Susan Glasser is editor of Politico.

American intelligence officials are used to forecasting how foreign elections will affect the United States. But whatever would foreign prognosticators make of Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and the world of November 9 and beyond?

We asked some of the smartest spies and analysts we know to turn the tables and imagine they were the National Intelligence Council dissecting the 2016 election as if the United States were a foreign country. What are the global scenarios or surprising international incidents a President Clinton could face—or precipitate? How would America’s role in the world be different from what we’ve seen under President Obama? And what happens if Donald Trump pulls off a win?


On October 25, these four global intelligence specialists—including former NIC and CIA officials—gathered for a forecasting exercise moderated by Politico editor Susan Glasser. While Trump was talking about a “rigged” election and Clinton was making a push into red states, the group cast their eyes toward serious international challenges that have largely been ignored on the campaign trail: from the North Korean nuclear threat to the future of Europe post-Brexit, Vladimir Putin’s designs on the Middle East to the collapse of Venezuela—and more. Here’s the conversation they had, condensed and lightly edited.

***

Susan Glasser: It seems like people are already turning their attention, in many ways, to November 9 and beyond. But everybody feels intuitively that this election is not just going to go away. The world is obsessed with this election. I’m sure all of you have your own examples of every single non-American person that you’ve talked you, right?

John McLaughlin, practitioner in residence at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, former deputy director for intelligence at the CIA, and former vice chairman for estimates at the National Intelligence Council: I just came back from Russia, Ukraine and Latvia. And prior to that I’ve been in Norway and England and France. Everyone is completely riveted on this, and thinking we’re insane, except maybe the Russians. They’d be amused by it all in a way.

Glasser: So let’s start with that effect. What does it mean that a lot of the world now has a different view of the American electoral process?

McLaughlin: One way to think about it is, when the world’s looked at the United States for the last 16 years, they’ve seen rather unusual politics. President George W. Bush, those eight years, were so heavily influenced by 9/11, which is a historically unique event. That administration was unusual in that the whole thing was affected by 9/11. The whole preemptive approach, the whole focus on security. Then the next eight years under Obama was, if you’re looking at it from outside, another kind of unusual period in that here you have a president whose theme seems to be “I’m not George Bush.” We’re not withdrawing our leadership, but we’re stepping back a bit, hesitant to get involved, maybe overlearning the lessons of Iraq. And I’m guessing, if you’re another country now, you’re wondering, “Are they going to get back to normal, back to a sort of centrist posture we’ve known typically from the United States through most of the Cold War years?” Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush and so forth, on back, Ronald Reagan. The rest of the world is wondering whether Hillary is going to take this back toward a kind of centrist posture or not.

Fairly or not—and I think it’s a little unfair—there’s this sense that we have stepped back from leadership, that we are not interested, at least, in leading the way that we used to lead. And therefore, they’ll be looking to see, are we going to take more of a leadership role? Are we going to be more out front that we have been in the last several years?

Christopher Kojm, professor of international affairs at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and former chair of the National Intelligence Council: From the standpoint of an international observer, looking at the United States, I would look it much as we look at European governments in Southern Europe or Eastern Europe, where there are the rise of right-wing and left-wing forces that really endanger centrist politics, and that are nationalist and protectionist and inward looking, and are fed by cultural fear and anger—what played out in the Brexit vote about immigration.

And I guess the added dimension, as an analyst looking at the United States, is that for better or worse, the United States has been viewed as a force of great institutional stability and predictability and credibility over time. Even if the election goes in Secretary Clinton’s favor and she wins, those questions don’t go away, about the nature of the ability of the United States to deliver on what has been its historic role from 1945 to the present.

Mathew Burrows, director of the Strategic Foresight Initiative at the Atlantic Council and former director of the analysis and production staff at the National Intelligence Council, where he was the principal author of NIC’s Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds: I was down in Brazil several weeks ago, and there was a certain level of shock. You know, how could this happen? But also a certain level of schadenfreude that here, you’re just as populist as we used to be—a sense of this superpower with its feet of clay. In terms of popular attitude, it may be one of those turning points.

Glasser: Popular attitudes outside the U.S. about the United States?

