Chaos Reconsidered: The Liberal Order and the Future of International Politics 0231205988, 9780231205986

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Introduction, by Robert Jervis, Diane N. Labrosse, Stacie E. Goddard, and Joshua Rovner
Part I. Trump and International Relations Theory
1. The Trump Experiment: An Assessment, by Robert Jervis
2. Trump Huffed and Puffed, and Liberal International Relations Theory Blew Down, by Michael N. Barnett
3. America First? The Erosion of American Status Under Trump, by Michelle Murray
4. Has Trump Changed How We Think About American Security?, by Deborah Avant
5. Trump’s Realism, by Randall Schweller
Part II. America First
6. When Donald Met Washington: The Genesis of “Great-Power Competition”, by Emma Ashford
7. What Trump’s Nationalism Ended Up Looking Like, by Thomas W. Zeiler
8. Trump’s Presidency as History, by Ryan Irwin
9. Globalism and U.S. Foreign Relations After Trump, by Frank Ninkovich
10. The Derangements of Sovereignty: Trumpism and the Dilemmas of Interdependence, by Samuel Zipp
11. The Trump Presidency in Historical Perspective, by John A. Thompson
Part III. American Institutions and Alliances After Trump
12. Presidents, Precedents, and the Laws of War, by Matthew Evangelista
13. Trump to the Intelligence Community: You’re Fired, by Richard Immerman
14. The Trump Administration and Economic Sanctions, by Nicholas Mulder
15. Donald Trump and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Deal, by Susan Colbourn
16. Trump’s Transactional Follies: The Consequences of Treating the Arms Trade Like a Business, by Jennifer Spindel
Part IV. Trump Abroad
17. Trump and Russia: Less Than Meets the Eye, by Angela Stent
18. Trump and U.S.-China Strategic Competition as the “New” Normal, by Jonathan DiCicco
19. Engage? Trump and the Asia-Pacific, by Dayna Barnes
20. Riding the Rollercoaster: India and the Trump Years, by Tanvi Madan
21. Swaggering Home: Trump, Grenell, and Pompeo in Conflict with Germany, by William Gray
22. Death-Grip Handshakes and Flattery Diplomacy: The Macron-Trump Connection and Its Larger Implications for Alliance Politics, by Kathryn Statler
23. “Mr. Brexit”: Donald Trump and the United Kingdom’s Departure from the European Union, by Lindsay Aqui
24. The Trump Administration and the Middle East: Not Much Change, Not Much Success, by F. Gregory Gause III
25. Fences Make Bad Hombres: Trump and Latin America, by Christy Thornton
Part V. The Expanding Meaning of International Security: Human Rights, Racial Justice, and COVID-19
26. “Shithole Countries”: Was Trump’s Foreign Policy Racist?, by William I. Hitchcock
27. Rethinking Vulnerability: Structural Inequality as National Insecurity, by Jason Ludwig and Rebecca Slayton
28. Lifting the Veil on Racial Capitalism: American Foreign Policy Before and After Trump, by Nivi Manchanda
29. Racialized Threats and Security Rationales in U.S. Immigration Policies, by Audie Klotz
30. The Trump Presidency, the Question of Palestine, and Biden’s Business as Usual, by A. Dirk Moses and Victor Kattan
31. The Trump Administration’s Insidious Approach to Human Rights, by Sarah B. Snyder
Part VI. Is Liberal Internationalism Still Alive?
32. Trump’s Foreign Policy Legacy, by Joshua Busby and Jonathan Monten
33. “America First” Meets Liberal Internationalism, by Stephen Chaudoin, Helen V. Milner, and Dustin Tingley
34. Liberal Internationalism and Partisan Conflict in the Post-Trump United States, by George N. Georgarakis and Robert Y. Shapiro
Part VII. Looking Forward: The Prospects for Joe Biden’s Presidency
35. The Biden Administration and Russia: Deeper Into a U.S.-Russia Cold War, by Robert Legvold
36. Joe Biden, American Democracy, and the China Challenge, by James Goldgeier
37. Transatlantic Relations After Trump: Mutual Perceptions and Strategy in Historical Perspective, by Alessandro Brogi
38. One Eye on the Rearview Mirror: The Middle East from Trump to Biden, by James Stocker
39. Reclaiming America and Its Place in the World, by Elizabeth Economy
Part VIII. Coda
40. World History, the American President, and the Gibbon Paradox, by Jeremy Adelman
41. Trump’s Limited Legacy, by Lawrence Freedman
42. American Constraints: Trump’s “Legacy” or Inexorable History, by Charles S. Maier
43. Making Trump History, by Martin Conway
List of Contributors
Index

Citation preview

CHAOS RECONSIDERED The Liberal Order and the Future of International Politics

Edited by Robert Jervis, Diane N. Labrosse,

Stacie E. Goddard, and Joshua Rovner

C H AO S RECONSIDERED

C H AO S RECONSIDERED The Liberal Order and the Future of International Politics

EDITED BY ROBERT JERVIS, DIANE N. LABROSSE, STACIE E. GODDARD, AND JOSHUA ROVNER WITH GEORGE FUJII

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2023 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Chapter 17 was first published in different form as Angela Stent, “Trump’s Russia Legacy and Biden’s Response,” Survival: Global Politics and Strategy 63, no. 4 (2001): 55–80. It appears here with the kind permission of the editors of Survival. © 2021 The International Institute for Strategic Studies, reproduced in revised form with permission Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jervis, Robert, 1940–2021, editor. | Goddard, Stacie E., 1974– editor. | Labrosse, Diane N., editor. | Rovner, Joshua, 1976– editor. | Fujii, George, contributor. Title: Chaos reconsidered : the liberal order and the future of international politics / edited by Robert Jervis, Diane N. Labrosse, Stacie E. Goddard, and Joshua Rovner ; with George Fujii. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022058419 (print) | LCCN 2022058420 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231205986 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231205993 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231556262 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: United States—Foreign relations—2017–2021. | United States—Politics and government—2017–2021. | Trump, Donald, 1946– | Liberalism. | International organization. | World politics—21st century. Classification: LCC E912 .C532 2023 (print) | LCC E912 (ebook) | DDC 327.73009/051—dc23/eng/20230104 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022058419 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022058420 Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Noah Arlow Cover image: Shutterstock

We hope that this volume not only advances our understanding about President Donald Trump’s effect on international politics but also reflects the values and intellectual commitments of our friend and coeditor, Robert Jervis, who passed away in December 2021 while we were putting the final touches on this book. (See part 1 of the H-Diplo/ISSF tributes to Jervis, edited by Richard H. Immerman, Diane N. Labrosse, and Marc Trachtenberg, at https://issforum.org/ISSF/PDF/ISSF-Jervis-Tribute-1 .pdf, and part 2 at https://issforum.org/ISSF/PDF/ISSF-Jervis -Tribute-2.pdf.) A giant in the field of international relations, Bob was committed to asking big questions, open-minded in his search for answers, and unusually willing to update his own beliefs about international politics when presented with compelling new evidence or interpretations. Part of his unique ability to produce a wealth of original and significant work lay in his unrelenting curiosity. Jervis valued interdisciplinary work long before it became the academic norm, and he read voraciously across disciplines, especially diplomatic history. Throughout his career, he engaged with the scholarly and policy communities, particularly with practitioners who were in intelligence and diplomacy. Jervis intended his work—even the most theoretical of his writing—to be read by a policy audience. It was Bob’s efforts to encourage conversations among these sometimes fractious tribes and, in particular, between international relations scholars and diplomatic historians that led to the creation, in partnership with the editors of H-Diplo, of the online H-Diplo/International Security Studies Forum in 2009 (https://issforum.org) and to the two volumes in this Columbia University Press series. We dedicate the book to him. Stacie Goddard, Diane Labrosse, and Joshua Rovner  •

CONTENTS

Introduction 1 ROBERT JERVIS, DIANE N. LABROSSE, STACIE E. GODDARD, AND JOSHUA ROVNER

PART I. TRUMP AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY13

1. The Trump Experiment: An Assessment

15

ROBERT JERVIS

2. Trump Huffed and Puffed, and Liberal International Relations Theory Blew Down 28 M IC H AEL  N. BA R N E T T

3. America First? The Erosion of American Status Under Trump 38 M IC H EL L E M U R R AY

4. Has Trump Changed How We Think About American Security? 46 D EB OR AH AVA N T

5. Trump’s Realism

55

R ANDAL L L . S C H W E LLE R

viii

Contents

PART II. AMERICA FIRST65

6. When Donald Met Washington: The Genesis of “Great-Power Competition” 67 EM M A AS H FO R D

7. What Trump’s Nationalism Ended Up Looking Like

76

TH OM AS  W. Z E I LE R

8. Trump’s Presidency as History 82 RYAN IRWIN

9. Globalism and U.S. Foreign Relations After Trump

92

F R ANK NIN KOV I C H

10. The Derangements of Sovereignty: Trumpism and the Dilemmas of Interdependence 104 SAM UEL ZIPP

11. The Trump Presidency in Historical Perspective 116 J OH N A. THO M PS O N

PART III. AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS AND ALLIANCES AFTER TRUMP125

12. Presidents, Precedents, and the Laws of War

127

M ATTH EW E VA N G E LI STA

13. Trump to the Intelligence Community: You’re Fired

138

R IC H AR D H . I M M E R M A N

14. The Trump Administration and Economic Sanctions NIC H OL AS M U LD E R

15. Donald Trump and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Deal 161 S USAN COLBO U R N

16. Trump’s Transactional Follies: The Consequences of Treating the Arms Trade Like a Business 168 J ENNIF ER S PI N D E L

PART IV. TRUMP ABROAD181

17. Trump and Russia: Less Than Meets the Eye ANGEL A ST E N T

183

152

Contents

18. Trump and U.S.-China Strategic Competition as the “New” Normal 196 J ONATH AN M . D I C I CCO

19. Engage? Trump and the Asia-Pacific 211 DAY NA B AR N E S

20. Riding the Roller Coaster: India and the Trump Years 222 TANV I M ADA N

21. Swaggering Home: Trump, Grenell, and Pompeo in Conflict with Germany 236 WIL L IAM GL E N N G R AY

22. Death-Grip Handshakes and Flattery Diplomacy: The Macron-Trump Connection and Its Larger Implications for Alliance Politics 248 KATH RY N C . STAT LE R

23. “Mr. Brexit”: Donald Trump and the United Kingdom’s Departure from the European Union 260 L INDSAY AQ U I

24. The Trump Administration and the Middle East: Not Much Change, Not Much Success 270 F. GR EGORY G AU S E I I I

25. Fences Make Bad Hombres: Trump and Latin America

278

C H R ISTY TH O R N TO N

PART V. THE EXPANDING MEANING OF INTERNATIONAL SECURITY: HUMAN RIGHTS, RACIAL JUSTICE, AND COVID- 19291

26. “Shithole Countries”: Was Trump’s Foreign Policy Racist?

293

WIL L IAM  I. HI TC H CO C K

27. Rethinking Vulnerability: Structural Inequality as National Insecurity 304 JAS ON LUDW I G A N D R E BE CC A S LAY TO N

28. Lifting the Veil on Racial Capitalism: American Foreign Policy Before and After Trump 318 NIV I M ANC H A N DA

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29. Racialized Threats and Security Rationales in U.S. Immigration Policies 325 AUD IE K LOTZ

30. The Trump Presidency, the Question of Palestine, and Biden’s Business as Usual 332 A. DIRK MOSES AND VICTOR KATTAN

31. The Trump Administration’s Insidious Approach to Human Rights 348 SAR AH  B . S N Y D E R

PART VI. IS LIBERAL INTERNATIONALISM STILL ALIVE?357

32. Trump’s Foreign Policy Legacy

359

JOSHUA BUSBY AND JONATHAN MONTEN

33. “America First” Meets Liberal Internationalism 369 STEP H EN CH AU D O I N , H E LE N   V. M I LN E R , A N D DUST I N T I N GLEY

34. Liberal Internationalism and Partisan Conflict in the Post-Trump United States 383 GEORGE N. GEORGARAKIS AND ROBERT Y. SHAPIRO

PART VII. LOOKING FORWARD: THE PROSPECTS FOR JOE BIDEN’S PRESIDENCY399

35. The Biden Administration and Russia: Deeper Into a U.S.-Russia Cold War 401 ROBERT LEGVOLD

36. Joe Biden, American Democracy, and the China Challenge

415

JAM ES GOL D G E I E R

37. Transatlantic Relations After Trump: Mutual Perceptions and Strategy in Historical Perspective 424 AL ESSAND R O BR O G I

38. One Eye on the Rearview Mirror: The Middle East from Trump to Biden 447 JAM ES R . STO C K E R

39. Reclaiming America and Its Place in the World EL IZAB ETH E CO N O M Y

458

Contents

xi

PART VIII. CODA467

40. World History, the American President, and the Gibbon Paradox 469 J ER EM Y AD E LM A N

41. Trump’s Limited Legacy

480

L AWR ENC E FR E E D M A N

42. American Constraints: Trump’s “Legacy” or Inexorable History C H AR L ES  S . M A I E R

43. Making Trump History 498 MARTIN CONWAY

List of Contributors Index 513

505

488

C H AO S RECONSIDERED

INTRODUCTION R O B E R T J E RV I S , D IA N E N . L A B R OS S E , S TACI E E .  G O D DA R D, A N D J OS H UA R OV N E R

F

our years ago, the H-Diplo/ISSF editors commissioned a set of essays from international relations scholars and diplomatic historians on the shocking outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. They were published in Chaos in the Liberal Order.1 At the time, many scholars and pundits focused on the implications of Donald Trump’s election for U.S. politics—the president’s forceful anti-immigration policies, his tacit encouragement of white supremacists, and his challenges to the rule of law. We wondered what a Donald Trump presidency meant for international politics and the global world order. Even before he was elected, Trump made it clear that he disdained the norms and customs of the liberal international order, as it is commonly known, as well as the postwar institutions that promoted traditional liberal values. During his campaign, Trump promised to correct “failed trade policies,” rejecting free-trade agreements and embracing trade wars and protectionist policies. He called the U.S.-led alliance structure obsolete, with NATO in particular being “disproportionately too expensive (and unfair) for the U.S.”2 For these reasons, Trump’s election in 2016 cast doubt on the future course of U.S. foreign policy. If he made good on his bombastic campaign rhetoric, Washington would withdraw its support for longstanding international norms and for decades-old international institutions. “Trump seeks nothing less than ending the U.S.-led liberal order,” Thomas Wright argued, “freeing America from its international commitments.”3 In Chaos in the Liberal Order, the essayists analyzed the extent to which Trump’s rhetoric and emerging policies departed from precedents and norms and asked whether Trump’s influence

2

Introduction

would prove to be merely a blip or would in fact radically transform U.S. foreign policy and international relations more generally. Although most of the essayists argued that tradition and institutional norms would hold, there was no consensus. If Chaos in the Liberal Order offered predictions, Chaos Reconsidered represents a moment of reflection. With 2020 came Trump’s chaotic loss and the election of Joe Biden, a president who seems to operate—at least on the surface— firmly in the American tradition of liberal foreign policy.4 The contributors here address several key questions. What did the Trump presidency and Trump’s embrace of nationalism and populism mean for our understanding of the liberal international order? How did Trump’s “America First” foreign policy change relations with U.S. allies and with liberal institutions more generally? What are the long-term effects of the Trump years for diplomacy abroad, with both strategic partners and competitors? What are the implications of the Capitol riot and the racism and norm busting of Trump’s presidency, along with its failed response to the COVID-19 pandemic, for the ability of the United States to lead the liberal international order? And, looking forward, to what extent is a Biden administration likely or able to rebuild the reputation and leadership abilities of the United States? Will China’s assertiveness cause U.S. allies to rally around traditional liberal themes? Will Russia’s invasion of Ukraine breathe new life into old liberal institutions?

An Interdisciplinary Response to the Trump Moment In his initial response to Trump’s 2016 election, Robert Jervis captured the feeling of bizarre historical dislocation. Yet when other analysts were scrambling for purchase, he saw an opportunity for genuinely interdisciplinary analysis, noting that “I never thought that I would write the phrase ‘President Trump,’ let alone liken it to IR theory. But the former is a great opportunity for the latter.” Indeed, in Chaos, he points out that “whatever else is true of Donald Trump’s presidency, it offers a great opportunity to test theories of international relations. . . . Now that he is in office, will he carry out radically different policies? Or will domestic and international constraints prevail? We are in the process of running an experiment, and even if the results are not likely to be entirely unambiguous, they should provide us with real evidence.”5 How we interpret that evidence and what counts as a radically different policy depend on our understanding of the past. The notion that Trump represented a sharp turn implies that there was a long stretch of policy continuity beforehand. It also implies that his beliefs and preferences would have been outside the bounds of reasonable debate in past administrations. Yet these assumptions require both theoretical and historical scrutiny. Trump’s crude and

Introduction

3

belligerent language certainly shocked longtime observers of U.S. foreign policy, but this does not necessarily mean that his approach was unprecedented. Indeed, it is possible that Trump’s style obscured the fact that in terms of substance his policies were hardly unique or novel. Our approach to understanding Trump and the world relies on a dialogue between IR theorists and historians. The former generate ideas about the causes of consequences of state actions; the latter put those ideas to the test. Historians also act as an intellectual guard against presentism, which is always a looming danger for analysts who focus on contemporary international affairs. Because the president’s behavior was so utterly outlandish, this is particularly important for evaluating America and the world before and after Trump. It is possible that his actions did in fact symbolize a deeper shift in international relations, but it is also possible that they were superficial and largely meaningless. Grounding our analysis of the Trump presidency in the past is essential for an understanding of this key difference. Of course, the dialogue among theorists and historians is not as simple as the stylized version just outlined. IR theorists are serious about history, and historians are quite capable of thinking theoretically. Some of the most important and lasting historical analyses come from trained political scientists, after all, and some of the most provocative theories come from historians. Encouraging conversations among these scholars can lead to more creative approaches to understanding the present as well as the past. We believe they will help readers put the Trump years in context and offer some guideposts for those who wonder about the future of the international order.

The Liberal Order and Trump’s Nationalist Turn in Theory and History The Trump presidency certainly generated questions for scholars who had argued for the resilience of the liberal international order. Most scholars agree that in the wake of World War II, the United States led the world in establishing a liberal international order, putting in place “settled rules and arrangements between states that define and guide their interaction.”6 The United States used its economic and diplomatic influence to promote free markets and democracy across the globe. It also used its military power to “isolate aggressive regimes and prevent them from upsetting a liberalizing global order.”7 It exercised its leadership in international forums to punish human rights abuses, broaden and deepen international law, and promote transnational cooperation to address common challenges. Scholars did not all agree that the U.S. pursuit of the liberal order was sincere. While some emphasized the benefits of an order designed to encourage trade, democracy, and diplomacy through multilateral

4

Introduction

institutions,8 others charged that U.S. appeals to a liberal international order were based upon little more than a self-serving and often dangerous myth.9 But whatever the substance of these debates, a general consensus held that there was a liberal international order and that U.S. leaders—whether on the basis of principle or power—would continue to support a foreign policy dedicated to preserving that order. Enter Trump, who seemed committed to tearing down the liberal order. He withdrew the U.S. from key agreements and institutions, such as the Paris Climate Accord, and hobbled others, such as the World Trade Organization. He dismissed NATO as outdated and called U.S. allies free riders. He called for a turn away from globalism and back toward U.S. nationalism. He also embraced and supported Brexit, an event that some scholars suggest has signaled the demise of the liberal order.10 As Jervis argued, no international relations theory predicted the ability of a single individual to challenge the fundamental norms and rules of the liberal order in this way. Liberal institutionalist theorists certainly saw the American liberal order as resilient, as “easy to join and hard to overturn.”11 Realists might have been skeptical: according to their theories, liberal norms depend on the support of dominant states, and as relative power shifted away from those states, the norms would atrophy. But it was material shifts in power—not a single individual and his nationalist ideology—that would lead to the order’s demise. Historians too wrestled with questions about Trump’s nationalism and the liberal international order. Like their critical IR theory counterparts, many asked whether it was genuinely liberal at all, given the long history of decidedly illiberal policies, as well as longstanding patterns of U.S. trade and support for international institutions, both of which are pillars of the liberal international order. In some ways, Trump’s antiglobalist stance might have presented less of a departure for American foreign policy than it appeared. And even if Trump’s appeals to nationalism and populism were uniquely disruptive, they might still have been rooted deep in U.S. social and political processes that long preceded his presidency. Careful attention to past practices is necessary to determine whether Trump constituted a profound challenge to the order.

Trump and the Practice of U.S. Foreign Policy: Allies and Competitors in the International Order International observers had become accustomed to a certain brand of American diplomacy. U.S. presidents from both parties have been reliable supporters of international institutions and sturdy champions of liberal values. To be sure, U.S. policy sometimes deviated from these lofty principles. Cold War presidents violated free-trade ideals, embraced covert action, and bankrolled illiberal regimes. Yet they cast these actions as temporary expedients in the long-term

Introduction

5

effort to contain Soviet communism and thus as necessary evils in the service of a greater goal. And whatever their actions, the liberal legitimation of U.S. foreign policy was consistent.12 Declarations of support for common values and shared commitments underwrote the U.S. effort to sustain the postwar international order. There may have been a gap between U.S. words and deeds, but allies were willing to forgive a little hypocrisy.13 Such is the nature of international politics. According to some observers, the image of America as a benign liberal superpower, one whose excesses might be forgiven, was hard to sustain after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Overwhelming U.S. military and economic advantages would surely cause other states to be wary of U.S. adventurism, no matter how it justified its actions.14 Others, however, believed that smaller states would tolerate the unequal distribution of power because the United States had bound itself to international institutions. These commitments made it inherently less threatening than hegemons of the past.15 Yet the aggressive response to the September 11, 2001, attacks and the George W. Bush administration’s preference for “coalitions of the willing” in place of permanent alliances seemed to foreshadow an end to the institutional grand bargain that had prevented serious balancing against U.S. power. These two trends converged in 2016. Donald Trump’s election seemed to reveal the U.S. preference for unilateralism, once and for all, and it caused foreign leaders to question their historic trust in the United States.16 Trump had no interest in projecting a friendly image to U.S. allies. Instead of praising strategic partners who provided ground for American bases, he issued blistering attacks against the states he described as free riders and the institutions that gave them influence. Instead of offering familiar bromides about the staying power of shared values, Trump promised a kind of transactional diplomacy, in which deals among states could be negotiated, renegotiated, or abandoned altogether. The contributors to this volume reflect on how Trump’s departures from liberal foreign policy shaped relations with allies and partners. Did their views of America’s image change as a result of Trump’s provocations? Did he cause them to reassess their views, or did they think that Washington had already chosen unilateralism? And if it was the latter, how much did Trump cause this shift in relations, or was it a symptom of other causes? Might it be that Trump’s rhetoric pulled back the curtain on a change in U.S. foreign policy that was already well underway before his election? Could Trump’s policies toward U.S. allies and partners simply reflect changes in the distribution of power, an inevitable return to national identity? Finally, the contributors grapple with the question of America’s image abroad after the Trump administration. It may be that Trump was an aberration. He won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote, after all, and the

6

Introduction

unusual circumstances of his victory might have encouraged foreign observers to be cautious about drawing grand conclusions about its meaning. Trump’s successor, moreover, is a trusted and decades-long fixture in the U.S. foreign policy establishment. Whatever U.S. partners think of President Joe Biden’s policy choices, they most likely do not doubt his basic commitment to the postwar order. Upon taking office, Biden declared that “America is back,” and he launched a deliberate effort to restore America’s image. Yet many of our contributors question whether longtime partners in the liberal order will be confident that Biden can accomplish this restoration—or even win a second term. As of this writing, he had not completely overcome that skepticism. And then there is the question of the Trump effect on the relationship with strategic competitors of the United States, especially Russia and China. The shift toward talking about Russia and China as strategic competitors preceded Trump; President Barack Obama “pivoted” to Asia in his first term and levied sanctions against Russia in his second. The Trump administration went further, centering “Great Power Competition” as the organizing principle of the 2017 National Security Strategy.17 Despite his public criticism of American allies, Trump actually increased the military presence of the U.S. in Europe and Asia, reinforcing the country’s extended deterrence commitments. The Biden administration has continued this approach. As of this writing, it, along with the United States’ traditional allies in the European Union and NATO, is actively opposing Russian president Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine and dissuading China from acting against Taiwan.18 Going forward, Russia and China have two basic options for responding. The first is to back down in the face of U.S. pressure. The second is to escalate. International relations theory provides models that describe and explain these choices. The deterrence model holds that states are impressed by forward displays of military power and will only restrain themselves if they fear the consequences of action. Efforts to preserve the status quo require a demonstrated willingness to fight for it. By contrast, the spiral model holds that states are more likely to lash out if they are under threat. They cannot be sure that their rivals are only interested in preserving the status quo. Instead, they increasingly feel that their own security is at stake and are impelled to take greater risks. A dangerous spiral of mutual hostility and mistrust ensues.19 Great-power competition has also revived the possibility of nuclear conflict. The United States, Russia, and China have invested in modernizing their nuclear arsenals over the last twenty years. The United States has developed extremely accurate warheads, supported by an impressive array of computing technologies and remote sensors, which might cause its leaders to believe that they can fight a nuclear war without suffering nuclear retaliation. Meanwhile, China and Russia have diversified their nuclear capabilities in order to assure the survival of their own forces. And all three great powers have invested in cyberspace

Introduction

7

capabilities that some scholars view as destabilizing: cyberattacks against enemy communications in the early stages of war might cause leaders to lash out in fear and frustration.20 Prewar confidence in fighting capabilities might give way to panic after the first volley. Critics have recently sounded the alarm about the danger of escalation if great-power competition transforms into war, echoing earlier warnings from the Cold War.21 These precedents suggest that something deeper than the Trump phenomenon is at work, even if Trump’s bellicose rhetoric may have accelerated the process.

Trump and a Changing International System Great-power politics have long occupied the attention of diplomatic historians and IR theorists. The theoretical issues animating debates over Russia and China are familiar: alliance demands, deterrence requirements, stability, arms control, and so on. But these policy debates are taking place at a time in which scholars are challenging our traditional understanding of security. Many of the contributors to this volume point out that despite the Trump administration’s focus on “conventional” IR issues, international relations under Trump encompassed a wide range of social issues.22 Transnational social movements grew alongside transnational security threats during the Trump years. The Women’s Marches and the #metoo movement highlighted stubborn patterns of inequality and ongoing sexual misconduct. The scale of the marches and the speed at which #metoo became a household hashtag suggest a serious challenge to the gender hierarchy in international politics. Later, the Black Lives Matter protests forced critical debates about race and politics in the United States. Like the Women’s Marches, they were also noteworthy because the protesters’ message resonated globally. There was something remarkable about witnessing protesters in distant capitals unite in response to George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, Minnesota. These movements forced a reconsideration of the meaning of security. Traditionally, such theories focused on national security and military conflict, narrowly defined. But the scale and intensity of the protests suggest that for most individuals, insecurity comes not from foreign armies but from domestic inequality. Some scholars argue that it makes little sense to talk about national security when so many citizens feel unsafe. Students of international security stand to benefit from deeper dialogue with students of human security.23 The converse is also true, given that states sometimes intervene abroad in order to protect vulnerable groups. Two other nontraditional security issues loomed over the Trump administration: climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic. Climate change was hardly a new problem when Trump took office, but extreme weather events

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became more frequent during his tenure: bitter cold snaps, bizarre heat waves, fires, and floods. Concerned scientists called for immediate policy action, which Trump resisted, in part because he ran for election as a climate change denier and also because he believed that the worst climate offenders were countries like China, who stood to benefit from anything that slowed the U.S. economy. President Biden entered office declaring his commitment to meaningful action on climate change. Although this was a relief to like-minded world leaders, it remains unclear whether he and other sympathetic leaders can stem the tide. Because climate change is a global problem, progress will require durable international cooperation. Resurgent nationalism and great-power competition may, however, get in the way. The same is true for COVID-19. As of this writing, the virus has killed over six million people worldwide, including one million Americans, which in part reflects the Trump administration’s initial denial of the seriousness of the pandemic. The virus has also mutated into several highly contagious variants, leaving millions more at risk of infection, long-term illness, and death. Effective vaccines, which were developed in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany and the European Union, have yet to be made widely available in large parts of the globe, and large unvaccinated populations have made viral mutations more likely. Vaccines developed by China and Russia proved to be of low efficacy. Critics warn that the uneven distribution of vaccines of varying efficacy will prolong the pandemic, but practical and political disputes made cooperation difficult. The race for vaccines took on a national character rather than a global effort to coordinate vaccine development in order to produce and distribute the most promising shots. Great powers also continue to struggle to share information; mistrust abounds. Climate change and COVID-19 highlight the problem of complexity and unexpected feedback. Domestic policies affect the international system; system effects complicate domestic policy making. Decisions to manage problems at home create or exacerbate problems abroad in ways that are not always predictable, and international responses constrain the menu of subsequent options. Seemingly routine decisions (for example, modifying regulatory standards for industry) have lasting implications for international coordination. System effects are nonlinear in interconnected systems and thus hard to manage. As the international system becomes more complex, the lines between domestic and foreign issues are blurred, as are the relations between cause and effect. Even the most judicious policy makers will struggle to maintain control.24 The contributors to this volume are almost all critical of Trump’s response to these transnational social issues. They agree that his rhetoric stoked racial tensions in the United States and may have deepened racial divides abroad. Trump’s inconsistent response to COVID-19 was partly a result of his disdain for institutions domestic and international. Transnational issues are inherently

Introduction

9

hard to manage, to be sure, but critics might be more charitable if Trump had expressed more seriousness about them. The essayists have had less time to evaluate Biden’s effort, finding that thus far he has worked, to the extent that is possible, to restore traditional U.S. alliances and partnerships as well as confidence in U.S. leadership, especially given his response to Russian aggression against Ukraine. Even so, most agree that Biden is digging out from a very deep hole.

Looking Forward and Back: The Liberal Order and International Relations Theory in a Post-Trump World What did four years of Trump teach us about international politics today, and what if anything do they portend? As with the first volume, there is no consensus. And as before, this is hardly surprising. Most of the authors are critical of Trump, arguing that he did serious damage to America’s position and prestige. A minority disagree, seeing his blunt nationalist rhetoric as a necessary corrective to past hypocrisy. (Interestingly, Jonathan M. DiCicco notes in chapter 18 a similar perspective among Beijing officials. They did not view Trump as friendly, but at least they understood him.) And still others wonder if the Trump administration will have lasting impact. Trump’s disinterest in the mechanics of policy making might have limited his influence, at least for now. A second Trump presidency or the rise of a pro-Trump leader will bring the debate roaring back. In the meantime, scholars must rely on their own theories to assess the ongoing Biden administration. Those who remain confident in the underlying rationale of the liberal order are confident Biden can make good on his promises to allies and partners. Critics of the order are doubtful not because of his policy or diplomatic shortcomings but because the structural forces that encouraged cooperation are no longer present. Whatever the outcome, it is safe to say that the next decade will be a hard test for the postwar order. The rise of nationalism, the return of great-power rivalry, and the increasing complexity of transnational threats will strain the alliances and institutions that Washington spent so long assembling. The liberal order may have outlasted Trump, but it has not outlasted the structural and domestic politics that brought him to power.

✳✳✳ When we commissioned essays for this volume, we hoped to shed light on the Trump administration’s lasting impact on U.S. grand strategy and international politics. It is clear that, much like in the first volume, there is no absolute

10

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consensus in the pages that follow, even if Putin’s war is suggesting a new coherence and strength for the liberal international order. As noted earlier, Jervis concludes that “we cannot fully judge the Trump experiment at the end of his term. The impact of what he has said and done will last longer and, for better and for worse, will carry over into the Biden presidency and perhaps beyond.” We cannot, as Jervis tells us, provide a clear and easy answer. But this is not unusual. “As in so many cases of history and international politics,” he writes, “at this point all I can do is to raise the question.” Our authors all follow Jervis’s charge to illuminate the important questions, offering invaluable guideposts and commentary for scholars and students alike. Sadly, we have to do without an analysis by Jervis of the consequences of Putin’s war, a topic on which he would have had much of value and insight to say.

Notes 1. Robert Jervis, Francis J. Gavin, Joshua Rovner, and Diane Labrosse, eds., Chaos in the Liberal Order: The Trump Presidency and International Politics in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 2. For the “failed trade policies, see “Trump Nominates Robert Lighthizer as U.S. Trade Representative,” PBS Newshour, January  03 2017, https://www.pbs.org /newshour /politics/trump-nominates-robert-lighthizer-u-s-trade-representative; for the statement on NATO, Donald  J. Trump, Twitter, March  27, 2016, 14:23:51, https://www .presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/tweets-march-27-2016. For an analysis of NATO, see chapter 15, by Susan Colbourn, in this volume. 3. Thomas Wright, “Trump’s 19th Century Foreign Policy,” Politico, January 20, 2016. 4. Although, as some of the authors in this volume discuss, Biden’s policies—especially his focus on great-power competition—suggest a step back from a universal liberal order. See, for example, Emma Ashford, chapter 6 in this volume. 5. Robert Jervis, “President Trump and IR Theory,” H-Diplo/ ISSF Policy Series, ed. D.  Labrosse, “America and the World—2017 and Beyond, Introductory 2 January 2017,” https://issforum.org /ISSF/PDF/Policy-Roundtable-1-5B.pdf; Robert Jervis, “Trump and International Relations Theory,” in Chaos in the Liberal Order, 3. 6. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 12. 7. Hal Brands, Making the Unipolar Moment: US Foreign Policy and the Rise of the Post– Cold War Order (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2016), 334. 8. See for example, Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan; Martha Finnemore, “Legitimacy, Hypocrisy, and the Social Structure of Unipolarity,” World Politics 61, no. 1 (2009): 58–85. 9. See for example, John Mearsheimer, “Bound to Fail: the Rise and Fall of the Liberal International Order,” International Security 43, no. 4: 7–50; Rebecca Adler-Nissen and Ayse Zarakol, “Struggles for Recognition: the Liberal International Order and the Merger of Its Discontents,” International Organization 75, no. 2 (Spring 2021): 611–34. See also Nivi Manchanda, chapter 28 in this volume. 10. See, for example, Stephen M. Walt, “The Collapse of the Liberal World Order,” Foreign Policy (online), June 16, 2016; https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/26/the-collapse

Introduction

11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

11

-of-the-liberal-world-order-european-union-brexit-donald-trump/; and Sebastian Mallaby, “Britain’s Awful Vote May Be a Tipping Point,” Washington Post, June 24, 2016. G. John Ikenberry, “Why the Liberal World Order Will Survive,” Ethics & International Affairs 32, no. 1 (2018): 25. See, for example, Stacie E. Goddard and Ronald Krebs, “Legitimating Primacy After the Cold War: How Liberal Talk Matters to Foreign Policy,” in Before and After the Fall, World Politics and the End of the Cold War, ed. Nuno Monteiro and Fritz Bartel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). Finnemore, “Legitimacy, Hypocrisy, and the Social Structure of Unipolarity.” Examples include Nuno P. Monteiro, “Unrest Assured: Why Unipolarity Is Not Peaceful,” International Security 36, no. 3 (2011): 9–40; and Stephen M. Walt, Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (New York: Norton, 2005). Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan. See also Rebecca Lissner and Mira Rapp-Hooper, An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for Twenty-First-Century Order (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020). See, for example, Joshua Busby and Jonathan Monten, chapter 32 in this volume. Office of the President, “National Security Strategy of the United States,” December 2017, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content /uploads/2017/12/ NSS -Final -12-18-2017-0905.pdf. Some commentators have found in the U.S. response to Putin a veiled threat to China. See, for instance, Yuan-kang Wang, “The Ukraine War and China’s Second Strategic Opportunity,” H-Diplo Essay 427, Commentary Series on Putin’s War, ed. D. Labrosse, https://hdiplo.org /to/E427. Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976). Ben Buchanan and Fiona S. Cunningham, “Preparing the Cyber Battlefield: Assessing a Novel Escalation Risk in a Sino-American Crisis,” Texas National Security Review 3, no. 4 (Fall 2020): 54–81; James Johnson, “The AI-Cyber Nexus: Implications for Military Escalation, Deterrence, and Strategic Stability,” Journal of Cyber Policy 4, no. 3 (September 2019): 442– 60; and Erik Gartzke and Jon R. Lindsay, “Thermonuclear Cyberwar,” Journal of Cybersecurity 3, no. 1 (February 2017): 37–48. Robert Jervis, The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). See, for example, Deborah Avant, chapter 4 in this volume. Variations on this theme include Richard Ullman, “Redefining Security,” International Security 8, no. 1 (1983): 123–53; Jessica Tuchman Mathews, “Redefining Security,” Foreign Affairs 68 (Spring 1989): 162–77; and Lincoln C. Chen, Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, and Ellen Seidensticker eds., Human Insecurity in a Global World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Robert Jervis, System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

PART I

TRUMP AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY

Editors’ Note The essays in this volume analyze the Trump presidency from seven perspectives. In this first section, using Robert Jervis’s opening chapter as a framing device, our contributors reflect on what Trump’s presidency tells us about international relations theory and its ability to interpret Trump’s effects on the liberal international order. Jervis sees a muddy picture, one where Trump was at times constrained by international and domestic politics while at other moments leaving an indelible mark. He wonders, disconcertingly, what might have happened had Trump been advised and supported by competent staff and advisors. Many of our essayists see Trump’s policies as a critical challenge to IR theory. In chapter 2, “Trump Huffed and Puffed, and Liberal International Relations Theory Blew Down,” Michael Barnett argues that Trump’s presidency revealed unforeseen weaknesses in IR theories, in particular in those that equate liberalism with teleological progress. He calls for a rethinking of many of the standards and norms in IR and concludes that “for those IR scholars who continue to categorize the United States in the way it prefers to be seen rather than the way it is, it is time to remove the blinders, relax the faith in progress, and let the darkness in.” (Barnett’s comments link well to those of Audie Klotz in chapter 29, from part 5.) Barnett and Deborah Avant (chapter 4) emphasize the ways that the Trump presidency exposed the less visible structures—most notably, racial inequities—that underpin the liberal order. Michelle Murray (chapter 3)

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draws from status theory to analyze how Trump’s behavior undercut friendship relationships that were sustaining the U.S.-led order, finding that “the United States no longer enjoys the benefit of the doubt about its foreign policy intentions.” While Randall Schweller (chapter 5) agrees that the order has changed, he shifts our focus away from Trump and toward changes in the international distribution of power. In the book’s only positive assessment of Trump, “Trump’s Realism,” Schweller argues that the president was both a symptom and an agent of change. He concludes that “dramatic shifts of international structure explain why the United States has abandoned its leadership role and is turning inward. Trump contributed to the irreversible nature of the [Liberal International Order]’s demise. He not only challenged Republican orthodoxy but also blew up its establishment, making Trumpism virtually impossible to dislodge.”

CHAPTER 1

THE TRUMP EXPERIMENT An Assessment R O B E R T J E RV I S

F

our years ago I wrote that the Trump presidency would provide a test for many IR theories.1 It was clear from Trump’s campaign and his personal style that both his policy preferences and his methods of operation were outside of the political mainstream, and indeed this was a major part of his appeal to voters, even if they did not necessarily approve or even know of the specific policies he was advocating. What made his period in office so valuable to IR scholars, even if they disapproved of him and what he sought to do, is that it provided insight into the classic arguments about how much freedom of action an American president has and the level of constraint domestic interests and the international system will apply. On this topic I found Kenneth Waltz’s well-known levels-of-analysis framework particularly useful.2 Here I want to discuss the results of the experiment and then turn briefly to what this means for the Biden presidency. Even in the laboratory, where scientists can clean their test tubes, the results of experiments often are unclear and susceptible to multiple interpretations. So in this case we should not be surprised that we—or at least I—see a muddy picture. One complication is that the experiment was not run under ideal conditions. Trump not only had unusual views but also was inexperienced in running a large and complex organization and had a short attention span for most issues. Richard Neustadt famously reported that President Harry Truman thought that his successor would not be able to manage the executive branch: “He’ll sit here, and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen.”3 Truman underestimated Eisenhower, but

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his prediction applies years later to Trump, in part because many of the people he appointed to high positions did not share his views. This was most obviously the case with two of his national security advisors, H. R. McMaster and John Bolton, but it was also true for Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and, to a lesser but still significant extent, Tillerson’s successor, Michael Pompeo. The old adage that personnel equals policy has a great deal of truth to it. The puzzle here, of course, is why Trump paid so little attention to the policy views of those he was appointing. Whatever the reason, the very idiosyncrasies that meant that Trump would test our theories hindered his ability to act effectively. Although he had many unconventional ideas, he seems to have held them with varying intensity, and so I would expect the Trump effect to be greatest in the areas that he cared most about, where he appointed subordinates who shared his views and values and where his views were implemented by agencies staffed by people with a supportive outlook. On balance, I think the picture is mixed. Unlike the case with some presidential transitions, the inauguration of Donald Trump brought a number of obvious, important, and dramatic changes to American policy. It would be hard to argue that an administration led by the Democratic Party nominee, Hillary Clinton, would have behaved in the same way. On the other hand, some realities proved obdurate. Central to Trump’s agenda was the notion of “America First.” (When he initially used this slogan, many observers, myself included, thought he would soon drop it because of its association with pre–World War II isolationism and, to a lesser but still significant extent, antisemitism.) It represented the belief that for years the United States had been taken advantage of not only by adversaries but also by allies who had been free riders on American efforts to help them and to provide public goods. For Trump, the glaring example was trade, with the argument that American negotiators had been played for suckers and that this explained the loss of jobs, especially in the manufacturing sector, that had led to so much misery in the country. Here Trump not only cared deeply but also appointed people who shared his outlook, such as White House advisor Peter Navarro and Special Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer; this partly explains why they were among the minority of his appointees who served for all four years. As a result, his administration followed very different policies from those of his predecessors. Using the rationale of national security, he applied tariffs to imports from allies, which had never been done before and which most observers felt was unjustified and destructive, and he also applied extensive tariffs to imports from China, with significant costs imposed on consumers (despite Trump’s claims to the contrary). At least as important a part of the America First agenda were the restrictions applied to migration, especially from Mexico and Central America as well

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as from predominantly Muslim countries. In parallel, he cut way back on admitting refugees and granting green cards, policy changes that received less attention from the media. Here too success was facilitated by his appointment of subordinates who shared his values. What he was able to do in these two areas counts against the argument that presidents are highly constrained. What is particularly significant is that Trump’s policies not only broke from the past but also were opposed by powerful domestic interests, especially in the business community. Immigration, both legal and illegal, fuels large segments of the U.S. economy, and the groups that benefit are fairly well organized. As far as trade is concerned, although some industries were directly protected supported his moves, the business community as a whole strongly opposed the administration’s protectionism. Our standard theories of policy making and the distribution of power in the United States indicate that those industries should prevail. In some instances they did. The revisions of NAFTA were minor, and even higher tariffs were possible. Nevertheless, the extent of the trade wars and the restrictions on immigration show the limits of the power of even strong domestic interests in the face of a committed president who is supported by the rest of the executive branch. One obvious reply is that while the organized business interests that usually prevail were indeed overridden, larger if more diffuse domestic interests supported and drove these policies. Anti-immigrant and protectionist sentiments were central to Trump’s election, and indeed even Hillary Clinton felt the need to renounce her previous free-trade positions. So it would not be correct to say that the domestic sources of foreign policy were weak. Rather, they underpinned Trump’s popularity and power as well as his policies in this area. There certainly is something to this. Nevertheless, I think most of our standard theories would have credited the business interests with more influence than in fact they were able to exercise. Trump did break the mold here. International institutions are another America First arena in which Trump exerted himself. Here the restraints were from both international and domestic sources, and Trump’s record is mixed. He withdrew from the 2016 Paris agreement on climate change relatively easily, although the consequences of doing so in terms of actual changes in the release of greenhouse gases are unclear. There were significant changes from the Obama years, but they resulted from domestic deregulation, not renouncing international agreements. Most dramatically, of course, Trump withdrew from the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), with major consequences in terms of Iran’s breaching many of the limits that it had pledged to respect (although still stopping short of a nuclear weapon) and producing friction with allies who were forced to choose between cutting trade with Iran or facing painful secondary sanctions from the United States. Although elite foreign policy opinion (the “foreign policy establishment,” now known as the

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“blob”) strongly opposed the move, it had little political power, and so its impotence did not disturb significant IR theories (although one could argue that the case counts against Stephen Walt’s arguments about the power of the blob).4 The international pressures to stay in the JCPOA, however, were strong, as exemplified by the flurry of visits by European leaders in the weeks before the final decision, and so Trump’s willingness to act in the face of them is significant. (Although it would be a digression to follow this thread here, it is interesting that there was speculation that Trump might not have withdrawn had he not had to sign sanctions waivers every six months, giving him a greater personal involvement.) On this issue, it was easier for Trump to fend off external pressure because his top advisors were critical of the agreement and withdrawing did not require the sustained implementing action of officials lower in the bureaucracy who supported it. The World Trade Organization (WTO) was also a target of Trump’s ire, and here too he was able to overcome significant international opposition to weaken the organization, if not to construct a different arrangement. As in the related area of tariffs, legislation had delegated a great deal of power to the executive branch, and Trump’s subordinates shared his disdain for the WTO. Furthermore, he could undermine the institution by simply refusing to approve appointments to the dispute-resolution panels rather than having to take a series of positive acts that might have required others’ assent. Here too, Trump showed that a committed president can ignore established practices that have widespread support in the international community. He also withdrew from the World Health Organization (WHO), doing so less on the grounds that it infringed on U.S. sovereignty than on the claim that it was excessively influenced by China, especially in its shielding the latter from the blame for the coronavirus outbreak. Here he was also unrestrained by the significant international and domestic opposition, and his move was facilitated by the fact that it did not require careful implementation but could be done with the stroke of a pen. He had less success—or perhaps suffered a failure of nerve—with the most important institution in the American security universe. Consistent with his general view that American allies took advantage of the United States, during the presidential campaign Trump argued that the United States was carrying an excessive share of the burden of defending others and that NATO was a poster child for this unfairness. He therefore threatened to withdraw the nuclear security umbrella from countries that did not spend 2 percent of their GDP on defense (incorrectly describing the previous commitments made under the Obama administration and saying that this was money that was owed to NATO). Somewhat inconsistently, he also wondered what the United States was doing guaranteeing the security of unimportant and far-off countries that might drag it into their own disputes. Congress and the foreign policy elite were vocal

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in their opposition to this shift in policy, seeing NATO as foundational to a safer and more orderly world in which the United States had great influence. Allies were even more disturbed but generally reacted by seeking to appease the president or at least keeping quiet, apparently (and reasonably) in the belief that vocal opposition would only egg him on. In the end, while the effect of Trump’s stance had important long-run consequences, as I discuss in what follows, he did not renounce or withdraw from the alliance. (Experts debated whether he had the power to do the latter without the approval of Congress, but he certainly could have said that as long as he was president he would not automatically live up to the mutual defense promise of Article 5.) The reasons for his inaction remain unclear, but if the account of his national security advisor, John Bolton, is to be believed, it was a close thing, and Bolton had to work in tandem with Secretary of State Pompeo to dissuade the president from taking this dramatic step.5 The failure here, or, to put it a different way, the strength of the constraints on the president, seems to be rooted less in the power of domestic interests or the external environment than in Trump’s failure to appoint top officials who shared his views. Policy toward Russia similarly represents a relative victory for the view of a constrained president, and for somewhat the same reasons, although domestic sources played a larger role. In this case analysis is complicated by the fact that it is hard to figure out exactly what Trump wanted. During the campaign and throughout most of his time in office, he said that he wanted better relations with Russia and that he thought he could work with President Vladimir Putin. But what this meant in terms of concrete policies on Ukraine, arms control, and the Russian role in Syria remained unclear, perhaps because Trump never gave these matters much thought and was more concerned with deflecting the argument that Putin had helped him get elected. Nevertheless, the general thrust of his desire was unambiguous: to reduce the conflict with Russia and to seek areas of common interest. Trump failed, but the reasons why are less clear. Some of the constraints were international. America’s allies were skeptical, and, more important, Putin did not seem inclined to compromise and indeed may have welcomed hostility with the United States for its value in generating domestic support. Trump was constrained domestically as well: Congress was deeply skeptical of Russia and passed legislation mandating economic sanctions by veto-proof majorities and would have sought to rally public opinion against any moves it considered to be “soft” on Russia. Perhaps Trump could have overcome these obstacles had he appointed officials who were skilled and shared his objectives and then carefully monitored and prodded them to see that the policy was on track. But while his first secretary of state, Tillerson, may have wanted to improve relations with Russia, he was a remarkably ineffective leader, and his successor was much more critical

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of Russia. In parallel, although National Security Advisor Michael Flynn shared Trump’s views, he was not around long enough to have any impact, and his successors shared the Washington consensus that Putin was a dangerous adversary who needed to be contained. One possible explanation for the odd discrepancy is that Trump really did not want a rapprochement with Russia; it is more likely that he simply was not paying attention. Trump campaigned on a platform of defeating the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which was hardly an unconventional position, and then withdrawing from what he called the “forever wars” in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, a less conventional stance. While no one wanted these wars to continue indefinitely, the Washington consensus was that rapid withdrawal could be dangerous. Here Trump was able to get some but not all of what he wanted, and he was partly constrained despite making his preferences clear. Defeating ISIS in Syria and Iraq, essentially by allowing the military to carry out the plans developed by President Barack Obama, proved relatively easy. But when Trump found himself trapped in Syria by the alliance with the Kurds that had been necessary to defeat ISIS, he rebelled and ordered the American troops to withdraw. He was not effectively inhibited by the reputational costs that most experts declared the international system would levy, but he was somewhat constrained by opposition from Congress and, even more, the Defense Department. For months the latter “slow rolled” White House commands for plans to withdraw, and when Trump persisted, Secretary Mattis resigned in protest. This did not lead the president to reverse his policy completely, but he did accede to demands from the security establishment that the American presence, even if reduced, not be entirely eliminated. (In a comically inept letter to President Recep Erdoğan, Trump tried to broker a deal between Turkey and the Kurds, only to have Erdoğan “throw the letter in the [trash] bin,” according to his spokesman.)6 Trump was left free to claim that the mission of the remaining troops was to see that the oil fields remained in friendly hands, although the real purpose was to support the Kurds and limit the influence of Russia and Turkey. In Afghanistan, Trump was able to reach an agreement with the Taliban by promising the complete withdrawal of American troops by May 1, 2021. Read literally, the only conditions were the Taliban’s ceasing its attacks on the American (but not the Afghan) forces, not permitting territory it controlled to be used by terrorists who would strike the United States and its allies, and opening negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government, although some American officials claimed that full withdrawal would occur only after the violence had diminished and serious progress was made in the intra-Afghan negotiations.7 At the end of his term, Trump pledged that all troops would be out before he left office, and he settled for a reduction to a low number despite the unanimous opposition of high-ranking Pentagon officials. On balance,

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Trump was able to go a significant distance toward ending American military involvement in the face of resistance from U.S. allies and Congress, and, as I will discuss, this facilitated his successor’s ability to withdraw at the end of August 2021. But Trump was not able to completely overcome the opposition from within his own government. He might want to blame the “deep state,” but the major problem was his own lack of persistence and skill. Trump’s policy toward North Korea showed both the power of a committed president to innovate and the limits of what a new policy could achieve, or at least the limits of the policy he pursued. No previous president would have initiated rather than concluded the negotiating process with a summit meeting. Trump’s belief in the importance of personal relations and his inflated view of his skills in face-to-face encounters were central to what most observers saw as a bizarre approach that was doomed to failure. Neither the constraints of domestic hostility toward North Korea (including the doubts of his advisers) nor the reservations of allies had much impact. Trump was not prevented from pursuing this unconventional policy. But the international system in the form of North Korean power and preferences meant that little came of the adventure. To discuss a subject as large as relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) during the Trump administration in one paragraph seems like a fool’s errand, but I think the salient points parallel those made for other policy arenas. Trump’s approach was unusual in the extent to which he saw relations with the PRC as a reflection of his personal relations with President Xi Jinping, and this often led him to gloss over significant conflicts, at least until the last year of his administration.8 His approach was also unusual in focusing on the bilateral trade deficit, which most economists felt was misguided. But Trump was not to be dissuaded, and this remained at the center of his attention throughout his time in office. On the one hand, this demonstrated the weakness of domestic constraints, as most well-organized interests opposed his tariffs. But here too the external environment in the form of Chinese interests and power meant that while he could raise the price of goods from China, he could not alter the organization of the Chinese economy or wring major concessions from the PRC. Of course, this was not all that the Trump administration did. Indeed, at least as salient was the general shift to a much harder line and greater SinoAmerican hostility, but aside from Trump’s animus stemming from the spread of the coronavirus, these changes reflected the preferences of Trump’s appointees, especially Secretary of State Pompeo. The administration produced a document outlining a strategy for combating Chinese power, which was declassified at the very end of Trump’s term,9 but its call for working with allies and acting strategically was defeated by Trump’s lack of attention and erratic moves. Also important is that the harder line was endorsed by much of the bureaucracy, especially in the Pentagon, and by a large segment of the Washington

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foreign policy establishment and the Democratic Party, so it does not give us a test of what a maverick president can do. It is easier to make changes when the new policy consists mainly of omission rather than of acts and when it can be implemented by the president. The twin and related examples are Trump’s propensity for bonding with authoritarians and his belief that the United States had no business trying to improve human rights abroad. In the latter area, it was the silence of Trump and his colleagues that spoke loudly, especially concerning Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey (except when an American pastor was held hostage), and North Korea. Human rights violations were added to the list of charges against the PRC in speeches by Pompeo, but this did not seem to be of major concern to the president. Congress, domestic groups, and some allies called on Trump to uphold the traditional American stance, but there was little they could do to make him act. Trump’s praise for dictators was more active, but because it was largely verbal it did not depend for implementation on the cooperation of his subordinates, let alone Congress. Here too he could work in his way, but the very fact that all it required was the granting of symbolic rewards like Oval Office visits and refraining from criticisms meant that the impact, although not insignificant, remained limited. Where does all this leave the Biden administration? Before the election, I sketched out what I saw as some of the challenges and opportunities,10 and here I just want to point to the impact of the Trump years on what President Joe Biden can do. Most importantly, Trump taught the world IR 101: states cannot bind themselves to the course of action they will follow in the future. Of course all leaders know that, but the basic continuity in American foreign policy since 1945 lulled many of them, and many Americans, into believing that the American commitment to the liberal world order, including NATO, multilateral economic organizations, and cooperation with allies, was irrevocable. The new understanding that this is not so will complicate relations with both allies and adversaries going forward. Even had Trump gone into a quiet retirement and more traditional Republican leadership had reemerged, his behavior would have cast a doubt on the permanence of the policies Biden would follow. And of course, far from withdrawing, Trump continued to dominate his party. Not only the memory but also the fear of the return of Trump led allies to welcome Biden’s election and to try to show that they are good partners. For example, although the EU’s signing of the investment treaty with China in the face of Biden’s request that they wait was an indication of the limits of the power of a warm atmosphere, the Europeans eventually backed off at least in part to please the new administration, with intra-EU politics and the PRC’s heavyhanded behavior also playing important roles. More dramatically, when the United States and United Kingdom undercut the French deal to sell submarine technology to Australia, the French reaction was fury, and even other allies were

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quick to see this as Trump-like behavior.11 The spat was mended fairly quickly, however, with even French leaders realizing that some similarities between the two administrations did not mean they were identical, an understanding that they preferred, and the other European states being even quicker to forgive, in part because the French had not treated them well in their pursuit of the initial deal. On trade, Biden moved to lift some but not all of the tariffs Trump had levied and sought to cope with disputes through negotiations rather than unilateral responses. But real issues remain, and with some reason allies wonder if the changes under Biden are more of tone than of substance.12 Although exactly how much the United States consulted with the Europeans before pulling out of Afghanistan in August 2021 is unclear, many of the latter felt that their voices had not been heard. As the Afghanistan case illustrates, the change of administrations did not and cannot change the fundamental imbalance in the alliance, with the United States being the dominant partner, especially because Europe is still far from united. This underlying reality is only compounded by the allies’ realization that a future administration, perhaps one again led by Trump, could revert to a Trumpist policy. Excessive dependence on the United States will then be to be avoided if possible.13 But even though Biden has reduced the U.S. opposition to a greater degree of European autonomy and a military force outside of NATO, it is not likely that the EU, which was already weakened by Brexit, can muster the political will to emerge as a real third force. Biden wishes to reach agreements with adversaries as well, most obviously an arms-control agreement with Russia, trade agreements with China, and arrangements with Iran to limit its nuclear and missile programs as well as its disruptive behavior in the region. Were any of these agreements to be enshrined in a treaty, other countries might have some assurance that they would last (but only some—Trump and President George W. Bush before him withdrew from significant treaties). This is not likely to be possible, however. The increased polarization of American politics has made it particularly hard for any administration to set a course that will outlast its time in office. This is vividly exemplified by the impossibility of making treaties on important issues that, were we not accustomed to this fact, would be seen as a shocking degradation of American democracy. Fortunately for Biden, extending the New START armscontrol treaty with Russia did not require Senate approval, and it is almost certain that any significant arrangements with Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea will have to be made by executive agreements, ones that will probably be contested and necessarily fragile; domestic constraints loom large here. I doubt if Trump thought about the legacy he was creating when he renounced previous American commitments. But when he and Secretary Pompeo realized that he was not likely to serve a second term, they made great efforts to make it much harder for Biden to reverse their policies.14 Many of the new sanctions

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against Iran were legally justified under antiterrorism statutes, and so they could not simply be waived if the Biden administration rejoined the JCPOA. Needless to say, this greatly reduced the value of any agreement to Iran. Although the negotiations have been conducted in secrecy, it appears that one of the reasons that they have not so far succeeded, contrary to the expectations of many observers (including me), is the inability to bridge the gap between Iran’s demand for commitments that the sanctions will not be arbitrarily reimposed and the legal and political constraints on the Biden administration. Separating the legal from the political would be difficult even with full information, but the latter constraints clearly play a role. All the Republicans in Congress, as well as many of the Democrats, would be quick to attack Biden for being “soft on Iran.” Even more, despite the fact that Trump’s policy of maximum pressure did not bring Iran around, once instituted it constituted a baseline against which alternative policies would be judged. So while Trump’s policy may have given Biden some leverage over Iran by making more credible his threats to maintain sanctions, it has weakened him by underscoring the difficulty of making promises credible. The sanctions that Trump applied in other areas also pose challenges to Biden. The Trump administration designated Cuba as a state that supported international terrorism and declared the Houthis in Yemen to be a terrorist organization, moves that legally are difficult to unwind even if they are not supported by facts. There are no legal inhibitions against repealing Trump’s lastminute loosening of restrictions on American officials meeting with representatives of Taiwan or renouncing Pompeo’s claim that Iran is now a “home base” for al-Qaeda,15 but there would be political prices for doing so. In the former case, however, this may not matter, because Biden does not seem to object to the policy. More generally, if Biden takes a less hard-line policy or relaxes sanctions toward adversaries in an attempt to establish better relations, domestic opponents will accuse him of being weak, if not an appeaser. There is another side to this coin, however: Trump’s policies may have generated leverage that Biden can use. The sanctions and other forms of hostility directed at Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela have not changed the behavior of these countries (or changed their regimes), but they have weakened them, and Biden’s ability to change direction may be a significant source of influence. And if Biden maintains the pressure, it may have great effect because the target states’ expectations of relief will have been frustrated. At this writing (November 2021), the results are mixed. Whether because of domestic constraints or because the disagreements between Biden and his predecessor in these areas are more of tone than of substance, there has been no sharp break in policy. The important, intriguing, but unanswerable question is whether Biden would have followed different policies toward these adversaries had Trump set us on a different path.

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Biden also inherited tariffs on goods from China and Europe. In the latter case, he lifted some of them and moved to negotiate some of the long-term irritants, most saliently over subsidies for civilian aircraft production. He maintained the more severe tariffs on China, however. Of course, the hypothetical is speculative, but while there is every reason to believe that no matter what Trump had done, Biden would have tried to build a coalition against the PRC and to hew to a fairly hard-line policy, whether he would have reached for tariffs as an instrument to both punish China and protect American workers is less likely in light of the consensus among economists that this tool will not contribute to either goal. But once Trump applied the tariffs, lifting them without a wider agreement will be seen as a sign of weakness (more by domestic than foreign audiences, I believe). Biden’s policy toward migration on the southern border is also influenced by the Trump inheritance. It is hard to believe that he would have originated the practice of automatically turning back people who might apply for refugee status on the questionable grounds of the COVID emergency or instituted the “stay in Mexico” policy had Trump not left these for him. The impact on Biden has thus far been mixed: on the one hand, it opened him to attacks from his liberal domestic supporters, but on the other hand (and I think more importantly), it protected against greatly increased migration flows that would have hurt him badly in terms of electoral support. In the Middle East, Trump’s policy did less to generate leverage than it did to change facts on the ground. Whether this will be conducive to a stable peace or the reverse is unclear, but what is clear is that Biden inherited a situation very different from that which prevailed at the start of the Trump administration. He has chosen to more or less let it be, at least at the start. He pursued a few more pro-Palestinian policies on the margins (e.g., trying to reopen a consulate in East Jerusalem) and abandoned the Kushner Plan (a.k.a the “Deal of the Century”) that would have ended the chance for a two-state solution, but this had already been traded by the Trump administration for the Abraham Accords, by which a number of Arab states opened relations with Israel. Proponents of the Trump policies would say that by not actively following the lines of possibility that Trump had opened, for example, by prioritizing punishing Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader for his human rights violations, especially his ordering the murder of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, over the chance of gaining Saudi recognition of Israel, Biden has missed the golden opportunity that Trump gave him. The reply is that human rights must be an important part of American policy and that the opportunity for a breakthrough in Israel-Saudi relations was illusory. It is in Afghanistan that Trump may have done Biden his biggest favor. From all reports, Biden was personally committed to a rapid and unconditional withdrawal of all American forces despite the advice of most if not all of his

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advisors and many in Congress, who urged keeping a small force as a way of pressuring the Taliban to reach an agreed settlement. Even had the withdrawal not been chaotic, accompanied by the last-minute ISIS-K bombing that killed thirteen U.S. soldiers and over 150 Afghan civilians and by allies’ claims that they had not been consulted, it would have been controversial and offered the Republicans an obvious opportunity to attack. But this was muted although not silenced by the Biden administration’s response that it was Trump’s earlier agreement with the Taliban that left the new administration no real choice. The blame, if blame there was, was shared with Trump, if not being largely his. My guess is that Biden probably would have withdrawn even in the absence of Trump’s agreement, but the precedent surely eased his way. What this means is that we cannot fully judge the Trump experiment at the end of his term. The impact of what he has said and done will last longer and, for better and for worse, will carry over into the Biden presidency and perhaps beyond. The difference that Trump’s idiosyncrasies have made, then, is yet to be fully determined. Furthermore, we may be misled by the use of the standard comparative method to judge the question I originally posed about how constrained Trump would find himself when he took power. The instances of continuity between Trump and Biden at first glance suggest that the former was not as innovative as it might seem. He instead was responding to pressures from the domestic or international environment that would have yielded a similar response, regardless of who was president, since Biden behaved as he did. While this may be true, it is also possible that Biden was able (or compelled) to act in this way only because Trump had charted a new course. As in so many cases of history and international politics, it is not easy to choose between these alternative explanations, and at this point all I can do is to raise the question.

Notes 1. Robert Jervis, “President Trump and International Relations Theory,” in Chaos in the Liberal Order: The Trump Presidency and International Politics in the 21st Century, ed. R. Jervis, F. Gavin, J. Rovner, and D. Labrosse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 3–7. 2. Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954). The classic statement of the president’s power in the realm of foreign affairs is Aaron Wildavsky, “The Two Presidencies,” Society 35 (January/February 1998): 23–31. 3. Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership (New York: Wiley, 1960), 9, emphasis in the original. 4. Stephen Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018). 5. John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020). 6. “Turkey’s Erdogan ‘Threw Trump’s Syria Letter in the Bin,’ ” BBS News, October 17, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-50080737.

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7. This position of conditionality was quickly endorsed by the Biden administration: “Statement by NSC Spokesperson Emily Horne on National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s Call with National Security Advisor Hamdullah Mohib of Afghanistan,” White House Press Release, January 22, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/ briefing -room /statements-releases/2021 /01 /22/statement-by-nsc-spokesperson-emily-horne - on-national-security-advisor-jake -sullivans - call-with-national-security-advisor -hamdullah-mohib-of-afghanistan/2021. Biden abandoned this position three months later, however. 8. Deborah Welch Larson, “Policy or Pique? Trump and the Turn to Great Power Competition,” Political Science Quarterly 136 (Spring 2021): 47–80. 9. “US Strategy for the Indo-Pacific,” cited in Josh Rogin, “The Trump Administration Had a China Strategy After All, But Trump Didn’t Follow It,” Washington Post, January 15, 2021. 10. Robert Jervis, “Foreign Policy Dilemmas and Opportunities for a New Administration: An Opinion Piece,” Political Science Quarterly 135, no. 2 (June 2020): 313–25. 11. Michael Crowley, “Friends and Foes Alike Hear Echoes of Trump in Biden Foreign Policy,” New York Times, September 24, 2021. 12. Annie Karni, “Biden Strives to Be the Anti-Trump, but He Is Finding It’s Not So Easy,” New York Times, October 1, 2021. 13. See the revealing data in European Council on Foreign Relations, “The Crisis of American Power: How Europeans see Biden’s America,” January  19, 2021, https://ecfr.eu /publication/the-crisis-of-american-power-how-europeans-see-bidens-america/. 14. See, for example, Karen DeYoung, “Pompeo’s Last-Minute Actions on Foreign Policy Will Complicate Biden’s Plans for a New Direction,” Washington Post, January 16, 2121. 15. Lara Jakes, Eric Schmitt, and Julian E. Barnes, “Pompeo Says Iran Is New Base for Al Qaeda, but Offers Little Proof,” New York Times, January 12, 2021, https://www.nytimes .com/2021/01/12/us/politics/pompeo-iran-qaeda-terror.html.

CHAPTER 2

TRUMP HUFFED AND PUFFED, AND LIBERAL INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY BLEW DOWN M I C H A E L N . BA R N E T T

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our years ago, I was asked to address whether international relations (IR) theory might help us anticipate the nature of newly elected President Donald Trump’s foreign policy. Reviewing the previous volume1 and reading many of the contents of this one, it is evident that most of us were and are overwhelmed by the prospect of trying to make sense of either the senseless or the nonsensical. There is simultaneously a wealth of different approaches that might have some insight and an acceptance that Trump exceeds anything we have ever seen (or hope to ever see again). And, as Ryan Irwin and others note in their chapters in this volume, much of the meaning we give to this unsettling period will depend on what comes next. When I was invited to contribute to the first volume, my immediate thought was that IR theories were not up to the challenge of predicting Trump’s foreign policy for one powerful reason: the profound disconnect between Trump the person and the prominence of rationality in IR theories.2 Trump might be rational according to some forgiving textbook definition, but he seemed all emotion and no reason. For the sake of warding off all those scholars who might want to retrofit Trump into a rational choice paradigm, in the first part of this chapter I repeat my initial argument, now buttressed with four years of evidence. I then explore how Trump’s personality characteristics might help explain his marginal impact on the international order. But he did have a decisive impact on the American order; his attempt to make America great again, ironically, led to a critical reconsideration of an American triumphalism and

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its narrative of liberalism and progress. America will never be the same; neither will liberal international relations theory.

Bye-Bye Rationality, Hello DSM-V Most IR theories are premised on some version of rationality. There are two defenses of the use of rational choice to explain foreign policy behavior: (1) that it approximates how individuals make decisions and act or (2) that its core axioms, regardless of their correspondence to reality, have explanatory and predictive power. Trump is rational choice theory’s worst nightmare. This was my position four years ago, and at the time I advised IR scholars to put aside their theories and listen to how a team of psychiatrists, armed with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), were diagnosing Trump. In fact, his four-year term familiarized us with a range of disorders: antisocial personality, malignant narcissism, borderline personality, paranoia, psychopathology, sadism, and on and on. After observing the list of disorders lengthen, I asked my psychiatrist wife: How many disorders does it take to make a mental illness? It has something to do with being able to distinguish fantasy from reality. Can Trump? There were those who referred to one or multiple disorders. Sometimes those who knew him suggested he was the consummate con artist or mountebank and that he worked the crowd for his own glorification. Others, though, suggested that he truly believed what he said and that his stream of outrageous recommendations—put a moat on the Mexican side of the “wall” and fill it with alligators, guzzle hydroxychloroquine to prevent COVID-19—came from an overbearing overconfidence in his gut’s ability to point him in the right direction. But there was evidence of a rich fantasy life at various moments. For instance, Trump ordered an investigation into whether photos of his inauguration had been doctored to make it look sparsely attended, making him look bad.3 Does he really believe the election was stolen? Those closest to him told him he lost, fair and square. Did he persist in his counterclaim because he is the world’s worst loser? Or had he conned himself into believing that the election was truly stolen and could no longer distinguish between fantasy and reality? Disorders or mental illness? Whichever you choose, “rationality” and “Trump” must never be uttered in the same sentence ever again.

International Resilience Trump’s presidency left behind hundreds of thousands of needless deaths from COVID-19 and a bitterly divided country, but his path of destruction largely

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stopped at the water’s edge. Charles S. Maier offers his own thoughts for this discrepancy in his chapter in this collection, and here are mine. IR theory typically focuses on how domestic and international constraints limit choice, but in this instance, we are better off starting with the person. Trump’s sense of self, by most accounts, is a combination of messiah, strongman, and king. He surrounded himself with those who dutifully told the unclothed king that he wore the finest royal apparel. World leaders who wanted his support did much the same. He demonstrated fondness for autocrats and often seemed jealous that he did not enjoy the same privileges and indiscretions at home. As he praised dictators, he belittled other democratic leaders. Yet for all his bravado and concerns about his manhood, Trump showed little desire for a barroom brawl. This is typical of many bullies. Turnbull recounted that he had a two-fold survival strategy for dealing with Trump. Because Trump “was a narcissist,” he would “respond well to flattery.” This strategy also included avoiding anything that might embarrass or threaten Trump the person. Yet Trump also was a bully, and sucking up to bullies only encourages them. Instead, to earn the respect of a bully means standing one’s ground.4 Turnbull was onto something, because Trump spoke loudly but changed the subject when he was expected to do more than saber-rattle. Consider North Korea. After taunting the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as the “rocket man,” leading to fears of a military conflagration, he flew to Singapore for a public display of affection.5 And then what? North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is thriving. As for China, while relations were certainly tense, with testy presidential exchanges and a trade war, Trump did nothing to challenge China’s despotic tendencies. He refused to condemn China’s internment and destruction of the Uyghurs. Nor did Trump respond to China’s squashing of the prodemocracy protests in Hong Kong and the island’s autonomy. His national security advisor John Bolton resigned when Trump failed to launch military strikes against Iran. Reagan called the Soviet Union the “evil empire”; Trump developed a bromance with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Exiling the Afghan government from the negotiations, Trump agreed to a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops that left the field wide open to the Taliban. Trump was all transaction and no sentimentality. He abandoned the American values that many U.S. presidents often used to launder the national interest. Or, rather, he removed the hypocrisy and exposed American foreign policy for the self-interest it was. Unlike other American leaders who saw the value of strong alliances built on mutual trust and the American-built international institutions, rules, and law that were part of American hegemony, Trump concluded that it was mainly costs and few benefits. If American allies (and others) wanted U.S. military support, they could pay for it. When the United States occupied Iraq, it should have controlled its oil fields for its economic benefit. On a whim he abandoned the Kurdish army that had fought valiantly alongside

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American forces in the campaign against ISIS; this proved too much for Secretary of Defense James “Mad Dog” Mattis, who resigned in protest. Trump could never see the difference between the national interest and his immediate emotional needs. Trump’s combination of extreme narcissism and impulse control disorder better explain his foreign policy than any IR theory I know. And yet in many ways his foreign policy resembled those of other presidents. He didn’t care about human rights, but, then again, most U.S. leaders defend them until they encroach on American interests. His policies toward international institutions resembled those of past Republican administrations. His “deal of the century” in the Middle East was a gift to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the idea of a Greater Israel, but, in reality, he only finalized a half-century of American indulgence of Israeli policies in the territories. His global war on terror and targeting killings were more a continuity of, than change from, those of his predecessor, Barack Obama. His immigration policies were certainly extreme, but Obama’s critics had nicknamed him the “deporter-in-chief.” And those hoping that President Biden would abandon Trump’s policies are still waiting. It is the Biden administration that forcibly sent Haitians at the U.S. southern border back to Haiti.

The End Times of International Liberalism President Joe Biden has attempted to return the United States to its “normal” position as leader of the free world and champion of democracy and human rights, as illustrated by the White House’s Summit for Democracy.6 Even in the halcyon days of American leadership, such summits could easily appear much more performative than substantive. But the criticism of this summit was that the United States should not be lecturing anyone about democracy and should be more concerned about the health of its own democratic institutions than those of others. At one end of Pennsylvania Avenue the Biden administration was giving a pep talk for democracy, and at the other end the Republican opposition continued to insist that Biden stole the election, that the Capitol invasion of January 6, 2021, had been more of an act of civil disobedience or unauthorized tailgate than an insurrection, and that Trump was an innocent bystander to the treasonous event. Trump’s election caused many Americans to reassess the highly qualified nature of American democracy. These reassessments usually start by attempting to situate Trump in perspective. He was both a beneficiary and agitator of the underlying fragility of American liberalism. He was unlike anything ever seen in American politics but also a readily identifiable type in American culture and politics. But to truly grasp the relationship between Trump and American politics required situating him alongside present and past demagogues

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and populists who preyed on societal anxiety, alienation, resentment, and fear.7 Americans became educated in the descent from democracy and the historical experiences of Germany, Russia, Turkey, and Argentina. One of the scariest features of this descent was that the brakes kept failing. More accurately put, Trump kept pressing the gas pedal, to the applause of many Americans. Trump announced his candidacy with outrageous bigotry, which the political establishment assumed would make him a pariah with voters. But a growing percentage of Republican voters increasingly embraced him and exhibited a fierce loyalty, and his campaign rallies became safe spaces for sexists, racists, antisemites, and nativists of all kinds—safe for his supporters but potentially dangerous for those who came to protest or to report on them.8 Members of his party kowtowed to him. Some were true believers, others used Trump to advance their other political agendas, and then there were the many who sold out the country for gold pieces and praise from Caesar. Different motives, perhaps, but they all ended up in the same place: holding the door open as Trump proceeded to smash one room after another. Even when he had lost the election, they were still willing to stand by his side. Few Republicans even blinked when he called on his faithful to overthrow the government, put out a hit on his vice president, and caused elected officials to run for their lives from his noose-waving, cross-carrying mob. He left office with a 34 percent general approval rating but a 79  percent rating among Republicans.9 In a late December 2020 survey, a clear majority of Republicans favored Trump as the party’s presidential nominee in 2024, with Florida governor Ron DeSantis, hardly the voice of reason, running a distant second with 11 percent. Despite four years of mayhem, racism, antisemitism, sexism, corruption, and chauvinism, a big part of the country loves him. Let me rephrase: he did well not despite his characteristics but because of them. These illiberal values have moved from the fringe to the mainstream, where they have been for much of American history. Most IR theories have a way to incorporate an illiberal United States into their theories, except one: liberal international relations. Trump resurrected a past that many preferred to ignore or sugarcoat with a progressive narrative. In doing so, he challenged America’s liberal identity and, with it, the very idea of a liberal international order. I want to make three points. First, IR scholars have a long history of dividing the international order between civilized and uncivilized states, advanced and backward states, and liberal and illiberal states. In this tradition the United States has always been coded as civilized, advanced, and liberal. Does the United States qualify as a liberal state? Liberal states are an ideal type that is defined by the holy trinity of competitive markets, the rule of law with a full complement of (civil and political) rights, and democratic institutions.10 These institutions are valued because they safeguard individual liberty, constrain the abuse of power by the

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state, and produce various individual, societal, and global dividends such as individual freedom and domestic and global peace and prosperity. Ideal types are precisely that: they are used for comparative analysis and without any expectation that these types exist in their pure form in reality. Many IR theorists proceed as if the United States is the poster child of liberal states. But is the United States more proximate to, say, a liberal or illiberal state? Few doubt the United States’ commitment to market principles, but it has not been a faithful practitioner of the rule of law or democracy. The rule of law in liberalism means equal rights, the equality of all before the law, and that the law must protect individuals from abuse by the state. The conjunction of America’s slow reckoning with its racist history and the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 exposed how racism and other forms of discrimination have imprinted the rule of law.11 The United States is credited with not one but two genocides— against African Americans and Native Americans—and it has used legal means to continue the oppression of those groups. Other countries have looked to the United States as a role model not of the rule of law but for how to make discrimination lawful. The United States’ racial policies were a template for those of the Nazis in the 1930s.12 And what about democratic rule? The Trump-led insurrection ended the United States’ long streak of peaceful transition of power. It was not until 1965 and the Voting Rights Act that the United States finally put the law behind the idea of democratic rule, but the right to vote remains something of a privilege that can be easily taken away from too many people through laws that have a clear discriminatory intent. Gerrymandering and the lack of campaign finance laws further stack the deck against free and fair elections. Certainly, all countries have their imperfections—but those who want to code the United States as liberal might have to either relax their definition of liberal (perhaps to the point that some states that are now defined as illiberal become redefined as liberal) or whitewash American history. Trump did more to expose the distance between America the myth and America the reality than a crash course in critical race theory could have. Second, if the United States is cashiered of its liberal rank, then what becomes of the liberal international order? Theories are not rejected because of a bad apple. But what if the apple is not just any apple but rather the mother of all apples? So much of liberal international theory is built around the United States that it is difficult to imagine the former’s existence without the existence of this critical case. Would devotees of liberalism also need to delist the many other liberal states with histories of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and systematic discrimination? Liberal international relations theory might still be a normative theory, but without an empirical basis. In addition to replication with a more valid data set, we should also consider whether race and other practices of exclusion have shaped the international

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order. Race forcefully fashioned the precursor to the liberal international order: the nineteenth century’s division of the world between civilized and uncivilized states. President Woodrow Wilson might have been the patron saint of international liberalism, but he also was a racist at home and abroad—and not the sort of racist who was unaware of his prejudices because of the times in which he lived but rather one who opposed integration measures and fought to turn the clock back.13 Thanks to Wilson and South Africa’s Jan Smuts, the League of Nations continued to operate with a civilizational view that divided the world into whites and nonwhites.14 The global color line continued after World War II with the help of many leading liberal states. U.S. foreign policy after that time continued to oppose various aspects of international human rights because it did not want the world to judge its racial policies. President Harry Truman signed the Genocide Convention, but the Senate refused to ratify it because it worried that international bodies might use the Convention to indict American policies toward Native Americans and African Americans. American immigration policies were unapologetically race based until the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. Trump’s statement that Haiti and African states are “shithole countries” is certainly crass but probably consistent with Wilson’s views. Decolonization did not end the role of race in the international order but instead submerged its presence.15 At the time when I was working on the topic of security communities, it never dawned on me to consider the role of race, but a few years ago I started to wonder whether this was an “omitted variable” that might help explain the bonds that bind and the boundaries that are erected.16 I would include race if we were to do it all over again. Third, disqualifying the United States from the liberal international order and considering how race and other practices of discrimination constitute liberal societies and their international orders potentially moves liberal internationalism from the realm of theory into ideology. Ideology can be briskly defined as a system of integrated beliefs and ideas that serve an existing order.17 Or, following on the claim of Robert Cox, theory is always for something and for someone, and ideology is a theory that serves the existing order.18 And what order does this ideology serve? Realists have asserted that liberalism is a Trojan Horse for American power.19 However, the significance of the illiberalism of Trump and the United States goes beyond the old saw of ideology masquerading for national power. Racism is not a prop but rather part of the body politic. This reconsideration of race in the nation and the international order forces the beginning of a reckoning with history. This same point is powerfully made by chapters in this volume, including those by William I. Hitchcock and Audie Klotz. Citing Ernest Renan, Eric Hobsbawm observed that all nations get their history wrong.20 The United States has a willfully selective memory. Typically, American leaders simply ignore the uncomfortable truths as they retell the story

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of America, or they point toward an America that is moving toward a more perfect union. But Trump found these truths not uncomfortable but rather prideful, which triggered two diametrically opposed responses. Many of his followers chose to defend these truths and this history against the “attack” on America by the walking woke. Those who viewed Trump and his followers as an assault on America’s promise responded by confronting these uncomfortable truths and trying to integrate them into a new narrative. Can this new narrative continue to sustain the idea of progress? Progress and liberalism are tightly bound. Progress means that civilization is moving in a “desirable direction” and that societies are enjoying “irreversible ameliorative change,” moving from one superior stage to the next and toward an “outcome that would have been chosen had it been foreseen.”21 And what is that outcome? A world with liberal values. Liberalism ties together the means and ends and makes liberalism the center of progress. The idea of progress in the West has not been so much a “theory to be defended as a fact to be observed.”22 It might unfold in fits-and-starts, through zigs-and-zags, and with occasional reversals, but it was as certain as the sun rising in the morning. Progress for liberals and many in the West is a “species of religion” and a “civil religion.”23 And like all religions, it is sustained by faith and a combination of belief and willful disbelief. But by embracing a past that many Americans either preferred to forget or not recognize, Trump forced many Americans to take a fresh look at themselves. What they saw was much less flattering and forced them to let go of mythological and Whiggish version of America. For those IR scholars who continue categorize the United States in the way it prefers to be seen rather than the way it is, it is time to remove the blinders, relax the faith in progress, and let the darkness in.

Notes 1. Robert Jervis, Francis J. Gavin, Joshua Rovner, and Diane Labrosse, eds., Chaos in the Liberal Order: The Trump Presidency and International Politics in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). See also the online essays at https://issforum.org /tag /trump/page/8. 2. Michael N. Barnett, “Trump and International Relations Theory: A Response to Robert Jervis’s ‘President Trump and IR Theory,’ ” http://issforum.org /ISSF/PDF/Policy -Roundtable-1–5L .pdf; and Michael N. Barnett, “What Is International Relations Theory Good For?,” in Chaos in the Liberal Order, 8–21. 3. Katie Reilly, “No, the National Park Service Didn’t Alter Photos of Trump’s Inauguration Crowd,” Time, June 27, 2017, https://time.com /4834745/national-park-service -trump-inauguration-crowd-size-report/. 4. Corbin Duncan, “Australian PM Details Trump Relationship, Says Obama Called Him ‘a Lunatic,’ ” Harvard Political Review, April 25, 2020, https:// harvardpolitics.com /obamaontrump/.

36 TRU MP A N D I N T E R N AT I O N A L R E L ATIO NS T H EO RY 5. Meghan Keneally, “From ‘Fire and Fury’ to ‘Rocket Man,’ the Various Barbs Traded Between Trump and Kim Jong Un,” ABC News, June 12, 2018, https://abcnews.go.com /International/fire-fury-rocket-man-barbs-traded-trump-kim/story?id= 53634996. 6. U.S. Department of State, “The Summit for Democracy,” https://www.state.gov/summit -for-democracy/. 7. Fintan O’Toole, “The Trump Inheritance,” New York Review of Books, February 25, 2021, https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/fintan-otoole/. 8. Jared Yates Sexton, “Is the Trump Campaign Just a Giant Safe Space for the Right?,” New York Times, July 1, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com /2016/07/01 /opinion /is-the -trump-campaign-just-a-giant-safe-space-for-the-right.html. 9. Eli Yokely, “Trump’s Approval Rating Stabilizes Among Republicans Ahead of Senate Impeachment Trial,” Morning Consult, January 19, 2021, https://morningconsult .com/2021/01/19/trump-approval-senate-impeachment-conviction-polling/. 10. G. John Ikenberry, “The End of Liberal International Order?” International Affairs 94, no. 1 (2018): 7–23; Constance Duncombe and Tim Dunne, “After Liberal World Order,” International Affairs 94, no. 1 (2018): 25–42; Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, “Liberal World: The Resilient Order,” Foreign Affairs 97 (2018); Riccardo Alcaro, “The Liberal Order and Its Contestations: A Conceptual Framework,” International Spectator 53, no. 1 (2018): 1–10. 11. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: New Press, 2010); Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents (New York: Random House, 2020); Beth LewWilliams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Claudio Sant, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory (New York: Norton, 2020). 12. James Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). 13. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 14. Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line; W. E. B. Dubois, “World of Color,” Foreign Affairs (April 1925). Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 15. Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019). 16. Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett, eds., Security Communities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 17. This is only one definition, as Terry Eagleton’s classic review on the concept concludes. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction, updated ed. (New York: Verso, 2007). 18. Robert Cox, Social Forces, States, and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 128. 19. John Mearsheimer, “Bound to Fail: The Rise and fall of the Liberal International Order,” International Security 43 (Spring 2019): 7–50; Charles Glaser, “A Flawed Framework: Why the Liberal International Order Concept Is Misguided,” International Security 43, no. 4 (2019): 51–87. 20. Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 12.

