COLUMNS

Carrying the Lessons Learned About Trump Into 2019

undefined and VP of Global Analysis
Reva Goujon
VP of Global Analysis, Stratfor

Nov 30, 2018 | 00:02 GMT

U.S. President Donald Trump greets French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on Nov. 11, 2018, during commemorations marking the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I.

U.S. President Donald Trump greets French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on Nov. 11 during commemorations marking the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. Trump's willingness to take certain tactics to an extreme can put allies such as France in an awkward position as they try to balance among the United States, China and Russia.

(LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP/Getty Images)

Highlights

  • U.S. President Donald Trump may be unorthodox in his methods, but he is still largely reacting to the impersonal forces driving the great power competition in the international system.
  • The president's tactics, however, not only can deviate from U.S. grand strategy but also directly undermine it in some critical cases. This puts middle powers in an especially awkward position in trying to balance among the United States, China and Russia.
  • Even as Congress and the military establishment have been significant institutional checks on executive policy, personality and ideology remain potent forces shaping policy in the Trump era.
  • Closely tracking the rise and fall of enablers and inhibitors surrounding the president has proved just as important as having a structural framework to make sense of the daily scuttlebutt.

As we close in on the end of 2018 and get ready to unveil our forecasts for 2019, now is as good a time as ever for some honest introspection. We know we're not the only ones out there who have been burned somewhere along the way in trying to read the tea leaves of U.S. President Donald Trump's presidency. But we now have nearly two years of the Trump administration on the examining table to sort and dissect. We emerge from this process more humbled and a bit battered, but also more enlightened. Here are just a few of the lessons we've learned that we intend to carry into the next year....

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