Burrows: Yes, about the U.S.—about our competence.

Reva Goujon, vice president of global analysis at Stratfor: It’s tempting to look at elections in terms of personalities, because it’s all about the personality in the election, and rarely about the substantive issues. But if we really want to understand what’s going to happen, there’s this discipline that’s required to look at what are those structural forces that are going to constrain the personality at the end of the day? I mean, Obama came in thinking he could vastly reduce the scale of the U.S. military commitments in the Islamic world. And there’s obviously a huge gap between intent and capability. Bush probably thought he was going to be very focused on China, then 9/11 happens, right? So things can shape your environment. It doesn’t really go the other way around, where the leader can shape the environment.

So when we look at the two models of what these candidates represent, I think there is a layer there that actually does matter when we talk about the human agency level, where Clinton really represents that post-World War model of global trade linkages, alliances. This is the way to manage the international system. And Trump has really emphasized this idea of self-reliance. You know, it’s, “If the U.S. looks after its interests and Mexico looks after theirs, South Korea can look after theirs. Let’s not worry about the immediate consequences of what that means. Just everybody has the right to look at their national interest first.” Of course, there are huge second-order and third-order effects when we’re talking about the primacy of the United States, and the U.S. being the one that underpins so many of those strategic arrangements. And everyone has to basically go back to the drawing board of: What does self-reliance actually mean in increasingly volatile geopolitical neighborhoods?

***

Glasser: If this is a turning point, one of the interesting questions is: Can Hillary Clinton revert to the status quo easily? If she’s elected, is it possible for her to wade back into the sort of liberal internationalist foreign policy we imagine or intuit is more of her natural inclination? And then related to that, but it’s a slightly separate question I want to ask each of you: Will the election undermine, in some longer-term way, views of American democracy internationally? Or will people be able to see this as a one-off, crazy interlude in American politics?

McLaughlin: We don’t know. We actually don’t know. What I’ve been telling people from other lands, perhaps optimistically is, “Trust our country. We have a lot of self-correcting mechanisms. We have a checks and balances system that prevents us from doing anything truly foolish. As foolish as we may look right now, we’ll find a way to get this fixed.” But I’m not confident that’s right. I’m not confident of that.

One thought related to the question of whether Hillary Clinton can revert to the status quo is that it’s not the world it was when that was the métier of American foreign policy. It’s not that world anymore. And I think the main thing that you have to factor into all of this is, for lack of a better term, globalization. But another way to put it is simply the interconnectedness of everything. From everything on social media to multinational patterns. If you look at the iPhone and just imagine how many places on the face of the Earth are involved in putting that together, it’s astonishing. As someone said to me the other day, “We don’t know whether that’s an import or an export.” That’s a new factor.

And what I think it does—I’m trying to reflect on Syria a lot on this. What I think it does and will do, for any new administration, is it makes decision-making harder. Because it’s very hard to find, in the options, a clear-cut choice that takes you where you want to go without major downsides. It will be a challenge for Clinton or whoever because of that—because of the way everything you do, push here, sometime pops up over here, and it may not be what you want.

Goujon: Can Clinton actually carry through with that legacy, if you will? With trade, no. We’ve already seen—if Wallonia can basically beat down an E.U.-Canada deal, and we have this resurrection of the nation-state in trade agreements, overall, this idea of having global spanning, streamlined trade agreements, that’s politically not as feasible as it used to be. So we are going to see those ambitions tempered significantly, just because of the political reality.

And when we talk about the evolution in trade, we’ve been living in this hyper-globalized world, where an iPhone consists of parts coming from a dozen different countries, and very long supply chains from the consumer, to the assembler, and the processor, and everything else. But that’s what’s changing. And that’s exactly why we’re heading into this huge crunch, because when you have a huge economic engine like China, who was importing all of those components before, to assemble them and then ship them back out to the consumer—China’s economy is evolving to where they’re producing those components increasingly now themselves. That means shorter supply chains, more regionalized; actually selling to the Chinese consumer. And that has shaved off global trade growth. We can bang our heads against the wall in trying to figure out how do we stimulate growth, and our monetary policy is exhausted at this point, in the developed world. But that’s one of the biggest global economic dynamics that any candidate is facing, not just in the United States but particularly across the developed world, where that secular stagnation, as a function of the technological advances and China’s economic development, its own evolution. This is a crunch that is not going to be passed in the next four years or eight years. We’re living in this low-growth environment for a while.

