Almost every president since the end of the Cold War had his foreign policy legacy defined by a war no one could have foreseen. For George H.W. Bush, it was Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Bill Clinton sought to deflect Bush’s 90 percent popularity after the successful 100-hour ground war by focusing on bread-and-butter issues. In 1992, Clinton campaign consultant James Carville summarized the strategy with the famous quip, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Clinton genuinely hoped to focus on the economy. He extricated U.S. forces from Somalia following the “Black Hawk Down” incident but found himself drawn first into Bosnia and then more reluctantly into Kosovo. George W. Bush, too, sought to be a domestic president but, after the 9/11 attacks, ordered U.S. forces into Afghanistan and, more controversially, into Iraq. Barack Obama pledged to end “dumb war[s],” but not only remained in Afghanistan and returned to Iraq but then involved the United States in Syria and Libya.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine dominated the Biden administration’s foreign policy. Joe Biden did not send U.S. forces into the theater, but he did provide Ukraine with weaponry and other forms of support for their war effort. For all his talk about his genuine interest in Africa, Biden has paid little attention to the world’s deadliest conflict, the civil war in Sudan. He staked out the middle ground in the Israel-Hamas conflict, meddling diplomatically and virtue signaling with humanitarian schemes while otherwise standing largely aloof. Biden also claimed to be “the first president in this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world.” However, he omitted U.S. involvement off the coast of Yemen.

While the COVID-19 Pandemic overshadowed Donald Trump’s first term (thanks to a Chinese lab leak), he is correct in saying that he did not involve the United States in new wars. His second term will likely not be so placid.

Several wars loom, all of which could impact Trump’s legacy, whether he chooses to involve himself or not.

Turkey And Syria Vs. The Kurds

After Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a Turkish-sponsored Sunni Islamist group that previously aligned with Al Qaeda rampaged through Syria and ended Bashar al-Assad’s dynasty after nearly a quarter-century. Trump celebrated. “I think Turkey is very smart...Turkey did an unfriendly takeover, without a lot of lives being lost,” he said.

Trump’s assessment of Turkey’s wisdom may be premature. While Hayat Tahrir al-Sham leader Ahmed al-Sharaa (Abu Bakr al-Jolani) seeks to win international recognition, he does so less because he has yet to consolidate control and more because recognition will bring access and control over the nearly $400 billion that Syrians will need to reconstruct their country.

The broader issue that could impact the Trump administration is what the new Syrian regime will mean for the Syrian Kurds. Trump may not care about the Kurds personally—he certainly did not hesitate to betray them during his first term—but the stakes are arguably higher. Both Al-Sharaa and Iraqi Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani are pawns of Turkey; both trade sovereignty and nationalist causes for cash and power. Both will turn on Syrian Kurds to remain in the good graces of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. 

In the past, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was a brake on Turkish ambitions. With him gone, Turkey and its proxies may seek to overrun Syria’s Kurdish regions. The short-term impact of this could be the release of thousands of Islamic State prisoners. They will tip the balance inside Syria toward militancy. They could spread throughout not only the Middle East—destabilizing Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia—but also become another tool by which Erdogan could blackmail Europe, as he did with Syrian refugees. It will only be a matter of time until some cross the southern border. What happens in Syria does not stay in Syria.

Azerbaijan Vs. Armenia

Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev took advantage of U.S. distraction during the 2020 election to launch an attack on Nagorno-Karabakh, a self-governing and democratic ethnic Armenian territory that Azerbaijan demanded to subordinate itself to Azerbaijan’s direct rule. On November 9, 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin imposed a ceasefire sparing about half the region’s territory and enabling 120,000 indigenous Armenians to remain in the rump region. With Putin preoccupied with the Ukraine War and with Secretary of State Antony Blinken signaling moral equivalency and weakness, Aliyev finished the job in September 2023, driving the entire 1,700-year-old Armenian Christian community into exile. Blinken’s refusal to describe that episode as “ethnic cleansing,” preferring instead to describe events in the passive voice as “depopulation,” leads Aliyev to believe he can continue his anti-Armenian jihad. In recent weeks, Aliyev has demanded the European border observation team evacuate and Armenia stop arming itself. His rhetoric about Armenia as “Western Azerbaijan” mirrors the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s quip about Kuwait being Iraq’s “nineteenth province.”

The Caucasus could become even bloodier if Ukraine falls. Since 2018, Armenia has pivoted toward the West. Putin has a long memory. If given the opportunity, he will exact his revenge on Armenia. The same holds true for Moldova, which has also oriented itself increasingly toward Europe and NATO. Russia has already tightened its grip on Georgia. Trump must consider whether he is fine with the reconstitution of the Soviet Union.

