Can IR theory help us understand what is about to happen? Can it help get us through the Age of Trump? Or, will Trump destroy IR theory in the same way that he eviscerated most accepted theories of electoral politics? In a cage match between Trump and Theory, the smart bet might be on Trump,…
Category: Policy Series
Policy Series: Donald Trump Versus American Exceptionalism: Toward the Sources of Trumpian Conduct
Is this how the Pax Americana ends? Since the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, countless commentators have answered in the affirmative. Four years after dismissing American decline as a myth, Robert Kagan now says he glimpses the “end of the 70-year-old U.S. world order.”[2] In the New York Times Magazine,…
Policy Series: Aristocracy, Oligarchy, and Donald Trump
“When a commonwealth, after warding off many great dangers, has arrived at a high pitch of prosperity and power, it is evident that, from long continuance of great wealth, the manner of life of its citizens will become more extravagant; further, rivalry for office and in other spheres of activity will become more and more…
Policy Series: Canada and the Election of Donald Trump
California and Canada have some things in common, extending far beyond the trivial fact that each political entity sports in its name the same two first letters. They are, for starters, similarly sized demographic entities, Canada’s 35 million or so people nearly matching California’s 39 million. They are each considered, with reason, to be multicultural,…
Policy Series: The Significance of the Trump Presidency
Those that did not foresee the likelihood or even the possibility of Donald Trump’s victory are going to find it hard to discipline themselves to a balanced projection of his forthcoming first term. To ardent liberals in the United States – not least most of those at the leading American universities – at worst it…
Policy Series: The Impact of the Trump Administration on U.S.-UK Relations
This essay is being written at the end of 2016, with the topic stimulating a series of reactions: bewilderment, then bemusement, then apprehension, then uncertainty, and, finally, curiosity. If President-elect Donald Trump himself knows what he truly plans to do – as opposed to what he would truly like to do – he has hidden…
Policy Series: Donald Trump and the Limits of Human Rights
The international human rights system, with its diverse global movements, is epoch-making, allowing stigma to be applied to errant states on matters of crucial global concern.[2] But promoting its exclusive relevance in the face of injustice, as if the alternative were apathy or despair, is simply not going to cut it.
Policy Series: Human Rights and the Trump Administration
Don’t tell me it doesn’t work—torture works,” then presidential candidate Donald Trump said at a February 2016 campaign event in Bluffton, South Carolina. “Okay, folks, Torture—you know, half these guys [say]: ‘Torture doesn’t work.’ Believe me, it works, Okay?”[1] Whether or not the President-elect’s promise of a return to Bush era waterboarding (or forced deportations…
Policy Series: Trump The Tweeter
If Hilary Clinton had been elected President it would have been a relatively easy to describe her foreign policy commitments, preferences, and likely responses to possible challenges. She is on record at some length on numerous issues as Senator, Secretary of State, and Democratic presidential candidate. Trump, by contrast, is a newcomer to the policy…
Policy Series: The Future of the Atlantic Alliance under President Trump
I accepted with some trepidation the kind invitation of the editors of H-Diplo to contribute a brief essay on the possible foreign-policy initiatives of the Trump administration. The candidate made only sporadic references to that topic during the presidential campaign—tirelessly repeating the slogan “America First” (in apparent ignorance of the historical context of that term)….