At USIP’s Passing the Baton conference, former Obama administration officials Michéle Flournoy and Jacob Sullivan suggested that President-elect Donald Trump has raised unsettling questions about how he will conduct foreign policy and whether he will continue to meet historic U.S. commitments to institutions such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The incoming deputy national security advisor, KT McFarland, argued that new approaches by Trump, combined with a nimble attitude, will create opportunities for increased leverage abroad.

Moderator Susan Glasser, Politico’s chief international affairs columnist, asked where the first national security crisis for the new administration might come from. The panelists’ answers varied:

• No state is more eager to provoke an international surprise than North Korea, Flournoy said. The administration could learn on Inauguration Day, she suggested, that North Korea has tested an intercontinental ballistic missile.
• A major terror attack on Americans at home or abroad that has a “game-changing character” is a possibility, Hadley said.
• The biggest immediate strategic threat is a “catastrophic event” in the United States set off by terrorists who “get their hands on weapons of mass destruction,” Sullivan said. Climate change is the only other challenge that “comes close to that level of absolute catastrophe and over the long term even exceeds it.”