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If the Democrats win the midterm elections, will American foreign policy change course?
There will probably be few changes in Donald Trump’s foreign policy, because Congress generally has little power in this area. I do not expect a brake that didn’t exist before to be put in place. There will be investigations and confrontations, but no real inflection.
Can Trump’s policy therefore become even more deranged?
Yes.
Why?
First, because he will be vulnerable. Donald Trump lacks self-confidence. Who knows what he will do if he feels rejected by the electorate? It is known that, day by day, he is obsessed with the legacy he will leave. After the war against Iran, which was a disaster, he will wonder: “What can I do to deserve my place on Mount Rushmore?” He went after Greenland in order to say: “I am the president who added the largest piece of territory to the United States.” He attacked the Iranian regime because he wanted to go down in history as the president who had the courage to do what no one else would dare to do: overthrow the Islamic Republic. After the midterm elections, he will wonder: “What can I do now to claim my place in history?” And, in my view, Cuba will top the list.
Could he launch a new military operation?
I suppose he will attempt to topple the Cuban government before the end of his term. He has already tried.
Could a Democratic victory prevent the summit Putin proposed among him, Xi Jinping and Trump?
No, the Democrats won’t be able to do anything about it. The sanctions bill Lindsey Graham devoted the rest of his life to is the perfect example: it ended up being adopted. And what did Trump do? He threw it in the trash.
What is your view of the increasingly evident rapprochement between Putin’s Russia and the United States?
It’s not hard to understand what is happening. We are two weeks away from the midterm elections. The Republicans are in trouble and Trump panics. These difficulties are primarily about the cost of living, and more specifically, the price of gasoline and diesel. His decision to reach out to Putin and to strike a deal on diesel exports is therefore largely tied to these elections. He has, in recent days, decided not to apply the new sanctions against Russia. Zelensky then intervened to criticize Trump regarding the diesel deal. Trump hates being criticized. He lashes out at Ukraine, and the situation only worsens.
Shouldn’t Zelensky have criticized this deal?
Zelensky must speak out, just as Mark Carney or the European allies who must set their red line and say: “Don’t even think about annexing Greenland.” On the other hand, Trump tends to fly off the handle and lose his composure. Take the example of Mark Carney. I completely understand what he says and what he does. But if I were his adviser, I would tell him to do like most European leaders: play the long game. Keep your tongue still. Wait for Trump to go. Do not quarrel with him, because that never ends well. Zelensky is in a somewhat different situation, because his country is at war; he therefore feels the need to express himself in a way I understand. But again, was that the right thing to do? Hard to say.
Is Donald Trump right to move closer to Russia?
Trump is doing what is necessary by engaging in dialogue with Putin and negotiating with the Russians.
More generally, many of his intuitions are sound. He understood that liberal internationalism, traditional American foreign policy, did not work for most Americans and led to overexpansion abroad as well as a decline in living standards at home. He also understood that some of the biggest mistakes the United States has made in recent decades stemmed from ideological excess, the belief that we could turn Afghanistan or Iraq into stable democracies. When I listened to the candidate Trump speak about foreign policy, I approved a large portion of what he said. His rhetoric spoke to me: no more wars, return to fundamentals, revitalization of the middle class, reduction of international involvement, etc.
But when Trump translates his intuitions into policy, it turns into disaster. On almost every front he has engaged, he has indulged in counterproductive excesses.
For example?
What Trump does with alliances had been necessary for a long time. They need to be rebalanced. And that works: Europeans, as well as Japan and South Korea, are spending more on their defense. But then he commits aberrations. He declares, for instance: “I will take Greenland.” He insults everyone, allies included, and even the Pope. He turns a success into a failure.
Regarding Putin and Xi Jinping, Joe Biden had this vision of a world pitting democracy against autocracy. Or rather, we live in a world where democracies and autocracies must work out a way to coexist. So, when Trump said: “I will talk to Putin, I will invite Xi Jinping to my inauguration,” I thought: “That’s brilliant.” But then, when you look at how he handled the Ukraine war, including in recent days, it’s a bit crazy. He has these meetings with Trump and Xi Jinping, and he says: “We have a real and great friendship,” then nothing happens. It yields nothing.
