Four years ago I was asked to address whether IR theory might help us understand the coming Trump presidency. I answered “no” for several reasons. IR theory is better at explanation than prediction. Even if it was reasonably good at prediction, its theories were completely outmatched by Donald Trump. Most IR theories are premised on rationality assumptions, but Trump exhibited little rationality. There were those who thought that he would be tamed by “adults” in the room, but I dismissed this as wishful thinking. Trump had demonstrated the ability to escape almost every single constraint he ever met. Trump would be Trump.[1] All we could know is that he would act in ways that met his needs, however he defined them at the time.
Category: Essays
Policy Series 2021-21: Canada and Trump Revisited, Revisited
I have to confess that when the editor asked me to provide my thoughts about the effect President Donald J. Trump has had upon Canadians and, by projection, upon the quality of the bilateral relationship between the United States and Canada, my memory flashed back to the early 1960s, when I first read Joseph Heller’s incredible antiwar satire, Catch-22. There are two reasons for the flashback. First is the strikingly bizarre impact (satirical were it not so sad) that the Trump presidency appears to have had upon what is usually considered to be the world’s platinum standard for sensible bilateral relationships. Just as Heller’s characters managed to make such a hash of warfighting, so too has Donald Trump seemingly accomplished the impossible – to lead a goodly number of Canadians actually to think of the United States as an “enemy”! For sure, this enemy image is far from reflecting a majoritarian perspective among Canadians – we are not yet a country populated by Russians or Iranians – but the mere fact that some 10 percent of those surveyed recently could have such a dismal view of their American neighbor speaks volumes about the depths to which the affective quality of the bilateral relationship has plunged since Trump became president.[1]
Policy Series 2021-20: Donald Trump and NATO: Historic Alliance Meets A-historic President
In the presidential election of 2020, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was given a reprieve from what could very well have been a death sentence in the four years to follow. Reelection of Donald Trump would have given the anti-NATO American president the opportunity to cancel the American commitment to the mutual defense provision of the alliance and pull U.S. forces out of Europe, both of which had been suggested as possibilities during his first term.
Policy Series 2021-19: The Ideals of 1989 Carried to the Grave
In my previous piece on this topic, I argued that the revolutions of 1989 in Eurasia had instituted a new post-Cold War global order.[1] Among its characteristics were priority for human rights, and even a willingness, at times, to reject individual states’ sovereignty in order to ensure these rights, a commitment to deregulation, privatization and open markets, on both the domestic and the international level, and a hegemonic position in world affairs for the US. This hegemony was generally exercised multilaterally, via institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, (IMF), General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), NATO, and even the United Nations, which had been from the 1970s through 1989 a center of hostility toward and resistance against U.S. policies. Scarcely begun, this global order was already under severe strain in the first decade of the twenty-first century, as a result of the unilateralist and dubious military adventures of the George W. Bush administration and international institutions’ inability to cope with economic difficulties—whether the very painful and poorly functioning transition from communism to capitalism in eastern Europe or the global economic crisis of 2008-9 and its European Union (EU) sequel two years later.
Policy Series 2021-18: “Why Does Donald Trump Have So Much Trouble with the Truth? A Brief Update”
Why does Donald Trump have so much trouble with the truth? Not long after the beginning of Trump’s presidency, I weighed in with some thoughts on the matter, as part of H-Diplo’s “America and the World – 2017 and Beyond” series.[1] In that essay, I made two primary claims. First, with Trump it is difficult to distinguish deception from self-deception. Second, deception in the Trump case appears to be as much a bottom-up phenomenon as a top-down one, insofar as partisan polarization has paved the way for the misinformation that Trump thrives on.
Policy Series 2021-17: The Trump Presidency and U.S. Workers: “America First” or America Diminished?
When the Associated Press projected Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential race on November 7, I joined in the collective sigh of relief that issued forth from millions of Americans who had come to view Donald Trump as an existential threat to democracy. Yet, like many, I remained puzzled that Trump still enjoyed so much popular political support and that the ‘Blue Wave’ had not been stronger. As a labor historian, I was particularly baffled by the working- and middle-class voters who had seemingly come to view Trump as a populist hero of working people and seemed convinced by his argument that the real threat to their well-being was not the corporate elite but the cultural, political, and media elites, in combination with illegal immigrants, who were allegedly taking American jobs, and Black Lives Matter activists, who were accused of fomenting violence on American streets. To anyone schooled in the left-wing populism of the American Gilded Age, the worship of a tax-dodging Robber Baron as a savior of working people seemed ironic but also frightening. Continued white working-class and rural support for Trump and his political allies, despite their false narratives of election fraud and recent efforts to overthrow the results of a legitimate democratic election, suggest that Trumpism within the Republican Party will survive his electoral defeat.
Review Essay 54 on Burn In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution
Social science largely concerns the past. Scholars employ data in a variety of ways to understand, analyze and explain events that have already occurred. Sometimes, scholars attempt to predict the future, but the purpose of theorizing is often not prediction. Scholarly analyses are limited to the analysis of factual events, and often do not attempt to reach a general audience.
Policy Series 2021-16: Revisiting Historical Legacies of US Policy in the Middle East: The Trump Administration
It may not have been Donald Trump speaking, but it was perhaps the best possible statement of the case for his achievements in the Middle East. Addressing the Republican National Convention on August 25, 2020, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke in front of a backdrop of the old city of Jerusalem, praising Trump’s “America First” foreign policy. The Middle East took up most of the four-minute speech. Among the successes touted was the killing of “the Iranian terrorist Qasem Soleimani,” who, he claimed, was “most responsible for the murder and maiming of hundreds of American soldiers and thousands of Christians across the Middle East.” The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) caliphate, Pompeo boasted, was “wiped out,” while U.S. troops were “on their way home.” Trump exited the “disastrous nuclear deal with Iran and squeezed the Ayatollah, Hezbollah, and Hamas.” The U.S. Embassy in Israel had been moved to “this very city of God, Jerusalem, the rightful capital of the Jewish homeland.” American mediators had brokered a “historic peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.” To end the talk, he invoked the release of “[a] n American hostage, imprisoned in Turkey for two years, Pastor Andrew Brunson, [who] said upon his release that he survived his ordeal with these words of scripture, ‘Be faithful, endure, and finish well.’”[1]
H-Diplo Essay 327- Lloyd E. Ambrosius on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
Growing up on a farm in west-central Illinois, near the town of Augusta where I attended high school, I never imagined that I would become a professor of history at a major university. My father taught history at a different high school, but I took only the required course in this subject as it was less interesting than math and science. After graduation in 1959, having won a four-year state scholarship that would pay my tuition and fees, I enrolled at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, as a pre-med student in its new Edmund J. James Honors Program.
Policy Series 2021-15: U.S.-UK Relations in the Time of Trump
In November 2016, I wrote an essay for H-Diplo on the possible impact of the Trump administration on U.S.-UK relations.[1] My first paragraph included the following sentences: “If Trump himself knows what he truly plans to do – as opposed to what he would truly like to do – he has hidden it from the rest of United States. Although the British government has a long tradition of adjustment to whichever government is in power in any given country of interest, adjustment needs an object or action or policy to which to adjust. Thus far, President-elect Trump has not felt the need to provide any of them,” other than the slogans promising to put America First and Make America Great Again.
