Dispatch from Dubai: After the midterms, allies see both US resilience and unreliability

DUBAI—The US midterm elections, in the view of one Emirati official, demonstrated American democracy’s remarkable ability to self-correct in response to voter concerns, which many observers around the world had begun to doubt. What concerned this official, whose job it is to understand Washington, was the frequency of that self-correction, given the dramatic foreign policy swings between administrations. He and others I spoke with in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia in recent days argued that US unpredictability had grown greater during the second term of President Donald Trump than at any time in the last eighty years: greater questioning of alliances, punishing tariffs on friends and foes alike, and a more transactional approach to policymaking. This refrain came in response to the most closely watched non-presidential elections of my lifetime, which won page-one coverage across the world. Allies are mightily impressed (and not a little relieved) by US democratic resilience, and they are stunned by the scale of the Trump setback. But that doesn’t make them worry any less about America’s strategic reliability. That’s because the most important question for allies and partners isn’t who wins US elections. It’s whether US commitments, ranging from security to trade, transcend all outcomes. That includes NATO’s Article 5 commitments to defend European allies in the face of Russia’s growing threats and US determination to stop Iran’s extremist regime from developing nuclear weaponry and threatening its Gulf neighbors. It is also, more broadly, whether the US will galvanize global friends to counter the autocratic combination of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. What allies are still asking is how to build economic and security relationships that can withstand US political pendulum swings. A new era of volatility As Stripe CEO Patrick Collison argued on X: “It seems to me that democracy has on the whole worked very well in America over the past decade, and perhaps better than in any other major country in the West. National outcomes have repeatedly been responsive to underlying voter preferences on meaningful questions, and significant changes in policy have ensued. I’ve been reading [Alexis de Tocqueville’s] Democracy in America this past week, and it’s striking how much it still rhymes nearly two centuries later.” An Emirati friend who showed me this post interpreted Collison this way: democracy had worked when voters elected Trump twice, expressing their displeasure with a great many things that they believed needed correction. That included borders that were too open to illegal immigrants, an excessive “woke” culture of political correctness that threatened their values, the unrelenting loss of jobs and manufacturing to globalization, and too much defense spending for European allies who were rich enough to take care of themselves. Then this past week, American voters again corrected course, this time against an administration and president they felt had grown too self-serving financially, had overstepped immigration enforcement with illegal brutality, had focused too little on their affordability concerns, and was caught in a costly war that was insufficiently explained and unsuccessfully fought. Last week’s elections have offered reassurance to Americans and non-Americans alike about the durability of American institutions, but they’ve done little to restore confidence in American predictability on which security and economic relations are based. While US allies are wary of Trump—and I heard often last week from those increasingly alarmed by the coarseness and callousness in Trump’s communication style at home and abroad—they are not nostalgic for a particular president, party, or Cold War foreign policy. What they miss is a period when, despite fierce domestic political disagreements, they could count on a relatively stable American strategic commitment across administrations. And they are struggling to digest the notion that American foreign policy volatility might need to become a defining feature of their own security and economic calculations. The optimistic judgment is that the American political system still works. Voters can register discontent effectively, institutions can impose checks, and political power can change hands without the system seizing up or breaking down. The pessimistic judgment is that the American system has become so politically volatile that allies can no longer assume today’s commitments will survive tomorrow’s vote. In the Middle East, I heard the United States compared more than once to China; no one preferred a closer strategic relationship with Beijing, but many pointed to that country’s greater predictability. The stakes for Europe, the Middle East, and Asia As I traveled from Europe to the Middle East and then in recent days to China, it was clear to me that though all US partners share concerns regarding American predictability, the nature and intensity of their interests differ depending on the context. All three regions will face tests in the coming weeks. First, the questions for Europe and Ukraine are existential. Watch the trilateral talks among negotiators from the US, Russia, and Ukraine in Abu Dhabi this week as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war heads into its fifth winter. Ahead of the first such talks since February, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that he expects the midterm outcome to result in greater US military and economic support, given that both Republican and Democratic majorities support Ukraine and oppose Putin. That said, a Trump administration adviser told me the president, in his search for a historic legacy, will look to this war first, as he believes that he has the weapons and intelligence leverage with Ukraine and the economic incentives for Putin to get a deal that will cost Ukraine territory but satisfy both sides. But for this plan to actually work, the Trump administration must use leverage in a systematic way against Russia; economic gifts will not do the trick. If Ukraine, Europe, and their