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21. J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry Into Its History and Growth (New York: MacMillan, 1932), 2; Charles van Doren, The Idea of Progress (New York: Praeger, 1967), 7; and Nannerl Keohane, “The Enlightenment Idea of Progress Revisited” in Progress and Its Discontents, ed. G. Almond et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 22. 22. Carl Becker, Power and Progress (New York: Knopf, 1949), 5. 23. The first quote is from Becker, Power and Progress, 7; the second from John Michael Greer, After Progress: Reason and Religion at the End of the Industrial Age (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 2015), 10.

CHAPTER 3

AMERICA FIRST? The Erosion of American Status Under Trump M I C H E L L E M U R R AY

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ow has the Trump presidency affected the status of the United States as the leader of the current international order? When Donald Trump assumed the presidency on January 20, 2017, few could have predicted what the next four years would mean for U.S. standing in the world. What was almost certain was that Trump’s approach to foreign policy would be different from his predecessors and that he would likely not be guided by the same rules, norms, and priorities that had shaped U.S. foreign policy after the Second World War. Four years later, we are in a position to take stock and think about the impact the Trump administration had on America’s role in the world and the challenges and opportunities it has revealed. In one sense, Trump’s foreign policy did not represent the radical departure that many feared when he first took office. While his rhetoric was mostly devoid of the outward commitment to liberal ideals that is characteristic of U.S. foreign policy discourse, there were no major wars, the United States did not wholly abandon its key allies, and the multilateral institutional order remains mostly intact.1 Nevertheless, the change in style and tone of his foreign policy represented a perhaps small but not insignificant change in U.S. foreign policy. Trump openly chastised allies, curried favor with dictators, and withdrew from international agreements. His brash, personalistic style eroded democratic norms at home and abroad.2 In short, Trump’s diplomatic style and choices have affected the standing of the United States in the world. Specifically, they worked to make America unrecognizable to the most important members of the international community for upholding American status, namely, close allies and

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friends. As a result, questions have arisen about the norms and values that underpin American identity and thus about the status of the United States as the leader of the international order going forward.

Status and International Order Status matters in world politics because it is both an expression of state identity and a means by which the state can instantiate that identity in practice and pursue its foreign policy goals. All states have a self-understanding that is the basis of their identities and that arises from their domestic discourses, politics, and past interactions with other states. These self-understandings are subjective—drawing from a state’s particular history and reflecting the distinct vantage point from which that state engages the world and understands its place in it. A state’s identity, in turn, shapes its interests and prescribes how it can achieve those interests through its foreign policy. Status refers to a recognized identity in a social order. States acquire status when their aspiring identity— that is, the role they want to play in international society that reinforces their self-understanding—is recognized by other relevant states, thus enabling them to enact their identities in practice.3 States care about their status for two reasons. First, states need “a sense of biographical continuity and wholeness that is supported and recognized in and through their relations with others” in order to have a coherent and stable foreign policy.4 Identities are social phenomena; they require the participation of others in order to have meaning in the world. Second, status serves this end because when a state’s desired role in the international sphere is recognized, its power is legitimated. When power is legitimate, there is “a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms.”5 As a consequence, status recognition organizes interstate relations in such a way that particular states are authorized to play specific roles—in the case of the United States, a leading role—in international politics. The roles that states take on are intersubjective; that is, they only acquire meaning through interactions with other states that reproduce relations of recognition. These routinized encounters make states recognizable to one another, and in turn “make interactions between states within [the international order] predictable and stable.6 Thus, the international order is, first and foremost, a kind of social order that arranges states’ relationships with one another and guides their behavior through routinized relations of recognition. At the center of this social order is the leading power, or hegemon, who by virtue of its status is able to define the rules, values, and norms that constitute the system. Indeed, when a state is recognized as the leader of the international order, it is able to order the system

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in ways that support its vision and values and, importantly, reinforce its power. Key to the leading power’s status is the recognition it receives from its friends and closest allies, who share a common vision of the international order and make a commitment to maintain it into the future. Even more, friends identify with one another on the basis of shared history and experience, a common set of values and priorities, and faithfulness to “a shared project of worldbuilding” that reproduces the international order and the status hierarchy that goes along with it.7 In this context, the relationships a leading power has with its friends—and the relations of recognition that sustain those relationships— are the principal means by which its status in the system is created and reproduced. Put simply, being a good friend is the key to maintaining standing in the world.

Trump and the Erosion of American Status Friends share a vision of the international order that is maintained through routinized relations of recognition, which reproduce the status hierarchy that constitutes the identity role structure at the center of the order. These acts of recognition manifest in both language and in states’ foreign policy practices vis-à-vis one another.8 Here I will focus on one important dimension of this process—“team play”—where Trump’s tone, style, and sometimes actions have destabilized the relationships upon which American status depends. “Team play” includes a wide array of foreign policy practices—both strategic and symbolic—that reproduce state identities and with it the shared project of the international order.9 These practices range from formal commitments to work together in institutional settings to the performative rituals of diplomacy. What these different kinds of practices do politically is reiterate and reinforce the collective identity of the group and the notion that they are working together on the basis of a shared vision of the world. Both Trump’s rhetoric and foreign policy decisions called the idea of team play into question. From the start of his presidency, Trump targeted the international institutional order, withdrawing from and/or significantly cutting funding to a range of organizations. For example, he withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris Climate Accords, UNESCO, the Global Compact for Migration, the Iran nuclear deal, the United Nations Human Rights Council, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, and the World Health Organization. He withdrew from several U.S.-Russia armscontrol agreements, crippled the World Trade Organization, started a trade war with the European Union (among allies and others), and routinely called into question America’s commitment to NATO. These organizations span a range of issues and areas of varied importance to the United States’ core

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interests; Trump’s actions reflect the general disdain that he has for the international order they represent. Moreover, Trump’s rhetoric was especially alarming to allies and is exemplary of his foreign policy approach and the damage it could do. Perhaps best captured by the “America First” slogan, the guiding principles behind Trump’s foreign policy were from the start transactional, defined by momentary exchanges of (often economic) self-interest. What is especially noteworthy about America First is not the notion that the United States would pursue its own interests or have interests that diverge from those of its important allies. Rather, it is that this rhetoric discursively undermined the collective sentiments at the heart of team play and suggested that the United States valued allies only insofar as they benefited its immediate, material interests. As former German ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger noted, “Everyone understands [Trump] doesn’t value transatlantic relations—or he values them in a very monetary way.”10 In this context, the United States and the values it represents were framed in opposition to those of its European counterparts. For example, Trump often referred to NATO as obsolete and questioned whether the United States should promise to defend countries that were “delinquent” on meeting targets for military spending, seeming to reduce the defense organization—which symbolizes the triumph of Western liberal democracy and is arguably one of the central organizations of the international order—to zero-sum economic exchanges.11 Trump took a long time to publicly commit to Article 5, and suggested more than once that any defense of Europe would be conditional on payments. Trump’s fixation on NATO members’ contributions led German chancellor Angela Merkel to suggest, “The era in which we could fully rely on others is over to some extent . . . we Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands,” implying an indisputable fracture in the quality of transatlantic relations.12 Similarly, Trump’s disruptive and transactional approach to trade upended several G7 meetings, which devolved into spats over retaliatory tariffs in Trump’s trade wars and made it difficult, if not impossible, for these leaders to speak of a shared ambition for the international order. After the G7 meeting in Canada in 2018, an EU diplomat who was in attendance described Trump’s behavior as “nauseating” and undermining of shared norms: “He was insulting one, insulting the other, lauding his relationship with [Korean leader] Kim [Jong-un], with [Russian president Vladimir] Putin, making the argument that Russia needs to come back to that G7 table, in such a rude, and mocking and misogynist way.”13 By testing these relationships in this way, Trump “endangered the mutual recognition of the friendship identity that had been forged over time” and that is the principal source of its status in the world.14 Indeed, one EU official characterized the impact of Trump’s behavior most clearly when he suggested Trump’s policies were “leading at the end of the day to more fundamental questions of our common approach to a rules-based international order.”15

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The question of America’s commitment to this shared international project was brought into sharp relief by Trump’s embrace of authoritarian leaders like Kim and Putin and their illiberal values. While Trump disrespected and alienated the close allies of the United States, he simultaneously went out of his way to work with and accommodate nondemocratic adversaries, thus raising doubts about America’s commitment to the shared norms and values that underpin the international order. Trump embraced a number of authoritarian leaders from across the globe during his presidency. What these leaders share is a general disregard for democratic governance, human rights, freedom of the press, and the rule of law. They suppress political opposition and dissent and have a penchant for violence that stands in stark contrast to the principles that define the liberal international order. Trump repeatedly spoke warmly of his relationships with these leaders, referring to them as friends, emphasizing the respect he had for them and their leadership style, and noting that he trusted them on important national security matters. Beyond praise, Trump even tacitly and sometimes openly condoned these leaders’ illiberal actions (sometimes on American soil). When Turkish president Recep Erdoğan ordered his security detail to attack protestors outside the Turkish embassy in Washington, DC—while he looked on—Trump “offered no public comfort to the victims of the attack, no rebuke to the perpetrators, no statement of support for the bedrock rights of free assembly and free expression.”16 When Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman authorized the brutal killing and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S.-based journalist (and permanent resident) and vocal critic of the Saudi government, Trump publicly contradicted his own intelligence agencies to say the cause of death may never be known. The statement was, as the New York Times described at the time, “a stark distillation of the Trump worldview: remorselessly transactional, heedless of the facts, determined to put America’s interests first, and founded on a theory of moral equivalence.”17 When Trump met Kim Jong-un about its nuclear program, he not only offered major material concessions to the North Korean dictator but also offered him a major symbolic victory: “A dictator who has ordered the murder of his own family members, and who oversees a gulag comparable to those of Hitler and Stalin, was able to parade on the global stage as a legitimate statesman.”18 Of course, Trump was not the first American president to work with autocrats. What distinguishes his behavior, however, is his outward embrace and admiration of these leaders, the simultaneous hostility he showed toward longstanding democratic allies, and the lack of any overriding strategic interest in cultivating these illiberal relationships. Taken together, these actions suggested to the world that the United States was moving away from the norms and values that have long defined the international order.

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After Trump: America Is Back? The unusual style and tone of Trump’s approach to foreign policy eroded America’s standing in the world. It did so because it rendered American representations of U.S. identity as illiberal and out of sync with the norms and values embodied in the international order, thus making the country unrecognizable to its friends and closest allies. The United States’ status in the system depends on the maintenance of routinized relations of recognition with its allies. Thus, Trump’s erratic and hostile diplomacy destabilized these recognition routines and with them American status. This is not to suggest that the United States is no longer the leading power in the system but rather that the stability of its leadership is tenuous. It is no surprise, then, that a key priority of President Joe Biden’s early foreign policy has been to rehabilitate these relationships and restore America’s standing in the world. In his first address before a global audience—at the Munich Security Conference in February 2021—Biden wholeheartedly declared that “America is back, the transatlantic alliance is back,” thereby drawing a clear distinction between his intended approach to foreign policy and that of his predecessor.19 This echoed remarks he made a few weeks earlier on America’s place in the world, where he charged American diplomats to “begin reforming the habits of cooperation and rebuilding the muscle of democratic alliances that [had] atrophied over the past few years of neglect, and . . . abuse.”20 Biden moved swiftly to restore America’s participation in many of the treaties and organizations that Trump had abandoned, rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement and reengaging the World Health Organization. As James Goldgeier notes in his chapter in this volume, Biden has reasserted the United States’ commitment to democratic values at home and abroad; has taken tougher stances with Russia, Turkey, and China on these issues; and has declared the United States the leader of the world’s democracies.21 While Biden’s foreign policy represents a distinct shift in tone, the effects of four years of America First persist. For example, European allies were troubled by the chaotic withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan in August 2021 and the almost immediate, seemingly unanticipated, fall of Kabul to Taliban control, which for them raised doubts about the sincerity of Biden’s commitment to global engagement and consultation. Afghanistan was the first mission in NATO’s history to emerge from invoking Article 5, the collective defense pact at the heart of NATO’s founding treaty that binds its members together and sets a “spirit of solidarity” within the alliance.22 NATO allies invested heavily in Afghanistan, both in terms of blood and treasure, as part of their commitment to the alliance and the shared international order it symbolizes. Biden’s ordering the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan

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without adequately consulting European partners in this decision signified to these allies a foreign policy more in line with American First than America Is Back. Likewise, when the United States and Britain announced a deal to help Australia build nuclear-powered submarines to counter growing Chinese power in the Pacific region, leading Australia to renege on a promise to buy Frenchbuilt submarines, French leaders were angered by their exclusion from the discussions and the failure of administration officials to have at least notified them beforehand. As an act of protest, French president Emanuel Macron recalled the ambassador to the United States, and Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian described the deal as a “unilateral, brutal, unpredictable decision” and compared it to the erratic decision making typical of the Trump administration.23 Indeed, an editorial in Le Monde made the issue at stake clear: “For any who still doubted it, the Biden administration is no different from the Trump administration on this point: The United States comes first, whether it’s in the strategic, economic, financial or health fields. ‘America First’ is the guiding line of the foreign policy of the White House.”24 As Jennifer Spindel argues in her chapter, arms sales have a political-signaling function and say something about a state’s political relationships.25 Thus, along with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, this episode seems to suggest a pattern of lack of genuine consultation with allies and has provoked a broader perception of American dismissiveness of its allies in its foreign policy. America’s status as the leader of the international order depends upon the recognition of its closest friends and allies. While it is clear that Biden has outwardly embraced the language of multilateralism and global engagement during his first year in office, more must be done to shore up the relationships and routines upon which the recognition of its leadership role depends. The United States no longer enjoys the benefit of the doubt about its foreign policy intentions. Thus, a key priority for the Biden administration’s foreign policy must be to make America recognizable again. To do this, it must invest in genuine and intentional consultation and collaboration with allies and friends on global affairs.

Notes 1. Robert Jervis, “The Trump Experiment Revisited,” H-Diplo/ISSF Policy Series, ed. D. Labrosse, “America and the World: The Effects of the Trump Presidency,” February 1, 2021, https://issforum.org /to/ps2021-7; see also chapter 1 in this volume. 2. See chapter 4 in this volume, by Deborah Avant. 3. Michelle Murray, The Struggle for Recognition in International Relations: Status, Revisionism, and Rising Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 45–46. This view of status stands in contrast to predominant approaches in international relations

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4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

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theory, which define status as perceptions of a state’s ranking on valued attributes. See Deborah Welch Larson, T. V. Paul, and William  C. Wohlforth, “Status and World Order,” in Status in World Politics, ed. Deborah Welch Larson, T. V. Paul, and William C. Wohlforth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Emmanuelle Blanc, “We Need to Talk: Trump’s Electoral Rhetoric and the Role of Transnational Dialogue,” Politics 41, no. 1 (2021): 113–14. Marc C. Suchman, “Managing Legitimacy: Strategic and Institutional Approaches,” Academy of Management Review 20, no. 3 (1995): 574. Karl Gustafsson, “Routinised Recognition and Anxiety: Understanding the Deterioration in Sino-Japanese Relations,” Review of International Studies 42, no. 4 (2016): 6. Felix Berenskoetter and Yuri van Hoef, “Friendship and Foreign Policy,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Foreign Policy Analysis, ed. Cameron G. Thies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 749. Murray, The Struggle for Recognition in International Relations. Berenskoetter and van Hoef, “Friendship and Foreign Policy,” 750. David M. Herszenhorn, “Fear and Loathing (of Donald Trump) in the EU,” Politico, October 9, 2020. Michel Rose and Estelle Shirbon, “Very, Very Nasty: Trump Clashes with Macron Before NATO Summit,” Reuters, December 2, 2019; Susan Colbourn, “Donald Trump and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Deal,” HDiplo Series. Herszenhorn, “Fear and Loathing (of Donald Trump) in the EU.” Herszenhorn, “Fear and Loathing (of Donald Trump) in the EU.” Blanc, “We Need to Talk,” 117. David M. Herszenhorn, “G7 and Trump: Can’t Live with Him, Can’t Live Without Him,” Politico, June 7, 2018. Don Peck, “Presidential Silence After an Attack on American Soil,” Atlantic, January 13, 2019. Mark Landler, “In Extraordinary Statement, Trump Stands with Saudis Despite Khashoggi Killing,” New York Times, November 20, 2018. Editorial Board, “Opinion: No More Concessions,” Washington Post, June 12, 2018. Aamer Madhani, “Biden Declares ‘America Is Back’ in Welcome Words to Allies,” APNews, February 19, 2021. Joe Biden, “Remarks by the President on America’s Place in the World,” speech, U.S. Department of State Headquarters, Washington, DC, February 4, 2021; emphasis mine. James Goldgeier, “Joe Biden, American Democracy and the China Challenge,” HDiplo Series. North Atlantic Treaty Organization, “Collective Defense – Article 5,” last updated November 23, 2021, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics _110496.htm. Roger Cohen, “In Submarine Deal with Australia, U.S. Counters China but Enrages France,” New York Times, September 16, 2021. Roger Cohen and Michael D. Shear, “Furious Over Sub Deal, France Recalls Ambassadors to U.S. and Australia,” New York Times, September 17, 2021. See chapter 16 in this volume, by Jennifer Spindel.

CHAPTER 4

HAS TRUMP CHANGED HOW WE THINK ABOUT AMERICAN SECURITY? D E B O R A H AVA NT

It is now impossible to read a great deal of writing on international relations published in the US . . . without noting the prevalence of a bland indifference toward—if not total neglect of—questions of race, social justice, and hierarchy. —Howard French, “Can America Remain Preeminent?”

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hat are the legacies of President Donald Trump’s years for how we think about security? Many might point to the “America First” frame the former president championed, which increased attention to national security and American advantage, as Emma Ashford does in chapter 6 of this book. Less obviously, though, as Joshua Busby and Jonathan Monten argue in chapter 32, the Trump presidency’s acceleration of polarization, racism, and dysfunction generated greater scholarly awareness of how exclusionary tools like sexism and racism, which are designed to give advantage to some and dismiss others, underlie many conceptions in the field.1 This latter trend, on which I focus here, created an opening for increased attention to the connections between human security, international security, and national security. More attention to these connections promises a more realistic analysis of the U.S. role in the world and better strategies for managing its various relations.

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As many have pointed out, polarization and dysfunction did not begin with the Trump years.2 Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt trace the beginnings of institutional breakdown to the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, and his Republican Revolution in the 1990s.3 A litany of studies has argued that polarization is deeply connected with racism and goes back much further in U.S. politics.4 Jeet Heer documented a long tradition of Republican Party appeals to racism.5 And Julia Azari argued that, contrary to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s assertion, Trump was not the first white president but the third.6 Presidents Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Trump were each elected after a major racial disruption. They also were each impeached and served only one term (Azari’s analysis of Johnson and Nixon in 2018 proved prescient of what would unfold with Trump). Polarization and racism under Trump, though, accelerated markedly. Many Trump voters appeared to be activated by racism, sexism, and anti-immigrant sentiments.7 The former president’s rhetoric and actions intensified these sentiments in ways that deepened partisan divides and the potential for violence. FBI data demonstrate a spike in hate crimes after Trump’s election.8 The AntiDefamation League reported a doubling in the numbers of militia groups between 2008 and 2020.9 A 2019 report showed that the number of hate groups had grown by 55 percent since Trump took office in 2017.10 The Southern Poverty Law Center tracked 838 hate groups in 2020.11 Though hate groups and militias may not engender broader conflict,12 with an advocate in the White House they took on greater public prominence, supported controversial administration policies, and solidified as a support base for Trump. Some portions of the bureaucracy, particularly Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), also proved fertile ground for these ideas.13 In 2018, Peter Bergen and David Sterman argued in Foreign Affairs that the real terrorist threat in the United States was domestic—including far-right terrorism but also perpetrators that elude ideological categorization, such as “Incels.”14 And there is evidence of increased connections between militia groups and police forces.15 Alongside polarization and racism was dysfunction. Most entertainingly discussed in Daniel Drezner’s Toddler in Chief, Trump’s predilections generated incompetence and corruption.16 As Fred Hiatt put it, “Trump’s primary motivations are spite, self-aggrandizement and greed.”17 His naked pursuit of these very narrow interests often enlisted the U.S. bureaucracy and appeals to U.S. national interests. Though perhaps most obviously on display during his summit with Russian president Vladimir Putin in 2018, enriching family members and Trump-property coffers were routine.18 David Halperin called him the most corrupt president in U.S. history.19 His squirreling away of sensitive documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate may have been unprecedented, but it should not have been unexpected.20

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The implications of this polarization, racism, and dysfunction were dramatically illustrated in the in last year of his presidency. The administration politicized the COVID-19 pandemic, simultaneously underplaying its severity, minimizing national coordination, questioning the importance of mask wearing and social distancing, racializing blame by using the term “China virus,”21 and asserting a go-it-alone strategy in its withdrawal from the World Health Organization. Then, as protests over extraordinary incidents of police brutality erupted in the spring, Trump escalated the rhetoric against the activists “by telling governors  to ‘dominate’ protestors,  threatening to send in the military, and  using decades-old racist dog whistles—as well as by  using actual violence  against peaceful protestors outside the White House.”22 His egregious actions led his former secretary of defense, James Mattis, to break his silence with a blistering critique of Trump that accused him of dividing the nation and ordering the military to violate the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens.23 It is hard to overstate the loss of hope that many felt in the midst of these events, even before the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. But with the despair has also come greater attention to the deeper problems that enabled Trump and Trumpism. As Ibram X. Kendi describes it, racism is a social construct designed to offer advantage to some at a cost to others, and it is closely related to other exclusionary justifications, such as those based on class, gender, and sexuality.24 Consistent with decades-long calls from feminists25 and advocates of broader approaches to security,26 mainstream venues began to question not only the racism and dysfunction in the Trump administration but its roots in many of the IR concepts that are central to security analysis. Traditional analyses often assume that exclusionary behavior is normal, even beneficial.27 Security scholars have long focused most of their attention on great powers, ignoring the reality that these have been mostly white powers, whose attention to maintaining balance and order among great powers has justified the subjugation of much of the world’s population.28 And assumptions that states are unitary actors pursuing national interests have masked the deeply political struggle over just what national interests are and who is ignored (or worse) in different manifestations of them.29 But even as Trump’s ham-handed endorsement of great-power competition with China that Ashford describes has taken hold in Washington, DC,30 scholars are increasingly questioning the assumptions on which it is built. In 2020, Foreign Policy ran a series of articles reflecting on race in the field. Kelebogile Zvobgo and Meredith Loken focused attention on how Western privilege and white dominance permeate the field.31 Robbie Shilliam reminded us that analyses of race and racism have been a productive part of international relations analysis in the past and could be again.32 And nine leading thinkers laid out claims on why and how IR ignored racism and colonialism.33 Those who had

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not done so already flocked to read Robert Vitalis’s 2015 book documenting the racism and imperialism behind the contemporary IR field and the often forgotten Black scholars who opposed it.34 The traditional realist Stephen Walt pondered whether developments and policies inside the United States might be far more consequential for its global standing than “any of the clever stratagems, initiatives, ploys, schemes, or interventions they undertook abroad.”35 While also critical of Trump’s foreign policy missteps, Walt held that the president’s domestic damage was worse and that the next administration’s attention to innovative capacity, tempering deep polarization, and rebuilding infrastructure was key to the country’s future. There were many others. Susan Hennessey claimed that the greatest threat to U.S. national security was the possibility that Donald Trump would be reelected.36 Tamara Cofman Wittes worried about the permissive environment Trump had provided for those (in and outside the United States) who were eager to increase division and violence in the country in order to fuel their agenda, which could lead to violence regardless of whether he was reelected.37 Ross Douthat wrote of a progressive revolution spurred by Donald Trump’s presidency.38 Academic programs in international affairs intensified their self-reflection. The Bridging the Gap program, a longstanding effort to connect scholars with the policy world, took action on diversity and inclusion, hosting webinars, launching a new voices program to bring voices to national security that are typically outside the Washington, DC, orbit, and offering a diversity fellowship.39 Social media feeds buzzed with mainstream security scholars seeking advice on works that incorporate race to include in their syllabi. Scholars and policy makers alike grappled with instances where calls for national security are an exclusionary guise for pursuing narrow interests that harm, rather than protect, the common concerns of Americans.40 As Michael Barnett points out in chapter 2 of this book, the rule of law in the United States is imprinted with racism and builds on two separate genocides—one against African Americans and the other against Native Americans. And many, including Barnett, reflected on their lack of attention to race in their own past analyses. In connecting national security to common concerns, analysts heightened attention to the human security of individuals as well as larger concerns, such as climate change and global health, which affect all of our lives. Attention to the lives of Black Americans, Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins argued, is a key part of national security. What people seek “is security in a more holistic way, whether those threats originate from international or domestic factors.”41 The organization Jenkins helped start, Women of Color Advancing Peace and Security, surveyed committed organizations about the struggles they face in fighting discrimination.42 The Biden administration’s “Foreign Policy for the Middle Class” and its Interim Strategic Guidance reflect attention to these

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connections.43 And mainstream security scholars have recognized the value of feminist and critical analyses, which have long made these connections. The International Studies Association’s International Security Studies Section, for instance, granted the feminist and critic of militarism Cynthia Enloe its 2020 Distinguished Scholar Award and issued a diversity statement in tandem with the call for proposals for the 2022 annual meeting. These developments could shift the ground on which security analyses must start. This essay’s opening quotation is from a 2021 review of three new books on the future of American power. Howard French’s statement reveals that in the year between the publication of these highly acclaimed books and his review of them, it has become obvious that what was once seen as “normal” analysis— ignoring the racism and injustice on which international hierarchies are often based—is now worth taking note of. It may be that Trump has precipitated what the essayist George Packer (drawing on Gershom Scholem) deemed “America’s Plastic Hour.” Trump did not create racism and sexism, but his corrupt, bigoted, and inept presidency pushed them to new depths in ways that helped generate a “crucial moment when it is possible to act.”44 Sociologists have long argued that unsettled times provide opportunities for reframing our understandings and practices,45 and many believe the United States is at such a strategic inflection point.46 Plastic hours are rare, and, as Packer reminds us, they can also be wasted: “Nothing happens unless you move.” Indeed, there have been plastic hours before. The debate over security’s meaning that started at the end of the Cold War generated new language, opened paths for new actors, and pulled some of these actors within expanded notions of global public norms.47 That debate was precipitated by worries about climate change.48 The climate crisis has since become truly existential.49 But the rethinking Jessica Mathews called for has had less impact on studies of national security. As Alexandra Stark, Candace Rondeaux, and Heather Hurlburt put it, “We don’t have the language, let alone the policy, to begin confronting the national security challenges we currently face.”50 The value of embracing this plastic hour can be illustrated through the different reactions to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Some scholars have recognized how the deep inequities in the Russian military alongside Putin’s poor treatment of soldiers and associated inattention to the Russian social fabric have hampered Russian power.51 Conversely, the stronger social ties within Ukraine and between it and the world, accompanied by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s integrity, generated an outpouring of support from businesses and civil society groups around the world as well as Western governments.52 The combination of this support and Ukrainian resolve has led to more resilience than many thought possible.53 Differential treatment of Ukrainian refugees demonstrates lingering racism in many European countries.54 Others have fallen back into old habits. Whether by assuming a unitary Russia with Putin acting in its national interest (despite the evidence to the contrary)55 or focusing on an end to

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the war that denies Ukrainian agency,56 there is much analysis that ignores the potential that the war in Ukraine poses for a postcolonial moment.57 Shifting the exclusionary underpinnings of national security in the midst of growing inequality, distrust in institutions, politicization of voting and elections at home, multiple global crises (including climate change), and resurgent geopolitical competition will require all hands on deck, including the international relations analysts who shape who we study and what is possible.58 Embracing change in the academy will mean continual reflection about the way our language may be inhibiting rather than enabling productive policy responses. The activities of last two years offer some hope that the security field may, this time, be up for the task.

Notes 1. Joshua Busby and Jonathan Monten, “Trump’s Foreign Policy Legacy,” H-Diplo ISSF Policy Series, March 12, 2021, https://issforum.org /ISSF/PDF/PS2021-13.pdf. 2. James Goldgeier and Bruce W. Jentleson, “The United States Is Not Entitled to Lead the World,” Foreign Affairs, September 25, 2020. 3. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2019). 4. See Christian Sebastian Parker and Christopher C. Towler, “Race and Authoritarianism in American Politics,” Annual Review of Political Science, 2019, https://www .annualreviews.org /doi/full/10.1146/annurev-polisci-050317-064519; Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Charles  W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014). 5. Jeet Heer, “How the Southern Strategy Made Donald Trump Possible,” New Republic, February 18, 2016; https://newrepublic .com /article/130039/southern-strategy-made -donald-trump-possible. 6. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The First White President,” Atlantic, October 2017, https://www .theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates /537909/. See the summary of Azari’s remarks in Deborah Avant, “Is the Liberal Order in Crisis?,” Political Violence@ a Glance, March 13, 2018, http://politicalviolenceata glance.org /2018/03/13/is-the-liberal-order-in-crisis/. 7. Brian F. Schaffner, Matthew Macwilliams, and Tatishe Nteta, “Understanding White Polarization in the 2016 Vote for President: The Sobering Role of Racism and Sexism,” Political Science Quarterly 133 (2018): 1, 9–34. See also Marc Hooghe and Ruth Dassonneville, “Explaining the Trump Vote: The Effect of Racist Resentment and Antiimmigrant Sentiments,” Political Science, July 2018. 8. Aaron Williams, “Hate Crimes Rose the Day After Trump Was Elected, FBI Data Show,” Washington Post, March 23, 2018. 9. Seth Cohen, “How Right Wing Militias Pose a Challenge to America and Its Leaders,” Forbes, October 10, 2020, https://www.forbes.com /sites/sethcohen /2020/10/10 /how-right-wing-militias-pose-a-challenge-to-america-and-its-leaders/. 10. Southern Poverty Law Center, The Year in Hate and Extremism 2019, https://www .splcenter.org /sites/default/files/yih _2020_ final.pdf. 11. Southern Poverty Law Center, “Hate and Extremism,” https://www.splcenter.org /issues/hate-and-extremism.

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12. Paul Staniland, “America’s Militias in Comparative Perspective,” 2016, https:// paulstaniland.com/2016/10/26/americas-militias-in-comparative-perspective/. 13. Franklin Foer, “How Trump Radicalized ICE,” Atlantic, September 2018, https://www .theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/trump-ice/565772/. 14. Peter Bergen and David Sterman, “The Real Terrorist Threat in America: It’s No Longer Jihadi Groups,” Foreign Affairs, October 30, 2018. 15. Sam Levin, “White Supremacists and Militias Have Infiltrated Police Across US, Report Says,” Guardian, August 27, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020 /aug /27/white-supremacists-militias-infiltrate-us-police-report. 16. Daniel Drezner, Toddler in Chief: What Donald Trump Teaches Us About the Modern Presidency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). 17. Fred Hiatt, “Yes, Trump Is Incompetent. But He’s Becoming Alarmingly Good at Corrupting the Government,” Washington Post, August  9, 2020, https://www.washing tonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-learning-to-bend-the-bureaucracy-to-his-will/2020 /08/09/f9b48ab0-d8dd-11ea-aff6–220dd3a14741 _ story.html. 18. John Harwood, “Trump Pushed His Personal Agenda, Not the National Interest, at Putin Summit,” CNBC, July 16, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/16/trump-pushed -his-personal-agenda-not-the-national-interest-at-putin-.html; Fernanda G. Nicola and Günter Frankenberg, “Trump (and Other Autocrats) See Power as Private Property,” National Interest, January  21, 2021, https://nationalinterest.org / blog /reboot /trump-and-other-autocrats-see-power-private-property-176790. 19. David Halperin, “Ten Reasons Trump Is the Most Corrupt President in US History,” Republic Report, October 26, 2020, https://www.republicreport.org /2020/ten-reasons -trump-is-the-most-corrupt-president-in-u-s-history/. 20. David Shribman, “FBI Raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Home Unprecedented and yet Predictable,” Globe and Mail, August 9, 2022, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world /us-politics/article-fbi-raid-of-trumps-home-unprecedented-and-yet-predictable/. 21. Andrea Salcedo, “Racist Anti-Asian Hashtags Spiked After Trump First Tweeted ‘China Virus,’ Study Finds,” Washington Post, March 19, 2021, https://www.washing tonpost.com/nation/2021/03/19/trump-tweets-chinese-virus-racist/. 22. Jeremy Venook, “Trump’s Record on Police Brutality and Peaceful Protest: Making the Problem Worse,” Center for American Progress, 2020, https://www.american progressaction .org /issues /security/news /2020/06/15 /177851 /trumps -record -police -brutality-peaceful-protests-making-problem-worse/. 23. Jeffrey Goldberg, “James Mattis Denounces President Trump, Describes Him as a Threat to the Constitution,” Atlantic, June  3, 2020, https://www.theatlantic .com /politics /archive /2020/06/james -mattis -denounces -trump -protests -militarization /612640/. 24. Ibrahm X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracitst (New York: Random House, 2019). 25. For instance, Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); J. Ann Tickner, “You Just Don’t Understand: Troubled Engagements Between Feminists and IR Theorists,” International Studies Quarterly 41, no. 4 (1997): 611–32. 26. See, for instance, Jessica Tuckman Matthews, “Redefining Security,” Foreign Affairs, Spring 1989. 27. See, for example, John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001). 28. Kelebogile Zvebgo and Meredith Loken, “Why Race Matters in International Relations,” Foreign Policy, June  19, 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/19/why-race -matters-international-relations-ir/.

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29. Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams, “Security and ‘Security Studies’: Conceptual Evolution and Historical Transformation,” in The Oxford Handbook of International Security (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 14–28. 30. Ashford, “When Donald Met Washington.” 31. Kelebogile Zvebgo and Meredith Loken, “Why Race Matters in International Relations,” Foreign Policy, June  19, 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/19/why-race -matters-international-relations-ir/. 32. Robbie Shilliam, “When Did Racism Become Solely a Domestic Issue?,” Foreign Policy, June  23, 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/23/racism-ir-international-relations -domestic/. 33. Gurminder K. Bhambra, Yolande Bouka, Randolph B. Persaud, et al., “Why Is Mainstream International Relations Blind to Racism?,” Foreign Policy, July 3, 2020, https:// foreignpolicy.com /2020/07/03 /why-is -mainstream-international-relations -ir-blind -to-racism-colonialism/. 34. Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015). 35. Stephen Walt, “All Great Power Politics Is Local,” Foreign Policy, August 24, 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/24/all-great-power-politics-is-local/. 36. Susan Hennessey, discussant, “Rational Security: ‘Buckle Your Seatbelts’ Edition,” Lawfare, October 28, 2020, https://www.lawfareblog.com /rational-security-buckle -your-seatbelts-edition. Hennessey has since joined the Biden administration’s Department of Justice, in the National Security Division. 37. Tamara Cofman Wittes, discussant, “Rational Security: ‘Buckle Your Seatbelts’ Edition,” Lawfare, October  28, 2020, https://www.lawfareblog.com /rational-security -buckle-your-seatbelts-edition. 38. Ross Douthat, “Did Trump Make Everything Progressive?” New York Times, May 4, 2021. 39. Bridging the Gap, https://bridgingthegapproject.org/programs/new-voices-in-national -security/. 40. Nikhil Kalyanpur, “Hegemony, Inequality, and the Quest for Primacy,” Journal of Global Security Studies 3, no. 3 (2018): 371–84. 41. Bonnie Jenkins, “Redefining Our Concept of Security,” Brookings Institution Blog, December 4, 2019, https://www.brookings.edu/ blog /order-from-chaos/2019/12/04/re defining-our-concept-of-security/. 42. Organizations in Solidarity, Standing Against Racism and Discrimination: Baseline Survey Report, WCAPS, June  2021, https://issuu .com /wcapsnet /docs/ois _ survey _results _2020_ final. 43. James Traub, “Biden’s ‘Foreign Policy for the Middle Class’ Is a Revolution,” Foreign Policy, March  17, 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com /2021 /03/17/ bidens-foreign-policy -middle-class-revolution/; Daniel Drezner, “Let’s Grade the Biden Administration’s Interim Strategic Guidance,” Washington Post, March 8, 2021, https://www.washing tonpost.com/outlook /2021/03/08/lets-grade-biden-administrations-interim-strategic -guidance/. 44. George Packer, “America’s Plastic Hour Is Upon Us,” Atlantic, October 2020, https:// www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/make-america-again/615478/; Gershom Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth (New York: Schocken, 1980). 45. Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review 51, no. 2 (1986): 273–86. 46. See, for instance, the first 2021 issue of the U.S. Army War College journal, Parameters. https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/.

54 TRU MP A N D I N T E R N AT I O N A L R E L AT IO NS T H EO RY 47. Deborah Avant and Virginia Haufler, “Public-Private Interactions and Practices of Security,” in The Oxford Handbook of International Security, ed. Alexandra Gheciu and William Wohlforth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 350–64. 48. Jessica Tuchman Mathews, “Redefining Security,” Foreign Affairs 68, no. 2 (1989): 162–77. 49. Katrina vanden Heuvel, “Why We Need a ‘Long Telegram’ About the Climate Crisis— Not Conflict with China or Russia,” Washington Post, November 9, 2021, https://www .washingtonpost . com /opinions /2021 /11 /09 / why -we -need - long -telegram - about -climate-crisis-not-conflict-with-china-or-russia/. 50. Alexandra Stark, Candace Rondeauz, and Heather Hurlburt, The Meaning of Security: Can a Divided Society Provide for the Common Defense (New America Report, April 2021), 11. 51. Jayson Lyall, “How Inequality Hobbles Military Power: Divided Armies Struggle to Win,” Foreign Affairs, July  22, 2022, https://www.foreignaffairs.com /ukraine/ how -inequality-hobbles-military-power/; Dara Massicot, “The Russian Military’s People Problem,” Foreign Affairs, May 18, 2022, https://www.foreignaffairs .com /articles /russian-federation/2022-05-18/russian-militarys-people-problem; Michael Mazarr, “What Makes a Great Power Great?,” Foreign Affairs, June  21, 2022, https://www .foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2022-06-21/what-makes-a-power-great/. 52. Katherine Smith, “How Companies Are Responding to the War in Ukraine: A Roundup,” Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship, https://ccc.bc.edu/content /ccc/blog-home/2022/03/companies-respond-to-war-in-ukraine.html; “Tens of Thousands Join Rallies Around the World in Support of Ukraine,” Guardian, March 5, 2022; IFW, “Ukraine Support Tracker,” https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine /ukraine-support-tracker. 53. Tymofii Brik and Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, “The Sources of Ukraine’s Resilience,” Foreign Affairs, June 28, 2022, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2022 -06-28/source-ukraines-resilience; Ishaan Thoroor, “How Russia’s Invasion Strengthened Ukrainian Identity,” Washington Post, August 24, 2022, https://www.washington post.com/world/2022/08/24/ukrainian-identity-russian-invasion/. 54. UN, “UNHCR Chief Condemns ‘Discrimination, Violence, and Racism’ Against Some Fleeing Ukraine,” https://news.un.org /en/story/2022/03/1114282. 55. Stephen Walt, “Does Anyone Still Understand the Security Dilemma?,” Foreign Policy, July 26, 2022. 56. Richard Wilcox, “A New Diplomatic Off-Ramp for Russia,” Politico, March 16, 2022, https://www.politico.com/news/ magazine/2022/03/16/austria-offer-model-ukrainenato-00017537; Anatol Lieven, “The Horrible Dangers of Pushing a US Proxy War in Ukraine,” Responsible Statecraft, April 27, 2022, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022 /04/27/thehorrible-dangers-in-pushing-a-us-proxy-war-in-ukraine/. 57. Maria Mälksoo, “The Postcolonial Moment in Russia’s War against Ukraine,” Journal of Genocide Research, 2022. 58. Henry Farrell and Jack Knight, “Dewey’s Democratic Account of International Politics,” 2018, http://henryfarrell.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Dewey-Paper.pdf.

CHAPTER 5

TRUMP’S REALISM R A N DA L L L . S C H W E L L E R

T

he era of Pax Americana—ushered in by President Harry Truman, put on steroids during the neoliberal wave initiated by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, and seemingly cemented by the profound changes in Europe after the Cold War—led many to proclaim the arrival of a final stage of global democratic peace and liberal order.1 This teleological view of history has, in recent years, proved to be an illusion. While progressives would like to believe otherwise, “in geopolitics, as in biology, mankind remains susceptible to new strains of old maladies.”2 And so a world that had grown accustomed to thinking of progress as inevitable and irreversible is now being rocked by old toxic patterns that had previously been thought crushed by the march of progress—the outbreak of a global pandemic, the rise of authoritarian alternatives to democracy, and the return of great-power competition.3 Enter President Donald J. Trump, a nationalist with a foreign policy agenda guided by core realist principles. Condemning the evils of neoliberal cosmopolitanism, he and his followers despised the “power-hungry” globalist class, whose transnational elites—with their postmodern views of borders, patriotic nationalism, and other traditional loyalties as expendable social constructs— they viewed as putting the well-being of the world above their own countries.4 Trump’s economic nationalism sanctioned the right of states to intervene in markets to defend their citizens and to control the capricious effects of globalization. Consistent with the political economy of realism, the goals were to bring jobs back home, support domestic manufacturing, limit immigration,

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raise tariffs, and ensure national self-sufficiency in the production of strategic goods—from steel and 5G networks to antibiotics and surgical masks. More generally, Trump’s foreign policy views sought a return to America’s pre-1941 approach to the world. Before the Cold War, American exceptionalism meant shielding the United States from foreign threats, steering clear of permanent alliances, spreading democracy through example rather than military force, embracing protectionism and fair trade, and preferring independent to multilateral action.5 Simply put, it was about putting “America first.” Embracing America’s past, Trump rejected the core tenets of the liberal international order (LIO)—the sprawling and multifaceted system that the United States and its allies built and have supported for seven decades. Questioning the very fabric of international cooperation, he assaulted the world trading system, reduced funding for the United Nations, denounced NATO, threatened to end multilateral trade agreements, called for Russia’s readmission to the G7, and scoffed at attempts to address global challenges such as climate change. Trump’s transactional approach to foreign relations marked a United States that was less interested in managing its long-term relationships than in making gains on short-term deals.

No More Uncle Sugar Drawing sharp distinctions between cosmopolitan and national interests, President Trump, unlike his predecessors, was not an unwavering free trader. A key part of his agenda was to rebalance the United States’ trade accounts with the rest of the world. The stated goal was to correct systematic and excessive trade imbalances with wealthy East Asia and Europe, while protecting industries that are vital to U.S. national security. Here, Trump was a mercantile realist, willing to “weaponize” the American market if necessary. Trump made it plain to the world: other countries would no longer be allowed to play the United States for a sucker—no more Uncle Sugar. “We’re like the piggy bank that everybody is robbing,” Trump said of America’s trade partners. “And that ends.” He further noted, “If they retaliate, they’re making a big mistake,” given the size of the U.S. economy. “We win that war a thousand times out of a thousand.”6 This reveals Trump’s inherent realist understanding of economic interdependence as a power resource, not a weakness, for the United States. While America is somewhat dependent on the external world, all other countries depend on the external world much more so. As Kenneth Waltz put it: “As compared to other nations, the United States is more independent than dependent.”7 To explain variation in state behaviors, realist theory places enormous causal weight on national power and international structure. And, indeed, dramatic changes in these structural-systemic factors predicted the shift in America’s

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foreign economic policy from neoliberalism to Trump’s transactional brand of politics. Since the start of the new millennium, the global distribution of resources and power—economic wealth, political influence, and military power—has evolved in a more plural direction. The United States remains the most powerful state in the world. But it is no longer an Atlas capable of carrying the world on its shoulders.

The Primacy of Relative Gains As Waltz correctly predicted back in 1993: “Economic competition is often as keen as military competition, and since nuclear weapons limit the use of force among great powers at the strategic level, we may expect economic and technological competition among them to become more intense.”8 Sino-American tensions rose dramatically during the Trump presidency. It was not a Cold War fueled by ideological and geostrategic competition. Rather, it was a hot war over economic and technological supremacy. The Sino-American struggle for global dominance in 5G networks, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence (AI) is the new superpower arms race. The winner stands to gain an economic, military, and intelligence edge for much of the century.9 Unlike prior presidents, who stressed global partnerships and economic interdependence, Trump did not sugarcoat the ruthlessness of global competition under anarchy. Realists understand the importance of leading-sector technologies on a nation’s relative power position within the international system. Once again, as Waltz observed: “Technical and economic advances accumulate. One technological breakthrough may lead to others. Economic growth rates compound.”10 Accordingly, realist theory finds that states are positional in character: they are most concerned about making relative gains and avoiding relative losses—concerns that often constrain their willingness to cooperate with one another.11 Realism’s preoccupation with relative gains and losses is rooted in its insights that states under anarchy not only fear for their survival as independent actors but also seek to maximize their power and influence over others. Reflecting his relative-gains orientation, President Trump made it clear at a White House event unveiling the administration’s 5G strategy in April 2019 that “we cannot allow any other country to outcompete the United States in this powerful industry of the future.” He went on to say that the race to develop these faster, more powerful networks is a competition “America must win.”12 What were the results of Trump’s economic realism? On January 15, 2020, the United States and China signed the Phase One trade deal, requiring structural reforms and other changes to China’s economic and trade regime in the areas of intellectual property,  technology transfer,  agriculture,  financial

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services, and  currency and foreign exchange. In return, the United States pledged not to increase tariffs on Chinese exports.13 As of this writing, Chinese purchases of U.S. exports have fallen far behind Beijing’s “trade deal” pledge. Yet, the trade war did produce one victory for the United States and the Trump administration. Global companies, fearing greater uncertainty and seeking diversity to lessen their dependence on China, have reduced their exposure to Chinese factories by shifting their supply chains to other countries, mostly the United States, Mexico, Vietnam, Cambodia, and India. The move, known as decoupling, has significantly diminished China’s role as the world’s factory—an outcome that many Trump administration officials wanted at the onset of the trade war.14 According to realist theory, relative-gains concerns extend beyond a state’s enemies. Realists stress the fact that the intentions of others are essentially unknowable and can change.15 Because today’s friend may be tomorrow’s enemy, states fear that joint gains from cooperation that advantage a friend in the present might produce a more dangerous potential foe in the future. Guided by this realist logic, Trump did not exempt America’s closest allies from his economic nationalism. In May 2018, for instance, the Trump administration made good on a key campaign promise when it said it was moving ahead with a 25 percent tariff on steel imports and a 10 percent tariff on aluminum imports from Canada, Mexico, and the European Union. The logic was rooted in core principles of realist political economy. Specifically, realists believe that states must anticipate the possibility of war, which sometimes requires them to deviate from policies prescribed by economic liberalism. With war always lurking in the background, “states will strive for national self-sufficiency, in order to assure the ability to produce the means to fight, as well as to reduce vulnerabilities that would result from the disruption of peacetime patterns of international economic flows.”16

No More Multilateralism Another realist plank of Trump’s foreign policy platform was that the United States should work with its international partners on a bilateral basis whenever possible, rather than through multilateral arrangements and commitments. Accordingly, the administration withdrew from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and 2016 Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the 2016 Paris agreement on climate change. Likewise, the Trump administration chose a bilateral approach to confront China on its trade and business practices—one that kept the European allies at arm’s length. Multilateralism, in Trump’s view, is intended to tie down American power and inhibit Washington’s ability to manage and control its own affairs. In a

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much-anticipated speech on foreign policy in April 2016, Republican presidential candidate Trump said: “We will no longer surrender this country, or its people, to the false song of globalism. The nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony. I am skeptical of international unions that tie us up and bring America down, and will never enter America into any agreement that reduces our ability to control our own affairs.” Thus Trump “oppose[d] democracy promotion, multilateralism, security guarantees, and, implicitly, keeping the global commons open for use by all nations.”17 The Trump administration was not alone in its assault on multilateralism. Countries around the world shifted to a “go it alone” strategy.18 The globalist panacea that envisioned everyone getting rich in an increasingly flat and borderless world has been in steady retreat for over a decade now, as a growing number of people seem willing to trade efficiency, growth, and openness for the sake of state autonomy and the preservation of national identity and cultural distinctiveness. Back in the 1930s, the Christian realist Reinhold Niebuhr warned that the “development of international commerce, the increased economic interdependence among the nations, and the whole apparatus of a technological civilisation, increase the problems and issues between nations much more rapidly than the intelligence to solve them can be created.”19 The coronavirus pandemic massively reinforced the current deglobalization trend. What COVID-19 has most glaringly shown is that, as Stephen Walt argues, tight interconnections among states “create as many problems as they solve, sometimes more quickly than we can devise solutions for them. For this reason, states—the critical building blocks of international politics—try to reduce risks and vulnerabilities by placing limits on their dealings with one another.”20

NATO Should Not Endure The final piece of Trump’s foreign policy is his insistence that U.S. allies pay their fair share of the costs of their defense. This is a deeply held belief that long predates his ascension to the presidency.21 The United States accounts for 73 percent of NATO defense spending—a rather large amount for an organization with twenty-nine members and focused on European security. Meanwhile, discussion of the current German defense budget foresaw military spending that would max out at 1.37 percent of GDP by 2020 and then fall to under 1.3 percent of economic output by 2022. This is well below Berlin’s “political goal” of 1.5 percent, never mind the 2 percent target to which Germany has repeatedly committed.22 Starved of funds by the German government, the Bundeswehr consists of only 181,500 soldiers (ranked twenty-seventh globally and down from 500,000 in 1990), whose military

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training sometimes features “laughable improvisations,” for example, battle exercises in which soldiers use broomsticks to stand in for gun barrels and passenger vans for armored personnel carriers.23 Most American allies have refused to shoulder the human and economic costs required for their own defense and credible military deterrents; they are more accurately regarded as American dependencies or protectorates than actual military partners.24 And the few U.S. “allies” that do spend a healthy amount on their defenses—Turkey, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia—do not share American interests or values; they cooperate with Washington only when it serves their purposes. Yet these same “allies,” despite their collective disinterest in U.S. goals, are happy to benefit from the United States’ arms, protection, and cash.25 As realism leads us to suspect, the deepening divisions within NATO and America’s alliances in the Middle East are less about the temperaments of current leaders or malicious turns in their domestic politics than about the changed international structure. In a world of increasingly decentralized power, alliances become less fixed: today’s friend may be tomorrow’s enemy (or, at a minimum, competitor), and vice versa. Trump accepted this. He operated according to the realpolitik principle that former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger, echoing Lord Palmerston, once summarized: “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.”26 A focus on international structure also reveals an enormous transfer of wealth and military capabilities from West to East over the past two decades. Why should the transatlantic alliance remain a vital force when the world’s political center of gravity has shifted to the Indo-Pacific? Like virtually every prominent realist over the past decade, Trump called into question the continued existence of NATO, thereby shocking the foreign policy establishment. As a realist, Trump was sensitive to the fact that NATO no longer exists to advance a realist purpose, namely, balancing against a dangerous superpower. Indeed, virtually all realists have been and remain sensitive to this fact. Thus, Kenneth Waltz very wrongly but quite logically predicted in 1993, “NATO’s days are not numbered, but its years are.”27 In the post–Cold War era, NATO abandoned its realist roots and become something akin to a regional collective security system, embracing the strategy of defending liberal democratic values: freedom, democracy, the rule of law, and respect for human rights.28 The Clinton administration articulated NATO’s mission as “enlarging the community of market democracies while deterring and limiting a range of threats to our nation, our allies, and our interests. The more that democracy and political and economic liberalization take hold in the world, particularly in countries of strategic importance to us, the safer our nation is likely to be and the more our people are likely to prosper.”29 NATO’s area of operations expanded as well. The 1998–1999 war in Kosovo was the first

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time that “a defensive alliance launched a military campaign to avoid a humanitarian tragedy outside its own borders.”30 Realists expected NATO to disappear, as had every other grand military coalition in history once the foe had been defeated. Yet it not only persisted but expanded as well. Realists attributed this “disconfirming” case to a pathological disorder associated with the historically unprecedented structural condition of unipolarity. Unchecked power, as realism warns, is dangerous not only to everyone who confronts it but to its possessor, who succumbs to the vice of overextension.31 For the United States, this vice has manifested itself not only in an outmoded generosity toward its rich NATO allies but in costly and pointless wars that have undermined its influence around the world.32

No “Glorious Restoration” For Democrats and “never Trump” Republicans, President Joe Biden’s victory promises a “glorious restoration” of the LIO and the strategic progress made during the post–Cold War decades—a return to the pre-Trump foreign policy for which they were responsible.33 It is possible that the report of the LIO’s death has been grossly exaggerated. After all, this is hardly the first time that the foreign policy community has been convinced that the sky is falling. Panic over the viability of the American global order has been a persistent theme among foreign policy analysts since the LIO began—from Sputnik in the 1950s, to Vietnam and the export of inflation in the 1960s, to the end of the Bretton Woods system and the oil shocks of the 1970s, to the soaring U.S. budget and trade deficits in the 1980s, to 9/11, and, most recently, the 2008 financial crisis. This time, however, it is different.34 The “after Trump” narrative of a restoration will never happen. Not because it was more catastrophe than glorious but rather because Trump’s victory is more consequence than cause of the LIO’s demise. Changes were afoot years before the rise of Trump. Deep structural forces in the international system inexorably work against any one country that accumulates so much power that it can establish and rule an international order. Unipolarity is over. The United States must come to grips with the new reality of bipolar strategic competition with China, multipolarity in other areas (the global economy and nuclear weapons), and limits on its action. Neoconservative internationalism has given way to neoisolationism among grassroots factions within the Republican Party. As Thomas Wright observes, they are “sick and tired of US involvement in the Middle East and have little interest in America’s alliances with Europe. They are mainly worried about the

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economic challenge from China. They’d pull up the drawbridge, build the wall, and live in the fortress.”35 It would be a mistake to treat these attitudes as a mere minority view, confined to the xenophobic-driven faction of Republican voters. Back in early 2014, a Pew survey found a majority of Americans, for the first time, said that the United States should be less engaged in world affairs and believed that their country had a declining influence on what was happening around the globe.36 Americans began to reject hard power and high politics. They no longer believe that the game of American primacy is worth the candle. Dramatic shifts of international structure explain why the United States has abandoned its leadership role and is turning inward. Trump contributed to the irreversible nature of the LIO’s demise. He not only challenged Republican orthodoxy but also blew up its establishment, making Trumpism virtually impossible to dislodge.37 But, again, he is more consequence than cause of neoliberalism’s demise. The same deep structural forces—the global deconcentration of power—that have created a more competitive great-power environment also explain why, even though former president Trump no longer steers U.S. foreign economic policy, his trade policy remains largely intact. As a candidate, Joe Biden called Trump’s “go it alone,” my-way-or-the-highway trade policy boorish and misguided. Candidate Biden promised, instead, to work with American allies and other trading partners on trade, saying that the United States must write the rules of trade within the existing WTO-based multilateral trading system. Now that he occupies the White House, President Biden has largely embraced Trump’s unilateralism and protectionism in trade. His administration has turned toward “more trade protection and managed trade, toward a proposed industrial policy that would add more restrictions on trade, and toward a destructive unilateralism that threatens to continue undermining the multilateral trading system overseen by the World Trade Organization,” complains the free-trade Democrat James Bacchus, a former U.S. representative from Florida.38 The current antitrade, antimultilateral, antiliberal direction of the political winds has been misdiagnosed by many on the political left in the media and think tanks as a mere populist fad, which will fade in the post-Trump years (perhaps taking a few Democrat administrations to fix the damage). The true cause, however, lies in changes in international structure, changes that typically move at a glacial pace.

Notes 1. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3–18; Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 2. Vance Serchuk, “Plagues Are Back. Will Wars Follow?,” Wall Street Journal, September 1, 2020.

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3. Serchuk, “Plagues Are Back.” Also see Ganesh Sitaraman, “A Grand Strategy of Resilience: American Power in the Age of Fragility,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 5 (September/ October 2020): 165–74. 4. Brett Samuels, “Trump: ‘You Know What I Am? I’m a Nationalist,’” The Hill, October 22, 2018, https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/412649-trump-you-know -what-i-am-im-a-nationalist. 5. Charles A. Kupchan, “The Clash of Exceptionalisms: A New Fight Over an Old Idea,” Foreign Affairs 97, no. 2 (March/April 2018): 139; Charles A. Kupchan, Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). 6. Damian Paletta and Anne Gearan, “Trump Pulls US from G7 Joint Statement After Bitter Feud with Trudeau,” Washington Post, June 10, 2018, https://www.ndtv.com /world-news /g-7-meeting-fails -to -calm-tensions -as -donald-trump -justin-trudeau -exchange-trade-threats-1865100. 7. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979), 157. 8. Kenneth N. Waltz, “The Emerging Structure of International Politics,” International Security 18, no. 2 (Autumn 1993): 59. 9. See, for example, David Sanger, Julian E. Barnes, Raymond Zhong, and Marc Santora, “U.S. Scrambles to Outrun China in New Arms Race,” New York Times, January 27, 2019. 10. Waltz, “The Emerging Structure of International Politics,” 60. 11. Joseph M. Grieco, “Realist Theory and the Problem of International Cooperation: Analysis with an Amended Prisoner’s Dilemma Model,” Journal of Politics 50, no. 3 (August 1988): 600–24. 12. Darlene Superville and Tali Arbel, “FCC to Hold Big 5G Auction, Spend $20B for Rural Internet,” Associated Press, April 12, 2019, https://apnews.com/402d7c2651914d31a4f2 16f81eadda53. 13. The complete text of the agreement is available at https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/files /agreements /phase%20one%20agreement / Economic _ And _Trade _ Agreement _ Between _The _United _ States _ And _China _Text.pdf. 14. Keith Bradsher, “Rethinking China’s Role as the World’s Factory,” New York Times, April 6, 2019. 15. John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001); Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 105. 16. Jonathan Kirshner, “The Political Economy of Realism,” in Unipolar Politics: Realism and State Strategies after the Cold War, ed. Ethan B. Kapstein and Michael Mastanduno (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 75. 17. Thomas Wright, “Five Things We ‘Learned’ From Trump’s Foreign Policy Speech,” Brookings, April 27, 2016: https://www.brookings.edu/ blog /order-from-chaos/2016/04 /27/five-things-we-learned-from-trumps-foreign-policy-speech/. 18. Peter S. Goodman, “Shift in Trade Around Globe: To Go It Alone,” New York Times, December 15, 2019. 19. Stephen M. Walt, “The Realist’s Guide to the Coronavirus Outbreak.” Foreign Policy, March 9, 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com /2020/03/09/coronavirus-economy-global ization-virus-icu-realism/. 20. Walt, “The Realist’s Guide to the Coronavirus Outbreak.” 21. Remarks by President Trump and Vice President Pence Announcing the Missile Defense Review, January 17, 2019, The Pentagon, Arlington, VA, https://www.white house .gov / briefings -statements /remarks -president-trump -vice -president-pence -announcing-missile-defense-review/.

64 TRU MP A N D I N T E R N AT I O N A L R E L ATIO NS T H EO RY 22. “Germany’s NATO Backslide,” Op-Ed, Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2019. 23. Stefan Theil, “Berlin’s Balancing Act,” Foreign Affairs 96, no.  5 (September/October 2017): 9. 24. Yoram Hazony and Ofir Haivry, “Why America Needs New Alliances,” Wall Street Journal, April 6–7, 2019. 25. Hazony and Haivry, “Why America Needs New Alliances.” 26. Wikiquote, https://en.wikiquote.org /wiki/Henry_ Kissinger. 27. Waltz, “The Emerging Structure of International Politics,” 76. 28. Visar Xhambazi, “From Collective Defense to Collective Security: NATO Intervention in Kosovo,” Journal of Political Science and Public Affairs 5, no. 2 (May 2017): 1–5. 29. The White House, “A National Security Strategy of Enlargement and Engagement,” February 1996, https://fas.org /spp/military/docops/national /1996stra .htm; see Sean Kay, America’s Search for Security: The Triumph of Idealism and the Return of Realism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), chap. 5. 30. Javier Solana, “NATO’s Success in Kosovo,” Foreign Affairs 78, no. 6 (November/ December 1999): 114. 31. Kenneth N. Waltz, “Structural Realism After the Cold War,” International Security 25, no. 1 (Summer 2000): 13. See also John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, “The Case for Offshore Balancing: A Superior U.S. Grand Strategy,” Foreign Affairs, July/ August 2016, 76; and Barry R. Posen, “Pull Back: The Case for a Less Activist Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs 92, no. 1 (January/February 2013): 121, 125. 32. See Stephen M. Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018). 33. Gerard Baker, “Elites Yearn for a Restoration Abroad Under Biden,” Wall Street Journal, August 25, 2020. 34. See Daniel W. Drezner, “This Time Is Different: Why U.S. Foreign Policy Will Never Recover,” Foreign Affairs 98, no. 3 (May/June 2019): 10–17. 35. Thomas Wright, “Will Trumpism Change Republican Foreign Policy Permanently?,” Brookings Institution, August 29, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/ blog /order-from -chaos/2020/08/29/will-trumpism-change-republican-foreign-policy-permanently/. 36. See David Brooks, “The Leaderless Doctrine,” New York Times, March 10, 2014, https:// www.nytimes.com/2014/03/11/opinion/ brooks-the-leaderless-doctrine.html. 37. Wright, “Will Trumpism Change Republican Foreign Policy Permanently?” 38. James Bacchus, “Biden and Trade at Year One: The Reign of Polite Protectionism,” Policy Analysis no. 926, Cato Institute, Washington, DC, April 26, 2022.

PART II

AMERICA FIRST

Editors’ Note Part II explores the legacy of Trump’s commitment to “America First” and his more blatantly nationalist foreign policy. For Emma Ashford in chapter  6, Trump’s nationalism simply amplified an already emerging push toward “great-power competition” in the mainstream foreign policy establishment. Trump may have been cruder in his transactionalism, but Ashford finds that the logics of power-political competition preceded him and will likely continue under Biden. Thomas W. Zeiler, however, points to the disastrous turn away from free trade and toward domestic protectionism (chapter  7). Ryan Irwin notes in chapter 8 that debates about many topics, from liberalism to migration, have not always shifted for the worse. Still, he writes, the “the challenges facing the global community feel bigger than the instruments on offer.” He wonders whether the United States has the ability to heal its self-inflicted political wounds. In his assessment of globalism and U.S. foreign policy after Trump, Frank Ninkovich also offers a pessimistic assessment, finding that “with an American public aroused by Trump’s rhetoric, internationalism, which has long been the guiding idea of U.S. foreign relations, can no longer be taken for granted” (chapter  9). He argues that while future American leaders may “muddle through” (a term employed by other authors, including Charles S. Maier), eventually “a tipping point will come when the direct experience of a critical mass of people will generate a demand that global problems be addressed in a

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truly practical manner.” Highlighting the damage of the Trump years to the United States in terms of both its domestic and foreign policies, Samuel Zipp concludes in chapter 10 that “the default liberal world order has failed to deliver a just response to globalization. Both Trumpist protofascism and the globeordering wishes of the liberal world order rest on a similar inability to grant the facts of our times. Both have failed to fully grapple with our interdependent planet.” Comparing Trump’s attempts to secure American dominance with U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War, in chapter 11 John A. Thompson sees Trump’s presidency as having had less influence on global politics than one might think. That said, Thompson points to the significant domestic legacy of racism and polarization as significant, concluding that “it may well be that Donald Trump’s greatest influence on the future of U.S. foreign policy will be the part he played, and is continuing to play, in exacerbating the toxic social and political civil war that did so much to elevate him to the presidency.”

CHAPTER 6

WHEN DONALD MET WASHINGTON The Genesis of “Great-Power Competition” E M M A A S H FO R D

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ashington’s foreign policy community had a love-hate relationship with President Donald Trump. Indeed, they hated some of his foreign policy ideas so much that hundreds of Republican former officials and foreign policy experts signed open letters arguing that “he would use the authority of his office to act in ways that make America less safe, and which would diminish our standing in the world.”1 Trump was certainly at odds with the DC establishment on many core foreign policy issues, from NATO funding to his proposed withdrawal from Afghanistan. Many pinned their hopes on the notion that principled appointees like former general James Mattis—the so-called adults in the room—could constrain Trump’s worst foreign policy impulses.2 Indeed, that question became the basis of substantive discussion, as scholars anticipated something of a natural experiment on the question of presidential advisors and influence. As Robert Jervis describes in chapter  1 of this volume, however, the results of that experiment were largely inconclusive. In some places, advisors were able to constrain Trump; in others, they were not. Regardless, by 2020, Trump’s foreign policy was so wildly unpopular that the Biden presidential campaign was able to explicitly cast its own foreign policy in terms of restoration, of fixing the wrongs done by Donald Trump. At the same time, the biggest foreign policy shift of Donald Trump’s four years in office was wholeheartedly embraced by Washington’s foreign policy community. First emerging in confirmation hearings and then—more notably—as the core organizing principle of the 2017 National Security Strategy, “great-power

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competition” (GPC) has become the Washington buzzword of the decade.3 And while many foreign policy hands might distance themselves from the more extreme aspects of the Trump-era approach to GPC—his destructive trade wars against China, for example—there is now a widespread acceptance of the idea that U.S. foreign policy should shift its focus from counterterrorism to confront a rising China and revanchist Russia. As President Joe Biden put it in his speech at the 2021 Munich Security Conference: “Competition with China is going to be stiff. That’s what I expect. And that’s what I welcome.”4 This assumption has only become more widespread with the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, the concept of competition has become so integral to Washington that, as the Atlantic recently put it, we’re now debating “whether or not to brand the competition with China a ‘cold war’ rather than interrogating our fixation on competition in the first place.”5 Trump’s tenure in office thus marked less of a break with the mainstream of U.S. foreign policy than one might have assumed. Instead, his bull-in-a-china-shop presidency acted more as a moment of punctuated equilibrium, allowing a trend that was already underway to emerge more rapidly. Certainly, it is unlikely that even under a generally more hawkish presidency of Hillary Clinton we would have seen such a rapid or forthright shift in U.S. relations toward China and Russia. The genesis of this greatpower competition —particularly its openly hostile framing—is thus one of the core legacies of the Trump presidency.

On the Roots of Great-Power Competition As with so many parts of the Trump presidency, GPC was in some ways more slogan than policy: poorly theorized, ill-defined, and implemented largely as a kind of reflexive hostility toward China. The assumptions underlying it were rarely stated and even less often examined. On the one hand, competition apparently offered a description of how the world operated. As the 2017 National Security Strategy (NSS) put it, “after being dismissed as a phenomenon of an earlier century, great power competition returned.”6 On the other hand, competition was also the administration’s proposed strategy, with the NSS arguing that “protecting American interests requires that we compete continuously.”7 If nothing else, this internal inconsistency made it an easy target, particularly for scholars of international relations. As Georgetown University’s Dan Nexon recently wrote in Foreign Affairs, “competition among great powers cannot return, because it never really went away.”8 Yet despite these flaws, Washington’s foreign policy community wholeheartedly embraced the slogan. Since 2016, there has been a notable shift in the

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Washington consensus on China. That year, a bipartisan study group of foreign policy experts—many of them advisors to that year’s Clinton presidential campaign—could plausibly argue that “there is no reason for a fundamental adjustment in the approach the last eight administrations—Republican and Democratic—have taken to China. Promoting the peaceful rise of China . . . remains a sound strategy for the United States.”9 Throughout the 2000s, there was surprisingly little opposition to the proposition, that—as former secretary of state Madeleine Albright put it in the 1990s—the United States should try to bring China “into the fold as a responsible participant in the international system, rather than driving it out into the wilderness of isolation.”10 In the brief span of the Trump presidency, however, such sentiments vanished almost overnight. Instead, the language of great-power competition, with its open references to “ambitious, aggressive countries seeking regional dominance”11 and “revisionist authoritarian forces,”12 quickly took hold. Op-eds, think-tank reports, panel discussions, and congressional testimony all began to reframe China and Russia as threats rather than opportunities and to suggest that the naïve hopes of the 1990s had not been borne out.13 Structural or power variables can only take us so far in explaining this shift. After all, the trendlines of China’s rise, America’s relative decline, and the world’s gradual shift from unipolarity to multipolarity have been visible for a decade or more. Nor can we really explain it solely as a response to Chinese or Russian aggression. After all, Chinese island building and Russia’s military interventions go back to the time of the Obama and George W. Bush presidencies. Yet the Bush administration sought to minimize tensions with Beijing over, for example, Taiwan, while the Obama administration’s failed “pivot to Asia” was framed in substantially more benign terms than today’s GPC language. As National Security Advisor Tom Donilon put it in 2012, the pivot focused on respect for “international law and norms” and on helping “emerging powers build trust with their neighbors.”14 In contrast, Trump’s open hostility to China appears to have acted as a catalyst for a shift in Washington’s assumptions about Chinese intentions, with published articles increasingly suggesting either directly or obliquely that a dangerous new era of competition was being driven by growing Chinese and Russian revisionism.15 Commentators echoed the Trump administration’s National Defense Strategy, which stated that “it is increasingly clear that China and Russia want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model—gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions.”16 It argued that Russia seeks to “shatter the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and change European and Middle East security and economic structures to its favor,” while China seeks “Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United States to achieve global preeminence in the future.”17

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The embrace of great-power competition—and its revisionist undertones— was the product of synthesis between the administration’s own hard-line policies and Washington’s existing bias toward maintaining American global primacy. As John A. Thompson notes in chapter 18 of this volume, “The determination to maintain America’s preeminent global position seems to have been what fueled the significant movement of opinion that occurred during Trump’s presidency—the emergence of a bipartisan political consensus that China should be regarded as a rival and adversary rather than a potential partner.” Trump’s presidency thus acted as a moment of punctuated equilibrium, or—as others in this volume note—as an accelerant of existing trends, marrying Trumpian revisionist sentiments to existing notions of American primacy to form a new Washington consensus.18

Revisionism and Great-Power Competition From the point of view of academic study, however, an open assumption of revisionism is a strange foundation upon which to build a grand strategy. All states are revisionist in some ways. Consider America’s post–Cold War behavior: the United States helped remake the map of Europe during the 1990s, invaded Iraq as part of an attempt to increase the spread of democracy globally, and helped overthrow dictators in Haiti, Libya, and elsewhere. Each of these actions sought to change the status quo; each was revisionist. This is particularly true for the simplistic, almost Manichean view of revisionism advanced by the Trump administration, which argued that China sought to “shape a world antithetical to US values and interests” and, ultimately, “to displace the United States.” As scholars have often noted, however, revisionism is rarely an all-or-nothing proposition. To be blunt: not all enemies are Nazis, but the mental scars of the Second World War often lead us to see revisionism in the light of this most extreme of historical outliers. Or as Jervis more pithily put it: “our memories of Hitler have tended to obscure the fact that most statesmen are unwilling to pay an exorbitant price for a chance at expansion.”19 In short, the question of Chinese intentions—and the impact of factors like domestic Chinese politics or the role of President Xi Jinping’s personality—is more open than the great-power competition framing would imply. As Michael Mazarr and Hal Brands argued in 2017, “the scope of Russian and Chinese ambitions, and the steps they are willing to take to achieve them—remain unknowable. . . . There are powerful and growing reasons for concern, but there is also accumulated evidence that these two states view a stable international order as important to their interests.”20 It would certainly be surprising if a rising China did not harbor revisionist intentions; its actions in recent years

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make those intentions clear, from island building to Chinese attempts to rewrite maritime norms. The scope of that revisionism, however, remains unknown. The same is true for Russia, which has shown strong revisionist inclinations toward neighboring Ukraine and Georgia—as well as toward some existing international norms—but whose broader territorial aims are unclear. Yet the Trump administration’s stance on foreign policy for the most part reflected an absolutist vision of a world full of dangers and avowedly revisionist states. As former national security advisor H. R. McMaster put it, “after the end of the Cold War, America and other free and open societies forgot that they had to compete to keep their freedom, security and prosperity”; these battles should be fought in overlapping “arenas of contestation.”21 This absolutist tendency has been embraced by many in Washington, where analysts often appear to confuse capabilities for intentions. Consider the recent imbroglio over Taiwan: though regional experts repeatedly argued that Beijing was probably attempting to coerce the island into political concessions through a series of provocative military maneuvers, many in Washington instead took this as evidence of an impending Chinese invasion.22 In March, for example, Admiral Phil Davidson of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command told Congress that China might try to seize control of Taiwan within the next six years,23 a claim many analysts consider to be overblown.24 This has driven many in Washington to suggest extreme measures in response; as Patrick Porter and Michael Mazarr put it recently, “in the face of Beijing’s increased verbal threats and intimidatory activities against Taiwan, a growing chorus urges Washington to abandon the ambiguity of its security promise to Taiwan in favour of an unqualified commitment.”25 And as Jonathan M. DiCicco argues in chapter 18 of this volume, the Biden administration has bought into much of this rhetoric: “Assured by experts that great-power competition with China is an essential component of the way forward, Biden almost certainly will not deviate from . . . continued maintenance, if not escalation, of the strategic rivalry with the PRC.” Even if the threat against Taiwan is real, however, there is little evidence to suggest that China harbors substantive revisionist intentions with regard to the rest of Asia. Despite this, Elbridge Colby, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Trump administration, recently argued that “even apparently limited demands may advance the aspirant’s ability to establish hegemony, whether that is an intentional result or not. Acquired territory may be strategically valuable, and appetite often grows with eating.”26 With regard to China, this suggests unlimited revisionist aims. At least Colby stops to interrogate his assumption of revisionism; such introspection is rare. Ultimately, the widespread acceptance of GPC as a core organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy conceals many of its Trumpian assumptions about revisionist great powers. It is certainly true that the Biden administration

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has been more circumspect about this aspect of great-power competition; the administration’s interim strategic guidance document notes more blandly that “China, in particular, has rapidly become more assertive. . . . Russia remains determined to enhance its global influence and play a disruptive role on the world stage.”27 Yet in speeches the president has referred to “extreme competition” with China.28 And the notion continues to permeate much of the writing on GPC in Washington foreign policy circles, where the Economist recently portrayed the China debate in Washington as one where “even dovish China watchers in America are becoming hawkish.”29

The Risks of a Counter-Revisionist Grand Strategy The nascent strategy of great-power competition—albeit a poorly operationalized and theorized one—is thus perhaps the most important legacy of the Trump administration for U.S. foreign policy. And it is a legacy that potentially sets American foreign policy on a more dangerous path in coming decades. This is not because it holds that states compete—a concept that should be noncontroversial to any student of international affairs—but rather because state intentions are nuanced and hard to discern. Reducing debate over U.S. foreign policy to a simple prescription for more competition with American adversaries is a recipe for potential conflict. Given its largely unthinking embrace of a more hostile posture toward China, Trump’s legacy is thus particularly toxic in this regard. Though there are the beginnings of a debate in Washington over what the goals of competition with China should be—from regime collapse to containment—it is disturbing that this debate is happening five years after the Trump administration embraced a strategy of great-power competition. The absolutism with which the Trump administration embraced GPC is primarily problematic in practical terms. For one thing, it has created a strong focus on capabilities over strategy, with simulated war games that suggest that the U.S. military is not sufficiently well equipped or positioned to win a war with China.30 Proposals for a 300-, 350-, or even 400-ship navy focus on quantitative metrics for a military buildup. The Biden administration’s defense budget continues the Trump trend toward ever-higher levels of military spending. And this focus on conflict also shuts off a variety of other plausible policy responses to China’s rise, leaving mostly maximalist options on the table. It suggests, for example, that rising powers cannot be reasoned with or managed diplomatically. It implies that spheres of influence are little more than a form of appeasement and that any attempt to find concessions or compromise that might address Chinese or Russian security concerns will fail. Indeed, this approach was notably—and tragically—present in the negotiations that preceded the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022; despite clear indications that

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Russia intended an invasion, U.S. negotiators refused to open discussions on NATO’s open-door policy or to consider concessions that might have prevented the conflict. This GPC framing also suggests that the only way to prevent conflict is to deter revisionist states. As former undersecretary of defense Michèle Flournoy outlined, “the more confident China’s leaders are in their own capabilities and the more they doubt the capabilities and resolve of the United States, the greater the chance of miscalculation—a breakdown in deterrence that could bring direct conflict between two nuclear powers.”31 Yet the security dilemma is perhaps more salient here: as history shows, a policy focused on deterrence is unfortunately also the approach most likely to heighten tensions and insecurity, leading to a spiral into conflict. Policy makers’ selective memories of the Cold War apparently obscure the fact that some of the most dangerous periods of the early Cold War were those in which shows of force led to crises. The more stable eras, in contrast, were those in which the superpowers maintained military readiness but also engaged in a variety of reassurance and crisismanagement measures. Historical examples are also instructive: Chancellor Otto von Bismarck skillfully shifted between alliance blocs to protect the interests of the infant German empire in the late 1800s; Great Britain sustained almost a century of peace (1815–1914) by offshore balancing primarily via a combination of skillful diplomacy and financial tools of statecraft. Competition between states in the international system may be inevitable, in short, but the best strategies often rely as much on nuance and diplomacy as on overt hostility. Unfortunately, the Biden team appears set to continue with Donald Trump’s problematic strategy of militarized great-power competition. Certainly, they have made attempts to set “guardrails” in the competition with China, mostly related to the issue of potential crisis management. Yet in the aftermath of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the administration has openly embraced a competitive, confrontational approach that is premised at least in part on assumptions about revisionism (including the notion that Russian revisionism implies Chinese revisionism). To be sure, the opposite assumption would also be problematic. It is not true that America has nothing to fear from China and Russia or that the United States can be sure of benign intentions from these states. The early months of 2022 have certainly proven that. Yet Trump’s time in office in many ways served to accelerate an ongoing shift in U.S. foreign policy so aggressively and so far in the other direction that it increased the risks of a new cold—or even hot—war. Heightened tensions, economic damage, proxy conflicts, and, in the worst case, great-power conflict; these are the costs of mindlessly pursuing “competition” and getting it wrong. Ultimately, this means that Donald Trump’s foreign policy legacy may end up being as consequential, and more dangerous, than his impact on domestic politics.

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Notes 1. “Open Letter on Trump from GOP National Security Leaders,” War on the Rocks, March 3, 2016, https://warontherocks .com /2016/03 /open-letter- on- donald-trump -from-gop-national-security-leaders/. 2. Quinta Jurecic, “Did the ‘Adults in the Room’ Make Any Difference with Trump?,” New York Times, August 29, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/opinion/james -mattis-trump.html. 3. Office of the President, “National Security Strategy of the United States,” December 2017, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content /uploads/2017/12/ NSS -Final -12-18-2017-0905.pdf. 4. “Remarks by President Biden at the 2021 Virtual Munich Security Conference,” February 19, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/02 /19/remarks-by-president-biden-at-the-2021-virtual-munich-security-conference/. 5. Uri Friedman, “The Dueling Ideas That Will Define the 21st Century,” Atlantic, November 10, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/joe-biden-foreign-po licy/620654/. 6. “National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” 27. 7. “National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” 26. 8. Daniel H. Nexon, “Against Great Power Competition,” Foreign Affairs, March 26, 2021, https://www. foreignaffairs .com /articles /united - states /2021 - 02 -15 /against - great -power-competition. 9. Kurt Campbell, Eric Edelman, Michèle Flournoy, et al., “Extending American Power: Strategies to Expand US Engagement in a Competitive World Order,” Extending American Power Project, Center for a New American Security, May 2016, https://www .cnas.org /publications/reports/extending-american-power-strategies-to-expand-u-s -engagement-in-a-competitive-world-order. 10. “Albright Interview on NBC-TV ‘The Today Show,’ ” U.S. Department of State Archive, February 19, 1998, https://1997-2001.state.gov/statements/1998/980219a.html. 11. Michael Mandelbaum, “America in a New World,” American Interest, May 23, 2016, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/05/23/america-in-a-new-world/. 12. Colin Dueck, Age of Iron: On Conservative Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 13. See, for example, Kathleen Hicks, Michael Mazarr, Oriana Skyler Mastro, et al., “Great Power Competition,” Defense 2020, https://www.csis.org /analysis/great-power-com petition; Uri Friedman, “The New Concept Everyone in Washington Is Talking About,” Atlantic, August 6, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/08 /what-genesis-great-power-competition/595405/; Hal Brands and Evan Braden Montgomery, “One War Is Not Enough: Strategy and Force Planning for Great-Power Competition,” Texas National Security Review 3, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 80–92; Bruce Jones, “China and the Return of Great Power Strategic Competition,” Brookings Institution, February 24, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/research/china-and-the-return -of-great-power-strategic-competition/. 14. Mark Manyin, Stephen Daggett, Ben Dolven, et al., “Pivot to the Pacific? The Obama Administration’s ‘Rebalancing’ Toward Asia,” CRS Report for Congress, Washington, DC, Congressional Research Service, March 28, 2012, https://fas.org /sgp/crs/natsec /R42448.pdf. 15. See, for example, Mandelbaum, “America in a New World”; and Aaron L. Friedberg, “An Answer to Aggression,” Foreign Affairs, September 15, 2020, https://www.foreign affairs.com/articles/china/2020-08-11/ccp-answer-aggression.

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16. U.S. Department of Defense, “Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy,” 2018, https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy -Summary.pdf. 17. “Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy.” 18. Randall L. Schweller (chapter 5 in this volume), for example, describes Trump’s impact on the world thus: “so a world that had grown accustomed to thinking of progress as inevitable and irreversible is now being rocked by old toxic patterns previously thought crushed by the march of progress. . . . History is accelerating, not ending.” A similar point is made by Michael Barnett (chapter 2 in this volume), who argues that “we should be thinking of Trump as an accelerant—a chemical that turns the fire into an inferno.” In short, a number of the scholars in this volume view Trump’s impact as less transformative than expediting changes in U.S. foreign policy already underway. 19. Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics: New Edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). 20. Michael Mazarr and Hal Brands, “Navigating Great Power Rivalry in the 21st Century,” War on the Rocks, April 5, 2017, https://warontherocks.com/2017/04/navigating -great-power-rivalry-in-the-21st-century/. 21. H. R. McMaster, Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World (New York: HarperCollins, 2020), 4. 22. Louise Watt, “ ‘Perception Gap’: Taiwan Says US Fears of Chinese Invasion Are Missing the Real Threat,” Yahoo News, https://news.yahoo.com/pressure-pineapple-wars -taiwan-fears-083000368.html. 23. Mallory Shelborne, “Davidson: China Could Try to Take Control of Taiwan in ‘Next Six Years,’ ” USNI News, March 9, 2021, https://news.usni.org /2021 /03/09/davidson -china-could-try-to-take-control-of-taiwan-in-next-six-years. 24. Elliot Waldman, “Fears of an Imminent Chinese Invasion of Taiwan Are Overblown,” World Politics Review, January 1, 2021, https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com /trend -lines/29538/fears-of-an-imminent-china-taiwan-war-are-overblown. 25. Patrick Porter and Michael Mazarr, Countering China’s Adventurism Over Taiwan: A Third Way, Lowy Institute, May 20, 2021, https://www.lowyinstitute.org /publications /countering-china-s-adventurism-over-taiwan-third-way. 26. Elbridge Colby, The Strategy of Denial (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021), 67. 27. The White House, “Interim National Security Strategic Guidance,” March 2021, https:// www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/NSC-1v2.pdf. 28. David Wertime, “ ‘Extreme Competition’ Is Now the Watchword in US-China Relations,” Politico, February 11, 2021, https://politi.co/3tN385w. 29. “Even Doveish China-Watchers in America Are Becoming Hawkish,” Economist, May 1, 2021, https://www.economist.com/china /2021/05/01/even-doveish-china-wat chers-in-america-are-becoming-hawkish. 30. Barry Rosenberg, “US ‘Gets Its Ass Handed to It’ in Wargames: Here’s a $24 Billion Fix,” Breaking Defense (blog), March 2019, https:// breakingdefense.com /2019/03/us -gets-its-ass-handed-to-it-in-wargames-heres-a-24-billion-fix/. 31. Michèle Flournoy, “How to Prevent a War in Asia,” Foreign Affairs, October 23, 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com /articles/united-states/2020-06-18/ how-prevent-war -asia.

