Transition 2025: A Report the Incoming Trump Administration Should Read

I wrote a few weeks back that Donald Trump will try to remake U.S. foreign policy but that he will not be able to do so as he pleases. Events will throw him a curveball or two. A smart administration will look to anticipate such events and develop appropriate contingency plans.

The incoming Trump administration would do well on that score to read the latest Preventive Priorities Survey (PPS) prepared by my colleagues in the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations. Now in its seventeenth year, the 2025 PPS reflects the views of some 680 foreign policy experts who were asked to assess thirty potential contingencies facing the United States. What distinguishes the PPS is that it looks at both the likelihood of a contingency threat and its impact on U.S. national interests.

The 2025 PPS’s overarching conclusion is sobering: “The second Donald Trump administration assumes office at a moment of great peril for the United States.” The survey found five high likelihood, high impact events, the largest number in any of the seventeen surveys undertaken thus far. Moreover, eighteen of the thirty contingencies would have a moderate or high impact on U.S. national interests if they materialized.

The five high-likelihood, high-impact contingencies were: a continuation of the Israel-Hamas war, a separate conflict between Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank, significant Russian gains in Ukraine, an escalation of the conflict between Iran and Israel, and a crisis on the U.S. southern border that raises tensions with Mexico. The survey also found two contingencies involving China that were of moderate likelihood but would have a high impact, namely, a crisis over Taiwan and an armed confrontation in the contested South China Sea. It is not surprising then that Paul Stares, who directed the survey, concluded that “the possibility that the United States could find itself in wars with not one but two major, nuclear-armed powers simultaneously is very real.”

The report contains a lot more that is worth reading and contemplating. But you should do so recognizing that the survey is not intended to be predictive. It is rather to highlight potential risks the United States faces so it can plan adequate responses. Those efforts will always be far from perfect; many threats never materialize and events seldom develop exactly as anticipated. But as President Dwight D. Eisenhower wisely noted, “plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” 

What Trump Is Saying

Trump held a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday where he repeated his interest in retaking the Panama Canal, acquiring Greenland, and making Canada part of the United States.

In response to a reporter’s question as to whether he would rule out using military force and economic pressure to pursue these objectives, Trump responded:

No, I can't assure you on either of those two, but I can say this. We need them for economic security. The Panama Canal was built for our military. I'm not going to commit to that, no. It might be that you'll have to do something. Look, the Panama Canal is vital to our country. It's being operated by China. China. And we gave the Panama Canal to Panama, we didn't give it to China. And they've abused it. They've abused that gift. It should have never been made, by the way.

As for Greenland, Trump argued that the United States needed it for “national security purposes.” He added:

People really don't even know if Denmark has any legal right to it, but if they do, they should give it up because we need it for national security. That's for the free world. I'm talking about protecting the free world. You don't even need binoculars. You look outside, you have China ships all over the place. You have Russian ships all over the place. We're not letting that happen. We're not letting it happen. And if Denmark wants to get to a conclusion, but nobody knows if they even have any right, title, or interest. The people are going to probably vote for independence or to come into the United States. But if they did do that, then I would tariff Denmark at a very high level.

Greenlanders show no interest in taking Trump up on his offer. Denmark has responded to Trump’s talk of acquiring Greenland by revamping its royal coat of arms to make the symbol for Greenland more prominent, emphasizing their shared national identity. Denmark has claimed control of the world’s largest island since the fourteenth century.

During the press conference, Trump also repeated his complaints that Canada and Mexico have treated the United States unfairly and vowed that “we're going to put very serious tariffs on Mexico and Canada, because they [migrants] come through Canada too, and the drugs that are coming through are at record numbers, record numbers.” Trump called Mexico “a lot of trouble. Very dangerous place,” and said he would “be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, which has a beautiful ring that covers a lot of territory. “

Not content to insult Mexico and alarm atlas makers, Trump dismissed comments by the leader of Canada’s Conservative Party, Pierre Poilievre, who recently said that “Under no circumstance will it [Canada] ever be the fifty-first state," by saying: “I don't care what he says.” On the bright side, Trump did rule out using military force to incorporate Canada into the Union.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau fired back on X Tuesday afternoon that there was “Not a snowball’s chance in hell” that Canada would merge with the United States.