McLaughlin: And a revolutionary environment. Let me give you an example from the paper that Chris and Mat—the great paper that you guys put together for 2030. Correct me if I have this wrong, but rapid population growth: So by 2050, the world will have 8.3 billion people. And I’ve read elsewhere that less than 3 percent of that growth will come in the developed world. So what you’re looking at is a huge growth in population in countries that are not prepared to deal with the consequences of it. And so the pressures on both internal stability—this would be particularly in Africa, parts of the Middle East, the Sahel and so forth—the pressures on internal stability will be great. And the pressures on migration across boundaries will only grow. That’s one thing. So there are revolutionary changes underway that will be very hard for any new administration to create an atmosphere that resembles late 20th-century normalcy.

Glasser: The first Clinton era.

Burrows: I think of Asia—it’s going to be more difficult, because Hillary Clinton has dug a hole for herself with changing her position on TPP. So it’s going to be a test whether she can find a way of reversing her position. If she renegotiates it, that’s an even more difficult task, both getting Congress back to give her that ability to do that, and then eventually to pass it.

So that’s one area. The other I would worry about is that because she does, I think, want to reverse course on what we’re seeing is the lack of activism in the Middle East, that she may talk herself into something that will have some bad consequences. You know, there aren’t—as John was just saying—there aren’t really any good solutions. U.S. presidents, when they come into office, particularly in the first term, you want to demonstrate that leadership. I think there’s probably, in this case, even more of a wish to demonstrate that the U.S. is back.

McLaughlin: If you had to pick out four or five problems that truly have enormous splash potential—I have four or five I would suggest, but just pick one of those that is different than what we faced in the past, it would be energy. I mean, with the United States heading towards self-sufficiency in oil and other forms of energy, over the next decade or two, I think that’s almost irreversible now. Certainly, in North America and probably the United States, there’s a disruption, a restructuring of the oil market, that not even the major oil companies quite get yet. It reminds me a lot, from the intelligence world, of when you’re sitting around, and you realize there’s mindset working here. You know, trying to get people to think outside the box, and they’re stuck.

Glasser: “Mindset working.” I like that phrase.

McLaughlin: So we don’t know how that’s going to work out, but there are these countries, particularly in the Gulf, whose very culture is dependent on others needing their oil. Their income, their cultures, their whole way of life. That’s something that’s loose in the world, maybe not for the next four years, but that changes a lot of the calculations, I think, if you look long term, about power in the world.

Kojm: Let me come back to some of the points here with a bit of a counter point, endeavoring to be more optimistic, at least for sake of argument. And that is that, should Secretary Clinton win, she more than anyone is well apprised of the complexity of how you move issues in the new international order, that it’s a collection of countries that are in part alliances, partners, friends, others. So I think, given her experience, she’s well-positioned to do this.

And I’m not as pessimistic on trade as Mat expressed. I acknowledge the problem. It is a credibility test with Asian partners. But you know, campaigns are one thing, and governing is another. It would not be an easy political pirouette. But it’s happened before. You know, Bill Clinton ran against NAFTA, and then embraced it. And so, it can be done.

McLaughlin: One way to think of this is, in a way, the United States, still the most powerful country in the world, has an opportunity here to do what the United States did after World War II—that is to restructure a lot of things in the world, to lead people to a different understanding of how things work. Because the only peer competitor we have, potentially, is China. Maybe India as well. But not Russia. Russia is a different kettle of fish. But even in the case of China, the United States still has enormous advantages ranging from demographic (China’s population is aging dramatically, ours is not to that degree); a culture of innovation that is unmatched in the world; a culture that is still emulated around the world. (I mean, 70 percent of box office receipts for American movies are overseas); and a desire, on the part of many in the world, for U.S. leadership, even when they complain about it. So I think the United States still has all of these advantages. And there’s an opportunity here for a sophisticated president to take all of this into consideration and really restore momentum to American leadership in the world.

