide Ukraine with long-range Taurus missiles, breaking from Biden’s policy — one Trump thinks is a mistake.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer spoke with Trump by phone and picked Peter Mandelson, a Labor Party veteran and trade specialist, as envoy to Washington. That choice drew criticism from Trump’s former campaign co-manager, Chris LaCivita, who called Mandelson “an absolute moron.”

Trump’s impending arrival has also buoyed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He has aligned himself with Trump, who faces fewer political pressures than Biden over the death toll from fighting in Gaza.

Netanyahu also sent troops further into Syria after the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime. Turkey, whose leader is another Trump ally, is expanding its reach to Syria through groups it supports.

“All of these leaders in the Middle East, they know the former president, now the president-elect, they know his team, so it’s kind of a unique moment in history where you have two presidents, and their teams, working on the ceasefire at the same time,” Morgan Ortagus, a former State Department spokeswoman during Trump’s first term, said on Bloomberg Television’s Balance of Power, referring to talks on a deal in Gaza.

In India, Trump’s arrival has coincided with an emboldened Narendra Modi preparing to host Putin for the first time since Russia invaded Ukraine. Modi is one of the world leaders Trump has cultivated through praise and shows of friendship.

China has embarked on something of a charm offensive, including with US allies, ahead of Trump’s return — while also preparing tools for a potential trade war in the form of limits on exports of critical minerals to the US and by signalling a warming with both Japan and India.

“In 2016, there was this constant sense of uncertainty, of alarm,” said Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Now there’s a fairly robust data set of how Trump behaved and how other countries behaved in reaction to him, and what worked well and what didn’t.”

But leaders are already learning that the carefully crafted strategies for dealing with the incoming president don’t always play out as planned.

After Trump threatened to slap a 25 per cent tariff on imports from Canada, Trudeau hopped on a plane to Trump’s Florida estate to talk the issue over at dinner. Then he offered a border security plan to assuage Trump’s concern (even though Canadian officials say migrant flows across the frontier are tiny).

Trump’s camp touted that as an early victory. “President Trump is already acting as the president,” Karoline Leavitt, his incoming press secretary, said on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures.

For his part, Trump offered no concessions and has spent the weeks since the dinner trolling Trudeau, suggesting Canada should become the 51st US state and complaining about the trade imbalance between the countries.

Now, Trudeau’s government is at risk after his top lieutenant quit, citing in her resignation letter a disagreement over spending and how to prepare for a potential Trump trade war.