Trump responded several hours later with a map of showing Canada as a part of the United States.

Meanwhile, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum held a press conference that featured an early seventeenth century map with much of what is now the United States labeled “America Mexicana.”

Whether Trump’s demands are sincere or performative, they are hurting U.S. interests. Friends, partners, and allies are alarmed at his embrace of nineteenth century imperialism, while China and Russia are silently applauding it. Trump’s rationales for seizing Greenland and Panama mirrors the reasons Beijing gives for its claim to Taiwan and that Moscow gives for its claims to Ukraine. They want a world where the strong bully the weak.

Ukraine and NATO also came up at Trump’s press conference. He blamed President Joe Biden for causing the war in Ukraine and said he would press NATO members to commit to spending 5 percent of their GDP on defense. The odds of achieving the latter goal lie somewhere between zero and none. (U.S. defense spending as a percentage of GDP is just over 3 percent.) Trump said nothing about how he would fulfill his promise of bringing the war in Ukraine to an end, and he has already walked back his previous claim of being able to end the war in “twenty-four hours.”  

Trump also repeated his claim that “all hell will break out” if Hamas does not release all the hostages it holds before he becomes president. He again declined to say just what that would mean in practice.

What the Biden Administration Is Doing

The Biden administration determined that Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have committed genocide in the course of the country’s nearly two-year-old civil war. The State Department statement issued under Secretary Antony Blinken’s said: “The RSF and allied militias have systematically murdered men and boys—even infants—on an ethnic basis, and deliberately targeted women and girls from certain ethnic groups for rape and other forms of brutal sexual violence.” As a result of that determination, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned the RSF’s leader, Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who is also known as Hemedti. The Biden administration did not level the same accusation or sanctions against the RSF’s rival for power, the Sudanese Armed Forces. Tens of thousands of Sudanese have died from the fighting and war-related diseases while millions have been forced to flee their homes.

The Biden administration on Monday eased some sanctions on Syria. The move was intended to make it easier to deliver humanitarian aid to Syria’s transition government, currently run by a group still under significant U.S. sanctions.

Nicolás Maduro started his third term in office today as president of Venezuela. The Biden administration, which argues that Maduro lost last July’s presidential election, responded by offering $25 million for information leading to his arrest. The Biden administration recognizes opposition leader Edmundo González as Venezuela’s rightful president.

The Biden administration imposed new sanctions on two of Russia’s largest oil companies and a major portion of its oil-tanker fleet. Trump can lift the new sanctions if he so chooses.

Trump Appointments

Trump named former State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus to be deputy special presidential envoy for Middle East peace, working under Steven Witkoff. But making the announcement, Trump made it clear that he is not a fan of Ortagus. He noted that “early on” she “fought me for three years.”  He then added, “these things usually don’t work out, but she has strong Republican support, and I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing it for them.”

Trump named Tammy Bruce to be State Department spokesperson. Trump praised Bruce, a longtime contributor to Fox News, for bringing the “TRUTH to the American People for over two decades.” The selection raised eyebrows, as Bruce has a record of criticizing her presumptive new boss, Marco Rubio. Among other things, she has called him “Little Marco,” the derisive nickname that Trump coined, and tweeted after a 2016 Republican presidential primary debate: “Strange. I didn't mute Trump but I had to mute Marco. <sigh>.”

Trump named Eric Trager to be senior director for the Middle East and North Africa on the staff of the National Security Council. An expert on Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood, Trager is currently a professional staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will hold Sen. Marco Rubio’s confirmation hearing for secretary of state next Tuesday, January 15. The committee has scheduled a confirmation hearing on the following day for Rep. Elise Stefanik to be U.S ambassador to the United Nations.

