On November 5, the United States elected Donald Trump – a leader with whom the world has ample familiarity from his first presidency from 2017 to 2021 – in decisive fashion as its 47th president.
Like any U.S. president, Trump will face considerable constraints in domestic policy, with Congress, the Supreme Court, and the vast array of government bureaucracies limiting his power. It is in foreign policy, however, where Trump will have far more influence.
The stakes of a second Trump presidency for the Kurdistan Region are thus real, with security naturally topping the list of areas where Trump’s foreign policy could most dramatically affect life on the ground. Yet security is also the most difficult to predict, as this will depend largely on the actions of other states in the region.
Moreover, significant changes to U.S. foreign policy are rare – according to a 2024 report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace entitled “Strategic Change in U.S. Foreign Policy” – because of inertia. After examining five historical case studies, the report noted that, “absent major external shocks, strategic change remains very difficult in U.S. foreign policy, where policies are often highly institutionalized and supported by many interests and groups in Congress, the different government bureaucracies, the expert community, and the broader public.”
For these reasons, rather than opine on the political ramifications of a Trump presidency for the Kurdistan Region and the Middle East, it is more helpful to focus on two specific areas of U.S. foreign policy that affect the global economy and international stability and will affect the Kurdistan Region: energy and climate.
Long a vital component of the global energy system as an oil exporter, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has also made serious commitments in recent years to bolstering its production of clean energy resources and implementing policies to address climate change. Given the close relationship between the United States and the Kurdistan Region, the new leadership in Washington will likely shape Erbil’s trajectories in energy and climate.
More price than the president
In fossil fuels, Trump’s longstanding rhetoric and policies reveal an unequivocal backing of expanding U.S. production, and he has pledged to tear down environmental regulations put in place by the Biden Administration to achieve this end.
But Trump’s goals are consistent with U.S. domestic and foreign oil and gas policy since the start of the shale boom in the late 2000s, and arguably for the past 100 years: produce as much as possible and create export markets through either positive commercial energy diplomacy or through coercive measures like sanctions, so long as U.S. domestic supplies are secure.
More importantly, the global price of oil, driven by global supply and demand balances, is the ultimate arbiter of U.S. oil-production levels, with geopolitical events and global economic trends capable of throwing the market into disarray. Currently, the oil market is oversupplied, causing the price to soften. In response, the alliance of oil producers in OPEC+ are extending their voluntary production cuts into 2025 lest the market becomes flooded and prompts the price to fall more dramatically.
Gas illustrates similar market constraints for the United States as oil. Trump says he will lift the Biden Administration’s pause on liquified natural gas (LNG)-export permitting upon entering office, but the pause was initiated because of the overcapacity of U.S. LNG export facilities and concerns about the future ability of overseas markets to import increased U.S. supplies.
At best, Trump may juice U.S. production at the margins through removing emissions-reducing regulations and champion sanctions on U.S. geopolitical rivals like Iran and Venezuela to create more market share for U.S. exports. These dynamics should encourage the KRG to continue its ongoing policies and commitments to diversify away from reliance on oil-export revenues.
Climate change
On the surface, Trump’s most discouraging foreign energy policy is his aversion to international climate agreements. Symbolically, his first act as president in 2017 was to remove the United States from the Paris Agreement, and he remains broadly antipathetic toward global engagements, seeking to steer an “America First” policy.
However, the world is undergoing an energy transition for its own reasons, regardless of U.S. predilections. Increasing clean energy production remains an imperative for all countries because fossil fuel-accelerated environmental degradation is threatening their societies, economies, and livelihoods – and fossil fuel imports are both expensive and insecure.
Moreover, market forces, aided by falling prices for solar and wind power, will continue to encourage the energy transition, a fact that the United States itself demonstrates. For instance, U.S. solar power production will increase by 63% from 2023 to 2025, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, while the U.S. state of Texas – a traditional powerhouse in oil – now accounts for over 27% of total wind-capacity generation in the entire country. Nuclear power and carbon capture technologies have also attracted significant investment in recent years.
Largely through tax incentives, the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is investing nearly $400 billion into wind, solar, battery power, and electric vehicles. Trump may try to roll back some of these incentives, but many of the Republican Party’s members of Congress come from states where the IRA has been a bounty in creating jobs and jumpstarting clean energy industries. They are unlikely to support a full repeal of the legislation.
Meanwhile, major oil and gas companies are incentivized to reduce emissions to meet the carbon border adjustment mechanism standards for oil and petrochemicals in Europe, the United States’ most important export market.
China and trade
There is an inherent contradiction in U.S. energy strategy that hinders the energy transition: tariffs on China. First instituted during Trump’s first president, the Biden Administration instituted new tariffs on China in May 2024 that hiked rates from 7.5% to 25% on batteries, 0% to 25% on critical minerals, 25% to 50% on solar cells, and a whopping 25% to 100% on electric vehicles. During his campaign, Trump floated the idea of a 60% tariff on all Chinese goods and vowed to wield tariffs more broadly once in office.
Given China’s dominance in producing clean energy technologies and processing critical minerals, it is doubtful that the United States can bolster its own manufacturing capabilities alongside those of its allies to help meet the world’s climate goals.
With trade wars becoming the primary manifestations of the broader geo-economic competition between the United States and China, the fate of the energy transition hangs in the balance. While a thaw in U.S.-China relations could rebuild the former supply chains of global trade that powered the 2000s and 2010s, this prospect is unlikely under Trump for many reasons, not least because energy is at the heart of the U.S.-China competition.
At this stage, the world is divided into two large energy blocks: the U.S.-Gulf-Russia fossil fuel-producing block that wants to extend the use of oil and gas in the global energy system, on the one hand; and the China-EU clean energy-championing and fossil fuel-importing block that seeks to use cheaper, cleaner resources that are domestically generated.
This global energy divide, undergirded by U.S.-China trade barriers, will inhibit the energy transition but should not dissuade the KRG from advancing along its current path in energy to diversify away from oil, develop gas, and champion clean energy while taking aggressive steps to make its environment more resilient to the rising dangers of climate change.
John V. Bowlus is a researcher and lecturer at Kadir Has University in Istanbul and has written widely about energy security, transit, geopolitics, and transitions from a contemporary and historical perspective. He is also the Editor of Kurdistan Chronicle.