CHAPTER 7

WHAT TRUMP’S NATIONALISM ENDED UP LOOKING LIKE TH O M A S W. Z E I L E R

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fter a year of Donald Trump in the White House, and drawing on the lessons of the turn inward (by presidents Herbert Hoover and even Franklin D. Roosevelt) during the Great Depression era, I argued that his hypernationalism in trade policy was inimical to U.S. economic and diplomatic interests.1 That turned out to be true. Trump’s vocal protectionism shirked decades of internationalism and threatened peace and security, as well as profits. As others in this volume have noted, including John A. Thompson (see chapter  11), Trump capitalized on decades of perceived overstretch in American foreign policy, in which domestic critics (like Trump himself) scored points by questioning an oft-times crusading zeal to spread democracy and fight for human rights. But Thompson and Charles S. Maier also note that Trump failed on numerous occasions to carry out this narrower construction of foreign policy—in negotiating with Iran, North Korea, and the People’s Republic of China; in convincing European allies to boost their NATO spending; and in ousting the unpopular Venezuelan regime.2 Worse, though, motivated by his craven need for popularity in domestic politics, and rather than privileging America’s role in the world and projecting, at least, some indication of traditional democratic values (which is also decried by Maier), Trump stirred up the past’s disastrous turn away from internationalism to an embrace of nationalism. And even worse, this was a unilateral economic nationalism that had long ago acquired the status of a black legend. This economic nationalism hurt the United States and the world during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and it could do so, and did, again.

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During Trump’s term, the United States got very little from its trade battles against its friends and its trade war with the People’s Republic of China (PRC)— and clearly not a fusion of economic policy with national security policy that both profited and protected the country, as Linde Desmaele describes by analyzing the “neo-neo synthesis” in international relations theory. Trump embarrassed himself and the nation by confronting close partners like the European Union, Canada, and Mexico with loud tariff announcements against their products.3 They retaliated in kind. Soybean farmers, boat makers, and spirits producers were among those caught in the crossfire. In late October 2020, the European Union received clearance from the World Trade Organization to impose $4 billion worth of retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods in response to subsidies to Boeing. And already recovering robustly from the coronavirus recession, China prepared to resume its trade advantage with the United States. The bilateral trade deficit that the United States suffered with the PRC in 2016, before Trump took office, was nearly the same in 2019, and the gap grew even larger by 2021, by the time he left the White House. Only the pandemic narrowed it a bit, and that because of the sharp decline in consumer spending and investment. Trump failed to reverse America’s sagging fortunes when it came to China, his priority target in trade. Doing so, he believed, would have made America great again. Instead, China—still adhering to structures and processes that violated market practices and that Trump and his team of nationalists failed to address—continued its rise to greatness. By no means did China appear to rein in its geostrategic ambitions. In short, Trump’s nationalism turned out to be bluster. It also undermined coalitions of nations (the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, from which Trump withdrew, being one) as a viable option to contain or change Beijing’s policies. Trump went after China and met formidable resistance from Beijing. With dubious national security justification, in 2018 Trump imposed additional tariffs on steel and aluminum because China was the world’s biggest producer of these commodities. President Xi Jinping retaliated, and Trump backed off. In June, he announced a two-stage plan to increase tariffs by $36 and $16 billion. China responded with its own two-stage program of tariff hikes. This tit-fortat action threatened not only bilateral commercial ties but disrupted global supply chains, raised consumer prices, and diminished growth in the United States. Such a “one-dimensional” approach through tariffs would not stop a mighty predator like China. Rather than working with the United States’ allies in the TPP to shape Chinese behavior, Trump enacted policies that were haphazard and weak. Typical of unilateral nationalism, they did not have the power of allies behind them.4 In his final year in office, Trump imposed new tariffs on almost $450 million of steel and aluminum products, not only hitting China but U.S. allies Taiwan, Japan, and the European Union as well. In February 2020, Xi and Trump

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agreed to phased-in decreases and exemptions for tariffs, but the damage was done. By mid-March, the ominous effects of the trade war were apparent when the novel coronavirus pandemic started sweeping the world. Because of tariff hikes on medical products, U.S. buyers had reduced purchases from China. They did not replace them with imports from other nations, and shortages ensued. As the pandemic caused a worldwide economic crisis and a temporary end to decades of robust Chinese growth, the trade war became moot because business shut down across the world—much as it had during the Great Depression. Even in the midst of the pandemic, Trump pressed on with a vengeful and inappropriate trade policy, raising already-raised tariffs on Canadian aluminum in early August 2020. The administration managed to bring mercantilism in line with isolationism and parochial politics, not to mention cruelty and futility in the face of COVID-19.5 Nationalism, as predicted, abjectly failed struggling Americans, including Trump’s base of farmers, who counted on commodity exports to China. What of the Trump nationalistic attack on globalization and its institutions, such as trade partnerships, an unfettered marketplace, and dynamic production, investment, and supplies of goods? He undermined all of them. As Elizabeth McKillen notes, protectionism did not really boost jobs; rather, the ensuing trade war with China and others depressed employment, as workers were laid off when prices dropped on products ranging from lobsters to blueberries.6 And any gains from tariffs (such as in steel) were offset by losses in agriculture and, generally, in industry. To be sure, unemployment dropped to historically low levels, but the catalyst was recovery at home (which had begun under his predecessor, President Barack Obama), not the tariffs imposed to generate revenue and guard against job losses. Farmers found themselves in a quandary. Many approved of Donald Trump’s jarring diatribes and adored his smallgovernment views, but they did not so much like Chinese retaliation against soybeans, ginseng, and other produce that dried up sales to the Asian powerhouse.7 As conservative adherents to the notion of the self-made, self-reliant yeoman farmer, they did not want handouts, but the Treasury bailed out farmers from their Trump-induced economic straits with large direct payments to make up for their losses in the trade war—and, of course, retain their votes for Trump. Thus, these patriotic Americans, believers in the market, became tools of nationalism. In sum, absurdly marketed as a way to transform China, America First economic nationalism did little in that regard. Ironically, rural voters turned out to be rural victims of a huckster: Donald Trump. That sad state of affairs arose because a key element to nationalism was Trump himself. He reveled in personal diplomacy. We knew that Trump neither knew nor cared about history and that his trade policy was purely transactional, designed for personal and political gain. Trade policy focused on Trump and did not share in the interests of the nation, the people, or allies throughout the

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world. This is why the supposed overhaul of the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA)—the United States–Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA)—was mostly just noise. It changed the basics of NAFTA hardly at all, despite Trump’s claim that he had invoked his “art of the deal” and made America great again by rewriting policy. To be sure, he had an audience of believers among the angry or desperate electorate. They had either legitimately felt the brunt of imports or perceived imports to be their economic undoing, though technology and automation were the more likely culprits. His supporters also hated internationalist cosmopolitans and educated leaders. But it was Trump, front and center, on the grand international stage that most appealed to them. His followers trailed along, though they failed to grasp that he had no systematic plan to help them, short of empty words to make them feel good about America’s supposed return to greatness. Promoting nationalism is not the role of a superpower. This was not the leadership expected from the United States, a nation that had based its diplomacy for seven decades on free-trade internationalism rather than nationalist protectionism and retaliation. Protectionism was ever-present in the trade agenda, but it had been muted by larger foreign policy concerns. The United States remained a giant, but unilateral bullying proved ineffective. More like Obama and unlike President George  W. Bush, Trump forswore the promotion of democracy. Nonetheless, he launched silly crusades, like trade wars. Of course, much of the problem lay with the boorish Trump himself. Nonetheless, at the policy level, other nations competed more effectively with the United States in a globalized community, a challenge that had been understood by all post– World War II presidents, regardless of their party affiliation or temperament.8 Trump seemed oblivious to this reality or, more likely, relished the attentiongetting chaos it created. Trump, his protectionist appointees, and his legislative enablers not only burdened the world economy but endangered the United States. Trump crowed in 2020 that he had gotten results in trade, that farmers and manufacturers loved him for his confrontation with China, which had caved under pressure. Before denouncing his political enemies, he claimed to a roused American Farm Bureau Federation in Austin, Texas, in January 2020 that “we now perhaps have the best relationship that we’ve had with China in many, many years.” The deals with China had enhanced the U.S. economy and security, though he did not say how, uttering his traditional empty phrases: “We’re taking care of our country. It’s ‘Make America Great Again.’ It’s ‘Keep America Great.’ It’s whatever you want to call it. We’re in the greatest country anywhere in the world, and we’re taking care of you.”9 Trump, who was both incompetent and egotistical, lied to the American people, offering false prophesies like his remarks in Austin to uninformed listeners. The coronavirus revealed U.S. weaknesses and Trump’s failings. Fearful of

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the economic repercussions, at long last, he did not deviate from the first phase of tariff reductions made earlier in 2020. Yet once again, Trump went back and forth on protectionism as the economy tanked. China’s sizable trade surplus with the United States blossomed once again and showed no sign of wilting.10 Old friends abroad refused to let Americans travel to their countries. Allies questioned the sanity of the U.S. electorate under such an unreasonable leader. They hoped for his ouster in the November elections at the hands of former vice president Joe Biden and the Democrats, and they got their wish. Like a majority of Americans who disapproved of Trump and even some of his former supporters whipsawed by his fatuous nationalism, internationalists at home and abroad banked on the restoration of multilateralism, realism, and logic to the core of U.S. foreign policy with the Biden presidency. During the transition period (as he had in the election campaign), Biden made clear that his administration would seek cooperation, not confrontation, with allies. It is still very much up in the air over whether the United States will rejoin the TPP and other initiatives that Trump withdrew from in his pique of America First nonsense. This does not mean that Biden will turn to outright free trade or even abandon some of Trump’s protectionism; indeed, in his first year, his trade policy for the middle class maintained tariffs on China, and Biden has continued that tough stance against Beijing (perhaps also to serve his reelection interests). Nationalism is a constant, but perhaps the country has laid to rest the era of close-minded unilateralism that is reminiscent of the disastrous Great Depression, sparked by the highly protectionist and ill-advised Hawley Smoot Tariff that led to an international trade war in the 1930s and weakened the democracies just as fascism and militarism reared up in Europe and Asia. Spurious nationalism at home, represented by the insurrectionists who stormed Congress on January 6, 2021, may have been more dangerous than the trade wars of yesteryear, but in a time when global responses to crises are required, there is no room for Trumpian nationalism—and there never was.

Notes 1. Thomas W. Zeiler, “This Is What Nationalism Looks Like,” in Chaos in the Liberal Order: The Trump Presidency and International Politics in the Twenty-First Century, ed. R. Jervis, F. J. Gavin, J. Rovner, and D. N. Labrosse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 136–50; also, https://issforum.org /ISSF/PDF/Policy-Roundtable-1-5T .pdf. 2. See Charles S. Maier, “The Trump ‘Legacy’ for American Foreign Policy,” H-Diplo/ ISSF Policy Series America and the World—The Effects of the Trump Presidency, September 22, 2021, ed. D. Labrosse, https://issforum.org /ISSF/PDF/PS2021-52.pdf. 3. Linde Desmaele, “Donald Trump and the Return of Relative Gains: Should We Rethink the Neo-Neo Synthesis?,” H-Diplo/ISSF Policy Series, America and the World—The

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4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

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Effects of the Trump Presidency, August 3, 2021, ed. D. Labrosse, https://issforum.org /roundtables/policy/ps2021-49. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, China’s Predatory Trade and Investment Strategy: Joint Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade and the Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, 115th Cong., 2nd sess., 2018, Cong. Brad Sherman (D-CA), 8, also Cong. William Keating (D-MA), 3. Wayne  M. Morrison, China-U.S. Trade Issues, Congressional Research Service, April  16, 2018, 2–3; Wayne  M. Morrison, China-U.S. Trade Issues, Congressional Research Service, July 30, 2018, 1, 57–58; Chad P. Bown and Melina Kolb, “Trump’s Trade War Timeline: An Up-to-Date Guide,” Peterson Institute for International Economics, March  13, 2020; Rajesh Kumar Singh, “Trump’s Tariffs Add to PandemicInduced Turmoil of U.S. Manufacturers,” Reuters Business News, April 30, 2020. Elizabeth McKillen, “The Trump Presidency and U.S. Workers: ‘America First’ or America Diminished?,” H-Diplo/ISSF Policy Series, America and the World—The Effects of the Trump Presidency, March 30, 2021, ed. D. Labrosse, https://issforum.org /ISSF/PDF/PS2021-17.pdf. Ana Swanson and Alan Rappeport, “Trump’s Trade Appeals to China Still Left Farmers Reeling,” New York Times, June 19, 2020. Jennifer Lind and Daryl G. Press, “Reality Check: American Power in an Age of Constraints,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 2 (March/April 2020): 41, 47; Stephen D. Krasner, “Learning to Live with Despots: The Limits of Democracy Promotion,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 2 (March/April 2020): 49. Remarks at the American Farm Bureau Federation Annual Convention and Trade Show in Austin, Texas, January 19, 2020, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents /remarks -the - american -farm - bureau -federation - annual - convention - and -trade -show-austin-texas. Robert E. Scott, “U.S. Trade Deficit Hits Record High in 2020,” Economic Policy Institute: Working Economics Blog, February 10, 2021.

CHAPTER 8

TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY AS HISTORY RYA N I RWI N

“Denouement” comes from the French, who use the word to describe the act of untying a knot, and it refers to the unraveling of a confusing or mysterious story . . . [it] is the moment when all of the knots of a story are untied, and all the threads are unraveled, and everything is laid out clearly for the world to see. —Lemony Snicket

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onald Trump’s ascendancy pushed new questions onto the American liberal establishment: How could such an odd person win a presidential election? What did his victory say about the United States? What were the implications for U.S. overseas leadership? Was Trump a blip in the story of American world power, or did he prove that a fundamental change was afoot? In retrospect, the denouement of January 6 feels somewhat inevitable. It was one final act of destruction, washing away the illusion that the United States is a stable, settled democracy. The entitled rage that Trump weaponized so purposefully burst through the walls protecting the country’s self-satisfied adages about democracy. The result was the kind of carnage that Trump spoke of in his apocalyptic inaugural address. What is the right question to ask now that Trump is out of the White House? The initial title for this book asked whether Joe Biden’s election is evidence that

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the liberal order has “struck back,” an ironic starting point if you linger too long on the phrase’s cinematic inspiration—The Empire Strikes Back—or the contemporary literature about the history of liberal internationalism. It is also an evocative starting point, since the obvious implication is that we are living together through an inflection point we can shape with the right clarion call. Admittedly, American democracy has seen better days. As the United States rumbles toward the 2024 presidential election, the implications of the January 6 insurrection are coming into sharper focus. The attack on the U.S. Capitol hangs over our politics like the memory of the Berlin Wall hung over the 1990s and Twin Towers loomed over the early 2000s.1 Seventy-four million people voted for Trump in 2020, and 71 percent of Republicans believe that Biden’s election was fraudulent. They are working to change how votes are collected and counted at the precinct level and doing so against backdrop of international crises that continue to accentuate the fragility of American overseas leadership.

✳✳✳ If we’re in an inflection point, how did we get here? This question, which informs this chapter’s intervention, is at the heart of “applied history,” which Harvard University’s Belfer Center defines as the explicit attempt to illuminate current challenges by analyzing historical precedents.2 An applied history of the present could take several forms. For example, historians who study politics might begin a story of America’s current dysfunction in President Barack Obama’s first term. The evidence is suggestive. Obama was the last American president to equate political success with bipartisan legislation. One of his first acts was to propose a national healthcare plan, of Republican origin. Eager to prevent the recrudescence of Clintonian triangulation, the GOP’s response—total resistance—reflected lessons that that party learned during Bill Clinton’s presidency and arguably created the conditions for Trump’s rise by stoking the Tea Party backlash against his predecessor. Perhaps our contemporary political nihilism originated as the unintended consequence of this previous era. Social historians, by contrast, will likely find causal power in the efflorescence of conservative populism. The evidence is equally suggestive. Running on a platform nearly identical to Trump’s, Patrick Buchanan, a perennial presidential candidate in the 1990s, mustered support from just .4 percent of the U.S. voting public in 2000. Obviously, something important changed over the subsequent decades. Putting aside the role of right-wing media and gerrymandering, the country was (and is) growing less religious and more diverse, and many millions of Americans felt (and feel) genuinely threatened by this fact. If Trump’s popularity is entangled with and reliant upon this grassroots populist backlash, another kind of applied history might argue that demographic change explains political infighting.

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Future intellectual historians will presumably offer a third interpretation. As Charles S. Maier and Jeremy Adelman suggest in their chapters in this volume (42 and 40, respectively), the current crisis challenges key aspects of the liberal tradition. Many Americans seem to have lost faith in democracy and human rights. As such, this crisis could be contextualized in a longue durée about American world making during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. If Vietnam uprooted liberal arguments about development, Iraq surely did something comparable to late-century neoliberalism, unsettling once sacrosanct claims about free elections, free trade, and the free world. Perhaps Trump emerged from a wasteland of newly dead dreams.

✳✳✳ How do these three modes of historical analysis interact, and how can they help us understand the present better? In some respects, these approaches merely put emphasis in a different place. One could debate whether elected Republicans spurred the mob on January 6 or merely responded to its whims, but both claims, I think, converge on the same underlying truth, which is that Republicans require fewer votes than Democrats to control the White House, the Senate, the House, and state legislatures. Conservative populism thrives because polarization keeps conservatives in power. Since many of the GOP’s policy objectives can be advanced through courts and executive orders, Republicans do not need bipartisan legislation to further their stated goals, unlike Democrats, who require new laws to achieve the changes they say they support. Democrats also operate in a landscape where they must win the popular vote by three or four percentage points to win the Electoral College.3 Understanding this imbrication—the way political stratagems fold into social movements—can enrich our understanding of both. Applied history is less effective when proscribing solutions. Truthfully, blaming Trump for January 6 is easier than empathizing with his supporters. “If you watch Fox News,” Obama opined just before the 2020 election, “you perceive a different reality than if you read the New York Times and that didn’t use to be as stark because you had local newspapers and you had people overlapping in terms of where they got information.”4 In other words, common ground will reemerge after Fox News stops manipulating its viewers. Others prefer to blame Russian President Vladimir Putin, the author of all the Liberal Establishment’s pain. This viewpoint has only grown more urgent since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which many commentators have interpreted as an attack on liberal norms of global governance. Others still blame Facebook and Twitter. After all, the January 6 mob “was a mix of everyday Americans: small business owners, suburb dwellers, rural militia types,” reporters for the New York Times intoned recently, and the one thing its members shared was a social media addiction.5

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There is something comforting in the idea that someone else did this to the United States—that we can shape this inflection point with a better policy or a good speech. But the past, once applied to the present, can weigh a lot. As the journalist Ta-Nehesi Coates quipped after January 6, the insurrection only ended with the arrival of an army and the installation of a barbed-wire fence around Congress. “The FBI is on guard against an inside job,” he wrote. “Whatever this is—whatever we decide to call this—it is not peaceful, and it is not, in many ways, a transition. It is something darker.”6 According to Coates, American democracy fell apart because the United States elected a Black president. White conservatives lost their minds. And the historian Samuel Zipp makes a comparable point in chapter 10 of this volume by illuminating the tangled relationship between whiteness and foreignness in American history. For a settler colony like the United States, the election of a Black president was an existential moment. Historians have the tools to wriggle out of this conclusion. For politicos, the counterfactuals are tantalizingly obvious: If Senator Mitch McConnell or Speaker John Boehner had adopted a less hostile strategy after Obama’s 2008 election, would conservative populism have had so much appeal afterward? If senators John McCain and Mitt Romney had run better presidential campaigns, would the GOP have stumbled toward such a nihilistic form of politics? If Obama had mocked Trump a little less, might the latter have remained a reality television star? Obviously, these questions sidestep the implications of what Coates and Zipp are saying, which is that liberals are living through an epistemological reckoning brought about by their earnest belief that Obama’s election would create a less racist America. And for every counterfactual, there’s an equally compelling rhetorical question: Can we blame January 6 on the actions of any one person—or any single entity—when so many social norms are falling away so quickly? We’re living through a time when a host of familiar stories are falling to the wayside; stories about the United States in the world, yes, but also stories about what it means to be a man or woman, and what it means to love oneself and one’s community. Was Trump a departure from a liberal status quo or a manifestation of its darker true self?

✳✳✳ Such questions are not meant to be answered. But applied history can help us think better about words and the way we use them, and the underlying issue here is how scholars conceptualize liberalism. The phrase was at the heart of the 2018 edited volume that preceded this one, Chaos in the Liberal Order, which pulled together perspectives from across academe to consider the impact of Trump’s election. Liberal internationalism anchors this volume, too, which explores whether Joe Biden’s election marks the return of the old order or the

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start of something new. As the editors of Chaos readily admitted in 2018, liberal internationalism is a contested concept, especially across disciplines as disparate as diplomatic history and international relations, where scholars tend to define the term differently.7 Accessing Trump as history—and thinking through what might happen now that he is out of office—is an opportunity to reconsider the liberal order’s meaning. There are at least two ways to tell this history. On one end of the spectrum are people who think like Biden. These people tend to believe that the United States has followed a single coherent foreign policy since about 1942, and there are plenty of examples of this mindset in this edited volume. According to many scholars, this single coherent foreign policy has cultivated democracy while confronting authoritarianism, and it left the world more peaceful, prosperous, and interdependent.8 There is no “bright line between foreign and domestic policy,” Biden told the U.S. State Department in February 2021.9 The international system that the United States “carefully constructed” after World War II—a system defined by multilateral international institutions—frayed because Trump and his ilk unleashed an ideology that was at odds with the American experience.10 Frank Ninkovich channels the implications brilliantly in chapter 9 of this volume, framing nationalism and globalization as opposites and suggesting that the United States has historically been a harbinger of the latter and opponent to the former. Biden similarly has defined liberal internationalism as inclusive, collective American leadership—codewords that define American exceptionalism for true believers. On the other end of the spectrum are writers like Stephen Wertheim, an exemplar of a counterview that defines U.S. foreign policy as forever war.11 This viewpoint agrees that the United States has adhered to a coherent project since the 1940s but insists that that project turned most of the planet into the United States’ personal killing field. Paul Thomas Chamberlin, for example, characterizes the Cold War not as a long peace, when the world’s leading democracy marshaled its resources responsibly, but as one long imperial genocide.12 By waging a series of forever wars, Washington destabilized societies in the name of peace, masking its inherent racism with platitudes about liberty. “It looks like [Biden] will not only prolong the endless wars,” Wertheim wrote during the 2020 presidential campaign, “but also restore and revive the ideas that generated them in the first place.” Biden’s ascendancy offends him because American liberals already have so much blood on their hands.13 Between these two extremes is the idea that the liberal order has meant different things to different people at different times. Personally, I am convinced that this position is the best departure point for historians participating in the debate, and my own genealogy of liberal internationalism is straightforward. Historically, the United States has projected its influence abroad by making united states. This project has roots in the country’s colonization of North America. From the beginning, state making was the conceptual cladding for

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westward expansion. Even after the Civil War, when the United States stopped incorporating new territory into its body politic, international law and then international institutions naturalized, globalized, and Americanized interstate unification as a world project, giving life to the belief that liberalism and imperialism could oppose each other. In the same way that natural rights muted the reality of settler colonialism, the disavowal of autarky—and the quest to make a rule-based international community—reframed liberalism as a nonimperial ideology in the minds of U.S. statesmen.14 This project followed a particular path after World War II. Initially, the United States bound its allies together with collective security pacts and an ideology we now call development, the underlying hope being that institutions and experts might create a free world where everyone thought similarly and lived peacefully. This project did not survive decolonization. As nation-states became ubiquitous (and less white) after the 1950s, unity became harder to sustain, and the liberal order’s inherent asymmetries grew more apparent to casual observers. American liberals adjusted their creed by redefining development. Basic human needs supplanted state capacity as a utopian ideal, and U.S. experts began crowing that people everywhere—regardless of citizenship— should be free to vote for their leaders and consume American commodities. Inexorably, the line between human rights and property rights blurred in the years that followed, and for a segment of influential policy makers, the movement of people, goods, and ideas became the physical manifestation of American ideological authority, hence the symbolic importance of the Berlin Wall during the Cold War’s endgame.15 In other words, liberal internationalism took two forms after the 1940s. These projects were not in conflict, but they used alternative metaphors—the construction site versus the marketplace—to rationalize American hegemony, and they flowed one into the other during the second half of the twentieth century. There are two points to accentuate about this argument. First, liberalism stood for different things in the 1980s than it had in the 1940s, and second, the neoliberal order, shorthand for the family of American ideas that arose after Vietnam, started buckling after the 2003 Iraq invasion. That war pulled together and then destroyed faith in participatory democracy and market capitalism, and the Syrian refugee crisis arguably washed away the final vestiges of neoliberal internationalism. Even if Obama and his advisors did not cause the refugee tragedy that spread after 2011, they let go of most of the universalizing ambitions that lay at the heart of U.S. postwar power.

✳✳✳ Historicizing the liberal order in this manner draws attention to assumptions that have melted away during the past decade. On the eve of the Iraq War, for example, most Washingtonians earnestly believed the democratic-peace

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hypothesis, the idea that countries with elected leaders did not go to war.16 Drawing on this adage, some elites concluded that the U.S. military could actually be an instrument for democracy promotion. The 1989–1990 Panama invasion was their template, and subsequent administrations sent soldiers to affect change on almost every continent during the next quarter century. Each intervention, whether in Bosnia or Libya, defined success as “free and fair” elections. Today, the premise that the U.S. military can create a democracy is laughable. Wertheim is right to draw attention to the destructive hubris of a bygone era, even as he is wrong to argue there has been no change since 2012. Washington’s claims about trade have changed too. After 1992, the United States invented a free-trade zone in North America and embraced China as a trade partner, nurturing the special economic zones that fueled that country’s transformation after the 1990s. Rather than returning to the halcyon days of the mid-twentieth century, this arrangement eroded restraints on multinational companies and financial institutions, creating commodity chains that look less sustainable every year. Arguably, these chains have diffused American computer technology in the same way British industrialists diffused steam technology during the late nineteenth century. Today, the main geopolitical winner is China, a country that has leveraged cheap labor to create the world’s secondlargest capitalist marketplace. Finally, the politics around migration have changed. The percentage of Americans born abroad has increased exponentially since the 1990s, which makes sense, since U.S. leaders so often cited migration as evidence of American exceptionalism after the 1960s. Irrespective of Washington’s spotty foreign policy record, the logic goes, people still flock to North America—not the Soviet Union or China—when given the opportunity. However, two backlashes have come into focus simultaneously as the United States has grown more diverse. Trump’s defense of white privilege is self-explanatory. Yet his relative popularity, holding steady regardless of what he says or does, has coexisted with a reckoning over white privilege in business, education, and media, which commentators like Coates have both reflected and guided. American social norms feel fraught right now because these backlashes are accelerating with equal fervor in opposite directions.

✳✳✳ Now what? When these changes are considered together in context, several conclusions jump out. For example, future historians will surely remember Washington’s humanitarian interventions the way they recall the imperial small wars of the late nineteenth century. Strip away the jargon and consider events from a local perspective, and the logic of the enterprise becomes ridiculous. The democratic-peace hypothesis looks as simplistically arrogant as the civilizing

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mission. Similarly, with the benefit of hindsight, the assumption that China would adopt American culture and money with the same enthusiasm is embarrassingly naïve, as is the belief that deregulating prosperous multinational companies would lead to shared national prosperity. Retired to history already, these mindsets might be viewed by future scholars as the two greatest policymaking blunders of the late twentieth century. Finally, while the politics around immigration are fluid, no one is clamoring for the pre-Trump status quo. Even before Trump’s ascendency, Obama’s policies had earned him the moniker of “Deporter-in-Chief,” and the nativism unleashed by Trump, dramatized by his horrific child-separation efforts, laid bare the incoherence of modern conservativism.17 Normal should not have a future when a movement claiming to champion family values starts tearing vulnerable families apart. Truthfully, some of the most interesting debates of the past four years have challenged the future of liberal internationalism. Take, for instance, the historian Jill Lepore’s effort to rethink American nationalism—and the pushback she has encountered from the historian Daniel Immerwahr, who castigated her for failing to acknowledge truths about the U.S. empire.18 For Immerwahr, Lepore’s attempt to reroot common American stories in more inclusive soil is a barrier to meaningful change. Immerwahr, in turn, was blasted by the historian Paul Kramer for writing the history of American empire from an American perspective. In Kramer’s opinion, the “real” United States can only be comprehended from the perspective of those it has oppressed. There are other examples on the pages of this volume. These debates are provocative, but almost no one assumes a future for American world making. Surprisingly few scholars still recognize the liberal order as a category at all; the phrase is increasingly treated as a moniker for the American imperium. The details of the conversation are different in other contexts, but the conclusions are still recognizable. Consider the recent intervention by former U.S. defense secretary Chuck Hagel, who insisted on the pages of Foreign Affairs that the next threat facing Americans will be the proliferation of nuclear weapons among their Cold War allies. His diagnosis rests on the assumption that the liberal order cannot be conceptualized apart from American military supremacy. Or contemplate the analyst Fareed Zakaria’s insistence that the United States would likely lose a sustained Cold War–style confrontation with China.19 The U.S. foreign policy establishment “successfully blocked or slowed down Trump’s attempted withdrawals from . . . the ‘endless wars’ in West Asia,” the reporter Patrick Coburn explained in January  2021. However, “it is not clear,” Coburn continued, “that [Biden’s advisors] have a realistic alternative approach.”20 Since the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan, nobody seems to believe that liberal internationalism has a future. In Jeremy Adelman’s astute estimation, the United States is now a nation without narrative, stumbling through what he calls “the Gibbon paradox” in his contribution to this book.

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The challenges facing the global community feel bigger than the instruments on offer. This seems to be the consensus that binds most of the chapters in this volume. The planet faces environmental calamity and population growth, and the Biden administration is struggling mightily with questions that barely resonate on the world stage: Can the Democratic Party pass legislation to modernize its physical and social infrastructure—or is that party now as broken as the GOP? Can the United States change without uprooting the nationalist rituals that once held it together—or do these rituals need to be cast aside because they’re too old-fashioned and exclusionary? Can Americans achieve social justice on common ground—or does the evocation of such ground serve the narrow interests of white supremacy? Perhaps U.S. leadership abroad turns on whether Americans have the ability to answer such questions.

Notes 1. Mary Elise Sarotte, The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Jeffrey Engel, When the World Seemed New: George H. W. Bush and the End of the Cold War (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018). 2. Graham Allison and Niall Ferguson, “Applied History Manifesto,” October 2016, https://www.belfercenter.org /project/applied-history-project#manifesto; Harm Kaal and Jelle van Lottum, “Applied History: Past, Present, Future,” Journal of Applied History 3 (2021): 135–54. 3. Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized (London: Profile, 2020). 4. Quoted in Michel Martin, “NPR’s Full Interview with Former President Barack Obama,” NPR, November 16, 2020, https://www.npr.org /2020/11 /16/934584373/tran script-nprs-full-interview-with-former-president-barack-obama. 5. Stuart Thompson and Charlie Warzel, “They Used to Post Selfies, Now They’re Trying to Reverse the Election,” New York Times, January 14, 2021. 6. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Donald Trump Is Out, Are We Ready to Talk About How He Got In,” Atlantic, January 19, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/01/ta -nehisi-coates-revisits-trump-first-white-president/617731/. 7. Robert Jervis, Francis Gavin, Joshua Rovner, Diane Labrosse, eds., Chaos in the Liberal Order: The Trump Presidency and International Politics in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), xi–xii. 8. For thoughtful reflections, see G. John Ikenberry, A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020). 9. Joseph Biden Jr., “Remarks by President Biden on America in the World,” February 4, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/ briefing-room /speeches-remarks/2021 /02/04 /re marks-by-president-biden-on-americas-place-in-the-world/. 10. Joseph Biden Jr., “Why America Must Lead Again,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-01-23/why-america-must -lead-again. 11. Stephen Wertheim, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2020). 12. Paul Thomas Chamberlin, The Cold War’s Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace (New York: HarperCollins, 2018).

Trump’s Presidency as History 91 13. Stephen Wertheim, “Why Joe Biden’s Foreign Policy Isn’t So Visionary,” Responsible Statecraft, March 9, 2020, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2020/03/09/why-joe-bidens -foreign-policy-vision-isnt-so-visionary/. 14. Ryan Irwin, “Some Parts Sooner, Some Later, and Finally All,” H-Diplo State of the Field Essay 142 (October 2016): 1–25. 15. Ryan Irwin, “Between Two Ages: United States, Decolonization, and Globalization in the Long Sixties,” in A Companion to US Foreign Policy, 1776 to the Present, ed. Christopher Dietrich (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), 726–48. 16. John M. Owen IV, “Iraq and the Democratic Peace: Who Says Democracies Don’t Fight,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2005, https://www.foreignaffairs.com /reviews/review-essay/2005-11-01/iraq-and-democratic-peace. 17. Alex Nowrasteh, “Obama’s Mixed Legacy on Immigration,” CATO Institute, January 25, 2017, https://www.cato.org /publications/commentary/obamas-mixed-legacy -immigration; Reid Epstein, “NCLR Head: Obama ‘Deporter-in- Chief,’ ” Politico, March 4, 2014, https://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/national-council-of-la-raza -janet-murguia-barack-obama-deporter-in-chief-immigration-104217. 18. Jill Lepore, This America: The Case for the Nation (New York: Norton, 2019); Daniel Immerwahr, “The Center Does Not Hold,” Nation, October 29, 2019, https://www .thenation.com/article/archive/jill-lepore-these-truths-this-america-review/. 19. Chuck Hagel, Malcolm Rifkind, Kevin Rudd, and Ivo Daalder, “When Allies Go Nuclear,” Foreign Affairs, February 12, 2021, available: https://www.foreignaffairs.com /articles/asia /2021-02-12/when-allies-go-nuclear; Fareed Zakaria, “The New China Scare,” Foreign Affairs, January/February  2020, https://www.foreignaffairs .com /articles/china/2019-12-06/new-china-scare. 20. Patrick Coburn, “War Zones,” New Left Review: Sidecar, January 14, 2021, https:// newleftreview.org /sidecar/posts/war-zones.

CHAPTER 9

GLOBALISM AND U.S. FOREIGN RELATIONS AFTER TRUMP F R A N K N I N KOV I C H

A

lready beleaguered before Donald Trump’s election in 2016, America’s growing list of structural deficiencies now must also contend with the ideological problems of globalization. With an American public aroused by Trump’s rhetoric, internationalism, which has long been the guiding idea of U.S. foreign relations, can no longer be taken for granted. This riff, delivered at one of Trump’s stream-of-consciousness rallies, provides a taste of his antiglobalist sensibility: “You know what a globalist is? You know what a globalist is? A globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly, not caring about our country so much. And you know what, we can’t have that. You know they have a word. It sort of became old-fashioned. It’s called a nationalist, and I say really, we’re not supposed to use that word. You know what I am? I’m a nationalist, okay? I’m a nationalist. Nationalist. Nothing wrong. Use that word. Use that word.”1 Though one could not tell it from these remarks alone, Trump knew little about globalization—its historical evolution, its complexity, or its importance as the preeminent social fact of the modern era. For that matter, he was equally ignorant about nationalism and its tragic history.2 Notwithstanding his innocence of such knowledge,3 his nationalist sensibility, aggressively pursued, threatened to undermine the structure of American foreign policy and to push world history into a self-destructive spiral. Worse still, the problem was more deep-rooted than Trump, who had inadvertently poked his finger into a festering wound in America’s body politic. Awakened by his neoisolationist rhetoric,

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much of the public turned its back on the grand global idea that had guided U.S. foreign policy since World War II.4 Trump took Americans to the precipice of a collapse of their international system, in which a disintegration of the global economic structure, the catastrophic effects of global warming, and the chaotic implications of even more lethal pandemics are no longer distant possibilities. The disorderly every-manfor-himself international response to the COVID-19 pandemic provided a harsh foretaste of what lay in store for a world driven by unextinguished nationalist impulses. With the election of Joseph Biden and his assurance that “America is back,” Trumpism might be waved off as a buffoonish historical interlude. But, Trump or no Trump, there is ample reason to fear his Americocentric ideas. For all his obtuseness, Trump did manage to get one thing right. He did not see globalization as an irreversible social force, and neither should we, for the quite different reason that foolish nationalist politics have the potential to destroy globalization. If we look to the past for guidance on how a Humpty Dumpty crackup of globalization might be averted, the best example—maybe the only example—is how the United States got through the Cold War. Much of the history of geopolitics in the twentieth century was driven by the fear that modern liberal civilization contained within itself the potential for self-destruction, be it through warfare, ideological dethronement, or both. In what turned out to be a choppy ride, the United States played a leading role in pulling the world through this century-long crisis, by joining to decisive effect major wars on two occasions and then by organizing a global community to weather the aftershocks. If the country did it once, why could it not do it again? Unfortunately, there is serious reason to doubt whether a similarly effective policy for the care and repair of globalization can be devised. This pessimistic conclusion is prompted by a review of how America generated domestic support for the Cold War, a success story, to be sure, but upon closer inspection one that makes the heart sink. The first critical turning point in abandoning isolationism arrived thanks to Japan’s December 1941 surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Instantaneously, this fortuitous event created a clamor for U.S. participation in a global conflict among a hitherto cautious and divided public. A more gradual but equally momentous change of heart came soon after the war ended. Following the breakup of the wartime alliance with the USSR, the Truman administration received the public’s seal of approval for a farreaching policy of containment that only a few years earlier had been politically inconceivable. We now know that no epiphany took place that overnight transformed the American people into devout internationalists. Instead, the Cold War consensus was made possible only by the panicky fear in the public mind of imminent domestic subversion by Moscow’s American communist disciples. Policy intellectuals always want crises to be rationally managed, but the

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Red Scare, however absurd in retrospect, demonstrated that fanciful threats can sometimes be more frightening than real perils and politically useful to boot. As it happened, the public and policy makers had very different dangers in mind. At the rarefied level of high policy, the USSR was not an existential threat to the United States, at least not directly. The Cold War was partly a military competition, to be sure, but viewed from on high it was ultimately a contest over which version of globalization would overspread the world and shape how societies were organized. Dumbed-down strategic metaphors like the domino theory were still too abstract and far removed from the public’s parochial concerns to be helpful in bridging the perceptual gulf between the world views of Washingtonian optimates and the common man. Stated bluntly, domestic delusions providentially licensed policies that were in fact founded on an elite preoccupation with global problems. For a time, this odd-couple relationship worked well. A globalized postwar economy and consumer revolution uplifted an American working class that never had it so good. But that horn of plenty emptied out in the 1970s, after which most Americans made little or no progress while a fortunate few profited disproportionately from supersized incomes and lucrative investments. Public disenchantment with internationalist policies surfaced fitfully through the decades, but it translated into outright political disaffection only with Trump’s astonishing victory. His election confirmed what had long been a foreboding among the foreign policy elite: that internationalism had not been culturally assimilated and that isolationism remained the underlying temper of the American people. With the notable exception of the Vietnam War, that predisposition had been successfully bottled up throughout the Cold War and the brief period of American hegemony that followed. Following the unexpected implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, the sudden disappearance of a formidable but reassuringly familiar opponent worried policy makers for a time— would the public continue to support an unrivalled military establishment in the absence of a reliable enemy? Islamic terrorism and the 9/11 attacks replenished the store of public credit that made possible new interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other terrorist hot spots, but only briefly and not without controversy. Neglecting the home front is always a peril for internationalism, whose cosmopolitan frame of reference makes it easy to lose touch with changes in one’s own culture. As the fear of global terrorism ebbed, Trump was presented with an opening to attack internationalist strategies, whose military and economic shortcomings were increasingly evident. His sales pitch attracted a surprisingly sympathetic audience that included many liberals who were increasingly concerned by the excesses, misadventures, and shortcomings of internationalist policies. What it did not do, however, was awaken a dormant public hostility to globalization. Public attitudes continued to be moved more by a bottom-line

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concern with well-paying jobs than by a reasoned opposition to a dimly understood historical process. This underlying indifference tilted the table toward isolationism if only because political internationalism presupposed a good deal of knowledge about the external world, knowledge typically acquired through education, reading, and travel. Isolationism, by contrast, required few intellectual resources besides the local knowledge on which the mass public relied. In one fundamental respect, this was a new isolationism. Before the 1930s, political isolationism was anchored by two pillars: solid footing in the strategic geography of its time and a tacit public approval that flowed from the economic growth brought about by active participation in a globalizing world. In this respect, the old isolationist elite—think 1920s Republicans—were the kinds of globalists reviled by Trump. They believed that globalization (which, unlike Trump, they understood quite well and approved of) was a positive historical trend that required no far-reaching political commitments by the United States, even as they agreed that ad hoc international cooperation on important issues like German reparations, disarmament, and attempts to outlaw war was desirable. On the surface, Trump appeared to be reviving the protectionism of William McKinley or Calvin Coolidge, but his jettisoning of the Republican Party’s longstanding friendliness to globalization and his willingness to subvert a well-established global system constituted a huge difference in kind. Submissively following their Pied Piper, his congressional minions silently averted their eyes to this retreat as they ditched their longstanding allegiance to free trade. Meanwhile, his populist supporters gladly abandoned their fair-weather toleration of internationalism. Fatefully, the internationalist establishment had failed to anticipate the impact of a public opinion roiled by the kinds of irrational ideas that now course uncontrollably through the internet, a national id unconstrained by a superego. In 1947, Senator Arthur Vandenberg famously advised President Truman to “scare hell out of the American people” in order to sell the novel policy of Cold War containment.5 Today, many Americans are already quite fearful, though in this case about a host of post–Cold War issues: the bogus menace of domestic socialism, global warming as hoax, ditto for COVID-19, allegedly rigged elections, the so-called deep state, traitors at the FBI and intelligence services, black UN helicopters as ominous symbols of world government, the Democratic Party as a satanic cult trafficking in children and their blood, wild talk about a coming civil war, and so on.6 Unlike the chance synthesis of the Cold War consensus, which at least had some common ground in a collective loathing for communism, these weird beliefs are impossible to mobilize for internationalist purposes because the threat lies primarily from within. Accordingly, structural necessity (a term of art) and ideological sanction are not likely to reunite any time soon.

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Even in the absence of such handicaps to rational policy making, domestic unity has always been difficult to come by in the United States. If one looks to history for examples of what it might take to produce national solidarity, certain episodes stand out: The explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbor in 1898, German U-boat sinkings of U.S. merchant ships in 1916 and 1917, the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1961, the September 11 attacks in 2001. These galvanizing events all led to war, save for the case of Cuba, which came perilously close to doing so. In each case, public outrage was ignited by a foreign military attack, real or presumed, or a fear thereof. A survey of domestic issues reveals no comparable energizing examples. Despite the calculated but ham-handed resort to war metaphors, Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty and Richard M. Nixon’s war on cancer failed to ignite a comparable sense of urgency among the public.7 Tellingly, occasional attempts to point out the enormity of the COVID pandemic by comparing death tolls with past military crises failed abysmally to rally the public around science-based public health strategies. Although COVID fatalities far exceeded those of 9/11 and more than tripled the losses suffered in World War II, the resort to such examples was unable to create anything resembling a general will. The pandemic, however impressive statistically, failed to hit home to the much greater number of people who had not been directly touched by it—that, too, was a statistical truth. The resulting political calculus for canny party politicians was one in which ideological optics mattered far more than statistical metrics. This disregard for objective measures highlights a problem of proportionality in U.S. political culture, in which dramatic dangers such as terrorism become big box-office draws while existential threats are relegated to the political equivalent of off-Broadway. All of which raises some uncomfortable questions: What constitutes a political crisis, anyway, other than the often-dubious sense that a crisis exists?8 More disturbingly, are there some existential challenges that are incapable of being engaged through democratic politics or, for that matter, any kind of politics? Whatever the answers, clearly there is something dangerously unhealthy about a politics in which drama creates more urgency than demonstrable peril. Therein lies a serious problem for the future of the republic. Democracies are clearly capable of mobilizing their military resources, but the predilection for spectacle in combination with the United States’ political polarization makes it difficult to see anything but a calamity unprecedented in scale generating the public support needed to deal energetically with global warming. But where is the drama if global warming turns out to be an incremental, slow-motion, multigenerational process? In the absence of a jolting scare, real or imagined, the outlook for competent action is not good. The threat of military attack obviously works as a mobilization tactic, but thus far the counterattacks by Mother Nature—raging wildfires in California and Australia, more frequent and

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disastrous hurricanes, deadly heat waves in Europe, rapidly melting glaciers and sea ice, floods, rising greenhouse-gas emissions, and accelerating biodiversity collapse—have produced weak-kneed political responses. Globalization without a clearly defined enemy will be a hard sell for an establishment that seeks an internationalist revival. In the absence of a robust internationalist public opinion, the elite worldview is likely to be in for a rough ride. In short, while the history of the Cold War offers an example of how a major challenge to liberal globalization has been met, the accidental way in which otherwise incongruous elite and popular perspectives merged into a Cold War consensus tells us nothing about how to surmount a coming global crisis. The central question is whether the United States will be capable of constructing a more potent version of internationalism—a crisis internationalism9—that meets the objective demands of our times before the penalties of ignoring social and scientific facts kick in with a vengeance.10 Despite the mounting evidence that some of those facts, particularly the unwelcome repercussions of climate change, have begun to make themselves felt, the ability of U.S. citizens to fashion adequate political responses remains in question. At the moment, they are limited to an unappetizing menu: a Trumpist mindset that recklessly subverts the global system or an internationalism left over from the Cold War whose use-by date has expired. Well, then, if the United States inhabits an unmanageable runaway world,11 why not let nature take its course and allow market forces to produce a new political and ecological equilibrium? In darker moments, I sometimes wonder if rampant nationalism, by dynamiting the ecologically wasteful globalized economy, might unwittingly mitigate global warming. Maybe, but consider the economic and political cost. Giving up on efforts to steer the course of events would leave each nation to go its own way, not unlike the strategies that nations have adopted in coping with the COVID pandemic. This would amount to a triumph of nationalism by default, in which case there will be a reassertion of unilateralism— on trade and immigration initially, with other major restrictions sure to follow—coupled with an unraveling of the aging and anemic international institutions currently tasked with managing global problems. In turn, this would invite a return to old-school great-power politics—with the proviso that nuclear proliferation will make it difficult if not impossible to settle disputes by military force. As happened in the Cold War, other means would take the place of clashing armies. We have an inkling of this in the current use of cyberwarfare by some countries—just add computers to German chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s famous speech about the unavoidable reliance on “blood and iron.” This would be a return, in modern dress, to an ageless power-based way of transacting international business. Such a turn of events would seem to confirm the inherent cynicism of the realist creed that has long been the dominant

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school of thought among historians of foreign relations and IR theorists. Trump’s revival of nationalism, once described as a “clear-eyed outlook,” that is, realism, fits nicely into that narrative.12 To globalization’s nationalist critics, its shortcomings underscore the need for people to huddle together with their own kind, to return to a primal source of solidarity. However, to think that nationalism is “natural” is historical hooey, because most nations are the artificial creations of governments. To adopt this view is in effect to shrug one’s shoulders and accept that, after thousands of years of human social evolution and extraordinary change, international relations still come down to a system in which the United States is powerless to check the operation of power other than to forcefully oppose it. Should events take it down this road, the history of internationalism will one day be seen as only a brief interlude in the neverending human pursuit of power. Unfortunately, far too many historians and IR theorists continue to think of internationalists as naïfs. Having emerged as objects of study only recently, internationalism and globalization lack the ancient pedigree and scholarly gravitas of realism, but it is past time that hoary ideas start earning their titles of nobility. For my part, I would contend that internationalists, who are often criticized for being idealists, are more deserving of the honorific title of realists. What is increasingly clear from the ongoing research is that political internationalism, far from being idealistic, was rooted in an urgent appreciation of the hard realities of power, though not the kind of power realists prefer to talk about. Power assuredly resides in military strength, at least in part—no argument there. But power is also inherent in social facts, in this case global facts that it would be folly to ignore.13 Any realism that hopes to live up to its name requires that all of reality be looked at, especially when national survival is at stake. Contra Trump, nationalism and the national interest are not synonymous, and globalism is quite the opposite of “not caring about our country so much.” For that matter, nationalism and internationalism are not mutually exclusive—they never have been—for internationalism is inconceivable without nationalism and the nation-state, as nineteenth-century liberal internationalists well knew. But nationalism as a conceptual beacon is hopelessly passé. Though it continues to capture the imaginations of many,14 it no longer offers a sensible scheme for coping with a globalized world. Nationalism is a historical failure whose virtues, which are ultimately undone by its shortcomings, can be convincingly explained. Yet despite its inability to solve the problems of its own time, it is hazily expected by its adherents to rescue us from our more complex current difficulties. In its heyday it served as an ideal type that was useful for orienting policy, but it has since lost its constructive links to the real world. Viewed pragmatically, we can no more go back to the past than we can reclaim our youth, for history is a nonstop journey whose point of no return was reached

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at its outset. Today the only realistic option for policy makers is to fashion a new internationalism to replace the internationalist hand-me-downs they have inherited from the Cold War. If U.S. leaders fail to treat global society as a social fact, they will pay the price of its demise. Only the global ravages of climate change will remain to remind them of the former global society. Internationalism is but the political counterpart to globalization. It is rooted in a historical reality that has been building for centuries. The starting point of most internationalists is not to create an idealized world but to navigate the world as they find it. That is the saving grace of American internationalism in the twentieth century, which had little to do with abstract idealistic dreams or the desire to impose an overweening American exceptionalism. Quite the contrary, it was a historically informed attempt to rebuild a badly malfunctioning global society. As Hegel might have viewed it, the cascading adversities of globalization make quite clear that this project, though successful in the short run, contained within it some fateful contradictions that await resolution.15 But when one tries to imagine alternative roads that might have been taken in the past, the United States could have done much worse. Let’s assume that a domestic consensus can be achieved. Fine, but even if the problems of democracy are resolved to the satisfaction of internationalists, that would only pour a foundation for a structure whose international architecture remains to be drawn. The familiar to-do list of foreign policy alone poses daunting problems whose solutions may be out of reach.16 Notwithstanding the apparent support of important world leaders and a string of thus-far ineffectual environmental conferences,17 addressing the dysfunctions of globalization while taking care not to intensify them will require far more skill than anything U.S. foreign policy has ever mobilized in the past. It is no secret that a new narrative or contemporary history is needed, as some contributors to this volume have ably pointed out,18 but that is far from sufficient, for ideas need somehow to do real work by being translated into actual political and diplomatic practice, an undertaking that would challenge the abilities even of a world awash with philosopher-kings. Unfortunately, we have to make do with a political culture ill-suited to navigating the challenges that lie ahead. This voyage would be less treacherous with American leadership, but that, too, can no longer be taken for granted. To be effective, leadership requires a followership, which in turn implies trust. If past performance is any indication, Americans’ fond memories about the high degree of trust enjoyed by the United States during the Cold War and after have been photoshopped. On some highprofile issues—Korea, Vietnam, Euromissiles, the second Iraq war, for starters— America’s allies were unenthusiastic and sometimes rebellious disciples. Perhaps Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, correctly appraised the zeitgeist of his era when he quipped that a leader without followers is

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preferable to followers without a leader. But a policy rooted in that kind of time-bound complacency will be impossible to pull off in an increasingly multipolar world in which the United States no longer possesses all-round superiority.19 Trump’s promise of a return to greatness, however delusionary, has an internationalist corollary: despite fervid declarations that “America is back,” America’s hegemonic moment has come and gone.20 Historians have no special competence in tackling contemporary problems. But we do know that many once-prevalent social practices have zero chance of a successful comeback. Would anyone care to make a case for resurrecting slavery? Restoring absolute monarchies? Rolling back women’s suffrage? Reviving the practice of wife beating? Torture? Blood sport? Raise your hands, please. This is unfair, I admit, because these examples, with the exception of monarchies, illustrate the power of modern moral sentiments. By comparison, internationalism, given its highly abstract nature, cannot—at least not yet, nor in sufficient degree—arouse a visceral feeling of rightness or wrongness, even when it comes to enforcing a no-brainer moral imperative like the belief in human rights.21 Readers may already have sensed at least one difficulty with this cheerless assessment: If one doubts something can be done, why bother even to try? Fair enough. But this does not rule out the painful optimism of muddling through.22 Such an expectation is not fatalistic, because the future is chock-full of the uncertainties that humble any attempt at political auguring. An unpredictable event(s) might change the equation. Epochal political realignment may come to pass. Should the U.S. educational system rise to the occasion, serial catastrophes might be unnecessary to mobilize future generations. A charismatic leader may step up. New technologies might save the day or at least ameliorate the situation. Public ignorance might, alas, conceivably play a salutary role by making it easier for canny leaders to shape mass opinion. And, the best being the enemy of the good (though sometimes vice versa), short of wishful thinking, Americans don’t really know what the best possible solution is. So the United States may muddle through, albeit at a price that it is just beginning to pay. That said, the United States is not wholly at the mercy of unpredictable events. One advantage of the modern temper is that scholars have learned a good deal about globalization’s historical evolution. That knowledge has provided us with a good grasp of where we have been and where we are, and with the additional help of science, one can be certain about the major challenges coming our way. As a result, we have reached an indispensable starting point for addressing our present situation. Sooner or later, one way or another, a tipping point will come when the direct experience of a critical mass of people will generate a demand that global problems be addressed in a truly practical manner—most likely that will be later, because, like it or not, sometimes things need to get worse before

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they can get better. But in due course, one hopes that all of us will have learned enough to avoid experiencing the classical Greek meaning of tragedy as an outcome foreordained by the arrogant blindness of humans. The very worst tragedies are those to which we surrender beforehand by rejecting the knowledge at our disposal.

Notes 1. Remarks at a “Make America Great Again Rally,” Houston, Texas, October 22, 2018, University of California Santa Barbara online American Presidency Project, hereafter cited as APP. Perhaps I am reading too much into these remarks, but here Trump sounds as if he has just realized that he is a nationalist, not unlike M. Jourdain, Molière’s bourgeois gentleman, who was pleasantly amazed by the revelation that he has always been speaking prose: “By my faith! I have been speaking in prose for more than forty years without knowing it.” Frédérique Michel and Charles A. Duncombe, Moliere’s “The Bourgeois Gentleman” (CreateSpace, 2011), 11.4, p. 34. Who knew? 2. Robert Samuelson, “Globalization Much More Complex Than Many Believe,” (Worcester, MA) Telegram and Gazette, July 6, 2016. I have found only two instances where Trump used the word “globalization” since October 2016, one of them likely scripted, whereas “globalists” and “globalizers” were employed more often. As a rule, Trump sought to pin blame on a relatively small number of individuals, e.g., a “corrupt political establishment that is the greatest power behind the efforts at radical globalization and the disenfranchisement of working people.” See his “Remarks at the South Florida Fair Expo Center in West Palm Beach, Florida,” October 13, 2016, APP; and “Remarks at the Whirlpool Corporation Manufacturing Plant in Clyde, Ohio,” August 6, 2020, APP. Globalists do exist, of course, but globalization as a historical process and a compelling social reality was not the product of a few easily blamed miscreants. For some illustrative takes on the depth and complexity of globalization, see Peter N. Stearns, Globalization in World History, 3rd ed. (London: Taylor and Francis, 2019); Nayan Chanda, Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, and Warriors Shaped Globalization (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); A. G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History (New York: Norton, 2002); A. G. Hopkins, ed., Global History: Interactions Between the Universal and the Local (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); William H. McNeill and J. R. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s Eye View of World History (New York: Norton, 2003); Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Globalization: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). For more recent developments, see Emily S. Rosenberg et al., A World Connecting: 1870–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2012); and Akira Iriye et al., Global Interdependence: The World After 1945 (A History of the World) (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2014)—and a host of others. 3. On various occasions, Trump seemed to think that Frederick Douglass was alive, that Finland was a part of Russia, that Britain was not yet a nuclear power, that windmills cause cancer, and that British troops had landed at New Jersey airports during the Revolutionary War. “Our Army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do, and at Fort McHenry, under the rocket’s red glare it had nothing but victory.” Dana Milbank, “The Case Against Trump, in 600

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4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

ALL-CAPS WORDS AND 35 EXCLAMATION POINTS!,” Washington Post, October 20, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/20. For a lengthier version of this argument, on which this chapter is based, see Frank Ninkovich, “Globalization and US Foreign Relations After Trump,” https://networks . h -net . org /node /28443 /discussions /7788524 / h - diploissf - policy - series - 2021 - 36 -globalization-and-us-foreign. The original source of this ubiquitous quotation is frustratingly difficult to pin down. A recent biography by Hendrik Meijer, Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 356, skirts the issue. But in an act of faith that historians are not mindlessly quoting one another, I cite the following: Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–1971 (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1972), 45; Andrew Bacevich, Twilight of the American Century (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2018); Eric Goldman, The Crucial Decade—and After: America, 1945–1960 (New York, 1960), 59; Richard Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism (New York: Knopf, 1971), 89. Whatever the provenance, the remark accurately reflects the prevailing sentiment of the foreign policy elite. Though I could cite various polls and surveys, no better evidence exists than the comedian Jay Leno’s “Jaywalking” episodes, which are readily available on YouTube. For starters, try https://www.youtube.com /watch? v = 7_ pw8duzGUg& list=PLKUC1BRE er3y_ k _eb3muCZagySJjjzJiW. I rest my case. Add to this the mindboggling percentage of Americans who deny global warming or neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology. Unsurprisingly, two of Trump’s greatest sources of strength are white voters without college degrees and evangelical Christians. The New Deal would seem at first sight to be an exception, but I disagree. Limitations of space preclude any elaboration of my views on this issue. For a suggestive but far from definitive discussion of what makes for a crisis, see Jared Diamond, Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis (New York: Little, Brown, 2019). Nevertheless, Diamond raises an important question. On how extraneous “noise” can warp our understanding, see Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Siony, and Cass R. Sunstein, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment (New York: Little, Brown, 2021). I am aware that there exists a sizeable literature on crisis management, which, focused as it is on the behavior of organizations, has little practical bearing on our current political situation. For a survey of “normal internationalism” and “crisis internationalism” as they developed in the twentieth century, see Frank Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century: US Foreign Policy Since 1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). On the significance of social facts, see the classic work by Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, trans. Sarah A. Solovay and John H. Mueller (New York: Free Press, 1938), 3, 10. Durkheim’s work was a manifesto that sought to convince readers of the existence and importance of “social facts,” whose defining attribute was a “power of external coercion which it exercises or is capable of exercising over individuals.” This emphasis on the power of social facts was part of a wide-ranging nineteenthcentury revolution in thought—liberalism, Marxism, and much of what would become modern social science—that rejected what one writer described as “the logic of the agrarian age, which decreed that power trumped wealth.” Ernest Gellner, Plough, Sword, and Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 108. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 131–39; Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalization Is Reshaping Our Lives (New York: Routledge, 2003).

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12. Consider how some of Trump’s early advisors deceived themselves into believing that their chief commanded “a clear-eyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.” Wall Street Journal, May  30, 2017, https://www.wsj.com /articles/america-first-doesnt-mean-america-alone-1496187426. 13. Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin, eds., Internationalisms: A Twentieth- Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York: Penguin, 2012); Warren F. Kuehl, Biographical Dictionary of Internationalists (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983). There are too many books to cite on the nonpolitical plane of globalization, which is where most of the action has taken place, stimulated in large measure by Akira Iriye (a mentor) in a series of seminal works such as Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). A prominent example is Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2000). 14. The formidable John Gray, for example, who once described the nation-state as “the pre-eminent political form,” in Isaiah Berlin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 115. 15. For introductions to the problems of globalization, see Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited: Anti-Globalization in the Era of Trump (New York: Norton, 2018); Robert Kuttner, Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism (New York: Norton, 2018); Dani Rodrik, Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). 16. See chapter 42, by Charles Meier, in this volume. 17. “The President’s News Conference with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany,” March 17, 2017, APP; Xi Jinping’s keynote speech at the World Economic Forum, Davos, January  17, 2017, https://www.weforum.org /agenda /2017/01 /full-text-of-xi-jinping -keynote-at-the-world-economic-forum. 18. The chapters by Conway and Zipp in this volume (43 and 10, respectively) do a fine job of elaborating this point. 19. While chapter 11, by John A. Thompson, in this volume makes clear the importance of structural changes in today’s world, the importance of structural capabilities receives extensive treatment in his splendid book, A Sense of Power: The Roots of America’s Global Role (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), which exhibits a kind of realism that I can live with. 20. David E. Sanger, “The End of ‘America First’: How Biden Says He Will Re-engage with the World,” New York Times, November 10, 2020; “Joe Biden’s Climate Team Actually Cares About Climate,” editorial, New York Times, December 29, 2020. 21. A tentative—nay, conjectural— exploration of how moral sentiments can matter immensely to foreign policy is Frank Ninkovich, “The Cultural Transformation of America’s Civilizing Mission in the Twentieth Century,” in Civilizing Missions in the Twentieth Century, ed. Boris Barth and Rolf Hobson (Leiden: Brill, 2020): 21–67. 22. On this, see Jeremy Adelman’s comment on “muddling through,” in chapter 40 in this volume.

CHAPTER 10

THE DERANGEMENTS OF SOVEREIGNTY Trumpism and the Dilemmas of Interdependence SA M U E L Z I P P

A

ny account of Donald Trump’s presidency, whether concerned with foreign or domestic affairs, must now begin with the grim and brutal events of January 6, 2021. The insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was clarifying. Trump’s actions that day, or in the months preceding the assault, may or may not fit the legal definition of “incitement,” but they fall squarely in that moral region. Incitement, his behavior reveals, was the motivating force at the heart of his entire campaign for semiabsolute rule. He stoked the fears of the disconnected and precarious, supercharging the fragmented media ecology of misinformation, encouraging a mob to install him as what his most fervent supporters call “GEOTUS,” or God Emperor of the United States. Trumpism, it turns out, is what it always appeared to be: a long con expertly worked to pervert and subdue democracy by manipulating resentment and fear—and all to satisfy one man’s vanity. Trumpism reached one endpoint that day. The slipshod coup did not come off. The strange scenes of mayhem, confusion, violence, and wanton boredom that unfolded over those four or five berserk hours—a bloodthirsty and determined siege of the building followed by an odd fever dream of petty vandalism, souvenir hunting, selfie-taking, photo bombing, livestreaming, awestruck tourist gazing, and aimless milling about—suggest that the popular upsurge around Trump had not yet cohered into a movement. It could not forestall the collapse of the center-right hegemony installed during the Reagan years and cannot yet establish the terms of a new political and cultural order based on a

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reactionary conservatism inherited from the Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society, or the White Aryan Resistance. The insurrection of January 6 was carried out by something between a rabble and a movement—a loose agglomeration of people with overlapping grievances and delusions. In the mob that day were conservative evangelicals, antigovernment militias, Proud Boy brawlers, and devotees of the QAnon madness, plus a welter of other motley white-nationalist, neo-Nazi, and paramilitary tendencies, the various Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, Lost Causers and Kekistan secessionists, Pepe the Frog enthusiasts and VDARE keyboard warriors. Someone erected a flimsy gallows on the Capitol grounds, a gesture cribbed from the pages of The Turner Diaries, the infamous white-power novel in which insurgents hang lawmakers and journalists on “The Day of the Rope.”1 But most people, it turns out, were there on their own or in small family or friend groups. There were many suburban parents and grandparents, men and women in business casual or jeans and sweatshirts, as well as a few Republican politicians—and no small number of off-duty cops and former military personnel—many of whom have pledged themselves to the ranks of the far right and their chat-room fantasies of deep-state takeover. And all of the MAGA horde styled themselves as “patriots”; this despite the fact that their sole allegiance was to Trump, not country, and to the delusion that the election had been somehow stolen from him by shadowy forces whose priests and initiates were at work inside the lofty citadel on the hill. They knew they had to “stop the steal.” Once inside, though, they weren’t sure what to do. It turned out there was nothing to stop because nothing had been stolen. If Trumpism is a con, it’s a long con—and it might yet cohere as a new kind of American protofascism. Ultimately, however, Trump is a symptom—he floats on larger forces at work over a longer span of time. So what lies beneath? What has allowed the con man to flourish, to give a name to all these roiling resentments, to install his chalky blockhead visage as a symbol of the still forestalled right-wing restoration? What causes Trumpism? The MAGA horde assaulted the fundamental framework of democracy, surging past mere protest or civil disobedience to mob insurrection, bringing real force to bear on behalf of the seditious conviction that has lodged itself deep inside the Republican Party as a whole in its late minoritarian phase: elections are only free and fair if their results satisfy the party’s preordained victor. The sheer fervor of this belief suggests some pervasive and underlying derangement. These people feel themselves to be both rightful rulers and the victims of a great catastrophe.

✳✳✳ There’s been no shortage of commentary pinning the whole thing on the persistent power of American white supremacy.2 More than just resurgent

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right-wing “hate,” Trumpist white supremacy can best be understood as a byproduct of the structural racism underlying the American experiment, a desperate attempt to rejuvenate the longstanding power of whiteness to deliver both ideological coherence and material advantage in the face of calamity and change. This whiteness works in many ways. It is no doubt an accelerant, sending a burst of aggrieved flame up from the coals laid by the great hollowing out of middle-class America, as offshoring and opioid addiction have swept across the rural and suburban expanses of an America set to burn by bipartisan neoliberal inequality.3 And whiteness serves as glue, too, binding the many Trumpist grievances together. It fastens economic precarity and imperiled manhood to fear of immigration and demographic change, solidifying the desperate wish to take the country back to some mythical age of uncorrupted purity when the patriarchal hierarchy felt right side up. And it permits the resurgence of overt white supremacy to go relatively unchecked. The pull of whiteness has allowed “you will not replace us!”—the white-nationalist rallying cry made famous at Charlottesville in 2017—to become a fever fueling the whole of the insurgent right. Whiteness was supposed to repair the breach. Long the taken-for-granted advantage—the “public and psychological wage,” as W. E. B. Du Bois famously named it—whiteness was the unseen guarantor of a seemingly natural insulation from fatal injustice.4 It underpinned the assumption that progress, safety, and growth were akin to a birthright for people like “us.” It delivered cultural and material compensation, rearing its head as a ready response at any hint of the threat that the country might be taken away by “them”—the Jews, the Blacks, the illegal aliens, immigrants, the elites. Working in the background, it secured privileges taken as rights. It delivered public subsidy for good schools and clean, efficient hospitals, easy access to credit and mortgages in safe, bucolic neighborhoods, a sense that the police were on your side, the expectation of a job when you wanted it—all things that have long been precarious or out of reach for those deemed “unworthy” by dint of their race. But when “they” demanded full and equal access to the publicly subsidized meadows of postwar abundance—as a matter of “civil rights” or economic justice—the response was unequivocal: a decades-long campaign to abandon public subsidies for upward mobility and replace it with the rocky cliffs of privatized neoliberalism. This is fealty to whiteness at its core: a willingness to indulge the deprivation of one’s own humanity in the name of safety and supremacy. The result? More precarity and despair for everyone.5 In the moment, of course, whiteness certainly delivered for the Capitol rioters—ensuring a lightly guarded perimeter, an initial lack of militarized pushback, and practically free rein inside the building. (Protestors for racial justice, as many remarked, never enjoy anything like it.) But over the last decade or so, over the last few decades, in fact, the power of whiteness has itself come

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to feel precarious, slowly undone by its own investment in hoarding the privileges it made possible and undermining society as a whole. In an age of inequality, in a time of government-ordered pandemic lockdowns, those privileges appeared less guaranteed. When the assurance whiteness confers begins to slip away, it resurfaces as blind rage for the old order it has done so much to destroy. But the sheer number of people across all walks of life who slipped down the QAnon hole and into fantasies of deep-state conspiracy suggests how whiteness requires both structural underpinnings and fresh fuel for its fire. Trumpist whiteness subsists on pervasive, longstanding national beliefs, principles that appear newly imperiled by forces that threaten to engulf the country as a whole. On the one hand, the source of this discontent predates the Great Recession, or the age of neoliberal inequality born in the 1970s, or the New Deal and the supposed “socialism” unleashed by the Democratic Party, and even goes back beyond the era of Reconstruction and the founding of the Lost Cause mythology, when white supremacy reestablished itself in the ruins of slavery. On the other, the great derangement is inflamed by a quite recent fear that the United States has finally lost the power it once had to command its own destiny and to chart its own path through world history. Both of these currents collect in our current moment and in a widely shared failure to face the challenges of our interconnected global lives.

✳✳✳ In the United States, whiteness found its initial power propping up the fundamental element of American political culture: independent self-possession. First deeded to white men with property, independence and the autonomy it promises has long been the brass ring of an unequal American democracy anchored in the assertion of rights by individuals. Those judged dependent in the evolutionary logic of this initial formulation have had to chase this prize. One way to tell the story of American history is to chart the pursuit of equal rights by the many millions deemed democracy’s children: Native Americans, wage earners, women, and slaves, initially, and then later immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, transgender people, the elderly, and even children. But movements for indigenous, racial, economic, gender, or sexual justice often claimed more than rights. They accompanied others—Progressive-era reformers, urbanists, New Dealers, internationalists, and environmentalists— who sought, in one way or another, to shift the terms of U.S. political culture toward recognition of the interdependence at the heart of social life. This is why each of these tendencies—whether they were liberal or radical, whether they were allies or uneasy bedfellows—has unleashed such turmoil in American life. Going back more than a century, efforts to reorient U.S. political culture around

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a vision of interdependence equal to the complexity of a social world organized by great metropolises, corporations, financial networks, and increasingly segmented and instantaneous communications media have long run up against the latent power of possessive individualism. Indeed, they threaten faith in independence with the specter of dependence. This is the great rupture that the MAGA horde rages to repair. For the Trumpists, freedom means not the expansion of rights but the defense of sovereignty—an independence secured by whiteness and patriarchy that appears to them everywhere under attack. The old conservative slur of “big government”—aimed at turning back the public power needed to answer the challenge of interdependence—has metastasized as fear of a “deep state” whose hidden officers threaten to everywhere regulate and obstruct the rightfully unencumbered exertion of autonomous individual striving. (Even if the major policy payoffs of this ideology would likely be delivered not to individuals but to the most powerful entities endowed with personhood in U.S. political culture: corporations.) Trump’s unashamed misogyny, xenophobia, and race baiting—as malevolent as they are in and of themselves—are ultimately a means to an end. His attempts to inflame fears of a “racial threat to the white homeland,” as William I. Hitchcock puts it in chapter 26 of this volume, signal official sanction for the idea that those long kept dependent have traduced the natural order of things. Rightful hierarchies appear overturned; the once independent fear suffering the dependence reserved for aliens, minorities, and women. Belief in whiteness, as its most perceptive critics suggest, impairs the ability to recognize common humanity. Its chief property is refusal to grant the fact of interdependence.6 All of this works, however, because right-wing fears find fertile ground in times when the challenges of interdependence go unmet. We live, and have lived for some time now, in such times. The proximate source of the anger on the right is no secret. Trump and his lieutenants told us exactly what fueled their fury. The “American carnage” he lamented in his inaugural address was a result, he and Steve Bannon declared over and over again, of “globalism.”7 They resurrected “America First”—that old rallying cry from the dark days of 1940 and 1941, when the United States ripped itself apart trying to stay out of the war in Europe—because it neatly expressed the plight of imperiled sovereignty in an era of globalization.

✳✳✳ Possessive individualism permits several forms of managed collectivity: the patriarchal family, primarily; the segregated neighborhood too; “states rights,” of course. But it reserves its highest public purpose for nationalism. Independence welds personal sovereignty to national sovereignty, and Trump has long

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made threats to national greatness the stuff of personal crisis and social crisis. If Trump has any principles, they start there. The rude scion of a real estate family committed to keeping Queens and Brooklyn segregated, some of Trump’s earliest pronouncements on national affairs trade in analogous alarm about imperiled independence and undefended borders, but scaled up a step: white panic gone nationwide. His great concern, expressed in the ads he took out in major newspapers in 1987 the first time he imagined a run for the White House, was that Japan was taking advantage of the United States. Protected by American military might since World War II, a prosperous Japan got rich off exports to the United States and foreign direct investment in American cities, running up a huge trade surplus that imperiled Americans. “A lot of people are tired of watching other countries ripping off the United States,” Trump would say to audiences in those days. “They laugh at us behind our backs. They laugh at us because of our stupidity.”8 This was the problem at the heart of what he called—shouting already, in caps, long before Twitter— “America’s Foreign Defense Policy.” The country was in danger of becoming Trump the narcissist’s worst fear: a loser. It could only be redeemed, he claimed, by “making Japan pay.” The United States should “tax” the Japanese with tariffs, of course. From there, the specter of a once proud nation unmanned, made dependent on Asian capital, lodged itself deeply in Trump’s instincts. The rage of the wounded giant, left unprotected by globalist elites and harried by foreigners at the gates, became the hard kernel at the center of his long con, the hurt that drives his malevolent politics. As president, Trump never had a foreign “policy” so much as a set of feelings about foreignness. The many rebukes he offered to conventional foreign policy—his threats toward NATO or the World Health Organization, his offhand disdain for “shithole countries,” his absurd pledge to make Mexico pay for his “big, beautiful” border wall, his tariff bluster duly transferred to China—stemmed from the original sense of sovereignty affronted.9 The world offered only threats to the independent assertion of American freedom, dangers that justified the right to withdraw from longstanding alliances or taunt minor foes with nuclear annihilation. The world consisted only of the strong and the weak, and so traditional diplomacy deserved only disdain. Careful tradeoffs between principle and compromise, the search for mutual interests and the veiled exercise of power, all of that required exchange, the regular give and take of politics in an interdependent world. For him diplomacy was deal making, a transaction he would only enter if he could “win,” if he could dictate the terms or control how he looked in the eyes of the player with the upper hand. This game of win or lose fueled his ungainly dance of submission and rebuke with authoritarians large and small, as he maneuvered to appear to have come out on top.

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Trump’s ascent and the aggrieved semi-insurgency he left in his wake signal a twofold crisis of interdependence. The perennial American investment in sovereign independence has always bucked against the demands of an interconnected globe, but those resentments have gone feral now that the U.S. hold over the commanding heights of world power is in peril. Trump’s hard unilateralism, in the end, will appear not so much an affront to the so-called liberal world order as an extreme and inelegant rearticulation of the nation’s chief foreign policy goal over the last seventy-five years. Despite all his norm breaking, he’s been utterly traditional in his fealty to what John A. Thompson in chapter 11 of this volume calls the “consistent interest” of post-1945 American foreign policy: “maintaining America’s preeminent position in world politics.” Trump’s bluster was an attempt to reestablish American supremacy, to keep the United States atop the hierarchy of the interdependent world. And in so doing Trump has revealed, like nobody and nothing else, the failure of the United States to confront the challenges of globalization with any subtler story than a drama of sovereignty won or lost.

✳✳✳ This is less a failure of foreign policy than of foreign relations writ large. It marks the tragic end of a long turn in the cultural history of internationalism and specifically the checkered career of American popular internationalism. Trump’s implosion brings to a close a seventy-five-year period that has one of its origin points during World War II, when Americans had a chance to accept a far more capacious perspective on the world at large. At another time of global crisis, when calls for America First last commanded the airwaves, several visions of U.S. internationalism vied for public approval. President Franklin Roosevelt championed the idea that would shape the future United Nations: a global order dominated by the Allied powers. But his Republican rival for the presidency in 1940, Wendell Willkie, offered a vision for a more fully democratic world body in his 1943 bestseller One World. This “common council” of all nations would work to end European empire and its everpresent handmaiden racism. Partisans of the Popular Front, backers of Vice President Henry Wallace, joined Willkie in attacking the power of racial discrimination at home and abroad but more directly assailed the emerging power of U.S. global empire. Meanwhile, many of Willkie’s erstwhile Republican allies soured on his challenges to nationalism and worked to limit the power of the future United Nations and create an unencumbered prospect for U.S. power. And as Cold War liberalism took shape, New Dealers and internationalist Republicans alike scored both “one world” ideals and Popular Front radicalism as naïve and unsuited to the hard truths of a world threatened by “totalitarianism.”10

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Not long after Willkie’s untimely death in late 1944, a new consensus began to form up around what the historian John Fousek calls “nationalist globalism”— the sense that American influence and power should rightfully be extended over much of the planet.11 Anything less—like Willkie’s more cooperative ideals—could be dismissed as what the writer and Connecticut representative Clare Boothe Luce would call “globaloney.” Tarred as a threat to national sovereignty and an illegitimate approach to foreign affairs, it could be banished in favor of modes of thinking attuned solely to power politics.12 Interest-based “realism” and crusading “idealism” became the only available choices on a menu scrubbed of cooperative internationalist options. Each turned on debates over U.S. power and how it should be defended, expanded, or unleashed around the world.13 Willkie’s strategic vision has been little appreciated. U.S. cooperation with the Soviet Union, he hoped, would open the geopolitical space for decolonization to flourish, leading to a widely shared era of global growth and development. This was wishful thinking at the time, perhaps, but his early insistence that the globe was shaped by three worlds, not two, captured the true dilemmas of the postwar era.14 One World sits at the hinge of the twentieth century, a warning that forgoing a true reckoning with empire, race, and nationalism would imperil interdependence and undermine the country’s quest for world leadership. Meanwhile, the United States did invest in the infrastructure of global society—and many individual Americans have worked to make it flourish— but too often as a byproduct of imperial world “leadership.” American internationalism of the “liberal” postwar era, Stephen Wertheim has most recently argued, was bent on U.S. “primacy” rather than full recognition of global interdependency.15 It sought to manipulate the emerging infrastructure of global cooperation to protect not just national sovereignty but U.S. dominance. Take the United Nations, for instance. The United States led the effort to found the world body, and many Americans helped staff its agencies and initiatives. But with the steep descent into ideological conflict with the Soviet Union, American officials began, as Jessica Wang summarizes it, to treat “the world organization as more a public relations problem than a serious framework for the pursuit of international relations.” From the Cold War to the War on Terror, the United States has viewed the United Nations as “part instrument and part obstacle,” a mere impediment to be either induced or coerced into ratifying U.S. policy.16 The unilateralist vision underpinning the so-called American Century put postwar internationalism at the service of U.S. global primacy. For a while it seemed to work, at home at least. For several charmed decades, during “the great exception,” as the historian Jefferson Cowie calls the postwar years, aggregate prosperity papered over the corrosive impacts of

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deindustrialization, racial discrimination, whites-only suburbanization, and military intervention in the Third World.17 By the 1970s, however, the nation faced Vietnam, Watergate, stagflation, and an oil crisis—and also a great inversion of U.S. imperial economic power. The system of global markets that had enriched America now began to pull jobs and capital away to the developing world, plunging older industries into crisis and setting off a long period of crisis, boom, and decline. Free-market fundamentalism, buoyed by white resentment of the civil rights revolution, unseated welfare-state liberalism. A new whitecollar and financial elite rose up, politics lurched rightward, inequality swelled, and racial divisions metastasized. Eventually the center came undone, fueling the ire of Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump alike.

✳✳✳ But the storming of the Capitol puts paid to any facile equivalence between Trump and Sanders, or between Congresswomen Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. For decades now, the country has been continually beset by calamity, buffeted by one shock after another, all of which have culminated in the debacle unleashed by the coronavirus pandemic. A borderdefying plague should be an object lesson in global interconnection, but the coronavirus further divided the country. Those who rankled at state-backed impositions on economic and social life were set to boil by a Republican-led federal response determined to endanger social welfare in order to gain political advantage. They turned first on the elites and the vulnerable and then on democracy itself. Trump incited a certain kind of derangement in his opponents as much as his supporters, leaving many with the feeling that he might be with us forever. He would be up there, some extravagantly feared, hunched and bilious in the penthouse atop some gold and glass tower, cable news on perpetual scream, jabbing at his tweetmaker high above the slag heap of the country he’s left behind. That menace has receded, at least for now. But whatever happens to Trump the man, the conditions on which he has preyed will remain urgent for the foreseeable future. “The Trump phenomenon,” as Martin Conway says in chapter 43 of this volume, “is here to stay.” He supercharged a longstanding right-wing shibboleth—the threat of a “new world order,” the nightmare of Willkie’s one-world dream gone wrong, in which some shadowy planetary government-in-waiting is intent on enslaving freedomloving American citizens. His America First nationalism plays on fear, but the great anger and dread it has unleashed feeds on the global and national inequality that the liberal order has produced and countenanced. The embrace of unequal globalization, and the inequality it produced, has been a bipartisan affair, and Trump has exposed that truth.

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Over the last few years, some have suggested that Trump’s rise signals a lurch toward fascism. If this is an American Weimar, the storming of the Capitol was not the United States’ Reichstag fire or its Kristallnacht. Not yet. Maybe it was its Beer Hall Putsch. The analogies are imprecise and worth only so much. Those who doubt them argue that Trump is too incompetent and narcissistic to pull off the white-nationalist restoration for which his supporters long.18 But history rhymes; it does not repeat. The resonances between this moment and the fascist surge of the 1920s and 1930s supersede Trump. In our time as well as theirs, Timothy Snyder has argued, democracies failed to confront the inequalities produced by periods of globalization. Fascists always tell a compelling lie because it is spun up from actual wounds. Globalization can feel like a distant, hidden, and nefarious plot against individual and national sovereignty. Fascism responds with a “glorious myth” of national self-sufficiency and offers a path toward collective and individual regeneration through militaristic insurgency— all in the name of a world—and a nation, crucially—put right side up again.19 The only way to begin to dilute the power of this story—and the resentment that inequality propels and whiteness nurtures—is to recognize that as corrosive and cynical as it is, the Trumpist attack on “globalism” got one thing right. The default liberal world order has not delivered a just response to globalization. Both Trumpist protofascism and the globe-ordering wishes of the liberal world order rest on a similar inability to grant the facts of our times. Both have failed to fully grapple with our interdependent planet.

