The Dangers of a Lame-Duck Trump
How Far Will He Go to Make Peace—and War?
Daniel W. Drezner and Elizabeth N. Saunders
November 4, 2026
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With the midterms over, U.S. President Donald Trump is now a lame duck. Second-term presidents who lose control of Congress have to face the reality that the time for signature legislation or other domestic policy initiatives has passed. As they think about their legacy, lame ducks often turn to foreign policy, where the power of the presidency allows them to act unfettered by pesky domestic politics. It is not unusual for a lame duck to reach for a final, lofty goal abroad. U.S. President Bill Clinton, for instance, put great effort into trying to advance a proposal for a final settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the end of his presidency.
Trump’s lame-duck period will not be those of his predecessors, however. He has already gone through what was widely considered at the time to be a lame-duck phase, between November 2020 and January 2021. He used it to contest the election outcome despite clear evidence that Joe Biden had won. Trump is the first president in the past 100 years to have served two nonconsecutive terms, and therefore the only American leader in living memory to have a second lame-duck period—this time lasting more than two years.
With Democrats soon to be in control of the House and the Senate, the threat of impeachment or investigations into the Trump family’s business dealings will ly make the president feel cornered and angry. And that’s what makes the remainder of Trump’s term so dangerous. A boxed-in Trump, with no obvious constructive foreign policy outlet to channel his energy, may well lash out internationally. And Congress, even if controlled by Democrats, will have little power over his day-to-day management of foreign policy.
There are plenty of ways Trump could act out: issuing fresh threats against Canada, launching new attacks on U.S. alliances, or colluding with Russia or China at the expense of Ukraine or Taiwan. But to turn those threats into policy would require serious effort, such as repositioning U.S. troops or painstakingly negotiating with other great powers.
The two places where Trump can inflict the most damage are Iran and Cuba. According to The New York Times, the Trump administration and Israel have drawn up plans for fresh strikes on Iran as soon as the midterms are over. A last-ditch effort to compel Tehran to surrender is unly to work and would put at risk the global economy and the security and stability of Persian Gulf allies. Trump might also try to force regime change in Cuba. Military action against both adversaries would only require Trump to give his say-so. With no election on the horizon, all that constrains the president abroad is the sense of his own legacy.
ONE FOOT OUT THE DOOR
We define presidents as lame-duck when they no longer need to contend with elections, either presidential or midterm. For a one-term president who has lost a reelection bid, this period lasts just a few months, between their successor’s election and inauguration. For a second-term president, it can last two years, between the midterms and when they leave office. (Trump, who has never been particularly interested in the political fortunes of other Republicans, is unly to let the 2028 presidential election affect his thinking.)
Freed from the burdens of campaigning and legislating, and often lacking domestic political capital, lame-duck leaders tend to pivot to diplomacy, taking chances abroad that they would not have dared to before. Clinton tried to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement and arrange a presidential trip to North Korea at the end of his second term. After losing the 2014 midterms, President Barack Obama concluded the Iran nuclear deal and normalized relations with Cuba.
Lame-duck presidents have also used military force in ways they might not have done in the lead-up to elections. George H. W. Bush, for example, intervened in Somalia in late 1992 with a limited mission to ease the famine. More than a decade later, in 2007, George W. Bush sent a surge of forces to stabilize Iraq after a punishing midterm election in which voters seemed to send the message that he should withdraw from the failing war there.
The results of these foreign policy moonshots have been mixed. Clinton’s Israeli-Palestinian negotiations failed; Obama’s diplomatic wins were short-lived; George H. W. Bush’s Somalia mission was largely successful in staving off hunger but left the roots of the conflict unresolved, tempting Clinton to expand the mission with disastrous consequences; and George W. Bush’s Iraq surge quelled violence in the short term but did little to permanently stabilize the country. These endeavors were, at the very least, debated and planned with input from relevant parts of government and outside experts. Their aims were clear, even if unmet. And in each case the president attempted to explain and justify his policies—standards Trump has routinely failed to meet.
GOING FOR BROKE
With Trump now diminished by the midterms yet still on a quest to win a Nobel Peace Prize, one might expect him to turn to diplomacy. The problem is that he has already exhausted many of the obvious lame-duck gambits. During his first term, Trump swung for the foreign policy fences by pulling out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, meeting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un three times, replacing the North American Free Trade Agreement with his own regional trade pact, facilitating the normalization of ties between Israel and a handful of Arab countries, and withdrawing from a raft of international agreements. Since returning to office in 2025, he has presided over a cease-fire in Gaza and the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Trump is not expected to return to most of these initiatives because he has reached the limits of what his spectacle-driven diplomacy can achieve. Trump vowed to take Greenland, for example, but has settled for a deal that expands the U.S. military presence in the territory. His “Board of Peace,” which he pitched as a rival to the United Nations Security Council, will continue to languish as other countries now feel less need to kowtow to his every whim.
