Did the midterms clip Trump abroad?

The Democrats are still riding the high of their seismic win in Tuesday’s midterms, while the Republicans, stunned, are penning op-eds to figure out what happened. 

And while we’re partial to a good post-mortem, we are at our core geopolitics nerds (with a penchant for 90s sitcoms), so let’s drill down a little more on the foreign policy side of things, starting with…

1. 🇮🇷 Iran 

Please hear what we’re saying (rather than how it sounds) when we point out that a Democratic midterm wave was Tehran’s best-case scenario, for several reasons.

First, it validated Iran’s energy-squeeze strategy to impose political costs on Trump’s military move. With gas above $4 and diesel above $6, voters didn’t have much trouble drawing a link between Trump’s war and their eye-watering bills.

Second, the Dems campaigned on curbing Trump’s foreign adventurism, a promise repeated by (for example) senior senator Chuck Schumer: “We are going to end the war” (the Iran one, to be precise). 

Now as we’ve explored yesterday and in our special edition (become an Insider!), the US president retains near-total powers over US foreign policy, so the Democrats can’t realistically force him to sign a deal with Iran. What they can do, however, is cut the Pentagon’s purse-strings until Trump rethinks.

Third, while only 4% of voters listed foreign policy as their top priority, the Iran war itself remained deeply unpopular. Even before the first bombs dropped, a majority told pollsters they didn’t like the idea, but Trump rolled the dice both on a) a successful decapitation strike, and then b) voters warming to a win.

Instead, Trump’s own Veep is now tweeting, “The reason we lost is the war.” Of course, Vance has 2028 incentives to distance himself from an unpopular policy, and has presumably been the source of leaks suggesting he’s dissented along the way. But still, not a winning vibe when your own Veep publicly spells it all out.

Fourth, Israel has now become a ballot box issue in ways unthinkable a decade ago: 54% of folks now favour curbing US security assistance, while Vance himself cited internal polling listing “change our relationship to Israel” as a top-four reason to vote blue or just stay home. Hence Trump’s election-day move to phase aid out.

Now, none of this means the Dems are soft on Iran, nor that the war will end tomorrow. To the contrary, maybe a wounded Trump with less to lose will double down on ousting a weakened regime. But it’s equally possible the regime now concludes that the midterms just drew enough US political blood to encourage holding out a bit longer. 

2. 🇨🇳 China 

Beijing probably now has mixed feelz: Trump will go down in history as the first president to abandon decades of fading US hopes that liberalising China’s economy would eventually liberalise China’s politics. Instead, the Party cashed all those checks while Xi kept warming his crown up for an unprecedented fourth term.

And yet… for all the chest-thumping, Trump 2.0 has now pivoted to stabilise US-China ties. History might show it’s just a tactical pause after China revealed the economic pain it could inflict in response to Trump’s 2025 tariffs; ie, perhaps Trump (or his successor) reverts to the mean once DC is no longer so beholden to China’s rare earths dominance (or ditto China to the USA’s chip controls).

But for now, Trump 2.0 keeps rolling over his manageable trade truce, showing flexibility over his chip controls, and has even made the occasional transactional noise about congressionally-entrenched US commitments to Taiwan.

Hence the mixed feels in Beijing: happy to see ties stabilised, US red lines wobbling, and a Trump 2.0 more chastened, gridlocked, and/or distracted. But probably also a little uneasy about what a semi-cornered Trump might do next, let alone who might replace him.

3. 🇷🇺 Russia 

The Kremlin didn’t waste time hiding its disappointment over Trump’s loss, with deputy FM Ryabkov noting the Democratic Party’s stance on Russia remains “sharply negative” (polling suggests US folks might prefer the term “rational”).

But Putin won’t hit the panic button just yet, for two reasons:

• i) An opposition-held Congress can’t stop the US president from (say) blaming Ukraine for Putin’s attacks, or welcoming Putin to US soil, or withholding further US sanctions, or calling for the ousting of Ukraine’s elected president, plus…

• ii) As we flagged yesterday, a chastened Trump might double-down on pressuring Ukraine into trading land for peace (which we assess Putin would see as banking some land before again trying to take the rest).

But as always, some caveats: Congress already restricted the Pentagon’s ability to cut US forces in Europe (a Putin bugbear) below 76,000. Plus there’s always the chance a chastened Trump might become more cautious after taking an electoral L the size of Texas (literally), rather than keep pushing Ukraine to cede its territory.

We’ll get a key early signal later this month when Trump potentially sees Xi and Putin (but not Ukraine’s Zelensky) at China’s APEC summit. 

4. 🇪🇺 Europe

If you felt a massive shift in Atlantic air currents on Wednesday, that was Europe breathing a collective sigh of relief. The surprise isn’t that Brussels cheered (Trump 2.0 has loved a bit of euro-bashing) so much as the extent to which Trump’s own dented populist brand might now impact Europe’s own political spectrum.

Don’t believe us? Look at (say) how France’s right-populist Jordan Bardella (of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally) framed it all: "Donald Trump's second term differs quite significantly, in its philosophy and foreign policy, from his first."

He’s distancing himself from Trump in the same indirect way we’ve now seen from Vance (above) but also Cruz (Texas) and DeSantis (Florida).

But that doesn’t mean Europe’s centrists will now crack the celebratory Chouchenn. Trump is still Trump, and a US president is still the president. Just this week, his team has still been pushing Europe to tip more cash into PURL (footing the bill for US arms provided for Ukraine’s self-defence), while warning pharma might be next.

So while this president might be bloodied at the ballot box, the white-knuckle ride of US foreign policy continues.

Sound even smarter:

• President Zelensky has described Monday’s Russian strike on a shelter and aid distribution centre in south-eastern Ukraine as “one of the deadliest attacks of this war”, leaving more than 40 dead and 30 missing.