Notes 1. For a guide, see Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive /2021 /far-right-symbols-capitol-riot/. See also Dorany Pineda, “The Turner Diaries Didn’t Just Inspire the Capitol Attack. It Warns Us What Might Be Next,” Los Angeles Times, January 8, 2021, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2021 -01-08/kathleen-belew-on-the-turner-diaries. 2. When I wrote the original version of this piece for H-Diplo, in the weeks after the events at the Capitol, this was a kind of ambient sentiment, emerging among liberal and radical commentators to contest the idea that the events of that day could be seen as simply an irrational explosion of right-wing delusion tied to the elections and resentment of elites. That tendency is visible now from a simple Google search of “January 6” and “white supremacy.” The results reveal a host of pieces in the mainstream media from those weeks, some blaming the events on an upsurge of far-right hate and white-power organizing, others investigating the role of structural racism in allowing a white mob to attack the Capitol with such impunity. See, for instance, Christine Fernando and Noreen Nasir, “Years of White Supremacy Threats Culminated in Capitol Riots,” AP News, January 14, 2021, https://apnews.com/article/white-supremacy -threats-capitol-riots-2d4ba4d1a3d55197489d773b3e0b0f32; Annette John-Hall, “The Capitol Insurrection Was Never About the Election. It Was About White Supremacy,” WHYY, January 16, 2021, https://whyy.org/articles/the-capitol-insurrection-was-never

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3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

-about-the-election-it-was-about-white-supremacy/. One result of this was President Joe Biden’s endorsement, in an October 21 speech, of the idea that the insurrection was “about white supremacy.” “Hate,” Biden said, “never goes away,” but “a president who appealed to the prejudice” allowed it to flourish. See Jenny Leonard and Nancy Cook, “Biden Says White Supremacy Drove Trump’s Jan. 6 Rioters,” Bloomberg News, October 21, 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com /news/articles/2021-10-21 / biden-says -white-supremacy-motivated-trump-s-jan-6-rioters. As Jason Ludwig and Rebecca Slayton argue in chapter 27 of this volume, “structural inequalities have not only created particularly vulnerable communities within the United States but have contributed directly to national vulnerability.” And Charles S. Maier in chapter 42 suggests that in an era of American decline, national success should be measured by “raising the health, education, and welfare levels of the world’s poorest, including America’s own.” W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935; New York: Free Press, 1998), 700. See Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (New York: One World, 2021). For a slightly different but related account of the way conflicts over race and gender have unmade the old liberal consensus and helped pave the way for a new form of conservatism, see Robert Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012). The account of whiteness here is drawn from James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991); Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1710–91; George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2018); Matthew Jacobson, Whiteness of A Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is A Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 20–22. Trump inaugural address: https://www.whitehouse .gov/ briefings-statements/the -inaugural-address/. The ads ran in the Washington Post, New York Times, and Boston Globe on September 2, 1987, as Trump considered entering the New Hampshire primaries to challenge George H. W. Bush. For a recap, see Marc Fisher, “Over Four Decades, Trump’s One Solid Stance: A Hard Line on Trade,” Washington Post, March 7, 2018, https://www .washingtonpost .com / business/over-four-decades-trumps-one-solid-stance-a-hard -line-on-trade/2018/03/07/4b1ed250-2172-11e8-badd-7c9f29a55815_ story.html. See Ali Vitali, Kasie Hunt, and Frank Thorp V, “Trump Referred to Haiti and African Nations as ‘Shithole’ Countries,” NBC News, January 11, 2018, https://www.nbcnews .com /politics/white-house/trump-referred-haiti-african-countries-shithole-nations -n836946; Lucy Rodgers and Dominic Bailey, “Trump Wall: How Much Has He Actually Built?” BBC News, October 31, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada -46824649. See Samuel Zipp, The Idealist: Wendell Willkie’s Wartime Quest to Build One World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2020); and Wendell Willkie, One World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943). John Fousek, To Lead the Free World: American Nationalism and the Roots of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 7–8.

The Derangements of Sovereignty 115 12. On Luce and “globaloney,” which she initially aimed at Willkie’s rival Henry Wallace, see Zipp, The Idealist, 279. 13. For an elaboration, see Zipp, The Idealist, esp. 307. 14. See Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (New York: Verso, 2004). 15. Stephen Wertheim, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2020). See also Patrick J. Hearden, Architects of Globalism: Building a New World Order During World War II (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2002); Christopher D. O’Sullivan, Sumner Welles, Postwar Planning, and the Quest for a New World Order, 1937–1943 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); John A. Thompson, A Sense of Power: The Roots of America’s Global Role (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015). 16. Jessica Wang, “The United States, the United Nations, and the Other Post–Cold War World Order: Internationalism and Unilateralism in the American Century,” in Cold War Triumphalism: The Misuse of History After the Fall of Communism, ed. Ellen Schrecker (New York: New Press, 2004), 212. 17. Jefferson Cowie, The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). 18. For the debate and this judgment, see Corey Robin, “Trump and the Trapped Country,” New Yorker, March 13, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists /trump-and-the-trapped-country. 19. Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Crown, 2017), 12. The analogies, as Martin Conway argues in chapter 43 of this volume, “can be stretched far beyond the plausible,” but it may yet be instructive to see how ultranationalist responses to an earlier moment in the history of globalization find echoes in the right-wing upsurge of our time, a period like the 1920s and 1930s when “institutional structures, ideological traditions, and indeed democratic norms” seem unmoored by a political scene in which “new practices of direct democracy coexist with a visual theater of rhetoric and gesture.”

CHAPTER 11

THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE J O H N A . TH O M P S O N

I

n appraising Donald Trump’s surprise election in 2016, I did not speculate about how he would behave as president; instead I focused on the evident public appeal of his call to put “America First,” seeking to explain this and to assess the impact it might have on the character of U.S. foreign policy.1 My starting point was that the extensive scope of America’s security commitments went far beyond those needed to safeguard the nation’s core interests of physical security and economic well-being and that they were therefore intrinsically vulnerable to domestic criticism, especially whenever they became costly to uphold. The commitments were the product of a broader conception of America’s vital interests as including also the existence of a stable world order in which its values as well as its interests would be respected. That the scale of America’s power brought with it a special responsibility for the maintenance of such a world order had become the orthodoxy governing U.S. foreign policy as a result of the two world wars, and it had been solidified during the Cold War. The end of the Cold War had led to a questioning of the justification for these wide-ranging military commitments—by realist advocates of “restraint” as well as by Trump—and, more recently, the lengthy and unsuccessful interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq had created public and political resistance to involvement in further “foreign wars.”2 This was the background of the apparent political appeal of Trump’s “America First” rhetoric, which was likely to raise doubts abroad about the credibility of U.S. commitments and thus weaken the country’s capacity to uphold its version of world order.

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My lack of attention to Trump himself in that essay was partly due to a belief that the general shape of U.S. foreign policy is determined by broader forces than the particular character and outlook of individual presidents. More fundamental in my view are movements of public and political opinion that are themselves often responses to overseas events and the way these are interpreted. Historically, the major changes in U.S. policy have occurred during the course of a presidency rather than when a new occupant enters the White House. Examples include the presidencies of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. Most of these cases involved a shift toward the wider and more vigorous deployment of U.S. power. By contrast, following the end of a costly conflict (whether successful or otherwise), U.S. policy has generally reflected public reluctance to become involved in another one. From this history, we can gain some understanding of what has in practice shaped the United States’ use of the great potential power it has possessed since the early twentieth century—what might be called the operational definition of the national interest. The picture is complicated by the fact that many of the cases involving the more forceful exercise of U.S. power have been precipitated by a direct attack upon Americans—and it is this that has really aroused the nation’s fighting spirit. But these attacks, including Pearl Harbor and 9/11, have themselves been responses to earlier U.S. actions. These actions, like many others, demonstrated that U.S. policy has been shaped by interests that go well beyond the nation’s own safety and prosperity. As anti-interventionists over the years have argued, safeguarding the country’s basic physical and economic security has required little in the way of foreign policy objectives and cannot explain the extent to which U.S. power has been deployed to shape developments across the world.3 On the other hand, the broad goal of a liberal international order has not been sufficient in itself to motivate strenuous and costly actions. Polls have consistently shown that the majority of the public generally attaches a low priority to the promotion of democracy or human rights in other countries unless doing so would bring some specific benefit to the United States, and for much of the Cold War the United States effectively tolerated a Soviet sphere that was hostile to liberalism in principle as well as in practice.4 This might suggest that America’s interests have been geographically circumscribed, but the historical record belies this too. Since the end of World War II, the United States has not been called upon to defend the Western Hemisphere or its allies in Western Europe and East Asia (or indeed Israel). Its major wars have been fought in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, which are not countries of obvious strategic significance or with which the United States had close cultural connections or (at the time) ideological bonds. If there is a consistent interest that explains both the extent and the limits of the exercise of U.S. power since 1945, it would seem to be that of maintaining America’s

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preeminent position in world politics.5 That there is domestic political support for this objective, independent of any particular instrumental purpose, was shown after the end of the Cold War. In the 1990s, when the United States enjoyed good relations with every major power, its military spending exceeded that of the next twenty or thirty countries combined, and by the end of the decade the Pentagon’s benchmark for the necessary forces was that they should have the capacity to wage two “major regional conflicts” simultaneously. By the time Trump became president, the United States had formal defense commitments to sixty-six other countries and informal security arrangements with several more, all of which was underpinned by approximately eight hundred military bases of various sizes across the globe.6 The determination to maintain America’s preeminent global position seems to have been what underlay the significant movement of opinion that occurred during Trump’s presidency—the emergence of a bipartisan political consensus that China should be regarded as a rival and adversary rather than a potential partner. Although Trump entered the White House as a long-time advocate of the use of tariffs to eliminate the U.S. trade deficit with China and began imposing such tariffs in early 2018, he was not primarily responsible for the adoption of a generally more confrontational policy; indeed, he had initially sought to achieve a trade deal by cultivating a personal relationship with Chinese president Xi Jinping. The Pentagon had long been pressing for a tougher response to Chinese expansion in the South China Sea but had met resistance from those who hoped to maintain a cooperative relationship. The emergence of a consensus in Washington that a harder line was called for was a gradual process largely driven by perceptions of Beijing’s behavior and ambitions. Trump was quick to adapt to this new reality and to seek political advantage by exploiting it— notably by blaming China for the COVID-19 pandemic. Presidents, as the only elected officials directly involved in the process, are inevitably sensitive to domestic opinion when making foreign policy, and in this respect as in others Trump was an extreme case, seeming to be almost exclusively concerned with the appeal of his actions at home rather than their effects abroad. For the most part, however, he sought to use foreign policy to fire up his base rather than seeking to broaden his support. On many issues, such as withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal or recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, this led Trump to act as another president would not have done. To a greater or less degree, the Biden administration has adopted a different approach on such issues, even if it is not able or willing to reverse all Trump’s actions. But on China policy, the more antagonistic attitude has persisted. Given the common tendency to discuss current issues in terms of historical precedent, it is not surprising that the emerging Sino-American contest has frequently been compared to the Cold War, which was the principal focus of

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U.S. policy for more than four decades. As many observers have pointed out, there are important differences. In the first place, there is a greater degree of mutual interest between the antagonists. The only really important interest that the United States shared with the Soviet Union was that of avoiding a nuclear war—which did indeed serve to mitigate the conflict and lead to limited agreements. Avoidance of nuclear war remains a common interest between the United States and China, but there are now other important ones, notably countering climate change and global pandemics. Beyond this, whereas the economic connections between the United States and the Soviet bloc were of slight importance to either side, the Chinese and American economies have become mutually dependent in recent decades, notwithstanding the efforts both governments are now making to reduce the extent to which this is so. Finally, the Cold War was essentially a conflict of ideologies; indeed, to some in the West, international communism was the chief enemy, with Soviet power only an instrument of this. Although Beijing imposes its own authoritarian rule in the areas it controls and also portrays China’s successes as proof of the superiority of its system to Western democracy, it seems to have little interest in bringing about ideological change in other countries. Instead, it proclaims its goal as being to displace the United States as the leading power in the world and thereby achieve paramount influence over the nature of the world system and in international affairs generally. This ambition points to a fundamental difference between the present situation and the Cold War: the changed balance of world power. The most acute phase of the Cold War took place in the decades when U.S. power was at its apogee. At the end of World War II, the United States was producing a third of total global output, and through the 1950s and 1960s its GDP was two and a half to three times greater than that of the Soviet Union. Now, the U.S. share of global GDP has fallen to 24 percent, whereas China’s is already 18 percent and has been projected to exceed America’s during the 2020s.7 There is, of course, no simple equation between the relative size of a country’s GDP and its influence in world politics, and despite the great recent growth of China’s navy, U.S. armed forces remain unparalleled in their strength and global reach. Nevertheless, the much greater rate of growth in recent decades of the Chinese economy than of the American one has helped generate a confidence in Beijing that history is going its way and that China is a rising power and the United States a declining one. How far did the Trump administration provide evidence of such a decline in U.S. power, and how far did it contribute to it? Trump was by no means indifferent to the extent of U.S. influence in world affairs. Although uninterested in sustaining a liberal world order, an implicit part of his project to “make America great again” was that the United States should prevail in the Darwinian struggle between states that he seems to have seen as the essence of international relations. Like earlier proponents of

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“America First,” he was not an isolationist but a unilateralist.8 This did involve some narrowing of the objectives he sought to achieve. Uniquely among post1945 U.S. presidents, Trump’s conception of the national interest did not include the promotion of freedom and democracy in other countries. But he had confidence in the scale of America’s hard power in all its several forms—military, economic, and financial—and was happy to wield it. It is true that he sought to unload on other members of NATO a greater share of the costs and that he often spoke of his desire to bring U.S. troops home from foreign trouble spots, but he promoted the further buildup of America’s military might (including in space) and had no inhibitions about using it, as he demonstrated early on in his presidency when he authorized the dropping of a monster twenty-thousand-pound bomb in Afghanistan and again in January 2020 with the assassination of Iran’s top military commander General Qassem Suleimani. Through the aggressive use of discriminatory tariffs he sought to use the “imperial” scale of America’s domestic market as a diplomatic weapon over a broader spectrum of issues than any of his predecessors.9 Trump’s administration also exploited the central role of U.S. banks in the international payments system in order to compel foreign companies to comply with unilaterally imposed sanctions on Iran and Venezuela and blacklisted more individual foreigners than George W. Bush and Barack Obama had done in sixteen years.10 As other contributors to this book have observed, Trump’s unilateral use of American hard power was almost completely unsuccessful in achieving its proclaimed objectives.11 The harsh economic sanctions imposed on Iran and Venezuela caused considerable economic hardship in those countries but did not produce the desired regime change any more than those on Russia caused President Vladimir Putin to become more amenable to Washington’s demands. The same lack of tangible success marked Trump’s well-publicized personal diplomacy with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, Xi, and Putin. Worse than failure to achieve new goals was the damage Trump did to intangibles that were fundamental to the influence in the world that the United States possessed when he took office—its trustworthiness, its willingness to cooperate with allies, and its image with people in other countries. Relationships with European allies were damaged by some of the things Trump said about NATO, and the credibility of U.S. commitments was brought into further question by the cynical abandonment of Kurdish allies in Syria in 2019.12 The abrupt withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) early in the administration scuppered a project that was designed to provide a counterweight to China in East Asia.13 Trump was unpopular outside the United States, receiving far lower poll ratings in almost every country (particularly European ones) than any of his predecessors—in stark contrast to Obama.14 One indication that this led to a more negative view of America generally and thus a decline in the country’s

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“soft power” is the steady decline during the years of Trump’s presidency in the number of students from overseas enrolled in U.S. universities.15 The Biden administration has sought to undo the damage that Trump did to America’s international image and influence by reversing or modifying many of the policies that had caused most offence abroad, by rebuilding relationships with old allies in Europe, and by strengthening ties in the Asia-Pacific both with longstanding partners and with projected new ones such as India. The relief with which Trump’s departure from the White House was greeted in many foreign capitals aided these efforts, which bore fruit in the rallying of NATO to an impressive collective response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine; crucially, this included the German commitment to significantly increased defense spending, which Trump’s petulant public nagging had failed to achieve. All this suggests that most direct consequences of Trump’s four-year presidency will be transient. Of greater importance for the future of U.S. foreign policy are likely to be two broader and more long-term developments, both of which contributed to Trump’s political rise and provided support for his policies. One is the pushback against continuing globalization. From the 1980s to 2009, world trade grew twice as fast as world output, but since then the ratio has slightly declined, and trade has concentrated more in regional blocs.16 COVID-19 has accentuated business as well as political concern about the insecurity of extended supply chains, and the Biden administration has indicated that it is in no hurry to lift the trade restrictions Trump imposed, keeping in place as well the “buy American” policy in major public tenders. The second, and more directly relevant, trend is the decreased readiness of the United States to deploy vigorously its military might, particularly its ground forces. The public disenchantment with “foreign wars” has been accompanied by an ebbing among policy makers of the hubristic confidence in America’s “unipolar” material and ideological power that prevailed in the 1990s and particularly in the early years of the George W. Bush presidency.17 The most obvious sign of this changed mood has been the evident desire to become less involved in the politics of the Middle East, manifested in Obama’s proclaimed “pivot to East Asia” in 2012 as well as in the withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan carried out by both Trump and Biden. Both Obama and Biden justified this retreat as a strategic rebalancing to concentrate on the threat from China. The upshot, particularly the humiliating return of the Taliban in Afghanistan, has spectacularly demonstrated that abruptly abandoning commitments can be politically damaging at home as well as abroad. In the case of Afghanistan, the extent of this damage can be partly attributed to the Biden administration’s misjudgments, but disentanglement is always bound to be a difficult process, as established alliances (and military bases) exercise an inertial

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counterforce.18 It may also be particularly difficult for the United States to impose a conception of strategic priority on the exercise of its power precisely because its policy objectives go beyond the defense of narrow national interests and are commonly articulated in general rather than regionally specific terms.19 Over the years, policy makers have been chary of publicly suggesting that defending “liberty” or “the free world” might be more important in some places than others. Thus, in World War II, there was a real danger that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor would upend the “Hitler First” strategy of the administration and the military, and during the Cold War policy makers argued that both the international credibility of the commitment to Western European security and domestic support for it depended upon holding the line in Korea and Vietnam.20 In the past, perception of a serious external challenge has been uniquely efficacious in creating the solid domestic support required for a focused and disciplined policy that involves a readiness to exercise U.S. power in strenuous or costly ways. A belief that the country’s values as well as its interests are at stake has also been an essential element in building the necessary consensus for such a policy. Although few have seen the promotion of democracy or human rights abroad as justifying the expenditure of significant resources, defending them where they are already established is a different matter. That “the world must be made safe for democracy” is the most quoted sentence in Woodrow Wilson’s 1917 war address, but it is commonly misread. It was a call not for the world to be made democratic but for a form of international order in which America could continue to live as a free society; the thrust was defensive rather than evangelical.21 That the defense of democracy and self-determination remains a potent appeal not only at home but also in other countries (particularly Western ones) has been confirmed by the response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This gives policy makers an incentive to stress the ideological dimension of the contest with China. Yet there are still reasons to doubt whether the China challenge will serve to focus and energize U.S. foreign policy as well as did the original Cold War or even the “war on terror.” In those cases, and other earlier ones, policy makers succeeded in persuading ordinary Americans that there was a real threat to their own safety and way of life in the homeland.22 It is hard to see a challenge to the rather abstract concept of world leadership or such specific issues as the Belt and Road Initiative or expansion in the South China Sea as engendering a similarly strong sense of existential danger. And then there is the problem of America’s own internal division, which to this outside observer seems deeper and more bitter than any since the Civil War. In more monarchical or autocratic polities, this would incentivize rulers “to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels,” but it is hard to see America’s divided political class adopting such a strategy—all the more so because Trump’s presidency served to “giddy”

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Americans’ minds with their domestic quarrels.23 Indeed, it may be that Donald Trump’s greatest influence on the future of U.S. foreign policy will be the part he played and is continuing to play in exacerbating the toxic social and political civil war that did so much to elevate him to the presidency.

Notes 1. John A. Thompson, “The Appeal of ‘America First,’ ” H-Diplo/ISSF, February 23, 2017, https://issforum.org/ISSF/PDF/Policy-Roundtable-1-5Q.pdf; John A. Thompson, “The Appeal of ‘America First,’ ” in Chaos in the Liberal Order: The Trump Presidency and International Politics in the Twenty-First Century, ed. R. Jervis, F. J. Gavin, J. Rovner, and D. Labrosse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 151–57. 2. For advocacy of “restraint,” see, for example, Eugene Gholz, Daryl G. Press, and Harvey M. Sapolsky, “Come Home, America: The Strategy of Restraint in the Face of Temptation,” International Security 21, no. 4 (Spring 1997): 5–48; Barry R. Posen, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014); and Stephen M. Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), 260–78. 3. For examples of such anti-interventionist arguments over the years, see Charles A. Beard, Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels: An Estimate of American Foreign Policy (New York: Macmillan, 1939); and Robert W. Tucker, A New Isolationism: Threat or Promise? (New York: Universe, 1972), esp. chap. 3; and the works cited in note 2, above. 4. See Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Foreign Policy in the Age of Retrenchment (2014). Also Randall L. Schweller’s contribution to this series, “Trump’s Realism,” H-Diplo, April 29, 2021, https://issforum.org /roundtables/policy/ps2021-26. 5. That global dominance became a basic objective of U.S. policy makers during World War II is the central argument of Stephen Wertheim in Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), though it is perhaps better described as an insight than as a research finding. 6. Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions, 24, 38–9, 62; Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States (London: Penguin, 2019), 344, 472. 7. Economist, June 5–11, 2021, 13; David Reynolds, America: Empire of Liberty: A New History of the United States, rev. and updated ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2021), 520. 8. Manfred Jonas, Isolationism in America, 1935–1941 (Ithaca, NY, 1966), esp. chap. 1. 9. On the United States’ “empire of consumption,” see Charles S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 10. For the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s statistics on this, see Economist, November 28, 2020, 46–47. 11. See, in particular, Thomas W. Zeiler, “What Nationalism Ended Up Looking Like,” H-Diplo, March 11, 2021, https://issforum.org /roundtables/policy/ps2021-12. 12. See Alessandro Brogi, “Transatlantic Relations After Trump: Mutual Perceptions and Historical Perspectives,” H-Diplo, May 21, 2021; Michelle Murray, “America First?: The Erosion of American Status Under Trump,” H-Diplo, June 29, 2021. 13. Subsequent developments are lucidly analyzed in Dayna Barnes’s contribution to this series, “Engage? Trump and the Asia-Pacific,” H-Diplo, May 11, 2021, https://issforum .org /roundtables/policy/ps2021-29.

124 AME RI C A F I R ST 14. See Elizabeth Economy, “Reclaiming America and Its Place in the World,” H-Diplo, June 16, 2021. 15. Elizabeth Redden, “International Student Numbers Decline,” Inside Higher Education, November 16, 2020. 16. “Special Report: The World Economy,” Economist, October 10, 2020, 6–8. 17. Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs 70, no. 1 (1990): 23– 33; William C. Wohlforth, “The Stability of a Unipolar World,” International Security 24, no. 1 (Summer 1999): 5–41. The hubris was particularly manifested by the Project for a New American Century. See Robert Kagan and William Kristol, Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (San Francisco, CA: Encounter, 2000). 18. On the relevance of this in this case, see F. Gregory Gause III, “The Trump Administration and the Middle East: Not Much Change, Not Much Success,” H-Diplo, May 4, 2021, https://issforum.org /roundtables/policy/ps2021-27. 19. For a development of this argument, see John A. Thompson, A Sense of Power: The Roots of America’s Global Role (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 271–73. 20. For the latest work on the difficulty policy makers faced in maintaining the Europe First strategy after Pearl Harbor, see Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman, Hitler’s American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany’s March to Global War (New York: Basic Books, 2021), esp. x–xv, 162–68, 191–93, 293–98, 306–8, 342–43, 354–56. 21. For a fuller analysis of Wilson’s views on democracy promotion, see John A. Thompson, “Woodrow Wilson,” in US Foreign Policy and Democracy Promotion, ed. Michael Cox, Timothy J. Lynch, and Nicolas Bouchet (London: Routledge, 2013), 53–68. 22. On this history, see John A. Thompson, “The Exaggeration of American Vulnerability: The Anatomy of a Tradition,” Diplomatic History 16 (Winter 1992): 23–43. 23. William Shakespeare, Henry IV. Part II, 4.3.

PART III

AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS AND ALLIANCES AFTER TRUMP

Editors’ Note Trump’s fiercest critics and supporters agree that he was no diplomat. He was singularly uninterested in keeping up diplomatic relations with friends and foes alike. The next two sections of this volume explore how Trump’s behavior affected the United States’ partnerships abroad and its institutions at home. Part III, “American Institutions and Alliances After Trump,” examines Trump’s relationships with U.S. allies and institutions. Here again we see a divide between those who see a fair amount of continuity between the Trump administration and its predecessors and those who see a radical break. In terms of international law, for instance, Matthew Evangelista notes that “many of Trump’s violations of the laws of war found ample precedent in previous administrations” (chapter 12). And when Trump tried to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria, a move that would have been more in line with international law, he faced bipartisan opposition. Richard H. Immerman warns in chapter 13 that Trump’s sustained assault on the intelligence community (IC) will have lasting consequences. The IC bounced back under Biden, and it received praise for predicting Russia’s invasion. More recently, however, new voices have blamed the IC for exaggerating Russian strength and underestimating Ukrainian resolve. The August 2022 FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate was praised or condemned mostly on partisan grounds. The Trump-era criticisms of the IC may foreshadow a return to

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intelligence-policy dysfunction, especially if future presidents share Trump’s attitude. As Nicholas Mulder argues (chapter 14), Trump may have pushed sanctions further than any other president, but “the risk of alienating allies by pushing sanctions too far has been a persistent problem for American administrations ever since the 1980s.” He concludes with his thoughts on the use of sanctions by the Biden administration as well as those of the early days of the Ukrainian war. Likewise, in chapter 15 Susan Colbourn notes that, on NATO, “Trump was not an outlier. His broad outlook on NATO, though often expressed in unvarnished and off-the-cuff remarks that seemed an outlandish departure from past precedent, tapped into a long tradition in Washington.” In other ways, however, he broke the mold. Underscoring the idea that Trump undercut both American alliances and institutions, Jennifer Spindel finds that Trump threw away the playbook governing arms sales and, as a result, confused and complicated relationships with allies and adversaries (chapter 16).

CHAPTER 12

PRESIDENTS, PRECEDENTS, AND THE LAWS OF WAR M AT TH E W E VA N G E LI S TA

O

ne of the words often associated with the candidacy and then presidency of Donald Trump is “unprecedented.” The president himself even tweeted it, although his spelling (“unpresidented”) occasioned some ridicule.1 We heard that Trump had an unprecedented number of billionaires in his cabinet, an unprecedented number of business conflicts of interest, an unprecedentedly long list of unfilled government positions far into his term, an unprecedentedly high security budget to cover his weekend trips to Mar-a-Lago, and so forth. Commentary on Trump’s approach to international law was no exception, stressing its unprecedented or at least highly unusual character. Candidate Trump threatened to “cancel” the 2016 Paris Accord on climate change, “break” the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and defy international and domestic legal prohibitions on torture “in a heartbeat.”2 By the time he lost his bid for reelection, President Trump had fulfilled many of those campaign promises. He pulled out of the Paris Accord, and he abolished NAFTA and replaced it with a revised United States–Mexico-Canada Agreement. 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 armscontrol 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

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have violated the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, had the United States ever ratified it. In these three domains, then—trade, climate, and arms control—Trump pursued his preferred policies without violating any laws. What about the laws of war? This essay focuses on the Trump administration’s approach to law regarding the use of armed force. During the campaign, media and professional reactions to Trump’s remarks about the laws of war betrayed a sense of alarm. Retired military officers protested when the candidate declared in March 2016 that “the problem is we have the Geneva conventions, all sorts of rules and regulations, so the soldiers are afraid to fight.” They “reacted with disgust” and declared him “monumentally unprepared” to serve as president.3 Critics denounced Trump’s cavalier attitude toward the use of military power when he vowed to “bomb the hell” out of the Islamic State.4 After offering a seemingly perfunctory rejection of the use of nuclear weapons, Trump alarmed the commentariat by adding that “we have to be prepared. I can’t take anything off the table.”5  A month before assuming office he tweeted that the United States must “greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability,” prompting a solemn warning from New York Times reporters of “the potential dangers in setting policy, especially on such grave matters, in Twitter bursts and offhand remarks.” Nuclear deterrence, they explained, “is normally a complicated subject debated in academic treatises and negotiated over years by diplomats.”6 Such reactions provoked Trump’s exasperated supporters at the New York Post to complain, barely a month into the new administration, that “President Trump practically can’t sneeze without critics calling it unprecedented or over the top.”7 They had a point. There were important differences in the way the Trump administration approached international law relative to his predecessors—not only in the president’s reliance on Twitter to convey his views. But in retrospect, the consequences of those differences in areas where the law should matter—compliance with the Geneva Conventions, harm to civilians from aerial bombardment, recourse to use of military force, attitudes toward the production and deployment of nuclear weapons—were incommensurate with the alarmed tone of foreign policy experts and the establishment media. On international law governing U.S. compliance with weapons treaties and the use of force abroad, the record of the reality TV star and real estate magnate was not so different from those of the two lawyers (Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) and fellow businessman (G. W. Bush) who preceded him as president or the lawyer (Joe Biden) who followed. The main body of law on the use of armed force is known as International Humanitarian Law, the term typically preferred by civilian legal experts and the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the Law of Armed Conflict, which is more often used by military professionals. Key legal concepts draw upon Catholic just-war tradition, including ius ad bellum, the conditions under

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which resort to war is justified, and ius in bello, the practices considered acceptable during armed conflicts. The main legal instrument governing the first domain is the Charter of the United Nations, with its prohibition on the use of force between states, embodied in Article 2(4): “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” The one exception, acknowledged much later in the document, is Article 51: “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.”8 A literal reading of the inherent right of self-defense permits the use of military force against another state only “if an armed attack occurs.” Because traditionally international law was mainly the law of states, there is no provision in the Charter for dealing with or even defining an “armed attack” by a nonstate actor, such as a terrorist group. Thus, state leaders and their legal advisers have devoted considerable efforts to justify military action against nonstate actors under a broad definition of the inherent right to self-defense. The most prominent bodies of law governing the ius in bello of actual combat are the 1949 Geneva Conventions and their two additional protocols from 1977. Originally designed to protect prisoners of war and wounded soldiers and sailors, the Geneva regime has come to encompass what was earlier known as “Hague law” (covering military practices and weapons) and to expand protections for civilians caught up in warfare and under military occupation. Also relevant are international treaties, such as the Genocide Convention (1948), the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984), and the Rome Statute (1998), which established the International Criminal Court, as well as treaties limiting particular weapons, such as the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (1968) and conventions banning antipersonnel landmines (1997) and cluster munitions (2008). To make a long story short, the United States has signed many, but not all, of these treaties, ratified some of them only after decades of delay, and has adhered unevenly to its obligations.9 This is the record against which to judge the legal compliance of the Trump administration. Perhaps most significantly, previous administrations have been attentive to legal interpretation of U.S. treaty obligations and have typically sought to shape understanding of the law to legitimize U.S. practices, rather than allow others’ interpretations of the law to constrain those practices. A key element of U.S. presidents’ approach to international law is their understanding of its relationship to domestic law. For the ius ad bellum dimensions, the U.S. Constitution and the War Powers Act of 1973 are the relevant instruments, where only Congress has the authority to declare war. For ius in bello,

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the president acts as commander-in-chief during time of war but must abide by the law. The Uniform Code of Military Justice, governing the armed forces, incorporates provisions of the Geneva Conventions, as the treaties intended—so a soldier, for example, who deliberately murders a civilian would be tried not for violating international but rather U.S. military law. There are also domestic laws that overlap with international treaties, such as 18 U.S. Code Chapter 113C, banning torture and providing penalties up to life imprisonment for conspiracy to commit torture. What distinguished Trump in the domain of international law on armed force was familiar from other policy areas: his erratic and attention-seeking personality, factual knowledge that barely extended beyond what he saw on television, a disregard for and willingness to invent facts, and a lack of grounding in any discernable or consistent ideology or policy framework. Trump’s two immediate predecessors—George W. Bush and Barack Obama—both embraced recognizable, if not fully developed, philosophies or policy orientations toward presidential use of force and adherence to law. We know about their views on law (better than about Clinton’s, for example) because of an explosion of interest in the topic that coincided with a growth in the prominence of legal advice on the use of force in the White House and within the Pentagon.10 The Bush administration was influenced by a group of legal scholars whom Jens David Ohlin calls the New Realists, people such as Jack Goldsmith, Eric Posner, Adrian Vermeule, and John Yoo.11 Paradoxically, these critics used legal analysis to demonstrate that in time of war the law is irrelevant (or silent, as Cicero put it). New Realists are a bit like Republican and libertarian politicians who run for office on an antigovernment platform. They make legal arguments to assert that the law doesn’t matter—at least international law. The theory underpinning their policy, particularly promoted by Vice President Dick Cheney, was that of the “unitary executive.” It bestowed upon the president, under his authority as commander-in-chief, the right to ignore international legal obligations, such as the ban on torture or the Geneva Conventions. Obama, the former constitutional law professor, sought to bring his military policies into better compliance with law, at least at the domestic level, by appealing to Congress and its 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). Under that law, “the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.”12 To extend that authorization to include the use of armed force against Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, and Iraq, not to mention the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which did not exist in 2001, seemed too much of a stretch for many observers. Obama’s lawyers, led by Harold Hongju Koh, sought to comply with the War Powers Act by declaring that its terms did not apply to Obama’s wars. When the administration left troops

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in Libya beyond the period by which it was required to seek congressional approval, for example, Koh reinterpreted the statute to make the practice legal. He redefined the term “hostilities” to include only situations when U.S. forces were in harm’s way.13 With that redefinition, much use of U.S. military power, if the harm were inflicted disproportionately on the target state without risk to U.S. forces, would escape congressional authority. The University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner slyly likened Koh’s legal gymnastics to John Yoo’s redefining torture (in his infamous “torture memos” of 2002) in the service of waterboarding, sleep deprivation, “rectal feeding,” and the other practices that followed.14 One may doubt, then, whether growing attention to law by the U.S. government, academia, the media, and the informed public has led to better compliance with the letter or the spirit of laws restraining the use of force. In the domain of air power, for example, Janina Dill has made a compelling case that the legalization of warfare in the Pentagon, even if there is literally “a lawyer behind every targeteer,” has not necessarily led to law-abiding behavior. She finds that U.S. military operations lead to far more harm to civilians than a stricter reading of legal obligations would yield.15 If we had already reached the limits of what law can achieve in restraining civilian harm in war, how much more damage could the Trump administration have been expected to do? The pre-Trump record of U.S. adherence to the laws of war is spotty at best. Bush initiated a war in Afghanistan in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, with the apparent blessing of the UN Security Council. By contrast, his advocacy of war against Iraq over the course of 2002—culminating in the invasion of March 2003—faced clear opposition by the Security Council along with many U.S. allies. Even without the trumped-up evidence of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, the invasion was illegal, absent an Iraqi attack on the United States or Security Council authorization. The Bush administration’s conduct of what it called the Global War on Terror entailed many more crimes, including the kidnapping (“extraordinary rendition”) and brutal torture of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Bagram air base in Afghanistan, and CIA “black sites” throughout the world. It held Guantanamo prisoners in indefinite detention, without putting them on trial; many, in any case, had not committed any crimes and were there by mistake. Obama and his lawyers sought to put behind them the legacy of Bush administration crimes by seeking (unsuccessfully) to close the Guantanamo facility and by calling such “enhanced interrogation techniques” as waterboarding by their true name—torture. Ironically, the administration’s legal arguments against the Bush policies contributed to its own legally dubious practice—the widespread use of “targeted killings” by armed drones in countries where the United States was not at war. As the New York Times reported, “the

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administration’s very success at killing terrorism suspects has been shadowed by a suspicion: that Mr. Obama has avoided the complications of detention by deciding, in effect, to take no prisoners alive.”16 Drone attacks pose problems for ius in bello when the targets are too broadly defined—all males of a certain age in a particular area, for example—and for ius ad bellum when they are conducted against countries where there is no recognized armed conflict in which the United States is involved. Critics expressed concern that the Obama administration’s policies, however well vetted by lawyers, made resort to war too easy.17 Within his first hundred days in office Trump made headlines by engaging U.S. military forces against Afghanistan and Syria. Both set precedents of a sort and followed precedents of another sort. The launching of cruise missiles against an air base in Syria in April represented the first major use of U.S. force against the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, although U.S.-supplied forces from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey had been actively involved in the war there, and the United States had been training and sending weapons to opposition forces since at least 2012. Trump’s decision to attack Syria came in the wake of reports of the regime’s use of chemical weapons, much as Obama contemplated retaliation in response to the regime’s chemical attacks of 2013. Obama hesitated and sought congressional approval before using military force, but Congress was unwilling to grant it. Trump did not consult Congress but informed it two days after the attack, acting in compliance with the War Powers Act. Thus, both Obama and Trump generally adhered to domestic law governing the use of force. But neither president had the authority to bomb a sovereign country—even one ruled by a brutal dictator in the midst of a civil war—because the United States was not subject to armed attack from Syria. There is no law that gives the U.S. armed forces the authority to enforce the terms of an international treaty (the Chemical Weapons Convention, in this case) by launching fifty-nine cruise missiles against violators, as even Bush administration lawyers have acknowledged.18 Perhaps more significant than the fact that the Trump administration violated international law by attacking Syria is how little that mattered to the public or punditry. Hillary Clinton, former secretary of state and Trump’s rival in the 2016 presidential campaign, endorsed the attack, as did Antony Blinken, who would later become President Biden’s secretary of state. Cable news commentators were fulsome in their praise: “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States last night,” Fareed Zakaria announced on CNN. “For the first time really as president, he talked about international norms, international rules, about America’s role in enforcing justice in the world.”19 In the attack against Afghanistan, the Trump administration approved use of the GBU-43/B massive-ordinance air blast (MOAB) bomb, with eleven tons of explosive force, one of the most powerful non-nuclear weapons in existence.

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The weapon was developed during previous administrations, with a total program cost of $314 million, which produced about twenty of the bombs, at a unit cost of about $13 million. Trump’s administration was the first to use the weapons, but presumably they were built to be used. The target was a cave complex suspected of hiding Islamic State fighters, and the legal justification for targeting a group that did not exist when Congress passed its 2001 authorization for the use of force in Afghanistan was unclear. The Pentagon set no precedent in its failure to investigate or report on the numbers of civilians killed in the attack (although the Afghan government provided figures): that was closer to standard practice.20 Trump’s vow to “bomb the hell” out of U.S. enemies and refusal to take nuclear weapons “off the table,” combined with his mercurial personality, erratic temperament, and poor self-control, understandably gave rise to worries that he would use U.S. military force, perhaps even nuclear weapons, indiscriminately. His predecessors had helped set the stage for him to do so. The “mother of all bombs” (MOAB) may have been the biggest non-nuclear weapon launched by the United States, but to call the attack unprecedented obscures the extent of destruction wrought in the ongoing campaign. By May 2016, for example, the United States and its allies had dropped 41,697 bombs in their war against ISIS, and Obama’s secretary of defense Ashton Carter planned to ask Congress for $1.8 billion to buy another 45,000 new ones.21 Obama, who advocated a world without nuclear weapons in a speech in Prague in 2009, left office after approving a nuclear “modernization” program estimated to cost $348 billion by 2024. Trump was able to claim credit for strengthening U.S. nuclear capability without lifting a finger. The fear, of course, was that he would lift a finger and put it on the nuclear button. That worry reverberated at the highest levels of government in the wake of the Trump-inspired insurrection of January 6, 2021. If Trump ordered a nuclear attack in the waning days of his presidency—Iran seemed to be his preferred target—he would arguably have been breaking international law, although his predecessors had never shaped the country’s nuclear strategy with international legal constraints in mind. He would not, evidently, have been breaking domestic law. On the contrary, Article 2 of the Constitution invests the president with the sole authority of commander-in-chief, and no civilian or military officials could defy Trump’s order to use nuclear weapons without breaking the law themselves. This unsettling situation seemed to come as a surprise to some government officials and the public at large, although experts had warned about it long before Trump’s election.22 Clearly U.S. presidents enjoy wide latitude in the use of force and the extent to which they allow international law to constrain that use. Given Trump’s outspoken disdain for the law, did he actually violate it more than his predecessors? It is hard to know for sure, mainly owing to the administration’s increase

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in secrecy governing military operations. In March 2019, Trump revoked an executive order that Obama had issued in response to criticism of his drone campaign that would have revealed information about the civilian toll of the strikes.23 Leaked documents revealed that the government possessed higher, more accurate figures than the artificially low ones it released.24 In an effort to deter such leaks, in May 2019 the government arrested Daniel Hale, an Air Force veteran who was charged under the Espionage Act for allegedly providing documents about the drone program to a journalist.25 Nongovernmental organizations criticized U.S. Central Command for lack of transparency and accountability in reporting the consequences of attacks under its authority.26 In November 2021, a New York Times investigation revealed that, in fact, the U.S. military was likely undercounting civilian casualties and even covering up possible war crimes. It did so with a mix of manipulation and violation that has long characterized the U.S. approach to the laws of war. In this case, a secret unit called Task Force 9 was operating in Syria against suspected Islamist forces, ostensibly in an advisory capacity and far from the battle front. Yet upward of 80 percent of the air strikes it ordered were justified as self-defense. As the Times explained, U.S. military authorities allowed their “troops and local allies to invoke it when facing not just direct enemy fire, but anyone displaying ‘hostile intent,’ according to a former officer who deployed with the unit numerous times. Under that definition, something as mundane as a car driving miles from friendly forces could in some cases be targeted.”27 The incident that sparked the investigation was an air attack in March 2019 against a group of civilians that horrified the Air Force officials monitoring the area from Qatar via surveillance drones. Some eighty people were killed, but as the article reports, “at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike. The death toll was downplayed. Reports were delayed, sanitized, and classified. United States–led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site” to hide evidence. When confronted with the information the Times had obtained, Central Command “acknowledged the strikes for the first time” but claimed “the airstrikes were justified. It said the bombs killed 16 fighters and four civilians. As for the other 60 people killed, the statement said it was not clear that they were civilians, in part because women and children in the Islamic State sometimes took up arms.”28 In legal terms, we have a U.S. military unit, acting outside the normal chain of command (a violation of ius in bello), deploying force in a country with which the United States is not formally at war (a violation of ius ad bellum), and creating post hoc justifications of self-defense to cover up possible war crimes. These practices are not unique to the Trump administration. As with the use of drones, secrecy hindered comparison between Trump and his predecessors on the use of special forces within and outside war zones. Many Americans, including members of Congress, were surprised, for example, to

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find out that U.S. forces were operating in countries like Niger when, in October 2017, three soldiers were killed in an ambush there.29 The Costs of War Project revealed that U.S. troops were active in counterterrorism operations in at least eighty countries.30 In some, such as Somalia, U.S. military action increased substantially under Trump. Official press releases announced some of the operations, but others, by the CIA, for example, remained unreported.31 The same may be true of Yemen, where “covert and clandestine” operations “appear to have dominated US engagements” in 2019, further hindering an evaluation of harm to civilians. 32 By definition, one cannot know whether such secret operations continued during the Biden administration, but it is a safe bet. In short, many of Trump’s violations of the laws of war found ample precedent in previous administrations. In his first year in office, Biden withdrew U.S. forces from a legally sanctioned armed conflict in Afghanistan in favor of “overthe-horizon” attacks and special operations against countries where the United States is not engaged in a recognized armed conflict, from Niger and the Philippines to Syria and Somalia.33 In adherence to the laws of war, the military policy of President Biden represents more continuity than change and follows the precedents set by his predecessors, including Donald Trump.

Notes 1. Mark Abadi, “Trump and His White House Have Made Some Embarrassing Spelling Mistakes—Here Are the Worst Ones,” Business Insider, July 19, 2017, https://www .businessinsider.com/trump-typos-spelling-tweets-unpresidented-2017-4. 2. Associated Press, “Donald Trump Vows to Cancel Paris Agreement and Stop All Payments to UN Climate Change Fund,” May 27, 2016; Justin Worland, “Donald Trump Says He Would Break NAFTA,” Time, September 27, 2015; Julian Hattem, “Trump Would Approve Waterboarding ‘in a Heartbeat,’ ” The Hill, November 24, 2015. 3. Spencer Ackerman, “Trump Attack on Geneva Conventions Denounced by Ex-officers and Advocates,” Guardian, March 31, 2017. 4. “Donald Trump to Newsmax: I Would ‘Bomb the Hell’ Out of ISIS,” Newsmax, July 1, 2015. 5. Doyle McManus, “Trump Failed the Commander in Chief Test. Badly,” Los Angeles Times, September 28, 2016. 6. Carol Morello, “Trump Says He Wants to ‘Greatly Strengthen and Expand’ U.S. Nuclear Capability,” Washington Post, December 22, 2016; Michael D. Shear and James Glanz, “Trump Says the US Should Expand Its Nuclear Capacity,” New York Times, December 22, 2016. 7. “Please Stop Calling Everything Trump Does ‘Unprecedented,’ ” New York Post, February 7, 2017. 8. UN charter, https://www.un.org /en/about-us/un-charter. 9. Genocide Convention (1948), signed 1948, ratified 1988; Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984), signed 1988, ratified 1994; Rome Statute (1998), signed 2000 but not submitted for ratification, “unsigned” 2001; Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (1968), signed 1968, ratified 1970;

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10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

Mine Ban Treaty (1997), neither signed nor ratified; Convention on Cluster Munitions Treaty (2008), neither signed nor ratified. Charlie Savage, Power Wars: Inside Obama’s Post-9/11 Presidency (New York: Little, Brown, 2015); Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016). Jens David Ohlin, The Assault on International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). U.S. Congress Authorization for Use of Military Force, November 18, 2006, https:// aldeilis.net/english/authorization-for-use-of-military-force/. Testimony by Legal Adviser Harold Hongju Koh, U.S. Department of State on Libya and War Powers Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, June 28, 2011. Eric R. Posner, “Stop Complaining About Harold Koh’s Interpretation of the War Powers Act,” New Republic, July 1, 2011. Janina Dill, Legitimate Targets? Social Construction, International Law, and US Bombing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Jo Becker and Scott Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” New York Times, May 29, 2012. Matthew Evangelista, “Is War Too Easy?” Perspectives on Politics 14, no. 1 (March 2016). John Bellinger, “What Was the Legal Basis for the U.S. Air Strikes Against Syria?” Lawfare, April 6, 2017. Rob Tornoe, “Dan Rather Blasts Journalists Who Called Trump ‘Presidential’ After Syria Missile Strike,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 8, 2017. Peter Beaumont, “Moab Attack on ISIS Was a Baffling Choice in Cold-Blooded Terms of Costs,” Guardian, April 14, 2017; Neta C. Crawford, Accountability for Killing: Moral Responsibility for Collateral Damage in America’s Post-9/11 Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Marcus Weisgerber, “The US Is Raiding Its Global Bomb Stockpiles to Fight ISIS,” Defense One, May 26, 2016. John Wagner and Colby Itkowitz, “Pelosi Says She Spoke to Nation’s Top Military Leader About Ensuring Trump Doesn’t Launch a Nuclear Attack,” Washington Post, January 8, 2021; David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt, “Pelosi Pressed Pentagon on Safeguards to Prevent Trump from Initiating Strikes,” New York Times, January 9, 2021. For a well-informed account of the legal and technical issues, see Bruce Blair, “What Exactly Would It Mean to Have Trump’s Finger on the Nuclear Button?,” Politico, June 11, 2016, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/2016-donald-trump -nuclear-weapons-missiles-nukes-button-launch-foreign-policy-213955. Charlie Savage, “Trump Revokes Obama-Era Rule on Disclosing Civilian Casualties From U.S. Airstrikes Outside War Zones,” New York Times, March 6, 2019; “The Secret Death Toll of America’s Drones,” editorial, New York Times, March 30, 2019. Jeremy Scahill, “The Assassination Complex,” The Intercept, October 15, 2015, https:// theintercept.com/drone-papers. Democracy Now, “Trump Steps Up War on Whistleblowers: Air Force Vet Daniel Hale Arrested for Leaking Drone War Info,” May 10, 2019, https://www.democracynow.org /2019/5/10/trump_ steps _up_war_on _whistleblowers. Airwars, Eroding Transparency: U.S. Counterterrorism Actions in Yemen Under President Donald Trump, October 2020, https://airwars.org /wp-content/uploads/2020/10 /Eroding-Transparency-Trump-in-Yemen.-Airwars-October-2020.pdf. Dave Philipps and Eric Schmitt, “How the U.S. Hid an Airstrike That Killed Dozens of Civilians in Syria,” New York Times, November 13, 2021.

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28. Philipps and Schmitt, “How the U.S. Hid an Airstrike.” 29. “Three US Special Forces Among Eight Dead in Niger Ambush,” Reuters, October 4, 2017. 30. Neta C. Crawford, “The Globalization of American War in the 21st Century: Militarism and Imperial Renaissance or Decline?,” Annals of the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi 53, no. 1 (2019): 40–41. 31. Airwars, “Conflict Data,” https://airwars.org /conflict-data/. 32. Airwars, Eroding Transparency. 33. Alex Horton, Louisa Loveluck, and John Hudson, “U.S. Targets Iran-Backed Militias in Iraq, Syria Strikes,” Washington Post, June 28, 2021; Mark Mazzetti, “Biden Declared the War Over. But Wars Go On,” New York Times, September 22, 2021.

CHAPTER 13

TRUMP TO THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY: YOU’RE FIRED R I C H A R D H . I M M E R M A N

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ssessments of President Donald Trump in any future history of the U.S. intelligence community (IC) will differ dramatically from those of any of his predecessors—and probably his successors. While Trump made little use of the IC to inform or implement policy, he abused or ignored it incessantly. The closest precedent is Richard Nixon. Yet Nixon reserved his scorn largely for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and kept it private.1 Trump was an equal-opportunity abuser who raged publicly. He gauged the IC according to its service to his own, not the national, interests. Because intelligence professionals refused to politicize their estimates, Trump politicized their leadership. The potential for the emergence of a better and more accountable institution is the one silver lining. Achieving that outcome won’t be easy, however. “Speaking truth to power” is the cardinal albeit imperfectly adhered-to principle of the IC. Trump broadcast his contempt for that principle before he set foot in the Oval Office. Successful hacking of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee in February and March 2016 resulted in the release of a massive cache of stolen emails in June. By that summer, the IC had reached a consensus that Russia was responsible; the only dissension concerned whether the intent was to disrupt the election and destabilize U.S. institutions or to assist Trump’s election. By August, the IC had developed sufficient confidence in its judgment to communicate it under the highest classification to President Barack Obama.

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The estimate attributed Russian “meddling” to President Vladimir Putin. It also revealed conversations Russians held during the campaign with several Trump allies, including General Michael T. Flynn, whom Trump would appoint his first national security advisor. Fearful that public disclosure would expose sources and methods, provoke Moscow’s escalation, and/or fuel Trump’s preemptive allegations about a “rigged” election, Obama opted to keep silent. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) broke that silence in October, when it issued a statement jointly with the Department of Homeland Security: the Russian government, aiming “to interfere with the US election process . . . directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions.” The statement bypassed the question of whether the Russians sought to promote Trump’s candidacy. With “high confidence,” the CIA answered that question affirmatively in a secret briefing to select senators soon thereafter.2 After the election, Trump declared “war” on the IC’s judgments, to quote Foreign Policy’s Micah Zenko. He expressed doubts (“it could have been a guy in New Jersey”), disbelief (“it’s ridiculous”), scorn (“These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction”), and rejection (“I don’t believe [Russia] interfered”).3 Interpreting the estimates as challenges to the legitimacy of his election, Trump escalated his attacks in early January. That week the IC released an assessment making explicit that Putin had directed the effort to benefit Trump.4 Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (DCIA) John Brennan, National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers, and FBI Director James Comey briefed the president and the relevant congressional committees on it. They cited the robust intelligence (withheld from the public) that underlay its judgments, and in private Comey gave Trump a heads-up on the Steele dossier, a file prepared by a former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, that alleged Trump’s misconduct and his campaign’s collusion with Russia. Comey acknowledged concerns about the dossier’s reliability. Trump exploded, claiming that none of the intelligence was reliable. The “briefers” were “dirty cops” and “sleazebags,” Obama appointees, and representatives of the “deep state.” Personalizing the assessment, Trump portrayed himself as a victim, as would become his standard. He vented that the IC was “out to destroy him” by conducting a “witch hunt.” In a tweet that enclosed “intelligence” in quotes, he falsely alleged that the IC had leaked the Steele dossier and likened this dissemination of “fake news” to Nazi Germany’s propaganda machine.5 Veteran intelligence officers worried that the IC would never gain the trust and confidence of their “first customer.” They were encouraged when, on the day after his inauguration, Trump travelled to Langley to deliver his first postinaugural speech. But the speech left them aghast. With the CIA headquarters’

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memorial wall as his backdrop, Trump spent a few moments pledging his allegiance to the IC and attributing reports of his hostility to the “dishonest press.” He then used the remainder of the time to brag about himself. “It’s simply inappropriate to engage in self obsession on a spot that memorializes those who obsessed about others, and about mission, more than themselves,” commented John McLaughlin, former deputy and acting CIA director, articulating the consensus. Trump’s speech was “despicable,” and he should be “ashamed,” added Brennan.6 Trump failed to appreciate how pervasive and profound was the CIA’s, and by extension the IC’s, distress. Bolstered by congressional allies, especially Devin Nunes (R- CA), the chair of the House Permanent Subcommittee on Intelligence (HPSCI) when Trump took office, the president ramped up his criticism of the IC assessment, publicly called for a halt to all investigations into the “Russia hoax,” and fired Comey. A year later, despite IC security concerns, Nunes’s committee released a memorandum claiming that political opposition to the president, not intelligence collected, explained the Russian investigation. Thereafter, in the midst of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s independent investigation, the HPSCI issued a report that cleared Trump and his campaign of any wrongdoing, charged the IC with “significant intelligence tradecraft failings,” and accused its leaders of leaking information to the media. A month later, however, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) issued a very different report. The SSCI confirmed the IC’s assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election and identified the purpose as aiding Trump’s campaign. The dueling reports made headlines but failed to influence Trump, his relations with the IC, or public opinion.7 Attention to the reports doubtless would have dissipated rapidly had not Trump scheduled a summit with Putin two weeks after the SSCIs went public. On July 16, 2018, the two heads of state met in Helsinki, Finland. What they actually discussed remains unclear. Trump confiscated the notes of the conversations, and neither country issued a communique.8 Yet, at the press conference later that afternoon, a reporter asked Trump whom he believed: the U.S. intelligence community, which charged Russia with meddling, or President Putin, who denied it. Trump responded, “My people came to me—[DNI] Dan Coats came to me and some others—they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be. . . . I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.”9 Observers fretted about the costs of the president of the United States siding with Putin over the IC. Would the best and brightest in America still find intelligence work attractive? Would analysts pull their punches when producing estimates? Would foreign agencies continue to share intelligence with the

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United States? By undercutting the IC for “doing its work precisely as intended,” Trump was generating “serious soul-searching.”10 Skipping this stage of worrying, many IC veterans generated a tsunami of commentary that violated the IC’s code of conduct. Brennan had already crossed normative lines by calling Trump a “snake oil salesman.” After Helsinki, he described the president’s behavior as “nothing short of treasonous.”11 Though Clapper had previously been more temperate in his criticism, he now took off the gloves. The former DNI, who had served in the IC for a half-century, questioned Trump’s fitness for office and explicitly expressed his concern over his access to America’s nuclear codes. Other IC stalwarts were likewise critical. When Trump sought retribution against Brennan by trying to revoke his security clearances, a dozen of them signed an open letter protesting Trump’s use of his authority as a “political tool.”12 Current intelligence officers held their tongues—for good reason. Only DNI Coats affirmed the validity of the IC assessment. When asked about the likelihood of another Russian cyberattack shortly before the Helsinki summit, he replied, the “warning lights are blinking red again.” He added that Russian efforts to subvert U.S. elections continued unabated. The comments proved fatal to Coats’s relationship with Trump; he resigned along with his deputy, the long-time IC veteran Sue Gordon, the next summer.13 The year 2018 proved to be a tipping point. Notwithstanding the frequent headlines during Trump’s first year about the investigation of Russian interference, the attention paid by Congress, the press, and the public to the dysfunctional relationship between Trump and the IC rarely correlated with policies. The reason was largely the historic boundary between the intelligence and policy-making communities. That boundary to an underappreciated degree quarantined the most egregiously partisan of Trump’s foreign and national security advisors, Mike Pompeo. A fierce ideologue, Pompeo was everything a CIA director was not supposed to be. Trump appointed him for that reason, and he did not disappoint. Eager to voice his opinion on everything, Pompeo challenged his own agency’s assessment of the 2016 election and otherwise backed the president over the IC on issues ranging from Iran to North Korea.14 Yet the IC stood by its assessments, whether of the election or Iran’s compliance with the requirements of the Obama-negotiated Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that constrained the Iranian nuclear program. Trump could draw on intelligence reporting to support neither proposals to ban Muslim travel to the United States nor claims that his meetings with and exchange of love letters with Kim Jung-un would lead to North Korea’s denuclearization. The IC estimates even contradicted Trump’s climate-change denials.15 Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in 2018 and moved Pompeo to Foggy Bottom, where he could freely exercise his muscle in the policy-making arena and public sphere. Undeterred by Gina Haspel’s complicity in the CIA’s

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extraordinary rendition and enhanced interrogation programs and the destruction of videotapes of the waterboarding sessions, the president (who championed waterboarding) appointed her Pompeo’s successor. The CIA and the other IC elements highly regarded Haspel, Pompeo’s deputy and the first female DCIA, for her professionalism and knowhow. Under her leadership, the CIA went about its business of collecting and analyzing intelligence as dispassionately as possible. Yet Haspel’s strategy for avoiding political minefields and maintaining the agency’s independence—and for retaining her job—was to keep her head down. She allowed Trump’s Helsinki meeting with Putin to come and go without comment.16 Nevertheless, in the summit’s aftermath, as rumors circulated that the Russians might have compromising material on Trump, the entanglement of Trump’s hostility toward intelligence and the administration’s policies became unavoidable. The surprise is that it took so long and that the catalyst was Saudi Arabia, not Iran, North Korea, or even Russia. On October 2, 2018, a team of assassins ambushed, suffocated, and dismembered the dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. A columnist for the Washington Post, Khashoggi was renowned for targeting Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) in scathing critiques of the Riyadh government. By November, reliable intelligence pointed to MBS as masterminding the gruesome murder. Outraged legislators from both parties demanded punishment, including a ban on the sales of weapons that Saudi Arabia was using to commit atrocities against civilians in Yemen. Trump would hear nothing of the kind. He valued Saudi Arabia as a customer. His son-in-law valued MBS as a friend. Following his template for Russia, he dismissed the intelligence as inconclusive. In a rare display of independence, in December Republicans joined with Democrats in both houses of Congress to vote to cancel the arms deal with the Saudis. The Senate failed to override Trump’s veto.17 By that time, each end of Pennsylvania Avenue was focusing more on Ukraine than on Saudi Arabia. The IC contributed minimally to the inquiries that led to the impeachment of Donald Trump for seeking to enlist Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s help to damage Joe Biden’s expected candidacy for the presidency. Yet the agency was a seminal player in the drama. A CIA whistleblower brought to the attention of the IC’s inspector general (IG) Trump’s conversation with Zelenskyy and the inappropriate storage of the reconstructed transcript on a highly classified computer system. Judging the complaint “credible” and “urgent,” the IG alerted Acting DNI Joseph Maguire. Initially Maguire resisted passing the complaint on to Congress, as required by law. Political pressure compelled Maguire to relent, however, setting off the inquiry that led to Trump’s impeachment. National Security Council and State Department personnel took center stage during the hearings. Still, the IC’s involvement, exacerbated by Haspel’s refusal to divulge the whistleblower’s

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name, was to Trump unforgivable. So was Maguire’s confirmation of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election in a briefing to Congress. Trump fired both Maguire and the IG.18 Disappointed by Coats and Maguire and unleashed by his impeachment acquittal and “exoneration” by the Mueller report, Trump turned the director’s office at DNI headquarters into a game of musical chairs as he sought to fill it with loyalists.19 Trump had appointed Maguire acting DNI only after his first choice to replace Coats, John Ratcliffe, had failed to meet the lowest qualifications standard. The criteria that Trump applied were Radcliffe’s rabid boosterism of the president and criticism of the Mueller investigation. When Ratcliffe couldn’t pass muster even with Republican senators, Trump turned to Maguire, who had already been confirmed as director of the National Center for Counterterrorism (NCTC). But Trump interpreted McGuire’s refusal to block the whistleblower’s complaint and endorsement of the IC assessment of the 2016 election as acts of betrayal. He had to go.20 Trump next appointed as acting DNI Richard Grenell, an appointment that a commentator in the New York Times described as “a calculated insult to the integrity and professionalism of the U.S. intelligence community.”21 Grenell, who had less intelligence experience than Ratcliffe and was, if anything, more of a partisan, retained his position as ambassador to Germany. As a consequence, he avoided the requirement of Senate confirmation. He could legally serve for only a limited time, however. That enabled Trump to turn back to Ratcliffe, whom this time the GOP-dominated Senate confirmed. Trump had politicized the ODNI beyond most observers’ imaginations. What is more, both Grenell and Ratcliffe declassified documents and initiated “reforms” that gutted ODNI components such as the NCTC. To intelligence professionals, these initiatives degraded America’s intelligence capabilities and threatened U.S. security.22 Trump spent his last year in office seeking to exact revenge for IC sins dating back to 2016. As if following the script of a Greek tragedy, this period coincided with the spread and intensification of the COVID-19 pandemic. A Washington adage holds that there are only policy successes and intelligence failures. Even as Trump used his considerable power to eviscerate and politicize the IC, he sought to spin the pandemic calamity to conform to that adage. The IC could not estimate when the coronavirus would reach the United States, how rapidly it would spread, or how virulent it would become. Much depended on the responses of governments worldwide. Still, as early as January 2020, and with increasing frequency, multiple agencies produced classified and urgent warnings that the Chinese were playing down the severity and potential spread of the virus’s outbreak. As president-elect, Trump had famously declared that he was too smart to need intelligence briefings. He was not. Albeit less frequently than his predecessors, he received briefings regularly (although

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he inexplicably delayed his first briefing on covert actions). Still, he resisted reading the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), preferring oral briefings accompanied by pictures and graphics. As attested to by Ted Gistaro, who provided candidate Trump with briefings and then continued on after his election, Trump barely “touched” the PDB. “He doesn’t really read anything.” Beth Sanner, who succeeded Gistaro, described briefing Trump as “story-telling.”23 Briefers also learned that getting and maintaining his attention required focusing on topics that inherently interested him, notably those that accented his personal relationships, and avoiding those with which he was not comfortable. Over time, moreover, they became progressively more reluctant to provide him with the most sensitive intelligence. Their reluctance intensified in 2019 after, despite objections from across the national security community, Trump tweeted a classified satellite photograph of an explosion at a space-launch facility in Iran. The image allowed adversaries to identify the satellite and refine their assessments of its camera’s capabilities. As one IC veteran explained, because “Mr. Trump never took the need to protect such material seriously,” briefers would “prepare a document with sensitive sourcing information removed.”24 That a president who was so disinterested in most of the briefing material he received, and who insisted on receiving most of that material electronically, held on to highly sensitive hard copies after the briefing had ended and he, his advisors, and the briefers left the secure briefing space remains a riddle in search of a solution. Yet that is what Trump did, thereby validating the suspicions of his briefers that he was not to be trusted with delicate secrets. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) discovered subsequent to Trump’s vacating the White House that he had taken with him fifteen cartons of his presidential papers, thereby violating the Presidential Records Act, which transferred legal and physical custody of those papers to the NARA on January 20, 2020. The severity of that violation escalated exponentially when, after retrieving the cartons, NARA officials identified documents marked as TS/SCI (Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information) scattered throughout the cartons. IC concern that not all these TS/SCI documents had been retrieved, and denials and obfuscation from Mar-a-Lago, led the Department of Justice to issue a search warrant.25 The resultant FBI “raid” on August 8, 2022, produced the confiscation of more cartons and more highly sensitive documents. The cache included eighteen documents marked top secret, fifty-four secret, thirty-one confidential, and 11,179 documents or photographs without any markings. Among these were at least one document that described a foreign government’s nuclear capabilities and others that could potentially reveal the identities of U.S. covert operatives or foreign assets, technological surveillance capabilities, and more. Also found were forty-eight empty folders that once contained classified materials.

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Notwithstanding the illegality of Trump’s possessing any of these documents at his home and the sensitivity of many of them, for Trump and his allies this raid was but another chapter in the IC’s “witch hunt” against him. That the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has the responsibility of assessing the security risks the Mar-a-Lago documents present adds insult to Trump’s perceived injury.26 Trump placed himself in legal jeopardy through his cavalier attitude toward sensitive documents and disregard for both the norms and laws that govern presidential papers. He also further “poisoned” his relationship with the intelligence community. Understood within the latter context, how, and how poorly, Trump consumed and safeguarded intelligence is integral to the narrative of his administration’s response to the spread of the novel coronavirus disease. Before deciding that his most effective strategy for managing the catastrophic impact of the pandemic was to ignore, minimize, mock, or think magically about it, Trump denied that he had received warnings. Then, when evidence surfaced of the PDBs and other reports, he claimed that the intelligence was too ambiguous to be actionable. That explanation betrayed Trump’s ignorance rather than proving persuasive. Intelligence is invariably ambiguous. So next, Trump threw his briefer under the bus by claiming that Sanner excluded the warning from her oral briefing because the intelligence was “unverified.” That allegation was no more convincing. Sanner was a career CIA analyst who was serving as a deputy director of national intelligence. That the primary function of the IC is to provide the president with the earliest warning possible was deeply ingrained. Likewise, she knew that no item would be included in the PDB if it was not somewhat credible, and early warning normatively precludes awaiting verification, the IC definition of which is broad. She surely briefed him on a threat of this magnitude. Yet Trump denied she did, and, not long after his reelection defeat, he stopped taking briefings altogether.27 The IC did its job as well as one could expect in light of the limitations imposed by the president and, as Charles S. Maier correctly underscores in chapter 42 of this book, the vexing global challenges that it confronted as a consequence of prior administrations’ policies and programs—Democratic and Republican. IC estimates are not always right; intelligence analysis is an art, not a science. Nevertheless, from what we know from testimony and reporting, the IC was accurate regarding Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea, the pandemic, and much more. In each case, Trump’s disregard or outright rejection of the analysis contributed to policies that were weak or nonexistent and an IC that was degraded and demoralized. It spoke truth to power, but power did not listen. According to its own criteria, it failed. A “pro-intelligence” president with decades of experience, Joe Biden in the immediate aftermath of his election set about fixing what Trump had broken, even as the president denied him access to classified reporting. President-elect

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Biden announced in late November his choice of Avril Haines as DNI, signaling his commitment to reversing Trump’s politicization and evisceration of the intelligence community. Haines is a veteran intelligence professional with a background in law and on record as decrying the politicization of the IC. Haines selected Morgan Muir to brief Biden, since she wanted someone whose experience approximated that of Biden; Muir had held the same position with George W. Bush. Biden then doubled down on his commitment to “reprofessionalize” the IC in January 2021 by designating the highly respected career diplomat William Burns, trusted by both Republican and Democratic presidents and a consumer of intelligence for over three decades, to direct the CIA.28 Although Haines and Burns will help, the IC confronts a challenging path to recovery. It suffered numerous resignations of senior intelligence officers between 2017 and 2021, and Trump’s war on the community is likely to deter a rush of talented young men and women to replenish its ranks. It may take years to attract recruits with critical language skills, many of whom are likely to come from immigrant groups that Trump banned. Recruiting reliable foreign assets may prove even more challenging.29 That the IC stumbled out of Biden’s gate intensifies its challenges to win back trust and respect. The community shouldn’t be faulted for failing to uncover the origin of the coronavirus or the “Havana Syndrome,” although many will give it poor marks for both. As for the United States’ chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, much remains for us to learn about the intelligence Biden and his advisors received. The rapid collapse of the Ghani government and triumph of the Taliban, nevertheless, coupled with casualties suffered by both military and civilian personnel, the bedlam that surrounded the U.S. evacuation, and the plight of those left behind strongly suggest a serious intelligence failure.30 Abetted by Republicans within and outside of his administration, moreover, Trump further crippled Congress’s historically weak oversight, undermined the authority of the IC’s inspectors general, and ravaged key community elements such as NCTC. John A. Thompson’s claim in chapter 11 of this volume that among Trump’s most pernicious legacies is the damage he caused to America’s international reputation and image is especially applicable to the world of intelligence: Trump shattered the bonds of trust on which the IC’s vital liaison relations with its allies’ intelligence services depend. The president gave foreign officials reason to doubt the word of counterparts whom the president called liars or to decide not to share classified intelligence that could leak. So might the American public doubt the IC’s estimates should Biden cite them to justify a policy. Accordingly, it is tragically appropriate that even as photographs of a mob desecrating the Capitol building on January 6, 2021 because they believed the president’s lies about the 2020 presidential election bathed the front pages, those same newspapers reported the ODNI analytic ombudsman’s judgment that the IC’s political appointees had “delayed, distorted, or obstructed” the

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agencies’ analysis of foreign interference in that very election “out of concern over policymaker reactions.”31 Donald Trump bequeathed to Joe Biden a profoundly fractured domestic society and, as Robert Jervis explains in the essay that opens this volume, a wobbly international alliance system that an adversary could perceive as offering a window of opportunity for aggression.32 Russia put that society and alliance system to the test in February 2022. The IC’s response exceeded the expectations of many, perhaps most, in the United States, Europe, and throughout the world. It unequivocally conflicted with the caricature of the IC that Trump has worked so hard for four years to draw. The CIA’s drone strike that killed al-Qaeda’s leader and Bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in August 2022 likewise belied Trump’s portrayal of the IC. That operation, reminiscent of the much-celebrated one that killed Osama bin Laden himself, was the culmination of a more than two-decadeslong hunt. Rather than hide in Pakistan, as bin Laden had, al-Zawahiri had returned to Afghanistan after the Taliban regained power. The CIA located his safe house outside Kabul, identified al-Zawahiri through an analysis of the occupant’s “pattern of life,” and, deciding on the Hellfire missile as the weapon of choice, killed him without any “collateral damage” while he stood outside on the balcony. For the CIA, al-Zawahiri’s death marked a major way station in its campaign against terrorists. For Biden, it offered a “a proof of concept for the ‘over-the-horizon’ strikes” that he maintained would enable the United States collect the intelligence necessary to degrade terrorism in Afghanistan in the absence of U.S. boots on the ground.33 The surgical strike that eliminated one of the globe’s most renowned terrorists quickly became old news as America’s and the world’s attention fixated on Russia and Ukraine. One would have to go back to the war scare of 1948 to find a European parallel with the crisis that erupted between the two countries fewer than eighteen months into the Biden administration.34 The president and his national security advisors assigned the IC an unprecedented role in formulating a response. The administration and America’s allies relied on U.S. intelligence to deter a Russian invasion of Ukraine as well as to provide warning as to whether Russia would invade—its traditional and most important mission. Even at the risk of disclosing sources and methods, the administration, with the approval of DNI Haines and DCIA Burns, broadcast both at home and abroad what it learned about Russia’s military preparations in order to solidify and prepare a coordinated NATO response and increase the difficulty of Russia’s exploiting a “false flag” operation (fabricating a Ukrainian attack on the separatist territories of Donetsk and Luhansk) to justify an intervention.35 Improvements in the IC’s capacity for technological collection, which its access to commercial satellites bolsters, explains the “high confidence” the community had in its estimates and the administration’s trust in them. The IC rewarded

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Biden’s trust; it “got it right” to an uncanny degree. That Russia did invade Ukraine as the IC forecast is only part of the story. As reported in the New York Times, the agencies “accurately assessed President Vladimir V. Putin’s intentions and, through strategic public releases of information, complicated his efforts to create a pretext to send his armed forces into Ukraine,” and even “got the timing of his invasion right almost to the hour.” What is more, “the depth and quality of the American intelligence strengthened President Biden’s hand in bringing the trans-Atlantic alliance into a unified front against Moscow. It provided time to prepare waves of sanctions and other steps to impose a cost on Russia, dispatch troops to bolster NATO allies and move Americans out of harm’s way.”36 Yet because deterrence failed and Russia did invade, many in the public and in Congress are unlikely to judge the IC’s efforts in Ukraine a “success” and are likely to forget what the IC got right. Absent was a “UN moment” such as when Adlai Stephenson, John F. Kennedy’s ambassador to the United Nations, displayed photographs of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962. In addition, depending on how well the IC assesses Ukraine’s sustained capacity to resist the Russian onslaught and Putin’s endgame, many Americans within and beyond the Beltway may ask of the IC a question equivalent to “What have you done lately.” The CIA estimated that Russia expected the war to last less than a week. That assessment underestimated Ukraine’s tenacity, overestimated Russia’s capabilities, and widely missed the mark in anticipating Putin’s postinvasion thinking and decision making. In addition, as the war wore on, the IC, as the DNI conceded, struggled to gain insight into Ukraine’s strategy. The Biden administration still delivered to the Ukrainian military billions of dollars’ worth of weapons systems. But although the IC’s assessments of Ukraine’s needs improved, the intelligence it collected was insufficient for him to be confident that Ukraine could use effectively and absorb rapidly the arms, munitions, and equipment America provided.37 Consequently, despite the IC’s successes with al-Zawahiri and at the outset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, countless skeptics of the credibility and competency of America’s intelligence community will remain on America’s political left and right. Trump did everything he could as president and still does everything he can in his post-presidency to generate, reinforce, and intensify that skepticism. His war against the IC is integral to his legacy, and the community will need to live with that for years to come.

Notes I dedicate this essay to the memory of Robert Jervis, who taught us all how to study intelligence. 1. Richard H. Immerman, The Hidden Hand: A Brief History of the CIA (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell), 88–90.

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2. Greg Miller, Ellen Nakashima, and Allen Entous, “Obama’s Secret Struggle to Punish Russia for Putin’s Election Assault,” Washington Post, June 23, 2017; Emmarie Huetteman, “Obama White House Knew of Russian Election Hacking, but Delayed Telling,” New York Times, June 21, 2016; Joint Statement from the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security, October 7, 2016. 3. Micah Zenko, “Trump’s War Against Intelligence,” ForeignPolicy.com, December 14, 2016. 4. Intelligence Community Assessment 2017– 01D, “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections,” January 6, 2017. 5. David E. Sanger and Matthew Rosenberg, “From the Start, Trump Has Muddied a Clear Message: Putin Interfered,” New York Times, July 18, 2018; John L. Helgerson, Getting to Know the President: Intelligence Briefings of Presidential Candidates and Presidents Elect, 1952–2016, 4th ed. (Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2021), 248–50; Calder Walton, “Is Trump’s Rage at US Intelligence Unprecedented?” Prospect, January 12, 2017; David Montgomery, “The Abnormal Presidency,” Washington Post, November 10, 2020. 6. Robin Wright, “Trump’s Vainglorious Affront to the C.I.A.,” New Yorker, January 22, 2017; Bess Levin; “Ex-C.I.A. Chief Blasts Trump’s ‘Despicable’ Speech at C.I.A. Headquarters,” vanityfair.com, January 22, 2017. 7. HPSCI majority staff memorandum to HPSCI majority members, “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Abuses at the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” January 18, 2018, enclosed with Donald McCann to Devin Nunes, February 2, 2018; House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Report on Russian Active Measures, March 22, 2018; and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “The Intelligence Community Assessment: Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections,” July 3, 2018. 8. It is plausible that the transcripts of Trump’s conversation with Putin are among the papers in the cardboard cartons that the former president took with him to his Mara-Lago home in Florida once he left the White House. 9. Remarks by President Trump and President Putin of the Russian Federation in Joint Press Conference, Helsinki, Finland, July 16, 2018. 10. David Ignatius, “The Intelligence Community Has Never Faced a Problem Quite Like This,” Washington Post, July 19, 2018; David Priess, “The ‘Time of Troubles’ Is Back for America’s Spies,” foreignpolicy.com. 11. Mattathias Schwartz, “John Brennan, Former C.I.A. Spymaster, Steps Out of the Shadows,” New York Times, June  27, 2018; Dylan Scott, “Former CIA Director: TrumpPutin Press Conference ‘Nothing Short of Treasonous,’ ” Vox, July 16, 2018. 12. Rachel Chason, “James Clapper Questions Trump’s Fitness, Worries About Access to Nuclear Codes,” Washington Post, August 23, 2017; “Statement from Former Senior Intelligence Officials,” Politico, August 16, 2018. 13. Julian E. Barnes, “ ‘Warning Lights Are Blinking Red,’ Top Intelligence Officer Says of Russian Attacks,” New York Times, July 13, 2018. 14. Matthew Rosenberg, “Trump Likes When C.I.A. Chief Gets Political, but Officers Are Wary,” New York Times, August 7; Paul R. Pillar, “Where Does Mike Pompeo Stand on the Issues? Too Close to Trump,” New York Times, March 13, 2018. 15. Tim Weiner, “When Trump Savages His Intelligence Chiefs, the ‘Deep State’ Has Reason to Worry,” Washington Post, January  31, 2019; Shane Harris, “Donald Trump Rejects Intelligence Report on Travel Ban,” Wall Street Journal, February 24, 2017; Courtney Kube, Ken Dilanian, and Carol E. Lee, “CIA Report Says North Korea Won’t

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25. 26.

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Denuclearize, but Might Open a Burger Joint,” NBC News, May 29, 2018; Ishaan Tharoor, “The U.S.’s Top Spies Issue a Challenge to Trump’s Agenda,” Washington Post, February 14, 2018. Adam Goldman, “Gina Haspel, Trump’s Choice for C.I.A., Played Role in Torture Program,” New York Times, March 13, 2018; Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman, “Gina Haspel Relies on Spy Skills to Connect with Trump. He Doesn’t Always Listen,” New York Times, April 16, 2019. Julian E. Barnes, “C.I.A. Concludes That Saudi Crown Prince Ordered Khashoggi Killed,” New York Times, November 16, 2018; Aaron Blake, “Trump Won’t Believe His Own Intelligence Community—Again,” Washington Post, November 17, 2018. Michael Morell and David Kris, “How the DNI-Congress Feud Puts Intelligence and Democracy in Danger,” Washington Post, September 19, 2017; Joshua Rovner, “An Attack on Inspector General Signals Something Much Bigger,” War on the Rocks, April 22, 2020. Trump claimed that the Mueller report exonerated him and authorized Attorney General William Barr to investigate the IC’s contribution to launching the investigation. It was Barr who preemptively declared that despite the evidence it presented, the Mueller report did not justify charging Trump with obstructing the independent investigation. Bess Levin, “DOJ Obstruction Memo Reveals Bill Barr Is an Even Bigger Trump Hack Than Previously Thought,” Vanity Fair, August 25, 2022. Shane Harris, Ellen Nakashima, and Josh Dawsey, “Responding to News of Russian Interference, Trump Sends Chilling Message to U.S. Intelligence Community,” Washington Post, February 22, 2020. Jonathan Stevenson, “Will Richard Grenell Destroy the Intelligence Community?,” New York Times, February 21, 2020. Michael Crowley, Julian E. Barnes, Nicholas Fandos, and Maggie Haberman, “Trump Taps John Ratcliffe for Director of National Intelligence,” New York Times, February 28, 2020; Robert Draper, “Unwanted Truths: Inside Trump’s Battles with the U.S. Intelligence Agencies,” New York Times Magazine, August 8, 2020. Louis Nelson, “Trump: I Don’t Need Daily Briefings,” Politico, December 11, 2016; Carol D. Leonnig, Shane Harris, and Greg Jaffe, “Breaking with Tradition, Trump Skips President’s Written Intelligence Report and Relies on Oral Briefings,” Washington Post, February 9, 2018; Helgerson, Getting to Know the President, 243, 266; John Walcott, “ ‘Willful Ignorance.’ Inside President Trump’s Troubled Intelligence Briefings,” Time, February 5, 2019; Draper, “Unwanted Truths.” Mark Mazzetti, “The Poisoned Relationship Between Trump and the Keepers of U.S. Secrets,” New York Times, August 11, 2022; Julian E. Barnes, Michael C. Bender, and Maggie Haberman, “Trump’s Tastes in Intelligence: Power and Leverage,” New York Times, September 1, 2022; David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, “In a Tweet Taunting Iran, Trump Releases an Image Thought to Be Classified,” New York Times, August 30, 2019. Tim Weiner, “The Mysteries of Mar-a-Lago,” New York Times, August 19, 2022. Charlie Smart and Larry Buchanan, “What the F.B.I. Seized from Mar-a-Lago, Illustrated,” New York Times, September 3, 2022; Devlin Barrett and Carol D. Leonnig, “Material on Foreign Nation’s Nuclear Capabilities Seized at Mar-a-Lago,” September 6, 2022; Glenn S. Gerstell, “The Mar-a-Lago Case Is About National Security, Not Politics,” Washington Post, August  31, 2022; Andrew De Siderio and Nicholas Wu, “Intel Officials to Assess National Security Fallout from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Documents,” Politico, August 2022.

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27. Mazzetti, “The Poisoned Relationship”; Micah Zenko, “The Coronavirus Is the Worst Intelligence Failure in U.S. History,” Foreign Policy, March 25, 2020; Aki Peritz, “The Intelligence Community Got the Pandemic Right. Then Politicians Botched It,” Washington Post, September 11, 2020; Natasha Bertrand, “Trump’s Intel Briefer Breaks Her Silence,” Politico, July 6, 2020; Helgerson, Getting to Know the President, 266–67. 28. James Lockhart and Christopher R. Moran, “Principal Consumer: President Biden’s Approach to Intelligence,” International Affairs, February 7, 2022; Daniel Klaidman, “Avril Haines, the Least Likely Spy,” Newsweek, June 26, 2013; Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman, “Veteran C.I.A. Officer, Who Previously Briefed George W. Bush, to Lead Biden Intelligence Sessions,” New York Times, January 21, 2021; Michael Morrell, Avril Haines, and David S. Cohen, “Trump’s Politicization of U.S. Intelligence Agencies Could End in Disaster,” Foreign Policy, April 28, 2020. 29. Edward Price, “I Didn’t Think I’d Ever Leave the CIA. But Because of Trump, I Quit,” Washington Post, February 20, 2017; John Sipher, “Trump’s Conspiracy Theories About Intelligence Will Make the CIA’s Job Harder,” Washington Post, June 11, 2019. 30. David E. Sanger, “Mystery Attacks on Diplomats Leave Scores of Victims but Still Little Evidence,” New York Times, August 8, 2021; Ellen Nakashima, Yasmeen Abutaleb, and Joel Achenbach, “Biden Receives Inconclusive Intelligence Report on COVID Origins,” Washington Post, August 24, 2021; Julian E. Barnes, “Intelligence Agencies Did Not Predict Imminence of Afghan Collapse, Officials Say,” New York Times, August 18, 2021. 31. Julian E. Barnes, Charlie Savage, and Adam Goldman, “Trump Administration Politicized Some Intelligence on Foreign Election Influence, Report Finds,” New York Times, January  8, 2021; Ellen Nakashima, “Political Appointees, Career Analysts Clashed Over Russian, Chinese Interference in 2020 Election,” Washington Post, January 6, 2021. 32. As Jervis writes in chapter 1 of this volume, the consequences of Trump’s posture toward America’s global partners remain to be determined. 33. Julian E. Barnes and Eric Schmitt, “How the C.I.A. Tracked the Leader of Al Qaeda,” New York Times, August 2, 2022; Shane Harris, “Zawahiri Appeared on His Balcony. The CIA Was Ready to Kill Him,” Washington Post, August 2, 2022. 34. Frank Kofsky, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A Successful Campaign to Deceive the Nation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993). 35. Shane Harris, Ashley Parker, and Ellen Nakashima, “New Intelligence Suggests Russia Plans a ‘False Flag’ Operation to Trigger an Invasion of Ukraine,” Washington Post, February 11, 2022; David E. Sanger, “The United States’ Message to Russia: Prove US Wrong,” New York Times, February 17, 2022; Joshua Yaffa and Adam Entous, “Inside the High-Stakes Fight to Control the Narrative on Ukraine,” New Yorker, February 21, 2022. 36. Julian E. Barnes and David E. Sanger, “U.S. Intelligence Strengthens Biden’s Hand in Uniting Allies,” New York Times, February 25, 2022. 37. Calder Walton, “Can Intelligence Tell How Far Putin Will Go?” War on the Rocks, February 28, 2022; Julian E. Barnes, “U.S. Lacks a Clear Picture of Ukraine’s War Strategy, Officials Say,” New York Times, June 8, 2022.