This is also the case with his discussions with Putin…
Yes, again, he mishandles it. The Ukrainians and Europeans should be at the negotiating table. At the same time, the United States should send more weapons to Ukraine. Putin keeps toying with Trump. They have charming phone conversations and Putin speaks kind words. Trump hangs up. What happens the next night? Six hundred drones strike Ukraine. The willingness to end this war through negotiation is a good thing. But its implementation is a true disaster.
Would Putin be truly ready to negotiate? Russia maintains maximalist goals and since January 2025, Moscow has never budged in its position in negotiations with Trump.
Under favorable conditions, negotiation is possible. This war must end, because the longer it lasts, the more Putin stands to gain. What is missing, in my view, is not dialogue, but a context in which negotiations could have a chance of success, and Trump does not create it. He must convince Putin that he cannot go any further. To achieve this, we must help Ukraine. We must prevent Putin from reaching his objectives so that he stops.
Wouldn’t this rapprochement risk weakening NATO?
On the contrary, I think we have, in a sense, proof that NATO is stronger than Trump. Trump tests it, but when he leaves office, NATO will remain NATO. It is important to distinguish rhetoric from reality. Trump does not like alliances: he insults allies and adopts a behavior that increases mistrust of the United States. But there are still around 80,000 American soldiers in Europe. American troops in East Asia have not really changed either. He does not withdraw. There are even more American soldiers in the Middle East today than before.
Yet his words have effects: for the first time in twenty years, China is seen more positively in the world than the United States.
It is indeed trust that does the damage. If I were the French president, the German chancellor, or the Japanese prime minister, I would ask myself: “Can I trust the United States? Are they reliable?” My answer would be: “I hope so, but I’m not sure.”
Would this change if the Democrats won the White House in 2028?
This situation does not hinge solely on Trump; the United States is going through a period of political dysfunction that affects the system as a whole. Congress no longer functions. It is a system that has lost its political center. If I were an ally of the United States or advising the German chancellor, I would say: “Play the long game, stay the course, but plan for a Plan B.” We simply do not know whether the United States will still be there in ten years.
How could the United States rebuild this political center?
By putting American workers back on their feet. This includes progressive economic policies: free childcare, support for elder care, higher taxes on the wealthiest and on corporations, because we are in the middle of a budget crisis.
Does the stance embodied by Mamdani in New York seem to be moving in the right direction?
Mamdani proposes free buses and municipal supermarkets. I think what we really need is an economy in which work provides a decent wage. Americans do not want handouts. They want a functioning social contract. And that is not the case today.
The solution is to determine how Americans can earn a decent living in the digital era.
Through different policies, Republicans with tariffs, Democrats with the Inflation Reduction Act, have both promised to reindustrialize the United States, precisely to address many of the expectations you listed. Why has this not worked?
Industrialization is a myth. Will there be new factories in the United States? Yes, there already are. Are semiconductors currently manufactured in Arizona by TSMC? Yes. How many people work there? Perhaps a few thousand. Both Democrats and Republicans have, to some extent, misled the American electorate by saying: “We will resort to tariffs, implement an industrial policy, bring back your job on the manufacturing line.” That will not happen: 80% or more of the American workforce works in the service sector. These people will not return to manufacturing lines. We need an honest discussion about how to train our citizens for the jobs of tomorrow. For the most part, these will not be manufacturing jobs.
With Donald Trump in the White House, the war in Ukraine still ongoing and the Middle East destabilized, how would you describe the current state of international relations?
The word that spontaneously comes to mind is “disorder”: uncertainty, instability and tensions have undoubtedly reached their peak. Very few people saw it coming. It was nonetheless predictable that power redistribution would rekindle geopolitical rivalries. In the 1990s, when everyone proclaimed the “end of history,” I already judged that to be naïve: we were confusing perpetual peace with the outcome of the Cold War, while in reality we were living the stability that came with unipolarity. Now that the balance of power is shifting, a more contested international landscape does not surprise me at all.
What surprised you, however?
