U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has reportedly tapped Florida Sen. Marco Rubio as his secretary of state. If Rubio were confirmed, it would make him the first Latino to hold the nation’s senior cabinet position.

Rubio, who has been in the Senate for 14 years, should not face any confirmation headaches. Even temporarily losing his seat with a handpicked Republican replacement, the GOP should have an easy 52-vote majority in the upper chamber. 

Rubio ticks nearly all the boxes for a future Trump foreign policy: He is hawkish against all the usual suspects. He is suspicious of, if not belligerent, toward China, hostile to Iran, not keen on Venezuela, rueful of the Cuba his parents left, and indifferent toward Gaza and Ukraine. The only problem with Rubio, from Trump’s point of view, is that he might be too hawkish.

Trump campaigned on a pledge to end wars. He did so messily in Afghanistan, and he has vowed to do so in Ukraine. He called off a large-scale attack on Iran during his first term and alternated between berating China and selling it soybeans. The big question is whether Trump’s vision of an “America First” foreign policy has enough room for the small diplomatic wars—a fresh recourse to sanctions on Iran, redoubled pressure on Venezuela, or an overhaul of U.S. policy toward Cuba—that Rubio’s worldview would encompass, or whether Rubio would have to set his sights exclusively on China.

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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Monday asked Florida Rep. Mike Waltz to be his national security advisor, according to multiple reports, filling another key cabinet position as his future administration takes shape. Waltz, who served 27 years in the U.S. Army Special Forces (also known as the “Green Berets”) and U.S. National Guard before retiring as a colonel, was elected to Congress in 2018 in the seat previously held by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. 

Waltz has been one of the most vocal China critics in Congress, serving on the China Task Force and sponsoring legislation to restrict government funding from U.S. universities with ties to China. He also serves on the Armed Services Committee and Foreign Affairs Committee.

While Waltz has broadly been supportive of U.S. aid to Ukraine in its fight against Russia, he has more recently criticized what he called the “blank check” approach and called on European countries to shoulder more of the burden.

Waltz is the latest addition to Trump’s cabinet, with Reps. Elise Stefanik and Lee Zeldin named as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, respectively. Waltz’s fellow Florida lawmaker Marco Rubio is also set to be named secretary of state. 

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has 70 days until he takes office, but his foreign-policy decision-making has already begun.

1. The United Nations. On Monday, Trump nominated New York Rep. Elise Stefanik to be the United States’ ambassador to the United Nations. Stefanik is a longtime critic of the international body. She has accused the U.N. of antisemitism for criticizing Israel’s settlements in the West Bank, and in October, she called for the “complete reassessment of U.S. funding of the United Nations.” Her appointment suggests that the incoming Trump administration intends to more aggressively defend Israel on the world stage.

2. Israel-Hamas war. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that he has spoken with Trump three times since the U.S. election last Tuesday and that the two men “see eye to eye on the Iranian threat in all its components and the danger it poses.”

It is unclear if Trump’s administration will help mediate cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas. The president-elect has expressed support for Netanyahu’s efforts to achieve “total victory” and has argued that a truce deal would only allow Hamas to regroup, but he has also stressed the need for the war in Gaza to end.

3. Russia-Ukraine war. The Washington Post reported on Sunday that Trump had spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin last Thursday to urge Moscow not to escalate its war against Ukraine. The Kremlin dismissed the report on Monday as “pure fiction” and said there were no concrete plans yet to connect with the president-elect. Trump (alongside billionaire Elon Musk) spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last Wednesday.

Trump has touted his ability to end the Russia-Ukraine war within 24 hours, but the details for how he plans to do that remain vague.

As Week 2 of the presidential transition begins, President-elect Donald Trump’s list of key policy personnel is starting to take shape. 

Two big names moved out of the “rumored” column on Monday. 

Trump named New York Rep. Elise Stefanik as his ambassador to the United Nations, a post occupied in his first term by Nikki Haley. (Trump had said earlier that Haley and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo would not be asked to join Trump’s new administration.) 

The second Trump appointee is Tom Homan, the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Homan will be in charge of U.S. border policy and will oversee “all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin,” Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform Truth Social. 

That’s in addition to Susie Wiles, Trump’s co-campaign manager whom he named White House chief of staff last week. Wiles will be the first woman in U.S. history to serve in that role.

Trump is expected to tap Stephen Miller, a key ally and immigration advisor in his first administration, as deputy chief of staff for policy, CNN reported. 

Two Republican governors—Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Doug Burgum of North Dakota—are reportedly being considered for the role of secretary of the interior. Burgum is also believed to be a candidate for energy secretary, as is former Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette. 

Other positions in the incoming Trump administration—including all the members of his cabinet—are yet to be confirmed, but here are some of the names we outlined in our Situation Report newsletter last week:

Brian Hook, who served as the director of policy planning and special envoy for Iran in the first Trump administration, is expected to lead the transition team at the State Department, CNN reports.

Former Veteran Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie is running point on the Defense Department’s transition team, Politico reports.

Former Democratic Rep. Peter Deutsch has expressed interest in becoming the next U.S. ambassador to Israel, Jewish Insider reports.

Sen. Tom Cotton has said he would not accept a cabinet position offer, despite being a top contender, Axios scoops.

Politico reports that Sens. Marco Rubio and Bill Hagerty and former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell have been mentioned as potential contenders for secretary of state.

Other names that we’re hearing as likely contenders for senior positions include: Rep. Mike Waltz; Keith Kellogg, a former chief of staff on the National Security Council; Kash Patel, a former chief of staff at the Pentagon; former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe; former National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien; and former Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary Elbridge Colby.

In recent weeks, North Korea deployed troops to Russia to reinforce Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. This is only the latest example of the increased collusion among the new Axis of Aggression: China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.

How can the new Trump administration address this challenge?

While the Trump 2.0 National Security Strategy has yet to be written, a major part of the answer will center on the president-elect’s promise to bring a quick end to the war in Ukraine.

The interlinkages among this Axis of Aggression are not as deep and robust as some might think. Rather, almost all of the ties revolve around the other dictators supporting Putin’s war against Ukraine.

North Korea is providing troops and munitions. Iran is providing drones. China is providing enormous economic support short of lethal military assistance, including the heavy-duty trucks and excavation equipment that are allowing Putin to literally dig in to Russian-occupied Ukraine. In exchange for this largesse, it is rumored that Russia is providing advanced military assistance related to nuclear weapons and space technology.

Apart from backing Putin’s war against Russia, however, the ties among these dictators are sparse. To be sure, there would remain a general antagonism to the U.S.-led, post-World War II international system, but the near-term, life-or-death incentives for urgent military collaboration would be removed.

Bringing the war in Ukraine to a quick and decisive conclusion, therefore, as Donald Trump has promised to do, would remove many of the incentives for autocratic collaboration.

This would provide time and space for the natural enmities among these dictators to emerge, providing Washington and the free world with the opportunity to develop a coherent long-term strategy to counter, deter, and if necessary defeat the Axis of Aggression at the same time.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is set to nominate New York Rep. Elise Stefanik to serve as his ambassador to the United Nations, multiple outlets report. Stefanik has accepted the offer, according to the New York Post. 

The position of U.N. ambassador is often seen as a proving ground for rising stars of the party in power. The news will come as little surprise to those who have tracked Stefanik’s ascension through GOP ranks over the past decade, serving most recently as chair of the House Republican Conference. 

Known for her prosecutorial style of questioning in House hearings, most memorably when questioning the heads of elite colleges about allegations of antisemitism on their campuses, she is likely to produce made-for-TV moments at the U.N. Security Council. She is widely expected to serve as Trump’s enforcer at the international body. 

She was first elected in 2014, making her the youngest woman ever to win a seat in Congress at the time. A once-proud moderate, she has become a Trump acolyte—even joining the attempt to try and overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. 

In 2022, I profiled Stefanik in search of answers as to what her rise and political evolution could tell us about how the Republican Party has changed since Trump was first elected. Her nomination as U.N. ambassador further cements her role in the party’s future.

Read it here: Elise Stefanik Is Most Likely to Succeed 

In the months ahead, Democrats will engage in a grueling process of soul-searching and finger-pointing. The party needs to reimagine its strategy if it hopes to regain control of the White House and cut into the significant gains that the GOP made throughout the electoral map.

There will be strong pressure for Democrats to veer more sharply toward the center on several key issues, including taxes, regulation, energy, and immigration. One of the historical examples that will be showcased as a model for moving to the middle will be the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a small group of insiders who came together in 1985 to rebuild their party following the wreckage of President Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory against former Vice President Walter Mondale. While the DLC provides reason to believe that centrism can help pave a roadway back to the White House, which it did in 1992 and 1996, it also offers a warning of the potential long-term costs that centrism can pose to the health of a party.

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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s desire to end Russia’s war against Ukraine is sincere. But it is understandable that Ukraine and its supporters may have concerns about how, exactly, the “deal” promised by Trump during his campaign will look. If it does not include ways to guarantee Ukraine’s ability to defend itself, the fighting may only stop temporarily; history shows that Russia will return in a few years to finish what it started. The war would not truly end—it would merely be frozen.

But these same supporters of Ukraine must also be honest and recognize that a Harris administration would have posed its own challenges, albeit for different reasons. Vice President Kamala Harris would likely have continued President Joe Biden’s tepid policy of doing just enough to help Ukraine to survive but never enough to succeed.

Long delays in providing key weapon systems, the illogical restrictions placed on those systems, and the slow drip of aid far short of what Biden had the legal authority to deliver have caused immense frustration among Ukrainians. These policies often seem to defy basic principles of military strategy and practice. As Ukraine endures daily attacks from Russian missiles, North Korean artillery, and Iranian drones—and with more than 10,000 North Korean soldiers now deployed on the Russian side—many Ukrainians see the Biden team’s self-imposed limits to military aid as an open invitation to the Kremlin to keep escalating its brutal war.