CHAPTER 14

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION AND ECONOMIC SANCTIONS NICHOLAS MULDER

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valuating the significance and effects of economic sanctions poses serious challenges for scholars. There are important causal questions that need to be disentangled.1 Sanctions are used to inflict pain and demonstrate resolve, making it tempting to see them as key drivers in the decision making of target states. In reality, they are never used in a vacuum. Their effects are mediated through a variety of ideological, political, economic, and military factors. There are also historical patterns of persistence that shape sanctions. Several countries currently under U.S. sanctions— such as Iran, Russia, and North Korea—have been exposed to them in the past, lived under their pressure for a long time, and changed their policies and political economies in response. The sanctions policy of the Trump administration must be placed in this wider overview of world politics. U.S. sanctions between 2016 and 2020 were characterized by a remarkable combination of rupture and continuity. The Trump administration’s rhetoric and approach to diplomacy constituted a major shift. But at the material level, existing policies of economic pressure continued and were extended further. In his deployment of sanctions, Trump used a tool that many previous presidents have resorted to. But he used it in a more aggressive, impulsive, and counterproductive way than his predecessors. Besides Trump’s intensification of the use of sanctions, the change in tone around the use of the instrument was marked. The U.S. government abandoned any plausible claim that it was using sanctions to enforce international rules. Indeed, international institutions such as the Netherlands-based International Criminal Court (ICC) found themselves

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directly targeted by U.S. sanctions. Attorney General William Barr defended the Trumpist attack on internationalism by accusing the ICC of being “little more than a political tool employed by unaccountable international elites.”2 This break in discursive norms—rivaled in some respects only by the unilateralist phase of the George W. Bush presidency—was important. It amounted to a wholesale abandonment of a core aspect of modern economic sanctions ever since their official invention at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919: that sanctions were justified as an enforcement of international norms. Traditionally, many presidents had used sanctions in a dual fashion: multilaterally when possible and unilaterally when necessary. This meant that the United States would use international institutions such as the UN Security Council against outlier states and terrorist groups—such as North Korea and the Islamic State—but resort to alliance networks like NATO when the target was more difficult to isolate—for instance when imposing sanctions against Russia in 2014. In the case of Iran, by far the most prominent target of U.S. sanctions pressure in the Trump years, multilateral and unilateral measures were combined. Here the milder multilateral sanctions formed a base on which Washington imposed its own, harsher sanctions. Trump also drew on a precedent established during the Bush administration and subsequently expanded under the Obama administration by engaging in the extraterritorial enforcement of U.S. sanctions.3 These different modalities of sanctions use were complex and could, in the right hands, be calibrated to deliver pressure that was—at least in principle—more subtle and less onerous on the world economy and key U.S. allies.4 The risk of alienating allies by pushing sanctions too far has been a persistent problem for American administrations ever since the 1980s.5 One reason for this is the relatively limited exposure of the U.S. economy to international trade.6 With a very large internal market buoyed by considerable consumer demand and a large trade deficit, American policy makers have to worry less about the effect of sanctions on their country’s exports than many open, tradedependent European and Asian economies. Washington’s sanctions were thus disproportionately burdensome for U.S. allies. Obama administration officials were aware of this imbalance. For this reason, they assembled the sanctions coalitions developed against Iran and Russia in 2010–2016 through extensive diplomacy and negotiations with European and Asian governments. Trump was uninterested in such diplomatic groundwork. His administration rarely heeded the concerns of other states, friendly or opposed, in its use of sanctions. Across the board, Trump’s sanctions ratcheted up tensions with allies and further antagonized opponents. The most dramatic episode in this respect was the U.S. unilateral withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. Declaring that “America will not be held hostage to nuclear blackmail,” he announced

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in May 2018 that the United States would leave the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).7 By the fall of that year, Trump had not only reimposed older sanctions but also launched a new “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran. Spearheaded by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, this approach sought to virtually eliminate Iran’s oil exports, with exceptions administered through a special waiver system.8 This extremely aggressive extraterritorial sanctions campaign prompted European signatories to the JCPOA to create a specialpurpose vehicle, INSTEX, to facilitate EU-Iranian trade. Yet INSTEX only covered the trade in humanitarian goods and food, leaving the rest of the Iranian economy exposed.9 The effects for Iran of this sudden snapback were very serious: the country’s GDP fell by 6 percent in 2018 and 6.8 percent in 2019.10 Yet despite the economic damage done to the Islamic Republic, “maximum pressure” was a fruitless and even counterproductive approach in political and strategic terms.11 Instead of moderating its behavior, the Iranian government expanded its sanctions-evasion infrastructure, setting up illicit oil exports to large Asian economies through Pakistan and Malaysia. Simultaneously, Iranian-linked groups and militias in the region asserted their presence from Iraq and Syria to Yemen. After an initial war scare in 2017, the continuous increase of U.S. pressure brought Washington and Tehran to brink of war in early 2020, when Trump directed the assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad. The possibility of a stabilization of these tensions, let alone a longer-term U.S.-Iranian rapprochement, was repeatedly undermined by the administration’s unilateral actions. Given the profound distrust created by this sanctions war, it is doubtful whether the new administrations in Washington and Tehran will be able and willing to come to any new kind of agreement. More than a year and a half into its time in office, the Biden administration has not managed to negotiate a return to the deal. Under Trump, old U.S. adversaries were targeted with new vehemence. This was also the case with Venezuela, whose government had been under U.S. sanctions for human rights abuses and money laundering since 2006. Trump went much further by imposing sanctions on Venezuela’s access to public and private international debt markets in August 2017. His administration subsequently expanded these restrictions in 2018 and 2019 to cover cryptocurrency, the national central bank, gold mining, oil exports, and government officials— putting virtually the entirety of the country’s state and foreign trade under embargo.12 This went hand in hand with the open pursuit of regime change in Caracas. Trump’s sanctions aimed to cause such profound economic collapse and despair among the Venezuelans that the regime would be forced to compromise. But the Trump administration never articulated a convincing argument for how aggravating popular misery would produce a more democratic government. National Security Advisor John Bolton claimed that a full embargo “worked in Panama, it worked in Nicaragua once, and it will work there again,

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and it will work in Venezuela and Cuba.”13 Yet this was ignorance masquerading as confidence; political change in Central America in 1989–1990 required a U.S. invasion against Panamanian president Manuel Noriega and a decade of violent proxy warfare against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua; the six-decade-old embargo against Cuba has not succeeded either. The inadequacy of sanctions as a tool of regime change became evident in Venezuela as well. The democratic opposition hardly benefited from increased U.S. economic pressure, which instead worsened the already considerable suffering among the poorest sections of the population.14 One study estimated that Venezuela’s excess mortality after the Trump sanctions went into effect rose to forty thousand deaths in 2018.15 As in Iran, the embattled Maduro government clung onto power, buttressing its position by building a vast smuggling network. It also opened the elite sectors of the economy to privatization and dollarization. This opportunistic response to the sanctions has deepened the class rifts between the Venezuelan rich, who have access to foreign currency and luxury conveniences, and the poor, who are caught in a vicious spiral of poor health, hunger, and meager incomes eroded by inflation.16 Surging global energy prices in 2022 have enabled the beginning of a return to economic growth, but the country remains vastly poorer than it was in the early 2010s. Russia, which was first targeted by U.S. sanctions in 2014 for its annexation of the Crimea, presented a different case. Any American sanctions measures against Vladimir Putin had to take into account the considerable size of the Russian economy and its deep links to European trading partners. Congress also showed itself to be an independent actor in shaping sanctions policy toward Moscow. Concerned about what they perceived as excessively close ties between Trump and Putin, Democrats and Republicans passed the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) in the summer of 2017.17 This made it more difficult for the president to undo sanctions legislation quickly and gave the U.S. legislature additional power to increase pressure on Russia, North Korea, and Iran. CAATSA also forced the president to impose economic sanctions on any country—whether a U.S. ally or not—that made a “significant transaction” purchasing weapons from the Russian Federation. This set up a tense force field around Russia’s exports of its state-of-the-art S-400 air defense missile system to Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and India.18 Some sanctions scholars have suggested that U.S. sanctions work better when threatened against allies, who value their relationship with Washington, than against rivals, who already have an antagonistic outlook.19 While this was true in the past, the S-400 imbroglio demonstrates that Trump-era overuse has diminished the returns to sanctions to the point where even allies are no longer deterred from pursuing their own regional interests in defiance of U.S. measures.

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Notwithstanding elite doubts about Trump’s political leanings, the Treasury continued to impose new sanctions on Russia throughout his years in office. These sanctions were marked not only by their incongruence with presidential messaging but also by a clear lack of research and preparation. A case in point was Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin’s announcement of sanctions against the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and his aluminum company, Rusal, in April 2018.20 Lacking a good understanding of how crucial Rusal’s operations were to the global aluminum supply, the Treasury’s decision caused a severe crunch in the London-based market for this industrial metal, now threatened by the sudden removal of a sizeable chunk of global supply. Forced to backtrack, Mnuchin eventually arranged a deal with Deripaska’s company that limited the damage to international markets. But the episode clearly showed how carelessly and quickly imposed U.S. sanctions could seriously destabilize parts of the world economy. In the wake of Trump, the Biden administration has expanded economic sanctions against Russia, modestly in the spring of 2021 and then massively to counter Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine since February 2022. The import and significance of this ongoing campaign of economic pressure—by far the most substantial and wide-ranging international sanctions effort of the twentyfirst century so far—awaits evaluation by future historians. But despite the shock of the Russo-Ukrainian war and the U.S.-led coalition’s support for Kyiv, the most significant long-term sanctions “pivot” initiated in the Trump years concern their use against China. Rivalry with the People’s Republic under Trump found its initial expression in the form of a trade war: the imposition of tariffs against swathes of Chinese exports. The trade war was a shock to reigning global trade norms, but it did not yet involve the use of offensive economic sanctions. This began to change after the 2017 National Security Strategy adopted a new paradigm of strategic competition with the PRC. Chinese investment in U.S. enterprises was targeted by the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act (FIRRMA) of 2018.21 This closing of the U.S. economy to Chinese state capital was the preliminary step in a dramatic escalation. In the second half of his presidential term, Trump launched a battery of sanctions against China’s government, military industry, and leading tech companies, most prominently the telecoms firms ZTE in 2018 and Huawei in 2019 and the semiconductor manufacturer SMIC in 2020.22 These measures reflected a growing bipartisan anti-Beijing posture in the U.S. political elite. Sanctions on Chinese tech firms have since expanded under Biden, which has extended them to firms in allied countries supplying the Chinese semiconductor industry. The prospect of being shut out of global markets has prompted Chinese state-linked enterprises to embark on mass buying sprees of vital inputs. Together with the pandemic-induced supply-chain crisis of 2020–2021, this has further squeezed

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the global supply of rare-earth metals, clogged factories with order backlogs, and contributed to a worldwide chip shortage.23 The arrival in office of the Biden administration in January 2021 accentuated several features of sanctions policy under Trump. On the one hand, Biden’s approach demonstrates more consistency and a return to liberal internationalist rhetoric in the application and justification of sanctions. Yet in terms of sanctions targets, many of the measures implemented under Trump have continued and broadened further. From the point of view of U.S. efforts to counter China in particular, Trump-era sanctions were not an exceptional departure that was quickly corrected but laid the groundwork for intensifying competition continued by a Democratic successor administration. Similar continuities in the U.S. use of sanctions are apparent in their continuation against North Korea and Venezuela; their expansion against Belarus, Iran, and Myanmar; and their massive intensification against Russia.24 This has become particularly clear in the Biden administration’s responses to key foreign policy crises during its first year and a half in office. After a quick withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, the Treasury froze over $7 billion in foreign exchange reserves held by U.S. financial institutions in the name of the Afghan central bank. As a humanitarian crisis gripped the country in the months following the retreat, this asset freeze came under criticism for sustaining economic misery and aggravating famine and malnutrition.25 By September 2022, a U.S.-Taliban deal had been reached in which the Switzerlandbased Bank for International Settlements would administer the funds. Sanctions also became the prime deterrent instrument used by Biden in the face of a Russian military buildup on the borders with Ukraine. When this culminated in a full-scale Russian invasion in late February 2022, the United States, European Union, and other G7 nations imposed sweeping sanctions against Russian banks, high-tech imports, oligarchs, government officials, airlines, and central bank reserves. This is a milestone in the history of sanctions not only because of the severity of the measures but also in terms of the size of Russia’s economy (at $1.5 trillion, the world’s eleventh largest), which dwarfs those of North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran.26 The sanctions campaign has hurt the Russian economy and lowered its long-term growth trajectory significantly. However, early hopes that the sanctions would cause an economic collapse or force a quick retreat or stalemate for the Russian army were too optimistic, as the Russian economy has plodded on, supported by high energy revenues and partial trade diversion to Asia. The most decisive arena of the first months of the war has been the battlefield rather than world economy. Ukrainian forces managed to stop Russian advances using large amounts of Western-supplied equipment, superior tactics, and NATO-provided intelligence.

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The Biden’s administration’s recourse to sanctions has made it clear that Trump’s presidency represented not a temporary but a permanent increase in the use of economic coercion in U.S. foreign policy. In the realm of sanctions, the transition to the post-Trump period has so far been marked by a continuity of antagonisms and policy tools. As it turns out, both Trump’s nationalist unilateralism and Biden’s liberal internationalism both have many uses for the economic weapon. Trump’s actions have rendered Biden’s project of diplomatic restoration significantly more difficult. By aggressively pursuing national self-interest in defiance of existing rules, the Trump administration forfeited much of what remained of U.S. credibility.27 Its repudiation of the JCPOA will have consequences far beyond the Middle East. Abandoning the Iran deal permanently weakened the U.S. position in all international disputes in which sanctions have been imposed to seek behavioral change from other states. Having witnessed what happened to Iran, can North Korea, Venezuela, Russia, and China believe that concessions will lead to prompt and effective sanctions relief? Even if Biden does lift all or most Trump-era sanctions (a scenario that at the time of writing seems increasingly unlikely), he faces the great challenge of convincing these governments that his Republican opponents will not reimpose them if they return to office. Trump’s dark discovery was that Washington incurs very few costs for breaking international agreements; given this fact, can any U.S. administration make believable promises in the future? This credibility problem is a lasting and damaging legacy of the Trump years for U.S. sanctions policy. But the frame of national foreign policy history only captures part of the possible effects of sanctions. Sanctions are invasive tools that affect entire societies and can produce unexpected responses from target states. Historically, these unintended consequences have ranged from compromise to steadfastness to escalation. They cannot be known in advance. This uncertainty makes discretion in the use of sanctions always advisable. In throwing such caution to the wind, the Trumpian stint in the White House initiated a more tumultuous phase in the global history of the twenty-first century—one that seems far from over even after his departure from office.

Notes 1. Classic early works are Margaret P. Doxey, Economic Sanctions and International Enforcement (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1980); and David Baldwin, Economic Statecraft (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). The literature on sanctions is dominated by political scientists and IR scholars using large datasets and quantitative approaches, epitomized by the oft-cited dataset and analysis of Gary Clyde Hufbauer, Jeffrey J. Schott, Kimberly A. Elliott, and Barbara Oegg, Economic Sanctions Reconsidered (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics,

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

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1990). These macrolevel analyses remain dependent on coding hundreds if not thousands of individual sanctions cases along a spectrum of effectiveness based on the judgment of scholars and experts. The methodological problems of case-specific confounding factors and multiple causality were highlighted by the critique of Robert A. Pape, “Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work,” International Security 22, no. 2 (1997): 90–136. As Peter van Bergeijk argues, it is possible “to reach a general conclusion, but this comes at the cost of a deeper understanding of country-specific relationships.” Peter van Bergeijk, “Can the Sanction Debate Be Resolved?” CESifo Forum 20, no. 4 (2019): 8. As a result, there is a lack of general consensus on the question of effectiveness in the overall sanctions literature, even though the most up-to-date datasets tend to indicate that their effectiveness has decreased in recent decades from an already restricted level of effectiveness. See Gabriel Felbermayr et al., “The Global Sanctions Data Base,” European Economic Review 129 (October 2020). For a recent conceptually sophisticated in-depth analysis of three cases (apartheid South Africa, Ba’athist Iraq, and Myanmar), see Lee Jones, Societies Under Siege: How International Economic Sanctions (Do Not) Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). “Trump Targets ICC with Sanctions After Court Opens War Crimes Investigation,” Guardian, June 11, 2020. Edoardo Saravalle, “The Watchful Eye of the US Dollar,” Alchemist Mag 1, no.  5 (May 2021). Richard Nephew, The Art of Sanctions: A View from the Field (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). This is a core insight of Lisa Martin, Coercive Cooperation: Explaining Multilateral Economic Sanctions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). For example, in 2019 U.S. exports and imports amounted to 11.7% and 14.6% of GDP, whereas the global average exports/GDP ratio was 29.5% and imports/GDP about 28.7%. See World Bank data, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE .IMP.GNFS.ZS. “Read the Full Transcript of Trump’s Speech on the Iran Nuclear Deal,” New York Times, May 8, 2018. The initial eight countries benefiting from this waiver system were both U.S. allies (South Korea, Japan, Italy, Greece), territories where U.S. interests were perceived to be at stake (India, Iraq, Taiwan), and rivals whose bilateral trade with Iran was too politically and diplomatically costly for the United States to sever (China). “U.S. Renews Iran Sanctions, Grants Oil Waivers to China, Seven Others,” Reuters, November 5, 2018. Esfandyar Batmanghelidj and Ellie Geranmayeh, “Trading with Iran Via the Special Purpose Vehicle: How It Can Work,” European Council on Foreign Relations, February 7, 2019. IMF data, World Economic Outlook, April 2021. Mohammad Nuruzzuman, “President Trump’s ‘Maximum Pressure’ Campaign and Iran’s Endgame,” Strategic Analysis 44, no. 6 (2020): 570–82; “The Failure of US ‘Maximum Pressure’ Against Iran,” International Crisis Group, March 8, 2021; Hadi Kahalzadeh, “ ‘Maximum Pressure’ Hardened Iran Against Compromise,” Foreign Affairs, March 11, 2021. “White House Raises Pressure on Venezuela with New Financial Sanctions,” New York Times, August 25, 2017; “The Wide Reach of Trump’s Venezuela Sanctions,” Associated Press, August 7, 2019. Jon Lee Anderson, “In Its Fight with Venezuela, the Trump Administration Takes Aim at Cuba,” New Yorker, October 10, 2019.

160 AME RI C A N I N ST I T U T I O N S A N D A L L IANC ES AFT ER T RUM P 14. Michael Shifter, “‘It Worked in Panama.’ This Is Not True,” New York Times, August 8, 2019. 15. Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs, “Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela,” Center for Economic and Policy Research, April 25, 2019. 16. “Venezuela’s Capital Is Booming. Is This the End of the Revolution?,” New York Times, February 1, 2020; “How a Vast Network Allowed Venezuela to Evade US Oil Sanctions,” El País, June 16, 2021. 17. U.S. Department of the Treasury, “Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act,” 2017. 18. “Saudi Arabia Agrees to Buy Russian S-400 Air Defense System,” Reuters, October 5, 2017; Paul Iddon, “Why Are Egypt and Turkey Risking US Sanctions for These Russian Weapons Systems?” Forbes, August 5, 2020; Ian J. Lynch, “The S-400 Knot in US-Turkey Relations: Assessing the Viability of US Sanctions,” Lawfare, December 11, 2020; “India’s Friction with US Rises Over Planned Purchase of Russian S-400 Defence Systems,” Reuters, January 15, 2021. 19. This point is explored in the work of Daniel Drezner, “Serious About Sanctions,” National Interest 53 (Fall 1998): 66–74. 20. Henry Foy and David Sheppard, “US Sanctions on Oligarchs Set to Resonate Globally,” Financial Times, April 8, 2018. 21. Stephanie Zable, “The Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act of 2018,” Lawfare, August 2, 2018. 22. See Covington & Burling LLP, “Department of Commerce Activates Denial Order Against Chinese Telecommunications,” April 20, 2018; Kate O’Keefe, John D. McKinnon, and Dan Strumpf, “Trump Steps Up Assault on China’s Huawei,” Wall Street Journal, May 15, 2019; “U.S. Blacklists More Than 60 Chinese Firms, Including SMIC,” Bloomberg, December 18, 2020. 23. Qu Hui et al., “How a Perfect Storm Created the Global Chip Shortage,” Nikkei Asia, June 1, 2021. 24. Amy Mackinnon, “Sanctions Deadline Looms Ahead of Biden’s Summit with Putin,” Foreign Policy, May 26, 2021. 25. “US Policy is Fueling Afghanistan’s Humanitarian Crisis,” Vox, January 22, 2022. 26. “Nicholas Mulder, Who Studies Sanctions, Declares a Watershed in Global Economic History,” Economist, March 4, 2022. 27. A point made well by Jonathan Kirshner, “Gone but Not Forgotten: Trump’s Long Shadow and the End of American Credibility,” Foreign Affairs, March–April 2021.

CHAPTER 15

DONALD TRUMP AND THE TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO- GOOD, VERY BAD DEAL S U SA N CO L B O U R N

D

onald Trump’s disdain for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is no secret. After launching his presidential bid in June 2015, he offered up memorable soundbites and caustic tweets, touching off a steady parade of transatlantic tizzies. On the campaign trail in 2016, the reality-television-star-turned-Republican-presidential-candidate famously lambasted the Atlantic Alliance as “obsolete.”1 Once in office, the hits kept coming. After months of will-he-won’t-he speculation about whether Trump would endorse Article 5, the guarantee at the heart of the North Atlantic Treaty, his aides indicated that he would finally do so in a high-profile speech at NATO Headquarters in May 2017 to dedicate a new September 11 monument. Instead, at the allied gathering, Trump turned on his fellow leaders, berating them and, at one point, pushing past Duško Marković, the prime minister of Montenegro. “You’re a world leader at a meeting of dignitaries and you act like they just called your number at KFC,” the late-night host Seth Meyers joked of the incident. “Me, that’s mine, the twelve piece.”2 In July 2018, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, Trump cast yet more doubt on his commitment to Article 5. The Fox News host asked why, if Montenegro were attacked, “should my son go to Montenegro to defend it?” “I understand what you’re saying,” Trump replied. “I’ve asked the same question.”3 Reports in January 2019 suggested that the president had contemplated walking away from the alliance entirely the previous summer.4 Should Trump have secured

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a second term, former administration officials warned that the president might follow through on his earlier musings and pull the United States out of NATO.5 Chief among Trump’s complaints was a sense that NATO was somehow unfair—a bad deal for the United States. In this chapter, I will consider Trump’s perennial complaints about the United States bearing the burden of the alliance and where they fit in NATO’s history more broadly. What was new about Trump’s critique? What wasn’t? And, what does this curious blend of old and new, in style and substance, tell us about the history of the Atlantic Alliance and the United States’ role therein? Trump was not an outlier. His broad outlook on NATO, though often expressed in unvarnished and off-the-cuff remarks that seemed an outlandish departure from past precedent, tapped into a long tradition in Washington. Over the years, policy makers and pundits across the political spectrum have bemoaned a European desire to free ride off the largesse of the American taxpayer. But Trump’s brash political style whipped up a new sense of profound crisis, even as his central complaints bore a striking similarity to decades past. At a campaign stop in Racine, Wisconsin, in 2016, the then-candidate doubled down on his earlier comments, ripping into Washington’s allies for failing to pay “their fair share.” “That means,” he insisted, “we are protecting them, giving them military protection and other things, and they’re ripping off the United States. And you know what we do? Nothing.”6 “We’re protecting those guys,” Trump remarked at another campaign appearance, “and we’re supposed to get into World War III for all these countries that aren’t paying their fair share.”7 An August 2019 tweet summed up these sentiments even more succinctly: “@NATO, very unfair to the United States!”8 Even in more moderate moments, the president remained fixated on the costs borne by Washington. “It got to be unfair for the United States,” he suggested in a December 2019 press conference with NATO’s secretary general Jens Stoltenberg, in which Stoltenberg praised Trump’s “strong commitment” to the alliance. The source of that “unfair” arrangement? That the United States “was paying a disproportionate amount.”9 Trump’s transactional thinking should hardly come as a surprise. On this, he has been remarkably consistent. In 1987, he spent almost $100,000 to take out a full-page spread in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe to rail against standing U.S. policy. Though primarily aimed at Japan, the advertisement’s insistence that “America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves” sounds strikingly familiar to observers of Trump’s NATO policy three decades later.10 To be sure, that attitude elicited more than a few scoffs. Scholars and pundits familiar with the ins and outs of NATO missed few opportunities to point out that Trump’s various takes reflected a dismal understanding of how the

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Atlantic Alliance actually works.11 NATO is not, in fact, a protection racket. As one 2018 Time headline put it, “Donald Trump Says NATO Allies Owe the U.S. Money. He’s Wrong.”12 Trump was more than happy to blast allies in public, armed with his nowdefunct Twitter account. With cries of “Just doesn’t work!” and “Fairness!,” he regularly returned to the question of sharing the burden and touted his ability to make change happen.13 “I got NATO countries to pay 530 Billion Dollars a year more, and the U.S. less,” he posted on December 8, 2019, one in a string of tweets on the subject surrounding NATO’s seventieth anniversary summit in London, before going on to complain that the “Fake News Media” had refused to report on these successes.14 Trump’s grievances, aired in Twitter broadsides and rapid-fire reactions, were often petty and personal. Take, for example, the spat that erupted between the president and his French counterpart, President Emmanuel Macron, in November 2018, shortly after Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. At Verdun, Macron insisted that “we must have a Europe that can defend itself on its own without relying only on the United States.”15 Trump took to the internet to respond, tweeting, “Very insulting, but perhaps Europe should first pay its fair share of NATO, which the U.S. subsidizes greatly!”16 A few days later, the president circled back. “Emmanuel Macron suggests building its own army to protect Europe against the U.S., China and Russia,” Trump tweeted on November 13. “But it was Germany in World Wars One & Two—How did that work out for France? They were starting to learn German in Paris before the U.S. came along. Pay for NATO or not!”17 Nor was Macron his only target. In late 2019, after the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation trimmed Trump’s cameo in Home Alone 2 to make room for advertisements, the president tweeted a link to news coverage from a Fox News affiliate in Tampa Bay along with the caption, “I guess Justin T,” a reference to Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, “doesn’t much like my making him pay up on NATO or Trade!”18 When the G7 met in June 2018, Trump reportedly lobbed a handful of Starburst candies onto the table in front of German chancellor Angela Merkel before remarking, “Here, Angela. Don’t say I never give you anything.”19 Beyond a seeming lack of filter or sense of decorum, Trump’s outspoken critiques so often stunned because they fit squarely within a broader message. His willingness to complain about key U.S. allies—and to do so in public, highprofile settings—could easily be seen as an extension of his political brand and more generic slogans trotted out by the president like “America First.”20 That language tapped into broader unilateralist impulses in U.S. foreign policy and stoked perennial concerns that the political establishment in Washington might turn away from NATO.21 But it did so with a particularly Trumpian edge, what

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Alessandro Brogi in chapter 37 of this volume describes as a “transactional type of nationalism” that struck at Europeans’ most basic fears. Yet Trump’s attitudes toward NATO seemed to find little sustained support among the electorate. Recent polling suggests strong bipartisan backing for the Atlantic Alliance.22 And, in some quarters, support for NATO might even be viewed as an outright rejection of Trump’s politics writ large. When the 2020 election was finally called for Trump’s Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, at least one enthusiastic denizen of Washington, DC, took to the streets wrapped in the NATO flag.23 As no shortage of thinkpieces has reminded us in recent years, there are historical antecedents to the substance of Trump’s complaints, if not their style. In 2011, to give one popular example, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates warned of a “dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress—and in the American body politic writ large—to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.”24 When Trump’s first secretary of defense, James Mattis, attended his first NATO meeting in February 2017, he referenced Gates’s earlier arguments as he made the case for increased allied spending, telling colleagues that “Americans cannot care more for your children’s future security than you do.”25 Complaining about the defense contributions of NATO’s other members is a time-honored tradition in Washington, long predating Mattis and Gates. President Dwight D. Eisenhower griped that the Europeans were “close to ‘making a sucker out of Uncle Sam.’ ”26 “You have to pay your fair share,” Barack Obama reportedly told British prime minister David Cameron, in a phrase that could have easily come out of the mouth of his successor.27 Examples of this abound. “Literally every U.S. defense secretary,” as Kori Schake reminded readers in early 2017, “has pleaded, cajoled, darkly warned, and threatened allies with the dire reckoning to come if Americans continue to shoulder this much of the common burden.”28 Administrations, both Democratic and Republican, have struggled to secure greater defense contributions from fellow NATO members. President John F. Kennedy explicitly pushed for a more equitable division of expenditures between the Western allies,29 while Jimmy Carter’s team pressed for each to reach a spending target of 3 percent, though how, exactly, that figure would be calculated remained a mystery. Press reports indicated that the Carter administration had used no fewer than three different formulas to calculate that percentage in the period between June 1977 and January 1978 alone.30 This problem might seem familiar: it’s based on a kind of math that continues to confound policy makers on both sides of the Atlantic. These efforts—and countless similar initiatives over the decades—have run up against a basic tension. The architects of these policies have weighed their

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desire to share the burden more equitably against reservations about what a more equitable transatlantic bargain might mean for policy—and for U.S. power and influence—should they ultimately succeed. Here, again, we could point to a host of examples where talk of European strategic autonomy or schemes for Franco-German cooperation rattled policy makers in Washington who, despite their pleas for Europeans to do more, took little of comfort away from discussions of what that might mean in practice. None of these underlying tensions have evaporated with a change of administration. To be sure, Trump’s tough talk framed the Biden administration’s early moves in obvious ways. On the campaign trail, reassurance was the Democrat’s watchword. And, in office, Biden and his foreign policy advisers have offered repeated promises that the United States is “back.” “America is back, the transatlantic alliance is back,” Biden promised listeners, speaking to the Munich Security Conference in February 2021. “I know the past few years have strained and tested our transatlantic relationship,” he continued, “but the United States is determined—determined—to re-engage with Europe, to consult with you, to earn back our position of trust and leadership.”31 Biden’s remarks at the Munich Security Conference made no mention of Trump, but they scarcely needed to for his audience to connect the dots. The core message was unmistakable. After all, reengagement requires someone to have disengaged at an earlier point. And early administration pronouncements touted plans to “reaffirm, invest in, and modernize” the Atlantic Alliance.32 But what does it mean for the United States to be “back”? Here, the Biden administration will confront familiar questions about how the burden should be shouldered within the Atlantic Alliance, what constitutes each ally’s “fair share,” and how to reconcile U.S. leadership—something the Biden team has made clear is a critical part of the United States being “back”—with increases in other allies’ defense expenditures. Already, in February 2021, Macron reiterated the need for enhanced European capabilities, maintaining that such a move would strengthen the Atlantic Alliance as a whole.33 Will those in Washington agree? Desirable in the abstract, the prospect of a more powerful and autonomous Europe has not always been a welcome development. NATO’s history, to paraphrase a popular aphorism, is just one damn crisis after another. Trump’s term in office was certainly no different. But I remain struck by the crisis that did not occur. The United States, for all the president’s complaints and press speculation to the contrary, did not walk away from the Atlantic Alliance. Why? What made NATO different from the other international agreements that the president also tagged as unfair deals? Trump’s refusal to withdraw from NATO could be the product of a successful campaign on the part of some of the president’s foreign policy advisers or indicative of a disconnect between how the administration talked about foreign

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policy and what policies the president hoped to implement. It could be the product of political inertia, with the administration sticking to the path already charted and not doing the hard work of changing course. Secretary General Stoltenberg’s public posture undoubtedly made it easier for Trump to stay, as NATO’s highest representative doubled down on much of the substance of Trump’s complaints about how the burdens of the alliance were shared.34 Before a joint session of Congress in April 2019, Stoltenberg reaffirmed Trump’s calls in no uncertain terms. “NATO allies must spend more on defense,” he argued. “This has been the clear message from President Trump. And this message is having a real impact.”35 There are, of course, limits to what we can know now. But, as more and more policy makers speak out, archivists tape back together various bits of administration documents, and historians delve into the record, the pressing issue will be how and why that particular dog did not bark.

Notes 1. Ashley Parker, “Donald Trump Says NATO Is ‘Obsolete,’ UN Is ‘Political Game,’ ” New York Times, April 2, 2016. 2. Samantha Schmidt, “Breaking Down Trump’s ‘Shove,’ ” Washington Post, May 26, 2017. 3. Krishnadev Calamur, “Trump Goes After Montenegro, a ‘Tiny Country’ with ‘Aggressive People,’ ” Atlantic, July 18, 2018. 4. Julian E. Barnes and Helene Cooper, “Trump Discussed Pulling U.S. from NATO, Aides Say Amid New Concerns Over Russia,” New York Times, January 14, 2019. 5. Andrew McDonald, “John Bolton: Trump Could Pull US Out of NATO,” Politico (Europe), October 1, 2020. 6. Parker, “Donald Trump Says NATO Is ‘Obsolete.’ ” 7. Donald J. Trump, “Remarks at the KI Convention Center in Green Bay, Wisconsin,” August 5, 2016, American Presidency Project. 8. Trump, Twitter post, August 21, 2019, 1:43 PM EST. All Tweets, now deleted from Twitter, have been accessed at the Trump Twitter Archive. 9. “Remarks by President Trump and NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg After 1:1 Meeting, London, United Kingdom,” December 3, 2019. 10. On Trump’s attitudes toward Japan from a historical perspective, see Jennifer M. Miller, “Let’s Not Be Laughed at Anymore: Donald Trump and Japan from the 1980s to the Present,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations 25, no. 2 (2018): 138–68. 11. See, for one such example, Stanley R. Sloan, “Donald Trump and NATO: Historic Alliance Meets A-Historic President,” H-Diplo, June 8, 2017. 12. W. J. Hennigan, “Donald Trump Says NATO Allies Owe the U.S. Money. He’s Wrong,” Time, July 11, 2018. 13. Trump, Twitter post, July 10, 2018, 2:52 PM EST; Donald J. Trump, Twitter post, December 8, 2018, 7:52 AM EST. 14. Trump, Twitter post, December 8, 2019, 2:59 PM EST. 15. “France’s Macron Pushes for ‘True European Army,’ ” BBC News, November 6, 2018. 16. Trump, Twitter post, November 9, 2018, 4:10 PM EST.

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17. Trump, Twitter post, November 13, 2018, 6:50 AM EST. 18. Trump, Twitter post, December 26, 2019, 7:03 PM EST. Quoted Tweet was FOX 13 Tampa Bay, Twitter post, December 26, 2019, 12:15 PM EST. 19. Cristina Maza, “Donald Trump Threw Starburst Candies at Angela Merkel, Said ‘Don’t Say I Never Give You Anything,’ ” Newsweek, June 20, 2018. 20. On the idea of “America First,” see Melvyn P. Leffler and William I. Hitchcock, eds., “America First: The Past and Future of An Idea,” Passport, September 2018, 33–51. 21. The prospect that the rise of unilateralist or isolationist politics in the United States posed a significant threat to NATO is showcased in Sayle’s argument about the dangers of the ballot box as a critical through line in NATO’s history: Timothy Andrews Sayle, Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 4. 22. For some recent polling, Joshua Busby et al., “Coming Together or Coming Apart? Attitudes of Foreign Policy Opinion Leaders and the Public in the Trump Era,” Chicago Council on Global Affairs, 2020, 5. 23. Idrees Ali, Twitter post, November 7, 2020, 2:03 PM EST. 24. Quoted in Thom Shanker, “Defense Secretary Warns NATO of ‘Dim’ Future,” New York Times, June 11, 2011. 25. Helene Cooper, “Defense Secretary Mattis Tells NATO Allies to Spend More, or Else,” New York Times, February 15, 2017. 26. “Memorandum of Conference with President Eisenhower,” November 4, 1959, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, vol. 7, part 1, ed. Ronald D. Landa et al. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993), doc. 226. 27. Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine,” Atlantic, April 2016. 28. Kori Schake, “NATO’s in Crisis (Again!),” Foreign Policy, February 16, 2017. 29. John F. Kennedy, “The President’s News Conference,” March 1, 1961, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1961 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962), 142. 30. “That ‘3 Percent’ for Defense,” Washington Post, December 27, 1978. 31. “President Biden Remarks to the Munich Security Conference,” February 19, 2021, C-SPAN. 32. “Interim National Security Strategic Guidance,” March 2021. 33. Roula Khalaf, Ben Hall, and Victor Mallet, “Emmanuel Macron: ‘For Me, the Key Is Multilateralism that Produces Results,’ ” Financial Times, February 18, 2021. 34. Leonard August Schuette, “Why NATO Survived Trump: The Neglected Role of Secretary-General Stoltenberg,” International Affairs 97, no. 6 (2021): 1863–81. 35. “NATO: Good for Europe and Good for America,” address to joint session of Congress, April 3, 2019.

CHAPTER 16

TRUMP’S TRANSACTIONAL FOLLIES The Consequences of Treating the Arms Trade Like a Business JENNIFER SPINDEL

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espite what former President Donald Trump would like to believe, international relations is not purely transactional. States, particularly great powers, often do things that follow a political rather than an economic logic. Great powers provide public goods for their allies, even if those allies sometimes free ride. They maintain a network of bases and military forces stationed in foreign countries and offer allies and friendly states various trade deals.1 President Trump’s business approach to international relations often overlooked or ignored many of the nuanced norms of international politics. This was particularly visible when it came to the arms trade, where Trump’s focus on the bottom line ignored the political consequences of arms sales. States use arms sales to send signals about political alignments. For example, in 2019 the United States sent Javelin missiles to Ukraine to express support for Ukraine and against Russian aggression, a message that was sent and received even though the missiles were never intended to make it to the front lines.2 Trump’s transactional approach to international politics created a mismatch between U.S. foreign policy goals and U.S. signals sent by arms sales. The Biden administration is looking to change course and has suggested it will revise U.S. armssales policies to align with its foreign policy goals and reassure allies of continued U.S. commitments.3 The United States, like most major powers, uses arms sales to send signals about its political relationships. Receiving, or not receiving, certain arms can

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be a way of welcoming a state into the inner circle or of drawing a sharp line between core and peripheral allies. For example, U.S. military sales and assistance manuals—key policy documents for selling arms—all state, “The willingness of the U.S. Government to sell military equipment varies country by country in accordance with the military requirement, ability to maintain and use, compatibility with existing inventory, and impact on the preconceptions and the actions of the buyer’s neighbors.”4 In other words, the United States expects its arms sales to send a signal about its relationship with the buyer and expects this signal to affect the behaviors of neighboring states. Concern with signaling and preconceptions explains why the United States and NATO allies were so enraged by Turkey’s purchase of Russian S-400 missile-defense systems in July  2019. As one scholar explained, “It’s a political statement that the U.S. doesn’t have hegemony and control over NATO members and particularly over Turkey.”5 The United States was concerned that the S-400 purchase foreshadowed a bigger rift between Turkey and NATO.6 Providing arms is one way for a state to signal political closeness and endorse the behavior of the receiver, just as receiving arms can be a way of claiming political support and demonstrating one’s political alignments. Yet the Trump administration ignored nearly all of these signaling dynamics and as a result sent confused signals that complicated U.S. relationships with allies and adversaries alike.

It’s Not Just the Economy One of the consistent refrains under the Trump administration was that arms sales would create jobs at home. Trump believed that he could create a “Buy America” plan that would increase U.S. arms sales, and he expected U.S. diplomats to “be salesmen” and promoters of U.S. weaponry.7 He said that the United States should sell $110 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia because that money would be an investment in the U.S. economy and would create “hundreds of thousands of jobs, tremendous economic development, and much additional wealth.”8 But as Jonathan Caverley points out, arms sales are very poor job creators: Lockheed Martin estimated that a $6 billion helicopter deal would potentially create 450 U.S. jobs.9 Nonetheless, the Trump administration acted under the assumption that selling arms was a good business idea and ultimately sold arms to countries that previous administrations had blocked for political reasons. For example, he unlocked $3 billion in arms sales to Bahrain, which the Obama administration had paused because of human rights concerns.10 This general approach of prioritizing economics over politics meant that previous political concerns, including human rights, took a back seat. As the Stimson Center’s Rachel Stohl noted, “This administration has demonstrated from the

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very beginning that human rights have taken a back seat to economic concerns.”11 With economic concerns at the fore, U.S. arms sales under Trump overlooked the ways in which governments can use arms sales (or embargoes) to pursue political goals. Even if withholding arms transfers has questionable effects on human rights behaviors, withholding arms can be an important normative step.12 Previous research has suggested that instances of human rights violations do affect U.S. decisions to sell certain weapons.13 Trump’s transactional approach meant that he was unable to appreciate these political consequences of arms sales. Deciding to sell arms to Bahrain was just one example of the shift in focus for arms sales under the Trump presidency. In a national security presidential memorandum of April 19, 2018, the administration emphasized U.S. competitiveness, jobs, and supporting U.S. manufacturers as the key criteria for selling arms. The memorandum lists eight policies for selling arms; all but one focus on competitiveness and technological advantages in manufacturing. The lone noneconomic criterion mentions reducing “the risk of national or coalition operations causing civilian harms.”14 In the section on the economic security of the United States, the memorandum promises to “simplify the regulatory environment” for selling arms abroad. As William Hartung noted, this often means downgrading the importance of human rights and other strategic concerns.15 One immediate consequence of treating arms sales like a business, then, was a missed opportunity to use arms sales to try to improve human rights behaviors.

Arms Sales and Signaling Overlooking human rights considerations was an immediate effect of the Trump administration’s approach to arms sales. There are likely to be longerterm consequences given the administration’s lack of understanding about the political dynamics that are the main drivers of the arms trade. States use arms sales to signal their political alignment with—and to approve of the behaviors of—other states.16 Arms sales to Saudi Arabia approved by the administration signaled U.S. support for Saudi military action and missed the opportunity to signal discontent with the Saudi regime after the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018. Similarly, Trump saw U.S. arms sales to Taiwan as both a business deal and a way to score points domestically, overlooking the rift that the sales caused with China precisely because of the signals sent by arms transfers. These are just two examples of the Trump administration’s lack of understanding about the arms trade, which meant it sent signals about political alignment without even recognizing that it was sending these messages.

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Signaling Support for Saudi Arabia In April 2019, President Trump used the veto—for only the second time during his term—to block legislation intended to stop U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia.17 Congress had wanted to halt arms sales after the murder of Khashoggi inside the Saudi embassy in Turkey in October 2018.18 Stopping arms sales was one way for the United States to express its outrage and displeasure with Saudi Arabia.19 By contrast, numerous European states enacted a ban on selling arms to Saudi Arabia and linked this ban to Saudi behavior. The European Parliament also voted for an EU-wide embargo against Saudi Arabia.20 Although scholars have debated the overall effects of arms embargoes, there is no doubt that even a temporary pause or halt to arms sales sends a political signal.21 As Lawrence Freedman observed in 1978, “refusing to sell arms is a major political act. It appears as a calculated insult, reflecting on the stability, trust, and credit-worthiness, or technical competence of the would-be recipient.”22 In announcing Germany’s ban on arms sales, Chancellor Angela Merkel articulated this logic, saying that “we are far from this [the Khashoggi incident] having been cleared up and those responsible held to account.”23 The steps taken by the European states stand in stark contrast to U.S. behavior. When asked about the murder of Khashoggi and whether the United States planned to stop arms sales, Trump said that Saudi Arabia had pledged to spend billions on arms, which “means something to me.”24 Displeased with the attempt by Congress to halt arms sales, Trump said that an embargo would “weaken America’s global competitiveness,” again revealing his belief that the arms trade was all about making money.25 As one scholar noted, continued U.S. arms sales essentially told “the Saudis that the U.S. is firmly in their concern . . . the Trump administration more or less supports you to the hills [sic].”26 Emboldened by the continued support of the United States, Saudi Arabia pushed ahead with its brutal policies. There was no internal reckoning after the murder of Khashoggi and multiple reports about the direct involvement of the Crown Prince; nor was there any change in Saudi Arabia’s approach to the war in Yemen, for which it has also been criticized. The United Nations labeled Yemen the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, and the United States faced domestic and foreign criticism of its materiel support for Saudi Arabia’s war efforts.27 Trump sold nearly $7 billion in precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia, despite concerns that these weapons would be used against civilian populations in Yemen.28 The State Department’s Inspector General determined that the issue of civilian casualties was not fully assessed in these transfer decisions.29 The continued flow of arms and implied U.S. approval of Saudi military action contributed to an increase in civilian casualties in Yemen. In late January 2021, President Biden announced an end to U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen and a hold on some arms sales—including

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precision-guided bombs—a sharp break from U.S. policy under the Trump administration.30 Importantly, in announcing these changes, Biden linked them to “re-forming the habits of cooperation and rebuilding the muscles of democratic alliances that have atrophied over the past few years of neglect.”31 One of the first leaders Biden spoke to was Merkel, a proponent of a continued arms embargo against Saudi Arabia.32

Tangling with Taiwan and China The Trump administration’s economic view of arms sales did not simply affect U.S.-Saudi relations. China, which views Taiwan as a renegade province, sees U.S. arms sales to Taiwan as a violation of the “one China” policy.33 Although the United States officially recognized mainland China in 1979, it has continued to sell arms to Taiwan; each sale has been taken by China as a sign that U.S.-Taiwan relations were improving or that the United States wanted to slight China.34 However, Trump’s transactional approach overlooked this contentious history, and throughout his term he approved and encouraged the sale of weapons to Taiwan. Trump either did not understand or did not care that providing arms to Taiwan was a strong signal of U.S. support, which would anger China and contribute to the deterioration of U.S.-China relations. In June 2017, the United States announced arms sales to Taiwan that included torpedoes, air-to-ground missiles, and early-warning radar equipment.35 China objected to this $1.4 billion sale: a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said that the deal would hurt China and ran counter to Washington’s commitment to the “one China” policy.36 Although the Obama administration had considered arms sales to Taiwan, the Trump administration made the decision to go ahead, and that choice was taken as a sign of closeness between the United States and Taiwan.37 This deal, which followed an announcement of new sanctions against China, increased the perception that the United States was interested in exploring new relations with Taiwan.38 The Chinese embassy in Washington reacted with “outrage” and said that the arms sale undermined the consensus that Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping had reached at Trump’s private club, Mar-a-Lago, a few months prior.39 The process was repeated in August 2019, when the United States announced $8 billion in F-16 fighter-jet sales, which was the largest single arms transaction between the two countries.40 A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said that the United States was violating Chinese sovereignty and interfering in China’s internal affairs.41 Unwilling or unable to see the political consequences of the decisions to sell arms, the Trump administration announced an additional $5.1 billion in arms sales to Taiwan in 2020 alone, including aerial drones, missile-defense systems, and rocket launchers.42

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U.S. arms sales to Taiwan did not affect the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait. But the sales negatively affected U.S.-China relations because China saw the sales as an unacceptable signal of U.S. political support for Taiwan. As a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said in October 2020, the arms sales “send a seriously wrong signal to Taiwan independence forces, and severely damage China-US relations and peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.”43 Fearful the U.S. sales would bolster Taiwanese independence efforts, China announced sanctions against the arms manufacturers Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin and additionally warned the United States against selling additional arms.44

The Future of U.S. Arms Sales Recognizing the political fallout of Trump’s arms-sale policies, the Biden administration enacted an immediate pause and review of all pending arms sales. This allowed it to consider many of the key issues that were ignored under the Trump administration, including human rights violations.45 Moving forward, the administration has an opportunity to correct course by aligning with American allies to use arms sales to achieve major foreign policy goals. What would an arms-sale policy that accounts for politics and signaling look like? A signaling approach to arms sales would have seen the Biden administration support Germany’s extended ban on arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Joining the embargo would have signaled both U.S. alignment with Germany (a key European and NATO ally), as well as U.S. disapproval of Saudi actions in Yemen. Since Saudi Arabia received more than 60 percent of its arms over the past five years from the United States, an embargo would both be a strong signal and could force behavioral change.46 However, Biden declined to directly penalize Saudi Arabia’s crown prince for his role in the murder of Khashoggi.47 Further, in November 2021 Biden approved the sale to Saudi Arabia of $650 million in air-to-air missiles.48 Biden was trying to walk a fine line between supporting Saudi Arabia and condemning its actions in Yemen. Key U.S. officials met with their Saudi counterparts to talk about the war in Yemen, and Biden announced that the United States would end support for offensive Saudi operations in Yemen.49 These statements are weakened, however, by continued U.S. arms sales to the Saudi government. The United States missed its opportunity to collaborate with Germany to signal strong condemnation of Saudi Arabia: in September  2022, Germany authorized the sale of equipment and ammunition for Eurofighter and Typhoon jets.50 With arms now flowing from the last holdout, the United States (and Germany) have tacitly said that a four-year hiatus was enough punishment for Saudi Arabia’s actions. The resumption of arms sales

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from Germany will also make it more difficult for the United States and others to condemn ongoing Saudi action in Yemen. Beyond arms sales to Saudi Arabia, the Biden administration is already taking steps to revise the Trump administration’s national security presidential memorandum that emphasized economics over politics and human rights in arms sales.51 This would allow the United States to reprioritize—to some degree—human rights and would demonstrate a renewed understanding of the political nuances of selling arms.52 Elsewhere, the Biden administration has recognized the signals sent by arms sales. Despite promising talks with Indian officials in March of this year, the administration is still concerned about India purchasing arms from Russia. India’s purchase of the S-400 missile-defense system shows that Indian-U.S. relations are not fully in sync and that the purchase from Russia indicates “lingering skepticism” about more closely aligning with the United States.53 The specifics of this deal matter less than the fact that the policy discourse in the United States is now aware of the signals that arms sales send about political alignment. Trump’s transactional approach to arms sales largely represented a break from the more politically aware approach to arms sales under previous administrations. Addressing the consequences—from a deemphasis on human rights to sleights to allies and boosts to adversaries—will require a deeper consideration of what signals are sent in selling arms. The Biden administration’s pause and review is one step in that direction and toward using arms as a tool of statecraft rather than merely as economic transactions.

Notes 1. Bruce Klingner, Jung H. Pak, and Sue Mi Terry, “Trump Shakedowns Are Threatening Two Key US Alliances in Asia,” Brookings (blog), December 18, 2019, https://www . brookings . edu / blog /order - from - chaos /2019 / 12 / 18 / trump - shakedowns - are -threatening-two-key-u-s-alliances-in-asia /; Brian Blankenship, “Promises Under Pressure: Reassurance and Burden-Sharing in Asymmetric Alliances,” Columbia University, 2018, https://doi.org /10.7916/D8281QPF; Michael  J. Lostumbo, Michael  J. McNerney, Eric Peltz, et al., Overseas Basing of US Military Forces: An Assessment of Relative Costs and Strategic Benefits (Rand Corporation, 2013), https://www.rand.org /pubs/research _ reports/RR201.html; Patrick Mills, Adam Grissom, Jennifer Kavanagh, et al., A Cost Analysis of the US Air Force Overseas Posture: Informing Strategic Choices, Research Report RR-150-AF (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 2013), https://www. rand .org /content /dam /rand /pubs /research _ reports / RR100 / RR150 /RAND_ RR150.sum.pdf; Joanne Gowa, Allies, Adversaries, and International Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 2. Luis Martinez, “What Are Javelin Missiles and Why They’re Being Mentioned Repeatedly During the Impeachment Hearings,” ABC News, November  15, 2019,

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4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

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https://abcnews .go.com /Politics/javelin-missiles-ukraine/story?id = 65855233; Amy MacKinnon and Lara Seligman, “Far from the Front Lines, Javelin Missiles Go Unused in Ukraine,” Foreign Policy, October  3, 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com /2019 /10 /03 /far -from - the -front - lines - javelin -missiles - go - unused -in - ukraine /; Fred Kaplan, “Why Ukraine Matters,” Slate, November  1, 2019, https://slate.com /news-and-politics/2019/11 /trump -ukraine-aid-javelins- obama .html. Remarks by President Biden, February 4, 2021, “America’s Place in the World,” Speech given at U.S. Department of State Headquarters, Washington, DC, https://www .whitehouse.gov/ briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/02/04/remarks-by-president -biden-on-americas-place-in-the-world/; Shimon Arad, “The Ambivalent Supplier: US Arms Transfer Policy Under Biden,” War on the Rocks (blog), November 10, 2021, https://warontherocks .com /2021 /11 /the - ambivalent - supplier -u - s - arms -transfer -policy-under-biden/. United States Military Sales and Assistance Manual, 1973, p. F-2, emphasis added, http://www.samm.dsca.mil/samm-archive/1973-masm-archive. Quoted in “First Shipment of Russian S-400 Systems Delivered to Turkey,” Al Jazeera, July 12, 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/7/12/first-shipment-of-russian-s -400-systems-delivered-to-turkey. Selim Sazak, “Why Did Turkey Buy Russian—Not Western—Missile Defense Systems?,” Washington Post, July  17, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com /politics /2019/07/17/why-did-turkey-buy-russian-s-s/; Jennifer Spindel, “What Turkey’s Purchase of a Russian Air Defense System Means for the US and NATO,” Washington Post, July 23, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/07/23/what-turkeys -s-purchase-means-us-nato/. Mike Stone and Matt Spetalnick, “Exclusive: Trump to Call on Pentagon, Diplomats to Play Bigger Arms Sales Role—Sources,” Reuters, January  8, 2018, https://www .reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-weapons-idUSKBN1EX0WX. Glenn Kessler, “Analysis | Trump’s $110 Billion in Arms Sales to Saudi Arabia: Still Fake,” Washington Post, October 11, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics /2018/10/11 /trumps-billion-arms-sales-saudi-arabia-still-fake/; Alexia Fernández Campbell, “Trump Says Selling Weapons to Saudi Arabia Will Create a Lot of Jobs. That’s Not True,” Vox, October 17, 2018, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018 /10/17/17967510/trump-saudi-arabia-arms-sales-khashoggi. Jonathan D. Caverley, “Want to Punish Saudi Arabia? Cut Off Its Weapons Supply,” New York Times, October 12, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/opinion/saudi -arabia-arms-sales.html; Ethan B. Kapstein and Jonathan Caverley, “Biden Must Base Arms Sales on US Interests—Not US Jobs,” Foreign Policy (blog), February 25, 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com /2021 /02 /25/ biden-must-base -arms-sales-on-u-s-interests -not-u-s-jobs/; See also Jennifer Spindel, “With Arms Sales, ‘It’s Not Just the Economy, Stupid,’ ” Duck of Minerva (blog), October 12, 2018, https://duckofminerva.com/2018 /10/with-arms-sales-its-not-just-the-economy-stupid.html. Mike Stone and Matt Spetalnick, “Exclusive: Trump to Call on Pentagon, Diplomats to Play Bigger Arms Sales Role—Sources,” Reuters, January  8, 2018, https://www .reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-weapons-idUSKBN1EX0WX. Stone and Spetalnick, “Exclusive.” Jennifer Erickson, “Punishing the Violators? Arms Embargoes and Economic Sanctions as Tools of Norm Enforcement,” Review of International Studies 46, no. 1 (2020): 96–120. Jennifer Erickson, Dangerous Trade: Arms Exports, Human Rights, and International Reputation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Richard A. I. Johnson and

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18. 19.

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Spencer L. Willardson, “Human Rights and Democratic Arms Transfers: Rhetoric Versus Reality with Different Types of Major Weapon Systems,” International Studies Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2018): 453– 64; Shannon Lindsey Blanton, “Promoting Human Rights and Democracy in the Developing World: US Rhetoric Versus US Arms Exports,” American Journal of Political Science 44, no. 1 (January 1, 2000): 123–31; Jennifer Erickson, “Stopping the Legal Flow of Weapons: Compliance with Arms Embargoes, 1981–2004,” Journal of Peace Research 50, no. 2 (2013): 159–74. Administration of Donald Trump, National Security Presidential Memorandum NSPM-10, April 19, 2018, p. 2, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/DCPD-201800254 /pdf/DCPD-201800254.pdf. William Hartung, “Trump Policy and Trends in US Arms Sales,” Reinventing Peace (blog), June 21, 2019, https://sites.tufts.edu/reinventingpeace/2019/06/21/trump-policy -and-trends-in-u-s-arms-sales/. For a discussion of the politics of selling arms, see Alexandra Stark, “Proposed UAE Arms Sale Raises National Security Concerns,” Just Security (blog), December 1, 2020, https://www.justsecurity.org /73617/proposed-uae-arms-sale-raises-national-security -concerns/; Campbell, “Trump Says Selling Weapons to Saudi Arabia Will Create a Lot of Jobs”; Jennifer Spindel, “The Case for Suspending American Arms Sales to Saudi Arabia,” War on the Rocks (blog), May 14, 2019, https://warontherocks.com/2019/05 /the-case-for-suspending-american-arms-sales-to-saudi-arabia/. Mark Landler and Peter Baker, “Trump Vetoes Measure to Force End to US Involvement in Yemen War,” New York Times, April 17, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019 /04/16/us/politics/trump-veto-yemen.html. “Jamal Khashoggi: All You Need to Know About Saudi Journalist’s Death,” BBC News, February 24, 2021, sec. Europe, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45812399. Shane Harris, Greg Miller, and Josh Dawsey, “CIA Concludes Saudi Crown Prince Ordered Jamal Khashoggi’s Assassination,” Washington Post, November 16, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost .com /world /national - security /cia - concludes - saudi -crown-prince - ordered-jamal-khashoggis -assassination /2018/11 /16/98c89fe6 -e9b2 -11e8-a939-9469f1166f9d _ story.html; Deirdre Sheesgreen, “Saudi Crown Prince ‘Complicit’ in Jamal Khashoggi’s Murder, Key GOP Senator Says After CIA Briefing,” USA Today, December 4, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/12/04/sen -lindsey - graham - says - saudi -prince - complicit -jamal -khashoggi -murder - senate -trump-administration/2199104002/. Rick Noack, “Germany Halts Arms Deals with Saudi Arabia, Encourages Allies to Do the Same,” Washington Post, October  22, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com /world /2018/10/22/germany-its-allies-well-halt-future-arms-sales-saudi-arabia-until -we-have-clarity-khashoggi-so-should-you/; Derek Bisaccio, “Germany Extends Arms Embargo on Saudi Arabia,” Defense Security Monitor (blog), March 24, 2020, https:// dsm . forecastinternational . com / wordpress /2020 /03 /24 /germany - extends - arms -embargo-on-saudi-arabia/; Jon Stone, “The European Parliament Has Voted for an EU-Wide Arms Export Embargo Against Saudi Arabia,” Independent, February 25, 2016, http://www.independent .co.uk /news/uk /politics/saudi-arabia-arms - export -embargo-european-parliament-eu-wide-arms-export-embargo-uk-a6895226.html. Spindel, “The Case for Suspending American Arms Sales to Saudi Arabia”; Andrew Miller and Seth Binder, “The Case for Arms Embargoes Against Uncooperative Partners,” War on the Rocks (blog), May 10, 2019, https://warontherocks.com/2019/05/the -case-for-arms-embargoes-against-uncooperative-partners/. For an alternative view, see Ray Rounds, “The Case Against Arms Embargos, Even for Saudi Arabia,” War on

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22. 23. 24.

25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

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the Rocks (blog), April 16, 2019, https://warontherocks.com/2019/04/the-case-against -arms-embargos-even-for-saudi-arabia/. Lawrence Freedman, “Britain and the Arms Trade,” International Affairs, 1978, 377–92. Noack, “Germany Halts Arms Deals with Saudi Arabia.” Darlene Superville, “Trump Puts Saudi Arms Sales Above Inquiry Into Khashoggi Killing,” PBS NewsHour, June 24, 2019, https://www.pbs.org /newshour/world/trump -puts-saudi-arms-sales-above-inquiry-into-khashoggi-killing. “Trump Uses Veto to Unblock $8bn Weapons Sale to Saudi Arabia,” BBC News, July  25, 2019, sec. US & Canada, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-4910 6989. Qtd. in Marcia Robiou, “What You Need to Know About Trump’s $8 Billion Saudi Arms Deal,” PBS Frontline (blog), July 16, 2019, https://www.pbs.org /wgbh/frontline /article/saudi-arabia-arms-deal-trump-what-to-know/. Jeannie Sowers and Ericka Weinthal, “The Biden Administration Should Prevent an ‘Atrocity Famine’ in Yemen,” Foreign Policy (blog), February  10, 2021, https:// foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/10/ biden-administration-should-prevent-atrocity-famine -yemen-conflict/; Mark Landler and Peter Baker, “Trump Vetoes Measure to Force End to US Involvement in Yemen War,” New York Times, April 17, 2019, sec. US, https:// www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/us/politics/trump-veto-yemen.html. Stone and Spetalnick, “Exclusive.” Dan De Luce, “Watchdog Report Says Trump Admin Ignored Risk to Civilians in Saudi Arms Deal,” NBC News, August 11, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com /politics /politics -news /trump -admin-failed-assess -risk-civilians -saudi-arms -deal-govern ment-n1236457. Anne Gearan, John Hudson, and Missy Ryan, “Biden Recommits US to Global Alliances, Ends Support for Saudi-Led War in Yemen in First Major Foreign Policy Speech,” Washington Post, February 4, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics / biden-yemen-saudi-war-support/2021/02/04/ae61c14a-670d-11eb-8468-21bc48f07fe5 _ story.html. Gearan, Hudson, and Ryan, “Biden Recommits US to Global Alliances.” Michael Fischer, “German Arms Export Ban on Saudi Arabia Extended by One Year,” Dpa International, December  10, 2020, http://www.dpa-international.com /article /urn:newsml:dpa.com:20090101:201210-99-637185; Bisaccio, “Germany Extends Arms Embargo on Saudi Arabia.” Bonnie S. Glaser and Michael J. Green, “What Is the US ‘One China’ Policy and Why Does It Matter?,” CSIS, January 13, 2017, https://www.csis.org /analysis/what-us-one -china-policy-and-why-does-it-matter. John Pomfret, “US Sells Weapons to Taiwan, Angering China,” Washington Post, 30 January 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com /wp-dyn /content /article/2010/01 /30 /AR2010013000508.html; Thomas L. Friedman, “China Warns US on Taiwan Jet Deal,” New York Times, September 4, 1992, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/09/04/world/china -warns-us-on-taiwan-jet-deal.html. “US Plans to Sell Taiwan About $1.42 Billion in Arms Could Test China Ties,” CNBC, June 30, 2017, sec. Asia News, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/29/china-reacts-angrily -as-us-plans-to-sell-taiwan-about-1-point-42-billion-in-arms.html. Ralph Jennings, “China Demands That US Arms Deal with Taiwan Be Cancelled,” Los Angeles Times, June 30, 2017, http://www.latimes.com /world / la-fg-china-us-taiwan -arms-deal-20170630-story.html.

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37. Joseph Trevithick, “Here’s What Taiwan Would Get in $1.3B Arms Deal with US,” The Drive, June 30, 2017, http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/12051/heres-what-taiwan -would-get-in-1-3b-arms-deal-with-u-s. 38. Trevithick, “Here’s What Taiwan Would Get in $1.3B Arms Deal with US.” 39. “China ‘Outraged’ by $1.42 Billion Planned US Arms Sales to Taiwan,” Reuters, June 30, 2017, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-taiwan-arms-china-idUSKBN19L0N4. 40. Edward Wong, “Trump Administration Approves F-16 Fighter Jet Sales to Taiwan,” New York Times, August 16, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com /2019/08/16/world /asia /taiwan-f16.html. 41. Wong, “Trump Administration Approves F-16 Fighter Jet Sales to Taiwan.” 42. “Timeline: US Arms Sales to Taiwan in 2020 Total $5 Billion amid China Tensions,” Reuters, December 8, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-taiwan-security-usa -timeline-idUSKBN28I0BF. 43. “China Threatens Retaliation After New US Arms Sales to Taiwan,” NBC News, October 22, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-threatens-retaliation-after -new-u-s-arms-sales-taiwan-n1244242. 44. Iain Marlow and Samson Ellis, “Trump Arms Sales to Taiwan Boost Anti- China ‘Hedgehog’ Strategy,” Bloomberg.com, October 27, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com /news/articles/2020-10-27/trump-arms-sales-to-taiwan-boost-anti-china-hedgehog -strategy. 45. Matthew Beinart, “Biden Administration to Pause and Review Foreign Arms Sales Approved by Trump,” Defense Daily (blog), January 27, 2021, https://www.defensedaily .com / biden - administration -pause -review -foreign - arms - sales - approved -trump /international/. 46. Jonathan D. Caverley, “Want to Punish Saudi Arabia? Cut Off Its Weapons Supply,” New York Times, October 12, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/opinion/saudi -arabia-arms-sales.html; Natasha Turak, “Pentagon Is Scrambling as China ‘Sells the Hell Out of’ Armed Drones to US Allies,” CNBC, February 21, 2019, https://www.cnbc .com /2019 /02 /21 /pentagon -is - scrambling - as - china - sells -the -hell - out - of - armed -drones-to-americas-allies.html. 47. David E. Sanger, “Biden Won’t Penalize Saudi Crown Prince Over Khashoggi’s Killing, Fearing Relations Breach,” New York Times, February  26, 2021, https://www .nytimes.com/2021/02/26/us/politics/ biden-mbs-khashoggi.html. For a discussion of the difficulties of penalizing the prince, see Fred Kaplan, “Why Biden Couldn’t Punish the Saudi Crown Prince,” Slate, March 2, 2021, https://slate.com/news-and-politics /2021/03/mbs-khashoggi-biden-punishment.html. 48. Kylie Atwood, “Biden Administration Notified Congress of $650 Million Arms Sale to Saudi Arabia,” CNN, November 4, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/04/politics /us-saudi-arabia-arms-sale/index.html. 49. Atwood, “Biden Administration Notified Congress of $650 Million Arms Sale to Saudi Arabia”; Mark Katkov, “Biden Administration Ends Support of Saudi-Led Offensive in Yemen,” NPR News, February 4, 2021, https://www.npr.org /2021/02/04/964070756 / biden-administration-ends-u-s-support-of-saudi-led-offensive-in-yemen. 50. “Germany Approves New Arms Exports to Saudi Arabia Despite Ban Since 2018,” Middle East Monitor, September 30, 2022, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20220930 -germany-approves-new-arms-exports-to-saudi-arabia-despite-ban-since-2018/. 51. Jordan Cohen, “Biden’s Conventional Arms Transfer Policy Review Could Be a Turning Point,” War on the Rocks, November 29, 2021, https://warontherocks.com/2021/11 / bidens-conventional-arms-transfer-policy-review-could-be-a-turning-point/.

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52. Annie Shiel, Seth Binder, Jeff Abramson, et al., “Toward a More Responsible US Arms Trade Policy: Recommendations for the Biden-Harris Administration,” Just Security (blog), January 19, 2021, https://www.justsecurity.org /74254 /toward-a-more-respon sible-us-arms-trade-policy-recommendations-for-the-biden-harris-administration/. 53. Jack Detsch and Robbie Gramer, “Russian Arms Sale Clouds US-India Ties,” Foreign Policy (blog), March 19, 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/03/19/russia-india-defense -secretary-lloyd-austin-s-400-china-arms-sales/.

PART IV

TRUMP ABROAD

Editors’ Note Alliances and institutions are made up of individuals as well as nations and groups. The essays in Part IV, “Trump Abroad,” explore how Trump interacted with particular countries, regions, and peoples as well as with particular world leaders. In chapter  17, Angela Stent explores Trump’s relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin, concluding that “the practical results of Trump’s Russia policy were less damaging internationally than was initially anticipated, but they had a pernicious and corrosive impact domestically that has survived into the Biden era.” The Obama administration famously sought to rebalance the U.S. focus to the Asia-Pacific. How did Trump proceed there, and what was the regional response? In chapter 18, Jonathan M. DiCicco traces the reaction of Chinese leaders and thinkers, finding that Trump’s bombast and anti-Chinese rhetoric and trade policies left “PRC elite views tend[ing] to affirm the belief that the rivalry has structural roots and is far bigger than any one president.” Surveying the wider Asia-Pacific, in chapter 19 Dayna Barnes argues that after four years of Trump, “with shaken allies and no part in the world’s largest trading bloc, America now plays a much-reduced role in the Asia-Pacific.” In “India and the Trump Years,” chapter 20, Tanvi Madan finds that Indian leaders felt that India had done better in dealing with Trump than other nations. She concludes that while “the India-U.S. relationship had experienced a fair degree of continuity from previous administrations,” it also experienced “changes—some positive from Delhi’s perspective, with forward progress in certain areas and cooperation

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during crises, but also some new or heightened areas of friction. Underlying all this had been a constant sense of uncertainty that left a longer legacy.” Several of the contributions focus on the United States and Europe, examining U.S. diplomacy before and after Russia’s war against Ukraine. William Glenn Gray analyzes the turbulent relationship between Trump and German chancellor Angela Merkel before shifting to Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s stunning response to the Ukrainian invasion (chapter 21). Kathryn C. Statler brings us into the diplomatic mind of Emmanuel Macron in chapter 22, analyzing both Macron’s “death grip” handshake and his reliance on “flattery diplomacy” as a means of assuaging the increasingly volatile relationship between Trump and U.S. allies, as well as his personal role in negotiating with Russia before the war and helping form the EU response. In chapter 23, “Mr. Brexit,” Lindsay Aqui discusses Trump’s effects on the Brexit vote as well as his effect on the “special alliance” between the United States and the United Kingdom. She cautiously concludes that although AngloAmerican relations have fluctuated considerably between 2016 and 2022, that may simply have been the result of the fact that the United States was led by a temperamental president for whom, in the words of Kathleen Burk, “the personal is the political.”1 Complete answers to questions about the implications of the Trump presidency for Brexit will have to wait until the full consequences of the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union are established. F. Gregory Gause III assesses Trump’s legacy in the Middle East in chapter 24, noting that while the “Trump administration privileged relations with Saudi Arabia even beyond what previous administrations had done,” thus “making Saudi-American relations a more toxically partisan issue than in the past,” ultimately the Trump years left “the Middle East and America’s role in it mostly unchanged. That fact is testament to the pressures for continuity in America’s approach to the region.” Trump would disagree, of course, given that he claimed to have achieved a breakthrough in the Arab-Israel conflict. Finally, in chapter 25 Christy Thornton tackles Trump’s fraught relationship with Latin America and his racialized approach to entire peoples and cultures, which may inadvertently have resulted in a pause to the United States’ “longstanding militarized kingpin strategy in Mexico.” She also highlights the toxic effects of Trump’s policies, especially the “seething xenophobia” and sense of victimization among his supporters. Such sentiments die hard.

Note 1. Kathleen Burk, “US-UK Relations in the Time of Trump,” H-Diplo and ISSF Policy Series, America and the World—The Effects of the Trump Presidency, ed. D. Labrosse, March 23, 2021, https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/7449651/issf-policy -series-2021-15-us-uk-relations-time-trump#_ ftn1.

CHAPTER 17

TRUMP AND RUSSIA Less Than Meets the Eye A N G E L A S TE N T

A

fter all the controversy, accusations, angry tweets, impeachment hearings, and conspiracy theories, how is the Trump administration’s Russia policy to be assessed? Russia consumed an unprecedented amount of domestic energy during Trump’s presidency, casting a shadow over the White House during the four years Trump lived there. Yet there has been scant systematic analysis of U.S.-Russian relations under Trump or of the troubled relationship he bequeathed to the Biden administration. With hindsight, the practical results of Trump’s Russia policy were less damaging internationally than was initially anticipated, but they had a pernicious and corrosive impact domestically that has survived into the Biden era. The Trump administration’s dealings with Russia represent the most controversial part of its foreign policy legacy. Russia was from day one a polarizing issue because of questions about Moscow’s role during the 2016 election campaign and accusations that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia to get Trump into the White House. The president’s consistent and extravagant public praise for Russian president Vladimir Putin baffled many. For four years, every White House contact with Russia was carefully scrutinized for signs of nefarious intent. Yet a careful examination of the outcomes of U.S.-Russian engagement on a range of bilateral and multilateral issues reveals a mixed legacy. Because the agenda of problematic issues has not changed that much in the past thirty years, there has been considerable continuity in U.S. policy toward Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.1 Republican and Democratic

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administrations since 1992 have each tried to reset ties with Russia and to find a better way of dealing with Moscow, only to end their respective terms in disappointment because U.S. and Russian definitions of a productive relationship are so different. In that sense, Trump’s refrain, both during the 2016 campaign and after he was elected, that “it would be great if we could get along with Russia” may have lacked subtlety but resonated with his predecessors’ attitudes.2 The Biden administration’s initial advocacy of a “stable, predictable relationship” with Moscow echoed that view, even though the administration explicitly said it was not seeking a reset.3 After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, however, U.S.Russian relations all but collapsed, with minimal contacts at any level.

Russiagate Russia became a domestic issue in the United States during the 2016 campaign. Not since the era of Joseph McCarthy has Russia (or the Soviet Union, as it was then) played such an outsize role in U.S. politics. Trump was dogged by accusations that his campaign was working with the Russians to bring him to power. These suspicions were amplified by Trump’s unprecedented praise for Putin and his reluctance to support Ukraine in its war with Russia. When Buzzfeed published the contents of the so-called Steele dossier purporting to document Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, Russia became a key focus of America’s highly polarized political discourse.4 The Obama administration was slow to react to evidence of Russian meddling in the 2016 election but, on its way out, imposed sanctions on Moscow for its hacking and leaking of Democratic Party emails and its use of social media to inflame the public debate against Hillary Clinton. Days before Trump came to office, the American intelligence community published a declassified version of its report on Russian interference. It concluded: “We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”5 For many Democrats and others who were opposed to Trump, this was proof that he had not been legitimately elected. Trump himself would never admit that there had been Russian interference because he believed that this would cast doubt on his right to occupy the White House. A wiser course might have been to acknowledge possible interference, appoint a commission, and move on. Trump’s rhetoric about the “Russia hoax” raised more suspicion about his ties to the Kremlin than were in reality warranted. He cast even more doubt on his dealings with Russia during a controversial press conference following

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a summit with Putin in Helsinki in 2018. In answer to a question about whether he agreed with his own intelligence experts about Russian interference, he responded: “President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be.”6 Throughout the Trump presidency, there were a series of inquiries into the relationship between Russia and members of the Trump administration, the most extensive of these carried out by former FBI director Robert Mueller. While his report detailed illegal acts by a number of people close to Trump, it did not establish that there had been collusion between the president himself and the Russians.7 By the end of 2021, the Steele dossier had been discredited after the man who provided Christopher Steele with much of the raw material for the report was arrested for lying to the FBI.8 It turned out that much of his material was the product of second- and thirdhand rumor. The fact that the U.S. media unquestioningly accepted the dossier as truthful reflected the toxicity of the Trump-Russia connection. Senior officials who worked with Trump attribute his views to his fascination with Russia going back to his days as a young real estate developer who viewed the Russian market as an exciting business opportunity. One official said Trump had a nostalgic view of Russia, formed when he first visited the country in the late 1980s, during the era of major summits between U.S. leaders and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Others attribute his refusal to criticize Russia to his general admiration for strongman rulers who are able to get their own way. He told the veteran journalist Bob Woodward that he preferred strongmen to democrats: “the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them.”9 Trump believed that he understood Putin well and that together they could get things done. Former national security advisor John Bolton recalled in his memoir that Trump “never offered an opinion” on Putin, “at least in front of me. I never asked what Trump’s view was, perhaps afraid of what I might hear. His personal take on the Russian leader remained a mystery.”10 Trump’s lavish praise for Putin stands in sharp contrast to his harsh criticism of some U.S. allies, particularly German chancellor Angela Merkel, whom he accused of allowing Germany to fall “captive” to Russia.11 Trump’s own rhetoric and refusal to criticize Moscow ensured that Russia became such a polarizing subject domestically that it was impossible for the president to implement his version of the reset with Russia that he had advocated on the campaign trail.

The Making of Trump’s Russia Policy Inconsistency was the hallmark of Trump’s Russia policy. Robert Jervis’s chapter in this volume questions whether Trump really wanted a rapprochement with Russia. Trump often seemed to personally favor a forward-looking policy,

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seeking to have Russia readmitted to the G8 (from which it had been expelled after its annexation of Crimea in 2014) and inviting Putin to a summit in Washington. According to Fiona Hill, senior director at the National Security Council for Russia and Eurasia from 2017 to 2019, Trump had for some time been focused on issues of nuclear weapons and arms control, believing that he could conclude a “huge” arms-control deal with Putin—as President Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev had done.12 Trump also believed that improving ties with Russia would persuade Moscow to rethink its increasingly close ties with China, which the White House perceived as the main threat. So confident was Trump in his ability to understand Russia that he declined preparatory “deep dives” on the subject ahead of phone calls and meetings with Putin throughout his presidency. Trump took his regular intelligence briefings but was not interested in discussions of policy.13 Yet he was unable to achieve his goals, partly because of bureaucratic infighting, partly because of the high turnover of White House staff working on these issues, and partly because of his erratic moves and complete disregard of official expertise. Hill has recounted that she rarely attended Oval Office meetings on Russia and recalled only one dedicated meeting ahead of the 2018 Helsinki summit, when Jon Huntsman, the U.S. ambassador, was visiting.14 The president apparently had his own informal advisers on Russia who did not brief NSC officials on their conversations. Hill’s testimony to the congressional impeachment hearings in January 2020, for example, showed that Ukraine policy on key issues was made by a group of Trump’s close allies without any communication with the NSC.15 While some in the White House sought to improve ties with Russia, national security advisors H. R. McMaster and Bolton, along with their staffs, pursued a tougher line, working with the rest of the executive branch. When Rex Tillerson was chosen as secretary of state, many assumed, because he had been CEO of ExxonMobil and had worked with the Russian oil giant Rosneft and its CEO Igor Sechin (one of Russia’s most powerful men), that he would be favorably inclined toward Russia. But he disappointed the Russians and those hoping for a softer State Department line on Russia. By the time of Tillerson’s dismissal by presidential tweet, Putin opined that he had “fallen in with bad company.”16 Just before he stepped down, Tillerson backed the British claim that the Russians were responsible for the poisoning with the chemical nerve agent Novichok of the former GRU double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England. “Russia,” he said, “continues to be an irresponsible source of instability in the world, acting with open disregard for the sovereignty of other states and the life of their citizens.”17 Tillerson’s successor, Mike Pompeo, came from directing the CIA to the State Department. His views on Russia were hard-line, and State continued to support sanctions against Russia for its election interference, the Skripal poisonings, and its determination to complete the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.

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Pompeo criticized Russia for election interference, its treatment of the dissident anticorruption activist Alexei Navalny, and its hacking of the U.S. SolarWinds platform. But while the State Department’s public statements and actions were often highly critical of Russia, Trump himself remained silent. The U.S. Congress was deeply divided over most issues during Trump’s presidency, but on Russia it spoke with one voice. A bipartisan consensus supported the need to impose sanctions on Russia for its actions and to ensure that the president could not remove them. President Barack Obama had sanctioned Russia in December 2016 by executive order, sanctions Congress soon acted to preserve. Throughout the Trump administration, the same Republican senators who usually supported Trump voted for punitive measures against Russia.

Arms Control U.S.-Russia ties are largely defined by the countries’ status as the world’s two nuclear superpowers. Arms-control treaties and negotiations have been a central feature of this relationship since President Richard Nixon first visited Moscow in 1972 and signed the SALT I treaty limiting strategic nuclear weapons with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Despite Trump’s initial wish to conclude a major arms-control treaty, he ultimately did more to dismantle the fifty-yearold arms-control regime. Indeed, during Bolton’s tenure, doing so was a key focus. Long a skeptic about arms control, Bolton ensured that the United States withdrew from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty after both sides accused each other of cheating. This opened the possibility of the United States once again deploying intermediate-range weapons in Europe or Asia. At the end of the Trump administration, the United States pulled out of the multilateral 2002 Treaty on Open Skies, which permits each state party to conduct short-notice, unarmed reconnaissance flights over the others’ entire territories to collect data on military forces and activities. Russia withdrew six months later. The one remaining treaty was New START, limiting strategic nuclear weapons, which was set to expire on February 5, 2021. The treaty could be extended for five years without a Senate vote, but the administration was determined to negotiate a new deal that would include China’s nuclear weapons. The Chinese repeatedly refused to join the negotiations, pointing out that their own nuclear arsenal was much smaller than those of the United States and Russia.18 Rather belatedly, the arms-control negotiator Marshall Billingslea began to negotiate with his Russian counterpart Sergei Ryabkov to replace New START, but he insisted that “the next arms control agreement must cover all nuclear weapons, not just so-called strategic nuclear weapons.”19 In the end, both sides were unable to reach an agreement, and by the time Trump left office it was unclear

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whether New START would survive. In one of his first acts after taking office, President Joe Biden extended the treaty. The Trump administration did participate intermittently in talks begun during the Obama years on strategic stability, but Bolton once told German foreign minister Heiko Maas that “strategy stability” referred to “what Russia didn’t like about America’s national missile defense program, which we had no intention of negotiating, let alone modifying or abandoning.”20

Sanctions and Economic Relations During Trump’s presidency, rafts of sanctions were imposed on Russian entities and individuals that had been implicated in the 2016 election interference, the poisoning of the Skripals, cyberattacks, and a range of other activities deemed to be malign. In July 2017, the U.S. Senate passed the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) by a vote of 98 to 2. Among other provisions, the law required the White House to submit to Congress lists of oligarchs and political figures linked to Putin who might be personally sanctioned.21 The legislation allows for “blocking sanctions,” which block all transactions with listed persons and their property in the jurisdiction of a sanctioning country, and “sectoral sanctions,” which prohibit entities from participating in select energy projects in Russia and in new debt and equity transactions with listed entities. Congressional sanctions, unlike those imposed by presidential executive order, are virtually impossible to remove. Since they are largely punitive, they contain few incentives for Russia to modify its behavior. Indeed, the Kremlin has no expectation that these sanctions will be lifted and even anticipates more. Despite hundreds of designations, Russia has not fulfilled its obligations under the Minsk II agreements to end the conflict in Ukraine and has not withdrawn support for separatist forces in the Donbas. Sanctions have, however, adversely affected the Russian economy. They have also had a negative impact on U.S. companies in terms of lost business opportunities and negative impacts on global competitiveness.22 Trump himself mostly opposed the sanctions, saying that when he signed CAATSA into law he believed the act was “seriously flawed—particularly because it encroaches on the executive branch’s authority to negotiate. . . . I built a truly great company worth many billions of dollars,” he added, claiming that “as president, I can make better deals with foreign countries than Congress.”23  Trump did, however, support sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which targeted not only Russian entities but German and European companies as well. Trump told Merkel that Germany was “controlled” by Russia and inaccurately accused Germany of becoming “totally dependent on Russian energy.”24

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The Kremlin retaliated against the sanctions by seizing two diplomatic properties and ordering the United States to reduce its Moscow embassy staff by 755 people. The United States then ordered the closure of the Russian consulates in San Francisco and Seattle. Eventually, the U.S. consulate in St. Petersburg was forced to close. The consequence of all these closures was a severe hollowing out of both countries’ diplomatic presence, even down to the most basic activities. While Congress and the executive branch were busy imposing sanctions, the White House tried to promote a high-level business dialogue with Russia. Trump, who had for decades unsuccessfully tried to secure Russian business deals, favored this, as did Huntsman, his first ambassador to Russia. Preparations had begun for this dialogue before the 2018 Helsinki summit, and both presidents announced it during their joint press conference.25 Unfortunately for the business community, however, Trump’s denial of Russian election interference during the same press briefing immediately undermined the establishment of the working group, which was intended to create space for both business and political dialogue. American CEOs faced the political fallout from the press conference and the limitations imposed by the sanctions, which placed restrictions on U.S. businesses and listed a number of key Russian CEOs. Russia did not help matters by arresting Michael Calvey, a prominent U.S. businessman and advocate for closer economic ties with Russia, over a dispute with a Russian partner. Instead of being adjudicated in a civil proceeding, the dispute became a criminal case. The business dialogue never happened.

NATO One of the reasons for the Kremlin’s interest in Trump’s bid for the White House was his denigration of the NATO alliance, which for Putin is “the main opponent.”26 Trump consistently criticized NATO, calling it “obsolete” and accusing most of its members of acting as free riders on the U.S. taxpayer by not living up to their 2014 commitment to spend 2 percent of their GDP on defense by 2024. Trump became increasingly irritated with the allies and convinced that the United States should leave the alliance, a move that would have demolished the postwar transatlantic security architecture. In his memoir, Bolton recalled tense moments during the July 2018 NATO summit, when even he was unsure whether Trump would announce that the United States was pulling out. In the end, Trump told the allies that he was with NATO “a thousand million percent” while admonishing them to double their contributions.27 As one senior official put it: “We saved NATO.” While Trump was unconvinced of the value of NATO, much of his administration understood the need to shore up the alliance against an increasingly

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assertive Russia. In his speech to the 2017 Munich Security Conference, vice president Mike Pence pledged U.S. support for NATO and acknowledged the need to contain Russia.28 All of Trump’s defense secretaries reiterated this stance. Moreover, the administration strengthened its military presence in the Baltic states and Poland, signing the U.S.-Poland Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement in 2020 to increase the number of U.S. troops and military installations in Poland.