What the Pundits Are Writing

My colleague Stephen Sestanovich argued in Foreign Policy that Trump should study the U.S.-led effort to broker a peace between Bosnia and Serbia in the 1990s if he wants to conclude a successful deal on Ukraine. Sestanovich writes: “Serbia’s president was a savvy and sophisticated bully, but he agreed to the deal the United States hammered out at Dayton because he saw that endless fighting had become unsustainably expensive; he needed the sanctions relief that only peace could provide. For [Slobodan] Milosevic, genocidal nationalism had proved to be a lousy strategy, a realization that led him—more than once—to rescue the negotiations by making significant concessions.” Sestanovich argues that Trump should deal with Putin like the U.S. dealt with Milosevic.

The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein reported that the Trump team is developing plans to impose higher tariffs on so-called critical imports rather than on all imports as Trump repeatedly pledged on the campaign trail. As Stein describes it, “If implemented, it would avoid the most sweeping elements of Trump’s campaign plans but still would be likely to upend global trade and carry major consequences for the U.S. economy and consumers.” The categories of goods to be targeted are still being debated, but likely candidates include steel, minerals, and medical supplies. Trump almost immediately took to social media to say that the Post story “is wrong.”

A narrowing of the scope of Trump’s tariffs aligns with the argument that Aaron Friedberg made in Foreign Policy that “tariffs are a scalpel, not a hammer.” Friedberg writes: “Trump sees tariffs as a sort of Swiss Army knife: an all-purpose tool capable of fixing any problem. But large, across-the-board duties of the sort that he is proposing will not achieve the beneficial effects that he has ascribed to them. In a more targeted, tailored form, however, import taxes can play an essential role in helping to defend U.S. interests and push back against Chinese mercantilism.”

Daniel Drezner assessed Trump’s apparent belief in the madman theory of foreign policy. That’s the idea, often attributed to Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War, though it is actually far older, that a leader who seems willing to do anything will get his way because adversaries are deterred and friends intimidated. The theory, which political scientists more dispassionately call “coercive bargaining,” depends on people believing that the mad leader will take everyone into the abyss if they don’t get what they want. But Trump’s first term suggested he was more bark than bite when enemies and allies called his bluffs. Which is what worries Drezner: “The problem is, if Trump is unable to convince anyone else that he really is a madman, then the only way he can prove it is to follow through on his most outlandish threats. Maybe that would work, but it could also lead to a conflict spiraling out of control. Which sounds, to be perfectly honest, like a pretty crazy idea.”

Niall Ferguson argued in Foreign Affairs that Trump would be well-advised to emulate Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy with the Soviet Union for China today. In Ferguson’s telling, “Reagan opened with strength” toward Moscow. “When the right time came, however, he pivoted to a series of summit meetings with Gorbachev that ultimately produced stunning breakthroughs in both disarmament and European security.” Trump should do likewise against China “by piling on the pressure with a fresh show of American strength. But this should not be an end in itself. His ultimate goal ought to be like Reagan’s: to get to a deal with Washington’s principal adversary that reduces the nightmarish risk of World War III—a risk inherent in a cold war between two nuclear-armed superpowers.”

Podcasts

I sat down with my colleague Ray Takeyh in the latest episode of The President’s Inbox to discuss Trump’s likely policy toward Iran. We discussed how Iran is reacting to Trump’s election, Tehran’s sudden vulnerability in the wake of the collapse of the “axis of resistance,” the state of Iran’s nuclear program, and the prospects that Trump could broker a successor deal to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that was longer, stronger, and broader.

Two weeks earlier, I sat down with my colleague Zoe Liu to discuss how China is reacting the Trump’s victory. We discussed a range of issues, including China’s unhappiness over Trump’s election, China’s sanctions on Secretary-of-State Designate Marco Rubio, why Trump invited Xi Jinping to his inauguration, and how Beijing plans to respond to Trump’s tariff threats.

The Election Certification Schedule

Inauguration Day is in ten days (January 20, 2025)

Oscar Berry assisted in the preparation of this post.