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This week’s Latin America Brief looks at how U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s election win has reverberated across the region—and examines what Democrats could learn from their Latin American counterparts.

Some Latin American observers argued this week that the Democrats should have taken a strategic cue from leftists in Mexico. President Claudia Sheinbaum’s Morena party was a rare incumbent this year that not only retained the presidency but also grew its congressional majority.

Over the last several years, Morena officials raised Mexico’s minimum wage dramatically and exhaustively communicated their intent to carry out economic programs to support the poor. Voters cited those policies during Mexico’s June election, and they appeared to overpower concerns about other problems in the country, such as security.

“The Democrats didn’t come out to vote because there is not a populist and transformative political project” within the party, Mexican writer and communications consultant Alberto Lujambio posted on X.

Read it here: How Latin America Sees Trump’s Win

President-elect Donald Trump’s post-election call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday included tech billionaire and staunch Trump ally Elon Musk, according to multiple reports. Zelensky described the call as “excellent” in a post on X (the platform that Musk owns) shortly after it took place, but he did not reference Musk’s involvement. 

Musk has been a key player both in Ukraine’s war against Russia and in the Trump campaign. The Starlink satellites operated by Musk’s company SpaceX have provided internet connectivity to Ukraine’s war effort. Yet Musk has also clashed with Zelensky over the former’s controversial peace proposal, which would see Russia retain control over Crimea, which it illegally annexed in 2014; Ukraine drop its bid to join NATO; and other measures that Zelensky opposes.   

Musk’s donation of more $100 million to Trump’s election campaign and appearances with him at rallies appear to have gained him Trump’s ear and a seat at the table during the presidential transition period. (Trump has previously hinted at giving Musk a formal role in his administration.) The billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO reportedly also joined Trump’s call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan this week. 

A Trump campaign spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Foreign Policy on Musk’s role in those calls and what was discussed.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed Yechiel Leiter to serve as the country’s next ambassador to Washington, Netanyahu’s office announced on Friday. Leiter previously served as his chief of staff when Netanyahu was finance minister. 

Leiter’s appointment just days after Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election can be seen as a bellwether of where the Israeli leader may seek to take his country’s relationship with the United States over the next four years. 

Leiter, who was born in the United States, is a strong supporter of the settlement movement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and lives in the Eli settlement, north of Ramallah. This has prompted speculation that Netanyahu may seek a green light from the United States to formally annex the Palestinian territory during Trump’s second term. Leiter’s son was killed last year fighting in the war against Hamas in Gaza.

Netanyahu notched a number of important diplomatic wins from the first Trump administration, including U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and the transfer of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. 

“Yechiel Leiter is a highly capable diplomat, an eloquent speaker, and has a deep understanding of American culture and politics,” Netanyahu said in a statement on Friday. Leiter will take office on Jan. 20, when Trump is inaugurated.

Donald Trump’s decisive victory in the U.S. presidential election this week has left many analysts reaching for precedents in the past. The last time an American won a non-consecutive second term as president was when Grover Cleveland defeated the incumbent Republican Benjamin Harrison. If Trump goes on to win the popular vote, it would be the first time a Republican leader has done so since 2004, when George W. Bush defeated John Kerry. And while it’s hard to remember a time when the U.S. electorate was as divided and polarized as it is, the United States has certainly been through moments of extreme division and instability. 

How do we place this week’s results in historical terms? To find out if the past has any lessons for the future, I spoke with two great American historians: Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history at Princeton University and the author or editor of 26 books including Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974; and Joanne Freeman, a professor of history at Yale University, whose most recent book is The Field of Blood: Congressional Violence in Antebellum America. 

What follows here is a condensed and edited transcript of our discussion; the full, live version is available on the video box atop this page, or on the FP Live podcast.

Ravi Agrawal: One big question about Trump’s first term was whether it was a blip in the trajectory of America’s politics. And now the question has to be asked if Biden’s term was the blip.

Julian Zelizer: It might have been. I didn’t think of Trump’s first term as a blip. I think it came out of changes that had happened both in Republican politics and in American politics more broadly. I think this election is shaping up to be a little bit like 1984, where a certain vision of politics was legitimated. President-elect Trump has been very transparent about what he believes in, how he’ll govern. And he just won. He might have won the popular vote as well. So, I think if we look back, Biden might have been an anomaly in the ways that the 2020 election took place. Or, as Ezra Klein recently argued, it might have been the last gasp of the Obama coalition.

RA: Joanne, how do you imagine the Founding Fathers would interpret this week’s news?

Joanne Freeman: Well, they might say “I told you so.” If you read the personal letters, anything that they were writing in the founding era, it’s hard to say that the founders agreed on a lot, but they did agree that the greatest threat to any republic, but particularly a democratic republic, was a demagogue. The world was monarchies at the time and a democratic republic grounded on public opinion was experimental. What made these largely elitist founders nervous was that “the public” would be easily persuaded, warped, led astray by someone who could get their emotions riled up. That’s the vulnerability of anything democratic, that the people and their emotions can lead them astray. And historically speaking—going back to ancient Greece, ancient Rome—when they looked at republics, what they saw were demagogues saying anything that they possibly could to get the public’s emotions flowing, to woo the public, and then once they got power, doing whatever they wanted and becoming tyrants. They talked about that throughout the entire founding period when trying to evaluate politics in the first decade of the republic. That was what was on their mind. So, in a way, this is an easy question to answer because that would be the absolute first thing that they would say—“We told you. We told you that demagogue tendencies are the vulnerability, and now here you are.”

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FP contributor Bronwen Everill is a historian who teaches writing to first-year students at Princeton University and who lives—and votes—in Philadelphia. I asked her to take the temperature of young people on campus and in her electorally significant hometown on Election Day and beyond. Here’s what she had to say:

“Despite news reports of high anticipated youth voter turnout, with lines stretching for hours at universities in the swing state of Pennsylvania, the number of young registered voters in Pennsylvania actually declined by 6 percent between 2020 and 2024. Tufts University estimates that, overall, only 42 percent of young voters aged 18-29 went to the polls in 2024—the lowest youth vote since 2000.

Students from several different universities in the state or nearby that I spoke to over the past weeks expressed this disinterest in the election. Several voted because it was their ‘civic duty’ and certainly among those who turned out and waited in line, or sent in their first mail-in ballot, there were high levels of enthusiasm. But for others, the high temperature of political debate amongst friends or family and a desire to ‘just stay out of it’ seemed to be disincentives to voting.

Since 1971, when the voting age was lowered to 18, youth turnout has only exceeded 50 percent three times: in 1992, in 2008, and in 2020. The high U.S. turnout in 2020 reflected broader global trends in youth activism. In Nigeria, for instance, after the EndSARS protests in the summer of 2020, 76 percent of newly registered voters were young people. But by the 2023 Nigerian election, total turnout was low, reflecting distaste for the increasingly heated rhetoric, concerns about violence, as well as low trust in both the system and candidates.

One consistent trend across elections and in different countries is that the youth vote’s decline seems particularly associated with a perception of trust in the political process to deliver on broad ideological promises. But before strategists start pointing fingers at the youth, it is worth noting the long history of the moral panic that the ‘democratic future of the nation is being eroded among the young’—as one Pennsylvania newspaper reported in 1992, just before the highest turnout in 20 years.”

Kenyan President William Ruto took longer than many African leaders to congratulate Donald Trump for his victory in the U.S. presidential election. Ruto had become a close ally of President Joe Biden’s administration, much to the chagrin of Kenyans, who held monthslong protests against Ruto’s economic policies and alleged corruption in his government. During that time, Biden designated Kenya a major non-NATO ally and secured its involvement in the Haiti peacekeeping mission.

In his congratulatory message to Trump on Wednesday, Ruto affirmed Kenya’s commitment to its long-standing partnership with Washington on “trade, investment, technology and innovation, peace and security, and sustainable development.”

Yet Ruto’s critics have called attention to the delayed messaging. “Trump win is bad news to the ruto administration. Trump abhors foreign aid as a means of developing africa . He will not meet ruto to dish out free sanitary towels and mosquito nets,” Kenyan MP Caleb Amisi wrote in a post on X. “Kenya will now be forced to work hard and stop over reliance on Western economic bloc!”

A trade and investment partnership with Kenya was slated to be finalized by the Biden administration next month, including investments in agriculture, climate resilience, and improving governance. The deal replaced formal trade negotiations undertaken by the first Trump administration in 2020 that emphasized U.S. access to Kenya’s wheat market and cooperation with small businesses.

It’s unclear whether Trump will revert to his more transactional trade proposal. Kenyan Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi on Friday sought to dampen fears. “American policy generally doesn’t change much whether the White House is held by a Republican or a Democrat,” Mbadi said. “Our current engagement is more at the multilateral level. The U.S. supports the World Bank, from which we receive assistance.”

Movie fans know that sequels are rarely any good, and they often take a darker turn than the original. The first installment of Trump as President was disappointing to many and fatal for some, which explains why he lost the 2020 election. The remake is going to be worse—here are the top 10 implications of the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

U.S. politics is a mystery. If it wasn’t clear already, it is now crushingly obvious that nobody understands how U.S. electoral politics works and that much of the conventional wisdom on the subject is dead wrong. Polls aren’t reliable, truisms about the importance of a “ground game” don’t apply, and all the smart people who thought they knew what would happen weren’t just wrong but off by a lot. As in 2016, I suspect former U.S. President Donald Trump and his team were as surprised as the rest of us. My crude take is that U.S. elites are still underestimating how much white-hot anger and fear is out there in the body politic, much of it directed at them. There will be reams of post-hoc analysis explaining what went wrong for the Democrats and why the experts missed it yet again, but these same “experts” have had eight years to figure this out and are still at sea.

