When Donald Trump took the oath of office as President in January 2017, his first foreign policy priority was to get tough on China. The Trump 2.0 Administration will continue that work. But when he strides back into the Oval Office on Jan. 20, Trump will also become responsible for U.S. management of two dangerous wars, the kinds of hot foreign policy crises he was fortunate to avoid during his first term.
Trump has presented himself to voters as a peacemaker, the leader who will cut the deals necessary to restore order and limit the cost of U.S. involvement in foreign wars (and potential wars) for the American taxpayer. The new President is already taking credit for the ceasefire that Israel and Hamas have agreed, which is due to start from Sunday.
In addition to the war in Gaza, Trump’s election has set expectations for how he’ll approach Israel’s confrontations with Hezbollah, and perhaps Iran, as well as Russia’s war on Ukraine. What should we expect in 2025?
The Middle East
For now, it appears the Israel-Hamas ceasefire will allow a pause in the fighting and the release of some of the hostages Hamas still holds. But the agreement will be fragile, and it’s highly unlikely to last for long. Which brings us to Trump’s likely grand strategy in the region.
His strongest foreign policy relationships remain with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and leaders of the Gulf Arab states. This is where he began his presidency eight years ago, with Saudi Arabia and Israel as his first foreign visits. The Middle East is also the site of his biggest foreign policy accomplishment. The Abraham Accords brought a normalization of relations between Israel and several Arab states, and this breakthrough agreement has proved sturdy enough to withstand Israel’s war in Gaza and attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The next step in this diplomatic process is to secure a landmark deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, one that would open lucrative commercial ties between the two countries and reward the Saudis with long-sought U.S.-made high-tech military hardware. Officially, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman says no deal is possible without a plan for Palestinian statehood. That’s not as big an obstacle as it sounds. The prince wants the deal, and a “plan” for statehood need not leave the drawing board before Trump, Israel, and the prince can get to yes.
And if there weren’t enough upheaval in the Middle East already, Syrian rebels last month ousted dictator Bashar Assad. Israel has already used the opportunity that this still evolving situation creates to strike Syrian weapons stockpiles and to make further incursions in that war-torn country.
But the biggest Middle East question for 2025 is the potential for an expanded war that targets Iran. Israel’s success in crippling Hamas and Hezbollah leaves Tehran without its most valuable assets in its “ring of fire,” and Iran’s leaders know their country is now vulnerable. Netanyahu has ample incentive to strike Tehran—and the country’s nuclear program. Iran’s leaders also know they’ll face a more aggressive Administration in Washington in 2025. Trump’s assassination of Iranian defense chief Qasem Soleimani in January 2020 has proved both Trump’s willingness to take risks with Iran and Tehran’s inability to do much about it.
But Netanyahu knows there can be no successful strikes on Iran’s heavily fortified, deep underground nuclear facilities without active and determined U.S. help. An attack would demand multiple waves of large-scale coordinated bombing that only the U.S. military can carry out. Anything short of a fully successful attack would push Iran to immediately build a bomb, and Trump continues to insist he won’t involve America in someone else’s war. Given the high stakes for all involved, we’re more likely to see a push instead for a broad diplomatic deal with Iran in 2025, one that would set new ballistic-missile restrictions on Iran and signal Tehran’s willingness to limit support for militant groups in the region in return for an easing of Western sanctions on Iran’s enfeebled economy and a halt to military escalation on all sides.
How likely is an agreement that restabilizes the Middle East? It depends on Trump—and on the estimations of Israeli and Iranian leaders about how much risk he’ll accept and how badly he wants a diplomatic deal.
Russia and Ukraine
With the approach of Trump’s Inauguration, Russia’s war on Ukraine has gotten hotter. The outgoing Biden Administration and the governments of Britain and France have granted Ukraine permission to use weapons they’ve provided on targets inside Russia. That’s a counter to Russia’s use of North Korean troops to expel Ukrainian forces from the ground they now hold in Russia’s Kursk region. President Biden is also sending land mines to help Ukrainian forces slow Russia’s continuing advance in Ukraine’s east. The hope is to bolster President Volodymyr Zelensky’s bargaining position for eventual talks with Vladimir Putin. Moscow immediately responded to the U.S. and British greenlights with another round of threats to start World War III, and hit the Ukrainian city of Dnipro with a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile.
This is the violent escalation Trump will inherit next week as he tries to keep his campaign promise to quickly force an end to the war. Putin will portray Trump as a welcome replacement for warmonger Biden, and Zelensky now faces a dilemma: risk the fury of his own people by accepting a Trump-brokered deal that cedes Russian-occupied land to the invader or defy Trump and hope allies in Europe will help. It’s one thing for Zelensky to accept privately that Russia will keep Crimea. It’s another to pitch that to Ukraine’s people.
Many European leaders are also bracing for Trump’s return. They know he’s unlikely to include them in plans to end the war, and they’re working now to preserve European unity in the face of both Trump and Putin. Ukraine’s future and Russian threats are far more important to (most) Europeans than to Washington. Poland, the Baltic states, and the Nordic countries would all feel threatened by any U.S. push to force what amounts to a Ukrainian surrender. Hungary’s Viktor Orban, on the other hand, sees an opportunity to score points with both Trump and Putin by undermining that unity. Pro-Ukrainian leaders of European states farther from the front know the price tag for backing Kyiv is high and rising.
The big questions here for 2025: Will Europeans stick with Ukraine if Trump throws U.S. support for Kyiv into reverse? Might some of them calculate that cutting a larger deal with Trump on U.S.-European trade terms requires a softening of support for Zelensky? Or might Europeans decide that broader trade and foreign policy engagement with China is a smart long-term hedge against continued reliance on an increasingly troubled transatlantic partnership?
It’s been more than eight decades since America’s role in the world was so difficult to predict. Trump remains a mercurial decisionmaker and may not know himself how he wants to approach foreign policy. In addition, leaders and policymakers around the world can see that the past three U.S. presidential elections have produced whiplash shifts in American priorities and intentions—from Obama to Trump, Trump to Biden, and now Biden back to Trump. Few are foolish enough to believe they can predict what international role the U.S. will play in the long run.
Never is that uncertainty riskier and more expensive than in a time of war. In 2025, the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine may draw to a tentative close under Trump. But there’s no reason to believe that any of the warring parties will have a clear enough view of the future to settle their deep underlying differences. That’s the difference between full settlements and tenuous agreements that can be blown up as quickly as the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East erupted. •