I certainly did not anticipate the generalized dysfunction we observe in many liberal democracies. Life in the United States has become unrecognizable. In France, domestic upheavals are quite worrying. Liberal democracy is faltering, the political center is eroding. This is what makes this period so destabilizing: we are subjected to changes from outside, linked to the shift in global power, and changes from within, due, in my view, to the advent of the digital age, to the impact of automation on workers and, in many respects, to the erosion of the social contract of the industrial era. The mix is toxic and reminiscent of the late 19th century, when rapid upheavals in the hierarchy of powers coincided with the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy. An era of great instability followed, marked by two world wars within a few decades. I hope that is not where we are headed.
We must therefore provoke a moment of reorganization now, to avoid having to do so after a new world war.
We are living through a kind of “interregnum”…
I do not know of a better formulation than Gramsci’s to describe the moment we are living: “the old dies and the new cannot be born: during this interregnum, the morbid phenomena are various.”
That is exactly where we are. We are witnessing the collapse of the old order. We have not yet even begun to discuss the new order. In a sense, Donald Trump is the principal architect of the collapse of the liberal international order, but he has not even started to sketch the slightest vision of the way forward. As I wrote recently, Trump is a demolisher, not an architect. At the end of his presidency, we will therefore all find ourselves in the midst of the rubble of the old order. The vast task ahead will then be to reconstruct a kind of international system that works in the post-Trump era, for it is not he who will do it.
Will the post-Trump world also be a “post-American” world?
The Pax Americana is coming to an end. I hesitate to say that the United States itself is in decline, because the American economy remains unequalled, as does its military, which far outpaces China’s. But the United States and its allies, who for decades formed a dominant coalition, are in the process of losing that status. The great industrial democracies that have accompanied Washington all this time—France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, Italy, Canada—are declining in the sense that their demographic weight recedes, and the rising powers—India, China, Indonesia, Brazil, Nigeria—will surpass many of the countries that once stood at the forefront. The Pax Americana, which rested not only on American power but also on the power of its allies, is therefore ending. At the same time, it is likely that due to the erosion of the political center, institutional dysfunction and the erosion of the middle class, American power is, today, in a sense, underestimated.
Are we heading toward a multipolar and regionalized world, or toward a new bipolarity between the United States and China?
That partly depends on how one measures polarity. If one relies on material indicators, such as GDP or defense spending, then we are moving toward a bipolar world, or at once bipolar and multipolar. The United States and China will indeed remain far ahead of other countries for some time to come. And even if China catches up economically with the United States, it remains far behind militarily. By contrast, if we judge polarity by how the international system functions, we face a much more multipolar system. This owes largely to the fact that the rising powers of the Global South now possess new agency. They practice what is called “multi-alignment”: even if there are perhaps two dominant powers, the United States and China, most other countries in the world will not choose a camp.
How does this translate into practice?
India is the quintessential example. Modi attends a state dinner in the United States with Joe Biden. A year later, he’s in Moscow embracing Vladimir Putin. A year later again, in China, alongside Xi Jinping. This is the direction we are heading. India is not the only one pursuing this hedging policy. For me, this is certainly a multipolar world, without fixed alignments, without democracies on one side and autocracies on the other. During the Cold War, the bipolarity between the United States and the Soviet Union, between East and West, somewhat structured the world. Most regions belonged to one bloc or the other, and the two blocs competed for the allegiance of other countries. Today the situation is far more complex.
In such a context, is international cooperation to meet common challenges still possible?
Today’s world is more interconnected and globalized than at any other time in history. Unlike the Soviet Union and the United States, which lived in their own separate worlds, the United States and China are now deeply integrated: their economies are interwoven, trade is intense, financial ties are tight. We are now confronted with a set of global threats that require large-scale collective action: climate change, public health, nuclear proliferation, security, AI and the development of new technologies. We cannot afford to return to a fractured world. Yet that is the path we are on. The demand for global governance is immense, while the supply is well below what would be needed. This is the gap we must close. If we do not all row in the same direction, we will all sink together. The discussion we need to have concerns how to implement this kind of collective action. What institutions and mechanisms can we imagine to prevent fragmentation of the global system that would only worsen everyone’s situation?
Are the United Nations no longer capable of playing that role?
The UN is doing remarkable work. Channeling humanitarian aid, healthcare, sharing information on pandemics, peacekeeping missions: the organization plays a key daily role. However, if one asks what role the UN has played in the major conflicts of our era—whether in Ukraine, in Gaza, during the Gulf War, or in Sudan—one must conclude that it has largely remained a spectator.