friends in Congress stand against any deal that betrays Kyiv, the midterm elections could bend the war in Kyiv’s favor. Second, watch Iran and Israel closely. The Middle East has become both a geopolitical and a domestic political test for any potential 2028 presidential candidate. It was a senior Middle East official who first shared with me Vice President JD Vance’s surprising statement on X following election day, along with Donald J. Trump Jr.’s supportive repost featuring three red “100” emojis. Wrote Vance: “The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night. If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest.” Analysts here raised the Vance post in almost every conversation, viewing it as something aimed less at establishing facts than in stating his intent to run for president in 2028 by distancing himself from Trump’s war. Even more astonishing here, Vance was distancing himself from support for Israel, which he listed as one of the four major reasons for the electoral loss. A consensus began to emerge among Middle East experts late last week that, given the midterm result, Iranian leaders would grow even more intransigent with the Trump administration against negotiating restrictions on their future nuclear development and that Trump would be even more determined to block Tehran from gaining a nuclear weapon. Once Trump concludes the Iranians won’t give up what he wants, he won’t escalate the war generally, but he is likely to launch a one-off set of strikes on strategic targets, most importantly by dropping some of the United States’ heaviest weaponry on Pickaxe Mountain. The mountain in Isfahan Province, roughly 140 miles south of Tehran, contains an underground site that is naturally fortified with dense granite. Iran has said the site was for producing and assembling advanced centrifuges, but intelligence analysts believe it has also been used for secure storage of enriched uranium or for covert uranium enrichment. If Trump strikes those targets hard once more, and given Iran’s refusal to join nuclear negotiations, the president could decide that the enemy has been sufficiently set back to declare success. Regarding Asia, Chinese President Xi Jinping and his negotiating team will be making calculations about how the midterms should influence his two scheduled meetings with Trump this year, one on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Shenzhen on November 18-19, and the second at the Group of Twenty (G20) Summit in Miami on December 14-15. Expect Xi to try to extract whatever he can from a weakened Trump, including extensions on their ongoing trade truce and on the pause in the US delivering Taiwan weapons. Conversely, Trump, keen not to appear weak, will press for Beijing to provide better access to critical minerals. The wild card will be whether Trump accepts efforts by Xi and Putin to lock him into a mini-summit with them on Ukraine—but excluding Europe and Kyiv. For Xi, who is on track to win a historic fourth term as Chinese leader next June, the goal will be to sail calm waters and make no waves. Echoes of Truman There have been moments in American history when a major midterm electoral setback to a sitting president, leaving both houses of Congress in the hands of the opposing party, would not have been an impediment to common cause in achieving historic outcomes. The Atlantic Council’s Brett McGurk reminded me that in November 1946, President Harry Truman’s Democratic Party suffered a crushing midterm defeat, with Republicans capturing both houses of Congress for the first time since the 1928 election. Republicans gained fifty-five seats in the House and twelve in the Senate, giving Republicans a 246-188 majority in the House and a 51-45 majority in the Senate. Truman’s approval rating sat at 35 percent, roughly in Trump-level doldrums, shortly after the election. Yet what followed was one of the most consequential periods of American foreign policy of the twentieth century, supported by Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican senator who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In March 1947, Truman announced what became known as the Truman Doctrine, committing the United States to supporting Greece and Turkey against communist pressure. That June, Secretary of State George Marshall unveiled a program for European economic reconstruction, and the Marshall Plan secured congressional approval in 1948. When Soviet leader Joseph Stalin imposed the Berlin blockade in June of that year, Truman organized the airlift that sustained West Berlin and broke the blockade. And in April 1949, the United States signed the North Atlantic Treaty, establishing NATO and committing itself to the collective defense of Western Europe. Truman benefited then from a growing bipartisan consensus about the international responsibilities the United States had to bear after the war in the face of rising Soviet communism. Republican leaders like Vandenberg were prepared to cooperate with Truman, even while opposing him fiercely on domestic matters. The conventional wisdom is that the return of that postwar brand of values-driven, bipartisan international leadership—which guided most of the eighty years thereafter, though not without difficulties—can’t be repeated. Our times are too divisive, Trump is too controversial, and incoming Democratic leaders are bent on calling hearings to investigate the behavior of the president and those around him. That said, Delaware Democratic Senator Chris Coons, likely the next chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, has the potential to become a modern-day Vandenberg. And many of the most significant Republicans in the Senate share his view regarding the seriousness of the United States’ current geopolitical challenges and the urgency of common cause. So color me optimistic, though perhaps not over the short term. I would wager that Americans will want serious presidential candidates in 2028 who will propose serious solutions to serious challenges. It may take a few years, but what the midterms began last week could result not just in America’s democratic resilience but also in a return to the strategic reliability demanded by our times.