Trump will be unpredictable. Well, duh. Trump sees unpredictability as an asset that keeps others off balance, and his well-deserved reputation for erratic behavior makes it harder to criticize him for being inconsistent. For this reason, nobody—including his supporters—should be confident that they know exactly what he’ll do. It’s a safe bet that he won’t do anything that isn’t in his personal political and financial interest, but how that translates into policy is impossible to fathom. He said a lot of crazy things during his campaign, but how much of it was bluster and bluff and how much was sincere remains to be seen.

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The United States has chosen former President Donald Trump as commander in chief once more. Here’s what we know about Trump’s plans for the Pentagon during his second term in office.

Domestic deployment? Trump has repeatedly spoken about using the U.S. military on domestic soil for a host of law enforcement purposes, including securing the southern border with Mexico, policing civil unrest, cracking down on crime in cities such as Chicago, and even pursuing his political opponents. 

A long-standing law known as the Posse Comitatus Act bars federal troops from participating in almost all civilian law enforcement roles, but the 1807 Insurrection Act offers some exceptions if needed to quash a rebellion. 

An American Iron Dome. On the campaign trail, Trump spoke repeatedly about building an Iron Dome missile defense shield—which was also included in the Republican Party platform this year. 

But critics of Trump’s proposal have noted that building such a system to defend the entire United States would cost a fortune, and it would be of little use intercepting medium- and long-range missiles fired by Russia or North Korea.

Schedule F. Trump had vowed on the campaign trail to revive efforts to strip job protections from thousands of federal civil servants in policymaking roles, which will also expand to the Pentagon. Trump’s promise to pursue “rogue bureaucrats” has raised fears that the move could be used to politicize the federal workforce. 

Goodbye DEI. During a campaign event in October, Trump said he would create a task force to monitor “woke generals” and eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion training. He is also likely to reinstate a ban on transgender people serving in the armed forces and has promised to restore Confederate names to U.S. military bases. 

Washington is deep in the throes of its favorite parlor game—trading gossip on who is set to serve in the second Trump administration.

Here’s a look at who is confirmed, rumored, and vying for a top job—and who has turned them down. A word of caution: Two days after the election, almost everything is informed speculation at this point.

Brian Hook, who served as the director of policy planning and special envoy for Iran in the first Trump administration, is expected to lead the transition team at the State Department, CNN reports.

Robert Wilkie, the former Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, is running point on the Pentagon’s transition team, Politico reports.

Peter Deutsch, a former Democratic U.S. representative from Florida has expressed interest in becoming the next U.S. ambassador to Israel, Jewish Insider reports.

Sen. Tom Cotton has said he would not accept an offer of a cabinet position, despite being a top contender, Axios scoops.

Politico reports that Sens. Marco Rubio and Bill Hagerty and former acting National Intelligence Director Ric Grenell have been mentioned as potential contenders for secretary of state.

Other names that we’re hearing as likely contenders for senior positions include the following: Florida Rep. Mike Waltz, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former chief of staff on the National Security Council Keith Kellogg, former chief of staff to the acting Defense Secretary Kash Patel, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, former National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, and former Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary Elbridge Colby.

U.S. voters have given President-elect Donald Trump a mandate to govern the United States, but his policies are certain to influence the entire world. It’s possible to speculate on the potential effects based on Trump’s first term as president. But his agenda is now more extreme, and his power less restrained.

Is Europe any more prepared than it was eight years ago to contend with a Trump presidency? What does another Trump administration mean for global climate policy? And what is China’s view on the U.S. election?

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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Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated Donald Trump on his victory in the U.S. presidential election during remarks at the Valdai discussion forum in Sochi, Russia, on Thursday, his first public comments since Trump’s reelection. 

The Russian leader said Trump’s “desire to rebuild relations with Russia” and end the war in Ukraine “deserves attention.” Putin indicated a willingness to speak with Trump, but he included a word of caution, saying that he did not necessarily know what would happen next. 

Putin also praised Trump’s handling of his attempted assassination in July, describing him as a “real man,” adding that Trump had been “hounded by all sides” during the election campaign.

U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday addressed Americans for the first time since Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential election loss, delivering a speech in the White House Rose Garden that called for unity and underscored the integrity of the U.S. electoral system. 

“Campaigns are contests of competing visions. The country chooses one or the other. We accept the choice the country made,” he said. “I’ve said many times—you can’t love your country only when you win. You can’t love your neighbor only when you agree.”

Biden confirmed that he spoke with President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday to congratulate him on his victory. “I assured him that I will direct my entire administration to work with his team to ensure a peaceful and orderly transition,” Biden said. Trump has refused to acknowledge losing the 2020 presidential election. 

“I also hope we can lay to rest the question about the integrity of the American electoral system. It is honest, it is fair, and it is transparent. And it can be trusted, win or lose,” Biden said.

Biden praised Harris, saying she has “a backbone like a ramrod” and that she “gave her whole heart and effort” on a campaign that she should be proud of. Biden also nodded to his own presidential legacy, declaring that his administration was “leaving behind the strongest economy in the world” and referencing legislation with an impact that “will be felt over the next 10 years.” 

He also urged Harris’s supporters to keep fighting. “We lost this battle. The America of your dreams is calling for you to get back up,” he said. “The American experiment endures. We’re going to be okay, but we need to stay engaged.”

The clearest change that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is likely to make on foreign policy is in Ukraine. Republican support for spending more on sending weapons to Kyiv has been declining, and Trump will probably follow through on his promise to seek a peace deal. 

The problem is that peace will likely come at terms that do not favor Kyiv. Now, Ukraine’s military losses have begun to mount, and the practical barriers to continued support to Ukraine—declining Western stockpiles, Ukraine’s significant manpower and corruption problems—have increased. Trump has a popular mandate to seek a settlement, even though Europeans might object. 

What, then, would a settlement in Ukraine look like? The territorial question will be settled by facts on the ground: Russia’s recent gains suggest that this will be worse for Ukraine than it would have been a year ago. The Kursk incursion could give the Ukrainians some leverage, but only if they can succeed in holding it.

Then there are the bigger strategic questions. Kyiv insists that any peace deal must include a security guarantee, ideally via NATO; Russia isn’t likely to tolerate this. Despite what Ukrainian leaders say publicly, a minimum acceptable deal for Kyiv might look more like Ukrainian sovereignty, the ability to arm itself with Western help, and economic integration into Europe. 

Trump is well placed to put pressure on Kyiv, but he and his advisors should be under no illusions that they can force Kyiv to the negotiating table. 

It’s possible that whatever deal is negotiated—particularly if it is negotiated over the heads of Ukrainians—would be politically unacceptable to the Zelensky government. Kyiv might opt to keep fighting and seek European support instead.

For the Trump administration, the choice would be whether to continue to support Ukraine or to step back and drop the problem on Washington’s European allies.

It took roughly six hours for The Associated Press to call the U.S. presidential election after the final polls closed on Tuesday, but Americans will wait 76 days before President-elect Donald Trump is sworn in. Though President Joe Biden’s lame-duck period may seem long, this waiting game is not unique to the United States.

Comparison of Lame Duck Periods

Indonesia held its election in February, but President Prabowo Subianto didn’t assume office until Oct. 20, 214 days later. Similarly, Mexico elected its first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum, on June 3—but she assumed office 120 days later, on Oct. 1. And though Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro declared himself the winner of the contested election on July 29, he will officially be sworn in on Jan. 10, 2025.

However, some elections this year saw quicker turnarounds. Voters in India, Bangladesh, and South Africa reelected their leaders, all of whom assumed office within 20 days. The shortest lame-duck period was in the United Kingdom, where Keir Starmer was appointed prime minister as soon as results were announced on July 5. (Sri Lanka is a notable runner-up: President Anura Kumara Dissanayake was sworn in a day after election results were announced on Sept. 22.)

Sources: Various news reports compiled by FP staff

With a cautious lame-duck president in office, set to be replaced by an unpredictable successor who is more comfortable brandishing American power, will U.S. adversaries try to test Washington in the coming weeks?

Perhaps Iran will try to dash to a bomb before a new Trump administration puts a credible military option on the table and fully backs Israel’s right to defend itself. China might see this as a closing window of opportunity to coerce Taiwan. Russian President Vladimir Putin could try to escalate the war in Ukraine. Or maybe North Korea—which has already sent troops to assist Russia—will engage in provocations against the South.

In an attempt to show adversaries that now is not the right time to test the United States, the U.S. Department of Defense was hard at work on election night. While the rest of us were attending watch parties, calculating the returns, or doomscrolling, a joint team of service members from the Air Force Global Strike Command and Navy launched an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile equipped with multiple targetable reentry vehicles from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, at 11:01 p.m. Pacific time on Nov. 5.

The test was scheduled years in advance, but it was intended to send a message. Gen. Thomas Bussiere, the commander of the Air Force Global Strike Command, said: “These tests are demonstrative of what Striker Airmen bring to the fight if called by the president.” He went on to state that the United States’ nuclear weapons are “the strategic backstop of our nation’s defense and defense of allies and partners.”

In other words, the United States retains the capability to impose staggering costs on any potential aggressor.

Americans may have been too busy to notice, but let us hope the signal registered in Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, and Pyongyang.

On Thursday, Chinese President Xi Jinping sent President-elect Donald Trump a message congratulating him on his election victory. 

According to the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs readout, Xi told Trump that “history tells us that both countries stand to gain from cooperation and lose from confrontation.” The Chinese leader added that a stable relationship also would meet “the expectations of the international community.”