***

Glasser: Can we get a little granular for a second? Let’s say Clinton’s elected, then it’s November 9—how specific can we get, laying out some things that we think will definitely happen, that have either been frozen or waiting for an outcome here? What are some of the pieces that feel like they’re, if not definitely known, at least knowable or highly likely? Things you think will move in the world as a result of this.

McLaughlin: She’ll face what no predecessor has ever faced with the same urgency: almost certainly, the North Korean capability to get an ICBM to the United States with a nuclear warhead. I’ve been following that since the mid-’90s and know enough about it to say they’re really getting close now. That’s one that’s sure to happen.

Burrows: You have Angela Merkel coming up for reelection in Germany in 2017. You have the French presidential election. And you also have—they’ll be well on their way with the Brexit negotiations. So, you know, Europe’s future is very much something that Clinton will have to deal with.

McLaughlin: And maybe in ways, again, that no American president has ever had to deal with.

Burrows: Unless you go back to Truman or something.

McLaughlin: But all previous American presidents since had the comfort of a Europe that pretty predictable and, more or less, united.

Kojm: Right. And a security producer rather than consumer.

Glasser: And yet, the candidates have really not talked Europe at all.

Goujon: Well, because what can the U.S. actually do? I mean, we can say, “Hey, we need you all to get along,” but the politics are taking a life of their own in Europe. And when you’ve got elections, in the two pillars of the European Union, Germany and France, where, even if you have Merkel reelected, you still have a very strong euro-skeptic and nationalist current that’s being fed by a number of forces that are not going away. And so, that fragmentation trend is continuing regardless.

What’s really interesting, in terms of a challenge for Clinton, going into this next year, is just look at the past year of Russian strategy in the Middle East and how President Vladimir Putin has been trying so hard to basically get Washington to the negotiating table, and to talk about the bigger strategic issues that Russia cares about: Where is going to be that dividing line when it comes to NATO’s push in the former Soviet sphere? What about sanctions? And the Middle East was this opportunity, a playground of sorts to really poke the U.S. where it was being consumed most.

McLaughlin: Where he sensed a vacuum.

Goujon: Absolutely.

So what does Russia do when it’s basically in a corner now? It’s not getting the strategic concessions it wants, even with a divided Europe. It can’t get the sanctions easing that it’s aiming for. And they’re getting very frustrated with that. You can continue to poke and prod in the Middle East. You can get more involved in the Far East, where I agree, I think North Korea is going to be pulling the U.S.’s attention away from the Middle East, when that is still all-consuming. That Russian problem is not going away. That’s a standoff that I think is definitely going to endure, at the same time that you’ve got some very big developing issues, both in the Mideast theater and the Far East.

McLaughlin: The analysis you laid out, I think, feels right, based on what we heard on my recent trip there, because I think if I had one single major impression, it’s that Putin’s primary aim, apart from extending Russia’s influence in the world and reestablishing it as a great power, is to maintain power at home. And his economy does not let him do that. And so he needs us to be either an adversary, because it is pointing to us as the source of all evil that allows him to unify the Russian population, which for whatever deep-seeded cultural-historical reason, tends to buy that. Or he needs us to give him respect of some sort. What he wants is respect or a fight.

Glasser: For the last two decades—really, since the end of the Cold War—each new American administration has come in and had some version of a reset in relations with Russia actually. Is there anyone who thinks that there’s any reset possible now with Putin? It seems that Clinton is likely to go the other direction, given the extraordinary confluence between Trump’s campaign and Russia.

McLaughlin: It’s hard to see a reset, but it’s probably necessary—without using that word. In other words, I was also skeptical about whether the term “new Cold War” is a good one, but I think it actually is. There’s a war hysteria underway in Moscow now. People are practicing with their hazmat suits. You don’t see that when you’re driving around, but—

Glasser: A war hysteria that we are going to go to war against them?

McLaughlin: Yes. And now, what’s not clear is whether that’s just for the entertainment of the population, and for unifying people around that idea when their economic lives are not improving as rapidly as they did in the early Putin era.

Burrows: Well, Putin openly says that he feels the West is at war with Russia. He actually is pretty frank, and as far as I can see, going back a decade or more, he’s giving us ample warning about how he sees the situation.