There are other long shots Trump could attempt, such as trying to end intractable conflicts in Kashmir or Sudan, to forge a reputation as a peacemaker. But these are exceptionally difficult problems to solve in the best of circumstances. Even forcing a lopsided deal in these cases would require a level of deftness, regional expertise, and patience that Trump lacks. He rarely invests meaningful time in diplomacy, as illustrated by his dubious claims to have ended a slew of conflicts, many of which are still ongoing.
Perhaps the biggest swing Trump could take would be to fashion a great-power concert—a forum in which he, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping worked together to impose global order. As with most of his prior meetings with Putin and Xi, however, future summits are unly to produce anything of substance. Neither Russia nor China has expressed much interest in the trilateral nuclear arms treaty that Trump has floated. Nor are they keen on pressing Iran to acquiesce to a deal with the United States.
Trump could use those meetings to throw Ukraine or Taiwan under the bus in the desperate hope of a peace deal. But as the past two years have demonstrated, Putin is not interested in compromise and has the resources to keep fighting. Xi views Taiwan as a domestic Chinese matter and will be unly to accept any constraints on his approach to the island. Trump will eventually figure out that he’s better off capitalizing on the optics of a summit of the three leaders than putting in the work to reach any kind of agreement.
ONE FOR THE ROAD
Trump is most ly to take action in Iran. He seems to believe that escalating the war could break the stalemate and rescue his legacy. But Iranian leaders won’t back down in the face of more force. Instead, they will probably ramp up attacks on commercial shipping, strike Gulf allies, and ignore diplomatic overtures until Trump leaves office. Moreover, Trump’s own options may be limited: a more radical U.S. escalation against Iran, such as deploying troops to Kharg Island, would probably be so unpopular within his base that he would avoid it. Even Trump’s biggest supporters are growing tired of the high prices that his war has caused. Renewed conflict could plunge the world into economic crisis.
Trump could also attempt to force regime change in Cuba. He has imposed a full-blown embargo on the island for most of 2026 in an effort to weaken its defenses. Cut off from its Venezuelan lifeline and without electricity for all but a few hours a day, the economic hardships and human suffering in Cuba have dramatically worsened in recent months. Ousting Cuba’s government is a personal priority of Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state and national security adviser, and would align with the “Donroe Doctrine,” an assertion of U.S. primacy in the Western Hemisphere.
For Trump, an attack on Cuba would be attractive because it would not require too much in the way of military assets and, at least in his mind, would solve a problem that has bedeviled U.S. presidents stretching back to the end of the Eisenhower administration. Trump might have already moved on Cuba had he not gotten bogged down in Iran. Of course, as the political scientist Alexander Downes has shown, using force to achieve regime change rarely works and often leads to unpredictable consequences—in the case of Cuba, it might mean a new influx of refugees to the United States.
Trump has already exhausted many of the obvious lame-duck gambits.
But a lame-duck Trump could see it as a gamble worth taking on the off chance that he can be the president to finally unseat the communist regime. When it comes to foreign policy, Trump loves nothing more than attempting to hack open a Gordian knot. He might also view regime change in Cuba as a way to distract from his failure in Iran.
Another possibility is that Trump will focus his policy efforts abroad on enriching his family. He has already created ample opportunities for foreign entities to seemingly buy influence in his administration. Trump and his family members have accepted a jetliner from the emir of Qatar, a $2 billion investment from a fund led by the Saudi crown prince, and profits from a number of cryptocurrency enterprises, much of which came from foreign buyers. According to TheNew Yorker, Trump’s family has reaped $4 billion through such profiteering. Trump, secure in the knowledge that the Senate will not have the 67 votes it needs to remove him from office, might figure that he has nothing to lose in pursuing more moneymaking schemes.
The most surprising foreign policy option Trump could take during his lame-duck period, however, is doing nothing at all. The president has busied himself with remaking Washington, D.C., in his own image by redecorating the Oval Office, designing a White House ballroom, and attempting to remodel the Kennedy Center. There is a chance that he could spend his last two years in office issuing pardons, trying to prosecute political enemies on the side, and erecting monuments to himself. Given the alternatives, inaction on foreign policy may well be the best-case scenario for Trump’s lame-duck years.
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