China’s Proxy Wars In Africa

Trump would not be the first president to ignore African conflicts, but he may be the first for whom doing so would put the United States at untenable risk. China is no stranger to the continent. In 2017, it opened its first overseas naval base in tiny Djibouti in the Hord of Africa, just a few miles from Camp Lemonnier, where the Pentagon still stations its Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa.

During the Biden administration, China consolidated its strategic position without any serious U.S. pushback. Rather than counter China’s economic and military inroads, the State Department often facilitated them.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) may be one of the world’s most dysfunctional states. Still, it nevertheless will be indispensable for the twenty-first-century economy. The lithium-ion batteries (upon which so many technologies depend) require cobalt, tantalum, germanium, and other rare earth elements that the DRC possesses in abundance. Some geologists estimate that Congo’s mineral wealth is worth up to $24 trillion.

China has taken a two-pronged approach to the DRC. It has bribed successive presidents for lucrative and exclusive mining concessions and simultaneously sold high-tech weaponry to support its investment in President Félix Tshisekedi, who now seeks an unconstitutional third term. Meanwhile, U.S. officials still celebrate Tshisekedi as a democrat. Under Michael Hammer, the U.S. Embassy in Kinshasa recommended lifting UN reporting requirements on Congolese military purchases, thus injecting an opacity that only benefits Beijing.

Tshisekedi is not an intellectual. He appears to believe that a top-shelf, multibillion-dollar military can buy victory, regardless of his regime’s corruption and general incompetence. Such a dynamic can lead rulers like Tshisekedi to pull the trigger. He has grown increasingly bellicose toward Rwanda, a pro-Western neighbor that has previously fought to protect itself from genocide-era terrorists who now call the DRC home. Anti-Rwanda rhetoric can both distract Congolese from Tshisekedi’s own mismanagement and also serve China’s interests as Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame has taken a balanced approach that has effectively blocked Beijing’s ambitions. If a third Congo War erupts—and odds are it will—Trump will be forced to deal with a conflict that could disrupt the twenty-first-century economy just as much as the Arab oil embargo disrupted the twentieth-century economy.

Chinese interference in the Horn of Africa is an even greater threat. Somaliland, an unrecognized country that is nonetheless the region’s only democracy, also possesses rare earth deposits. It hosts an airfield that, prior to Somalia’s collapse into chaos, was an emergency landing strip for NASA’s space shuttle program, a deep water port that today is one of Africa’s top-ranked facilities, and several hundred miles of strategic coast along the Gulf of Aden. While countries like Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates take a transactional approach between the United States and China, Somaliland stands on principle and openly sides with Taiwan. 

China, alongside the Somali government in Mogadishu, has responded by sponsoring an insurgency in Somaliland’s Sool region. The Biden team bizarrely sided not with democratic, pro-Western, pro-Taiwan, and reasonably transparent Somaliland but rather with Mogadishu and Beijing. If Trump does not side unequivocally with Somaliland and recognize it, expect China to increase its efforts to destabilize the country. Simply put, it is impossible for Trump to stand up to China without working to checkmate its projects in Africa.

China Vs. Taiwan

The one possible conflict for which Trump’s team recognizes the need for preparation is a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Make no mistake: Taiwan is not China. Historically, it has been distinct for most of the last 500 years. Even Mao Zedong recognized that Taiwan was as distinct from China as Korea.

Taiwan, however, is not simply the single island that many Americans picture. It also includes several outlying islands—some in the Taiwan Strait and some further afield. Trump’s advisors must not assume, as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy-designate Elbridge Colby does, that China would “go big” with an immediate effort to conquer Taiwan’s main island. After all, the Taiwan Relations Act does not cover the islands Matsu or Quemoy, the epicenter of the Eisenhower-era Taiwan crises, let alone those further afield like Taiping or Dongsha. 

For Beijing, Chinese “salami slicing” tactics in the South China Sea have been a success. Why should they change them now? Rather than simply address a theoretical invasion of Taiwan proper, Trump needs to determine in advance whether he will stand down should that invasion come in slow motion. After all, if China occupies Dongsha or Matsu absent American pushback, it is conditioning the American public for inaction.

Every president enters office with an agenda, but reality quickly intrudes. Biden allowed problems to fester, and the weakness and vacillation of aides like Blinken only encouraged irredentists and adversaries.

The foreign policy crises Trump does not expect and that his aides hope to ignore will likely define Trump’s legacy in ways he does not now imagine. Trump side-stepped wars in his first administration. He may not be so lucky in his next one.

Michael Rubin is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum.

Image: M2M_PL / Shutterstock.com.