CNN reported that Xi called Trump on Wednesday, citing two anonymous sources, but Foreign Policy was unable to confirm that a call took place. When asked to comment on the CNN report, Chinese Embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu only said Xi sent Trump a congratulatory message.

Trump’s presidency ended with a rocky year in U.S.-China relations in which his administration blamed China for unleashing COVID-19 on the world and stepped up ties with Taiwan. To read more about Trump’s stance on China going into his new term, see Foreign Policy’s guide to his agenda here.

Update, Nov. 7, 2024: This post has been updated to include comment from the Chinese Embassy.

Emma Ashford: Morning, Matt. We finally have an answer to the question the world has been asking for months. The next president will be Donald Trump—and he seems to have won, if not by a landslide, then by a healthy margin in almost every key swing state. It’s a clear mandate from the voters for another four-year Trump term.

I assume you’re popping Champagne?

Matthew Kroenig: Trump supporters drink beer.

The results of Trump’s foreign policy were objectively better than Biden’s (who likes major wars in Europe and the Middle East with no end in sight?), and I am optimistic about a Trump 2.0.

On the results, it proves the adage that Washington, D.C., is 12 square miles surrounded by reality. Progressive elites in Washington and other capitals are horrified by this outcome, but the American people clearly were not buying what Kamala Harris was selling. They prefer Trump by a decisive margin.

EA: Harris was a weak candidate, though Democrats didn’t have a lot of choice given the late-stage switch from President Joe Biden. But it’s definitely interesting that foreign policy seems to have played a role. Remember we asked that question last time: Do voters care about foreign policy? The answer is that they usually don’t.

But this time, I’m pretty confident that at least some of Harris’s trouble with younger voters, and Arab Americans in particular, come from her decision to double down on Biden’s unpopular foreign policies and her strange embrace of the neoconservative architects of the Iraq War. She lost by about 80,000 votes in Michigan, more than 100,000 voted third party, and some clearly stayed home—that’s easily enough to lose it.

MK: I think you are right that it contributed to the outcome. Reports from Dearborn, Michigan, suggest a protest vote against Biden.

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President-elect Donald Trump’s Iran policy during his first term was never as bellicose as his rhetoric. His “maximum pressure” campaign was mostly similar to former President Barack Obama’s application of sanctions that brought the Iranians to the negotiating table and resulted in the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal.

Just because Trump called that agreement the “worst deal ever” did not mean that he wanted to pursue regime change in Tehran, however. Rather, he wanted to negotiate a better deal with the Iranians, one that allowed him say his nuclear deal was superior to Obama’s nuclear deal. Trump was otherwise quite dovish on Iran. At moments when it would have been legitimate for Trump to use military force—after the IRGC seized oil tankers, mined the Persian Gulf, shot down an American drone operating in international airspace, and bombed Saudi oil facilities—the president chose (with bipartisan support) not to respond.

There are still comprehensive sanctions on Iran, but the Biden administration has tended to look the other way at Iran’s oil sales. That had everything to do with the political calculations of a president who was stung early on in his administration by high energy prices. The collective pain of Americans at the gas pump contributed to Biden’s persistently low approval rating.

It remains an open question if Trump would risk the same through tougher sanctions enforcement. It depends on how he calculates his parochial interests: Does he want to be the guy who got “the better deal”—consistent with his self-image as master dealmaker—or does he want to ensure that Americans enjoy cheap oil and gas? Does he think he can do both? Only President-elect Trump could know the answers to those questions—and he may not either.

President-elect Donald Trump’s broad mandate portends many changes to U.S. policy, but when it comes to the Middle East, things are likely to remain mostly the same. Support for Israel will continue, Iran will be a major pre-occupation, and Team Trump will likely look for ways to establish normal diplomatic relations between Saudis and Israelis. Sounds familiar, no?

Like the Biden administration, which worked for a cease-fire in Gaza that never was, Trump wants the war there to end sooner rather than later. In a phone call ahead of the election, the president-elect told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to wrap up major military operations in Gaza before Inauguration Day. That is consistent with the Biden team’s efforts, though it is inconsistent with Israel’s timeline.

Unlike Biden, however, Trump and the people around him are unlikely to apply pressure on the Israelis to get there. They are more likely to give Israel a lot of leeway, including releasing Biden’s hold on the transfer of certain weapons to finish the job as soon as possible. Biden, to be sure, has overseen an unprecedented 14-month effort to re-supply the Israel Defense Forces. But Trump is less likely to ask hard questions about Israel’s operations, the provision of humanitarian aid, and the status of Gaza after the war ends.

For Gazans, it may seem that the quicker the war ends the better. But if the Trump administration allows the Israeli government to pursue the end of the conflict in ways it sees fit, it is likely that more Palestinians will be killed along the way. Then, of course, there are Netanyahu’s partners who want to resettle the Gaza Strip, the logical conclusion of which is the further dispossession of a population that was already predominantly refugees and their descendants.

With Donald Trump’s election victory this week, it’s clear that the president-elect will not be nearly as supportive of Ukraine’s fight against Russia as the current administration—and may well abandon Ukraine entirely. Such a reality is already resounding in Ukraine, with plenty of hand-wringing in Kyiv about how Trump will pull the United States back from its fight. As a result, Ukrainians will be forced in the coming weeks and months to search for solutions beyond Washington’s support—and consider a potentially nuclear solution that had been only hinted at previously.

Last month, with little fanfare, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made the stakes of the ongoing war in Ukraine as clear as possible. With Russian troops bearing down on Ukraine’s east, and with Western support continuing to flag, Zelensky clarified the potential outcomes of the war. “Either Ukraine will have nuclear weapons and that will be our protection or we should have some sort of alliance,” he said. “Apart from NATO, today we do not know any effective alliances.”

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Just hours after Donald Trump’s presidential election victory in the United States, Germany’s three-party governing coalition collapsed, sending the country into a political tailspin.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz fired Finance Minister Christian Lindner, the latest development in an escalating spat between the two men over Germany’s public spending. Lindner—who heads the neoliberal Free Democratic Party—wanted a pared-down 2025 budget as a recession looms. His stances angered Scholz’s Social Democrats and the Greens, who favored increased spending on social programs, defense, and climate goals.

Over the past week, Lindner had suggested that the coalition—known as the traffic light—may not be up to the task of governing Germany into the future. Its three member parties have publicly clashed on numerous policy priorities since taking office in 2021, including an infamous 2023 heating law. Although Scholz initially rejected Lindner’s proposals for snap elections, the presidential vote in the United States apparently pushed the chancellor to think again.

In a speech on Wednesday night, Scholz announced that he was dismissing Lindner, lambasting the ex-finance minister for prioritizing the “short-term survival of his party” over making “compromises in the interest of all citizens.” Scholz repeatedly mentioned the U.S. election, saying that the uncertainties provoked by Trump’s win—especially the president-elect’s stance on the Russia-Ukraine war—made clear to him that Germany must spend more to take responsibility for its own economic modernization and defense.

“We need a government that is ready to negotiate … to make the necessary decisions for our country,” Scholz said. “Especially today, one day after such an important event like the election in the United States, [Lindner’s] egoism is totally incomprehensible.”

Scholz is expected to face a no-confidence vote on Jan. 15, 2025, which he is likely to lose. Snap elections would follow in March.

Vice President Kamala Harris was supposed to deliver an election night speech at her alma mater, Howard University; instead, she returned Wednesday to deliver her concession speech after having lost the race to President-elect Donald Trump. 

Music bumped in the campus quad as thousands of students and supporters filtered into the election party-turned-wake. The playlist, which included such songs as Curtis Mayfield’s “Move On Up” and Beyoncé’s “Run the World (Girls),” seemed more fitting for the previous night. 

In her speech, Harris reiterated what she said to Trump in a phone call on Wednesday conceding the election: that the peaceful transfer of power is the foundation of U.S. democracy. At the same time, she rallied her supporters to build toward a future era of renewed Democratic leadership. 

“On the campaign, I would often say, ‘When we fight, we win,’” Harris said. “But here’s the thing: Sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn’t mean we won’t win.”

Harris also encouraged the crowd to get organized to keep fighting for the campaign’s promises.

“This is not a time to throw up our hands. This is a time to roll up our sleeves,” she said. The audience roared loudest when she spoke about the importance of fighting for the right of women to make choices about their own bodies. 

For some speech attendees, the consequences of the election result felt immediate and personal. Sarah Dale, a 43-year-old Harris supporter who works on air quality issues, told Foreign Policy: “I’m feeling pretty horrible. I work in the federal government, so this will have an impact on our macro world as well as me very personally.” Trump has pledged to overhaul the federal workforce. 

Harris offered parting words of consolation to her supporters. “Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. I know many people feel like we are entering a dark time, but for the benefit of us all, I hope that is not the case. But here’s the thing, America: If it is, let us fill the sky with the light of a brilliant, brilliant billion of stars, the light of optimism, of faith, of truth, and service.”  

A bevy of the most prominent billionaires and technology executives in the United States have publicly congratulated President-elect Donald Trump on his election victory. 

Among the first to do so was Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, whose controversial blocking of the newspaper’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris dominated headlines in the lead-up to the election. “Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory,” Bezos wrote in a post on X on Wednesday. “Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman soon followed suit, as did Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Many of those tech executives had remained relatively neutral in the election, though some notable ones didn’t. 

Chief among them was Tesla and SpaceX CEO and X owner Elon Musk. The world’s wealthiest man not only donated more than $100 million to Trump’s reelection effort and campaigned with him, but Musk could also be set for a role in Trump’s administration. Other prominent Trump backers in Silicon Valley included Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. 

