How Trump 2.0 May Deal With Global Flashpoints

From Ukraine to the Middle East to China – clues to how the Trump-Vance administration will handle global challenges

DEEP DIVE

BEIJING, CHINA – U.S. President Donald Trump takes part in a welcoming ceremony with China’s President Xi Jinping on November 9, 2017 in Beijing. Trump was on a 10-day trip to Asia. (Photo by Thomas Peter-Pool/Getty Images)

Posted: November 10th, 2024

By Tom Nagorski

Tom Nagorski is the Managing Editor for The Cipher Brief. He previously served as Global Editor for Grid and served as ABC News Managing Editor for International Coverage as well as Senior Broadcast Producer for World News Tonight.

DEEP DIVE – As Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House, the U.S. faces an unusually broad set of global security challenges: wars in Europe and the Middle East, neither of which look likely to end before Inauguration Day; a tense relationship with China and the possibility of conflict over Taiwan; and an increasingly potent and coordinated group of adversaries – what many have called an “axis of authoritarians” – working to counter the U.S. and the West. Also in the mix are foreign disinformation campaigns, cyberattacks against the U.S., and a threat of terrorism which has risen to “a whole other level,” as FBI Director Christopher Wray has put it, inspired largely by Israel’s war in Gaza.

“The global security challenges that the U.S. faces…we haven’t seen anything quite like this since World War II,” General Jack Keane, a Cipher Brief expert and former Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, said at a security conference earlier this year.

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