Kojm: I agree with John. I guess what I’m going to add is, you know, a reset is easily doable, and it’s kind of implied by things that Trump has said and done, which is you accept Crimea, accept the status quo, events in the Ukraine and afford Russia respect, and you can reset relations. But that’s not the basis on which the United States can—

McLaughlin: Probably not politically feasible to do it in those terms.

Glasser: Given that Trump has—sort of—articulated that version of it, does that make those options impossible and toxic? In fact, that’s my other question to the group: OK, Trump maybe hasn’t had fully formed views about the world. But he’s laid out certain things, or magnified versions of things that even Obama and others have believed, whether it comes to questioning NATO and how viable and long term that alliance is, or outlining a different way forward with Russia. Are those things now off the table because Trump said them?

Kojm: No, once elections are past, the scene is very different. But I agree with John, that it’s not easy to find a way out of this confrontation that we’re in. But parties are going to have to, otherwise we’re going to have a hard time working our international agenda, if Russia is there as a spoiler.

McLaughlin: The physical manifestations of it are powerful. When we were there, there were like 61 shellings of Ukraine. Ten Russian tanks had come across the border from Russia into Ukraine, we were told by the Ukrainians. When you go to the Baltics, the Russians are carrying on major exercises along the border. And the Latvians had their backs up. And the main thing you hear from them, is that we don’t want to allow a gray zone to develop. What they worry about is the little green men predominant where, though some combination of obfuscation and propaganda and covert action, Putin is able to create confusion and some uncertainly about what’s going on. They’re pretty much determined to not let that happen. So they’re ready to deal with it in a pretty forceful way if that were to occur. And that would take you to Article 5 in NATO pretty quickly, I think, if he were to step across that boundary—which I doubt he will do, but we don’t know. That’s a temptation for him.

Glasser: Do we all think that Hillary Clinton will be more forceful than Obama has been in articulating a renewed U.S. commitment to Article 5 and to the Baltics or Eastern Europe? Is that likely?

Burrows: Could be. What seems to be lacking with Obama is actually the leader-to-leader aspect of it. It’s only allowed Merkel to take over that role. And so I think the big question will be, can Hillary actually sit down and talk? We know from the emails that she actually called Putin, at one time, very charming, when she met him as secretary of state. But I think that’s going to be a big test.

McLaughlin: On the issue of how you get ahold of this, where we may be is what could be called “confidence-building measures.” Something fairly technical—arms control is a good place to start because that tends to be something the Russians like to work on, and they like it to all be legalistic and nailed down. So you could look at something like the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, for example, where they object to what we’re doing with our missiles in Poland and Romania. They think they’re capable of firing Tomahawks as well as intermediate-range missiles. And we say they’re not. So that wouldn’t be a terribly hard thing to iron out. And we worry about the missiles that they’ve put into Kaliningrad, the Iskander section system, whether that is something that exceeds the provisions of the INF Treaty. So you can take something like that and resume negotiations on it, and try to clear up those technical aspects of it, which, I think, wouldn’t be that hard to clear up.

Goujon: But it requires some complex diplomacy, right?

McLaughlin: It does.

Goujon: Because Russia has been leveraging the nuclear arms treaties and withdrawal from them as a way to tell the United States, “Look, we need to talk or else.” And so it’s the “or else” part, right, of what is the U.S. willing to concede at the same it’s going to be trying to reassure its allies? Which, again, is the very complex diplomatic part.

But when we talk about a reset, I don’t think a reset fundamentally is possible, but the scenario that drives the conversation fundamentally, regardless of personalities, is when we look at what’s building in Syria. I mean, Turkey’s pushing further south; it has its imperatives completely clear-cut, doesn’t matter what anybody else is saying—Turkey is going to have a blocking force in north Syria and northern Iraq. And with Russian forces operating there, with Iranian forces, with Syrian regime forces trying to counter that, the potential for another collision on that very crowded battlefield is very real. And that is exactly the scenario that Obama has been desperately trying to avoid. And I think that’s the situation that the next president is going to be heading into—a collision between Turkey and Russia where you just have those imperatives on the Syrian battlefield, where Russia has unfinished business with the U.S. so it’s not like it’s just going to withdraw its presence from Syria; Turkey is on a mission and believes that it’ll have enough U.S. protective cover to keep going. There’s so much room for error there. And I think that’s what will drive it.