On the other side of that equation were Texas billionaire Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team who campaigned for Harris, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. In a lengthy post shared on LinkedIn and X, Hoffman expressed hope that Trump “wouldn’t seek to punish political opponents, wouldn’t corruptly play favorites in business or foreign policy, wouldn’t actually enact a crippling, 19th-century tariff regime,” as Trump promised to do on the campaign trail. 

Cuban’s message was more succinct. “Congrats @realDonaldTrump. You won fair and square,” he wrote on X. “Congrats to @elonmusk as well.”

Latin America is home to several right-wing politicians who have long embraced U.S. President-elect Donald Trump. Unsurprisingly, figures such as Argentine President Javier Milei and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro relished in Trump’s election victory on social media; in Buenos Aires, presidential staffers wore red ties today to celebrate.

But many countries in the region are currently governed by leftists, including regional heavyweights Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. Presidents of those countries tested cautious public messaging in the wake of the U.S. vote.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Wednesday that she would wait for more of the official tally in the United States to be complete before recognizing a winner and added that Mexicans should have “not a single reason to worry” about how a Trump administration might affect them. (They have abundant reasons to worry—on issues from trade to immigration—but Sheinbaum’s comments suggest her government is taking the risks of Trump 2.0 seriously.)

Colombian President Gustavo Petro, meanwhile, congratulated Trump in a post that claimed the “north-south dialogue” was still alive. And Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s pro-Kamala Harris sentiments of a few days ago morphed into collegial wishes of “luck and success” to the incoming Trump government.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump celebrated his reelection victory on Wednesday with congratulatory calls from several foreign leaders, many of whom he shared warm ties with during his first term in office.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was one of the first world leaders to call Trump, according to the Israeli leader’s spokesperson. “The conversation was warm and cordial,” Netanyahu’s office said, noting that the two “agreed to work together for Israel’s security” and discussed “the Iranian threat.” Netanyahu was also quick to congratulate President Joe Biden on his victory in 2020, which enraged Trump, who had claimed that the election was still ongoing. 

“The first person that congratulated [Biden] was Bibi Netanyahu, the man that I did more for than any other person I dealt with,” Trump told Axios in 2021, using the Israeli leader’s nickname. “Bibi could have stayed quiet. He has made a terrible mistake.”

Trump also spoke with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, with whom he had cozy ties during his first term. According to a statement from Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Ministry, Mohammed bin Salman expressed “the kingdom’s aspiration to strengthen the historical and strategic relations between the two countries.” 

In a post on X, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi shared that he had congratulated his “friend” Trump on a “spectacular victory.” “Looking forward to working closely together once again to further strengthen India-US relations across technology, defense, energy, space, and several other sectors,” he said. 

French President Emmanuel Macron and Trump also engaged in a “very good discussion” for 25 minutes, Macron’s office said. In their phone call, the two leaders discussed Ukraine, the Middle East, and the European Union.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who was the first world leader to congratulate Trump in 2016, has also spoken with him, according to a statement from his office.

Europe is better prepared to work with a Trump White House than it was eight years ago but still needs to do more to boost its defense spending, former NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in an interview with Foreign Policy. 

“Though the Europeans are better prepared now, we need to do much more,” said Rasmussen, who added that the alliance should raise its spending targets from 2 to 3 percent—a move that both President-elect Donald Trump and NATO officials have backed. 

Rasmussen echoed the cautious optimism of Ukrainian officials that Trump’s businesslike approach to world affairs could potentially be of benefit in any talks to end Russia’s war in Ukraine. 

“His unpredictability combined with his desire to look like a winner could be used to help the Ukrainians build up a leverage that can be used,” Rasmussen said. “From my time as secretary-general of NATO, I know that unpredictability can be very forceful when it comes to deterrence.”

The former NATO chief said restrictions on Ukraine’s ability to use Western weapons to strike Russia should have been lifted a long time ago, and he criticized the Biden administration for being too cautious in its approach to the conflict out of fear of provoking Moscow. 

“I think our hesitation, and the hesitation of the Biden administration, has actually fueled the war. It has given [Russian President Vladimir] Putin appetite for more,” he said.

As the world wonders who will be calling the shots in a second Trump administration, one name keeps popping up among possible economic advisors: Robert Lighthizer. As the U.S. trade representative during President-elect Donald Trump’s first term, Lighthizer was the architect of the United States’ aggressive use of tariffs and other trade restrictions against friend and foe alike, abandoning decades of U.S. support for free trade. His trade policy revolution was subsequently embraced and expanded by the Biden administration.

Lighthizer may now be on the short list for a key economic post come January, with treasury secretary mentioned as one possibility. If he gets the nod, he could apply equally revolutionary ideas to policy areas beyond bilateral trade—with enormous implications on the financial sector and on economies around the world, as FP columnist Edward Alden describes in his profile of Lighthizer with a view to a second Trump term.

But even if a Lighthizer comeback is limited to a trade portfolio, the world could be in store for an economic upheaval. As Bob Davis outlines in his review of Lighthizer’s 2023 book, No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America’s Workers, the former trade official favors an economic and technological decoupling from China so comprehensive that it would take the protectionism initiated during Trump’s first term to an entirely new level.

Read it here: The Man Who Would Help Trump Upend the Global Economy and Trump Trade War Mastermind Is Back With a Dangerous New Plan

This week’s South Asia Brief examines the fallout of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s reelection for the region. Expectations are high for significant changes in U.S. foreign policy, but in South Asia we can expect considerable continuity from Washington.

The U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy has become the core driver of U.S. policy in Asia more broadly. This strategy first emerged under Trump as great-power competition intensified. The Biden administration robustly embraced the approach, albeit with some modifications, and has sought to strengthen ties with most South Asian capitals and to counter China’s deepening footprint in the region.

Trump prioritizes great-power competition considerations in foreign policy. This suggests the Indo-Pacific strategy (or the goals that drive it) will remain intact. However, Trump’s victory will certainly lead to some changes to U.S. bilateral ties in the region. Climate change could take on less importance, as well.

Read it here: In South Asia, Expect Continuity From Washington

What’s fascinating about former U.S. President Donald Trump’s return to the White House is that he is both replicating former President Grover Cleveland’s rare feat of two nonconsecutive terms and is doing so on a tariff policy that would make Cleveland’s final successor, William McKinley, blush. The world may still be getting its bearings after Trump’s landslide victory, but historians of the 19th century are in fine fettle.

Trump, who took tariffs to new depths in his first term, has promised to make them the centerpiece of his second-term economic agenda—alongside tax cuts, a bigger deficit, possible cuts to the safety net, and a reversal of everything outgoing President Joe Biden has done.

The questions about Trump’s tariff plans boil down to: How big, how soon, how, why, and what happens next?

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Vice President Kamala Harris called President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday to concede the election, according to a statement that her campaign manager, Jenn O’Malley Dillon, sent to campaign staff. Harris told Trump that she would work with outgoing President Joe Biden “to ensure a peaceful transfer of power, unlike what we saw in 2020,” Dillon said in an email to campaign staff. “She also made clear that she hopes he will be a President for all Americans.”

Harris is scheduled to make her first public comments since losing to Trump at 4 p.m. EST at Howard University in Washington, D.C. 

“I’ll leave you with this: losing is unfathomably painful. It is hard. This will take a long time to process,” Dillon wrote. “But the work of protecting America from the impacts of a Trump Presidency starts now.” 

The Trump campaign confirmed Harris’s call in a statement from the campaign’s communications director, Steven Cheung. “President Trump acknowledged Vice President Harris on her strength, professionalism, and tenacity throughout the campaign, and both leaders agreed on the importance of unifying the country,” Cheung said.

Update, Nov. 6, 2024: This post has been updated to include the Trump campaign’s statement.

A month after Franklin D. Roosevelt won the 1940 presidential election, he called for legislation to ramp up military aid to countries fighting Nazi Germany. Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941. Within months, Britain and the Soviet Union were pounding Adolf Hitler’s forces with U.S. weapons and other equipment.

Now that Americans have voted to return Donald Trump to the White House, the situation risks flipping into reverse: After Jan. 20, 2025, the United States may abandon its European allies to Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s fascist war machine.

During his campaign, Trump said he will “not give a penny to Ukraine.” Part of his plan to end the war “in one day” is that he would “tell [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky, no more. You got to make a deal.” But if Russia is allowed to conquer and subjugate Ukraine, it would only be a matter of which democracy gets colonized next by a neighboring dictatorship: Poland, the Baltic States, Moldova, or Taiwan.

Thus, over the next 75 days, Congress and the Biden administration face an urgent historic mission to help Ukraine get as many weapons as possible before a possible withdrawal of U.S. support.

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Exit poll data offers a glimpse into how gender—a key focus of both presidential campaigns—factored into former U.S. President Donald Trump’s reelection. 

Women have traditionally leaned Democratic over Republican. That was true for this election, too: 54 percent of women voted for Vice President Kamala Harris, while the same percent of men backed Trump. Interestingly, Harris did not make more inroads among women than President Joe Biden or former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did in 2020 and 2016, respectively, despite Harris’s efforts to galvanize female voters over reproductive rights. 

Along racial lines, Trump won the majority of support of both white men and women, performing particularly well among white voters without college degrees. Black men and women overwhelmingly backed Harris, with 92 percent of Black women casting their votes for the vice president. 

The majority of Latina women also voted for Harris, but by a slimmer margin of support for Democrats than in previous years. Latino men, who largely backed Biden and Clinton in the last two elections, flipped for Trump this election. 

Across age groups, Harris performed particularly well among women aged 18-44 and women above the age of 65. Trump saw strong support from men above the age of 30. Men aged 18-29 tilted toward Harris, but only by two percentage points.

