Donald Trump’s re-election to the American presidency has sparked serious debates over both the United States’ role in world politics and as the leader of the Liberal International Order. Despite warranted claims about Trump’s unpredictability, volatility and unreliability, he is no “isolationist”. Trump, along with the various forces behind him – corporate, intellectual, and political – remain wedded to US global power but in more unilateralist, nationalist, realist, ways, and are therefore committed to even more aggressive pursuit of US ‘vital interests’.
This means the incoming administration broadly rejects liberals’ methodology of regime change, ‘democracy’ promotion, and a liberal international order. However, even post—Cold War liberals, such as those part of the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations, have been pragmatic, and highly selective, about their commitment to multilateralism and international law. Notably, US military budgets have continued to burgeon throughout the period since 1991.
Trump has therefore intensified, broadened and mainstreamed a tendency that has been long in the making. As a ‘blunt instrument’, whose self-concept and vision has clearly sharpened since 2020, Trump falsely projects himself as the anti-war candidate while simultaneously aiming to further strengthen the US military machine under the banner of “peace through strength”. Hence, the challenges Trump offers to traditional US foreign policy will rattle allies and stir up ‘beltway’ national security elites. His Nixonian era ‘mad man’ approach to global messaging is meant to be unsettling but, ultimately, Trump remains rooted in and loyal to the goal of US global predominance – that of an American empire.
The US foreign policy establishment in crisis – of destruction and reconstruction
With the return of Trump to the White House, the ‘traditional’ US foreign policy establishment is in another one of its periodic crises. However, as Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci noted, crises are moments of destruction and reconstruction. Hence, anxious establishmentarians’ debates abound in the hallowed halls of the exclusive think tank, Ivy League university, blue-chip Wall Street corporation, bank and law firm, in the mainstream media ecosystem, and in the American state. The US establishment is seemingly besieged by enemies and critics from within and without.
America’s allies worry about what a second Trump administration might do to the G7, NATO, UN, or World Health Organisation. Global South states, particularly China, demand status and recognition, decrying “centuries of [colonial] humiliation”. At home, that establishment is held responsible for ‘endless’ wars, especially since the 1990s, including seemingly intractable conflicts such as Ukraine’s war with Russia.
The ‘traditional’ liberal internationalist foreign policy establishment under ‘threat’
The US foreign policy establishment, largely dominant since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, has had 3 major methodological-ideological characteristics that are now in crisis and flux:
- Constantly expanding and open markets, broad commitment to freer trade;
- Global economic expansionism organised under the umbrella of US-led liberal international order;
- Above underpinned by that dominant elite’s ideology – American exceptionalism, historic mission of a chosen people to improve the world.
Those three principal characteristics are now seen as less relevant or even obsolete. They are secondary to the more naked pursuit of unilateral power. The traditional principles and methods of US power in a world system dominated by the US, and its allies, are no longer sufficient to achieve or maintain America’s global primacy, and are being marginalised or thrust aside by Trumpism’s increasing insistence that the United States is not exceptional but in effect another ordinary state, albeit with extraordinary power.
Trump’s blunt challenge and Republican foreign policy tribes
Appointments in the first Trump administration to high level defence, security, and foreign policy positions, in comparison to those now being appointed and nominated in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s 2024 victory, signal a significant change in the offing. Appointees under the first Trump administration were comparable to those in previous administrations, continuing the Washington, DC, establishment trend, but by 2019 appointees were more consistent with MAGA and America First loyalists.
By 2024, nominees and appointees appear based on the ‘Fuhrer’ principle: loyal to the leader and saturated in MAGA (‘Make America Great Again’)principles and beliefs: anti-immigration, rejection of globalisation/free trade, denial of the climate crisis and question reckless military interventionism (though support greater military spending to maintain global armed superiority). A large part of this agenda also aligns with the more traditional mainstream support of the Trump-era Republican party as a whole. Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz (Secretary of State and National Security Adviser picks) resemble ‘primacists’ – believers in US global hegemony in which Washington must maintain its global leadership and military dominance, including in terms of NATO, and Ukraine, whilst allies must also provide more for global security. Other pro-Trump loyalists ‘prioritise’ one region over another – such as the Indo-Pacific over Europe, and more specifically Ukraine, while a third group constitute ‘restrainers’ who are more domestically-focused, arguing for military restraint, and have an emphatic focus on China rather than Russia. All three ‘tribes’, however, are pro-Israel, and MAGA-loyalists.
In conclusion, the second Trump administration will continue to play an aggressive role in world affairs in practically all respects. In part, a more ‘realist’ global strategy is required by the increasingly failing US social fabric – based on the effects of decades of neoliberal globalisation, which fuelled both ‘America First’ and ‘Bidenomics’. Both main parties have embraced ‘industrial policy’ to strengthen the US economy for intensified geoeconomic and geopolitical competition, mainly with China, but with other emerging states as well as the European Union and Japan.
The US is now more flexible than ever before in how it maintains its global imperium, principally through weaponising every aspect of its powers. Trump 2.0 presents as ‘disorderly’. It is a blunt force shift in methods and flexibility in observance of the rule of law, at home and abroad. The slow evolution in these directions since the end of the Cold War, presided over by successive Democratic and Republican administrations, was accelerated by Trump’s first term, and appears to be hyper-intensifying under Trump II. Trump is actively and simultaneously disordering and reordering America at home, and the world system, based on overwhelming full spectrum dominance.
We are living in an era of organic crisis and flux – of morbid symptoms, violent solutions, charismatic leaders claiming to restore lost glories – an age of danger.
Inderjeet Parmar is a professor of international politics and associate dean of research in the School of Policy and Global Affairs at City, University of London, a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and a columnist at The Wire. He is an International Fellow at the ROADS Initiative think tank, Islamabad, and author of several books including Foundations of the American Century. He is currently writing a book on the history, politics, and powers of the US foreign policy establishment.
This article was originally published on The Foreign Policy Centre.