McLaughlin: Yes, we are one miscalculation away from this relationship going kinetic.

Glasser: That is a very scary sentence, by the way. OK, so John has given us one pretty alarming scenario that is likely regardless, really, of who wins, but involving North Korea and a missile. Go around. Chris, do you have something else that you think is definitely going to pop up on the agenda that isn’t, at the moment, sort of top of the agenda for Obama?

Kojm: Well, I was thinking about the North Korean example as well. Our policy has really gotten us to a dead end because for over 20 years here it’s been predicated on the elimination of North Korea’s nuclear weapons capability. And the regime, even with hunger and the deaths of over a million people in the ’90s, the regime is intact. Is it brittle? Is it out of touch with the 21st century? Yes and yes, but it’s still in place and there are no signs that we see that it’s going anywhere else. So that is a very tough question for the next president.

McLaughlin: Venezuela. It’s hard to imagine the next president getting through four years without a major collapse or a crisis of some sort in Venezuela that will generate enormous social problems, immigration, disruptions in the oil market and so forth. All the indices there are pointing downward.

Another one that the next president is going to have to deal with is the question of, for lack of a better term, global order, whether we are talking about China challenging maritime rules in the South China Sea or Russia challenging border integrity in Ukraine and Crimea, and by others in the Middle East.

Part of the global order is the alliance we’ve had in Europe for all of these years, and now among the things that are certain to happen, is that Britain will either leave or not the European Union. And if it leaves, there is a steam building for a similar move in places like Holland, a couple of the east European countries. One thing that’s certain, I think, is that Europe is going to be a less predictable, reliable base for our partnerships in the world as we try to advance the values that we share with Europe, common Western values, than any American president has experienced since the ’50s. So that, to me, is a certainty. I put that all under the heading of global order. Everyone talks about global order, but no one really knows what it is.

Burrows: We haven’t really talked about this, but cyber. So the administration already has some ideas for retaliation against the Russian hacking, but I think there’s a broader question of: Is this the new kind of spying, what we did in the Cold War, only with a lot more dangerous implications? And do we want to actually get some sort of agreement at a state level about what are the do’s and don’ts on this? What are the limits? We kind of opened the door with the Stuxnet and so we’re not completely blameless in it, but that, I think, is going to be a question of how you handle that.

McLaughlin: If we were to pick out an issue that has the biggest ripple effect that the new president fails to deal with at peril, I think it’s Syria in this sense: How that all ends is going to affect everything from the physical integrity of at least two countries in the Middle East to the role and reputation of great powers in the Middle East because right now you’ve got at least three of them involved—Russia, United States, Iran and many others, but those are the big three, Turkey, all involved. And it’s going to affect the battle in the Middle East between Sunni and Shia, the competition between Saudi Arabia and Iran, all going on simultaneously with the Iran nuclear agreement, which we should probably come back to because that’s another huge ripple effect potential. It’s going to affect migration to Europe, which in turn affected the Brexit. So you can see the effect of Syria all the way into the Brexit vote, and therefore it is affecting the internal stability of Europe.

Glasser: Do you have any other issue to put on the table? By my count, we’ve got North Korea and the very real issue of ICBMs coming up in the next term, cyber, the Venezuela meltdown, reordering of the global order, which encompasses different things from what kind of an exit Britain is making or not from the E.U., China’s seeking to challenge existing governance. Russia.

McLaughlin: The biggest surprise of all would be if Xi Jinping fails in what he’s doing. He’s the first Chinese leader to face the beginning of failure of the traditional China model, which is energy security equals growth equals political stability, and all three parts of that equation are shaky right now.

***

Glasser: I want to bring us back to admittedly a low-probability event, but one that we should not finish the conversation without addressing, which is the possibility of Trump winning. Certainly nothing is 100 percent, and it could happen. So I thought we should go around and sort of say, well, if Clinton represents the effort, perhaps unsuccessful, to restore kind of standing in the world in foreign policy that we have a clear sense of, what does the Trump scenario mean to you in terms of things that would happen as a result of it?

