As leader of the foremost superpower and so-called “world police”, whoever sits in the United States’s White House – and the decisions they make – can have a huge effect on the course of conflicts around the world.
Israel’s war in Gaza and Lebanon, the Russia-Ukraine war, and Sudan’s civil war have collectively seen hundreds of thousands killed and millions displaced. Those conflicts could worsen or end, based on Washington’s stance.
With analysts struggling to predict a clear winner before the November 5 US election between Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump and the Democrats’ Vice President Kamala Harris, it’s worth considering two scenarios.
How might a Trump or Harris White House affect major wars? Here’s what we know:
Israel’s war on Gaza and Lebanon
Harris and Trump have both been unequivocal in their support for Israel. Most Palestinians and the wider Arab world, therefore, see little prospect of the war ending with the election of either candidate. Neither has offered solutions for ending the war, however.
Trump scenario
Trump has vocally condemned the Palestinian group, Hamas, whose assault on villages and army outposts in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, ended in the deaths of 1,139 people and the capture of 251 and sparked the Israeli war on Gaza. He has expressed little sympathy for the people of Gaza: more than 43,000 Palestinians in the besieged enclave have been killed in the war in the past year.
During a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in July, Trump urged the Israeli leader to “get his victory” over Hamas. He said the killings in Gaza had to stop but that Netanyahu “knows what he’s doing”.
That rhetoric is in line with Trump’s actions during his first run as president. His government recognised the disputed city of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, sparking anger among Palestinians. He negotiated “normalisation” deals between Israel and several Arab nations under the Abraham Accords and he pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, which Israel also opposed.
However, there was some tension between Netanyahu and Trump. In 2020, Trump presented a “Peace Plan” that entailed a two-state system with a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem.
Palestinians condemned it for conceding too much territory to Israel. The plan ultimately fell apart after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attempted to use the moment to announce Israel’s annexing of parts of the West Bank, which Trump hadn’t agreed to. “I was so angry … that was going too far,” Trump later told the US publication, Axios.
Trump continues to speak about his plan in the run-up to the current election. In the final days of his campaign, Trump has put on a charm offensive targeting the sizeable Lebanese and Arab American voter population, especially in the key battleground state of Michigan, promising peace.
“Your friends and family in Lebanon deserve to live in peace, prosperity and harmony with their neighbours, and that can only happen with peace and stability in the Middle East,” he said in a post on X, without mentioning Gaza or Israel.
Harris scenario
Compared with President Joe Biden, Harris has been more vocal on the need to end the “inhumane” suffering of the people of Gaza, pressing for a ceasefire and a hostage deal in the immediate term.
In July, Harris told Netanyahu she would “not be silent” in the face of the suffering in Gaza. “Israel has a right to defend itself and how it does so matters. What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating,” Harris told reporters after the meeting.
Harris is also said to want peace on the Israel-Lebanon border. She praised Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in September. On Thursday, Brett McGurk, President Biden’s Middle East co-ordinator, and conflict negotiator Amos Hochstein arrived in Israel to push for a ceasefire with Hezbollah. Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken has also made 11 failed missions to Israel to negotiate ending the war since October 7, 2023.
Despite her words, however, Harris has not committed to immediately halting Israel’s war on Gaza, many in the US Arab and Muslim communities note. Some say she has not laid out clear steps to achieve her goals, like cutting military support to Israel. “Without an actual commitment to stop killing the children of Gaza, I don’t care about her empathy for them,” Eman Abdelhadi, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, told Al Jazeera.
Like Biden, Harris has also stopped short of presenting a two-state plan, analysts say. Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has criticised the Biden administration in the past for failing to propose a two-state system.
Voters in the Arab American community helped push Biden to victory in 2020 in key swing states like Michigan. Some are now choosing to vote for Trump or not at all, having lost faith in the Democratic Party.
Former President Bill Clinton’s gaffe in Michigan this week, in which he appeared to justify Israel’s bombardment of Gaza while campaigning for Harris, caused more outrage.
Russia-Ukraine war
The Ukraine war is grinding on with both sides making occasional gains but also recording devastating losses. Kyiv, analysts say, needs more military funding to get the upper hand against a much bigger Russian force.
Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and wants to expand territorial gains. In a “victory plan” released in October, Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy named an invitation to join NATO as a critical step towards winning the war – even though the US-led military alliance has so far signalled that it will only invite Ukraine after the war with Russia is over.
Trump scenario
A Trump presidency would be disastrous for Ukraine, some analysts say. As president, Trump maintained close relations with Moscow, even openly admiring Vladimir Putin at times. Trump has also not lived down accusations that the Kremlin intervened in the 2016 elections that got him to the White House.
