Donald Trump’s election will be “the biggest f**k-you ever recorded in human history,” predicted the film-maker Michael Moore in the summer of 2016.[2] He reminded his Midwestern audience that it was Trump who had the audacity to meet with CEOs of Ford Motor Company and warn them: if you move your factories to Mexico, I…
Tag: Trump
Policy Roundtable 1-6: Is Liberal Internationalism Still Alive?
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.[1]
Policy Series: This is What Nationalism Looks Like
The H-Diplo/ISSF Policy Series asks, among other questions, what diplomatic history and international relations theory tell us about the future of the U.S. in the world. I attempt to answer from the historian’s side, by focusing on economic nationalism in the 1930s. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 represents the most famous case of trade protectionism…
Policy Series: The Failed Promises of 1989 and the Politics of 2016
On the night of November 9, 1989, it was apparent to everyone on the scene in Berlin, and to spectators across the world, watching on TV, that history had reached a turning point. The ramifications of the opening of the Berlin Wall, as was also widely understood at the time, would not be limited to…
Policy Series: Why Does Donald Trump Have So Much Trouble with the Truth?
A number of the essays in this series have grappled with the question of how big a departure Donald Trump’s presidency is from the theory and practice of American foreign policy and international relations more broadly. Having published a book on presidential deception not too long ago, I have been reflecting on this theme with…
Policy Series: The Appeal of ‘America First’
As with other aspects of the Trump presidency, it is impossible at this stage to predict how the day-to-day conduct of foreign policy will actually work out. But in his campaign rhetoric, and also in earlier statements over the years, Donald Trump made it clear that his predispositions are at odds with the orthodoxy that…
Policy Series: The Waning of the Post-War Order
Making sense of the present is a difficult undertaking at the best of times. It seems more especially so at the current moment. The tumult of 2016 was of a kind not seen since the ‘spring of the peoples’ in 1848. Power no longer seems to be what it was and where it was thought…
Policy Series: U.S.-Latin American Relations in the Age of Donald Trump
The election of Donald Trump seems to many to mark the death of liberal internationalism. Given the President-elect’s failure to give clear guidelines regarding what he intends to do in so many areas, however, we may be surprised by the things he chooses to do because he has yet to devote much time and attention…
Policy Series: “The Donald versus ‘The Blob’”
Donald Trump presents the most formidable challenge to the foreign policy consensus that has prevailed in the United States since World War II. We do not yet know what U.S. foreign policy will be like under the Trump administration, and it is possible it will exhibit greater continuity than many people now expect. Trump ran…
Policy Series: A Third-Image Explanation for Why Trump Now: A Response to Robert Jervis’s “President Trump and IR Theory”
I am only guessing, since no one has said as much to me, but I suspect that I was asked to participate in this policy roundtable because of my remarks about Donald Trump to The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos, which appeared in the 26 September 2016 issue: “I think we’re just at a point in…