Kojm: Well, I mean where do you begin? Just on every front you can imagine, we would be set back. On addressing climate change, trade, the deficit, the role of the dollar in the world economy, our alliances, non-proliferation, counterterrorism. Wow. Just on the fronts I’ve mentioned, he would set back our country and where policy has been for decades under leaders of both parties. It’s very hard to see how a strongly nationalist, internally directed, protectionist, exclusionary leadership in the United States is beneficial to us or to the world.

Burrows: I’ll just give—to be provocative, throw out one thing: You could actually see Europe finally figure out how to take care of its own security because they wouldn’t have the U.S. out there to help.

Kojm: I’m extremely doubtful. [Laughter]

Goujon: And that’s an old argument, right? I mean, Trump is not the first to say that our allies need to shoulder more of the burden.

Kojm: Every president has said that.

McLaughlin: It’s actually official policy.

Goujon: Exactly.

Glasser: I mean, Obama has said that from the beginning. So what’s your Trump scenario, Reva?

Goujon: I think it comes down to our alliances. If we are perceived as pursuing a self-reliance policy and so South Korea and Japan have to basically fend for themselves, to some degree, in dealing with a North Korean nuclear scenario, that obviously sets off a whole weaponization campaign that—you know, just give it a few years, it’s going to be very difficult for the United States to try to rein in later on. A questioning of our alliances in central and eastern Europe, so you’re going to see a tighter bloc of those Visegrád countries, Poland taking more of a leadership role. There are huge frictions amongst these countries, but I think that would be smoothed over just given the security concerns that they have, and especially if they feel like the U.S. isn’t going to have their back as much as they used to.

Glasser: Market crash?

Goujon: In the short term? Yes, you’re going to have some market volatility.

Burrows: I don’t know on the market because, you know, with Brexit everybody predicted it would fall to bits. Initially yes, you had a fall, but the pound has stayed very flat, but the market itself—

McLaughlin: In the unlikely event Trump is elected, someone will come out of the woodwork of the, loosely speaking, Republican ranks and try to help him govern. But the problem, as I see it, is he has too steep of a hill to climb in terms of the impression he’s created in the world. I just don’t think he could dig out of that deep hole that his comments have created around the world, almost regardless of what he did.

The real tell of the campaign for me has been that he’s unable, it seems, to take advice from smart people. I can’t believe that people haven’t advised him to not do some of the things he’s done that have created the mess for him, but he’s done them anyway, which I guess tells me that, as president, he’ll probably be the same way. And he would have to prove to the world that he isn’t because everyone now kind of has seen who he is, what they think he is. I just think the hill is too steep for him to climb to be, even with help, an effective leader.

Goujon: It’s the ultimate test, right? We refer to Rodrigo Duterte as kind of the Trump of the Philippines, right? And his rhetoric has been very controversial. At the end of the day, though, the Philippines is a very small country, fundamentally vulnerable. And it’s going to play this balancing act, it’s going to see what it can get out of China, China can hold out Scarborough Shoal access, but they’re going to want something big in return. And the Philippines can’t compromise on its own sovereignty claims. China can’t either, so they’re going to hit a wall eventually, right? The Japanese will step in. And so even as we have all these concerns, there are still certain things that are going to shape the Philippines’ behavior. So the difference here is that’s the Philippines, a very small country; this is the United States, right? So it’s the ultimate test of rhetoric and constraints. And Trump is certainly pushing that challenge more than anything on how much does human agency really matter in a presidency.

McLaughlin: Yes, if he were elected, it would test what I’ve been saying, which is that our country has a good self-correcting mechanism and can provide checks and balances for any kind of behavior. It would test that. But, you know, when I say the hill would be just too steep for him, most countries would just be holding their breath, but not in a good way. Sometimes you want them to hold their breath a little bit—I mean, certainly Reagan made them hold their breath occasionally, but he didn’t do anything crazy. It would test the fabric of the United States, I think.

Kojm: It would test our institutions in a way that we haven’t seen in a long time.