President-elect Donald Trump won the Michigan city of Dearborn, a closely watched race seen as a potential barometer of whether the Biden administration’s Middle East policies would factor in at the ballot box. 

A majority of the city’s residents—55 percent—are of Middle Eastern descent. A little more than 42 percent of people in the city voted for Trump, according to data from the city clerk reported by the Detroit Free Press, while 36 percent voted for Vice President Kamala Harris. The city was a focal point for the Uncommitted Movement, which sought to pressure the Biden administration to change its stance on Israel and the wars in Gaza and Lebanon.

Leaders of the movement did not endorse Harris, but they called on their supporters not to vote for Trump.

In a sign of discontent with both candidates, the Green Party’s Jill Stein won 18 percent of the vote in Dearborn, compared with less than half a percentage point nationally. 

While the war in Gaza appears to have played a role in the results of the vote in pockets of the country such as Dearborn, it’s unlikely to have been a decisive factor in the outcome of the election given the scale of Trump’s lead over Harris.

We are going back.

Kamala Harris’s campaign slogan notwithstanding, Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States. Just what does this mean? A few things stand out for me already.

The first is that the late-campaign focus among Democrats and commentators on whether Black voters, and men in particular, would turn out in large enough numbers for Harris hurt her candidacy.

Black people don’t like to be told every four years that the future of American democracy rests on their shoulders, only to be forgotten until the next election. And Black men resent being scolded about their supposed apathy—even when this comes from another Black man, as in the case of former President Barack Obama, whose starchy rhetoric on Harris’s campaign trail was probably counterproductive. This push may have also driven away some white voters, a group that has leaned Republican in recent elections, reinforcing their sense of the Democratic Party as a Black party.

The message Harris’s campaign relied on most to appeal to white people, and especially white women, was a pledge to restore the right to abortion. However, according to exit polling, the majority of white women voted for Trump, which seems to suggest that racial identity is as powerful among white people as it is commonly assumed to be among Black people.

Against a weak candidate with as many liabilities as Trump, what Harris lacked most of all was a program. Harris had barely 100 days in the race, but she and her party failed to define a platform that went beyond leaning on traditional constituencies and the abortion issue. Trump’s campaign was almost entirely free of details, but it did project a vision—one of resurgent nationalism, of turning back immigrants, and of heightened executive power. For the majority that elected him, that was enough.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took a big risk this week when he abruptly fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant.  U.S. voters were going to the polls in a presidential election in which the outcome was by no means certain, but Netanyahu seemed willing to bet that former U.S. President Donald Trump would emerge victorious and that giving Gallant the boot would cost him little in regard to relations with Israel’s most important ally.

Now that Trump has won the election, Netanyahu might be vindicated, but that will only become clear over the next few months as the new president assembles his foreign-policy team and his squishy campaign rhetoric is translated into actual policies. What is more certain is that in the short term—between now and Jan. 20—dumping Gallant will almost certainly prove to have been a bad gamble because Netanyahu will have to continue dealing with the outgoing Biden administration.

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On Wednesday, China and Taiwan both offered their congratulations to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump.

Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te wrote on X at 6:30 a.m. EST: “Sincere congratulations to President-elect @realDonaldTrump on your victory. I’m confident that the longstanding #Taiwan-#US partnership, built on shared values & interests, will continue to serve as a cornerstone for regional stability & lead to greater prosperity for us all.”

At 11 a.m. EST, after it was reported that Vice President Kamala Harris would deliver a concession speech later Wednesday, Chinese Ambassador to the United States Xie Feng followed with his own note: ​​“My warm congratulations to Mr. Trump @realDonaldTrump on his reelection as President of the United States! China looks forward to working with the U.S. side for a stable, sound and sustainable China-U.S. relationship.”

The Chinese Foreign Ministry also posted this statement on its website: “We respect the choice of the American people and congratulate Mr. Trump on being elected as president of the United States.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping has yet to make a statement. In 2016, Xi waited one day to congratulate Trump on his victory, and in 2020, he waited several weeks to congratulate U.S. President Joe Biden.

The warm messages from both the Chinese and Taiwanese governments so far stand in contrast to deep concerns in both places about the potential for the Trump presidency to destabilize their relationships with the United States, given Trump’s threat of 60 percent tariffs on China and his comments that Taiwan should pay the United States more for its military support.

U.S. voter turnout on Nov. 5 is projected to be around 65 percent, with more than 158 million ballots counted, according to data from the University of Florida’s Election Lab. That number is a dip from the 2020 U.S. presidential election, which registered a historic 67 percent turnout.

U.S. Voter Turnout Over Time

This year, Indonesia (82 percent) and Sri Lanka (79 percent) had some of the highest voter turnout globally. In Indonesia, which holds the largest single-day election in the world, restaurants handed out free food and coffee to voters amid heavy rain. In Sri Lanka, more than 13 million voters headed to the polls for the first time since the country spiraled into an economic crisis in 2022.

Comparison of Global Voter Turnout in 2024 Elections

By contrast, the countries with some of the lowest voter turnout rates this year were Pakistan (48 percent) and Bangladesh (42 percent), where opposition leaders were either barred from running or boycotted the election. The United Kingdom registered its lowest voter turnout in a general election since 2001, despite the Labour Party’s landslide victory. Similarly, South Africa’s voter turnout (59 percent) was the lowest in the country’s 30-year democratic history.

Sources: The Election Project; news reports and various election commission data compiled by FP staff

It’s time to consider whether the 2020 election was the anomaly, not 2016.

As the results from this year’s vote sink in, Americans must process the basic strength of the MAGA/Republican coalition. While there will be soul-searching among Democrats about what they did wrong, it is equally incumbent on their party to start thinking about how President-elect Donald Trump not only won but also substantially broadened his base.

Trump’s appeal to rural, working-class Americans is clearly formidable, and he has expanded his reach among Black, Latino, and suburban voters—once considered solid members of the Democratic bloc.

After the 2020 election, political journalists Amie Parnes and Jonathan Allen wrote Lucky, which examined the unexpected variables that resulted in President Joe Biden securing the Democratic nomination and winning the general election at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking back, the authors were onto something: In 2020, few votes would have been necessary to shift the outcome to Trump—who increased his total vote count from about 63 million to 74 million, despite his record in office.

Though the unique circumstances of 2020 opened a window for Biden to defeat Trump, now that those circumstances are gone, the latter has roared back into power.

Democrats need to wake up—not to replicate the kind of reactionary populism that the Republican Party has used to win but rather to start the process of figuring out how to address the economic concerns and frustrations of working-class Americans who feel abandoned by political institutions.

Until Democrats take this step, the risk of 2028 being a continuation of 2024 will only grow stronger.

In September, FP columnist Matthew Kroenig urged U.S. allies to stop worrying about a second Trump administration and reflect on his actual record in office.

“Trump was an effective foreign-policy president, presiding over a period of relative global stability and prosperity, and a second Trump administration promises improved performance based on the lessons learned in the first term,” he wrote, pointing to a focus on “peace through strength,” burden-sharing, fair trade, ending the Russia-Ukraine war, toughness on Iran and China, and securing the border.

Read it here: Why the World Should Stop Worrying About a Second Trump Term

When U.S. President-elect Donald Trump unexpectedly won his first term in 2016, it stunned European officials and sent them scrambling to puzzle out the implications for transatlantic ties. 

Not this time. 

For months, European governments have been working behind the scenes on contingency plans to increase the continent’s self-sufficiency and shield military aid to Ukraine from the headwinds of U.S. politics. 

The mood since Tuesday night has been one of resignation and preparation. “This will probably mean that Europe finally realizes that it has to start taking care of itself,” said a European official who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the results. “The world’s oldest teenager will finally have to move out.”

Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski was circumspect in his remarks on the election. “The American people have voted, and we respect their decision,” he said Wednesday morning, speaking to the press. “Europe urgently needs to take more responsibility for its security.”

The question is whether these preparations will be enough. Another European official noted that the continent was better prepared “psychologically,” but questioned the substance of actual changes. “It’s not like Europe has made a huge leap in provisioning for its own defense in the meantime,” the official said. 

First on the list of concerns in Europe is what Trump’s victory could mean for the war in Ukraine, which he has promised to resolve in 24 hours. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was quick to congratulate Trump, on whom he will soon rely for the majority of his military aid. 

Trump’s eschewing of diplomatic norms and his personal relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin have long stoked anxiety that he may force Ukraine into an unfavorable deal for the sake of ending the war. But some see cause for hope in the businessman-turned-president’s transactional approach to global affairs. 

“Overall I am cautiously optimistic,” said Oleksandr Merezhko, the chair of the foreign affairs committee in the Ukrainian parliament. “In my opinion, from now on the issue of Ukraine becomes an issue of his personal success as a politician. He doesn’t want his legacy to be compared with the American withdrawal from Afghanistan.”

Economists, like much of the world, are having to recalibrate today.

Donald Trump’s sweeping victory in Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election answers some questions and poses others. Here’s one question: How good will Trump be for the world’s biggest economy in the short run—and how scary over the longer haul, not just for the United States? His promises of monetary and fiscal expansion, paired with trade and labor headwinds Trump is all but certain to inflict himself, portend a genuine economic roller coaster, with winners and losers galore.

Oxford Economics just released its view of what it calls a “limited Trump scenario,” in which a Republican White House and Congress extend tax cuts and boost federal spending, especially on defense, that will temporarily offset the harms of higher tariffs and mass deportations. The upshot is slightly stronger GDP growth after Trump’s first full year in office, followed by a sharp correction by 2028 as inflation rises, the labor market tightens, and trade shrinks.

