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.
Category: Roundtables
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.
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]
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.
Policy Series 2021-14: Joe Biden and the Gibbon Paradox
In early March 2018, evangelical leaders from around the world descended on Charlotte, North Carolina, for the funeral of the renowned preacher, Reverend Billy Graham. President Donald J. Trump joined the mourners. While there, Trump had a face-to-face conversation with Graham’s grandson, Edward. Graham the younger was an Army Ranger and had served for sixteen years in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bitter about America’s endless wars, he fumed about the futility of propping up weak regimes overseas with lukewarm support at home. Trump, following a long tradition of skepticism about foreign entanglements and always in search of evidence for his convictions, found a confirming mouthpiece.
Policy Series 2021-13: Trump’s Foreign Policy Legacy
Four years ago, we wrote that Donald Trump’s presidency could spell the end of an already weakened liberal international order.[1] Now that the Trump presidency is in the rearview mirror, what can we make of what transpired for U.S. foreign policy and the global order? In this essay, we review what we wrote four years ago, survey the Trump administration’s foreign policy record, and assess how the Biden administration may – and may not be – constrained by Trump’s foreign policy legacy.
Policy Series 2021-12: What Nationalism Ended Up Looking Like
After a year of Donald Trump in the White House, and drawing on the lessons of the turn inward (by Herbert Hoover and even Franklin D. Roosevelt) during the Great Depression era, I argued that his hyper-nationalism in trade policy was inimical to U.S. economic and diplomatic interests.[1] His vocal and staged protectionism shirked decades of internationalism and threatened peace and security, as well as profits. Such economic nationalism hurt the United States, and the world, in the 1930s, and it could do so again. That turned out to be true.
Policy Series 2021-11: “America First” Meets Liberal Internationalism
Candidate Trump, and then President Trump, advocated for a dramatic change in the direction of American foreign policy, which he labelled “America First.” His vision stood in stark contrast to the liberal internationalism (LI) pursued by most presidents since World War II. For Trump, unilateralism would replace multilateralism; retrenchment would replace global engagement; pursuit of short-term, transactional American interests above all else would replace international cooperation. These dramatic changes in direction were to be accomplished through many smaller steps taken in relation to each issue area and across many countries.
Policy Series 2021-10: More of the Same, and Worse: Revisiting Donald Trump and the Limits of International Law
By the time he lost his bid for reelection, President Donald Trump had fulfilled many of his campaign promises regarding international law. On trade policy, he abolished the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and replaced it with a revised U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), and he launched a tariff war with China in hopes of making a better deal on bilateral trade. On climate change, he pulled out of the 2016 Paris Accord, as promised. As far as we know he did not fulfill his vow to defy domestic and international prohibitions on torture, as his main military advisers counseled against it, and he listened for a change. Reflecting an animus against arms control treaties with Russia, even longstanding ones negotiated by Republican predecessors, Trump withdrew the United States from the Treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) and the Open Skies Treaty, and he expressed eagerness to resume testing of nuclear weapons, an action that would violate the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, had the United States ever ratified it.