Ukraine Ukraine and Ukrainians with ties to Russian intelligence occupied an outsize role in the events leading to Trump’s first impeachment trial in January 2020 and in the 2020 presidential campaign. Trump had always been ambivalent about Ukraine, possibly because his first campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had worked for ousted Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovych and a number of prominent Russian oligarchs and viewed the post-2014 Ukrainian government as hostile to his interests. Trump had implied on the campaign trail that Crimea was Russian and that Russia had not invaded Ukraine.29 Once in office, his skepticism about Ukraine grew, as he became convinced that the Ukrainians had interfered on Clinton’s behalf in the 2016 election. Throughout Trump’s time in the White House, a group of close aides and advisers led by Trump’s personal lawyer, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, pursued an agenda in Ukraine that was at odds with the priorities of the rest of the executive branch. Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, was one of their recruits. As Hill put it, Sondland’s role was to carry out a “domestic political errand” that undermined U.S. national security and foreign policy, as well as the diplomatic apparatus that was in place to serve those ends.30 This “errand” was securing Trump’s reelection by collecting negative information on Ukraine’s role in 2016 and on the activities of Joe Biden’s son Hunter, who sat on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma. It also involved engineering the firing of the well-respected U.S. ambassador in Kyiv, Marie Yovanovitch, whose firm anticorruption message to the Ukrainians was weakened by requests from Trump’s inner circle for compromising material on the Bidens. Ultimately, Trump told Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy that the United States would withhold security assistance to Ukraine unless the Ukrainians provided damaging information on the Bidens. This information was leaked to the media, and Ukraine blew up in the White House’s face. After riveting testimony about his dealings with Ukraine, Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for abuse of power, only to be acquitted by the Republican-controlled Senate. While the White House pursued its own Ukraine policy, the rest of the executive branch increased its support for Kyiv by supplying it with defensive

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lethal weapons, something the Obama administration had refused to do. Tillerson appointed Kurt Volker, the former U.S. ambassador to NATO, as special representative for Ukraine negotiations, in which role he met with his Russian counterpart, Vladislav Surkov, in Kyiv, the Donbas, and Moscow to try to resolve the frozen conflict in the Donbas. Volker’s negotiations paralleled the French and German efforts to implement the Minsk II agreements but were unable to advance the peace process. After Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Trump said that Putin would never have invaded Ukraine on his watch. John Bolton countered these claims: “The fact is that he barely knew where Ukraine was. He once asked John Kelly, his second chief of staff, if Finland were a part of Russia. It is just not accurate to say that Trump’s behavior somehow deterred the Russians. I think the evidence is that Russia didn’t feel that their military was ready.”31

Syria and the Middle East The Trump administration’s dealings with Russia in the Middle East were complex, cooperative in some instances and confrontational in others. Both Russia and the United States were committed to defeating the Islamic State (ISIS), but Russia focused more on other anti-Assad groups. When Trump proposed to pull all U.S. troops out of Syria, Putin agreed, arguing that the United States had no right to a military presence there, unlike Russia, which had been invited in by President Bashar al-Assad in September 2015. In the event, most U.S. troops did leave Syria, but a contingent remained in the northeast. It was there that they came into direct conflict with troops from Wagner, a mercenary group owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close Putin associate. The Russian troops had entered an area controlled by U.S. and allied forces next to the Tabiya natural gas plant formerly owned by Conoco in Deir ez-Zor. In the ensuing battle, two hundred to three hundred Russians were killed, but Russia refused even to acknowledge that the firefight had taken place.32 Senior  U.S. officials say that Russia admitted that the Wagner troops had violated an agreement signed with the United States and accepted the casualties without pushing back. When the Trump administration bombed Syrian chemical-weapons facilities after Assad used chemical weapons on his own people, the Russians were given advance warning. The focus of Trump’s Middle East policy was to counter Iran and, if possible, change the regime in Tehran. The administration pulled out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that the Obama administration, along with the other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (the P5) and Germany, had negotiated with Iran. Moscow criticized the withdrawal and Washington’s decision to subsequently impose sanctions on Iran but was clearly ambivalent about Iran’s role in Syria and its support of Hizbullah, a

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group with which Russia was working, at least in theory, to keep Assad in power. On several occasions, Putin told Bolton that Russia did not want the Iranians in Syria.33 According to James Jeffrey, Trump’s special envoy for Syria, the Russians realized that the Iranians were trying to create a state within a state in Syria and to bypass existing institutions.34 At an unusual meeting with the Israeli and Russian national security advisers in Israel, Bolton and his counterparts agreed that Iran should eventually leave Syria, although Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of Russia’s Security Council, continued to praise Russia’s ties with Tehran.35 Trump’s major achievement in the Middle East was the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Some of the work to facilitate the accords was carried out through a private channel between Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, whom Putin had used as an envoy to the Trump administration when it first came into office and who had business interests in the UAE.36

Venezuela The Trump administration and Russia were firmly at odds over Venezuela. After the authoritarian Nicolás Maduro remained in power following a disputed election in 2018, Russia was instrumental in thwarting the administration’s attempts to support his rival, Juan Guaidó (president of the National Assembly of Venezuela), who was recognized by sixty countries, including the United States, as the legitimate president, in line with the constitution. Venezuela was in debt to Russia to the tune of $6 billion, and Rosneft was active in Venezuela’s oil sector. Russia sent around two hundred government troops to back Maduro, as well as officials to train the security services, although Cuba remains the backbone of Maduro’s security structure. According to Elliott Abrams, Trump’s special representative for Venezuela, Moscow wanted to “ensure that the U.S. did not create a ‘color revolution’ in Venezuela.”37 In April 2019, an attempted uprising by forces loyal to Guaidó failed to install him as president. There is some evidence that in May, Russia dissuaded Maduro from leaving the country to go into exile.38 Trump officials viewed Russia as the main spoiler as Venezuela descended into poverty and violence.

The Trump Administration’s Balance Sheet By the end of Trump’s presidency, given the continuing questions about election interference in 2016 and 2020, the ongoing war between Russia and

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Ukraine, cyberattacks, and the poisoning and imprisonment of the Kremlin’s opponents, U.S.-Russian relations were worse than they had been when Trump entered the White House. The COVID-19 pandemic complicated the administration’s outreach to Russia because it prevented the in-person meetings that both leaders sought, including Trump’s attendance at the Victory Day parade in Moscow in June 2020 to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of the Second World War and Putin’s hosting of a P5 summit at the United Nations to discuss the future of world order. By November 2020, the Russians had come to believe that Trump was too unpredictable and unable to deliver the improved relationship he had initially promised and that Moscow desired. Yet Putin waited until December 14, 2020, after the vote of the Electoral College, to congratulate Biden on his victory in the presidential election in November, and some Russian media outlets continued to propagate the Trumpian “stolen election” myth both before and after the January 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol. As Robert Legvold points out in his chapter, there were three distinct Russia policies during the Trump administration, that of the president, that of the rest of the executive branch, and that of Congress. Policy was inconsistent and at times incoherent. The U.S.-Russia relationship under Trump began at a low point, and it ended at an even lower point, with very limited accomplishments. Given this legacy, the Biden administration came into office needing to remove Russia as a toxic domestic issue while at the same time seeking to renew channels for engagement. Once Russia invaded Ukraine, the White House had to jettison both of these goals as it united with its allies to contain Russian aggression and provide Ukraine with the wherewithal to fight back.

Notes 1. See Angela Stent, The Limits of Partnership: US-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 2. See Dan Mangan, “President Donald Trump Says Getting Along with Russia Is ‘Not Terrible, It’s Good,’ ” CNBC, February 16, 2021, https://www.cnbc .com /2017/02/16 /president-donald-trump-says-getting-along-with-russia-is-a-good-thing.html. 3. White House, “Readout of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. Call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia,” April 13, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/ briefing-room/state ments -releases /2021 /04 /13 /readout- of -president-joseph -r -biden -jr - call -with -pre sident-vladimir-putin-of-russia-4-13/. 4. Ken Bensinger, Miriam Elder, and Mark Schoofs, “These Reports Allege Trump Has Deep Ties to Russia,” BuzzFeed News, January 10, 2017, https://www.buzzfeednews.com /article/kenbensinger/these-reports-allege-trump-has-deep-ties-to-russia. 5. U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections,” January 6, 2017, p. ii, https://www.dni.gov/files /documents/ICA _2017_01.pdf.

194 TRU MP A B R OA D 6. “Trump Sides with Russia Against FBI at Helsinki Summit,” BBC News, July  16, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44852812. 7. See Robert S. Mueller, “Report on the Investigation Into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election,” March  2019, https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file /1373816/download. 8. Charlie Savage, “Why the Discredited Dossier Does Not Undercut the Russia Investigation,” New York Times, December 1, 2021. 9. Fiona Hill, There Is Nothing for You Here (Boston: Mariner, 2021), 219. 10. John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 63. 11. See Ewan MacAskill, “Angela Merkel Hits Back at Donald Trump at Nato Summit,” Guardian, July  11, 2018,  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/11/nato-sum mit-donald-trump-says-germany-is-captive-of-russians. 12. Author’s interview with Fiona Hill. 13. Author’s interview with Fiona Hill. 14. See Adam Entous, “What Fiona Hill Learned in the White House,” New Yorker, June 22, 2020,  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/29/what-fiona-hill-learned-in -the-white-house. 15. Nicholas Fandos and Michael D. Shear, “Fiona Hill Testifies ‘Fictions’ on Ukraine Pushed by Trump Help Russia,” New York Times, November 21, 2019, https://www .nytimes.com/2019/11/21/us/politics/fiona-hill-impeachment-ukraine.html. 16. “Putin: Tillerson Fell Into ‘Bad Company,’ ” UAWire, September 8, 2017, http://www .uawire.org /putin-tillerson-fell-into-bad-company. 17. John Cassidy, “Rex Tillerson Gets Fired the Day After He Criticized Russia,” New Yorker, March 13, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/rex-tiller son-gets-fired-the-day-after-he-criticized-russia. 18. Leanne Quinn, “China’s Stance on Nuclear Arms Control and New START,” Arms Control Association, August 23, 2019, https://www.armscontrol.org / blog /2019-08-23 /chinas-stance-nuclear-arms-control-new-start. 19. “U.S. Pushes for Broadening of New START Treaty, Pushes for China to Join Accord,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, June 23, 2020, https://www.rferl.org /a/u-s-pushes -for -broadening - of-new - start-treaty -pushes -for - china -to -join -accord /30686509 .html. 20. Bolton, The Room Where It Happened, 162. 21. U.S. Department of the Treasury, “Counter America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act,”  https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/sanctions-programs -and-country-information/countering-americas-adversaries-through-sanctions-act. 22. See U.S.-Russian Business Council, “USRBC Compendium of Worldwide Sanctions Against Russia,” May 24, 2021. 23. White House, “Statement by President Donald J. Trump on Signing the ‘Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act,’ ” August 2, 2017, https://ru.usembassy .gov/statement-president-donald-j-trump-signing-countering-americas-adversaries -sanctions-act/. 24. Rick Noack, “Trump Accused Germany of Becoming ‘Totally Dependent’ on Russian Energy at the U.N. The Germans Just Smirked,” Washington Post, September  25, 2018,  https://www.washingtonpost.com/world /2018/09/25/trump-accused-germany -becoming-totally-dependent-russian-energy-un-germans-just-smirked/. 25. Jennie Neufeld, “Read the Full Transcript of the Helsinki Press Conference,” Vox, July 17, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/7/16/17576956/transcript-putin-trump-russia -helsinki-press-conference.

Trump and Russia 195 26. Vladimir Putin, First Person (New York: Public Affairs, 2000), 6. 27. Bolton, The Room Where It Happened, 145. 28. Mike Pence, address at the Fifty-Third Munich Security Conference, February 18, 2017, https://www.americanrhetoric.com /speeches/mikepencemunichsecurityconference 2017.htm. 29. Brian Naylor, “How the Trump Campaign Weakened the Republican Platform on Aid to Ukraine,” NPR, August 6, 2016, https://www.npr.org/2016/08/06/488876597/how-the -trump-campaign-weakened-the-republican-platform-on-aid-to-ukraine. 30. Zack Beauchamp, “The Key Moment from Fiona Hill’s Testimony,” Vox, November 21, 2019,  https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/11/21/20976364/impeachment-hear ing-dr-fiona-hill-trump-errand. 31. Bess Levin, “John Bolton: Trump is a Putin-Loving Moron Who Thought Finland Was Part of Russia,” Vanity Fair, March 1, 2022, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03 /john-bolton-donald-trump-ukraine-finland-russia. 32. Thomas Gibbons-Neff, “How a 4-Hour Battle Between Russian Mercenaries and U.S. Commandos Unfolded in Syria,” New York Times, May 24, 2018, https://www.nytimes .com /2018 /05 /24 /world /middleeast /american - commandos -russian -mercenaries -syria.html. 33. Bolton, The Room Where It Happened. 34. Author’s interview with Ambassador James Jeffrey. 35. Tovah Lazaroff, “US, Russian, Israeli Understanding Iranian Forces Will Leave Syria,” Jerusalem Post, June 25, 2019, https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/us-russia-and-israel -meet-in-unprecedented-trilateral-summit-watch-live-593609. 36. Erin Banco, “Revealed: Jared Kushner’s Private Channel with Putin’s Money Man,” Daily Beast, August 24, 2020, https://www.thedailybeast.com/jared-kushners-private -channel-with-putins-money-man-kirill-dmitriev. 37. Author’s interview with Elliott Abrams. 38. See Nicole Gaouette and Jennifer Hansler, “Pompeo Claims Russia Stopped Maduro Leaving Venezuela for Cuba,” CNN, May 1, 2019, https://www.cnn.com /2019/04 /30 /politics/pompeo-maduro-russia/index.html.

CHAPTER 18

TRUMP AND U.S.- CHINA STRATEGIC COMPETITION AS THE “NEW” NORMAL J O N ATH A N M . D I CI CCO

D

onald  J. Trump made no secret of his resentment toward the People’s Republic of China (PRC). As the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, he tweeted hundreds of times about China’s unfair trading practices. As president, he railed against China as a currency manipulator, dubbed COVID-19 “the China virus,” and labeled China an enemy of the United States.1 But for all of Trump’s bluster—and the tariffs, sanctions, and export controls—it is misleading to paint Trump’s China policy as altogether deviant. In truth, the slide toward greater antagonism was a widely anticipated development in a relationship that is recognized by elites on both sides as a strategic rivalry.2 As this chapter demonstrates, PRC elite views tend to affirm the belief that the rivalry has structural roots and is far bigger than any one president. While Trump’s bombastic presidency did not disrupt fundamental understandings of the U.S.-China rivalry, it did normalize overt strategic competition between the United States and the PRC. The administration’s unilateral imposition of tariffs on PRC-produced goods broke with institutionalized trade practices and heralded an atmosphere of intense competition.3 Some elites viewed the implied framing of PRC-U.S. relations as a struggle between nearpeers as validating their claims about emergent bipolarity—and as absolving Beijing of any remaining need to “hide and bide,” even with the attendant risk of stumbling into dangerous metaphorical traps.4 Beijing is now more openly confrontational with Washington and projects a sense that the PRC is a peer competitor to the United States.5 With regard to China, then, Trump threw

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rhetorical bombs but may have been received as a balm—one that eased Beijing’s discomfort with acknowledging the rivalry and competition that animates it. And in the wake of Trump’s departure, President Joe Biden’s administration has embraced and even intensified the rivalry.6

Locating Trump in a Long View of the U.S.-China Rivalry Trump’s administration drew considerable media attention for labeling the PRC a “revisionist power” and framing U.S.-PRC relations as involving “Great Power Competition” (on this point, see chapter 6, by Emma Ashford). But the notion that the United States was endeavoring to frustrate and contain China was, according to Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Julian Gewirtz, “widespread among Chinese officials long before Trump came to power.”7 Gewirtz, who later was named director for China on Biden’s National Security Council, argued that the apparent disruptions associated with Trump served only to vindicate those in the PRC who had already characterized U.S.-China relations as contentious and U.S. policies as rivalrous. In this sense, Trump’s ratcheting up of the U.S.-PRC rivalry fits an overarching narrative that predates Trump’s presidency and continues in its wake.8 That narrative is scarcely lost on China’s foreign policy elites. To illustrate the point and to aid in an exploration of those views, this chapter takes as a point of departure a survey of elite viewpoints on U.S.-China strategic competition by Zhao Minghao of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University. Zhao’s observations inform much of what follows.9 But first, a caveat: reliable assessment of elite views in the PRC is quite difficult. The University of Pennsylvania’s Jacques deLisle aptly notes several obstacles: evidence “remains limited and unsystematic,” and sources are “imperfect,” given political bias and self-censoring. Expert commentary is sparse, diverse, and constrained by experts’ awareness of “political limits on what they can safely say and publish”— and therefore may not be altogether forthcoming.10 Bearing this in mind, an assessment of Chinese elite views derived from published academic works yields a number of insights. One is that Chinese observers forecast increasing U.S.-China competitiveness long before Trump’s election and that Trump’s presidency was hardly the origin of strategic competition. Indeed, Zhao argues that the Trump presidency occasioned a third wave of debate among elites, coming after the Obama administration’s strategic pivot to Asia and, before that, the global financial crisis of 2008.11 That crisis “altered the state of asymmetry in U.S.-China relations, gradually compelling the United States to treat China as a co-equal,” according to Zhao’s reading of the arguments of Tao Wenzhao, senior researcher at the China Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).12 Similarly, Yuan Peng of the China

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Institute of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR) flagged the financial crisis as the onset of a shift in the global order: the United States would retain its superpower status, but the foundations of its hegemonic position were exposed as weakened.13 How have Chinese thinkers made sense of the shift and of the effects of Trump’s presidency on China’s relations with the United States? Four elite viewpoints can be identified, and they all fit neatly with the assumption of rivalry: analyses focused on granular policy differences (or issue disputes) that animate U.S.-China relations, realist analyses that draw on power-transition theory, analyses emphasizing mutual perceptions, and ideological competition as a lens for understanding strategic competition.14 Trump’s presidency is not a decisive factor in any of these, though it may be understood as an accelerant of certain trends—and as an irritant or a salve, depending on one’s perspective.15 However irritating Trump’s policy changes may have been to China’s elites, it seems that in the big picture, his presidency helped ease the PRC’s growing pains, in part by serving as a reassuring indicator of United States’ relative decline (on the decline of U.S. status, see chapter 3, by Michelle Murray). Evidence supporting this conjecture may be discerned through a brief review of elite perspectives.

Four Elite Perspectives on U.S.-China Strategic Competition First, but least helpful in the big-picture sense, is that Sino-American strategic competition is driven by specific policy conflicts. The list is long and familiar and features Taiwan, North Korea, and other flashpoints. Each conflict grows and matures, and together they stand between the United States and China; so many trees make a forest, and perhaps so many issue disputes make a rivalry.16 But it is a mistake to reduce the overarching conflictual relationship to the sum of its parts. Scarborough Shoal and the South China Sea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, the Senkakus and the Spratlys are important, of course, but each is a metaphorical Pleiku.17 Any one of them would provide reason enough to intensify hostilities, should either side find it useful to escalate. Rather than any one point of conflict, what is truly at stake is the underlying relationship.18 Realist analyses ostensibly privilege that relationship and the structural factors that shape it. Yan Xuetong of Tsinghua University, as Zhao notes, argues that “U.S.- China strategic competition is inevitable due to the structural contradictions between the hegemon and the rising power.”19 The root cause of the two countries’ burgeoning competition, then, is China’s narrowing of the national capabilities gap, which calls to mind theories of power transition and war.20 Indeed, in 2017 Yan appealed to the facts of structural change: “Donald

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Trump will come to understand that even though the United States was able to grow at a much faster rate than all other nations in the world after the end of the Cold War, China . . . has been able to grow faster than the United States in recent decades,” and “while the United States will be able to make China’s rise more challenging, it will be unable to prevent China from rising successfully in the end.”21 This claim is consistent with power-transition theory and endogenous-growth theory, which, like Yan’s article, identify the engine of growth as primarily domestic.22 Tariffs, trade wars, and even aggressive “decoupling” will not derail the locomotive of China’s economy.23 Yan does not, however, reduce “composite national strength” to economic or material factors alone; he also assigns considerable importance to political leadership. In his “moral realist” view, a rising power must work to reduce international resistance to its ascendancy.24 While friction with the declining power might be unavoidable, overreaching by the rising state is avoidable; China should allow the declining power to make mistakes, reasons Yan, at the same time that it cultivates “strategic credibility” with other countries.25 Recent incidents of rabid “Wolf Warrior diplomacy” aside, the PRC is more typically depicted as having transformed itself from “revolutionary order-challenger” (say, under Chairman Mao Zedong) to “reformist order-shaper”—an image that, along with its considerable and growing influence, could be reconcilable with a widening base of support.26 As Robert Jervis argued in his classic book The Logic of Images in International Relations, a state’s image markedly influences its ability to achieve its goals, and a desirable image can be more useful than a boost in material capabilities.27 With this idea in mind, Yan’s argument has considerable relevance to debates over the PRC’s prospects for global leadership. On the topic of leadership, in early 2017 Yan projected a sanguine attitude toward what a Trump administration might do to frustrate China’s rise. “At most,” argues Yan, “the United States will only be able to create certain challenges for China by adopting tactics in the security and political realm.”28 The use of the word “tactics” underscores the nonstrategic and likely fleeting nature of “America First” policies. Yan recognized that such “tactics” could include U.S. efforts to exacerbate tensions inside the PRC or to use China’s internal problems as a lever in international politics. But Trump privileged trade over, say, human rights; for example, he sidelined the issue of Beijing’s alarming persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang until trade negotiations with the PRC had ended.29 Not only did Trump sidestep allegations of human rights violations, but he also avoided making critical statements about corruption and undemocratic, authoritarian governance. Trump’s distaste for lecturing officials in Beijing increased his appeal. As Shen Dingli of Fudan University reportedly told the journalist Benjamin Carlson in 2018, Trump was “an especially easy president

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for China to handle.”30 Carlson, who is a Beijing correspondent for Agence France-Presse, conjectured that PRC elites saw Trump as “someone they could do business with” because unlike other U.S. presidents, he did not lay claim to a morally superior position.31 Trump’s seemingly hard-line stance on China thus appeared more pliable—if not softer—than that of his immediate predecessor, inasmuch as Trump’s presidential style was more transactional than ideological.32 In this sense, Trump’s presidency was indeed as much salve as irritant. Even though Trump used trade policy as a cudgel, prioritizing economic competition is a calculus well understood by the authorities in Beijing.33 Some analysts regarded Trump’s resort to protectionist measures and rejection of multilateral arrangements as signs of U.S. decrepitude and threats directed at China “as the ineffectual flailing of a declining power.”34 Elites in China realized that United States was hurting itself with a short-sighted trade policy salvaged from history’s dustbin.35 To borrow an image from the classic cartoons of Friz Freleng and Chuck Jones, the United States under Trump seemed less “Uncle Sam” and more “Yosemite Sam”: loud, temperamental, given to wild threats, but prone to shooting himself in the foot. Cartoonish images aside, rivalries are partly constituted by enemy images, and a third type of elite viewpoint emphasizes the importance of mutual perceptions.36 In Zhao’s words, “Many Chinese scholars observe that the new wave of China threat perceptions in the United States has deepened the anxieties of the hegemon about the rising power. . . . As Wang Jisi [president of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies at Peking University] argues, ‘the Americans are alarmed at China’s expanded global influence, exemplified by the Belt and Road Initiative, and its reinforcement of the role of the state . . . as well as the consolidation of the Communist Party leadership and its ideology.’ ”37 One highly visible data point affirming Wang’s observation came in October 2020: a Foreign Affairs magazine article by Robert C. O’Brien, then national security adviser. O’Brien’s article shrilly warned that the global agenda of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) threatens the idea of democracy and even threatens to undermine American democracy.38 Perceptions tend to be complicated by domestic politics within both countries. It might seem from a Chinese perspective that the polarization and divisiveness of American politics have created fertile conditions in which perceptions of China-as-Other will thrive, but it also suggests vulnerability and unsettling contradictions in the United States’ claim to global leadership. Symbolized by (but not reducible to) the Trump presidency, the populist turn in American national politics signals a rejection of liberal elites and the liberal international order.39 Moreover, Trump’s attempts to undermine the results of the 2020 election suggest that the United States can be its own enemy when it comes to democracy promotion in today’s world (see also chapter 10, by Samuel

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Zipp, in this volume). Ryan Hass, a senior fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center and the Center for East Asia Policy Studies, outlined the optics of the grotesque attempt in early 2021 to keep Trump in the White House: The January 6 insurrection in Washington, D.C., provided powerful ammunition to Chinese propagandists that long have sought to delegitimize democracy as a dangerous Western conceit that lacks solutions for 21st-century societal challenges. Chinese media outlets broadcast images of mayhem inside the American Capitol to a domestic audience to buttress a narrative of America as a country in descent, plagued by deep divisions and a broken political system.40

Though Chenchen Zhang of Queen’s University Belfast has documented a tendency among Chinese social media users to co-opt right-wing populist tropes from the West—including racism—the larger point is not lost.41 The image of the United States struggling to preserve its democratic traditions, and the erosion of American credibility in upholding the values that U.S. leaders have promulgated for generations, threatens to be a persistent legacy of the Trump presidency.42 Here lies a point of departure for Biden, who has presided over a series of moves intended to reaffirm the United States’ commitment to democratic governance and democratic states around the world—including the December  2021 Summit for Democracy meetings, which excluded the PRC.43 The Biden administration’s perceived need to restore confidence in an American commitment to democracy, rule of law, and human rights sets the stage for what might be an integral component of global rivalry: ideological competition. China’s elites recognize that strategic competition may be fueled by ideological differences—or at least the appearance of ideological differences. The backdrop of global capitalism—whether interpreted as the government-led coordination and state-owned enterprises of the PRC’s statist capitalism or, on the other hand, the deregulation, corporate tax breaks, and privatization of public services associated with the current U.S. model—provides more common ground than is sometimes acknowledged.44 Family squabbles over which brand of capitalism is superior are a far cry from the pitched ideological confrontation that animated the U.S.-Soviet Cold War. That said, Zhao attributes to Chinese analysts usage of the phrase “cold war mentality” and a corresponding tendency to regard American rhetoric as symbolizing an ideologically charged Cold War in the making. For example, he cites CASS senior researcher Zhao Mei’s concerns about “a new ‘political correctness’ . . . apparent in the spreading of anti-China discourse in the United States,” a “ ‘neo-McCarthy’ stance on China” characterized as “a truly disturbing trend that bodes far-reaching negative impact on U.S.-China relations.”45

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Nor, it seems, has the trend abated with the Biden administration. When the U.S. convened the Summit for Democracy in December 2021, the Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng of the PRC attributed the event to “a typical Cold War mentality.”46 Trump may be fairly criticized for blaming China for the United States’ economic woes, but for much of his presidency Trump did not elevate the U.S.China trade rivalry to the abstract heights of an ideological rivalry. Indeed, Trump’s trade negotiations with Beijing communicated an “American economic interests first” sort of pragmatism. However, as the COVID-19 pandemic shook the world and threw diplomacy into a tailspin, the Trump administration became more transparent about what was becoming a whole-of-government approach to countering China47 and introduced an explicitly ideological dimension to the competition.48 If Trump resisted pressure from ideologues to raise the stakes with China during the first half of his term, the second half revealed the China hawks’ resilience.49 Foreshadowing the argument in O’Brien’s subsequent article, the administration’s 2020 strategic guidance document on China emphasized ideological conflict on a global scale.50 It leveled the following accusation: The CCP’s campaign to compel ideological conformity does not stop at China’s borders . . . PRC authorities have attempted to extend CCP influence over discourse and behavior around the world . . . [and] PRC actors are exporting the tools of the CCP’s techno-authoritarian model to countries around the world, enabling authoritarian states to exert control over their citizens and surveil opposition, training foreign partners in propaganda and censorship techniques, and using bulk data collection to shape public sentiment.

That document has since been removed from the White House website by the Biden administration, but (perhaps ironically) its ideological edge—as well as the whole-of-government approach to great-power competition with China outlined in the document—seems an integral part of the Biden administration’s stance.51

U.S.-China Strategic Competition After Trump The transfer of power from Trump to Biden occurred in a moment of almost incomprehensible precarity for the United States. Assured by experts that strategic competition with China is an essential component of the way forward, Biden has not deviated from the designated path: continued maintenance, if not intensification, of the strategic rivalry with the PRC.52 Incentives to do so abound. In addition to the diplomatic and military imperatives, such as restoring

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relations with U.S. allies whose faith might have been shaken by Trump’s dismissal of multilateral commitments, Biden has political motives for his actions. Specifically, a whole-of-government approach to strategic competition with China could invigorate bipartisan policy coordination, counteract internal divisions, and fuel a “whole-of-nation” mindset among Americans otherwise polarized by Trumpist politics, misinformation, and conflicting attitudes about the COVID-19 response.53 Success in this endeavor may be crucial to restoring the United States’ vitality as the leading world power. Must China be the external rival against which Americans are rallied to greater unity? Some might point to Putin’s Russia as an alternative, but its consideration merely underscores why China remains the chief candidate in the long run.54 With memories of the Cold War still lingering among older Americans, Russia’s antagonistic rhetoric toward NATO countries and its February  2022 invasion of Ukraine invite treatment of Russia as a rival (on Russia-U.S. relations, see chapters 35 and 17, by Robert Legvold and Angela Stent, respectively).55 Polls show that a majority of Americans have negative impressions of Russia and of Vladimir Putin, under whose rule an increasingly authoritarian Russia developed a reputation for intervening in countries in its “near abroad.”56 Yet despite its reputation and ominous, months-long military buildup on Ukraine’s border, Russia’s invasion seemed to shock American onlookers.57 Many prominent Republican legislators joined with Democrats in condemning Russia’s action and supporting the Biden administration’s response, which included unprecedented sanctions intended to degrade Russia’s power-projection capability.58 Trump, however, played the role of spoiler by praising Putin and the invasion, and he cajoled his diehard supporters to do the same.59 Once again, Trump used divisive rhetoric in a manner that threatened prospects for bipartisanship and unity, even in the face of a clear and present danger. Russia’s invasion provoked a severe reaction from horrified leaders of countries around the world, and many of them moved quickly to support a coordinated response—but not China.60 Beijing’s position taking was more nuanced than Trump’s but suggested that China too could act as a spoiler. China’s initial response to the invasion was cool and measured; Beijing urged restraint and the use of peaceful means to resolve the conflict but stopped short of criticizing Russia, choosing instead to imply that Russia’s security concerns were legitimate and should be respected.61 China’s potential spoiler role was twofold. Beijing’s reluctance to admonish or punish Moscow arguably weakened the collective use of sanctions and weaponized interdependence to retaliate for what most considered a brazen violation of international rules.62 Second, critics could tar China as further undermining an order that had been deteriorating since at least 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea under flimsy pretenses.63 In 2022, in other words, Russia’s latest revanchist challenge to the U.S.-led international

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order was followed by a subtler (if arguably more consequential) diminishment of that order by China—the near-peer strategic rival of an internally divided United States struggling to defend an order under fire. Whether Biden is able to counter images of the United States as a decaying, declining power wracked by divisions is an open question. It is, at least, what thinkers like Wang Jisi would anticipate; in Zhao’s rendering, Wang “argues that although a large number of Chinese analysts believe that American power has declined, the Americans themselves cannot accept such a view. Therefore, as the United States is unwilling to acknowledge its weakness vis-à-vis China, a kind of strategic competition between the two sides is inevitable.”64 Wu Xinbo, dean of Fudan University’s Institute of International Studies and director of Fudan’s Center for American Studies, also forecasts an “inevitable” increase in competition and friction. But despite some Americans’ tendency to see the rivalry as ideological, Wu argued just before the pandemic that “China did not intend to enter into such ideological competition . . . we have no intention to compete ideologically.”65 Whether such claims can or should be taken at face value is unclear. What is clear is that strategic rivalry is what states and their leaders make of it. A structurally overdetermined rivalry need not take on the Manichean fervor of an ideological cold war.66 Whether it does so hinges on mutual perceptions, particularly among leading elites on both sides. As president, the normdefying Trump normalized a hard-nosed approach to the U.S.-China rivalry—a rivalry that existed before he took office and that persists after his departure.67 Strident insistence on a values proposition threatens to entrench the rivalry as a global franchise that could force other countries to choose sides.68 If the postTrump United States continues to take that tack, much depends on what PRC elites and leaders make of it.

Notes The author thanks the editors and Jingjing An for helpful comments on various drafts of this chapter. 1. Toh Han Shih, “Trump on China: 7 years and 400+ Tweets Later,” Inkstone News, https://www.inkstonenews .com /politics/ history-trumps -view-china-tweets/article /2141292; Joshua Rovner, Dingding Chen, Mira Rapp-Hooper, et al., H-Diplo/ISSF Policy Roundtable 1-9: U.S.-China Relations and the Trump Administration, https:// issforum.org /roundtables/policy/1-9-us-china#_Toc482487430. On calling China the “enemy,” see M. Taylor Fravel, J. Stapleton Roy, Michael D. Swaine, et al., “Opinion: China Is Not an Enemy,” Washington Post, July 3, 2019. 2. See also chapter 36, by James Goldgeier, in this volume. William Thompson and David Dreyer classify the U.S.-PRC relationship as a strategic rivalry from 1949 to 1972 and from 1996 onward. William R. Thompson and David R. Dreyer, Handbook of International Rivalries, 1494–2010 (Washington, D.C.: CQ, 2012), 195–98. For a general

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5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

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discussion of international rivalries, see Jonathan M. DiCicco and Brandon Valeriano, “International Rivalry and National Security,” in The Oxford Handbook of US National Security, ed. D. S. Reveron, N. K. Gvosdev, and J. A. Cloud (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Emma Farge and Philip Blenkinsop, “WTO Finds Washington Broke Trade Rules by Putting Tariffs on China; Ruling Angers U.S.,” Reuters, September 15, 2020. Yang Yuan, “Escape Both the ‘Thucydides Trap’ and the ‘Churchill Trap’: Finding a Third Type of Great Power Relations Under the Bipolar System,” Chinese Journal of International Politics 11, no. 2 (Summer 2018): 193–235; Chunman Zhang and Xiaoyu Pu, “Introduction: Can America and China Escape the Thucydides Trap?,” Journal of Chinese Political Science 24 (2019): 1–9. For more on China’s opportunism in response to signs of U.S. decline under Trump, see chapter 39, by Elizabeth Economy, in this volume. Lingling Wei and Bob Davis, “China’s Message to America: We’re an Equal Now,” Wall Street Journal, April 12, 2021. See, for example, Aaron Blake, “Biden’s Most Hawkish Comments on Taiwan Yet,” Washington Post, September 19, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022 /09/19/ biden-taiwan-china-defense/; and U.S. Secretary of State Anthony J. Blinken’s speech “The Administration’s Approach to the People’s Republic of China,” May 26, 2022, https://www.state.gov/the-administrations-approach-to-the-peoples-republic-of -china/. Julian Gewirtz, “China Thinks America Is Losing; Washington Must Show Beijing It’s Wrong,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 6 (November/December 2020): 62–72. On the continuity of the rivalry, see, for example, Robert Sutter, “Barack Obama, Xi Jinping and Donald Trump—Pragmatism Fails as U.S.- China Differences Rise in Prominence,” American Journal of Chinese Studies 24, no. 2 (October 2017): 69–85. For a historical perspective on narratives concerning China’s rise and role, see Ja Ian Chong, “Popular Narratives Versus Chinese History: Implications for Understanding an Emergent China,” European Journal of International Relations 20, no. 4 (2014): 939– 64. For reactions to the official labeling of China as a revisionist power, see Emma Ashford and Joshua Shifrinson, “Trump’s National Security Strategy: A Critic’s Dream,” Texas National Security Review 1, no. 2 (2018): 138–44. Minghao Zhao, “Is a New Cold War Inevitable? Chinese Perspectives on US–China Strategic Competition,” Chinese Journal of International Politics 12, no. 3 (Autumn 2019): 371–94. Jacques deLisle, “Purple State China: China’s Preferences in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election Are . . . Complicated,” Foreign Policy Research Institute, Asia Program, October  30, 2020, https://www.fpri.org /article/2020/10/purple-state-china-chinas -preferences-in-the-2020-u-s-presidential-election-arecomplicated/. Zhao, “Is a New Cold War Inevitable?,” 373–74. Zhao, “Is a New Cold War Inevitable?,” 374, citing Tao Wenzhao, “Jinrong weiji yu zhongmei guanxi” (The financial crisis and Sino-U.S. relations), Heping yu fazhan (Peace and development) 4 (2009): 28–30. Note that Tao Wenzhao’s views on the U.S.China power relationship are nuanced and should not be reduced to a simplistic understanding of relative power position. See, e.g., Tao Wenzhao, “International Order Won’t Be Bipolar,” China-US Focus, January 21, 2020, https://www.chinausfocus.com /foreign-policy/international-order-wont-be-bipolar. On changes in the system related to this more nuanced perspective, see also Edward Rhodes, “Challenges of Globalization, Flattening and Unbundling,” South Asian Journal of Business and Management Cases 2, no. 1 (2013): 17–23.

206 TRU MP A B R OA D 13. Zhao, “Is a New Cold War Inevitable?,” 375. 14. Zhao, “Is a New Cold War Inevitable?,” 376. Ronald Tammen has argued (against most others) that power-transition theory is not a realist theory; see Ronald Tammen, “The Organski Legacy: A Fifty-Year Research Program,” International Interactions 34, no. 4 (2008): 314–32. 15. William Pesek, “China’s Xi Jinping Is Really Going to Miss Donald Trump Despite Four Chaotic Years,” Forbes, January 18, 2021. 16. The political scientists Paul Hensel, Sara Mitchell, and Cameron Thies have linked issue conflicts to rivalry relationships, and David Dreyer demonstrates that accumulated issue disputes make for war-prone rivalries. Paul R. Hensel, “Contentious Issues and World Politics: The Management of Territorial Claims in the Americas, 1816–1992,” International Studies Quarterly 45, no. 1 (March 2001): 81–109; Sara McLaughlin Mitchell and Cameron G. Thies, “Issue Rivalries,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 28, no.  3 (2011): 230– 60; David  R. Dreyer, “Issue Conflict Accumulation and the Dynamics of Strategic Rivalry,” International Studies Quarterly 54, no. 3 (September 2010): 779–95. For disputed issues in the U.S.-China context, see, e.g., M. Taylor Fravel, “The Certainty of Uncertainty: U.S.-China Relations in 2017,” H-Diplo/ISSF Policy Roundtable 1–9: U.S.-China Relations and the Trump Administration, https:// issforum.org /roundtables/policy/1-9-us-china#_Toc482487429. 17. Paul R. Pillar, “Streetcars Named Deception,” National Interest, May 30, 2016, https:// nationalinterest.org / blog /paul-pillar/streetcars-named-deception-16398. 18. The point is made in detail in Karen A. Rasler and William R. Thompson, “Contested Territory, Strategic Rivalries, and Conflict Escalation,” International Studies Quarterly 50, no. 1 (March 2006): 148; see also John Logan Mitton, “Rivalry Intervention in Civil Conflicts: Afghanistan (India–Pakistan), Angola (USSR–USA), and Lebanon (Israel– Syria),” Canadian Foreign Policy Journal 23, no. 3 (2017): 277–91. 19. Zhao, “Is a New Cold War Inevitable?,” 376. For an American academic’s perspective, see John J. Mearsheimer, “The Inevitable Rivalry: America, China, and the Tragedy of Great-Power Politics,” Foreign Affairs 100, no. 6 (November/December 2021). 20. See, e.g., A. F. K. Organski, World Politics (New York: Knopf, 1958); A. F. K. Organski and Jacek Kugler, The War Ledger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Ronald Tammen, Jacek Kugler, Douglas Lemke, et al., Power Transitions: Strategies for the 21st Century (New York: Chatham House, 2000). See also Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and commentaries including Jonathan M. DiCicco and Jack S. Levy, “Power Shifts and Problem Shifts: The Evolution of the Power Transition Research Program,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 43, no. 6 (1999): 675–704; Jack S. Levy, “Power Transition Theory and the Rise of China,” in China’s Ascent: Power, Security, and the Future of International Politics, ed. Robert S. Ross and Zhu Feng (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 11–33; and H-Diplo/ISSF Roundtable XII-2 reviewing Steve Chan, Thucydides’s Trap? Historical Interpretation, Logic of Inquiry, and the Future of Sino-American Relations (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020), https://issforum.org/roundtables/12 -2-Thucydides. 21. Yan Xuetong, “Strategic Challenges for China’s Rise,” Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy, February  23, 2017, https://carnegietsinghua .org /2017/02/23/strategic -challenges-for-china-s-rise-pub-71208. 22. James Morley, “What Is Endogenous Growth Theory?,” World Economic Forum, June 24, 2015, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/06/what-is-endogenous-growth -theory/; Jacek Kugler, “Extensions of Power Transitions: Applications to Political Economy,” Peace Economics, Peace Science, and Public Policy 5, no. 3 (1999): 5–6.

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23. The PRC’s growth is projected to slow as its population ages. On China’s endogenous growth path, see, e.g., Ronald L. Tammen and Ayesha Umar Wahedi, “East Asia: China on the Move,” in The Rise of Regions: Conflict and Cooperation, ed. Ronald L. Tammen and Jacek Kugler (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020): 19–36. For a nuanced analysis of Chinese intellectual elites’ discourse on the U.S.-China trade war and the prospects of decoupling, see Li Wei, “Towards Economic Decoupling? Mapping Chinese Discourse on the China–US Trade War,” Chinese Journal of International Politics 12, no. 4 (Winter 2019): 519–56. 24. See also Amitav Acharya, “From Heaven to Earth: ‘Cultural Idealism’ and ‘Moral Realism’ as Chinese Contributions to Global International Relations,” Chinese Journal of International Politics 12, no. 4 (Winter 2019): 467–94; Vasilis Trigkas, “On Global Power Differentials, Moral Realism, and the Rise of China: A Review Essay,” Journal of Contemporary China 29, no. 126 (2020): 950–63; and Yan Xuetong, Leadership and the Rise of Great Powers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). 25. See also Yi Feng, Zhijun Gao, and Zining Yang, “East Asia: China’s Campaign to Become a New World Leader,” in The Rise of Regions: Conflict and Cooperation, ed. Ronald L. Tammen and Jacek Kugler (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020): 37–54. 26. Zhimin Chen and Xueying Zhang, “Chinese Conception of the World Order in a Turbulent Trump Era,” Pacific Review 33, nos. 3–4 (2020): 438–68; Zhiqun Zhu, “Interpreting China’s ‘Wolf-Warrior Diplomacy,’ ” The Diplomat, May  15, 2020, https:// thediplomat.com/2020/05/interpreting-chinas-wolf-warrior-diplomacy/. 27. Robert Jervis, The Logic of Images in International Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 6. 28. Yan Xuetong, “Strategic Challenges for China’s Rise,” Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy, February  23, 2017, https://carnegietsinghua .org /2017/02/23/strategic -challenges-for-china-s-rise-pub-71208. For a discussion of alternative points of view, see Chen and Zhang, “Chinese Conception of the World Order,” 453–54. 29. “Trump Held Off Sanctioning Chinese Over Uighurs to Pursue Trade Deal,” BBC World News, June 22, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53138833. 30. Benjamin Carlson, “China Loves Trump,” Atlantic, March  2018, https://www.the atlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/trump-china/550886/. 31. Carlson, “China Loves Trump.” 32. Da Wei, director of the Chinese Modern International Relations Institute’s American Research Institute, as quoted in Camille Boullenois, Jiakun Jack Zhang, Melanie Hart, et al., “The Trump Opportunity: Chinese Perceptions of the US Administration,” European Council on Foreign Relations, June 20, 2018, https://ecfr.eu /publication /china _ analysis _trump_opportunity_chinese _perceptions _us _ administration262/. Da also situates Trump’s hard-line stance as reflecting the views of a hard-line faction in the U.S. policy community that developed under the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. 33. Elizabeth Economy, The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); see also Carlson, “China Loves Trump.” 34. Melanie Hart and Blaine Johnson, “China’s Blind Spots on US Foreign Policy,” in Boullenois et al., “The Trump Opportunity.” On the Trump administration’s rejection of multilateral arrangements, see chapter 39, by Elizabeth Economy, in this volume. 35. Ryan Hass and Abraham Denmark, “More Pain Than Gain: How the US-China Trade War Hurt America,” Brookings Institution, August 7, 2020, https://www.brookings .edu / blog /order-from- chaos /2020/08 /07/more -pain -than -gain -how-the -us - china -trade-war-hurt-america/.

208 TRU MP A B R OA D 36. For a critique of the United States’ “familiar tendency to attribute conflict to our opponents’ internal characteristics,” see Stephen M. Walt, “Everyone Misunderstands the Reason for the U.S.-China Cold War,” Foreign Policy, June 30, 2020, https://foreignpolicy .com/2020/06/30/china-united-states-new-cold-war-foreign-policy/. 37. Zhao, “Is a New Cold War Inevitable?,” 377. 38. Robert C. O’Brien, “How China Threatens American Democracy: Beijing’s Ideological Agenda Has Gone Global,” Foreign Affairs, October  21, 2020, https://www . foreignaffairs . com /articles /china /2020 -10 - 21 / how - china -threatens - american -democracy. 39. David A. Lake, Lisa L. Martin, and Thomas Risse, “Challenges to the Liberal Order: Reflections on International Organization,” International Organization 75, no. 2 (2021): 225–57. 40. Brookings Institution, “Around the Halls: How Leaders and Publics Around the World Are Reacting to Events at the Capitol,” Brookings Institution Blog: Order from Chaos, January  8, 2021, https://www.brookings.edu / blog /order-from-chaos/2021 /01 /08 /around -the -halls -how -leaders - and -publics - around -the -world - are -reacting -to -events-at-the-capitol/. Hass’s words echo earlier statements by Xu Guoqi of the University of Hong Kong, who told Benjamin Carlson that with Trump in the White House, Beijing officials enjoyed a “golden field for their propaganda” and that the Trump administration was “a gift for the [Xi] regime in China.” Carlson, “China Loves Trump.” 41. Chenchen Zhang, “Right-Wing Populism with Chinese Characteristics? Identity, Otherness, and Global Imaginaries in Debating World Politics Online,” European Journal of International Relations 26, no. 1 (March 2020): 88–115. 42. For a more optimistic view, see chapter 4, by Deborah Avant, in this volume. 43. Mareike Ohlberg and Bonnie S. Glaser, “Why China Is Freaking Out Over Biden’s Democracy Summit,” Foreign Policy, December 10, 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com /2021/12/10/china-response-biden-democracy-summit/. 44. Naná de Graaff and Bastiaan Van Apeldoorn, “US Elite Power and the Rise of ‘Statist’ Chinese Elites in Global Markets,” International Politics 54, no. 3 (2017): 338–55. Cf. Jude Blanchette, “Confronting the Challenge of Chinese State Capitalism,” Center for Strategic & International Studies, January  22, 2021, https://www.csis.org /analysis /confronting-challenge-chinese-state-capitalism. 45. Zhao, “Is a New Cold War Inevitable?,” 379. 46. “Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng: The So- Called ‘Democracy Summit’ Has Been Reduced to a Complete Farce,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, December 3, 2021, https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa _eng/wjbxw/202112/t20211203 _10462033.html. 47. Robert Sutter, “Pushback: America’s New China Strategy,” The Diplomat, November 2, 2018, https://thediplomat.com/2018/11/pushback-americas-new-china-strategy/. 48. O’Brien, “How China Threatens American Democracy,” provides evidence of this shift. 49. Josh Rogin, “Opinion: Trump’s China Hawks Are Loose and Not Wasting Any Time,” Washington Post, June 25, 2020. See also Hal Brands, Peter Feaver, and William Inboden, “In Defense of the Blob: America’s Foreign Policy Establishment Is the Solution, Not the Problem,” Foreign Affairs, April  29, 2020, https://www.for eignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-04-29/defense-blob. For a critical view of scholarly claims about “the Blob,” see Robert Jervis, “Liberalism, the Blob, and American Foreign Policy: Evidence and Methodology,” Security Studies 29, no.  3 (2020): 434–56.

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50. “United States Strategic Approach to the People’s Republic of China,” White House, May 26, 2020, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/U .S.-Strategic-Approach-to-The-Peoples-Republic-of-China-Report-5.24v1.pdf. See also this apparently declassified internal document on “U.S. Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific”: https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IPS -Final-Declass.pdf. 51. Jill Disis, “The China Trade War Is One Thing Joe Biden Won’t Be Rushing to Fix,” CNN, January 26, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/21/economy/china-trade-tech -war-biden-intl-hnk /index.html; Ana Swanson, “Biden on ‘Short Leash’ as Administration Rethinks China Relations,” New York Times, February 17, 2021; David E. Sanger, “Biden Defines His Underlying Challenge with China: ‘Prove Democracy Works,’ ” New York Times, March 26, 2021, updated October 6, 2021. See also Blinken, “The Administration’s Approach to the People’s Republic of China.” 52. For a welcome counterpoint to great-power competition as strategy, see Daniel H. Nexon, “Against Great Power Competition: The U.S. Should Not Confuse Means for Ends,” Foreign Affairs, February  15, 2021, https://www.foreignaffairs.com /articles /united-states/2021-02-15/against-great-power-competition. On rivalry maintenance, see Gary Goertz, Bradford Jones, and Paul F. Diehl, “Maintenance Processes in International Rivalries,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 49, no. 5 (October 2005): 742–69. 53. Sanger, “Biden Defines His Underlying Challenge with China”; David Brooks, “Opinion: How China Brings Us Together: An Existential Threat for the 21st Century,” New York Times, February 14, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com /2019/02/14 /opinion /china -economy.html. However, recent scholarship casts doubt on the prospects of a partisan convergence in response to external threat; see Rachel Myrick, “Do External Threats Unite or Divide? Security Crises, Rivalries, and Polarization in American Foreign Policy,” International Organization 75, no. 4 (Fall 2021): 921–58. 54. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken laid bare the primary reason: “China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.” Blinken, “The Administration’s Approach to the People’s Republic of China.” 55. Stephanie Pezard, “U.S. Strategic Competition with Russia: A RAND Research Primer,” RAND Corporation, 2022, https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA290-2.html. 56. David Lauter, “Ukraine War Exposes Lack of Support for Trump’s Pro-Putin GOP Wing,” Los Angeles Times, February 25, 2022, https://www.latimes.com/politics/news letter/2022-02-25/ukraine-trump-and-the-politics-of-war-essential-politics. 57. Marc Fisher, “5,000 Miles Away but Hitting Home: How Russia’s Advance on Ukraine Is Rattling Americans,” Washington Post, February 23, 2022, https://www.washing ton post .com /national - security /2022 /02 /23 /5000 -miles - away -hitting -home -how -russias-advance-ukraine-is-rattling-americans/. 58. U.S. Department of the Treasury, “U.S. Treasury Announces Unprecedented & Expansive Sanctions Against Russia, Imposing Swift and Severe Economic Costs,” press release, February 24, 2022, https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0608. 59. Marc Fisher, “How Republicans Moved from Reagan’s ‘Evil Empire’ to Trump’s Praise for Putin,” Washington Post, February 25, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com /nation /2022 /02 /25 / how-republicans -moved -reagans - evil - empire -trumps -praise -putin/. 60. United Nations, “Security Council Fails to Adopt Draft Resolution on Ending Ukraine Crisis, as Russian Federation Wields Veto,” SC/14808, February 25, 2022, https://www .un.org /press/en/2022/sc14808.doc.htm.

210 TRU MP A B R OA D 61. Permanent Mission of the People’s Republic of China to the UN, “Explanation of Vote by Ambassador Zhang Jun at the UN Security Council on the Draft Resolution on Ukraine,” February 25, 2022, http://chnun.chinamission.org.cn /eng / hyyfy/202202 /t20220226_10645825.htm. 62. Keith Bradsher and Ana Swanson, “Before Ukraine Invasion, Russia and China Cemented Economic Ties,” New York Times, February 26, 2022, updated February 28, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/26/ business/china-russia-ukraine.html; on “weaponized interdependence,” see Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman, “Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion,” International Security 44, no. 1 (2019): 42–79. 63. Charlie Campbell, “How Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Could Change the Global Order Forever,” Time, February  24, 2022, https://time.com /6150874 /world- order-russia -ukraine/. 64. Zhao, “Is a New Cold War Inevitable?,” 377. 65. Tang Jie, “Wu Xinbo on the ‘Transformation’ of US-China Relations,” The Diplomat, January 9, 2020, https://thediplomat.com/2020/01/wu-xinbo-on-the-transformation -of-us-china-relations/. 66. Thomas J. Christensen, “There Will Not Be a New Cold War: The Limits of U.S.Chinese Competition,” Foreign Affairs, March  24, 2021, https://www.foreignaffairs .com/articles/united-states/2021-03-24/there-will-not-be-new-cold-war; Jue Zhang and Jin Xu. “China–US Strategic Competition and the Descent of a Porous Curtain,” Chinese Journal of International Politics 14, no. 3 (Autumn 2021): 321–52. 67. See Keikichi Takahashi, “How Unique Is Trump’s China Policy?,” The Diplomat, June 17, 2020, https://thediplomat.com/2020/01/wu-xinbo-on-the-transformation-of -us-china-relations/. 68. For a defense of values as a cornerstone of US foreign policy after Trump, see chapter 42, by Charles S. Maier, in this volume.

CHAPTER 19

ENGAGE? TRUMP AND THE ASIA- PACIFIC DAY N A BA R N E S

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ngage.” This was the captain’s signature command in the liberal internationalist sci-fi classic Star Trek: The Next Generation. It is clear why. Engagement is the lifeblood of diplomacy. Maintaining dialogue and manifold ties with allies and rivals alike is the way to nourish relationships and forge new common ground. In  U.S. foreign policy, expansive engagement can be defined as “a broad-based grand strategic orientation,” or as President Bill Clinton’s national security advisor Anthony Lake described it, “active American engagement abroad on behalf of democracy and expanded trade.”1 At the very least, you cannot get to yes without keeping the lines of communication open. By that metric, the Trump administration leaves behind a mixed legacy. The bombastic and mercurial approach to policy making during President Donald Trump’s four years in office destabilized the economic and security architecture that have served U.S. interests in the Asia-Pacific so well since 1945. Trump argued that such relationships are transactional and must be in America’s immediate interests. Trump’s public questioning of alliances, and especially America’s 2019 abandonment of its Kurdish allies in Syria, diminished the value of security agreements and informal alliances with the United States.2 This in turn has decreased deterrence, a contributing factor to Russia’s 2022 decision to invade Ukraine and increased tensions between the United States and China over the status of Taiwan. The United States withdrew from the 2016 TransPacific Partnership (TPP), a multilateral trade agreement and a crowning achievement of the Obama era. The TPP, revised and renamed the Comprehensive and

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Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), went ahead without American involvement. China, not the United States, was the biggest power at the bargaining table for a larger trade agreement, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which was signed in 2020, and in September 2021 it further increased its influence with an application to join the CPTPP.3 With shaken allies and no part in the world’s largest trading bloc, America now plays a much-reduced role in the Asia-Pacific. Trump’s hostile rhetoric and trade actions against China constrained cooperation between the world’s two largest economies. Modern-day Cassandras and China’s president Xi Jinping himself called out the threat of a new cold war.4 So far, so much disengagement. However, the administration also proved willing to shake up calcified conflicts and reengaged with two of the thorniest and most intractable security situations in the region: the political status of Taiwan and North Korea’s nuclear program. The fruits of those endeavors remain to be seen.

Security Engagement Since the end of the Second World War, the United States has been able to project power globally through its security alliances with regional allies. These agreements allowed the United States to establish military outposts far beyond its own sovereign territory, creating a modern “empire of bases.”5 This strategy of cooperation, which underpins America’s global hegemony, was undermined by Trump. The president openly questioned the value of American allies and the empireof-bases strategy, taking to Twitter and making off-the-cuff remarks both in front of the cameras and behind closed doors. These casual statements undermined what had been enduring relationships. The U.S.-Japan security alliance is the foundation of America’s ability to project military power in the AsiaPacific and perhaps the most important alliance since the end of World War II. However, Trump was capricious about the relationship. Immediately after a May 2017 bilateral meeting with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, Trump stated that the “U.S.-Japan alliance is steadfast and ironclad. We want peace, and we want stability.”6 Just weeks later, he took a different line. Japan, he argued, took “tremendous advantage of the United States” through the arrangement.7 In his blustering negotiating style, Trump first disparaged alliances and then demanded that allies pay huge payments to maintain them. He demanded 400 percent and 500 percent increases in annual contributions to the cost of hosting U.S. troops from Japan and South Korea, America’s most important regional partners. He then threatened to destabilize the region and embolden North Korea by pulling troops out if host countries did not pay up.8 Most of

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Trump’s demands were ultimately repulsed, and the alliances continue, but with little warmth and less trust. America’s seventy-year security alliance with the Philippines has been even more badly damaged than relations with Japan or South Korea. Philippine politics played a role in the current contentiousness of the U.S.-Philippine relationship. President Rodrigo Duterte came into office in 2016 with a confrontational style and the promise of big changes. He advocated a reorientation away from the United States and toward friendlier relations with China and Russia. The Philippines was able to avoid threats of exorbitant “cost sharing” like those made against Japan and South Korea by announcing a unilateral end to the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) in February 2020. The declaration proved to be a delay tactic to undermine Trump’s approach. The Philippines did not take immediate action to expel American troops following its announcement and retracted the decision entirely during the new Biden administration.9 Still, the legacy of this issue is a much shakier U.S.-Philippines alliance. Adding injury to insult, protectionist trade policies targeted these allies. At a donor event in March 2018, Trump threatened South Korea’s national security in order to strengthen America’s bargaining position on trade. “We have a very big trade deficit with them, and we protect them,” Trump said. “We have right now 32,000 soldiers on the border between North and South Korea. Let’s see what happens.”10 Such threats, reported around the world, undermined the credibility of the U.S. security umbrella and threw the value of being America’s ally into question. The administration later imposed what it called “national security tariffs,” which were designed to boost domestic production of steel and aluminum, a blow to major allies like Japan and Taiwan.11 The tariffs were driven by domestic political messaging more than American economic or strategic interests. By August 2020, most imports had to be given a tariff exemption in order to avoid catastrophic shortages.12 Tariffs were so harsh that domestic producers could not meet demand, leaving American manufacturers without needed materials and friendly powers feeling alienated.

Economic Engagement The 2017 withdrawal from the TPP represents a significant missed chance. If the goal of economic engagement is squeezing the most concessions out of a trade deal, then a powerful actor like the United States can gain much by one-to-one agreements. There is no possibility of smaller powers banding together to strengthen their positions, as can happen in multilateral negotiations. Clearly, this is how Trump viewed trade strategy. As he tweeted, “I don’t like the deal for the United States . . . Bilateral deals are far more efficient,

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profitable and better for OUR workers.”13 Trump walked away from the TPP and instead focused his energies on hardball renegotiations of bilateral agreements. The interests of the United States are, however, served by something much larger than wringing every last concession from individual states. Big agreements increase U.S. influence by using the pull of what is still the world’s largest economy to hold allies close and bring others into the American orbit. They offer a chance to write the rules that shape trade decisions in accordance with American interests and values, even when members are not trading with the United States. The TPP was intended to be a “gold standard in trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade, the kind of environment that has the rule of law and a level playing field,” which would “cover 40% of the world’s total trade and build in strong protections for workers and the environment.”14 Although China was not included in the deal, the TPP was expected to shift regional norms and encourage China to adopt trade practices that would benefit the United States, especially intellectual-property protections. When the United States pulled out of the deal, the agreement evolved into the CPTPP, with eleven signatories. The new deal uses language on labor standards, environmental protections, and dispute-resolution agreements taken from TPP drafts. However, members removed rules on intellectual property that the United States had previously fought to include. These included technology protections and patent and copyright term lengths, which were meant to protect U.S. pharmaceutical products against competition from generics.15 Without American participation, the CPTPP is smaller than its predecessor. Rather than being attractive enough to draw more neighbors to sign on to U.S.-backed rules in return for access, its diminished size instead left room for a new, larger trade agreement, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. Signed in November 2020, this agreement brings China, not the United States, into the world’s largest trading bloc. The RCEP also includes South Korea and the ASEAN members who had not joined CPTPP. Accordingly, rather than reinforcing American-backed norms, this new agreement was negotiated without U.S. involvement. Reflecting Chinese and ASEAN preference for noninterference, it is far less strict than the CPTPP, with few new rules on intellectual property and none on labor or environmental standards.16 Combined, CPTPP and RCEP will increase trade and integration within Asia but reduce America’s influence in the region. China’s recently declared interest in joining the CPTPP is another opportunity to strengthen that country’s foreign connections and counter American containment strategies.17 Pro-business publications like Forbes call on the new Biden administration to “reconsider the TPP . . . [and] rethink a U.S. retreat.”18 However, it is harder to negotiate concessions when joining an existing club. In addition, 2016 campaign

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rhetoric demonized the agreement as “potential disaster” for the United States, making it politically toxic.19 Rather than creating a lucrative trade agreement based on U.S.-written rules that China and others would be required accept in order to join, Trump’s withdrawal from the TPP has created two massive trade agreements from which the United States is excluded.

Diplomatic Engagement Shakeups While Trump’s North Korean diplomacy came to naught in the short term, it may pave the way for future successes. The precedent of highest-level discussions lowers the barrier for future talks. They may also have revealed a fundamental misunderstanding in the United States of North Korea’s position. The country is extremely unlikely to give up its nuclear arsenal before receiving concessions, and future overtures may be more likely to take this reality into account. If so, then a temporary diplomatic failure followed by continued engagement brings potential for something new and constructive to what had become a stagnant situation. The question of Taiwan’s political status is another knotty issue that the Trump administration reengaged with fresh thinking. America has been a stalwart supporter of the Kuomintang since the 1930s, when that party controlled China.20 It remained so when the party lost control of the mainland during the Chinese Civil War and continued to recognize the government of Taiwan as the sole legitimate government of China until the 1970s. After diplomatic relations were established with the People’s Republic of China in 1979, the United States ceased formal relations with the government of Taiwan as a state and began an informal and ambiguous relationship that continued alongside American security guarantees and arms sales to build up Taiwan’s defenses against a forced reintegration with the mainland. America’s policy of strategic ambiguity adopts a kind of Schrödinger’scat approach to Taiwan, which it treats both as a stable democratic ally and as a region within the People’s Republic of China. As long as one doesn’t open the box and look inside, both mutually exclusive options can be true at the same time. Trump moved away from this policy, stating that America was not necessarily committed to a One China policy. Instead, his administration sent two high-level visitors to Taiwan. On August 10, 2020, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar signed a memorandum of understanding and met with Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen. A month

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later, Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment Keith Krach attended the state funeral of former president Lee Teng-hui. In the final weeks of the Trump administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that the United States would end its ambiguous and informal diplomatic form of relations with its Taiwanese counterparts. The form had been a misguided “attempt to appease the Communist regime in Beijing,” he said. “No more.”21 Such strong statements and actions explain why Taiwan alone in the Asia-Pacific region rooted for Trump in the 2020 U.S. election.22 The status of Taiwan is a “red line” issue for China, a non-negotiable question of state sovereignty within its own borders. Demanding clarity and an end to strategic ambiguity is unlikely to end well for independence-minded Taiwanese. China has repeatedly warned that this is a matter over which it will go to war, and open conflict is in no party’s interest. However, contrary to this author’s expectations, the Biden administration has stayed this new, more confrontational course. In his first two weeks in office, Biden continued arms sales to Taiwan and sent U.S. warships transiting the Taiwan Strait. While stating that there has been no policy change, senior politicians have made visits to Taiwan, and the new president has stated that U.S. military personnel would fight to defend the island against a mainland invasion.23 The shift, which began in the Trump administration, has stirred up the situation and added to a sense of crisis.

China The Trump era witnessed a rise in harsh anti-Chinese rhetoric. The ideological divide and intense rivalry raised fears of a new cold war. Certainly, Sinoskepticism was a plank in the Trump platform, as seen in publicized moves against Chinese technology firms like Huawei and TikTok. It appeared in Trump’s references to the new coronavirus disease as the “China virus” and in the expulsions of Chinese journalists. Trump’s national security strategy for the Indo-Pacific, which was declassified and released in the final days of his administration, is illuminating. Drafted in the administration’s first year and endorsed by the president, the document confirms that the U.S. policy goal in the region is to contain and constrain China.24 As one analyst put it, “The United States . . . is increasingly defining competition with China in zero-sum terms.”25 Beijing-bashing rhetoric was stepped up in the 2020 campaign cycle, fomenting American hostility toward China. Combined with increasing Chinese assertiveness, especially over Hong Kong, it made the “basic premise of the Trump policy . . . that China is now an adversary” into a bipartisan and accepted part of American politics.26

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There are upsides to a cold war. It could rally popular domestic support for government and tighten bonds between allies in the face of a shared foe. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued that the struggle of war improves us.27 We can see this in some past responses to Cold War challenges. For example, the Soviet Union’s criticism of American racism was a driver of the civil rights movement.28 We may see a similar dynamic in response to America’s recent declaration that China’s treatment of its Muslim Uyghur population constitutes a genocide.29 Still, a cold war between the United States and China would diminish the potential for cooperation between the world’s first- and second-largest economies, likely with deleterious effects on both regional stability and the American ability to project influence in the AsiaPacific. Cold wars are dangerous. They heighten tensions and limit options. They are polarizing and lead to violence through proxy wars. The escalating trend of harsh rhetoric and threats is therefore alarming. The United States and China have vast areas of overlapping common interest. China benefits from international architecture long championed by the United States. Its very successes in economic engagement only reinforce what the country has to gain from maintaining a stable system of rules-based order by which all parties abide. However, in a climate of “China bashing,” President Biden seems to have calculated that he cannot afford to lose domestic political capital by rolling back aggressive U.S. policies against China, even if his administration believed doing so were in the country’s best interest.30 This is exactly the kind of self-imposed straightjacketing that makes cold-war logic illogical and hard to escape once caught in. Certainly, despite an abstract commitment to cooperate on environmental measures and a presidential-level virtual meeting, the confrontational rhetoric on security and trade issues has carried over into Biden’s first years in office.31

Moral Engagement The fact that America is a symbol of democracy, rule of law, and human rights is important to the country’s soft power in the region. It is also the basis of America’s place in “the quad,” a quadrilateral relationship between the United States, Australia, Japan, and India, which is the focus of American plans for stability in the region. The Trump administration adopted the term “IndoPacific” to describe the region and took part in the first-ever ministerial-level meeting of the quad in 2019.32 However, aspects of the Trump era dealt a blow to the international prestige of the U.S. political system and call into question America’s commitment to the shared values of the quad. Once in office, Trump launched a rhetorical assault on democratic values and institutions, including the free press. He claimed that the press is “truly

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the enemy of the people”; branded the paper of record in the United States, the New York Times, a “Fake News paper”; and described the more conservative Washington Post as “Crazed and Dishonest.”33 Trump often refused to call fellow leaders to account for human rights abuses, instead engaging in moral relativism. In response, one senator lamented on Twitter, “We are watching in real time as the American human rights bully pulpit disintegrates into ash.”34 After losing his bid for a second term in November 2020, Trump openly rejected the results of election, claiming fraud and calling on his supporters to “stop the steal.” The result was the January 6, 2021, insurgency on the Capitol and an unprecedented second impeachment of the president.35 By eroding belief in the media, elections, and peaceful transfers of power, these actions gave ammunition to regimes that are skeptical of democracy as a stable form of governance. They may diminish America’s standing to speak out against military coups and election fraud going forward.

Trump’s Legacy in Asia For all the sound and fury about reevaluations and putting America first, U.S. strategic goals actually changed very little. While some Trump policies damaged U.S. prestige and antagonized America’s allies, those traditional relationships survive. The Trump White House policy document on national security strategy for the Indo-Pacific, while highly aggressive in its containment strategy for China, is otherwise actually quite conventional. Listed under “Top interests of the United States in the Indo-Pacific” is the aim to “Enhance the credibility and effectiveness of our alliances,” with references to India, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan throughout.36 This traditional alliance approach was reinforced by the Biden administration in September 2021 with a new trilateral security partnership between the United States, Great Britain, and Australia known as AUKUS. The partners will share technology, including nuclear submarines, in support of rules-based international order and military containment of China.37 Strong security alliances and a liberal economic order remain foreign policy cornerstones even after a dramatic outsider reevaluation of U.S. interests. But perhaps what will turn out to be the most significant effect of the Trump administration’s actions on U.S.-foreign relations was not intended as foreign policy at all. The botched response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States economically and politically weakened the country, at least in the medium term. A more organized and centralized response from governments including China’s has meant that the relative impact of a global health crisis has been uneven. As the United States reeled, China resumed a semblance of normalcy. China’s economy continued to grow while America’s contracted and then faced

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record price inflation. This has sped up an existing shift in the balance of power in China’s favor, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. And, if a new cold war that is based on an ideological divide has indeed begun, the success of China’s coronavirus response thus far has been a powerful argument for centralized, communal, authoritarian systems over the decentralized and highly individualistic American model.38 As a historian, I quail at predicting the future, particularly in such eventful times. So much still feels precarious as I write from what may be the near end or the mere beginning of the global pandemic. The past four years have seen a weakening of American influence around the world. Voices questioning the long-term leadership potential of the United States in the Asia-Pacific no longer speak in a whisper. Cold-war rhetoric has raised tensions and hinders America’s ability to cooperate with a declared rival. Trump’s tweets and some of his actions made America appear an unreliable ally even to its closest friends. But Trump’s fresh approach has shaken up issues related to North Korea and Taiwan. The outcomes of that reengagement may yet yield new paths out of what have been viewed as intractable problems.

Notes 1. “National Security Advisor Anthony Lake’s Speech at the Johns Hopkins University, September 21, 1993,” Foreign Policy Bulletin 4 (November–December 1993): 45; qtd. in Evan Resnick, “Defining Engagement,” Journal of International Affairs 54, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 552. 2. Ben Hubbard, Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt, and Patrick Kingsley, “Abandoned by US in Syria, Kurds Find New Ally in American Foe,” New York Times, October 13, 2019. 3. “China Applies to Join Pacific Trade Pact to Boost Economic Clout,” Reuters, September 17, 2021. 4. “China’s Xi Warns Against ‘New Cold War,’ ” Al Jazeera, January 21, 2021. 5. Chalmers A. Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Henry Holt, 2003). 6. “Donald Trump: ‘US-Japan Alliance Is Steadfast and Ironclad,’ ” BBC News, May 27, 2019. 7. Linda Sieg and Daniel Leussink, “Trump Renews Criticism of Japan-US Alliance Before G20 Summit,” Reuters, June 27, 2019. 8. Jesse Johnson, “Trump Demanded Japan Cough Up $8 Billion for US Troops—or Risk Pullout, Bolton Says,” Japan Times, June 22, 2020. “US and South Korea Negotiate Cost-Sharing Deal of US Military Presence,” All Things Considered, March 5, 2020. 9. “Philippines Extends Termination Process of US Troop Deal, Eyes Long-Term Defence Pact,” Reuters, November 11, 2020. Jim Garamone, “Philippine President Restores Visiting Forces Agreement with US,” DOD News, July 30 2021. 10. Veronica Stracqualursi, “Trump Apparently Threatens to Withdraw US Troops from South Korea Over Trade,” CNN, March 16, 2018. 11. Chad P. Bown, “Trump’s Steel and Aluminum Tariffs Are Cascading out of Control,” Peterson Institute for International Economics, February 4, 2020, https://www.piie.com

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12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

/ blogs/trade-and-investment-policy-watch /trumps-steel-and-aluminum-tariffs-are -cascading-out-control. “US Waived Extra Tariffs on 70% of Japanese Steel and Aluminum,” Nikkei Asia, August 11, 2020. As Trump has been banned from Twitter, his original tweets have been removed. However, the quotation appears in Nyshka Chandran, “Trump Appears to Rule Out Rejoining the TPP,” CNBC, April 18, 2018. Hilary Clinton in 2012, qtd. in Michael A. Memoli, “Hillary Clinton Once Called TPP the ‘Gold Standard,’ ” Los Angeles Times, September 26, 2016. Jack Caporal, “The CPTPP: (Almost) One Year Later,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, November 5, 2019, https://www.csis.org /analysis/cptpp-almost-one -year-later. Peter A. Petri and Michael Plummer, “RCEP: A New Trade Agreement That Will Shape Global Economics and Politics,” Brookings Institute, November 16, 2020, https://www .brookings.edu/ blog /order-from-chaos/2020/11/16/rcep-a-new-trade-agreement-that -will-shape-global-economics-and-politics/. Hemant Adlakha, “With RCEP Complete, China Eyes CPTPP,” The Diplomat, December 22, 2020. Robert Goulder, “It’s Not Just The Taxes and Tariffs: Why Biden Should Reconsider the Trans-Pacific Partnership,” Forbes, December 22, 2020. Donald Trump, qtd. in “Trump Executive Order Pulls Out of TPP Trade Deal,” BBC News, January 24, 2017. Hilary Clinton also hedged on TPP during her 2016 presidential campaign, indicating she would push for more restrictions on currency manipulation. Michael A. Memoli, “Hillary Clinton Once Called TPP the ‘Gold Standard.’ Here’s Why, and What She Says About the Trade Deal Now,” September 26, 2016. See Dayna Barnes, Architects of Occupation: American Experts and the Planning for Postwar Japan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017), 12–15. Robert Eldridge, “Trump’s Whiplash Policy on Taiwan,” Japan Times, January 17, 2021. Matthew Smith, “Who Do People in Asia-Pacific Want to Win the US Presidential Election?,” YouGov, October 15, 2020, https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles -reports/2020/10/15/who-do-people-asia-pacific-want-win-us-presidentia. Phelim Kine, “Biden Leaves No Doubt: ‘Strategic Ambiguity’ Toward Taiwan Is Dead,” Politico, September 19, 2022, https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/19/ biden-leaves -no-doubt-strategic-ambiguity-toward-taiwan-is-dead-00057658. “US Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific,” Trump White House Archives, https:// trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IPS-Final-Declass.pdf. Mireya Solís, “US-Japan Relations in the Era of Trump: Navigating the Turbulence of ‘America First,’ ” México y la Cuenca del Pacífico 24, no. 8 (September 2019): 12n4. “A New Cold War: Trump, Xi and the Escalating US-China Confrontation,” Financial Times, October 4, 2020. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (New York: Knopf, 1923), 43. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). Edward Wong and Chris Buckley, “US Says China’s Repression of Uighurs Is ‘Genocide,’ ” New York Times, January 19, 2021. Eric Yu- Chua Huang, “Taiwan’s Opportunities and Risks During the Post-Trump, New Biden Era,” Brookings Institution Taiwan-US Quarterly Analysis Series, December 14, 2020.

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31. “US-China Joint Glasgow Declaration on Enhancing Climate Action in the 2020s,” US Department of State, November 11 2021, https://www.state.gov/u-s-china-joint -glasgow-declaration-on-enhancing-climate-action-in-the-2020s/. Ian Johnson, “Takeaway from the Biden-Xi Meeting: Jaw Jawing as Success,” Council on Foreign Relations Blog, November 17, 2021. Praveen Menon and Shashwat Awasthi, “China’s Xi Warns Against Return to Cold War Tensions at APEC Meeting,” Reuters, November 11, 2021. 32. “A Free and Open Indo-Pacific: Advancing a Shared Vision,” US Department of State, November 4, 2019, https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Free-and-Open -Indo-Pacific-4Nov2019.pdf. 33. Brett Samuels, “Trump Ramps Up Rhetoric on Media, Calls Press ‘The Enemy of the People,’ ” The Hill, April 5, 2019. 34. Mark Landler, “Trump’s ‘Very Friendly’ Talk with Duterte Stuns Aides and Critics Alike,” New York Times, April 30, 2017. 35. Dan Barry and Sheera Frenkel, “ ‘Be There. Will Be Wild!’: Trump All but Circled the Date,” New York Times, January 8, 2021. 36. “US Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific.” 37. “Aukus: UK, US and Australia Launch Pact to Counter China,” BBC News, September 16, 2021. 38. This trend has continued into the Biden presidency despite a largely successful roll out of vaccines. When this piece was first written as part of the ISSF policy series in midFebruary 2021, the seven-day average of COVID deaths was 1,831. As I update it ten months later, the average daily toll is a still-high 1,133. The persistence of the virus had led to political divisions and legal battles over mask-wearing mandates, supply-chain shortages, and dramatic inflation, all of which have reduced public confidence in the government. By contrast, although China too faces rising inflation, domestic support for President Xi has increased. “Interactive Feature: Coronavirus Map and Cases,” New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html. Reis Thebault, “Judge Strikes Down Pennsylvania’s School Mask Mandate; State Health Department Appeals Decision,” Washington Post, November 15, 2021. Jeanna Smialek, “Inflation Warning Signs Flash Red, Posing Challenge for Washington,” New York Times, November 10, 2021. “China’s Communist Party Passes Resolution Amplifying President Xi’s Authority,” Reuters, November 11, 2021.

CHAPTER 20

RIDING THE ROLLER COASTER India and the Trump Years TA N V I M A DA N

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n November  9, 2016, India’s prime minister Narendra Modi called President-elect Donald Trump to congratulate him on his electoral victory. Perhaps fittingly, news of this exchange first appeared on Twitter.1 Subsequently, reports emerged in late November that then Indian foreign secretary Subrahmanyam Jaishankar was in the United States to meet with members of Trump’s transition team.2 Both the call and the visit were striking because they were a departure from the norm. Usually, if U.S. presidents-elect speak to their Indian counterparts, it is after, not before, phone calls to U.S. allies. Moreover, the Indian government has in the past tended to interact with presidential transition teams from Delhi or through its missions in the United States. These unusual developments reflected two elements that characterized India-U.S. relations during the Trump administration: first, India’s desire to maintain ties with a country that had become a crucial partner, accompanied by its uncertainty about the new president’s views and approach, and second, its recognition that dealing with Trump was not going to be business as usual and would require Delhi to adapt its approach. This led to an Indian strategy that involved trying to keep the India-U.S. flight steady, taking advantage of tailwinds, handling turbulence as best as possible, and hoping that there would be no sudden changes in flight plans or crises. By the end of the administration, India’s policy makers felt that they had come through the Trump years—what its foreign minister said in 2021 were

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often a roller coaster time3—better than several U.S. allies.4 The India-U.S. relationship had experienced a fair degree of continuity from previous administrations. It had also witnessed changes—some positive from Delhi’s perspective, with forward progress in certain areas and cooperation during crises, but also some new or heightened areas of friction. Underlying all this had been a constant sense of uncertainty that left a longer legacy.