The short-term fallout was anticipated—markets cheered Wednesday—and easy to model. What is harder to estimate is the impact that Trump’s promised tariffs of up to 20 percent on all trading partners and at least 60 percent on China will have on U.S. trade, growth, and inflation. Oxford Economics assumes the tariffs will be token and phased in; if Trump goes as promised, the negative macroeconomic impacts would come sooner and harder.

Ultimately, as Adam Posen, the president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, doesn’t cease to point out, the real risks of Trump 2.0 for the economy are the known unknowns. One can restrict goods (by hiking tariffs), or one can restrict the supply of labor (by deporting all the immigrants who work in agriculture and services). Doing both at the same time would be an unprecedented, risky, and certainly costly experiment. 

Donald Trump has won the election by winning Wisconsin, The Associated Press reports.

In his many visits to the Badger State, Trump campaigned hard on the economy, which polls consistently found to be the most important issue to voters there. Wisconsin has the second-highest concentration of manufacturing employment in the country, and industrial policy played a particularly important role in his messaging.

In October, I reported on Racine County, a bellwether county at the center of both major candidates’ competing visions for the economy. What’s going on there reveals a great deal about how Trump might go about revitalizing American industry in his second term.

Read the full story here: ‘Made in America’ Is on the Ballot in Wisconsin

Europe is a big casualty of the U.S. elections. It is better prepared for a Trump presidency than it was eight years ago—but to limited effect, since Europe’s geopolitical situation has worsened in that same period.

Having seen Trump in action, Europe knows what could be coming this time: aggressive economic competition—even a trade war—and severe conditionality, at best, on continued U.S. contributions to Europe’s security and defense. Meetings chaired by the European Commission have been held for the past year to prepare for these scenarios.

Retaliatory measures have been drawn up if the Trump administration raises tariffs on European goods. And talks about common investments in a European defense industry—in order to reduce dependence on Washington—may have stalled, but the proposals exist and can get moving if the 27 member states feel sufficient urgency. Moreover, Europe has (for once!) chosen strong leaders; one reason Mark Rutte was appointed NATO secretary-general is that, as Dutch prime minister, he managed to work with Trump reasonably well. The hope is clearly that Rutte can keep the United States engaged in NATO as a somewhat reliable ally.

Despite these preparations, Europe is not ready for Trump 2.0. The world has changed radically since 2016, to Europe’s disadvantage. It is surrounded by two wars, in Ukraine and the Middle East, whose outcomes will be determined by outside powers, not Europeans. The multilateral rules-based order is imploding and cannot be shored up by Europeans alone. U.S.-Chinese rivalry, meanwhile, dominates everything—with Europe squeezed in the middle.

Europe can only shield itself when it is strong and defending common positions. During previous shocks (COVID-19, the euro crisis, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine), the 27 put their differences aside to defend the common interest. Much more resolve will be needed in the coming years.

Donald Trump’s clear path to electoral victory shields the United States and the world from a few months of litigation and uncertainty. That doesn’t mean the ride between now and January will be smooth.

The Biden administration now has an expiration date, and a to-do list. Topping it will likely be tapping the remaining presidential drawdown authority to get financial and military aid to Ukraine, which remains locked in an existential struggle for survival after Russia’s invasion and which may soon face pressure from Trump and his administration to reach a negotiated peace with Moscow.

As of late October, the Biden administration still had $5.5 billion it could throw into Ukraine’s war chest. In the past, that has come in the form of air-defense batteries, battle tanks, and long-rage U.S. firepower that can help Ukraine balance the playing field against a larger neighbor with seemingly inexhaustible manpower and ample assistance from allies in Asia. 

With the election over, and new realities dawning, there may also be a new perspective in Washington: Longtime U.S. restrictions on Ukraine’s use of U.S.-supplied weapons to strike targets beyond the front line may now be loosened. Ukraine has pleaded for months to be unleashed, and might now get the chance.

That same shift in Washington’s post-electoral calculus could also apply to broader issues. With no reason to worry about spiking oil and gasoline prices, the United States may be more amenable not only to Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil infrastructure, but also to the unsheathing of additional sanctions on miscreant oil producers such as Iran and Venezuela, which skated clear of sanctions all year thanks to U.S. worries about the domestic impact of an energy war.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s election victory marks the beginning of another roller-coaster ride in U.S. foreign policy. The president-elect is poised to bring back the hallmarks of his first term: a trade war with China, a deep skepticism—even hostility—toward multilateralism, a fondness for strongmen, and an iconoclastic, tweet-from-the-hip style of dealmaking diplomacy. Trump’s advisors have said his “peace through strength” approach is what the country needs in this precarious moment.

This second term will bring new challenges, though—not least the two wars, in the Middle East and Ukraine, that the United States is deeply involved in. Trump has promised to end the war in Ukraine before he even takes office, but he has yet to offer any detailed plan; his plans for bringing peace to the Middle East are equally vague.

Unclear as Trump’s designs may be, Foreign Policy waded into his track record as well as his statements and those of his advisors to offer clues on what the future of U.S. foreign policy holds. As Trump’s first term showed, his own whims often contrast with his advisors’ agenda; this time around, he may have a tighter grip on the wheel as a second-time president likely staffed by a more loyal circle of advisors.

Here’s a glimpse into the Trump 2.0 future.

Read more

The postmortems about U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump in the 2024 U.S. presidential election will go on for a long time. Many books will be written, pundits’ reputations made and unmade, and academic careers launched as the polling data behind this baffling, unprecedented election are pored over for years to come. But as a first rough draft of history, there are a few ominous road markers that stand out.

After a remarkable start to her campaign, Harris failed to close the deal rhetorically. In an unfortunate echo of Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016, Harris spent far too much time trying to argue that Trump was unfit for the presidency and too little time delivering a coherent message about why she would be better. Despite overpowering Trump in their only debate on Sept. 10 and raising more than $1 billion in donations in just three months—a new record—Harris often floundered when challenged to deliver a convincing summary of her agenda on critical issues such as the economy and immigration. She also fumbled badly in explaining her flip-flops on issues such as fracking (which she once opposed and later supported, but without pointing out the simple fact that improved technology had made it environmentally safer). That led Wall Street Journal commentator Peggy Noonan to label Harris an “artless dodger.”

And, in the end, Harris failed to find a politically agile way of distancing herself from her unpopular boss, U.S. President Joe Biden.

Read more

Donald Trump has won the U.S. presidential election, becoming only the second U.S. president to be elected to two nonconsecutive terms in office and the first convicted felon to win the White House. 

The Associated Press called the race for Trump around 5:30 a.m. EST after he won the key swing states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, securing 277 electoral college votes and thus clinching his victory over Vice President Kamala Harris. The AP call followed those by Fox News and Decision Desk HQ. Trump also triumphed in other key swing states, winning North Carolina earlier in the night and flipping Georgia, which President Joe Biden won in 2020. 

Trump hailed his victory in a speech to supporters at Mar-a-Lago, his country club in Florida’s West Palm Beach, taking the stage just before 2:30 a.m. EST and declaring that he was at the helm of a “movement like nobody’s ever seen before.”

“Now it’s going to reach a new level of importance because we’re going to help our country heal,” he said.

“I will not rest until we have delivered the strong, safe, and prosperous America that our children deserve, and that you deserve,” he added, boasting that he had also won the popular vote. (As of 6 a.m. EST, Trump had won 51 percent of the popular vote, with nearly 71 million votes.) Trump lost the popular vote in both 2020 and 2016. 

He also referred to “certain networks,” including CNN and MSNBC, as “the enemy camp” before inviting Vice President-elect J.D. Vance to speak. “I think that we just witnessed the greatest political comeback in the history of the United States of America,” Vance said. 

Trump then retook the mic to thank other key allies, including his family, campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, billionaire Elon Musk, and Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White. “We have to put our country first for at least a period of time. We have to fix it because together we can truly make America great again for all Americans,” he concluded just before 3 a.m. EST. “I will not let you down. America’s future will be bigger, better, bolder, richer, safer, and stronger than it has ever been before.”

Harris canceled a planned appearance to speak earlier on Tuesday night at her alma mater, Howard University, in Washington, D.C. The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment and has not publicly acknowledged Trump’s victory.

Republicans also retook control of the U.S. Senate; control of the House of Representatives remains up in the air. 

Global leaders reacted to the projected electoral victory of former and seemingly soon-to-be-again President Donald Trump with a mix of crowing and cowing. 

His friends—in Israel, Hungary, and India—greeted a new Trump term with delight, while warier souls sought hurricane insurance in the middle of the storm.

“Congratulations on history’s greatest comeback!” wrote Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on X, looking forward to the “powerful recommitment” of the U.S.-Israeli alliance. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi offered his “heartiest congratulations.” Hungary’s Viktor Orban cheered a “much needed victory for the World.” Russian President Vladimir Putin did not yet weigh in, but Champagne corks are no doubt popping in Moscow.

Other world leaders reacted with the expected mix of shivers, both from pleasure and fear.

Dmitry Medvedev, the one-time Russian president and a stalking horse for the Kremlin’s view of the world, said on X that “Kamala is finished…” warning, “The objectives of the Special Military Operation remain unchanged and will be achieved.”

Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil and a keen student of Trump’s politics and policy, ticked all the boxes in his love letter, applauding the “resurgence of a true warrior.”

Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, “warmly” congratulated Trump, and reminded him that the United States and Europe are “more than just allies. … So let’s work together on a strong transatlantic agenda.” It was a message akin to that from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who welcomed Trump and reminded him of the importance of the “special relationship.”

Those likely to be on the sharp end of Trump’s foreign policy tried to make lemonade out of lemons. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has perhaps the most at stake next year, congratulated Trump and pleaded not to be abandoned in the middle of a war. “We rely on continued strong bipartisan support for Ukraine in the United States,” he said. 