Why?
Because the Security Council is paralysed by the veto power of its permanent members. The United Nations works in a very appealing way, like a kind of world parliament, but its sheer size is a problem. It is indeed much harder to reach a consensus when 193 voices speak around the table than when only a few do. It is a problem that cannot be solved. We need greater representation of Southern countries on the Security Council, and it is clear that the organization must be reformed. Yet if the UN were reformed and the Security Council expanded, that would only exacerbate the initial problem. And that is why the UN is what it is. If it did not exist, it would have to be invented. But we must complement it.
How?
We need a double movement. On the one hand, as power shifts from West to East and from North to South, the world system will inevitably regionalize: power flows from the center to the periphery. Regional organizations and actors must therefore take on more responsibility. In other words, there must be an ascending order that starts from the base and moves upward. On the other hand, precisely because we live in a globalized and interdependent world, we need a descending order that starts from the top. This is something new. If you look back to 1700, for example, the world was already regionalized and multipolar. But its poles—the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Mughal Empire, the Qing Dynasty and the Tokugawa Shogunate—had little to do with each other. That is no longer the case today.
Is there a model for this new arrangement?
I see the European Concert as a model for several reasons. First, it functioned without a charter, without formal rules and without a veto, operating by consensus: solutions emerged from circumstances. Second, it was small, which is an advantage for decision-making and progress. It is indeed easier to agree among five around a table than among a hundred or two hundred. Third, it was ideologically tolerant and pluralistic. It brought together three absolute monarchies (Russia, Prussia, and Austria) and two liberal powers (France and Great Britain), which agreed to differ on their internal governance. Finally, it combined an ascending order and a descending order. Each member was recognized for a sphere of influence based on geography and proximity, but they also met collectively through the system of congresses. It is this combination of regionalization and centralization that, in my view, should inspire what comes next.
Wouldn’t the world, by default, be heading toward this kind of diplomacy already?
At the end of the Cold War, we experienced a relatively brief period when Security Council members got along and veto usage had clearly diminished.
Today we are back in a world where everyone vetoes everyone else. Consequently, there has been a natural shift toward forming coalitions of voluntary actors to carry out missions that are not undertaken by the UN or other official multilateral institutions. If we look at the last decades, which groups have actually mobilized to solve problems? It is the P5+1 group that negotiated the Iranian nuclear deal. It is the six-party talks on North Korea. In the Middle East, there is the Arab League. Different configurations have negotiated Gaza. France, the United States, Lebanon and Israel studied the situation in Lebanon. As for mediation between Iran and the United States, it was Pakistan, Qatar and Oman who played this role. As for the Sudan civil war, it was the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, the United States and a few other actors involved. These coalitions thus form naturally.
If that is going to happen anyway, let us take the initiative. Set up these coalitions of volunteers before crises, or at least during them, because diplomacy is often simply absent. I acknowledge that Trump deserves credit for having attempted to negotiate with the Russians about Ukraine. But for years there had been no dialogue. The events of October 7 occurred at a moment when there was no real peace process underway between Palestinians and Israelis. We must ask which issues need to be resolved and who should be at the table. Let’s set up these coalitions of volunteers rather than wait with arms folded for problems to arise.
How could this kind of process be institutionalized?
One can imagine a global concert that would bring around the table the world’s great powers and the various regions of the world. Rather than selecting one great Latin American country, such as Brazil, or one great African country, we would call on representatives from their regional organizations themselves. The European Union would send a high representative who would serve as a supervisory body. A physical seat would be established, positioned halfway between East and West and between North and South. Istanbul and Dubai, for instance. This group would be tasked with establishing “sub-concerts.” One could focus on Ukraine, another on the Israeli–Palestinian question, another on climate, and another on artificial intelligence and technology. It would be tailored coalitions bringing together the parties who should be at the table. This is the type of discussion we need and which has not yet taken place.
Would such a system lack transparency?
I think one of the UN’s problems is precisely that it is too transparent. The Security Council serves as a platform for speeches, for gesticulations and for mutual accusations. It would be useful to have a place where leaders could negotiate in a continuous and strategic manner, away from the public gaze.