Trump says he could negotiate an “exciting” peace deal that would end the war “in 24 hours”. He has provided scant details about this plan but his running mate, JD Vance, said in a media interview that Trump would negotiate a demilitarised zone according to current demarcation lines. That would mean Ukraine cedes control of Russian-occupied Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhia, as well as the previously occupied Crimea, something the Ukrainians don’t want.
Vance also said Russia would likely get a guarantee that Ukraine will not join NATO, another sore point for Kyiv, which is seeking assurances that a Russian invasion will never happen again by joining the security bloc. Analysts say Trump could lift Biden-era sanctions on Russia to sweeten the deal. Putin, in October, welcomed Trump’s comments.
“This scenario is not going to be acceptable for Ukraine,” Lev Zinchenko of the European Policy Centre, a Brussels-based policy think tank, told Al Jazeera. “The most that can come out of this ‘peace’ agreement is a frozen conflict in Ukraine … it will have the same effect and encourage further Russian aggression in Ukraine and beyond its borders, against some European NATO member states. Trump’s administration will sell out Ukraine for his political profits.”
Kyiv may not have a say, though, according to some observers. Trump and several Republican lawmakers are strongly against providing crucial US military aid to Ukraine, even blaming the Biden government for funding a war they say does not benefit American interests.
If Kyiv loses US funding – its biggest source of military aid – it could lose the war. Analysts still blame Kyiv’s current disadvantage on Congress’s delay of a $60bn aid package that materialised in April.
A Trump presidency could be an opportunity to break the deadlock, however, some analysts say, and a peace deal, even if hardly palatable, would save Kyiv from looking defeated, and make the US a guarantor of the process.
Harris scenario
Although Harris has not laid out plans for an immediate end to the war, she has voiced strong support for Kyiv and has urged Western countries to ramp up military support for Ukraine.
Already, the US has sent Kyiv more than $64bn in aid and weapons since Russia’s 2022 invasion. If Russia wins, “Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe … starting with Poland,” she said during the presidential debate with Trump in September.
And what about NATO?. Biden’s US vetoed Ukraine’s NATO ascension and restricted Kyiv’s use of US-supplied weapons on Russian territory, wary of pulling the entire bloc into war.
When Zelenskyy laid out his victory plan to Western leaders in October, the White House seemed uncommitted, but analysts said this was perhaps because any attempt to change policies so close to elections would be an own goal for the Democrats. That could change once Harris wins.
“It’s expected that Biden will move forward with lifting the US veto, and Harris would be in charge of continuing the support,” analyst Zinchenko said.
Under Harris, Kyiv is also likely to see more financial funding from Washington, although Republican apathy in Congress could delay her moves. Harris could also take a more proactive approach than Biden when it comes to ending the fighting in the short term, the International Crisis Group, a global affairs think tank, wrote in an editorial in October, whether through negotiations or boosted support for Kyiv.
Sudan war
Fourteen million people have been displaced in Sudan’s civil war, the world’s largest displacement crisis. Conflict broke out in April 2023, after General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, leader of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), and General Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo who leads the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), fell out in a power struggle.
Trump scenario
Analysts don’t see a Trump presidency putting Sudan on the priority list, or immediately pushing to find a way to end the war. Some even blame his first administration for the current conflict, accusing him of focusing on Sudan normalising relations with Israel, rather than on installing a civilian leadership in the country.
During the overthrow of former leader Omar al-Bashir in 2019, Trump ignored the heavy-handedness of the two military factions – both of which fatally cracked down on protesters – and further pressed those same forces into a transitional government that ultimately put too much power in the military’s hands, according to an editorial by published by Qatari think tank, the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies.
“In my view, there was always a bit of a fig leaf about it actually being called a ‘civilian-led’ transitional government, given that there were more military personnel on the Sovereignty Council than civilian, and the military insisted on leading the transitional government during the first half of the transition, with the civilians to lead the second phase of the transition,” said Susan D Page, former US ambassador to South Sudan-turned professor at University of Michigan, in an interview with the Ford School at the University of Michigan in 2023.
Harris scenario
Biden’s administration is not much better than Trump’s, experts say, and has shown little appetite for ending the war in Sudan.
Alex de Waal, director of the World Peace Foundation, blamed both Biden and Trump for having a similarly tepid response. “The Trump-Biden doctrine … it’s essentially the same doctrine,” de Waal told Al Jazeera.
Others point out that the Biden-Harris government sanctioned the Sudanese government by freezing millions in development aid to force the generals to the table.
The US has also sanctioned top officials, including an SAF general accused of buying weapons from Iran and Russia in disregard of US sanctions on those countries. Sudanese businesses accused of funding the RSF have been hit with sanctions, too. However, the US has not directly sanctioned Dagalo or al-Burhan.