NATO chief Mark Rutte chimed in and also reminded Trump that “peace through strength” means “keeping our Alliance strong.” France’s Emmanuel Macron put a brave face on his own kudos, telling Trump he was “ready to work together as we did for four years. … With respect and ambition.”

Early words aside, what Trump’s victory means is a reshuffling of the global order. The fate of Ukraine’s “victory plan” to prevail over Russia is now more uncertain than ever. Israel has no checks other than a blank one from Washington. Autocrats are emboldened. U.S. allies are huddling. As rocky as the last four years have been from a geopolitical perspective, the real tremors—and aftershocks—start now.

Global markets responded to the apparent victory of former President Donald Trump early Wednesday with a mix of fear and anticipation, as the presumptive winner’s proposed economic policies promise smooth sailing for U.S. equities and a rough ride for emerging economies, as well as an intensified trade war with China.

The biggest U.S. index was up in pre-market trading, a sign that Trump’s plans to slash regulations and cut taxes are seen as good for business in the short run at least, and the dollar gained strength against most major currencies. Asian stock markets reacted in disparate ways, with Japan’s blue-chip Nikkei index up more than 2 percent, mirrored to a lesser extent by India’s main board, while Shanghai’s composite index slipped a bit, much as the renminbi did against the dollar, a slide mirrored by most smaller economies that stand to bear the brunt of a renewed push for U.S. tariffs and further hurdles to global trade. Iran’s currency, meanwhile, nosedived at the prospect of Trump 2.0.

Trump’s stunning result—he declared victory around 2:30 a.m. EST and appears poised to have control of both houses of Congress—left other markets wrestling with a mixture of bullishness and sangfroid. Big cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, jumped to new highs on the expectations that Trump’s economic playbook will mean bigger deficits, lower interest rates, and higher inflation; that makes alternative assets such as cryptocurrencies more appealing.

The oil market, a proxy for investors’ fear of geopolitical risk, took Trump’s dominance in stride, with prices for both U.S. and Brent crude slipping slightly in pre-market trading, a sign that the next U.S. administration will pursue an oil-friendly energy policy without stoking further conflict in the Middle East.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has won the hotly contested battleground state of Georgia and its 16 electoral college votes, according to The Associated Press.

Trump secured 50.9 percent of the vote, while Harris took 48.4 percent, with 94 percent of votes counted, The AP said. Trump’s win in Georgia, a key swing state, narrows Harris’s potential path to victory.

Wednesday morning’s result stands in sharp contrast to what occurred in 2020, when Trump—running against then-Vice President Joe Biden—became the first Republican presidential candidate to lose the state in nearly three decades. Biden narrowly won the state by a margin of just under 12,000 votes, a victory driven in part by an 84 percent surge in Asian American voter turnout, as I reported for Foreign Policy.

For the first time in four years, Republicans have regained control of the Senate.

Republicans retook control of the chamber on Tuesday after businessman Bernie Moreno flipped Ohio’s Senate seat and West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice secured the state’s open Senate seat. In Nebraska, the incumbent Republican senator, Deb Fischer, also fended off independent challenger Dan Osborn and held onto her seat.

With Moreno’s and Justice’s victories, Republicans will now command at least one chamber of Congress, giving them enormous sway and political leverage in the event of either a Harris or a Trump presidency.

In Ohio, Moreno secured 50.3 percent of the vote, defeating his Democratic opponent, incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown, who won 46.3 percent, with 95 percent of the votes counted, according to The Associated Press. Moreno is a Colombian immigrant who owns a number of car dealerships and was backed by Trump on the campaign trail.

For more on key congressional races, check out my colleague Lili Pike’s reporting.

U.S. presidential elections matter to African nations because they serve as a barometer for democracy. Extreme polarization, disinformation, and hatred have marred Nigerian ballots—often resulting in violent protests and the refusal to accept election results. Other familiar practices, such as vote buying, are now being observed in the U.S. campaign. Elon Musk’s $1 million-a-day giveaway to voters via his political action committee feels eerily familiar in Nigeria, where politicians’ use of money to influence voters is commonplace.

The dissatisfaction with democracy is also familiar. About 94 percent of Nigerians view politics as corrupt, according to polling firm Afrobarometer. Asked to describe the state of politics last year, about 79 percent of Americans used words like “corrupt” and “divisive” in a Pew Research Center survey.

African politicians “can point to the American political landscape, rife with polarization and chaos, to justify their own authoritarian tendencies and abuse of democracy,” development specialist Chinedu George Nnawetanma wrote.

But the United States can also learn about accepting ballot results from recent elections in Senegal, South Africa, and, most recently, Botswana. Botswana oversaw a smooth transfer of power on Monday after a crushing election defeat for the Botswana Democratic Party, which had enjoyed 58 years in power.

Former President Mokgweetsi Masisi conceded defeat even before full results were announced. Masisi has said he will not run for political office again, despite having served only one out of two possible five-year terms.

“Botswana today sends a message to the whole world and says democracy is alive here, democracy is in action,” Botswana’s newly elected leader, Duma Boko, declared after taking office.

Vice President Kamala Harris has earned Virginia’s 13 Electoral College votes, though by a far slimmer margin than most polls had predicted, The Associated Press reports. Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine also won reelection, beating out longshot challenger Hung Cao, a former U.S. Navy captain.

Cao, a Trump acolyte, was born in Vietnam and made anti-communism the centerpiece of his campaign. In an interview with Foreign Policy, Cao said that he was “basically the standard bearer” for Virginia’s Vietnamese American population, the country’s fifth-largest. But as I reported from the Washington, D.C., suburbs last week, the reality is more complex. The community skews Republican, but there is strong support for Democrats as well.

Kaine, who has served in the Senate since 2013, is a member of the Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees. He gained national prominence as Hillary Clinton’s running mate in the 2016 election—and again over the weekend, when he appeared on Saturday Night Live (along with Harris and pop star Chappell Roan).

Read it here: In Virginia, a Vietnamese American Community Divided

Among the foreign observers at former U.S. President Donald Trump’s election watch party at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida is Brazilian lawmaker Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro. The younger Bolsonaro posted a photo with Donald Trump Jr. to X in which he praised the “good company.”

Jair Bolsonaro was banned from running for office until 2030 after a court ruled that he abused his presidential power. But his brand of far-right politics is still influential in Brazil—and it leans heavily on Trump for strategic cues. In objection to their loss in a presidential election months earlier, Bolsonaro’s supporters stormed the Brazilian seat of government in January 2023.

Eduardo Bolsonaro traveled to the United States with a handful of other conservative Brazilian lawmakers who similarly used their social media profiles to boost Trump’s messaging.

The night appears to be heading down a familiar path for U.S. election watchers: a nail-biting tally of the votes in the final swing states, with former U.S. President Donald Trump in the lead. Neither candidate has pulled off an upset; instead, the race is so far trending along the lines of what the polls projected. Trump appears likely to win Georgia and North Carolina, where the news and polling analysis website 538 had him up by a point heading into Election Day. Vice President Kamala Harris would have to make up ground in the urban areas where the votes are still being counted in order to turn those states around.

If Trump wins those two key states, it is likely that the race will come down to the big three “blue wall” states: Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, which helped deliver President Joe Biden to victory in 2020. Harris had a slight advantage in Wisconsin and Michigan in the final polls, whereas Pennsylvania was dead even.

The odds are looking increasingly tough for Harris—the infamous New York Times needle has swung to “likely” for Trump.

Pennsylvania. Georgia. Arizona. Michigan. Maine. The list of states in which dozens of polling locations have faced bomb threats on Election Day continues to grow.

Authorities at the federal, state, and local levels—including the FBI—have all stressed that none of the threats so far have been considered credible, and no bombs have been found at any location, but the threats nonetheless led to temporary suspensions of voting in several counties. Many of the affected polling places will now stay open later than usual so people can cast their ballots.

Several officials, including the secretaries of state of Arizona and Georgia, said they believed the bomb threats originated from Russia, though neither provided any evidence to back up that claim. The FBI also said bomb threats in several states “appear to originate from Russian email domains.”

Russia does have a long track record of attempting to interfere in U.S. elections, including this one. And it’s not the only time they have been accused of using bomb threats to interfere with the vote during an election—Germany made similar allegations during the ongoing Moldovan election on Monday.

But there isn’t a smoking gun just yet. One U.S. official told the Wall Street Journal that there hasn’t been a formal assessment of Russia’s involvement in the bomb threats.

By most accounts, this presidential election will be close. We don’t have the kinds of landslide elections we had in 1936, 1972, or 1984. Instead, we have elections that come down to a handful of swing states and slivers of the electorate within those states.

The landmark book Insecure Majorities by my colleague, Princeton University political scientist Frances Lee, explores this instability. She explains that before 1994, congressional majorities were quite stable: Democrats had controlled the House since 1954 and the Senate for most of the time (aside from 1981 to 1987). Since then, however, we have entered an era in which control flips back and forth, and the size of these majorities has shrunk.

When Democrats had large and stable majorities, they could afford to make compromises, and Republicans had to reach across the aisle if they wanted any influence. Once that ended, the incentives for partisanship intensified. The potential cost of compromise increased as concessions could flip seats in the next election. Partisan battles became endless.

Presidential campaigns are now driven by similar dynamics. As fault lines have calcified, it has become increasingly difficult to know which way the electoral winds will blow. Candidates must slug it out over very small parts of the electorate, and the stakes of each fight have become greater. The 2000 election ushered in this era, when the parties entered a bare-knuckles battle over the vote count in Florida.

Although the colors of some of the states have changed, including Florida, we have been living in the shadow of that contentious election ever since.