Tuesday, Oct. 29, students and Williamsburg community members gathered to discuss the future of United States foreign policy under the next presidential administration.
Hosted by Dr. Kiron Skinner and Dr. Francis J Gavin at the Global Research Institute, the discussion aimed to provide a glimpse into what a Harris or Trump administration’s foreign policy objectives would look like.
Skinner served as director of policy planning at the state department during the Trump administration. She also authored the “Department of State” chapter of The Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, also known as Project 2025. She currently works as the Taube Family Chair of International Relations and Politics at Pepperdine University.
Gavin is the director of Johns Hopkins’ Center for Global Affairs. He’s also the Co-Founder of the Carnegie International Policy Scholars Consortium and Network and the author of multiple books regarding nuclear and economic foreign policy.
Professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University Jessica Trisko Darden moderated the discussion.
The discussion started with a question on which candidate represents change versus continuity in their respective foreign policy agendas. Skinner answered first with regards to former President Trump’s agenda.
“Having served in the [Trump] administration, having been on prior Trump campaigns and transition efforts, I think he wants to come back to finish the job,” Skinner said. “And much of what he started, the Biden administration has not jettisoned, such as tariffs on China. Some things like international agreements that he withdrew from, like the Paris Climate Accord and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, we saw the Biden administration going in a different direction. But, the core of U.S. foreign policy in some areas remains the same.”
She added that Trump will likely promote policies such as increased tariffs, nuanced China strategy, arms control and burden-sharing of NATO partners.
“NATO contributions increased by hundreds of billions under Trump,” Skinner said. “So I think there will be a kind of consistency that’s connected to what he’s already started. I don’t think there will be lots of surprises because he has a tendency to tell you what he’s going to do.”
Gavin answered next, mentioning that, despite the polarization of American politics, differences between administrations are rare.
“It turns out that it’s very, very hard to bring about profound change,” Gavin said. “True discontinuity is far rarer than you would think.”
Gavin remarked that an administration’s most pressing foreign policy issues are often unforeseeable. He cited the war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic as examples of events that unexpectedly shaped the Biden and Trump administrations. Gavin believes that unpredictable issues will once again rise to the surface and become focal points for the next administration.
“The Biden administration was not anticipating that Russia would invade Ukraine, yet it has come to shape the Biden administration’s grand strategy,” Gavin said. “The Trump administration did not expect that a global pandemic would be the most important event on their watch. The George W. Bush administration did not anticipate the 9/11 attacks.”
The discussion briefly touched upon the relationship between a president’s foreign policy objectives and the United States’ agreements with other nations.
Skinner was the only one to answer, highlighting the problems with executive orders and how they create a foreign policy that easily alters between administrations, making it harder for allies to predict changes in the United States’ position.
“That’s the one area where I wish that we could find better common ground, because it does have second or third order effects for other things that we want our allies and partners to do,” Skinner said. “And, it often leaves them holding the bag.”
The discussion pivoted to whether either administration would be up to the challenge of addressing contemporary international crises.
Gavin argued the country’s global system was created to solve fundamental threats like the Malthusian Curse, but that the system now struggles with new issues like climate change, pandemics and heightened migration. He expressed the US’ geopolitical frameworks are not equipped to deal with twentieth-first-century challenges, despite being successful in the past.
“We’ve done enormously impressive things, but in the process we have a whole series of new challenges, which are planetary challenges,” Gavin said. “We lack not only the institutional framework to deal with this, but even the conceptual, intellectual.”
Skinner continued this line of thought, sharing her belief that shifting the country’s geopolitical system would require an intense bureaucratic overhaul, which she believes is nearly impossible.
“A lot of what you’re talking about is connected to a massive reorganization of the foreign government, which I don’t think will happen because there are constituencies that are so connected to the Cold War organization of those bureaus that it will be hard,” Skinner said.
Skinner emphasized the importance of “geo” in geopolitics, arguing that America’s core problem is being too oriented on its own worldview rather than viewing issues from the perspectives of other countries.
“We don’t understand the ‘geo’ part of geopolitics,” Skinner said. “And, even our bureaus throughout our government are organized by how we see the rest of the world, not how people see themselves. So, we group the world by the way we think it should be grouped.”
The discussion then moved to the role of third-party candidates in shaping foreign policy.
Gavin highlighted that, while a two-party system can be frustrating, multi-party systems have their own sets of issues for effective policy-making, as seen in France and Great Britain.
“While you’re going through an election, this two-party system seems really frustrating, especially to young people,” Gavin said. “It seems like nothing gets done and these issues are ignored, everyone is unpleasant. But in fact, there’s a certain genius to it.”
Skinner focused more on the dynamism of the two-party system. She offered the current Republican party as an example, stating that Trump’s victory would concretely shift the GOP away from Bush-era politics.
“The Republican party is in a civil war with itself,” Skinner said. “It’s not a shooting war, but it is a civil war. And the American First movement, I think if Trump wins, gets solidified as the direction of the party. That’s a huge moment for the Bush, Romney and Paul Ryan era that has been receding for a long time. It’s hard for many in those camps to accept.”
Darden then opened the floor to audience questions.
Sophie Adams-Smith ’25 asked about Skinner’s work on Project 2025, and specifically how foreign policy with the European Union will be affected.
“I think there would be some tension with the EU in the Trump Administration, but there already was,” Skinner said. “But then they still worked together. The EU is one of the largest economies in the world. I think a Trump approach would be, ‘you should work on human rights, but you should also pay more for the Ukraine war.’”
Skinner then discussed the importance of politically-appointed ambassadors overseas, stressing her opinion that the president should be able to choose the members of the foreign service.
“I do think there should be a larger number of political appointee ambassadors in key roles,” Skinner said. “Because for whatever reason, we’re in a period where many career officials feel that this is their way or the highway. They’re not elected to anything. And we’re just in a difficult time where the federal bureaucracy is largely against Republicans, definitely against conservative Republicans and will resist when in fact that’s not what should happen.”
Gavin agreed with Skinner’s statement, describing what he sees as a “Senate approval crisis” that affects both major parties while in control of the White House.
“I completely agree with your answers about the crisis in terms of senate approval,” Gavin said. “It’s shameful on both sides, and it’s terrible and counterproductive. And I think you’re right, if you win an election, you should have deference.”
After the discussion, Adams-Smith shared her disagreement with the panelists’ view on politicizing the foreign service. She felt that Project 2025’s plan to replace current ambassadors with conservative sympathizers would create instability.
“What research shows, and one of the things that makes our government strong, is that we have civil servants who are non-partisan and who serve the Constitution rather than a president,” Adams-Smith said. “They work for the administration that is in power, but they also work for the Constitution and for the American people and provide expertise between administrations. And so I think that leaving our foreign service leaderless for an indeterminate amount of time would be dangerous for national security.”
Adams-Smith expressed her disappointment that the talk seemed to address Trump’s foreign policy objectives more than those of Harris, wishing the panelists had given a more balanced assessment.
“Given that it was pitched as a discussion about the future of American foreign policy, it was a very one-sided and kind of misleading idea of how the future could look,” Adams-Smith said. “We got almost a stump speech for Trump on what foreign policy would look like and why it would be better than Harris’ policy. And we didn’t get any pushback on why Harris’ policies might be better, and on the flaws in Trump’s policy. I think if the Global Research Institute were to provide an alternative perspective, that would have been better.”
