AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
With the return of President-elect Donald Trump to the Oval Office tomorrow, many in the international community are bracing themselves for what promises to be a significant shift in American foreign policy. We turn to NPR correspondents Eyder Peralta in Mexico City, Lauren Frayer in Dublin and John Ruwitch in Beijing to find out how some are preparing for Trump's second term.
JOHN RUWITCH, BYLINE: Here in China, there's buzz building about the big event coming up. Not the inauguration - the Lunar New Year holiday, which kicks off in a little over a week. On a busy Beijing street, it's hard to get people to stop and talk, and many don't seem to have given much thought to a second Trump presidency. 20-year-old Yu Zuyong (ph) has, though.
YU ZUYONG: (Non-English language spoken).
RUWITCH: He says, "the impact on China of Trump 2.0 could be big." The first time around, Trump launched a trade war against China. He's promised even higher tariffs this time and is stacking his cabinet with China hawks.
YU: (Non-English language spoken).
RUWITCH: Yu says, "China's economy is already fragile, so another round of trade salvos could do some real damage." And he's got concerns.
YU: (Non-English language spoken).
RUWITCH: But he also has faith that his country will get through it and that the future will be right. For its part, the Chinese government is doing what it can. Chinese leader Xi Jinping had a call with Trump this week, and he's sending his vice president to Washington for the inauguration. Wu Xinbo, director of the Center for American Studies at Shanghai's Fudan University, says there's a lot of uncertainty.
WU XINBO: I think the Chinese side has been making preparations for all kinds of scenarios.
RUWITCH: He says Beijing misjudged Trump when he took office the first time.
WU: Later on, I think we learned that dealing with Trump, wrestling is part of the negotiation, is part of the deal. You have to be tough with him.
RUWITCH: China has been testing out asymmetric trade warfare, he says. When the Biden administration increased restrictions on the sale of technology to China, the Chinese government responded by tightening controls over rare earth mineral exports to the U.S.
WU: For China, the ideal situation is that we can still make a deal.
RUWITCH: But that, he says, will depend largely on Trump.
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: It's not only China. Donald Trump may also take aim at a much smaller economy, Ireland.
I'm walking along Ireland's River Liffey through downtown Dublin, and you can see PWC and Citigroup, glass and steel towers for big U.S. multinational companies, in a place that used to be like industrial dock lands.
SAM LOGUE: Yeah, it's definitely massively gentrified now from all the foreign investment coming in.
FRAYER: Commuter Sam Logue has seen Dublin transform.
LOGUE: You've got, like, Google and Facebook and Twitter who's based down there.
FRAYER: All these U.S. companies base at least some of their intellectual property here, allowing them to route profits through Ireland and pay Irish corporate tax, which, in recent years, has been 12.5%, compared to 21% in the U.S. Now that's a bargain for these companies, but it's what economist Aidan Regan calls an America-last model.
AIDAN REGAN: It's not unreasonable to expect U.S. companies to pay taxes on where their big market is, in the USA.
FRAYER: Their big market maybe the U.S., but Ireland gets their tax revenue, and that's something Donald Trump wants to change. He's proposed lowering U.S. corporate tax to lure some of these companies and their profits back to America. Now, that could devastate the Irish economy. Prime Minister Simon Harris told local media that the government here...
PRIME MINISTER SIMON HARRIS: ...Is setting aside a very significant amount into funds, future funds, to protect our country from any economic shock.
FRAYER: Economic shock could be exacerbated by any tariffs Trump might impose on the European Union, which Ireland is part of.
HARRIS: This is a time of risk and uncertainty for Ireland.
FRAYER: Dan Mulhall was Ireland's ambassador to Washington the last time Trump was president, when he slapped tariffs on European steel and aluminum. This time around, Trump posted on social media that he wants the EU to buy more U.S. oil and gas. Otherwise, he wrote, it's, quote, "tariffs," all caps, "all the way." So Mulhall says the EU is getting ready.
DAN MULHALL: I think the tariffs will be rather across the board for the European Union. And hopefully, this can be avoided. You know, the best minds in Brussels are currently working overtime.
FRAYER: Brussels is where the European Commission is based. It negotiates trade for Ireland and 26 other EU countries. The last time Trump imposed tariffs, Brussels retaliated with countermeasures on classic American exports - bourbon, blue jeans and Harley-Davidson motorcycles.
EYDER PERALTA, BYLINE: I meet Pedro Fernandez (ph) at Chapultepec, the central park of Mexico City, one of its most prominent spaces. Fernandez has written some of the country's most popular historical novels. And in the mid-1800s, in this very spot, American troops stormed this castle.
PEDRO FERNANDEZ: The castle was actually the military school for the boys.
PERALTA: The boys were cadets, 18- and 19-year-olds, and they were ill-prepared for battle, but the lore is that they put up a fight. And when U.S. troops were about to overpower them, one of the boys grabbed the Mexican flag and jumped to his death instead of being captured by the Americans.
FERNANDEZ: And, of course, the American troops won.
PERALTA: And Mexico loses land that runs from modern-day California all the way to Kansas. Today, there are statues of the young cadets.
FERNANDEZ: It's something that's like an open wound. We lost helpful (ph) territory.
PERALTA: And just before that war, President James Polk won an election pushing manifest destiny. I ask Fernandez if he sees echoes to what's happening now with President-elect Trump pushing for American expansion and even threatening a military intervention against drug cartels in Mexico.
FERNANDEZ: Well, I think United States have always wanted to control the continent.
PERALTA: What he means is that an American president openly meddling with Mexico is nothing new. The U.S. helped Mexico fight off a French invasion in the 1860s. And in the early 1900s, when President Porfirio Diaz started strengthening trade relations with Europe and Asia, the U.S. helped to fund a revolution against him. On his way out of the country, Diaz met with President William Taft.
FERNANDEZ: They had a fight, and they were public fights.
PERALTA: Diaz allegedly uttered one of the most famous lines in this country. Poor Mexico, he said, so far from God, so close to the United States. It meant...
FERNANDEZ: ...That the greatest curse for Mexico was to be next to the United States and the greatest curse for the United States was being next to Mexico because sometimes they get along and sometimes they fight, and they can't live without each other.
PERALTA: What's happening now is not very different. Indeed, Trump and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum have already begun a war of words.
RASCOE: That was Eyder Peralta in Mexico City, Lauren Frayer in Dublin and John Ruwitch in Beijing. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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