Up close and personnel: What Donald Trump’s administrative picks mean for US foreign policy and Europe

On 20 January 2025, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 47^th president of the United States. In Europe, uncertainty looms regarding Trump’s future approach to foreign policy and whether he might act on radical pledges regarding European security; minimise America’s role in NATO; withdraw US troops from Europe; or force Ukraine into a peace deal which includes territorial concessions to Russia and military neutrality for Ukraine.

In European capitals, all eyes are on the incoming appointments for Trump’s foreign and security policy cabinet positions. The expectation is that – if the maxim “personnel is policy” holds true – then Trump’s appointments to key cabinet positions (including the Department of State, the National Security Council, and the Pentagon) may help Europeans decipher the direction of his second foreign-policy agenda.

And Trump’s second-term cabinet is likely to be more aligned with his instincts regarding European security and America’s commitment to its European allies. Identifying the Republican party’s three foreign-policy tribes (primacists, prioritisers, and restrainers) is therefore vital to interpreting his first cabinet picks; and how they may cooperate or clash in the battle for Trump’s mind.

Primacists comprise the majority of the traditional Republican foreign policy elite in Congress and support continued US global leadership. They see America’s leadership in NATO and the country’s continued support for Ukraine as being in America’s strategic interest. Prioritisers and restrainers, by contrast, argue that US support for Ukraine is depleting America’s military capacity in a region which is not in America’s key strategic interest, and urge for the prioritisation of financial and military resources to the Indo-Pacific to deal with the threat from China. Restrainers especially want the US to focus on problems at home – starting with securing the country’s southern border with Mexico – and to show restraint in its deployment of military force abroad.

Prioritisers and restrainers want Europe to take full responsibility for its own security and for Ukraine’s, allowing the US to focus on China and domestic issues

Ultimately, both restrainers and prioritisers want Europe to take full responsibility for its own security and for Ukraine’s, allowing the US to focus on China and domestic issues.

Trump’s own view is that, during his first term, a primacist-dominated cabinet sabotaged his foreign policy agenda in conjunction with the ‘deep state’. He labelled many of his first-term advisors “globalists and warmongers” and pledged to exclude them from his second administration – confirmed via Trump’s announcement that he will not invite Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley, two prominent primacists from his first administration, to return to his second cabinet. His son, Donald Trump Jr., is a key member of Trump’s transition team: he reposted on X that the “‘stop Pompeo’ movement is great but it’s not enough” and pledged to entirely root out “neocons and war hawks” from the next administrative line-up.  

But the announcement that Trump has picked Florida congressman Michael Waltz and senator Marco Rubio as national security advisor and secretary of state respectively indicates that Trump’s second-term cabinet is prepared to accept some primacists – albeit with certain adjustments.

Waltz and Rubio are both former primacists turned prioritisers, and prominent ‘China hawks’ in Congress. Previously an advisor in the George W. Bush administration, Waltz is highly critical of US aid spending in Ukraine, arguing that it should end the ‘blank check’ policy and hand over responsibility for Ukraine’s defence to wealthy European nations – in particular France, Germany, and the UK. Waltz has also spoken out against Ukraine’s bid for NATO membership. Similarly,  Rubio has become increasingly critical of US support for Ukraine. He sees America’s greatest task as “forcing the outdated foreign policy blob… to reprioritise and focus on America’s most pressing threat: the Chinese Communist Party. And that will require tradeoffs and burden-sharing…”.

In other words, both Waltz and Rubio have shed their previous primacist beliefs. They want to end Russia’s war in Ukraine as soon as possible, hand over responsibility for Ukraine to Europe, and shift US focus to developments in the Indo-Pacific.

And the same is true for the appointment of Elise Stefanik, who Trump has appointed as his next UN ambassador. During the 2016 to 2020 term, she displayed primacist tendencies by disagreeing with Trump’s position on NATO and opposing the administration’s effort to broker an agreement with Taliban. However, Stefanik is proving herself an ardent Trump loyalist, throwing her support behind him during the Ukraine impeachment hearings in 2019 and after the Capitol insurrection on 6 January 2021. This, along with her outspoken support for Israel, has secured her a spot at the top table: given Trump’s general disdain for the UN and other international institutions, Stefanik’s role is likely to be similar to that of Haley during Trump’s first term. This mostly focused on advocacy for Israel and defence of the Trump administration’s withdrawal from international agreements and institutions.

For now, it seems that prioritisers and restrainers will be steering the ship on Ukraine. This seems, chiefly, to involve opposing Ukraine’s NATO membership while heightening the expectation that Europeans should take collective responsibility for providing security guarantees to Ukraine – and support a Trump-brokered deal between Russian president Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

But how Trump’s administration will approach foreign policy with regard to the Middle East is less clear cut. Unlike their views on Europe, Waltz and Rubio retain strong primacist instincts on the Middle East, especially with regard to the Israel-Iran issue. On the issue of US-supported Israeli military strikes on Iran, their views could potentially conflict with those of true prioritisers like incoming vice president, JD Vance. The latter has pledged he would not support authorising military strikes on the Iranian mainland and is keen to prevent any escalation in the region which may see a heightening of US involvement.

Finally, an important dynamic will emerge between key cabinet members and the ‘corporatist’ tribe around Trump. Influential individuals such as Elon Musk, Richard Grenell, and Jared Kushner do not fall officially into any of the foreign-policy tribes. But their strong business interests in other global regions – Musk in China and Kushner in the Middle East and Arab Gulf states – mean they may not necessarily be aligned with the ideas promoted by Trump’s prioritiser members of the cabinet. There is a possibility of conflict between Musk’s business interests in China and the highly hawkish approach by prioritisers such as Waltz, Vance, or the potential next US trade representative, Robert Lighthizer. Kushner’s designs for peace in the Middle East also may not align with the prioritiser or restrainer tribes, which seek to retrench from the region and avoid escalation with Iran at all costs. In contrast, however, the second-order foreign policy issues – on which prioritisers and restrainers have no opinion – will be entirely run by those, such as Grenell, who are both in charge and do have a strong opinion. Here, a prime example is the Western Balkans.

There is also the possibility of the Trump wild card: he is erratic and unpredictable, and has already swung between the different foreign-policy tribes during his first term of office. But in the end, Trump’s lack of foreign policy coherence means his foreign policy advisors also have ample space through which to develop and determine America’s outreach. While the results will likely be messy and inconsistent, it is crucial that the governments of European countries brace themselves to deal with the foreign policy of a second Trump term. It will not come close to anything like his first.