Convergence The most significant forward progress came in the strategic realm, driven in large part by shared India-U.S. concerns about a rising China’s assertiveness. Initially, there were doubts in Delhi about the administration’s approach to China, particularly given Trump’s desire for a trade deal and for Chinese cooperation on North Korea. In this context, there were worrying signs for Delhi, including the Trump summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago in April 2017 and the president’s subsequent dispatch of a U.S. delegation to China’s inaugural Belt and Road Forum, which India boycotted.5 This reinforced India’s historic concerns, dating back to 1971, about a potential U.S.-China condominium (or G2).6 But there were also some uncertainties related to this that were particular to Trump—that his disdain for alliances and doubts about U.S. commitments abroad might make him supportive of a spheres-of-influence world, that his family’s corporate interests would make him susceptible to Chinese overtures, and that his proclivity for powerful personalities would lead him to seek a “bromance” with Xi. However, there were more heartening signs for India in the summer of 2017 related to India’s challenges both to its east (China) and west (Afghanistan and Pakistan). The administration’s approach to China shifted, in part because of Trump’s frustration that Beijing was not responding to his trade demands and not pressuring North Korea sufficiently.7 Administration officials who saw China as more of a competitor than partner also seemed to be winning key internal debates. Signs of this shift were evident when Modi visited Washington in June 2017, even as a Sino-Indian military standoff was underway at the Bhutan- China-India border trijunction. They became more evident with the Australia-Japan-U.S. trilateral dialogue in August and the subsequent unveiling of the administration’s Free and Open Indo-Pacific vision and tougher language on China. The Indo-Pacific framing and the key role that the administration envisioned for India, outlined in a speech by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, was particularly welcome in Delhi.8 That summer, Trump also announced a South Asia strategy. While he had promised a troop withdrawal from Afghanistan during the campaign, Delhi was relieved that he instead previewed a tougher approach to the Taliban and

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a small increase in troops. Moreover, acknowledging Indian contributions in Afghanistan, he called for greater India-U.S. collaboration on the issue. On the other hand, he criticized Pakistan for being a safe haven for terrorist organizations and the Taliban.9 Delhi also found the administration helpful on issues related to its rival to the west. Washington worked to place Pakistan on a terrorist financing and money laundering watchlist (the “gray list” at the Financial Action Task Force).10 Together with France and the United Kingdom, it also successfully pushed China to lift its hold on the designation of the leader of a Pakistan-based terrorist organization at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) 1267 Committee.11 And when Beijing, urged by Pakistan, sought to raise and publicize India’s dilution of article 370, which gave Jammu and Kashmir autonomy, Washington and Paris ran interference.12 The latter also reflected another Trump characteristic that helped the Modi government—his lack of interest in the values pillar of the relationship, which was also visible when he traveled to Delhi in February 2020. Some saw the president’s response to questions about ongoing protests against India’s Citizenship Amendment Act as a refusal to criticize Modi; others saw it as an endorsement of the prime minister’s approach.13 One question that historians might explore in the future is whether the Modi government saw the Trump period as a particularly conducive time in terms of the international landscape to move forward with such policies. More broadly, India-U.S. strategic convergence paved the way for significant diplomatic, defense, and security cooperation over the course of the administration. This was driven by shared concerns about a rising China’s behavior and complementary Indo-Pacific visions, as well as counterterrorism objectives. There was greater institutionalization of the India-U.S. partnership, with the creation of new mechanisms, such as an annual 2+2 dialogue between foreign and defense ministers, with an intercessional consultation at the assistant secretary level, a defense cyber dialogue, and new liaisons in the form of an Indian liaison at the U.S. Naval Forces Central Command and an American liaison at India’s Information Fusion Centre–Indian Ocean Region. The two countries also upgraded their military exercises, with a new multiservice Tiger Triumph exercise and the revival of the bilateral air force exercise Cope India, while continuing their annual army and special-forces exercises and regular naval exercises. Intensifying competition with China also contributed to India’s ability to overcome its earlier reluctance and signing “foundational” agreements with the United States, which facilitate military interoperability and enable intelligence sharing. India also agreed to acquire additional military equipment from the United States (for example, MH-60R helicopters for its navy). Washington, in turn, renewed an offer of fighter aircraft and, moving past the reluctance of previous administrations, put armed drones on the table as well.14

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Competition with China and greater comfort with Washington also made Delhi more willing to partner with the United States beyond the bilateral context. The Trump administration and Modi government upgraded their trilateral dialogue with Japan to the leader level and revived the Australia-IndiaJapan-U.S. quadrilateral (“Quad”).15 They jointly trained peacekeepers in Africa and included each other or like-minded partners as participants or observers in various bilateral and multilateral military exercises. Moreover, their navies participated in a group sail with Japan and the Philippines through the South China Sea.16 They also collaborated in regional and multilateral institutions, including the UNSC (where in the past India and the United States have often been at loggerheads).17

Crises This cooperation was buoyed by the administration’s approach to the three major national security crises Delhi faced during the Trump years. In each one, Indian policy makers found Washington to be helpful. In 2019, after an attack on Indian security forces in Kashmir by the Pakistan-based U.S.-designated terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed, the Trump administration condemned the attack. It further called on Pakistan “to end immediately the support and safe haven provided to all terrorist groups operating on its soil.” National Security Advisor (NSA) John Bolton did not contradict an Indian statement that he had told his counterpart that he “supported India’s right to self-defense against cross-border terrorism.” And when India conducted retaliatory air strikes across the border, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo labeled them “counterterrorism actions” and put the onus for deescalation on Pakistan.18 Significantly for India, the administration was also helpful in border crises with China when Delhi accused Beijing of trying to change the status quo unilaterally. In 2017, when the two militaries engaged in a standoff at Doklam, the administration called for a return to the status quo and respect for Bhutanese sovereignty and international law (the Indian position). The United States consulted with Delhi, offering assistance, and, according to sources in India, provided intelligence on Chinese troop deployments.19 In 2020, both the crisis and American assistance were more significant. The United States was the only major power to explicitly criticize China’s actions at the border. It did so for its own reasons, highlighting the Chinese moves as reflective of a broader assertiveness that needed to be tackled. However, this stance benefited India—not just because of the diplomatic support but also from the subsequent sharing of intelligence, leasing of military platforms, and fast-tracking of certain military supplies.20

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The Trump administration’s approach helped counter the view prevalent in some quarters in India that Washington would not take India’s side in crises.21 Other facets of the relationship also improved. Before the COVID-19 crisis, trade, investment, and revenue-generating people-to-people (tourism, education) ties had all increased. And during the pandemic, India and the United States offered each other assistance.22 However, as Joshua White has noted, the defense and security pillar of the relationship strengthened far more than the others—and bore most of the load of the relationship during the Trump years.23

Divergence On the other side of the ledger, the two countries experienced differences on a range of issues. On the strategic side, perhaps the most significant was related to the U.S. drawdown from Afghanistan. In 2018–2019, Trump altered his approach to Afghanistan, seeking to withdraw U.S. troops as soon as possible. For Delhi, this created two challenges. First, it led to a Trump shift on Pakistan, which he saw as a facilitator with the Taliban. Among other things, this led to engagement—and a certain bonhomie—between Trump and Prime Minister Imran Khan of Pakistan.24 Second, the administration’s talks with the Taliban left India somewhat isolated—its 1990s partners on that issue, Iran and Russia, had already engaged the Taliban. The U.S.-Taliban deal in February 2020 only increased concerns in India about the implications for the Ashraf Ghani government in Kabul that both Washington and Delhi had been backing, as well as for stability in Afghanistan. A Taliban return to Kabul would have implications for Indian security; Delhi believed it could embolden the Pakistani military and Pakistan-based terrorist groups that targeted India—and give such groups additional space to operate in Afghanistan.25 India-U.S. differences about China also emerged. For instance, Delhi was constantly concerned about a Trump pivot toward Xi upending the more competitive American stance on China. There were also some differences on the best competitive approach—India, for example, was not as focused on the ideological dimension of the conflict or as interested in calling Beijing out by name. Another difference involved whether Russia was part of the China problem or part of the solution to the China problem. While Trump sought to engage Russia—an approach that India had hoped would prevail—other administration officials and members of Congress took a tougher view.26 The administration’s National Security Strategy identified both China and Russia as revisionist threats.27 Delhi, on the other hand, had been advocating for the United States and the West more broadly to help stall deepening Sino-Russian ties (or even creating a wedge) by reaching a new modus vivendi with Moscow. 28

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Divergence on Russia also created a more parochial problem for India. The 2017 Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) opened up the possibility of sanctions on India for its acquisition of Russian military platforms, particularly the S-400 missile-defense system. It was not clear whether the Trump administration understood or tried to prevent the inclusion of related provisions in the bill. Once the potential consequences for not just India but also other Indo-Pacific partners such as Indonesia and Vietnam became apparent, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis argued for a waiver provision. It was subsequently included in the National Defense Authorization Act.29 Nonetheless, the problem remained for India. Beyond the fact that the act left a sword of Damocles hanging over the relationship, it left open the possibility that a transactional president like Trump could seek concessions in exchange for a waiver. The administration’s sanctions on Iran and Venezuela also hurt India (it imported oil from both and was engaged in a project in Iran benefiting Afghanistan’s connectivity).30 All three developments reinforced traditional Indian concerns about U.S. reliability, conditionalities, and weaponization of interdependence in ways that constrained India’s strategic autonomy.31 Delhi also had concerns about the Trump administration’s approach to international agreements and institutions. The U.S. withdrawal from the Iran deal and the Paris Climate Accords had direct (and adverse) implications for India. There was, for instance, the question of the fate of Obama-era agreements on clean-energy finance and technology transfer given that the Trump administration was more focused on the hydrocarbon space, where U.S.-India collaboration did increase. Furthermore, India worried about Trump’s perception of alliances. Policy makers believed Trump’s disdain for the traditional allies of the United States did open up space for a partner like India. However, Delhi also had an interest in the United States reinforcing—not weakening—its network of alliances and partnerships and its presence in the Indo-Pacific.32 Moreover, Indian leaders were concerned about Trump’s critique of multilateralism (of which India is a strong proponent) and his attitude toward organizations like the World Health Organization and the World Trade Organization (WTO), among other things, leaving a vacuum for China to fill.33 Trump’s view of the WTO also reflected his preferred economic approach, which caused significant India-U.S. friction. India found itself the target of tariffs, lost certain trade benefits, and had to grapple with an American approach to immigration that adversely affected India’s (and Indians’) interests in terms of labor mobility and remittances.34 Many of the administration’s problems with Delhi in this realm were not new and included market-access concerns, investment restrictions, and price controls on medical devices. Other

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challenges emerged in the digital-trade domain, with the Trump administration expressing concern about India’s e-commerce regulations and datalocalization plans. But there was also the specific issue of dealing with a president who focused primarily (and even solely) on specific transactions and trade deficits when measuring the benefits of economic ties.35

Adaptation In each case, Delhi sought to manage or downplay these differences—something that Indian governments have historically done when a country is important enough for India’s interests. Administration officials also worked with Delhi to ensure particularly that differences on trade would not spill over, impeding strategic cooperation. This worked in part because the president did not generally have a negative view of India. Indeed, he was relatively familiar with India, where his company continued to do business. He also often praised Modi.36 The prime minister, in turn, made it a point to woo Trump. While some believed this was a factor of their chemistry as two “strong” men, there is little evidence that this was more than choreography on Modi’s part.37 Instead, this approach was fueled by the prime minister’s recognition that it was important to keep on the side of the leader of a country that was crucial to his domestic and foreign policy goals, especially when that leader’s personal preferences shaped, if not dominated, policy.38 The administration’s focus on competition with China also benefited India in this regard. Delhi had to be nimble in dealing with frequent personnel changes at the most senior levels. However, it found that Trump’s successive national security advisors, secretaries of defense, and secretaries of state saw India as important from this China/Indo-Pacific lens. India also benefited from the fact that experienced India or South Asia hands held key positions for most of the Trump administration. These included the National Security Council’s (NSC) senior director for South Asia; Lisa Curtis, the acting assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, Alice Wells; and the U.S. ambassador to India, Kenneth Juster. Others were not India hands per se but Asia/ Indo-Pacific hands who saw value in India as a partner in the context of competition with China, for instance, Matthew Pottinger, NSC senior director for Asia and later deputy NSA, and Randall Schriver, assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs. While these officials helped keep the relationship on track, particularly on the defense and security front, Indian policy makers also made special adjustments for Trump. Traditionally, certain elements have featured in India’s relationship with the United States. One aspect has been not talking money or touting deals and numbers publicly—especially at the highest levels—lest the

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relationship be seen as transactional or the Indian government be seen as engaging in quid pro quos or acting under American pressure. Another element has been problems caused by perceived slights against India or Indians. A third has been Delhi expressing disapproval—directly or indirectly— of American engagement with India’s adversaries, especially Pakistan. A fourth has been generally staying out of American politics, since Delhi has benefited from bipartisan support for the relationship and has advocated noninterference in countries’ internal affairs. During the Trump years, there was a departure from each of these elements in part to adapt to Trump’s personality and priorities. For instance, Indian policy makers highlighted transactions, touting the dollar amounts of defense and energy deals. They reduced India’s tariffs on certain Harley-Davidson products after Trump’s frequent complaints about the rates.39 Instead of taking offense or objecting, they downplayed developments that would otherwise have fueled a firestorm in India, including reports of Trump making fun of Modi’s accent and belittling India’s contributions to Afghanistan, his calling India “filthy,” his offers to mediate the Kashmir dispute, his public praise of Pakistan while in India, and his threat of retaliation if India did not supply the United States with hydroxychloroquine (which Trump was touting as a COVID-19 treatment).40 Delhi’s adaptation to Trump’s proclivities also included engaging with the president’s children, for instance rolling out the red carpet for Ivanka Trump, who visited India for the Global Entrepreneurs’ Summit.41 More noticeably, in a nod to the president’s love of large audiences, Modi gave Trump public platforms in the United States (at a “Howdy Modi” rally in Texas in 2019) and in India (at a “Namaste Trump” event in Modi’s home state of Gujarat in 2020). Trump’s campaign used both for political purposes, and in India, some criticized Modi for mentioning a Trump campaign slogan at the Houston event in a way that could be read as an endorsement.42 Less noticeably, the Indian government also agreed to cooperate to tackle the opioid problem, which Trump highlighted on the campaign trail.43 But beyond adjusting its bilateral approach, the Trump era also led to adaptations in terms of India’s broader foreign policy. This stemmed in significant part from heightened concerns about the reliability of the United States and uncertainty about its continuing role and commitment in the Indo-Pacific. This had two effects. First, in order to keep Trump engaged and onside, Delhi highlighted India’s willingness to burden share in the region. It also agreed to a revival of the Quad in part to incentivize the United States to stay involved in Asia (thus bringing to mind Geir Lundestad’s “empire by invitation” thesis).44 Second, India hedged against uncertainty about the United States. It did this by doubling down on its traditional diversification strategy, maintaining multiple partnerships to maximize the benefits and to minimize the risks of overdependence on just one country. India accordingly deepened ties with not

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just Australia and Japan, which also shaped its decision on reviving the Quad, but also South Korea. In addition, India reinvigorated ties with European countries, particularly France, and invested in its traditional relationship with Russia.45 Delhi briefly even tried to stabilize relations with China in 2018–2019, but that effort ran aground with the COVID-19 and border crises in 2020.

Legacy and Looking Forward By the end of the Trump administration, India had a healthier portfolio of partners, one that did not preclude but, in fact, included a much closer defense and security relationship with the United States. The India-U.S. partnership that the Biden administration inherited was in a much better place than many other American relationships. In certain realms, it was also in a better place than it had been at the end of the Obama administration. The relationship thus did not require repair as much as rebalancing. And the new administration broadened the areas of cooperation while continuing to build on the strategic convergences that have been apparent since 2000 and intensified during the Trump years. The Biden team indeed engaged more with India in its first year in office than any prior U.S. administration—both because of convergences, with India relevant to several administration priorities, as well as because of crises involving COVID-19, China, and Afghanistan. However, in 2021, Delhi also found itself grappling with other, more problematic, legacies of the Trump era. This included the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and greater political polarization in the United States, which prevented more effective and speedy American action on the pandemic and subsequent economic recovery. The increased uncertainty of American allies about the United States has also had consequences. While it led them to seek to partner with India, it also led some of them to hedge between the United States and China, thus precluding the kind of collaborative action across Asian and European theaters that Delhi desires. And while India’s need for alignment will lead it to a closer relationship with the United States, its own uncertainty during the Trump era will also reinforce its parallel desire for autonomy, thus setting limits on how far it might go with the United States even under a new president. As a result, India will seek to maintain ties with partners like Russia that Washington finds problematic.

Notes 1. Tweet by the Indian Ministry of External Affairs, November 9, 2016, https://twitter .com/MEAIndia/status/796392497849110528?s =20.

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2. “Foreign Secretary Jaishankar Meets Trump’s Transition Team During US Visit,” Press Trust of India, November 24, 2016, https://www.outlookindia .com /newswire/story /foreign - secretary -jaishankar -meets - trumps - transition - team - during - us -visit /961270. 3. Australian National University Crawford Leadership Forum, “JG Crawford Oration 2021 with His Excellency Dr. S. Jaishankar, External Affairs Minister of India,” September 6, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io21kAphiDQ. 4. C. Raja Mohan, “Trump, Biden and India,” Seminar 737 (January 2021), https://www .india-seminar.com/2021/737/737_c _raja _ mohan.htm. 5. For the concerns, see comments in “Deconstructing the Modi Doctrine: Three Years of Modi’s Foreign Policy,” Brookings Institution India Centre, New Delhi, India, May  24, 2017, https:// brook .gs/3hHB4vJ; Forum for Strategic Initiatives & Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, “Roundtable on 100 Day of Trump—Implications for India,” New Delhi, India, May 11, 2017, https://www.kas.de/documents/252038/253252/7_dokument _ dok _ pdf _ 50029 _ 2 .pdf /43f6a908 -71cb - 540b - a864 -7f8824bc0873 ? version = 1 .0 & t = 1539648630388. For Belt and Road Forum differences, see “US to Send Delegation to China’s Belt and Road Summit,” Reuters, May  12, 2017, http://reut.rs/2pEV5p7; Indian Ministry of External Affairs, Official Spokesperson’s Response to a Query on Participation of India in OBOR/BRI Forum, May  13, 2017, https:// bit .ly/2VAs mmM. 6. Tanvi Madan, Fateful Triangle: How China Shaped US-India Relations During the Cold War (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press), 221–59. 7. Julie Hirschfeld Davis, “Trump Criticizes China as Meeting on North Korea Nears,” New York Times, July 5, 2017, https://nyti.ms/2VXP9Og; Brad Lendon, “Trump Rips China After North Korea Missile Test,” CNN, July 30, 2017, https://cnn.it/3zo8Kor; Ana Swanson, “Trade Talks Fizzle as China Rebuffs Key Trump Team Demand,” Washington Post, July 19, 2017, https://wapo.st/3km8eDd; Lesley Wroughton and Jeff Mason, “Trump Orders Probe of China’s Intellectual Property Practices,” Reuters, August 14, 2017, https://reut.rs/3CnmKk8. 8. “Joint Statement—United States and India: Prosperity Through Partnership,” Washington, DC, June 27, 2017, https://mea .gov.in /outoging-visit-detail.htm?28560 / Joint+Statement+ +United +States + and +India +Prosperity +Through+Partnership; “Joint Statement—Australia-Japan-United States Trilateral Strategic Dialogue,” August 7, 2017, Manila, Philippines, mofa .go.jp/files/000279008.pdf; “Jim Mattis at Hearing on Political and Security Situation in Afghanistan,” U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, October  3, 2017, https://www.armed-services.senate.gov /imo/media /doc/17–82 _ 10– 03–17.pdf; Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, “Defining Our Relationship with India for the Next Century,” Remarks at Center for Strategic & International Studies, October  18, 2017, https://translations.state.gov/2017/10/18 /secretary- of-state -rex-tillerson- on- defining- our-relationship -with-india-for-the -next-century/. 9. The White House, “Remarks by President Trump on the Strategy in Afghanistan and South Asia,” Arlington, VA, August 21, 2017, https://in.usembassy.gov/remarks-pre sident-trump-strategy-afghanistan-south-asia /; C. Raja Mohan, “Trump and South Asia: Breaking New Ground,” Asian Views on America’s Role in Asia: An Early Assessment of the Trump Presidency (Asia Foundation), July 18, 2018, https://asiafounda tion.org /2018/07/18/trump-and-south-asia-breaking-new-ground/. 10. Salman Masood, “At U.S. Urging, Pakistan to Be Placed on Terrorism-Financing List,” New York Times, February 23, 2018, https://nyti.ms/2VTdswL.

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11. Sachin Parashar, “China Gets Ultimatum to Lift ‘Technical’ Hold on Masood Azhar,” Times of India, April 12, 2019, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/china/china -gets-ultimatum-to-lift-technical-hold-on-azhar/articleshow/68840398.cms. 12. Anirban Bhaumik, “Despite UN Feat, UK’s Stand, Russian Surprise Irk India,” Deccan Herald, August 17, 2019, https://www.deccanherald.com/national/despite-un-feat -uks-stand-russian-surprise-irk-india-755090.html; Shubhajit Roy, “France, U.S. Block China Move on J&K at UNSC,” Indian Express, January 16, 2020, https://indianexpress .com/article/india/france-us-block-china-move-on-jk-at-unsc/. 13. Apurva Vishwanath and Kaunain Sheriff M, “Explained: What NRC+CAA Means to You,” Indian Express, December 25, 2019, https://indianexpress.com/article/explained /explained-citizenship-amendment-act-nrc-caa-means-6180033/; Jonathan Lemire and Jill Colvin, “Trump Defends Modi, Refuses to Weigh In on Citizenship Law,” AP, February 25, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/narendra-modi-donald-trump-ap-top -news-new-delhi-international-news-2ea28e127629341e3c9a33b33eae198f; Dipanjan Roy Chaudhury, “Donald Trump Backs PM Modi on Citizenship Law,” Economic Times, February 26, 2020, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and -nation /donald -trump -backs -pm -modi - on - citizenship -law/articleshow/74311234 .cms. 14. For a fuller list of developments in this space during the Trump administration, see Tanvi Madan, “Managing China: Competitive Engagement, with Indian Characteristics,” in Global China: Assessing China’s Growing Role in the World, ed. Chhabra et al. (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2021), 126; or https://twitter.com/tanvi _ madan/status/1327311456027729921?s =20. 15. Indrani Bagchi, “In First-Ever Trilateral Summit, India-Japan-US Focus on ‘Inclusive’ Indo-Pacific,” Times of India, December 1, 2018, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com /india /in -first - ever -trilateral - summit -india -japan -us -focus - on -inclusive -indo -pacific/articleshow/66889722.cms; Tanvi Madan, “The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of the ‘Quad,’ ” War on the Rocks, November 16, 2017, https://warontherocks.com/2017/11/rise -fall-rebirth-quad/. 16. “Exercise Enhances Trust, Cooperation Between U.S., Indian Air Forces,” PACOM, December 18, 2018, https://www.pacom.mil/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article /1716949/exercise-enhances-trust-cooperation-between-us-indian-air-forces/; Indian Ministry of Defence, “AUSINDEX-19 Concludes,” April 16, 2019, https://pib.gov.in /Pressreleaseshare.aspx?PRID =1570731; “U.S., Japan, India and Philippines Challenge Beijing with Naval Drills in the South China Sea,” Reuters, May 9, 2019, https://reut .rs/3nLcuxT. 17. Seema Sirohi, “India-US-EU Combine Halts China’s Belt and Road Initiative at the UN,” The Wire, December 12, 2018. 18. The White House, “Statement from the Press Secretary on the Terrorist Attack in India,” February 14, 2019, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements /statement-press-secretary-terrorist-attack-india/; Indian Ministry of External Affairs, “Readout of Telephonic Conversation Between National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and U.S. NSA Amb John Bolton,” February 16, 2019, https://www.mea .gov.in /press -releases .htm?dtl /31058/Readout _of _Telephonic _Conversation _ between _ National _ Security_Advisor_Ajit_Doval_and_US _NSA_Amb_John_Bolton; Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo, “Concern Regarding India-Pakistan Tensions,” February 26, 2019, https://2017-2021.state.gov/concern-regarding-india-pakistan-tensions/index.html. 19. Tanvi Madan, “The US and Doklam: Look Beyond Rhetoric,” Order from Chaos (Brookings Institution), September 26, 2017, https:// brook .gs/3CrCSkw; Pranab Dhal

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21. 22.

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24. 25.

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30.

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Samanta, “US’ COMCASA Assurance: Won’t Share India Data Without Consent,” Economic Times, September  5, 2018, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com /news /politics-and-nation/us-comcasa-assurance-wont-share-india-data-without-consent /articleshow/65678934.cms. Humeyra Pamuk and Jonathan Landay, “Pompeo Says China Took ‘Incredibly Aggressive Action’ in Recent Clash with India,” Reuters, July 8, 2020, https://reut.rs/3nJikQn; “Manu Pubby, “India Acquires 11,000 Extreme Cold Gear Sets from US Army,” Economic Times, October 29, 2020, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence /india-acquires-11000-extreme-cold-gear-sets-from-us-army/articleshow/78922920 .cms; “Indian Navy Inducts Two American Predator Drones on Lease, Can Be Deployed on China Border,” ANI, November  25, 2020, http://timesofindia .indiatimes.com /articleshow/79409200.cms; see comments from General Kenneth S. Wilsbach, Commander, U.S. Pacific Air Force in Conversation with the Defense Writers Group, November 18, 2020, https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/ blogs.gwu.edu /dist /2/672/files /2020/11/DWG-Gen.Wilsbach.pdf. Mohan, “Trump, Biden and India.” Neha Arora and Sumit Khanna, “India Exports 50 Million Hydroxychloroquine Tablets to U.S. for COVID-19 Fight: Source,” Reuters, April  30, 2020, https://reut.rs /3lDjgDo; “US Hands Over Second Shipment of 100 Ventilators to India,” Press Trust of India, August 19, 2020, https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/covid-19-us -hands-over-second-shipment-of-100 -ventilators-to -india /story-XYq2d9d5hAENG dbHJzoEJL .html. Joshua T. White, After the Foundational Agreements: An Agenda for US-India Defense and Security Cooperation (Brookings Institution, January 2021), https://www.brookings .edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/FP_20210111 _us _india _white.pdf. Madiha Afzal, “Evaluating the Trump Administration’s Pakistan Reset,” Order from Chaos (Brookings Institution), October 26, 2020, https:// brook .gs/3i6wrfh. Nyshka Chandran, “US Troop Withdrawals in Afghanistan Are a Major Headache for India,” CNBC, December 28, 2018, https://cnb.cx /3An66QR; Mihir Sharma, “Trump’s Taliban Deal Is Bad for India,” Bloomberg, March 2, 2020, https://bloom.bg/3nLDLk3;. Elizabeth Roche, “India to Closely Watch Trump-Putin Summit in Helsinki Today,” Mint, July 16, 2018, https://www.livemint.com/Politics/CthCygJu913WVMDVoacuFM /India-to-closely-watch-Trump-Putin-summit-in-Helsinki-today.html. The White House, National Security Strategy of the United States of America, December  2017, https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content /uploads/2017/12/ NSS -Final-12-18 -2017-0905.pdf. Tanvi Madan, “Between a Cold War Ally and an Indo-Pacific Partner: India’s U.S.Russia Balancing Act,” War on the Rocks, October 16, 2018, https://warontherocks.com /2018 /10/ between -a - cold -war-ally-and -an -indo -pacific -partner-indias -u -s -russia -balancing-act/. Richard  M. Rossow and Kriti Upadhyaya, “Assessing India’s CAATSA Sanctions Waiver Eligibility,” The Diplomat, February 12, 2021, https://thediplomat.com/2021/02 /assessing-indias-caatsa-sanctions-waiver-eligibility/. Kalpana Pathak, “As US Sanctions Kick In, Indian Refiners Brace for Costly Crude,” Mint, May 1, 2019, https://www.livemint.com/industry/energy/as-us-sanctions-kick-in -indian-refiners-brace-for-costlier-crude-1556690214456.html. India did get an exemption for the connectivity project: “US Gives ‘Narrow Exemption’ to India from Sanctions on Chabahar for Afghan Aid: Official,” Press Trust of India, December 19, 2019, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/72884455.cms.

234 TRU MP A B R OA D 31. “Implications of CAATSA on U.S.-India Relations,” USISPF, September  16, 2021, https://youtu.be/N6xZavaDBfw. 32. See the foreign minister’s comments in Yaroslav Trofimov, “India Sees Opportunity as U.S. Remakes Its Alliances,” Wall Street Journal, January 22, 2020, https://on.wsj .com/3knxR6D. 33. Devirupa Mitra, “India Indicates Trump’s WHO Fund Freeze Is Ill-Timed, as It Weighs the Tedros Equation,” The Wire, April 15, 2020, https://thewire.in/diplomacy/donald -trumps-fund-freeze-who-india-tedros; Gulshan Sachdeva, “Trump and WTO: India Must Be Prepared by Reshaping Its Strategy,” Money Control, May 11, 2020, https:// www.moneycontrol.com/news/opinion/trump-and-wto-india-must-be-prepared-by -reshaping-its-strategy-4351141.html. 34. Chad P. Brown, “Trump’s Mini-Trade War with India,” Peterson Institute for International Economics, July 8, 2019, https://www.piie.com/ blogs/trade-and-investment -policy-watch/trumps-mini-trade-war-india; Anjani Trivedi, “Trump’s Immigration Stance Stings India’s Most Important Industry,” Wall Street Journal, February 1, 2017, https://on.wsj.com/3tPSewi; Kai Schultz and Sameer Yasir, “For Indian Diaspora, Panic and Anger Over Trump’s Immigration Plans,” New York Times, May 12, 2020, https:// nyti.ms/3lAFDct. 35. The two sides negotiated a phase-one trade deal but never went through with it. Suhasini Haidar, “Trump Regime Blocked Trade Deal: Jaishankar,” The Hindu, December  12, 2020, https://www.thehindu .com /news/national /jaishankar-blames-trump -team-for-failure-of-trade-deal/article33315761.ece. 36. Tanvi Madan, “Trump, India, and the Known Unknowns,” Order from Chaos (Brookings Institution), November 2, 2016, https://brook.gs/3nJx7e1; Mo Abbas et al., “Trump Heaps Praise on India’s Modi in Packed Stadium,” NBC News, February  24, 2020, https://nbcnews.to/3nKQSBN. 37. “Birds of a Feather: On Trump-Modi Chemistry,” The Hindu, February  13, 2020, https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/ birds-of-a-feather-the-hindu-editorial - on - the - chemistry - between - us - president - donald - trump - and - prime -minister -narendra-modi/article30803725.ece. 38. Interviews with Indian officials, 2019–2020. 39. The White House, “Remarks by President Trump and Prime Minister Modi of India in Joint Press Statement,” New Delhi, India February 25, 2020, https://trumpwhitehouse .archives.gov/ briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-prime-minister-modi -india-joint-press-statement-2/; Kirtika Suneja, “Duty Relief Proposed for Harley Motorcycles Ahead of Trump Visit,” Economic Times, February  15, 2020, https:// economictimes .indiatimes .com /news/economy/foreign-trade/duty-relief-proposed -for-harley-motorcycles-ahead-of-trump-visit/articleshow/74143989.cms. 40. Greg Jaffe and Missy Ryan, “Up to 1,000 More  U.S. Troops Could Be Headed to Afghanistan This Spring,” Washington Post, January 21, 2018, https://wapo.st/3CtEn1w; “U.S. President Donald Trump Mocks PM Modi for Library in Afghanistan,” AFP, January 3, 2019, https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/us-president-donald -trump-mocks-pm-modi-for-library-in-afghanistan/article25896776.ece; Sriram Lakshman, “Donald Trump’s Remark on ‘Filthy’ Indian Air Sparks Row,” The Hindu, October 23, 2020, https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/trumps-remark-on -filthy-indian-air-sparks-row/article32932776.ece; Sanjeev Miglani, “Trump Touches Off Storm in India with Kashmir Mediation Offer,” Reuters, July 23, 2019, https://reut .rs/3EwUpcP; The White House, “Remarks by President Trump at a Namaste Trump Rally,” February 24, 2020, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements

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41.

42.

43.

44. 45.

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/remarks-president-trump-namaste-trump-rally/; “Trump Talks Tough, Warns of ‘Retaliation’ If India Doesn’t Export Hydroxychloroquine to U.S.,” Press Trust of India, April 7, 2020, https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/would-be-surprised-if -india-doesnt-allow-export-of-hydroxychloroquine-to-us-trump/article31276161.ece. Michael Safi, “Hyderabad Prepares for Ivanka Trump Tour with Rainbows and Lookalikes,” Guardian, November 17, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017 /nov/27/hyderabad-india-prepares-ivanka-trump-arrival-rainbows-lookalikes. Yashwant Raj, “ ‘4 More Years’: Trump Campaign Woos Indian Americans with ‘Howdy Modi,’ ‘Namaste Trump,’ ” Hindustan Times, August 23, 2020, https://www . hindustantimes .com /world -news /4 -more -years -trump - campaign -woos -indian -americans-with-howdy-modi-namaste-trump/story-ExSTlHE9flOo4TdqmWGjOM .html; “ ‘Abki Baar, Trump Sarkar’: PM Modi Gives Tacit Support for Trump’s ReElection in 2020,” Press Trust of India, September 23, 2019, http://timesofindia.india times.com/articleshow/71253436.cms; “ ‘Do Not Misinterpret PM Modi’s ‘Ab ki baar, Trump Sarkar’ Slogan,’ S Jaishankar Tells Media,” Scroll, October 1, 2019, https://scroll .in/ latest /939061/do-not-misinterpret-pm-modis-ab-ki-baar-trump-sarkar-slogan-s -jaishankar-tells-media. “India, US Agree to Create a Counter-Narcotics Working Group to Fight Drugs Trafficking,” ANI, February 25, 2020, https://www.aninews.in/news/national/general-news /india-us-agree-to-create-a-counter-narcotics-working-group-to-fight-drugs-traffick ing20200225154930/. Geir Lundestad, “Empire by Invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945– 1952,” Journal of Peace Research 23, no. 3 (September 1986): 263–77. Garima Mohan, “Rediscovering Europe: New Avenues for the Europe-India Partnership,” Raisina Debates, August 9, 2018, https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak /43148 -rediscovery-of-europe-new-avenues-for-the-europe-india-partnership/.

CHAPTER 21

SWAGGERING HOME Trump, Grenell, and Pompeo in Conflict with Germany WI LLIA M G L E N N G R AY

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veryone saw the photo of President Donald Trump and Chancellor Angela Merkel glaring at one another during the G-7 summit in Quebec in June  2018. Trump, seated, looked stubborn and impetuous; Merkel leaned forward across the table in stern disapproval. The photo went viral after being tweeted out by the chancellor’s press chief—an indication that Merkel herself may have approved this framing.1 Fifteen months earlier, Merkel’s staff had publicized more amicable photos of the chancellor’s visit to Washington, but the gaping rift between the United States and Germany was becoming impossible to gloss over.2 The exceedingly poor personal chemistry between Trump and Merkel was, of course, one major source of tension. Even the president’s attempts at levity, such as when he famously tossed Starburst candies at Merkel, came across as sour and ill-tempered.3 The damage was compounded by the “swaggering” demeanor of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the brusque comportment of the U.S. ambassador to Berlin, Richard Grenell. In their distinctive ways, all three men trampled on German sensibilities and put the United States on a course toward withdrawing strategic assets from Germany.4 Trump’s election loss in November 2020 put an end to the freefall in U.S.German relations. Since the inauguration of President Joe Biden, no European country has seen a greater favorable swing in public opinion toward the United States.5 But Merkel remained studiously aloof toward the Biden administration during its first six months, and it has taken a change of coalition in Berlin to restore some degree of German confidence in Washington.6 The specter of

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Trump is not fully banished so long as his hold over Republicans—and his popularity among anti-immigrant, vaccine-denying Germans—remains uniquely strong. For the government in Berlin, Trump’s departure from the White House leaves behind a legacy not merely of “America First” nationalism but of crude efforts to forge a transnational right-populist coalition across the Atlantic. Personalities dominate media coverage, and this was particularly evident in reports on meetings between Trump and Merkel. Attention often focused on the gender dynamics: the president’s body language conveyed a lack of courtesy and respect. Following their first White House meeting, he brushed off Merkel’s request to shake hands.7 During subsequent phone calls the president berated the chancellor, reportedly calling her “stupid” while conveying a long litany of grievances. Although Merkel remained remarkably calm during these encounters, such revelations—coming late in Trump’s term in office—would surely have deepened the crisis in U.S.-German relations had he been reelected.8 Yet Trump’s snide treatment of Merkel reflected a deeper animus toward Germany. Europe’s strongest economy was a touchstone for President Barack Obama’s foreign policy, and Germans had responded rapturously to Obama as a presidential candidate; he drew a crowd of more than two hundred thousand to the Victory Column in Berlin in July 2008. Disillusionment set in during Obama’s second term, as ongoing drone strikes and espionage allegations by the whistleblower Edward Snowden touched off a furious response in Germany. Obama’s initiative for a Trans-Atlantic Investment and Partnership (TTIP) encountered a great deal of suspicion in Berlin and might have been derailed even under a Hillary Clinton presidency.9 Nevertheless, within U.S. domestic politics Democrats have often foregrounded Germany as a positive role model—as seen in President Bill Clinton’s enthusiasm for German jobapprenticeship programs.10 For a president determined to reverse Obama’s line on every front and to undo whatever Democratic administrations had done in the past, a rejection of warm relations with Germany was only to be expected. Thanks in part to his colossal ignorance of history, the president did at least refrain from taking cheap shots about the Third Reich. The hoary old specter of “Rapallo,” the suspicion that Germany and Russia might conspire against the interests of the West, fell into abeyance. On the contrary, it was the humanitarian impulses of Merkel’s Germany that drew fire from Trump during his 2015–2016 election campaign. Trump declared that he was “no longer a fan” of Merkel; her improvised decision to welcome nearly one million refugees from Syria’s civil war was a “total disgrace.”11 In the summer of 2016 he claimed (falsely) that asylum seekers in Germany had driven crime “to levels that no one thought they would ever, ever, see.”12 It was a convenient talking point for Trump’s base, highlighting his own determination to keep out refugees and to stop migration at (or before) the U.S. borders. As president, Trump continued to tweet out defamatory claims about German crime rates.13

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Germany also loomed large as a leading advocate for international action against climate change. “This Paris climate accord is not just some accord or the other,” Merkel remarked at a press conference in May 2017. “It is a central accord in defining the contours of globalization.”14 Trump, in turn, spoke of the Paris agreement as a “self-inflicted, major economic wound” that “handicaps the United States’ economy in order to win praise from the very foreign capitals and global activists that have long sought to gain wealth at our country’s expense.”15 There was no scope for common ground here. After Trump formally announced U.S. plans to withdraw from the Paris accord, the chancellor made climate change the central topic of the G20 summit she hosted in Hamburg in July 2017. Merkel orchestrated a united front against Trump in Hamburg; the summit’s final communiqué rebuked the U.S. position and declared the Paris agreement to be “irreversible.”16 Long before Merkel emerged as the European ringleader of resistance to Trump’s policies, the president had enumerated his core grievances against Germany. There was trade, of course. In January 2017, the president-elect threatened to impose a 35 percent tariff on German vehicles—in apparent ignorance of the fact that U.S. workers in South Carolina were building BMWs that were exported to the world market.17 Coverage of the Trump-Merkel encounters emphasized the chancellor’s hapless efforts to educate the president about the nature of global trade.18 Such reports implicitly backed the German standpoint. But there clearly were problems generated by German economic policies; Berlin’s tight budgets fueled underinvestment at home and created structural imbalances for everyone else.19 Unfortunately, rather than stimulate fresh thinking in Merkel’s cabinet, Trump’s “America First” policies merely reinforced EU solidarity with Germany. The Trump administration’s imposition of a 25 percent tariff on steel and 10 percent tariff on aluminum against the European Union in June 2018 prompted retaliatory tariffs against iconic U.S. products such as bourbon, blue jeans, and Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Such petty trade battles did nothing to advance American interests.20 Arguably Trump’s deepest conviction about Germany involved its unsatisfactory performance as a military ally. His Twitter feed, preserved in the “Trump Twitter Archive,” contains frequent expressions of anger over Germany’s lagging defense spending. March 18, 2017: “Germany owes vast sums of money to NATO & the United States must be paid more for the powerful, and very expensive, defense it provides to Germany!” December 8, 2018: “All we ask is that you pay your fair share of NATO. Germany is paying 1% while the U.S. pays 4.3% of a much larger GDP—to protect Europe. Fairness!”21 To be sure, there is a much longer history of U.S. presidents urging the European allies to spend more on defense, as Susan Colbourn’s contribution to this volume (chapter  15) reminds us. The Nixon administration used a strong-arm tactic similar to Trump’s, threatening to scale down U.S. forces

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if Germany did not “offset” the cost of stationing American soldiers there.22 But whereas Nixon’s cabinet desperately needed “burden-sharing” help from the Europeans and did not actually favor troop withdrawals, the Trump administration had the opposite priority. Demagogic attacks against freeloading Germans provided cover for a U.S. effort to wriggle free of alliance commitments. Trump’s views on Germany were impervious to change. In that sense, the July 2020 decision on troop levels—announcing that one-third of U.S. forces in Germany would be sent home or redeployed elsewhere in Europe—was long foreordained. “We spend a lot of money on Germany, they take advantage of us on trade and they take advantage on the military, so we’re reducing the force,” the president explained, leaving no doubt that his motive was purely punitive and not grounded in military considerations.23 Yet like so many of Trump’s decisions, the execution was hasty and improvised, with little input from State or the Pentagon. The financial rationale was nonsensical; the redeployments would cost billions, and two countries favored in the relocation—Belgium and Italy—fell equally short in meeting NATO’s spending targets.24 Only after the withdrawal announcement did the Trump administration find a way to reward Poland, a bigger-spending NATO ally, by reestablishing the Fifth Army Corps with a forward base in Poznan.25 Trump’s punishment of Germany can be seen as the culmination of his vision for the Atlantic alliance, a demonstrative act intended to sort out which leaders would kowtow to Washington and which would not. By singling out Germany for abuse, the president treated the entire alliance as an instrument of American caprice. But in keeping with the Trump administration’s chaotic decision making, the action was also a case study in how the petty emotions of influential insiders could inflect the direction of U.S. policy. The ego in question here was that of Richard Grenell, Trump’s handpicked ambassador to Berlin and a second major irritant in U.S.-German relations alongside the president.26 Grenell’s turbulent two years as ambassador, from May  2018 through June 2020, magnified all of the most unwelcome features of the Trump presidency. Insulting tweets from the White House were bad enough; insults from a U.S. ambassador in Germany were completely unacceptable. Grenell’s first noteworthy act on the job was an impolitic tweet sent on May 8, 2018, the very day he presented his credentials: “German companies doing business in Iran should wind down operations immediately.”27 He claimed that this was merely intended as friendly advice.28 But it sounded like an order—and the timing, coming on the anniversary of Germany’s capitulation in World War II, reinforced the negative reaction. The veteran columnist and publisher Theo Sommer wondered why Foreign Minister Heiko Maas should even bother meeting with an ambassador who practiced diplomacy by Twitter.29

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Grenell pushed just as hard on other economic questions, decrying Nord Stream 2—the Russian gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea—as a conduit for European dependence on Russia. In another remarkable breach of diplomatic protocol, he wrote letters directly to German companies involved in building the pipeline, warning that they faced “a significant risk of sanctions.”30 More threats followed in March 2019 as Grenell urged Merkel’s government to bar the Chinese firm Huawei from building Germany’s 5G telecommunications network.31 In both cases, regardless of the merits of the U.S. position, Grenell proved to be an unsuitable messenger; his poor reputation undermined the position of German officials and lawmakers who otherwise agreed with him. Opposition parties on the center and left called on Merkel to declare Grenell persona non grata.32 If German politicians sought political advantage in denouncing the U.S. ambassador, it was a sure sign that his mission was already a failure. Almost as damning was the applause Grenell garnered from the far-right opposition, the Alternative for Germany (AfD). From the start, the ambassador expressed his intention to advance a political agenda: “I absolutely want to empower other conservatives throughout Europe,” he told Breitbart in June 2018. In classic populist language, he spoke of mobilizing a silent majority against the “group-think of a very small elitist crowd” that controlled European politics. Asked for an example, Grenell pointed to Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz, calling him a “rockstar.”33 This was, in effect, an endorsement of Kurz’s controversial political alliance with the right-populist Freedom Party of Austria. Interviewed by Tucker Carlson on Fox News, Grenell claimed that Kurz was gaining in popularity “throughout Germany” as a result of his hard line against immigration; Germans, he said, wanted leaders who promised secure borders. To the news magazine Der Spiegel, this was a “thinly veiled call for a change of government in Berlin.”34 The ambassador’s conduct bordered on internal interference in German sovereign affairs—though he did at least refrain from official meetings with AfD leaders, despite their shared views on immigration.35 In light of Grenell’s prior experience as a Fox News contributor, it was no surprise when he began lambasting German media outlets for publishing “fake news.” He was not always wrong about this: in December 2018, Der Spiegel acknowledged that a prize-winning staff journalist, Claas Relotius, had fabricated long passages of his supposed field reports from Trump’s America.36 Grenell exploited the occasion to blast the mainstream press, accusing Der Spiegel of crass anti-American bias.37 The Relotius scandal did, indeed, expose uncomfortable truths about elite German journalism. Editors were catering to a German public that craved stories about the shabby xenophobia of small-town American life—just as Fox viewers ate up lurid reports about crimes perpetrated by migrants to Germany. The estrangement between Germans and Americans was not purely a function of Grenell’s ham-handedness or even Trump’s

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constant obscenities. But Grenell, with his frequent appearances on Fox, was a constituent part of the media ecosystem that fed off of and intensified negative images of Germany. He had little use for harmonious U.S.-German relations; he treated the country as a negative foil in speaking to domestic U.S. audiences— foremost among them the president himself. In theory, a political appointee with the ear of the American president might be especially welcome to a host government.38 Such an advantage did not accrue to a Trump appointee, since there was never any doubt what this particular president thought on a daily basis. Closeness to Trump was, in fact, a liability for Grenell, since German public opinion toward the administration had already cratered by the time of his arrival. As Trump’s reservoir of willing collaborators began to shrink, Grenell’s ultraloyal posture made him a significant asset in Washington, and he kept getting pulled in to perform other tasks—as a special envoy for Serbia and Kosovo (from October 2019) and as acting director of national intelligence (February–May 2020). Grenell tried to hang on to his post in Berlin, but German officials complained that his new roles were incompatible with full-time service as ambassador, and he finally tendered his resignation in June 2020.39 Ambassadors do not ordinarily have sway over military strategy, yet Grenell—in conjunction with Trump’s ambassador to Warsaw, Georgette Mosbacher—had been calling for redeployments from Germany to Poland for some time. He told the German Press Agency (dpa) in August 2019 that “it is actually offensive to assume the U.S. taxpayer must continue to pay to have 50,000-plus Americans in Germany, but the Germans get to spend their surplus on domestic programs.”40 Some German analysts dismissed Grenell’s threats about redeployments as a “PR stunt,” pointing to the enormous strategic significance of U.S. infrastructure in western and southern Germany.41 The Merkel government did lay out plans to boost defense spending over time, albeit at a comically slow pace—achieving 1.5 percent of GDP by 2024 and 2 percent by 2031.42 Grenell was scarcely mollified by this, and on his way out the door he resolved to defy German expectations by orchestrating the long-debated troop withdrawals. Working behind the scenes with Trump and National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, Grenell achieved the shock effect he was aiming for.43 Afterward he tweeted smugly: “Warning ignored.”44 By all indications Grenell was and is proud of having taught the Germans a lesson. In comparison with Trump and Grenell, both of whom cared more about media dynamics than institutional structures, Mike Pompeo had a bureaucratic role to play as secretary of state. He came to office promising more stability for U.S. diplomats following the disruptive purges of the Rex Tillerson era.45 Unlike Trump and Grenell, he had experience on the ground in Germany, having served as a tank commander at the Fulda Gap during the final years of the Cold War. Leaders in Berlin did their best to play up those historical connections,

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but Pompeo’s understanding of the past was flat and marked by a one-sided emphasis on U.S. dominance. For Pompeo, the United States could advance its priorities merely by projecting confidence, or “swagger.”46 His critique of multilateral institutions appalled his German counterparts, and his efforts to win bilateral German support for U.S. regional initiatives largely foundered. U.S. leadership never looked less convincing, or less palatable, to German counterparts. Upon entering office in April 2018, Pompeo made reassuring noises about NATO, reaffirming the importance of mutual security in deterring Russian aggression.47 As late as October 2018, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas claimed that Pompeo “listens to our viewpoints and deals with them constructively.” In observing that “the U.S. is more than the White House,” Maas apparently hoped that Pompeo would push back against Trump’s callow rejection of the “ideology of globalism.”48 Any such hopes were put to rest following a major address Pompeo delivered to the German Marshall Fund in December 2018. The secretary of state opened with a nod to the years following World War II, when “collectively, we convened multilateral organizations to promote peace and cooperation among states.” But he claimed that these institutions no longer served their purposes well—neither the United Nations nor the World Bank nor the International Monetary Fund nor the European Union. “We aspire to make the international order serve our citizens—not to control them.” Perhaps Pompeo did take the prospect of institutional reform seriously, but it sounded as though he wished to replace any semblance of a rule-based order with naked American might. “America intends to lead,” he intoned, “now and always.”49 German observers read Pompeo’s speech as a watershed, a definitive U.S. repudiation of the cooperative legacy of the Marshall Plan and the liberal international order.50 Pompeo’s State Department did maintain a semblance of working relations with German authorities. Here and there Germans acceded to U.S. requests— barring an Iranian airline from landing in Germany or imposing sanctions on Russia in response to the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London.51 At the urging of Israel and the United States, Germany outlawed the Iranianbacked Hezbollah organization in April 2020 and enforced the ban with raids on mosques.52 But on larger questions such as the “Iran Deal,” German and U.S. policy remained at loggerheads, and there is little indication that German policy makers were moved by U.S. entreaties concerning Syria, Afghanistan, or North Korea, let alone China. Pompeo did, at least, see value in attempting to line up German support for U.S. positions, but what incentive did Germany have to follow the U.S. lead at a time when Washington commanded so little respect? When the Trump administration’s punitive troop withdrawals were announced, Pompeo played along—despite his apparent exclusion from the

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decision-making process. Neither Washington nor Berlin was really pretending to aspire to partnership any longer. Merkel refused to attend a planned G7 summit at Camp David, citing the global pandemic, but by this point it was hard to imagine a productive gathering chaired by Donald J. Trump.53 Pompeo and Maas spoke by phone every month or so during the pandemic, but there were few points of common action. As U.S. pressure mounted against the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, Maas conveyed his “displeasure” to Pompeo.54 Ongoing clashes over Huawei marked Pompeo’s final months in office, as did a constant stream of rumors about a planned U.S. strike against Iran. German leaders did not trust the Trump administration to keep the peace and worried that political desperation might yet lead to violence. As the president’s response to electoral defeat demonstrated, such fears were not misplaced. “The only thing that will help now is to hibernate [überwintern],” remarked Wolfgang Ischinger, a former ambassador to Washington, during Trump’s second year in office.55 The metaphor suggested that spring would follow the Trumpian winter. But international politics is not as cyclical as the seasons, and after four years of Trump neither the United States nor Germany could set back the clock to January 2017. In April 2021, the Biden administration did act to reverse the Trump troop cuts in Germany, even pledging to add five hundred soldiers more.56 But years of browbeating by an amoral and erratic administration in Washington—not to mention the farcical and time-consuming Brexit process—left the Merkel cabinet fundamentally unreceptive to leadership or even expertise coming from the Anglo-American world.57 Throughout 2021, reminders of Trump’s America still abounded in Germany. The right-populist AfD—in league with an assortment of so-called independent thinkers (Querdenker)—mimicked the style and slogans of COVID protests at various U.S. state houses. Even QAnon flags made an appearance.58 This was not an insignificant corner of German politics; the AfD attained 10.3 percent in the September 2021 Bundestag elections. In the heat of those elections, AfD politicians borrowed Trump’s rhetoric by challenging the legitimacy of mail-in ballots.59 Over time, the larger stumbling block for U.S.-German relations may not be the staggering number of Germans who disapproved of Trump but rather the uncomfortable number of Germans who still admire him. That being said, the advent of a new governing coalition in Berlin in December 2021 yielded fresh prospects for overcoming the Trump legacy. Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock represents a Green Party that has developed a realist critique of Russia and a human rights critique of China—positions that are compatible with Biden’s team without being imposed from the outside.60 Olaf Scholz, the Social Democratic chancellor, warmly welcomed Biden’s election at the time and was one of the first European politicians to call upon Trump to stop questioning the election results. Like Biden, Scholz argues that the transatlantic democracies must “stick together” in their “systemic competition” vis-à-vis “authoritarian

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systems” such as China and Russia.61 It is not altogether surprising, then, that the Scholz cabinet joined the Biden administration and its NATO allies in roundly condemning the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine in February  2022. Within seventy-two hours of Russia’s attack, two of the biggest sticking points in U.S.-German relations found resolution: Scholz barred certification of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and pledged to revamp the German army with an unprecedented surge in defense spending.62 External threats produced what neither the Trump nor Biden administrations might otherwise have achieved—closer U.S.German alignment on core problems of European security. In hindsight, it is not just the Trump administration’s policies that look shortsighted. The Ukraine conflict has exposed grievous shortcomings in the national security policies of Merkel’s coalition governments dating back to 2005. None other than Donald Trump made an ominous prediction at the UN General Assembly meeting on September 25, 2018, warning that “Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course.” The German UN delegation, including Heiko Maas, was caught on camera smirking at these words.63 Four years later, even without Nord Stream 2 in service, Germany’s vulnerability was cruelly exposed as Russia kept stopping and restarting gas deliveries via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline. The tragedy of the German-U.S. relationship during the Trump years lay in the unwillingness of each side to take the other’s concerns seriously. Trump’s mocking tone was repaid in kind. The Biden-Scholz rapprochement offers the potential for more attentive listening in both directions. But given the whipsawing nature of political and military developments in both Europe and North America, it would be hazardous to assume that the current amity will hold indefinitely.

Notes 1. David McHugh, “Body Language: Photo of Merkel, Trump Captures G-7 Tensions,” Associated Press, June 10, 2018. Unless otherwise noted, all citations refer to online editions of the publications in question. 2. “Trip to the USA: Angela Merkel Meets Donald Trump,” photo series published on http:// bundeskanzlerin.de. 3. “Bremmer: Trump Threw Starbursts on Table,” CBS News, June 20, 2018. 4. This essay draws on numerous journalistic accounts from the period. None are more compelling than the halftime report by Susan Glasser, “How Trump Made War on Angela Merkel and Europe,” New Yorker, December 17, 2018. 5. Eli Yokley, “Biden’s Early Tenure Has Improved America’s Image Abroad,” Morning Consult, April 27, 2021. Between January and April 2021, favorable views of the United States in Germany rose from 24 percent to 46 percent; unfavorable views fell from 62 percent to 37 percent. 6. Constanze Stelzenmüller, “Germany Is Pouring Cold Water on the Biden-Europe Love Fest,” Foreign Policy, January 22, 2021; Bojan Pancevski, “Angela Merkel’s White House

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

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Visit Ends Trump-Era Hostilities, but Trans-Atlantic Drift Continues,” Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2021. Madeline Conway, “In Awkward Exchange, Trump Seems to Ignore Merkel’s Handshake Request,” Politico, March 17, 2017. Carl Bernstein, “From Pandering to Putin to Abusing Allies and Ignoring His Own Advisers, Trump’s Phone Calls Alarm US Officials,” CNN, June 29, 2020. Daniela Schwarzer, “Why Obama Couldn’t Rescue US- German Relations,” Foreign Policy, April 22, 2016. David Finegold, “Making Apprenticeships Work,” RAND Issue Paper, Institute on Education and Training, March 1993. “Trump Blasts Merkel Over Refugee Crisis,” AP video footage from November 17, 2015, posted to Youtube on November 16, 2016. Felicia Schwartz, “Trump Goes After Merkel, and Germany Takes Note,” Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2016. Adam Taylor, “Trump Says Crime in Germany Is Way Up. German Statistics Show the Opposite,” Washington Post, June 19, 2018. Amy Davidson Sorkin, “Angela Merkel and the Insult of Trump’s Paris Climate-Accord Withdrawal,” New Yorker, June 1, 2017. “Trump’s Speech on Paris Climate Agreement Withdrawal, Annotated,” National Public Radio, June 1, 2017. Alison Smale, “Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron Unite Behind Paris Accord,” New York Times, June 2, 2017; documentation on the G20 summit of July 7–8, 2017, http://www.g20germany.de. Peter Campbell, “Donald Trump Threatens 35% Tariff on BMW Imports,” Financial Times, January 16, 2017. Sonam Sheth, “Angela Merkel Reportedly Had to Explain the ‘Fundamentals’ of EU Trade to Trump 11 Times,” Business Insider, April 22, 2017. Heather Long, “The Huge Number Driving Trump’s Frosty Relationship with Germany’s Merkel,” Washington Post, April 27, 2018. For a monumental critique of German policy, see Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (New York: Viking, 2018). Jonathan Stearns, “EU Metals Tariffs Retaliation to Start June 22,” Bloomberg News, June 20, 2018. Results from entering “Germany” into the search box at http://thetrumparchive .com. Hubert Zimmermann, Money and Security: Troops, Monetary Policy, and West Germany’s Relations with the United States and Britain, 1950–1971 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Ryan Browne and Zachary Cohen, “US to Withdraw Nearly 12,000 Troops from Germany in Move That Will Cost Billions and Take Years,” CNN, July 29, 2020. Michael R. Gordon and Nancy Youssef, “Pentagon to Move Nearly 12,000 US Troops from Germany,” Wall Street Journal, July 29, 2020. John Vandiver, “V Corps Takes Up Position at New Poland Headquarters,” Stars and Stripes, November 20, 2020. Matthias Gebauer, Christiane Hoffmann, and René Pfister, “Trump’s Former Ambassador to Germany Gets His Revenge,” Spiegel International, June 15, 2020. Tweet by @RichardGrenell, May 8, 2018. Martin Knobbe, “A Visit with Trump’s Man in Berlin,” Spiegel International, May 23, 2018.

246 TRU MP A B R OA D 29. Theo Sommer, “Ein notorischer Vertragsverbrecher,” Die Zeit, May 15, 2018. 30. Darko Janjevic, “US Ambassador Richard Grenell Threatens German Firms Over Russian Pipeline,” Deutsche Welle, January 13, 2019. On the Trump administration’s use of sanctions, see chapter 14, by Nicholas Mulder, in this volume. 31. Bojan Pancevski and Sara Germano, “Drop Huawei or See Intelligence Sharing Pared Back, US Tells Germany,” Wall Street Journal, March 11, 2019. 32. David Gilbert, “German Lawmakers Want Trump’s Ambassador Kicked Out,” Vice News, March 20, 2019; “ ‘Die Linke’ Demands Berlin Expel Outspoken US Ambassador,” The Local [Berlin], March 29, 2019. 33. Chris Tomlinson, “Trump’s Right Hand Man in Europe Rick Grenell Wants to ‘Empower’ European Conservatives,” Breitbart, June 3, 2018. 34. Konstantin von Hammerstein, “Trump’s Ambassador Finds Few Friends in Germany,” Spiegel International, January 11, 2019. 35. Grenell later expressed regret that he had not met with AfD leader Alice Weidel; Chris Johnson, “Grenell Says Not Meeting with Germany’s Far-Right Leader a ‘Difficult Thing’: Report,” Washington Blade, October 6, 2020. 36. Ullrich Fichtner, “SPIEGEL legt Betrugsfall im eigenen Haus offen,” Spiegel, December 19, 2018. 37. Tim Stelloh, “US Ambassador Accuses a Leading German News Magazine of AntiAmerican Bias,” NBC News, December 23, 2018. 38. Stephen F. Szabo, “Richard Grenell: An American Ambassador Leaves Berlin,” American Institute for Contemporary German Studies (AICGS), June 9, 2020. 39. Erik Kirschbaum, “Germans Demand US Ambassador, a ‘Biased Propaganda Machine,’ Be Replaced,” Los Angeles Times, February 25, 2020. 40. Timothy Jones, “US Threatens to Withdraw Troops from Germany,” Deutsche Welle, August 9, 2019. 41. Tweet by @thorstenbenner, August 10, 2019, referencing Paul-Anton Krüger, “Kalte Kosten-Nutzen-Rechnung,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, August 9, 2019. 42. Robin Emmott, “Germany Commits to NATO Spending Goal by 2031 for First Time,” Reuters, November 7, 2019. 43. Zachary Cohen, Vivian Salama, and Barbara Star, “Germany Troop Withdrawal Highlights Rising Fortunes of Two White House Allies Amid Esper’s Isolation,” CNN, June 26, 2020. 44. Tweet by @RichardGrenell, July 30, 2020. 45. Alex Ward, “Mike Pompeo Spent His First Week as Secretary of State Being the AntiRex Tillerson,” Vox, May 2, 2018. 46. Gardiner Harris, “Pompeo Promises to Return ‘Swagger’ to the State Department,” New York Times, May 1, 2018. 47. Lesley Wroughton, “On First Day, Pompeo Charms NATO but Warns on Iran, Defense Spending,” Reuters, April 27, 2018; Nick Wadhams, “Trump Confronts NATO. Then Pompeo Praises It,” Bloomberg, July 11, 2018. 48. Maas interview with Spiegel Online, “The US Is More Than the White House,” posted by the Federal Foreign Office, October 2, 2018. 49. Pompeo, Remarks to the German Marshall Fund, Brussels, Belgium, December 4, 2018. 50. Paul-Anton Krüger, “US-Außenminister stellt international Ordnung in Frage,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, December 4, 2018. 51. “Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo and German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas at a Joint Press Availability,” Berlin, May 31, 2019.

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52. Ivana Kottasová, Frederik Pleitgen, and Nadine Schmidt, “Germany Bans Lebanese Militant Group Hezbollah and Raids Mosques and Homes,” CNN, April 30, 2020. 53. Matthew Karnitschnig David M. Herszenhorn, Jacopo Barigazzi, and Andrew Gray, “Merkel Rebuffs Trump Invitation to G7 Summit,” Politico, May 29, 2020. 54. David Rising, “Germany’s Maas Confronts Pompeo Over Pipeline Threat,” AP, August 10, 2020. 55. Bernd Riegert, “EU-Ratschef Tusk haut auf den Putz,” Deutsche Welle, May 16, 2018. 56. Robert Burns et al., “US Adds 500 Troops in Germany, Ends Large-Scale Troop Cuts Despite Trump Pledge: SECDEF,” Military Times, April 13, 2021. 57. Adrian Daub, “The Weird, Extremely German Origins of the Wirecard Scandal,” New Republic, April 21, 2021. 58. Esther Felden et  al., “As Donald Trump Exits, QAnon Takes Hold in Germany,” Deutsche Welle (dw.com), January 19, 2021. 59. Isaac Stanley-Becker, “Election Fraud, QAnon, Jan. 6: Far-Right Extremists in Germany Read from a Pro-Trump Script,” Washington Post, September 25, 2021. 60. Arne Delfs, “German Greens Pick China Critic Baerbock as Foreign Minister,” Bloomberg.com, November 25, 2021. 61. Tweet by @OlafScholz, November 7, 2020; “German Vice Chancellor Scholz Says Trump Should Concede,” Politico, November 10, 2020; Ulrich Speck, “Scholz’s Views,” German Marshall Fund Berlin Monthly Dispatch, October 28, 2021. 62. Noah Barkin, “Europe’s Sleeping Giant Awakes,” Atlantic, March 1, 2022. 63. Rick Noack, “Trump Accused Germany of Becoming ‘Totally Dependent’ on Russian Energy at the U.N. The Germans Just Smirked,” Washington Post, September 25, 2018.

CHAPTER 22

DEATH- GRIP HANDSHAKES AND FLATTERY DIPLOMACY The Macron-Trump Connection and Its Larger Implications for Alliance Politics K ATH RY N C . S TATL E R

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orewarned by a number of other world leaders, French president Emmanuel Macron was well prepared for the infamous Donald Trump handshake. On May 25, 2017, at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit in Brussels, the two world leaders met for the first time. With cameras clicking and video rolling, President Trump praised Macron’s “tremendous victory” in the 2017 French presidential elections that the “whole world is talking about” and expressed his eagerness to work with Macron on “terrorism” issues. Trump then extended his hand to the brand-new French president, which Macron gripped tight. An awkward, white-knuckled struggle ensued, with Trump wincing and trying to disengage multiple times before Macron released him.1 In the zero-sum game of testosterone-laden death-grip handshakes, the score: Macron 1, Trump 0. Despite his tough physical posturing at the meeting, Macron also responded to Trump’s opening remarks by expressing a desire to coordinate on the issue of counterterrorism and then followed up by referencing economic, climate, and energy issues as other areas of potential collaboration. Macron concluded that by working together, the two leaders could “change many things.”2 Macron, unlike many of his peers, had already begun to employ what I like to call “flattery” diplomacy to sweet-talk Trump into upholding important multilateral commitments near and dear to Macron’s heart, specifically the 2015 Paris Climate Accords and Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreements with Iran. Macron was committed to the climate accords’ ambitious goals to limit global warming to well below two degrees Celsius and to the JCPOA’s

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lifting of decades of sanctions against Iran in exchange for Iran’s agreement to restrict its nuclear weapons program. Macron would employ flattery diplomacy repeatedly. Though it proved unsuccessful in the short term, one could argue that it was the correct longterm strategy in dealing with the forty-fifth president of the United States. Although the U.S. government abandoned the nonproliferation agreement with Iran in May 2018 and the Paris Climate Accords in November 2020, many American officials and citizens appreciated Macron’s efforts at the time, as did world public opinion. Macron avoided directly condemning Trump for leaving both treaties. Moreover, as of this writing, more than 470 “climate mayors” representing 74 million Americans have announced that their cities will adhere to the Paris Accords, and Joe Biden’s first advertised international act as president was to rejoin them, followed by a quiet restarting of negotiations with Iran.3 By skirting a complete break in Franco-American relations, Macron kept the main items on his international agenda on life support until they could be nursed back to a healthier state. A word about flattery diplomacy. Normally, I would simply call this type of presidential outreach “personal” diplomacy, where world leaders meet one on one (usually at some sort of commemorative event) to discuss substantive issues. Trump required an extra effort. Flattery diplomacy should not be confused with what we might term “obsequious toadyism diplomacy,” the type practiced at home by Vice President Michael Pence toward his boss. Flattery diplomacy comes from a position of relative strength and plays out in the form of accolades, honors, gifts, and reminders of shared history and sacrifice. By first demonstrating his strength through a type of behavior Trump understood— physical posturing—Macron’s flattery diplomacy could then be deployed from a fairly equal position of power. How then did this flattery work? Macron toiled for four long years to provide Trump with every possible honor while at the same time attempting to educate him on the historical strength of the Franco-American alliance. His first and perhaps most spectacular success was to invite Trump as the official guest of honor for the French Bastille Day celebrations on July  14, 2017. Macron shrewdly highlighted the fact that France would also be commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of the U.S. entry into World War I and the valiant efforts of American soldiers during the conflict on behalf of France. The notoriously foreign-travel-averse Trump accepted the invitation. To be clear, relations between the two men had gotten off to a rocky start, and not just with the handshake. At that same NATO meeting in Brussels, Trump railed against his European allies’ failure to contribute more money to NATO and declined to reaffirm U.S. support for Article 5, NATO’s collectivedefense clause. He followed up by announcing that the United States would leave the Paris Climate Accords as soon as possible. Macron obviously decided

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to pursue a conciliatory strategy when he issued the official invitation to Trump to visit Paris in late June. During the G20 Hamburg summit in early July, Macron sought Trump out and announced that he hoped to “change his mind” about the Paris Accords.4 The following week Macron would have his chance. Trump arrived in Paris on July 13 to bask in constant red-carpet treatment as he was accorded every possible honor. That night, Trump and First Lady Melania dined in over-the-top elegance with Macron and his wife, Brigitte, at the exclusive Jules Verne restaurant perched on the third floor of the Eiffel Tower, with jaw-dropping views of the city of light. The highlight, for Trump, was clearly the military parade on the avenue des Champs Elysée on July 14, the French national day of revolutionary independence. The normally unimpressed Trump was observed talking excitedly with Macron as World War I tanks rolled by. His enjoyment of the spectacle increased as military jets flew past, dispersing the colors of the French and American flags.5 Indeed, despite the most awkward goodbye between two world leaders ever recorded, Macron had hit the flattery-diplomacy jackpot.6

Flattery Diplomacy at Work Macron had purposely set out to win Trump over by making him the guest of honor at what is clearly a sacred French commemoration, while also highlighting the importance of the Franco-American military alliance of the First World War. He demonstrated his desire to put Trump first, which Macron accurately perceived as the best chance to salvage the Iran deal and Paris Climate Accords and keep the Franco-American alliance going. Trump responded to these overtures by honoring Macron with an official invitation to visit the White House, the first one offered to a foreign head of state since Trump took office. Mirroring Macron’s personal invitation to dine atop the Eiffel Tower, Trump and Melania offered a private tour and dinner at Mount Vernon to the French president and first lady. The historic double date commenced on April 23 with Macron gifting Trump with a young oak tree from the World War I battlefield Belleau Wood (where 1,800 American soldiers lost their lives) to commemorate the hundred-year-old battle. Under overcast skies, Macron and Trump planted the oak tree together in the White House gardens as Brigitte and Melania observed closely. Macron tweeted “100 years ago, American soldiers fought in France, in Belleau to defend our freedom. This oak tree (my gift to @realDonaldTrump) will be a reminder at the White House of these ties that bind us.”7 The two couples then took a helicopter to Mount Vernon, where they toured George Washington’s estate, followed by a luxurious private dinner there.

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Then, on April 24 Trump rolled out his version of the red carpet, with five hundred U.S. troops and a twenty-one-gun salute on the White House south lawn to greet Macron officially. The two leaders embraced à la française, kissing each other on the cheeks, patting each other on the back, with Trump even going so far as to brush a piece of supposed dandruff off Macron’s suit to “make him perfect.” Friends indeed. At the glitzy state dinner that night—the highest social honor a president can offer an ally—they lavishly toasted their personal friendship as well as that of their countries, with Trump proclaiming, “May our friendship grow even deeper, may our kinship grow even stronger, and may our sacred liberty never die.” Macron responded, “I got to know you, you got to know me. . . . We both know that none of us easily changes our minds, but we will work together, and we have this ability to listen to one another.”8 Undoubtedly Macron was referencing the Iran nuclear deal at this point, as he clearly hoped to at least mitigate the worst of the fallout from Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the JCPOA and to reach a broader nuclear agreement. Macron’s plan was on full display the next day as he addressed Congress. After receiving a three-minute standing ovation, Macron avoided criticizing Trump directly but reminded his audience that the United States had signed the JCPOA and should uphold its international commitments. He also spoke of the “unbreakable bonds” between the two countries and their common values of “tolerance, liberty, and human rights.” He rejected the idea of tariffs and deregulation of world trade and reiterated his commitment to combating climate change, maintaining that “there is no Planet B” and that he was sure the United States would rejoin the Paris Accords one day.9 If we can look past various viral YouTube clips of the Macron-Trump deathgrip handshakes and other awkward physical interactions, we see genuine attempts at flattery diplomacy on both sides throughout this period.10 And surprisingly, this flattery diplomacy apparently worked: Trump and Macron managed to keep a relatively smooth Franco-American relationship going. Much of the credit here must go to Macron’s level-headedness and calm as he built a personal relationship with Trump to keep the dialogue flowing.

Domestic Politics and Diplomatic Disputes: The End of Flattery Diplomacy? Despite the continuing conversations between Macron and Trump, both leaders had become much more occupied by domestic issues by the end of 2018, which sidelined their international agendas. Macron focused on calming the protests of the gilets jaunes movement, so named because of their fluorescent yellow, highly visible vests. The protests, which had begun in response to

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Macron’s planned increase in the fuel tax as part of his commitment to the Paris Accords, metamorphosed into a series of increasingly violent antigovernment street riots every Saturday well into 2019. Meanwhile, Trump found himself grappling with an onslaught of controversies, culminating in a July 25, 2019, phone call where Trump pressured Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to open an investigation into the business dealings of Hunter Biden, the son of then former vice president Biden, while simultaneously holding up military aid to Ukraine. Once made public, these actions prompted a congressional investigation and ultimately Trump’s impeachment. In the meantime, the Macron-Trump relationship had also soured. Ironically, the lowest point arrived at the hundredth anniversary of the World War I armistice during Trump’s weekend trip to France on November 10–11, 2018. On the first day of his trip, Trump opted out of the planned commemorations at Belleau Wood. Considering that Macron had chosen an oak tree from Belleau Wood as a gift to Trump to highlight the sacrifice of U.S. troops during his visit to Washington, DC, just six months earlier, Trump’s failure to visit the cemetery to pay his respects because of rain drew scathing criticism in both the French and American media. The following day at a commemoration at the Arc de Triomphe, with Trump in attendance, Macron denounced nationalism as a “betrayal of patriotism,” a clear dig at the American leader.11 Macron, along with every other Western leader except Trump, had solemnly marched down the Champs Elysée to the Arc de Triomphe. The absence of the U.S. head of state was glaring and highlights the point Alessandro Brogi makes in chapter 37 of this volume that Trump’s transgressions can be viewed as the extreme manifestation of a growing distance between transatlantic partners. Trump then sent a series of tweets criticizing Macron and returned to his old threat of leaving NATO. In response to Macron’s drive for a more autonomous European defense system, Trump tweeted, “President Macron of France has just suggested that Europe build its own military in order to protect itself from the U.S., China, and Russia. Very insulting, but perhaps Europe should first pay its fair share of NATO, which the U.S. subsidizes greatly!”12 In Trump’s eyes, Macron had gone from “perfect” in April to “insulting” by November.13 Moreover, the Belleau Wood oak that Macron had offered Trump in April 2018 had to be ripped out and placed in quarantine, where it subsequently died. Macron pledged to send another and insisted that no analogies to the Franco-American relationship should be drawn, stating, “It’s no big drama, the symbol was to plant it together,” adding, “I’ll send another oak because I think the US Marines and the friendship for freedom between our peoples is well worth it.”14 Despite these setbacks, it looked like Macron and Trump would salvage their relationship. Anyone doubting that symbolic gestures are unimportant in alliance politics should read the U.S. press coverage of the seventy-fifth anniversary

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of the June  6, 1944, D-Day landings. Macron, with Trump alongside him, awarded the French Legion of Honor to five surviving American veterans and gave a rousing speech at the Normandy Cemetery and Memorial at ColevilleSur-Mer, where over nine thousand Americans are buried. In his speech Trump took a page from Macron’s playbook and highlighted the combined sacrifice and history of the two nations, claiming, “to all our friends and partners—our cherished alliance was forged in the heat of battle, tested in the trials of war, and proven in the blessings of peace. . . . Our bond is unbreakable.”15 Macron also harked back to what multilateralism had achieved and applied it to the present, exhorting the United States to honor what he called “the Normandy promise,” to never forget that “when free people unite, they can rise to any challenge. . . . That is what the United States did when it created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.”16 After the ceremony Trump, Macron, and their first ladies visited the cemetery, reinforcing the idea of shared history and sacrifice. As Trump’s first visit to Normandy, he was clearly moved by the stories and actions of Americans fighting to liberate France during World War II. The G7 summit that Macron hosted in Biarritz just a few months later seemed to suggest that flattery diplomacy was back on track. Although Macron gambled and lost when he tried to arrange direct negotiations between Trump and Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif at the summit, his attempt to serve as an honest broker between the two adversaries opened the door to future talks. Macron also signaled his independence by informing, not asking, Trump about his invitation to Zarif. At the end of the summit, the seven leaders issued a joint statement: “We fully share two objectives: to ensure that Iran never acquires nuclear weapons and to foster peace and stability in the region.”17 Reading between the lines, such a declaration still held out the possibility of restarting negotiations with Iran. On the world economic front, G7 leaders also agreed to work on reducing regulatory barriers to trade. Incremental progress on some of Macron’s major foreign policy initiatives could thus be discerned. And then, in mid-March 2020, COVID-19 hit, and the world plunged into its worst pandemic since World War  I. For the moment, flattery diplomacy faltered as both Macron and Trump turned inward to grapple with the domestic fallout. Despite concerns that the two nations were parting ways as the Trump administration downplayed the severity of the pandemic and pursued its nationalist and protectionist policies, especially as Trump continued tariffs on European steel, it appeared the Franco-American relationship would endure.18 Given Trump’s rocky relationship with German chancellor Angela Merkel and even British prime minister Boris Johnson during this same period, as William Glenn Gray details in chapter 21 of this volume, Macron should perhaps receive even more credit than he has been given in holding on

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to a slender thread of Franco-American cooperation until the 2020 U.S. presidential elections.

Surviving Trump In congratulating Biden on his presidential win, Macron tweeted on November 8, “The Americans have chosen their President. Congratulations @JoeBiden and @KamalaHarris! We have a lot to do to overcome today’s challenges. Let’s work together!” He followed up with an official phone call on November 10. Despite his delight in welcoming a president who believes in multilateral international organizations and rule of law, Macron is concerned with what the next presidential election may bring and has proposed “strategic autonomy” for Europe, in which it will build up its own military and technological capabilities. In his first official phone call with the newly inaugurated U.S. president on January 24, 2021, Macron announced, with Gaullist flair, that “cooperation cannot be dependence.”19 Continuing to channel his inner Charles de Gaulle, Macron was convinced that French national security should not depend on the political whims of the American electorate. In many respects, it might feel like 1960s déjà vu, with Britain out of a European common market and France focused on building a strategic security system that excludes the United States.20 Despite these moves, the two countries have a very long history as partners. It seems likely that major goals, including containing Iran, confronting terrorism, and, even more important, combating climate change, will ensure that their partnership continues. As an auspicious sign, Biden and Macron’s first meeting on June 11, 2021, at the G7 summit meeting, could not have gone more differently than the first Trump-Macron meeting in 2017. Macron and Biden smiled, patted backs, and embraced, radiating affection and good will. At their official meeting on June 12, Macron declared that Biden has “definitely” convinced allies that the United States is back, adding, “I think it’s great to have the U.S. president part of the club, and very willing to cooperate.” Macron said at the summit in England, “What you demonstrate is that leadership is partnership.” In turn, Biden affirmed that “we can do a lot,” emphasized the “cohesion of NATO,” and praised the European Union as “an incredibly strong and vibrant entity that has a lot to do with the ability of Western Europe to not only handle its economic issues but provide the backbone and the support for NATO. . . . And so, I—we’re very supportive—very supportive.”21 Also important to note is that the meeting was Biden’s only formal bilateral one that day. Undoubtedly, given Merkel’s end of tenure, Macron is Biden’s most important European ally. Flattery—or perhaps now we are back to personal—diplomacy and a repaired Franco-American alliance appeared to have returned, with both leaders

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working hard to recommit to military alliance, friendship, rule of law, and multilateral efforts. Most recently, these positive changes were reflected in the French gift of one of the Statue of Liberty’s eight “little sisters,” which arrived at Ellis Island on July  4 and then was installed at the French Embassy in Washington, DC, on July 14, a not-so-subtle symbolic gift of Franco-American solidarity but also a pointed reminder of France’s commitment to democracy.22 And then came the surprise announcement of the U.S.-UK-Australian nuclear deal on September 16, 2021. Australia, in response to the increasing Chinese threat in the Indo-Pacific, signed a contract with the United States for eight nuclear-powered submarines and nuclear-technology transfers that to that point had been reserved only for the United Kingdom. This move negated the French-Australian deal inked in 2016 involving twelve less technologically advanced diesel-electric submarines. Notified just hours before the public announcement, the Macron administration’s immediate and unsurprising response came on the cultural front. The French Embassy cancelled the planned September 17 gala designed to commemorate the 240th anniversary of the decisive Franco-American naval triumph over the British at Chesapeake Bay. Following this cultural castigation, French invective rose to heights not seen since 2003, when the two allies clashed over U.S. military intervention in Iraq. “This is not done between allies,” French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said in an interview, calling the deal a “unilateral, brutal, unpredictable decision” and a “knife in the back”—and, for good measure, condemning the decision as something Trump would do.23 To demonstrate the depth of his anger at the American betrayal, on September 18 Macron recalled the French ambassador to the United States Philippe Étienne, the first time France has ever done so, although this was another largely symbolic move.24 The seriousness of French displeasure stemmed from multiple sources. First, the U.S. role in the deal was seen as a betrayal of trust by a key ally who should have informed the French government much earlier about such a major decision. Étienne said he learned about the deal from news reports, followed by a call from U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan.25 Even worse, the Macron administration viewed the move as yet another French exclusion from the U.S.UK military partnership, with the added insult of Australia’s inclusion (the partnership is now known as AUKUS), which renewed Macron’s push for European strategic autonomy and will perhaps cause his administration to hew even closer to a middle-of-the-road approach between the United States and China.26 The French were already caught flat-footed by the precipitous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August. The Indo-Pacific is a major strategic concern for France, given the 1.6 million French-speaking people who reside there; the French overseas territories of New Caledonia, Polynesia, and Reunion; and the significant French military presence in the region.

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The Biden administration’s downplaying of French anger did not soothe the situation. Importantly, Macron himself was very careful in handling the crisis, on the one hand allowing subordinates to vent but on the other hand putting himself above the fray. He undoubtedly had a close eye on the French electorate and the 2022 presidential elections, where his challengers were the farright candidates Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour. Macron therefore had to push back against the AUKUS deal, reasserting French autonomy. As serious as that rift was, a glance in the rearview mirror as to how the two allies handled past acrimonious incidents provides a possible template for moving forward. French and American presidents have a long history of using personal diplomacy to reach agreement on divisive issues. Richard Nixon and Georges Pompidou renewed the Franco-American alliance in a number of oneon-one meetings. Nixon wooed Pompidou during his official state visit to the United States in 1970 and then followed up with meetings to work on economic issues, arms limitations, the Middle East, and Vietnam. This rebirth culminated in the massive French presence at the American Bicentennial in 1976. In another example, presidents Ronald Reagan and François Mitterrand hammered out a common Western European security strategy as they commemorated their way through the two hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Yorktown in 1981, the fortieth anniversary of D-Day in 1984, and the hundredth anniversary of the Statue of Liberty in 1986. Macron was thus following presidential precedent in pursuing one-on-one meetings with Trump wrapped in commemorative pageantry, and, in all probability, Biden will issue his own personal invitation combined with some sort of commemorative gift/visit to Macron (as well as serious economic incentives and military assurances) at some point. Indeed, the United States quickly announced that vaccinated European travelers would be allowed into the United States, which had been another thorn in the French side. Moreover, Biden reached out to Macron in a September 22 phone call, carefully admitting in a joint statement that “the situation would have benefited from open consultations among allies on matters of strategic interest to France and our European partners” and that they were starting a process of ongoing “in-depth” discussions.27 The French ambassador returned to the United States the following week, and Biden had a one-on-one meeting with Macron at the French Embassy in Rome on October 29 before the G20 summit. The venue itself (technically French territory) was a U.S. concession, as was Biden’s agreement to a U.S.France Bilateral Clean Energy Partnership and joint statement on not only the “indivisible security” of the NATO alliance but also the importance of “a stronger and more capable European defense” as well as “robust collaboration in the Indo-Pacific.” Perhaps Biden’s tweet sums it up best: “I had a great meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron this afternoon. The United States has

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no older, no more loyal, no more decent ally than France. They’ve been with us from the beginning—and we will always be there for them.”28 The Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022 proved Biden’s words correct. Learning from previous mistakes, the Biden administration carefully crafted a unified strategy with France, prompting Ambassador Étienne to praise the United States for its “really close coordination” in working with European leaders.29 Macron demonstrated once again that he was the man of the hour in promoting strong European leadership, or “Europe-puissance,” and greater investment in European defense in the face of the Ukraine crisis. This long-term strategy has come to fruition in the recently concluded March 2022 Versailles Declaration, which provides a blueprint for bolstering defense, reducing energy dependence, and building a stronger economic base. Moreover, just as he sought to keep a dialogue going with Trump, Macron has done the same with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Though his many phone calls with another intransigent ego-driven bully will probably not prevent further bloodshed in Ukraine, Macron positioned himself as both an honest broker and as the essential player in leading an increasingly unified and assertive Europe allied with the United States against antidemocratic forces. His successful bid for reelection, albeit with only 58.5 percent of the vote versus the far-right Marine Le Pen’s 41.5 percent, has only reinforced his vision for a stronger Europe dedicated to democratic norms and rule of law. Most recently, Macron declared to his ambassadors that “we cannot let Russia militarily win the war” and that Europe must remain united.30 As the U.S. midterm elections play out in 2022, it is impossible to predict the future of negotiations with Iran or how the world will handle climate change as well as many other equally pressing global issues, including an ongoing Russian-instigated land war in Europe, humanitarian crises, and counterterrorism. Still, if history is any judge, the Franco-American alliance will persevere in the middle of uncertain times, and Macron should get a good deal of the credit, both for his death-grip handshakes and for his flattery diplomacy from 2017 through 2021. Macron understands how reminders from the past can forge a stronger alliance in the present, hence his invitation to Trump to share in the July 14 celebration and commemoration of the World War I Franco-American military alliance in 2017, his gift of the Belleau Wood oak tree during his 2018 Washington visit, and his resounding commitment to shared world leadership during the June 6, 2019, D-Day ceremonies. Indeed, Macron, a pragmatic internationalist, has a clear vision of the importance of a coordinated security strategy and what the world could look like with a unified Western front. This vision is materializing as I type. As Frank Ninkovich puts it in chapter 9 of this volume, “the starting point of most internationalists is not to create an imagined world,

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but to navigate the world as they find it,” and Macron navigated Trump exactly as he found him. Though Trump never came to a similar understanding of the world, he proved receptive to Macron’s death-grip handshakes, honeyed words, honors, gifts, and shared commemorations. It turns out that a bit of flattery diplomacy can go a long way in extending the life expectancy of alliances.

Notes 1. Macron-Trump meeting, May 25, 2017, https://www.youtube.com /watch? v=VOf9F qsLfA8. 2. Macron-Trump meeting, May 25, 2017. For excellent overviews of the Trump-Macron relationship and how it fits into the larger Franco-American alliance, see Jeff Lightfoot, “The French-American Alliance in an America First Era,” Research Report, Atlantic Council, April 1, 2018, 2–13; Natalie Nougayrède, “France’s Gamble: As America Retreats, France Steps Up,” Foreign Affairs 96, no. 5 (September/October 2017): 2–8; and Maud Quéssard, Frédéric Heurtebize, and Frédérick Gagnon, eds., Alliances and Power Politics in the Trump Era: America in Retreat? (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). 3. Climate Mayors, https://climatemayors.org /actions-paris-climate-agreement/. 4. As reported by AP News, July 8, 2017, https://apnews.com/article/emmanuel-macron -united-states-donald-trump-ap-top-news-group-of-20-5fda0a3ef4d8421791375ea39a 9fd84a. 5. Maggie Haberman, “Trump and Macron Cement Unlikely Friendship in Bastille Day Visit,” New York Times, July 14, 2017. 6. In the history of world leader goodbyes, this twenty-nine-second extended handshake/ patting on the back/side hugging/while walking has to rank number one as the most weird and entertaining. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 1DwijJfVbBg. 7. Emmanuel Macron (@emmanuelmacron), Twitter, April 24, 2018, with video. 8. Julia Hirschfeld Davis and Katie Rogers, “Le Bromance, Trump and Macron, Together Again,” New York Times, April 24, 2018. 9. Julia Hirschfeld, “Macron Critiques Trump’s Policies in Speech to Congress,” New York Times, April 25, 2018. 10. A sampling of these handshakes includes the aforementioned May 25, 2017, NATO summit and the July 14, 2017, twenty-nine-second goodbye. See also the April 24, 2018, handshake and kiss at the White House during Macron’s official head of state visit, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CV2N71W0FQ, and the August 27, 2019, G7 summit handshake, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 9RnuHtGC _ 9k. Also, not to be missed is “dandruffgate” during the April 2018 visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=j22BQe5L3bM. 11. “French President Macron: ‘Nationalism Is a Betrayal of Patriotism,’ ” CNN, https:// www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2018/11/11/ip-trump-in-paris.cnn. 12. Donald Trump (@RealDonaldTrump), Twitter, November 9, 2018. 13. See Jeffrey Lightfoot and Olivier-Rémy Bel, “Sovereign Solidarity: France, the US, and Alliances in a Post-Covid World,” Atlantic Council, November 1, 2020, for a detailed analysis of the 2018–2020 evolution of the Trump-Macron relationship. 14. “Macron to Send Trump Another Friendship Tree After First One Dies,” France24, June 12, 2019.

Death-Grip Handshakes and Flattery Diplomacy 259 15. Mark Landler and Maggie Haberman, “Trump Honors D-Day Sacrifices, with Some Legacies Unspoken,” New York Times, June 6, 2019. 16. “D-Day Remembrance: Trump Mixes Solemnity with Swipes at Mueller and Pelosi,” New York Times, June 6, 2019. 17. “G7 Leaders Declaration,” June 26, 2019, https://www.gouvernement.fr/en/g7-leaders -declaration. 18. See, for example, Jussi Hanhimaki, Pax Transatlantica: America and Europe in the Post– Cold War Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). Hanhimaki argues that conflicts, rather than undermining the transatlantic alliance, underscore its resiliency. 19. “Macron Tells Biden That Cooperation with U.S. Cannot Be Dependence,” New York Times, January 29, 2021. 20. See, for example, Frank Costigliola, France and the United States: The Cold Alliance Since World War II (New York: Twayne, 1992); Frédéric Bozo, Two Strategies for Europe: De Gaulle, the United States, and the Atlantic Alliance, trans. Susan Emanuel (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001); Sebastian Reyn, Atlantis Lost: The American Experience with De Gaulle (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011); and Erin Mahan, Kennedy, De Gaulle, and Western Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), for details on De Gaulle’s rejecting Britain’s entry into a common European market, withdrawing from NATO’s integrated military command, and demanding nuclear independence from the United States. 21. “Remarks by President Biden and President Macron of the Republic of France Before Bilateral Meeting,” White House Briefing, June 12, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov / briefing -room /statements -releases /2021 /06 /12 /remarks -by-president-biden -and -president-macron-of-the-french-republic-before-bilateral-meeting/. 22. The little sister came from the Museum of Arts and Métiers in the fourth arrondissement in Paris and will reside in the United States until 2031. 23. Roger Cohen, “In Submarine Deal with Australia, U.S. Counters China but Enrages France,” New York Times, September 16, 2021. 24. Piotr Smolar, Claire Gatinois, and Philippe Ricard, “Sous-marins australiens: en rappelant ses ambassadeurs, la France formalize sa colère contre les Etats-Unis et l’Australie,” Le Monde, September 18, 2021. 25. Smolar, Gatinois, and Ricard, “Sous-marins australiens.”  26. Cohen, “In Submarine Deal with Australia, U.S. Counters China but Enrages France.” 27. See Sylvie Kauffmann, “No Wonder the French Are Angry,” New York Times, September 22, 2021. 28. Sylvie Corbet, “U.S.-French Spat Seems to Simmer Down After Biden-Macron Call,” AP News, September 22, 2021. 29. United States–France Joint Statement, October 29, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov / briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/10/29/united-states-france-joint-statement/; Joe Biden (@POTUS), Twitter, October 29, 2021. 30. “Transcript: World Stage: Ukraine with Philippe Étienne, French Ambassador to the United States,” Washington Post, February 28, 2022. 31. “Macron Vows to Prevent Russia from Winning the War in Ukraine,” AP News, September 1, 2022.

CHAPTER 23

“MR. BREXIT” Donald Trump and the United Kingdom’s Departure from the European Union LI N DSAY AQ U I

T

he two electoral shocks of 2016—the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union (“Brexit”) and Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States—left observers aghast or elated. For those who found themselves in the former category, the outcome of the Brexit referendum represented a crisis that dwarfed any other challenge the European Union had faced in recent years, while Trump’s victory was seen as a “profound shock to the west, one that calls into question the future of its democratic model and the liberal international order.”1 For the latter group, Brexit was an enormous victory over an “arrogant, out-of-touch political class.”2 Similar feelings could be found across the Atlantic, as Fox News claimed that the result of the 2016 presidential election was a “national rejection of both the traditional media and the Hollywood elite.”3 The one shared sentiment among the majority of observers was surprise. Before the polls closed on June 23, 2016, even Nigel Farage, former leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party and a key figure in the campaign to vote Leave, said he thought Remain would win the EU Referendum.4 Only a small minority had the prescience to know that the conditions for both outcomes had been building for some time. Jonathan Haslam was among the few who thought that Trump’s election was “likely,” given “burgeoning blue collar resentment and dissentient opinion among longstanding Democrats.”5 Reactions were not the only resemblances between the 2016 EU Referendum and 2016 presidential election. As Graham K. Wilson writes, there are some similarities between the themes explored in the campaigns: immigration, the

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triumph of “ordinary people” over the “elite,” and the restoration of national pride. Overlap can also be found in terms of personalities.6 Farage endorsed Trump and made several appearances at campaign events. Trump crowned himself “Mr Brexit” on Twitter.7 But the linkages go deeper. In an article for the Guardian, the journalist Carole Cadwalladr revealed the role of Cambridge Analytica in collecting data about and targeting voters on behalf of both the Trump and Vote Leave campaigns. The firm was owned and funded by Robert Mercer, an American hedge-fund billionaire, prominent donor to the Trump campaign, and friend of Farage.8 Given the parallels and connections between the two, it makes sense that since 2016 a series of debates have emerged about the consequences of Trump’s election for the Brexit process and, more broadly, the repercussions of the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union for Anglo-American relations. A full assessment of those implications will have to await the opening of archival records. Nevertheless, now that Trump’s time in the White House is over, at least at the time of writing this chapter, the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement has been signed (in force from February 1, 2020), and the post-Brexit trade deal, the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement, is operating (as of May 1, 2021), it is possible to begin to assess the impact of the Trump presidency on the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union. Did Trump’s election make the Brexit negotiations easier or harder for the United Kingdom? Before the referendum, Trump, who was soon to become the Republican Party nominee, announced he was in favor of a Leave vote, although he stressed that this preference was an opinion and not a recommendation.9 As a prominent politician in one of the key allied states of the United Kingdom, Trump’s backing of Brexit, in addition to pressure from the Republican Party to negotiate a U.S.-UK free-trade deal, seemed to suggest that if the United Kingdom could not get a beneficial trade agreement with the European Union, it would be able to compensate for it by deepening ties with one of the world’s largest economies.10 On the other hand, some commentators suggested that European political leaders might punish the United Kingdom in order to send a signal that the European Union would not tolerate the kind of populist politics that both Trump and Brexit represented.11 The instability Trump epitomized was certainly a concern in Europe. The European Union called an emergency meeting to coordinate its response to the U.S. election, especially in light of Trump’s questioning of the American commitment to European security through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and his determination to seek a closer partnership with Russian president Vladimir Putin.12 Thus, if U.S.-UK relations had a significant bearing on Brexit, Trump’s election pulled in two directions. It had the potential to reduce the economic damage of Brexit through a trade deal and to make the exit negotiations harder by changing the strategic calculus for the European Union. Now that the United Kingdom’s

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departure is complete, there are clear signs of residual strain in transatlantic relations. As William Glenn Gray argues in chapter 21 of this volume, following the Trump years and the “farcical and extremely time-consuming process of Brexit,” the European Union is exhausted in its dealings with AngloAmerica. 13 Historically, the United States has tried to influence the United Kingdom’s policies toward the European Union and its predecessor organizations, so it is not unusual that there would be speculation about the implications of Trump’s election for Brexit. In the 1950s and 1960s, successive American administrations advocated for the United Kingdom to join the European Economic Community (EEC). As James Ellison points out, during the period when Prime Minister Harold Wilson contemplated the military withdrawal from East of Suez, a major rupture in Anglo-American relations, one of the few areas of agreement between Wilson and President Lyndon B. Johnson was the decision to embark on a second application for EEC membership.14 That application failed, but by the 1970s it had been revived and successfully negotiated by Edward Heath’s Conservative government. President Richard Nixon’s administration was initially concerned about the United Kingdom’s accession, given the competition the United States would face from the EEC, which, with the entry of the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Ireland, had become the world’s largest economic bloc in terms of population. However, by 1974 the administration concluded that the United Kingdom was an important partner that could help the United States influence the European Community (EC) from the inside, a return to what had been American policy for over a decade.15 Of course, an interest in the outcome does not necessarily equate to having the power to change it. There is, for example, considerable debate about how much weight to place on the role of Anglo-American relations in prompting the United Kingdom’s first application for EEC membership in 1961 and over the role of the United States in its demise two years later at the hands of French president Charles de Gaulle. Historians have questioned whether Prime Minister Harold Macmillan submitted the application in order to appease the Americans, especially in the wake of the Suez Crisis, or if the decision represented a genuine change in British policy.16 After all, Macmillan’s government had to come to terms with the uncomfortable realities of decolonization and waning British influence in world affairs. As the scholarly literature on the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union develops, similar questions may arise over the extent of Trump’s influence, and that of Anglo-American relations more generally, over the Brexit process. When it comes time to place those debates in a wider historical context, it will be important to remember two things. First, the European Union of today is a much stronger international player than the EEC/EC of the 1960s and 1970s and therefore was more able to temper any unwanted

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American influence on the course of the Brexit negotiations. Second, Brexit is an order of magnitude larger than any previous disruption to UK-EU relations, and thus comparisons to previous moments when the United States tried to influence British policy toward the European Union should be drawn with caution. The shockwaves caused by Brexit have given rise to another question: Can the so-called special relationship survive the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union? On the one hand, there are those who argue that Brexit will make the United Kingdom a less appealing partner for the United States because leaving the European Union will weaken the United Kingdom in terms of material resources and soft-power influence.17 On the other hand, Steve Marsh argues that the debate about whether Brexit threatens the Anglo-American relationship is “misplaced,” pointing out that the United Kingdom’s influence in the European Union is not the driving force behind the special nature of Anglo-American relations.18 Marsh makes an important point. The United Kingdom’s membership in the EC was important for the Anglo-American relationship during the Cold War insofar as British governments made themselves more valuable to the United States via the offer of influence in Brussels and other EC capitals. Although prime ministers John Major and Tony Blair both tried to maintain that role in the period after the end of the Cold War, it diminished in significance as the United States deepened key bilateral relationships with the European Union’s member states and the European Commission without using the United Kingdom as an intermediary. If the United Kingdom’s utility to the United States is to be found in its ability to support American interests in the European Union, Washington’s view of the importance of that role started to wane before 2016. Although the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union will sever any remaining vestiges of it, on that basis Brexit will not drastically alter the nature of Anglo-American relations. Nevertheless, the health of relations between London and Washington has fluctuated considerably since Brexit, especially in terms of the rapport between the president and prime minister. Under Trump’s leadership, relations were influenced less by Brexit than by the president’s temper and his personal view of the occupant of No. 10 Downing Street. By 2017, it was obvious that Prime Minister Theresa May and Trump would not find it easy to work together, not least because her “Global Britain” rhetoric pulled in the opposite direction of one of the key messages of his presidency: “America First.” Trump’s unpopularity in the United Kingdom was a liability for the prime minister, as was the two leaders’ lack of personal chemistry. To make matters worse, he publicly condemned May’s approach to negotiating the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union. In an interview with the Sun, Trump claimed that her Brexit plan, which had been agreed at Chequers in July 2018, might undermine any

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possibility of a free-trade deal with the United States.19 Furthermore, Trump made no secret of his preference for Boris Johnson, a key rival to May who succeeded her in 2019. As Martin Farr argues, the Trump-May relationship was a true low point.20 Even before Johnson became prime minister, it seemed as though his entry into Downing Street might hasten a recovery of the Anglo-American relationship. In an odd turn of events, the improvement began with a controversy over leaked memos in which Sir Kim Darroch, the United Kingdom’s ambassador to the United States, criticized Donald Trump. Prime Minister Theresa May backed Darroch, but Johnson, who was at the time fighting the Conservative Party’s leadership contest, openly disapproved of him staying in the post. Between Johnson’s lack of support and headlines in the United Kingdom claiming that the ambassador was a “crazed Europhile and therefore the wrong person to be representing modern Britain” as it navigated the post-Brexit world, his position became untenable.21 Within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office the episode was a worrying indication of the future of British diplomacy, which called into question the ability of ambassadors and civil servants to provide frank and honest advice.22 Yet for Johnson, the scandal was an early opportunity to signal his support for the president, and it appeared that the soon-to-be occupant of No. 10 would place a high priority on maintaining good relations with the United States, even at the expense of relations with the civil service. The tactic worked, and, with Darroch gone, Trump praised Johnson as “Britain Trump [sic]” and the “right man” to deliver Brexit.23 There was agreement in other areas too. At first Johnson appeared to part ways with Trump over policy toward China, but the eventual reversal of the prime minister’s decision to have Huawei provide the United Kingdom’s 5G network was praised by the U.S. administration.24 In his first postelection interview in the United Kingdom, Trump told Michael Gove, one of May’s cabinet ministers and a prominent campaigner for the Leave vote, that he would press ahead with a trade deal “very quickly. I’m a big fan of the UK. We’re gonna work very hard to get it done quickly and done properly.”25 Yet even after the nadir of the Trump-May years and the renewal of relations under Johnson, there was little in the way of serious help for the United Kingdom. The trade deal remained just an idea, and as the 2020 presidential election campaign began, it became clear that any deal would have to pass an American Congress that was increasingly concerned about the implications of Brexit for Ireland. At the time of writing, the United Kingdom has seventy trade deals and agreements in place, the majority of which are “roll over” deals that replicate what the United Kingdom had as an EU member state. The Johnson government’s priorities were to launch negotiations with the United States and Australia, and it has applied to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).26 However, the only new, post-Brexit, and

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non-European trade deal the British government has signed is the UK-Japan Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement. At the end of October 2021, an agreement in principle was reached with New Zealand, trade with which, according to the BBC’s analysis, accounts for less than 0.2 percent of UK Gross Domestic Product (GDP).27 A recent government publication suggests that the value of a U.S.-UK Free Trade Agreement would be an increase to UK GDP of 0.07 to 0.16 percent, or £1.6 to £3.4 billion.28 Yet, after five rounds of talks conducted during the Trump presidency, there is no sign that the new U.S. administration, led by President Joe Biden, is interested in seeing the negotiations continue. The necessary permission for the U.S. executive to “fast track” a trade deal, granted by the Trade Promotion Authority, expired in July 2021.29 During talks at the White House in September 2021, Biden only wanted to discuss the question of a trade deal “a little bit.”30 There are other processes at work that make it difficult to fully assess the effects of the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union on AngloAmerican relations. The impact of Brexit on Ireland is something to which the Biden administration has paid close attention, and it remains to be seen whether the operation of the border in the Irish Sea will further inflame tensions. If the events of early 2021, such as the protests when supermarket supplies were disrupted after Brexit, are any indication, this is a major cause for concern.31 Another is the ways in which Brexit might undermine the constitutional integrity of the United Kingdom. Nicola Sturgeon was reelected as Scotland’s first minister in May 2021 and promised to hold a second referendum on Scottish independence. The case for doing so, according to the Scottish National Party, rests on the fact that the United Kingdom that Scotland voted to remain part of in 2014 is fundamentally different from the post-2016 union.32 It is also the case that the United Kingdom’s post-Brexit foreign policy priorities remain unclear. Part of the problem is that it is difficult to disentangle the government’s actions in the international arena from the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Is, for example, the decision to cut the international aid budget truly a short-term reaction to the economic impact of COVID-19, or does it reflect the priorities of a government that is withdrawing from or redefining its previous international role? For clues as to what the Johnson government’s true priorities might have been, one could look to the 2021 AUKUS deal, the trilateral security pact under which the United States and United Kingdom will help Australia acquire nuclear-powered submarines. The agreement resulted in the cancellation of a French-Australian submarine deal. This riled Emmanuel Macron’s government and prompted French foreign minister JeanYves Le Drian to call AUKUS a “stab in the back.”33 In a move characteristic of a prime minister whose rhetoric and actions were often incongruous, Johnson asked the French president to “prenez un grip” and “donnez-moi un break”; he also claimed that the United Kingdom and France had a “very important and

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indestructible relationship” and that the AUKUS pact was not “exclusionary.”34 Nevertheless, it seems that the United Kingdom is turning its international attention away from its strategic partners in the European Union. As this chapter was being finalized, two developments further obscured the impact of Brexit on Anglo-American relations, and although historians are often for good reason leery of commenting on current affairs, a preliminary assessment is in order. The first is Russia’s violent invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which brought British (and international) attention back to Europe and the European Union. During his February 24, 2022, speech condemning Russia, Johnson stressed the significance of financial sanctions in concert with the European Union. Furthermore, alongside counterparts from Ukraine, the United States, and Canada, Liz Truss, then the United Kingdom’s foreign secretary, attended the European Union’s Foreign Affairs Council in mid-March. At the same time, Johnson continued to emphasize the United Kingdom’s links to and cooperation with other international partners, in line with his “global Britain” rhetoric. In the same February  24 speech, he pointed to AngloAmerican cooperation on sanctions, the need for “unity . . . in the G7,” and the importance of strengthening “NATO’s defences still further.”35 In an article on March 6, Johnson outlined a six-point plan for Ukraine, which included bolstering Euro-Atlantic security.36 Even in the face of war in Europe, Johnson continued to emphasize “global Britain” and claimed that he—personally—and his government were “bringing the West together.”37 The second development, alluded to in the previous paragraph, is Johnson’s departure from Downing Street. Following a series of high-profile scandals involving alcohol-fueled partying that flouted the government’s own guidance about social mixing during the COVID-19 pandemic and allegations of sexual misconduct by the deputy chief whip, Johnson was forced to concede that he could no longer lead the Conservative Party or the country. A leadership campaign ensued, from which Liz Truss emerged victorious and became prime minister on September 6, 2022. Little can be said about the form Truss’s relationship with Biden would have taken, as she only served in post for forty-four days, but even during her brief time in office there were signs that it would not have been characterized by closeness. During her tenure as foreign secretary, Truss said the Anglo-American relationship was special but not exclusive and made no mention of the “specialness” of relations with the United States in a speech intended to set out her vision for British foreign policy.38 Truss also threatened to unilaterally override parts of the Northern Ireland Protocol through domestic legislation, a move that would have significantly heightened tensions on the island of Ireland and with Europe and the United States. Biden used his first phone call with the prime minister to emphasize the importance of maintaining the Good Friday Agreement and reaching an agreed settlement with the European Union. According to senior Democrats, including Speaker

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of the House Nancy Pelosi, both are prerequisites to any trade deal with the United States.39 Truss acknowledged this reality, stating ahead of her first inperson meeting with the president, which was delayed until after the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, that it was unlikely that a trade agreement would emerge in the short to medium term.40 After a brief warming of Anglo-American relations under Trump and Biden, it looked like under Truss the relationship would have been headed for a colder time. It is too soon to tell how the relationship will fare during the tenure of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Given the level of uncertainty about the post-Brexit United Kingdom and the international arena in which it operates, what can be said about the influence of “Mr Brexit” on the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union or the impact of Brexit on Anglo-American relations? There are a multitude of connections between the United Kingdom’s referendum and the U.S. presidential election in 2016, from the personalities and themes in the campaigns to the wave of populism and instability that both represent. Despite these connections, we should not assume that one outcome will have an overriding influence on the other. Historically, the fact that an American president wanted to sway the course of UK-EC/EU relations has not necessarily manifested in the ability to do so. One should also be careful about drawing parallels to other moments when Anglo-American relations have intersected with those between the United Kingdom and its partners in Europe. Given the size of the disruption caused by the 2016 EU Referendum, it is very difficult to draw comparisons between Brexit and other major points of rupture in the United Kingdom’s relationship with the European integration project. Although Anglo-American relations have fluctuated considerably between 2016 and 2022, that may simply be the result of the fact that for most of the period the United States was led by a temperamental president for whom, in the words of Kathleen Burk, “the personal is the political.”41 Complete answers to questions about the implications of the Trump presidency for Brexit will have to wait until the full consequences of the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union are established.

Notes 1. Chris Morris, “Biggest Crisis yet for Brussels,” BBC News, June 24, 2016, https://www .bbc.co.uk /news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36616018; James Blitz, “Brexit Briefing: What Trump’s Victory Means for Britain,” Financial Times, November 9, 2016. 2. Cover of the Daily Mail, June 25, 2016. 3. Dan Gainor, “Trump Triumphs—Media’s ‘Primal Scream’ Is Heard Round the World,” Fox News, November 9, 2016, https://www.foxnews.com /opinion /trump-triumphs -medias-primal-scream-is-heard-round-the-world. 4. Charlie Cooper, “EU Referendum: Nigel Farage Says It ‘Looks Like Remain Will Edge It’ as Polls Close,” Independent, June 23, 2016.

268 TRU MP A B R OA D 5. Jonathan Haslam, “The Significance of the Trump Presidency,” H-Diplo International Security Studies Forum, January 24, 2017, https://issforum.org /roundtables/policy/1– 5h-trump-significance. 6. Graham K. Wilson, “Brexit, Trump, and the Special Relationship,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 19, no. 3 (2017): 544–45. 7. Andrew Buncombe, “Nigel Farage Endorses Donald Trump as ‘Force for Change’ Ahead of Joint Appearance in Mississippi,” Independent, August 24, 2016; Dominic Rushe and Nicole Puglise, “Trump’s Declaration He’ll Be ‘Mr Brexit’ Opens Speculation Floodgates on Twitter,” Guardian, August 18, 2016. 8. Carole Cadwalladr, “The Great British Brexit Robbery: How Our Democracy Was Hijacked,” Guardian, May 7, 2017. 9. Sam Levin, “Donald Trump Backs Brexit, Saying UK Would Be ‘Better Off’ Without EU,” Guardian, May 6, 2016. 10. Siobhan Hughes, “Republicans Push for a Trade Deal with U.K.,” Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2016. 11. Talking Politics Podcast, “Brexit After Trump,” November 23, 2016. 12. Duncan Robinson, “Britain and France Snub EU’s Emergency Trump Meeting,” Financial Times, November 13, 2016. 13. See also the online version; William Glenn Gray, “Swaggering Home: Trump, Grenell, and Pompeo in Conflict with Germany,” H-Diplo and ISSF Policy Series, America and the World—The Effects of the Trump Presidency, July 6, 2021, https://issforum.org /roundtables/policy/ps2021-45. 14. James Ellison, The United States, Britain, and the Transatlantic Crisis: Rising to the Gaullist Challenge, 1963–68 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), chap. 5. 15. Luke Nichter, Richard Nixon and Europe: The Reshaping of the Postwar Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), chap. 5. 16. For a discussion of these debates, see Nigel Ashton, Kennedy, Macmillan, and the Cold War: The Irony of Interdependence (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 130–32. 17. Wilson, “Brexit, Trump, and the Special Relationship.” 18. Steve Marsh, “The US, BREXIT, and Anglo-American Relations,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 16, no. 3 (2018): 272–92. 19. Tom Newton Dunn, “Trump’s Brexit Blast,” Sun, July 13, 2018. 20. Martin Farr, “Donald Trump and Theresa May: The Incredible Relationship,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers from Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson, ed. Michael Patrick Cullinane and Martin Farr (London: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). 21. Kim Darroch, Collateral Damage, Britain, America, and Europe in the Age of Trump (London: HarperCollins, 2020); details of Darroch’s resignation are in chapters 1 and 16, quotation on 261–62. 22. “Kim Darroch: Effectively Sacked by Johnson on the Orders of Trump,” Guardian, July 10, 2019. 23. BBC News, August 25, 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk /news/av/uk-politics-49464268; BBC News, July 25, 2019, available online: https://www.bbc.co.uk /news/av/world-us -canada-49090804. 24. Martin Farr, “Donald Trump and Boris Johnson: The Unfulfilled Relationship,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers from Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson, ed. Michael Patrick Cullinane and Martin Farr (London: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).

“Mr. Brexit” 269 25. Donald Trump, as quoted in Heather Stewart, Alan Yuhas, and Peter Walker, “Donald Trump’s First UK Post-Election Interview: Brexit a ‘Great Thing,’ ” Guardian, January 16, 2017. 26. For details on the CPTTP, see Institute for Government, “Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP),” https://www.institute forgovernment.org.uk /explainers/trade-cptpp. 27. Tom Edgington, “Brexit: What Trade Deals Has the UK Done So Far?,” BBC, October 21, 2021, https://www.bbc.co.uk /news/uk-47213842. 28. Department for International Trade, “UK-US Free Trade Agreement,” March 2, 2020, 83, https://www.gov.uk /government/publications/the-uks-approach-to-trade-negotia tions-with-the-us. 29. James Kane, “What Does a Biden Presidency Mean for Trade?,” Institute for Government, November 11, 2020, https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk /blog/us-election -trade-implications. 30. “Joe Biden Plays down Chances of UK-US Trade Deal,” BBC, September 22, 2021, https://www.bbc.co.uk /news/uk-politics-58646017. 31. “Brexit Faces Problems at the Northern Irish Border,” Economist, June 19, 2021. 32. “Scotland’s Future,” SNP Manifesto, May 2021, 11, https://issuu.com/hinksbrandwise /docs/04_15_ snp_ manifesto_2021 _ _ _ a4_document. 33. “Were the French Blindsided by the AUKUS Submarine Deal?,” France24, September  21, 2021, https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20210921-were-the-french-blind sided-by-the-aukus-submarine-deal. 34. “Boris Johnson Tells Macron: Donnez-Moi un Break Over New Pact” BBC, September 22, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58654624; Alex Therrien, “Aukus: France Pulls Out of UK Defence Talks Amid Row,” BBC, September 20, 2021, https://www .bbc.co.uk /news/uk-58620220. 35. Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 709, February 24, 2022, 564–67. 36. “PM article on Ukraine,” March 6, 2022, https://www.gov.uk /government/news/pm -article-on-ukraine-6-march-2022. 37. William Booth and Karla Adam, “What’s Behind Boris Johnson’s Boast He’s Leading the West on Ukraine,” Washington Post, February 2, 2022. 38. Dominic Penna, “Liz Truss: Britain’s Relationship with the US ‘Special but Not Exclusive,’ ” Daily Telegraph, October 4, 2021; Liz Truss speech at Chatham House, “Building the Network of Liberty: Foreign Secretary’s speech,” December 8, 2021, https://www .gov.uk /government /speeches/foreign-secretary-liz-truss -building-the -network-of -liberty. 39. Gary O’Donoghue, “Liz Truss and Joe Biden: The Big Issue That Could Derail UK-US Relations,” BBC, September 11, 2022, https://www.bbc.co.uk /news/world-us-canada -62819799. 40. “Liz Truss Admits No US Trade Deal in ‘Short to Medium Term,’ ” BBC, September 20, 2022, https://www.bbc.co.uk /news/uk-politics-62959374. 41. Kathleen Burk, “US-UK Relations in the Time of Trump,” H-Diplo and ISSF Policy Series, America and the World—The Effects of the Trump Presidency, ed. D. Labrosse, March 23, 2021, https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/7449651/issf-policy -series-2021-15-us-uk-relations-time-trump#_ ftn1.

CHAPTER 24

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION AND THE MIDDLE EAST Not Much Change, Not Much Success F. G R E G O RY GAU S E I I I

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uch like its predecessor, the Trump administration came into office rhetorically committed to reducing the American footprint in the Middle East and left office with the American role in the region largely unchanged. And like its predecessor, it came into office ready to engage diplomatically on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, and it left office with little progress on that core conflict of the Arab-Israeli arena. President Trump succeeded in expanding the number of Arab countries that diplomatically recognize Israel, but those recognitions did little to change the immediate geopolitical dynamics of the Arab-Israeli issue. They were more a testament to the enduring centrality of the United States in the Middle East, a backhanded acknowledgment that Trump’s initial desire to deemphasize the region in American foreign policy had failed. Unlike its predecessor, the Trump administration increased pressure on Iran, in the failed hopes of either renegotiating the 2015 nuclear deal or, more ambitiously, changing the regime in Tehran. The Trump administration privileged relations with Saudi Arabia even beyond what previous administrations had done, but with the result of making SaudiAmerican relations a more toxically partisan issue than in the past. The Trump administration leaves office with the Middle East and America’s role in it mostly unchanged. That fact is testament to the pressures for continuity in America’s approach to the region. Reducing the American footprint would require a rethinking of thirty years of military policy, since the Gulf War of 1990–1991. The Pentagon has established bases and facilities all along the Persian Gulf littoral’s Arab side—in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab

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Emirates (UAE), and Oman. Where the American military has poured concrete, it is loath to leave. Such a military reduction would also require reversing the twenty years of American focus on counterterrorism that resulted from the 9/11 attacks. With salafi jihadist groups continuing to play a role in the Middle East, it would be hard for any administration to declare the region unimportant to American security. Continued, bipartisan support for Israel raises the costs to any American president of deemphasizing the region. The Trump administration’s specific policy of pressuring Iran was absolutely inconsistent with a desire to reduce the U.S. presence in the Persian Gulf. A real reduction of the American focus on the Middle East would require a profound reassessment of American interests there. That was not a task the Trump administration was willing to undertake.

The U.S. Military in the Middle East: Not Much Change When President Trump entered office, there were about 58,000 American troops in the Middle East (including Afghanistan). In December 2020, there were about 42,000 in the region (excluding Afghanistan), but regular rotational deployments meant that the number could rise to as many as 65,000 at any particular time.1 Like President Barack Obama before him, Trump came to office committed to avoiding military engagements in the region. He did draw down the number of American forces in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, though not to zero. However, the system of American military bases in the region did not change at all during Trump’s four years in office. The Fifth Fleet remains headquartered in Bahrain; 13,000 U.S. troops were stationed in Kuwait in December 2020; al-Udeid airbase in Qatar was home to 8,000 troops.2 The administration surged forces into the region on numerous occasions. President Trump left office with the American military infrastructure in the Middle East basically unchanged. The Trump administration fell victim to the same temptations as the Obama administration regarding military force and the Middle East. America’s stick is so big that it is hard to resist using it. Trump did not do anything as substantial as the Libya campaign. However, he launched missile attacks on Syria in 2017, increased the intensity of the air campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in 2017–2018, and expanded the very active drone-strike campaign of his predecessor. He began his term by increasing the American force presence in Afghanistan but subsequently reduced it before leaving office. Trump avoided any major new military commitments in the region, but he did not completely end any of the commitments that he inherited and, through his policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran,3 added a potential escalation risk that had to be managed.

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A Big Change, but Not Much Success: Policy Toward Iran The one area where the Trump administration took a completely different approach from its predecessor was Iran. President Trump campaigned against the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the agreement among the United States, the other permanent members of the UN Security Council, Germany, the European Union, and Iran that set limits on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of UN sanctions. He disparaged the agreement as a “disaster” and “the worst deal ever negotiated.”4 Upon entering office, and bowing to the advice of more conventional foreign policy advisers like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, Trump maintained the agreement even as he continued to criticize it. In October 2017, he finally “decertified” American participation in the JCPOA.5 As that first group of advisers left the White House, the administration adopted a policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran, centering on surprisingly effective unilateral American sanctions that had the effect of cutting Iran off from the world financial system. Iran’s oil sales plummeted amid economic hardship and scattered protests around the country.6 The COVID-19 crisis and the resultant plunge in world oil prices in March 2020 further increased the pressures on the Islamic Republic. Official administration policy was that the United States sought a return to negotiations with Iran for a better deal, one that would strengthen and extend the limitations on Iran’s nuclear program, limit Iranian missile capabilities, and roll back Iranian involvement in regional trouble spots. President Trump even sought direct contact with Iranian president Hassan Rouhani during the UN General Assembly meeting in the fall of 2019. At the same time, Tillerson’s successor as secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, laid out a set of preconditions for talks with Iran that could only have been reached through regime change. In the end, Trump never had to decide just what he wanted from Iran, because Tehran was not willing to engage with his administration on Washington’s terms. The Iranian response to “maximum pressure” was to create crises in the Persian Gulf, in hopes that international pressures would bring Washington back to a multilateral negotiation. In the summer of 2019, Iran mined ships in the Arabian Sea, just outside the Strait of Hormuz, and shot down an American drone flying over the Persian Gulf. In September 2019, Iran launched an audacious missile attack on Saudi oil facilities that took over 5 million barrels of oil a day off the market for weeks.7 These crises exposed the tensions in Trump’s approach to the region. He did not want to launch yet another military adventure. At the last minute, he called off a planned bombing of Iranian sites in retaliation for the downing of the American drone.8 Despite the decades-long contention that the free flow of oil from the Persian Gulf was a vital American

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interest, Trump made no proportionate response to the attack on the Saudi oil facilities, the most serious challenge to oil flows since Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Yet in order to maintain “maximum pressure,” the administration had to sustain the military presence in the region as an ultimate threat to Iran. It also sought more piecemeal payback, most notably killing the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani, in a drone attack in Baghdad in January 2020.9 The Quds Force is the IRGC’s overseas arm, extending Iran’s military and political presence in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere, and Soleimani had become the face of Iran’s regional presence. The “maximum pressure” policy failed. Iran did not negotiate the theoretical “better deal” that Trump sought,10 nor did the regime collapse. Rather, it began to exceed the limits on its nuclear program set by the JCPOA. By the time the Trump administration left office, Iran arguably was closer to nuclear weapons breakout capability than it had been when he took office.11

A Complicated Embrace: Saudi Arabia The Saudi-American relationship has been close for decades, but President Trump elevated it to an unprecedented level of direct presidential involvement and access. In the process, he also moved it into the field of partisan politics in an unprecedented way. Saudi Arabia has never had many defenders in the American political system, but Democratic and Republican presidents have always wanted to have a good relationship with Riyadh, the world’s largest oil exporter and a major player in the Middle East and the Muslim world. Increasing numbers of Democrats in Congress and the foreign policy establishment now see the country through the lens of Trump’s embrace of it. Trump’s flirtation with Riyadh began even before he took office, with the establishment in late 2016 of a close relationship between his son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner with Prince Muhammad bin Salman, the young son of the Saudi king who is known as MBS. Trump made Riyadh the destination of his first foreign trip. Shortly after the visit, on June 6, 2017, Trump publicly backed by tweet the boycott of Qatar that had been declared by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, despite the fact that Qatar hosted America’s largest airbase in the Middle East and that his secretaries of state and defense were attempting to mediate the crisis. Later that same month, MBS muscled his way into the crown prince position, turfing out his older cousin, Prince Muhammad bin Nayif, who had been America’s primary interlocutor on counterterrorism issues since the 9/11 attacks. The Trump administration signaled that they not only approved of the change but perhaps even had a hand in it. The

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public signaling of such involvement by the United States in the politics of the Saudi ruling family was unprecedented. Trump had personalized the relationship with Riyadh in a dramatic way. The negative consequences of that personalization became clear in October 2018, when the Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. U.S. intelligence agencies assessed that the operation was ordered by MBS.12 The outcry in Washington was immediate and bipartisan. Khashoggi was well known to American elites and was writing an occasional column for the Washington Post. The brutality and brazenness of the act struck a chord. Combined with the continuing Saudi military campaign in Yemen, which was creating a humanitarian disaster there, the Khashoggi killing made MBS persona non grata to the American political establishment. But not to President Trump, who continued to defend him, provide U.S. military support for Saudi Arabia’s Yemen campaign, and tout the benefits of arms sales to the Saudis for the American economy.13 In his 2020 campaign, President Biden termed Saudi Arabia a “pariah.” Upon entering office, he suspended American military aid to Saudi Arabia’s Yemen operations.14 However, Biden administration did not completely break with Saudi Arabia. The president visited the kingdom in July 2022 in an effort to mend relations, as the Ukraine war pushed oil prices higher. The equities in the areas of regional geopolitics, counterterrorism, and oil that have always sustained the relationship are still present. But President Trump’s personal embrace of MBS and the equal and opposite Democratic reaction against MBS have introduced a level of partisanship into the relationship that is a new and unpredictable factor going forward.

Peripheral Success, Core Failure: The Arab-Israeli Arena The most significant Middle Eastern diplomatic success of the Trump administration in the Middle East was the late 2020 diplomatic recognition of Israel by four Arab states: the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan.15 Jared Kushner made what came to be called the “Abraham Accords” the major focus of his efforts at the end of the administration. While important as indicators of the continuing normalization of Israel’s role in the region, these recognitions did not change the fundamentals of the Arab-Israeli arena. Contrary to the way they were portrayed by Trump and his loyalists, they were not “peace” agreements.16 None of the four Arab states had fought a war against Israel (although some Moroccan troops participated in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War)17 or are anywhere near Israel’s borders. Most importantly, this diplomatic movement came after the administration failed to create a breakthrough in the core Israeli-Palestinian issue. In an unintended way, that failure might have actually led to the accords.18

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The Trump administration came to office, like many of its predecessors, proclaiming a renewed commitment to Arab-Israeli peace. Signaling its importance, Trump gave that portfolio to Kushner. But Trump also wanted to be a historically pro-Israeli president, as his evangelical Christian base wanted. Before Kushner presented his “deal of the century” to the Israeli and Palestinian governments in 2019, the Trump administration in November 2017 recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved the American embassy there. This step gave the government of Benjamin Netanyahu something that it always wanted, without a quid pro quo to advance the peace process, and alienated Palestinian opinion. When Kushner finally did present his peace plan, which called on Palestinians to forsake independent statehood for theoretical commitments of tens of billions of dollars in investments in their territory, the Palestinian Authority did not give him the time of day.19

Conclusion: Not Much Change, Not Much Success President Trump, for all his unconventional diplomatic style, ended up pursuing a relatively conventional American foreign policy toward the Middle East. He did not substantially change the American military footprint in the region. He prioritized counterterrorism, as had his two immediate predecessors. His administration developed its own plan for Arab-Israeli peace, which failed, as had the plans of his two immediate predecessors. Trump maintained close relations with traditional American allies, though his pro-Israel tilt was more pronounced than that of previous administrations, and his embrace of Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman has complicated Saudi-American relations for the Biden administration. He departed substantially from the Obama administration’s approach to Iran, but it was Obama who was more the outlier among recent American presidents on this issue. Trump’s hard line toward Iran was much closer to President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” stance and President Bill Clinton’s “dual containment” approach. President Trump’s Middle East policy was not that different from his predecessors, but it was also distinctly unsuccessful.20 The Abraham Accords should be put in the win column, but there was no movement on the core Arab-Israeli issue, the Palestinian-Israeli relationship. The ISIS territorial caliphate was destroyed, but that result was well on the way by the time Trump took office. Trump’s singular innovation in the Middle East, the “maximum pressure” policy toward Iran, was a complete failure. He neither brought Tehran back to the table nor changed the regime. Iran’s regional influence in the broken Arab states—Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen—was as great in 2021 as it was in 2017, if not more so. Trump left office with Iran closer to developing a nuclear weapon than when he entered. The Biden administration sought a return to negotiations with Iran to undo the damage.

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Trump’s failures in the region do not make him unique among recent American presidents. Clinton failed to convert America’s unparalleled power position into Israeli-Syrian and Israeli-Palestinian peace deals. Obama’s signature diplomatic achievement, the JCPOA, was easily overturned by his successor, and his intervention in Libya created a civil war that continues to this day. These failures, along with the palpable American fatigue with the Middle East, have led many to speculate that American power in the region is in decline.21 It is hard to argue that America’s power position is as enviable as it was in the early 1990s. However, it would be a mistake to discount the American regional role too much. It is still the dominant regional military power. Its regional allies dwarf those of Russia and China. Only the United States can put substantial economic pressure on regional states. The Abraham Accords indicate that regional states still want to be on America’s good side. Every Arab state opening to Israel, from Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s treaty in 1979, through the negotiations of the 1990s, up to these recent recognitions, has been first and foremost an effort to cultivate the United States. The UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan had little to gain from direct relations with Israel, but they had plenty to gain from Washington.22 The United States still has plenty of cards to play in the Middle East. A new administration with a defter diplomatic touch and a more modest agenda could reverse the recent string of failures.

Notes 1. Ash Carter, “The Logic of American Strategy in the Middle East,” Survival 59, no. 2 (2017): 13–24. 2. Mike Sweeney, “A Plan for U.S. Withdrawal from the Middle East,” Defense Priorities, December 2020, https://www.defensepriorities.org/explainers/a-plan-for-us-with drawal-from-the-middle-east. 3. Heritage Foundation, event announcement, “After the Deal: A New Iran Strategy,” May 21, 2018, https://www.heritage.org/defense/event/after-the-deal-new-iran-strategy. 4. Yeganeh Torbati, “Trump Election Puts Iran Nuclear Deal on Shaky Ground,” Reuters, November  9, 2016, https://www.reuters .com /article/us -usa- election-trump -iran /trump-election-puts-iran-nuclear-deal-on-shaky-ground-idUSKBN13427E. 5. For references to the early months of the Trump presidency, see the author’s “Donald Trump and the Middle East,” in Chaos in the Liberal Order: The Trump Presidency and International Politics in the Twenty-First Century, ed. R. Jervis, F. Gavin, J. Rovner, and D. Labrosse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 273–86. 6. Farnaz Fassihi and Rick Gladstone, “With Brutal Crackdown, Iran Is Convulsed by Worst Unrest in 40 Years,” New York Times, December 3, 2019, https://www.nytimes .com/2019/12/01/world/middleeast/iran-protests-deaths.html. 7. “Special Report: ‘Time to Take Out Our Swords’—Inside Iran’s Plot to Attack Saudi Arabia,” Reuters, November 26, 2019, https://mobile.reuters.com /article/amp/idUS KBN1XZ16H.

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8. Michael Shear, Helene Cooper, and Eric Schmitt, “Trump Says He Was ‘Cocked and Loaded’ to Strike Iran, but Pulled Back,” New York Times, June 21, 2019, https://www .nytimes.com/2019/06/21/us/politics/trump-iran-attack .html. 9. Mark Mazzetti, Ronen Bergman, and Farnaz Fassihi, “How Months of Miscalculation Led the U.S. and Iran to the Brink of War,” New York Times, February 13, 2020, https:// www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/us/politics/iran-trump-administration.html. 10. David Sanger, Farnaz Fassihi, and Rick Gladstone, “Urging Iran to ‘Make the Big Deal,’ Trump Ties Nuclear Negotiations to Election,” New York Times, June 5, 2020, https:// www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/world/middleeast/trump-iran-nuclear.html. 11. Sune Engel Rasmussen and Laurence Norman, “Iran’s Nuclear Program: How Close Is Tehran to Developing Nuclear Weapons?,” Wall Street Journal, February 10, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/iran-nuclear-program-11610564572. 12. “The Report on Jamal Khashoggi’s Killing,” New York Times, February 26, 2021, https:// www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/02/26/us/report-jamal-khashoggi-killing.html. 13. F. Gregory Gause III, “After the Killing of Jamal Khashoggi: Muhammad bin Salman and the Future of Saudi- U.S. Relations,” CSIS Brief, December 12, 2018, https://www .csis .org /analysis /after -killing -jamal -khashoggi -muhammad - bin - salman - and -future-saudi-us-relations. 14. Ben Hubbard and Shuaib Almosawa, “Biden Ends Military Aid for Saudi War in Yemen. Ending the War Is Harder,” New York Times, February 5, 2021, https://www .nytimes.com/2021/02/05/world/middleeast/yemen-saudi-biden.html. 15. Karen DeYoung and Steve Hendrix, “Trump Critics Hail Accords Between Israel and Arab Countries Even as Original Goal of Palestinian Peace Remains Unmet,” Washington Post, October  31, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/trump -middle-east-accords/2020/10/31/f0585dec-19fc-11eb-aeec-b93bcc29a01b_story.html. 16. Fred Kaplan, “A Big Deal but Not a Peace Deal,” Slate, September 15, 2020, https://slate .com/news-and-politics/2020/09/trump-israel-uae-bahrain-deal.html. 17. Chaim Herzog, The Arab-Israeli Wars (New York: Vintage, 1982): 285, 287, 296. 18. Martin Indyk, “Trump’s Accidental Diplomacy in the Middle East: How a Botched Peace Plan Produced the Abraham Accord,” Foreign Affairs, August 19, 2020, https:// www . foreignaffairs . com /articles /middle - east /2020 - 08 -19 / trumps - accidental -diplomacy-middle-east. 19. Michael Crowley and David M. Halbfinger, “Trump Releases Mideast Peace Plan That Strongly Favors Israel,” New York Times, January 28, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com /2020/01/28/world/middleeast/peace-plan.html. 20. For a similar argument about Trump’s failures in the Middle East, see Steven Cook, “Trump’s Middle East Legacy Is Failure,” Foreign Policy, October 28, 2020, https:// foreignpolicy.com/2020/10/28/trumps-middle-east-legacy-is-failure/. 21. In a poll of academics who study the Middle East conducted in February 2021, 75 percent believed that the United States was weaker in the region than it was ten years ago. Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami, “Here’s How Experts on the Middle East See the Region’s Key Issues, Our New Survey Finds,” Washington Post, February 16, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost .com /politics /2021 /02 /16/ heres -how- experts -middle -east-see-regions-key-issues-our-new-survey-finds/. 22. Lara Jakes, “Trump Incentives for Signing Peace Accords with Israel Could Be at Risk,” New York Times, December 20, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/20/us/politics /trump-israel-sudan-peace-accord.html.

CHAPTER 25

FENCES MAKE BAD HOMBRES Trump and Latin America C H R I S T Y T H O R N TO N

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t starts, of course, with the wall. From its earliest moments, the campaign of Donald Trump for the presidency of the United States was predicated on hardening the border between the United States and Mexico and, by extension, between the United States and Latin America—the border where, as Gloria Anzaldúa wrote more than three decades ago, “the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.”1 Rubbing salt in those borderland wounds, Trump began his campaign with a call to seal the United States off from supposed horrors emerging from the south, rendering “drugs” and “crime” as external threats carried across the border by people deemed “illegal.” With increasingly explicit incantations of looming demographic change and social disorder pushed by advisors like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, the Republican Party under Trump proudly mainstreamed racist, xenophobic ideas that many thought had been relegated to the fringe. The consequences of such mainstreaming were devastating: the man who opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle in a Walmart parking lot in El Paso in 2019, for example—killing twenty-three people and injuring dozens more—wrote in his online manifesto that he specifically set out to target Mexicans, citing the “great replacement” conspiracy theory about a “Hispanic invasion.”2 It was a conspiracy theory that predated Trump, to be sure, but one that his administration amplified—the actual history of a place like Texas, of the border itself, be damned. Indeed, the call to “Make America Great Again” entailed, among other things, an explicit renarration of the history of relations between the United States and Latin

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America, one rooted in a pernicious combination of nostalgic return and selective forgetting. Forgoing a claim to the future, Trump instead repeatedly called on the past, seeking to recover lost glory by either glossing over or openly celebrating the mistakes, failures, and outrages of previous eras. Over the course of his presidency, Trump marshaled three broad themes in the history of U.S.–Latin American relations: mobilizing an imagined past in which U.S. dominance in the region was unquestioned; deploying an often anachronistic but nonetheless virulent anticommunism that was focused on left-leaning leaders and movements; and stoking nativist anti-immigrant sentiment toward people coming from Mexico, Central America, and what he called “shithole” countries such as Haiti.3 In the administration’s early days, Trump’s personalist deal making drove some policy toward the region, as when he lifted a ban on the import of Argentine lemons shortly after receiving permits to build a new office complex in Buenos Aires, demonstrating what Tom Long astutely summarized as Trump’s “short-term transactionalism.”4 But as it developed over his four years in office, Trump’s rhetoric and resultant policy toward Latin America often took the tone of a paean to imperial power—power he implied had been lost, or ceded, by previous administrations. Though President Barack Obama’s secretary of state John Kerry had won cautious plaudits in the region for asserting in 2013 that “the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over,” Trump’s team was keen to reverse course and reassert U.S. prerogative in the Western Hemisphere.5 Trump’s preference for exerting domination over building consent could be seen when the president insisted on installing a right-wing Cuban American member of his National Security Council, Mauricio Claver-Carone, as president of the Inter-American Development Bank—defying sixty years of tradition that held that a Latin American should head the multilateral institution.6 Indeed, Trump made his desire to return to an era of untrammeled U.S. power in the region explicit, invoking the Monroe Doctrine by name in his speech at the United Nations General Assembly in 2018.7 National Security Advisor John Bolton then repeated Trump’s reaffirmation shortly thereafter, when a television reporter questioned why the Trump administration tolerated authoritarians in other regions of the world but pushed for regime change in, for example, Venezuela. “In this administration,” Bolton told the reporter, “we’re not afraid to use the phrase ‘Monroe Doctrine.’ ”8 If Bolton’s justification harked back to the nineteenth century, however, the more proximate historical lineage Bolton summoned was that of Cold War “democracy promotion.” Venezuela was a country in this hemisphere, he argued, and “it had been the objective of presidents going back to Ronald Reagan to have a completely democratic hemisphere.” Bolton then doubled down on this logic in a speech to Bay of Pigs veterans in Florida, in which he proclaimed that “the Monroe Doctrine is alive and well.”9 In that speech, Bolton

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named Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua as the “troika of tyranny,” a pale imitation of George W. Bush’s “axis of evil.” While the phrase failed to catch on, the fearmongering over the threat of socialist subversion endured and reverberated domestically, becoming a key theme for the Trump administration, especially as it approached the reelection campaign—not least in the key state of Florida. Trump’s electoral politics in Florida made clear the contours of a “foreign policy for domestic consumption” and raised from the dead several Cold War specters.10 Cuba was unsurprisingly central, as Bolton’s 2019 celebration of Bay of Pigs veterans—literal Cold Warriors—made clear. Though Trump had been somewhat noncommittal on Cuba during his first campaign, once in office he quickly began to roll back the Obama administration’s attempts to normalize relations with the island, imposing new sanctions and reinstating travel restrictions, seeking even to end longstanding educational exchanges.11 Closely linked to Cuba was Venezuela, which supplied important aid and oil to the island in defiance of the decades-long U.S. blockade. During the Trump years, in fact, invocations of both former Cuban president Fidel Castro and former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez—both already dead by the time Trump assumed office—became routine, as when Trump’s lawyer argued in November 2020 that Chávez, who died in 2013, had somehow conspired with Presidentelect Joe Biden to rig that year’s election.12 As though haunted by ghosts, the Trump administration frequently tried to pull relations with Latin America back to an earlier era, one where Cold War anticommunism provided an organizing principle for U.S. power in the region. Stoking this anticommunist sentiment was a surprising figure far from the center of U.S. electoral politics: former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe. As the analyst Adam Isacson noted, Uribe’s influence on those in the Trump circle became especially clear during the reelection campaign, when Trump ran a Spanish-language ad in Florida that linked Joe Biden to Castro, Chávez, current Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, and Colombian senator and former guerrilla Gustavo Petro.13 The mention of Petro—who, at that time, was far from a household name in the United States—was a clear marker of the influence of Uribe, who had been leading a campaign against socialism in the region and had coined the epithet “Castro- Chavismo” to describe the influence of left movements and parties throughout the Americas.14 Trump directly deployed Uribe’s language repeatedly during the campaign, as when he tweeted in October, “Joe Biden is a PUPPET of CASTRO-CHAVISTAS,” and argued that Biden, who had defeated the socialist Bernie Sanders in the primary, was himself “weak on socialism.”15 Uribe’s influence was also visible when, during the campaign, Trump brought up the historic peace plan negotiated by former Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos that sought to end the nearly sixdecade armed conflict between the state and the Revolutionary Armed Forces

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of Colombia (FARC; Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia). Uribe had successfully spearheaded an opposition campaign against the peace plan, rallying Colombians to vote against it by a narrow margin in 2016. At a 2020 campaign rally in Jacksonville, Trump slammed what he called the “ObamaBiden-Santos deal with Colombian drug cartels,” arguing that the Obama administration had “surrendered to the narco terrorists.”16 Though few voters in the United States were likely motivated by concerns about the internal politics of Colombia, Uribe’s frame of Castro-Chavismo served as a useful shorthand for Republican electioneering about the dangers of socialism. If the specters of Castro and Chávez hung over Trump’s campaigning, his policy summoned other Cold War ghosts, too. The political resurrection of Elliott Abrams, in particular, revealed how a history of hard-line anticommunism could overcome even Trump’s personal antipathy. Abrams had overseen key aspects of the Reagan administration’s brutal support for counterinsurgency in Central America in the 1980s, calling U.S. policy in El Salvador—where a UN truth commission found that the U.S.-backed military and paramilitary death squads killed more than 75,000 civilians—a “fabulous achievement.”17 He was also convicted for lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra affair but was pardoned by the George H.W. Bush administration before serving again under the younger Bush. Abrams, however, had publicly criticized Trump during the 2016 campaign, and Trump had to be convinced by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to appoint the Cold War hawk as special envoy to Venezuela. At Pompeo’s insistence, Abrams was brought in to handle Venezuela policy in the same week that Trump, urged on by anti-Maduro lawmakers like Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Robert Menendez (D-NJ), announced that the United States was withdrawing recognition from the Maduro government and instead officially recognizing the opposition upstart Juan Guaidó as the interim president of Venezuela. Trump then signaled his intent to exert “maximum pressure” to force regime change in Venezuela, a task he assumed would be “low-hanging fruit” for the United States, expecting a “major foreign policy victory.”18 Despite dragging Abrams’s legacy in El Mozote and Iran-Contra into its Venezuela policy, however, the Trump administration had none of the major victories it anticipated. Though the United States did convince a host of other countries to recognize Guaidó—whose ability to bring together the notoriously fractious Venezuelan opposition remained limited, to say the least—Abrams and the Trump administration ultimately had little to show for their sanctions and saber rattling. As of this writing, Maduro remains in office, and Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis, exacerbated by COVID-19, only worsened with Trump’s escalating sanctions.19 Perhaps the most important accomplishment of the Trump Venezuela strategy was laying the groundwork for a surprising continuity into the next administration. Biden has thus far largely continued Trump’s “maximum pressure” approach, with the added step of converting the

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Trump administration’s last-minute granting of Deferred Enforced Departure for Venezuelans in the United States into Temporary Protected Status (TPS)—a move that anti-immigrant hardliners in the Trump administration had been unwilling to make.20 Venezuela, however, wasn’t the only country in the region to experience an upheaval of leadership during the Trump years. In another echo of the Cold War, the Trump administration’s supposed reverence for “democracy promotion”—invoked by Bolton in regard to Maduro—foundered elsewhere on its commitment to supporting right-wing regimes with antisocialist agendas. The cases of Brazil, Bolivia, and Honduras make this tendency clear. Trump was a close ally of Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, who was elected after a series of dubious legal maneuvers had ousted former president Dilma Rousseff and prevented her predecessor, Ignacio “Lula” da Silva, from running for president again.21 Bolsonaro modeled his presidency on Trump’s in many ways, constantly denouncing “fake news” and downplaying the emergence of COVID19 as a “little flu,” thereby creating the conditions for one of the most devastating outbreaks in the entire world, with an official death toll that now stands below that of only the United States.22 Even as Bolsonaro stoked talk of the return of the country’s Cold War military dictatorship, explicitly casting doubt on the democratic process in Brazil, close ties between the Bolsonaro family and Trump advisors like Jared Kushner continued.23 As was the case during the long Cold War, U.S. insistence on promoting democracy was a policy deployed toward enemies, not allies. Similarly, in Bolivia, the Trump administration was quick to throw its weight behind an insurgent right. After a flawed statistical analysis led the Organization of American States (OAS) to argue that then-president Evo Morales had rigged his already controversial 2019 reelection, Morales fled the country under military pressure, and the little-known senator Jeanine Áñez used a series of parliamentary procedures to declare herself the interim president.24 Trump quickly recognized the new leader and subsequently turned a blind eye when the Áñez government unleashed a wave of violent repression against supporters of former president Morales.25 Trump even sent National Security Council official Mauricio Claver-Carone to Bolivia to meet with Áñez and offer his support for her leadership. There, Claver-Carone argued that the socialist government of Evo Morales had caused a rift in U.S.-Bolivian relations in an “unnatural way.”26 A return to the state of nature in which Latin American governments could be counted on to be trusted U.S. allies was, therefore, in order. In Honduras, in contrast, where the OAS also argued that there was rampant electoral fraud during the 2017 reelection of the right-wing president Juan Orlando Hernández—and where there was election-related protest and upheaval similar to that in Bolivia—the Trump administration quickly recognized Hernández as the winner, ignoring the calls of the OAS and members of U.S.

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Congress for a new election.27 An admirer of the U.S. president, Hernández supported Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and Honduras was one of just nine countries (together with Guatemala, led by the evangelical Christian Jimmy Morales) that voted with the United States against a UN resolution condemning the move.28 The suggestion of quid pro quo was unavoidable: just one day after voting with Trump at the United Nations, the administration officially congratulated Hernández on his election win, recognizing him as the legitimate leader of Honduras.29 Later, Hernández signed an agreement that was intended to stem the flow of migrants through and from his country, allowing the United States to deport even non-Honduran arrivals to Honduras and requiring those seeking asylum to do so from Honduras, rather than at the U.S. border. (Similar agreements were negotiated with right-wing president Nayib Bukele in El Salvador and Morales in Guatemala).30 Though Hernández had already been identified as the unindicted co-conspirator in the U.S. federal trial of his brother, Tony, on drugtrafficking charges, Trump administration support never wavered—even after court documents alleged that Hernández said he would make U.S. officials think he was cooperating in the drug war but actually “shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos.”31 Trump’s friendly relations with Honduras therefore followed a long U.S. government tradition in Central America and elsewhere of subordinating concerns about democracy or drugs to concerns about immigration and socialism.32 The Honduras case makes clear that while restoring U.S. supremacy and backing right-wing forces in the region were key themes, the most consistent through line of Trump policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean was its stance on immigration. Trump’s fear that residents of so-called shithole countries were immigrating in large numbers to the United States put the spotlight on Haiti in particular. Some Haitian-Americans who harbored antipathy toward the Clintons for their bungled aid programs in postearthquake Haiti had initially supported Trump against Hillary Clinton, a fact that he played up in his first campaign, promising to be a “champion” for Haitians.33 But when Trump moved to end TPS for Haitians in his first year in office, hundreds of Haitian and Haitian-American protestors descended on Trump’s resort at Mara-Lago to denounce the president, and they returned after his “shithole” remarks became public.34 Trump clearly knew little about Haiti and cared even less; as his comments desirous of immigrants from “Norway” made clear, he approached the country only through a lens of racist xenophobia. In these comments, Trump therefore not only signaled to his followers an almost gleeful return to a revanchist U.S. tradition of xenophobia—a tradition at least as old as Chinese exclusion and debates around the imperial subsumption of nonwhite Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Filipinos in the late nineteenth century— but he also drew on the long tradition of selective forgetting of the history of

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U.S. military and electoral interventions in Haiti, implicitly disavowing their repercussions in the present.35 A similar forgetting also defined Trump’s racialized antipathy toward the tens of thousands of Central Americans, many of them children, who arrived seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border during his term. As the Trump administration developed increasingly elaborate justifications for defying international asylum law—eventually using the emergency of COVID-19 to effectively close the border to asylees altogether through the newly enacted Title 42, even when the virus was more rampant north of the Rio Grande than south—the long history of U.S. destabilization in the region remained unacknowledged. The United States is responsible, in important ways, for creating some of the conditions from which hundreds of thousands of Central Americans were forced to flee: it supported right-wing dictatorial regimes in the region during the 1950s and 1960s, backed the overthrow of the Guatemalan government in 1954, armed and funded counterinsurgency and paramilitary forces during the 1980s, fostered drug trafficking by U.S. allies in the same period, deported youth involved in gangs like the MS-13 from U.S. prisons during the 1990s, looked the other way with regard to the massive illegal traffic in U.S. guns to Mexico and Central America, failed to address the uneven ravages of climate change, and intervened in political processes as recent as the 2009 ouster of Honduras’s left-leaning president Manuel Zelaya. But these histories were immaterial as Trump rallied his base to build the “big beautiful wall.” If this was perhaps the most egregious example of Trump’s selective forgetting, however, it is one that the Biden administration has disconcertingly continued, with its “do not come” message to immigrants from the region and its continuation of the use of Title 42 procedures to send expelled migrants to Mexico.36 While the wall was itself a kind of fetish of the Trump presidency—a physical object imbued with fantastical powers—border enforcement in fact went well beyond the barrier. In this, Trump continued the policies of his predecessor, President Obama, who worked with Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto to fortify Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala in an attempt to stop Central Americans from transiting Mexico in the first place. An Obama immigration official had declared in 2012 that “the Guatemalan border with Chiapas is now our southern border,” and Trump sustained this policy, putting pressure first on Peña Nieto and then on his successor Andres Manuel López Obrador to further harden the crossing.37 In fact, during this period, Mexico deported far more Central American migrants than the United States did, putting the Mexican state in the service of U.S. immigration goals.38 Though López Obrador, known widely as AMLO, promised during his campaign that he would promote dignity for migrants and seek an end to this policy, he has not only overseen the continued militarization of the southern border with his newly formed National Guard, but he also agreed to the so-called Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) known

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popularly as the Remain-in-Mexico program, which kept asylum seekers from crossing into the United States (a program that was formally ended by the Biden administration in June 2021). While many antipopulist opponents of both Trump and AMLO chalked up Mexican acquiescence to the program to personal affinities between the two leaders, analysts and scholars have instead emphasized both the pragmatic tradition in Mexican foreign policy and, perhaps more importantly, the structural constraints under which Mexican leaders operate, particularly when it comes to the economy.39 The negotiations over MPP underscore the emphasis on trade and economic integration in Trump’s policy toward Mexico and their links to the immigration question. Given his penchant for personalist deal making, Trump often used the presidential authority over tariffs as a cudgel in his foreign policy. To bolster his own negotiating image, Trump made loud threats to institute escalating tariffs on Mexico if migrant numbers weren’t contained—though the deal he negotiated with AMLO had already largely been concluded months before Trump’s announcement and his retraction of the tariff threat.40 Nevertheless, such a threat was in keeping with his repeated assertions that trade under NAFTA had been a boon for Mexico and a curse for the United States, a claim that wholly ignored the distributional consequences in both countries in order to stoke a nationalist furor.41 Mexico was “killing us on jobs and trade,” Trump argued, and therefore NAFTA had to be scrapped.42 His negotiation of the United States–MexicoCanada Agreement (USMCA) as a “new NAFTA” therefore fulfilled a key campaign promise, particularly with provisions to raise wages and labor standards in Mexico, theoretically making outsourcing less attractive. It remains to be seen, however, what effects the USMCA might have on U.S. manufacturing and agricultural employment; even companies with which Trump personally intervened continued to automate and offshore manufacturing jobs.43 If little actually changed with regard to the legal trade in goods between the United States and Mexico in the Trump era, however, the question of illicit trade, particularly in narcotic drugs, saw a somewhat surprising shift under López Obrador—though largely in reaction to bungled U.S. actions. While Trump initially insisted that his administration would embark on a new strategy with regard to drugs, particularly in the context of the overdose crisis in the United States, the administration largely continued the failed punitive drug-war policies of his predecessors over the previous five decades.44 But in his insistence on the unquestioned U.S. prerogative to fight drug trafficking, Trump overplayed his hand with regard to longstanding security cooperation agreements with Mexico. After a brutal attack on a family of dual citizens in northern Mexico in 2019, Trump tweeted that he would send U.S. forces to “wage WAR” on drug-trafficking organizations; AMLO politely but firmly rejected the suggestion as an affront to Mexican sovereignty.45 Later, however, when the United States arrested a high-ranking Mexican military official, General Salvador

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Cienfuegos, on drug-trafficking charges without the knowledge of the Mexican state—revealing U.S. investigations to which the notoriously corrupt and compromised Mexican security forces weren’t privy—AMLO responded by scaling back security cooperation with the United States for the first time in decades. Mexico insisted, using the threat of kicking the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) out of the country, that the United States return Cienfuegos to Mexico, and the United States complied. Once the general was transferred from U.S. custody, AMLO immediately oversaw the passage of a new bill to limit cooperation and curtail the privileges of U.S. security forces.46 Mexico subsequently declined to indict the general, much to the dismay of U.S. prosecutors. By insisting on a return to an imagined past where U.S. drug-war dictates were unquestioned, therefore, the Trump administration may have actually constrained the U.S. prerogative in Mexico on the question of drugs. If the result is a rethinking of the longstanding militarized kingpin strategy in Mexico—a failure in every regard—perhaps some good will come from Trump’s blunders. Indeed, Mexico has now moved to end the Mérida Initiative security-cooperation agreement and announced the negotiation of a new “Bicentennial Understanding” framework with the Biden administration.47 A more enduring legacy of Trump’s approach to Mexico, however, is likely to come from the president’s constant invocations of Mexicans as “bad hombres.”48 Repeating a trope that has reared its head repeatedly over the decades, Trump continuously insisted that Mexicans bring drugs and crime across the border, corrupting a once great United States—thereby conjuring a return to an imagined period before the white body politic was tainted with racialized others. The seething xenophobia that this formulation fostered among Trump supporters mobilized history through a kind of funhouse mirror: an entirely distorted past in which Mexico was the aggressor and the United States the victim. The grievance politics that emerged from this combination of nostalgic return and selective forgetting underlines the incoherence of the Make America Great Again project, in which the United States was simultaneously the most powerful and important country in the world yet also the victim of the predations of those who were presumed to be inferior and external. As was revealed in that Walmart parking lot in El Paso in 2019, such a worldview is deeply dangerous, and the destabilization it fostered under Trump is likely to be with us for some time to come.

Notes 1. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987), 3. 2. Philip Rucker, “ ‘How Do You Stop These People?’: Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric Looms Over El Paso Massacre,” Washington Post, August  4, 2019, https://www

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11. 12. 13.

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.washingtonpost . com / politics / how - do - you - stop - these - people - trumps - anti -immigrant-rhetoric-looms-over-el-paso -massacre/2019/08/04 /62d0435a-b6ce-11e9 -a091-6a96e67d9cce _ story.html. Ali Vitali, Kasie Hunt, and Frank Thorp V, “Trump Referred to Haiti and African Nations as ‘Shithole’ Countries,” NBC News, January 11, 2018, https://www.nbcnews .com /politics/white-house/trump-referred-haiti-african-countries-shithole-nations -n836946. Tom Long, “From Trump to Biden in Latin America,” NACLA Report on the Americas 53, no. 2 (2021): 121–26. On Argentine lemons, see Christy Thornton, “An Empire Upside Down,” Dollars & Sense, July/August 2017, http://www.dollarsandsense.org /archives/2017/0717thornton.html. John Kerry, “Remarks on U.S. Policy in the Western Hemisphere,” November 18, 2013, https://2009-2017.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2013/11/217680.htm. Christy Thornton, “U.S.-IADB: A Last-Ditch Effort at Securing U.S. Hegemony?,” AULABlog, September 30, 2020, https://aulablog.net/2020/09/30/u-s-iadb-a-last-ditch -effort-at-securing-u-s-hegemony/comment-page-1. “Address by the President of the United States of America H. E. Mr. Donald Trump,” New York, September 25, 2018, https://gadebate.un.org/sites/default/files/gastatements /73/us _en.pdf. “What Is the Monroe Doctrine? John Bolton’s Justification for Trump’s Push Against Maduro,” Washington Post, March 4, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world /2019 /03 /04 /what -is -monroe - doctrine -john - boltons -justification -trumps -push -against-maduro. “Ambassador Bolton Remarks to the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association—Brigade 2506,” April  17, 2019, https://cu .usembassy.gov/ambassador-bolton-bay-of-pigs-veterans -association-brigade-2506. Renata Keller, “A Foreign Policy for Domestic Consumption: Mexico’s Lukewarm Defense of Castro, 1959–1969,” Latin American Research Review 47, no. 2 (September 7, 2012): 100–19. Council on Foreign Relations Backgrounder, U.S.- Cuba Relations, May  12, 2021, https://www.cfr.org / backgrounder/us-cuba-relations. Fox News alert, November 19, 2020, https://twitter.com /David _ Leavitt /status/1329 494629138444288. Adam Isacson, “Trump, ‘Castro-Chavismo,’ and the Centro Democrático,” WOLA, October 19, 2020, https://colombiapeace.org /trump-castro-chavismo-and-the-centro -democratico; Rafael Bernal, “Trump Spanish-Language Ad Equates Progressives, Socialists,” The Hill, August 3, 2020, https://thehill.com/latino/510268-trump-spanish -language-ad-equates-progressives-socialists. Tim Padget, “Is Colombia Interfering in the U.S. Election in Florida—with Tactics It Exported to Florida?,” WLRN, September 22, 2020, https://www.wlrn.org/2020-09-22/is -colombia-interfering-in-the-u-s-election-in-florida-with-tactics-it-exported-to-florida. Isacson, “Trump, ‘Castro-Chavismo,’ and the Centro Democrático.” Donald Trump campaign rally transcript, Jacksonville, FL, September  24, 2020, https://www.rev.com/ blog /transcripts/donald-trump-jacksonville-fl-campaign-rally -transcript-september-24 David Corn, “Elliott Abrams: It’s Back!,” The Nation, June  14, 2001, https://www .thenation.com/article/archive/elliott-abrams-its-back; Raymond Bonner, “What Did Elliott Abrams Have to Do with the El Mozote Massacre?,” Atlantic, February 15, 2019, https://www.theatlantic .com /ideas/archive/2019/02/ilhan-omar-elliott-abrams-and -el-mozote-massacre/582889.

288 TRU MP A B R OA D 18. Ishaan Tharoor, “Trump’s Maximum Pressure Tactics Are Incoherent,” Washington Post, June 21, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/06/21/trumps-maxi mum-pressure-tactics-are-incoherent. 19. Alexander Main, “Out of the Ashes of Economic War,” NACLA, April 2, 2020, https:// nacla.org /news/2020/07/16/out-ashes-economic-war. 20. Sabrina Rodriguez, “Trump Grants Venezuelans Temporary Legal Status on His Way Out,” Politico, January  19, 2021, https://www.politico.com /news/2021 /01 /19/trump -venezuela-temporary-legal-status-460524; “US Citizenship and Immigration Service, Designation of Venezuela for Temporary Protected Status and Implementation of Employment Authorization for Venezuelans Covered by Deferred Enforced Departure,” https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/03/09/2021-04951/designation -of-venezuela-for-temporary-protected-status-and-implementation-of-employment; “Rubio Welcomes Designation of Temporary Protected Status for Eligible Venezuelan Nationals in the U.S.,” March 8, 2021, https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index .cfm/2021/3/rubio-welcomes-designation-of-temporary-protected-status-for-eligible -venezuelan-nationals-in-the-u-s. 21. Alexandre de Santi and Rafael Moro Martins, “In Sharp Rebuke, Brazil Supreme Court Rules Judge Who Locked Up Lula Was Biased,” Intercept, March 15, 2021, https:// theintercept.com/2021/03/15/ brazil-lula-sergio-moro-supreme-court/. 22. Nick Paton Walsh, Jo Shelley, Eduardo Duwe, and William Bonnett, “Bolsonaro Calls Coronavirus a ‘Little Flu.’ Inside Brazil’s Hospitals, Doctors Know the Horrifying Reality,” CNN, May  25, 2020, https://www.cnn .com /2020/05/23 /americas/ brazil -coronavirus-hospitals-intl/index.html. 23. Robert Muggah, “Bolsonaro Is Following Trump’s Anti-Democracy Playbook,” Foreign Policy, January 14, 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com /2021 /01 /14 / bolsonaro-brazil -trump-anti-democracy-elections/. 24. Julie Turkewitz, “M.I.T. Researchers Cast Doubt on Bolivian Election Fraud,” New York Times, February  28, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com /2020/02/28/world /americas / bolivia-election-fraud.html. 25. Lucien Chauvin and Anthony Faiola, “As the U.S.-Backed Government in Bolivia Unleashes a Wave of Political Persecution, the Trump Administration Remains Silent,” Washington Post, March 6, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world /the _ ame ricas /as -the -us -backed-government-in -bolivia-unleashes -what-many-see -as -poli tical-persecutions -the -trump-administration-remains-silent /2020/03 /06/542b828c -5751–11ea-8efd-0f904bdd8057_ story.html. 26. “Bolivia Pressures Argentina Over Morales’ Call for ‘Armed Militias,’ ” Reuters, January 15, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bolivia-politics/ bolivia-pressures -argentina-over-morales-call-for-armed-militias-idUSKBN1ZE2FA. 27. Sarah Kinosian, “US Recognizes Re-election of Honduras President Despite Fraud Allegations,” Guardian, December 22, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017 /dec /22 /us -recognizes -re - election- of-honduras -president- despite - calls -for-a-new -vote. 28. Joshua Partlow, “Guatemala and Honduras Sided with Trump on Jerusalem. Here’s Why,” Washington Post, December 28, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world /the _ americas /guatemala -and -honduras -sided -with -trump - on -jerusalem -heres -why/2017/12/28/7c4dfeee-eb1e-11e7-956e-baea358f9725_ story.html. 29. “Statement by Heather Nauert, Spokesperson, on the Presidential Elections in Honduras,” December 22, 2017, https://hn.usembassy.gov/statement-heather-nauert-spoke sperson-presidential-elections-honduras.

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30. Nicole Naurea, “Trump’s Agreements in Central America Are Dismantling the Asylum System as We Know It,” Vox, November 19, 2019, https://www.vox.com/2019/9/26 /20870768/trump-agreement-honduras-guatemala-el-salvador-explained. 31. Emily Palmer and Kirk Semple, “A Damning Portrait of Presidential Corruption, but Hondurans Sound Resigned,” New York Times, March 23, 2021, https://www.nytimes .com /2021 /03 /23 /world /americas / honduras -juan - orlando -hernandez - drug -trial .html; “US Prosecutors Accuse Honduran President of Drug Conspiracy,” Associated Press, August 3, 2019, https://www.usnews.com/news/ best-states/florida/articles/2019 -08-03/honduran-president-accused-in-ny-of-drug-conspiracy; Kate Linthicum, “The President of Honduras Was Supposed to Be a Drug War Ally. U.S. Prosecutors Say He Helped Move Cocaine,” Los Angeles Times, January 9, 2021, https://www.latimes.com / world -nation /story /2021 - 01 - 09 /us - legal -move - expands - drug - claims - against -honduras-president. 32. Alexander Aviña, “A History of Inconvenient Allies and Convenient Enemies,” NACLA, April 30, 2020, https://nacla.org /news/2020/04/30/narco-state-allies. 33. Jude Sheerin, “US Election 2016: What Really Happened with the Clintons in Haiti?,” BBC News, November 2, 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016–37826098; Jonathan Katz, “The Clintons’ Haiti Screw-Up, as Told by Hillary’s Emails,” Politico, September 2, 2015. 34. “TPS Protesters March on Mar-a-Lago,” WLRN, November 21, 2017, https://www.wlrn .org /news/2017-11-21/tps-protesters-march-on-mar-a-lago. 35. On this history, see Mary Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); and Jonathan M. Katz, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire (New York: St. Martin’s, 2022). 36. Pedro Gerson, “Kamala Harris’ ‘Do Not Come’ Message Was a Political Failure,” Slate, June 10, 2021, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/06/kamala-harris-immigration -guatemala .html; Matt Stieb, “Why Is Biden Still Relying on an Idea from Stephen Miller?,” New York Magazine, December 6, 2021, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021 /12/why-is-biden-still-relying-on-title-42-to-expel-migrants.html; Adam Isacson, “Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update,” Washington Office on Latin America, September  16, 2022, https://www.wola.org /2022/09/weekly-u-s-mexico-border-update-title -42-expansion-venezuelan-migration-in-el-paso-darien-and-elsewhere. 37. Jeff Abbot, “Keep Out! How the U.S. Is Militarizing Mexico’s Southern Border,” Progressive, October 2, 2017, https://progressive .org /magazine/ keep - out-how-the -us -militarizes-mexico-southern-border. 38. David Bier, “Mexico Deported More Central Americans Than the U.S. in 2018,” Cato Institute, June 12, 2019, https://www.cato.org / blog /mexico-deported-more-central -americans-us-did-2018. 39. Pamela Starr, “What AMLO Really Thinks About Biden,” Foreign Policy, February 2, 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/02/what-amlo-really-thinks-about-biden. 40. Michael Shear and Maggie Haberman, “Mexico Agreed to Take Border Actions Months Before Trump Announced Tariff Deal,” New York Times, June 8, 2019, https:// www.nytimes.com/2019/06/08/us/politics/trump-mexico-deal-tariffs.html. 41. Council on Foreign Relations, “Backgrounder: NAFTA and the USMCA: Weighing the Impact of North American Trade,” July 1, 2020, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder /naftas-economic-impact. 42. Robert Valencia, “Trump Should Worry About U.S. Unskilled Labor and Stop Blaming Mexico for Job Losses, Official Says,” Newsweek, December 10, 2017, https://www

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.newsweek .com /trumps - economic -policies -hurt-us -more -mexican -labor- official -says-741868. David Lynch, “Trump’s Carrier Deal Fades as Economic Reality Intervenes,” Washington Post, October 26, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/10/26 /trump-carrier-manufacturing-jobs/. Dina Fine Maron, “Is Trump’s Opioid Strategy a ‘War on Drugs’ Relapse?,” Scientific American, March  20, 2018, https://www.scientificamerican.com /article/is-trumps -opioid-strategy-a-war-on-drugs-relapse. Mary Beth Sheridan and Brittany Shammas, “Nine Members of Mormon Family, Dual U.S.-Mexican Citizens, Killed in Attack in Northern Mexico; Trump Offers Support,” Washington Post, November 5, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world /at-least-seven -members - of-mormon -family-brutally-killed -in -northern -mexico /2019/11/05/d303e448-ffbb-11e9-9518-1e76abc088b6_ story.html. Mary Beth Sheridan, “Mexico Fast-Tracks Law That Could Limit Anti-Drug Cooperation with U.S.,” Washington Post, December 11, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost . com / world / the _ americas /mexico -fast - tracks - law - that - could - limit - antidrug -cooperation-with-us/2020/12/11/aa2f90d4-3b43-11eb-98c4-25dc9f4987e8_ story.html. Catherine Osborne, “The U.S.-Mexico Drug War Gets a Rebrand,” Foreign Policy, October  15, 2021, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/ 2021/10/15/mexico-united-statesdrug-war-security-cooperation-merida-initiative-bicentennial-framework-biden-a mlo. Ben Zimmer, “Why Trump Uses Mock Spanish,” Atlantic, June 14, 2019, https://www .theatlantic .com /entertainment /archive /2019 /06 / loco -hombres -why-trump -uses -mock-spanish/591733.

PART V

THE EXPANDING MEANING OF INTERNATIONAL SECURITY Human Rights, Racial Justice, and COVID-19 Editors’ Note International security is not just about war and peace, a point underscored by extraordinary events during Trump’s tenure. In Part V, our contributors consider Trump’s lasting legacies on issues of race, immigration, climate change, human rights, and the global pandemic. William I. Hitchcock (chapter 26), Jason Ludwig and Rebecca Slayton (chapter 27), Nivi Manchanda (chapter 28), and Audie Klotz (chapter 29) examine the role of race in U.S. foreign policy and national security. For Hitchcock, Trump was a uniquely racist president and indeed “understood world affairs chiefly as a conflict of ‘races’ and sought to govern through a rhetorical strategy that emphasized a racial threat to the white homeland.” Ludwig and Slayton link national security and domestic human security, concluding that for the Biden administration, “the physical assault on the U.S. Capitol and the horrific death toll from coronavirus must serve as grave reminders that mitigating structural inequalities and the national vulnerabilities they create should be a top priority not only for human security but also for American national security.” For Manchanda, Trump was no aberration. Instead, his “performative and over-the-top race-baiting makes it harder to whitewash and paper over the persistence of the racial capitalist global system over which the United States presides.” Klotz emphasizes the long and deep legacy of structural racism in the United States as well as the failure of IR as a discipline to account for that legacy, writing that President Woodrow “Wilson’s ghost haunts the field of

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international relations.” She concludes that “overturning illiberal inequality requires much more than fixing migration policies and procedures.” On the topic of human rights and Palestine, in chapter 30 A. Dirk Moses and Victor Kattan evaluate Trump’s legacy with regards to the Middle East and the Palestinian question, focusing on the so-called Deal of the Century and the policy implications of the “Abraham Accords” of September 15, 2020. Looking forward, they argue that “if the two-state solution remains the preferred solution for the ‘international community,’ then the Biden administration’s refusal to rein in Israeli expansionism will surely signal its official demise.” Sarah B. Snyder shows in chapter 31 the ways in which Trump attempted to remove issues of human rights from American foreign policy and how as a result “the reputation of the United States as an observer, protector, and champion of human rights eroded.” While the Biden administration has reconnected with human rights as a core issue of U.S. foreign policy, it is unclear how much ground the United States has lost.

CHAPTER 26

“SHITHOLE COUNTRIES” Was Trump’s Foreign Policy Racist? WI L LIA M I . H ITC H CO C K

T

hroughout his years in the public eye, former president Donald Trump has frequently said things that reveal his belief that the construct of “race” is a valid measure of human difference and human worth. In countless public utterances, he has used racist, derogatory language to insult, belittle, and abuse nonwhite people. He has also conflated whiteness with American-ness, implying that the United States is a racial community of white people whose nonwhite residents cannot be incorporated into the nation because of their race. After all, he rose to national political prominence primarily through his prolonged racist campaign against President Barack Obama, claiming that Obama had been born in Kenya and was also a Muslim. And his announcement in June 2015 that he would seek the presidency featured the defining comment of what might be called Trump’s “racial panic.” Speaking about immigration to a group of cheering supporters, Trump said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”1 His many racist remarks, so much a part of his public identity on the campaign trail in 2016, foretold his administration’s approach in domestic policy. In areas such as immigration, public housing, healthcare, policing and incarceration, environmental stewardship, and civil and voting rights, among others, Trump pursued policies that made life worse for people of color.2 And in responding to the Black Lives Matter movement, which in the summer of 2020

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mobilized millions of people in nationwide protests against police violence toward Black Americans, Trump again revealed his antagonism toward communities of color, not least by referring to the protesters as “thugs,” “terrorists,” and “anarchists.”3 Many analysts claim that Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 as well as his gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency unmistakably hurt communities of color while benefiting economic elites.4 Racism, then, shaped Trump’s domestic agenda. Did it also shape his foreign policy? Here, the precise connection between Trump’s racism and his foreign policy seems at first glance less explicit than in the domestic arena. Naturally, there is ample evidence of Trump using vulgar language or racial slurs in discussing foreign peoples; in January 2018, for example, Trump referred to African nations as “shithole countries,” adding that the United States should want immigrants from countries such as Norway rather than from Haiti or El Salvador.5 Beyond these sorts of ugly slurs, though, where do we see racism shaping Trump’s foreign policy? This chapter argues that Trump viewed the world primarily through the lens of race, and so scholars who examine U.S. engagement with the world in the 2016–2020 period must account for Trump’s racialization of virtual all policy problems. In seeking to evaluate the role of racism in foreign policy, historians look not merely for the occasional vulgar phrase or insulting epithet. Rather, they point to the ways that race is woven into the structures of power through which the United States acts in the world. From its origins as a slave-holding society to its long embrace of legalized racial segregation, the United States has used race as an organizing framework for its engagement with the world; it would be strange indeed if we did not find it active in Trump’s administration. And sure enough, we do find race as an explicit organizing principle of the Trump presidency. As Nivi Manchanda writes in chapter 28 of this volume, Trump “advertised his racism and wore it as a badge of honor.”6 We might start by noting the lack of racial and gender diversity in his entourage of senior officials. Not since the first days of the Reagan administration thirty-six years earlier had a presidential cabinet been so white.7 This pattern held in his judicial appointments. In 2020, the Associated Press reported that “Eighty-five percent of [Trump’s] Senate-confirmed U.S attorneys are white men . . . compared with 58% in Democratic President Barack Obama’s eight years, 73% during Republican George W. Bush’s two terms and at most 63% under Democrat Bill Clinton.”8 Trump appointed 226 federal judges; nine of these were Black; a total of thirty-seven were nonwhite.9 In the national security field, whiteness also ruled. Trump relied upon an all-white team, from his secretaries of defense, state, and homeland security to his directors of national intelligence, his CIA directors, and national security advisors. With a few exceptions (Gina Haspel at CIA, Kirstjen Nielsen at Homeland Security, Nikki Haley as UN ambassador), these posts were held by white men, and Trump

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frequently made important statements on national security topics accompanied only by white male senior officials. Some analysts have argued that these demonstrations of white masculinity were carefully staged. Following a presidential announcement in January 2020 on Iran policy during which Trump was surrounded by an all-male phalanx of advisors, Kate Brannen of the online forum Just Security noted that Trump meant to signal not just unity of command: “this carefully choreographed moment sent another message: The only people who can handle this national security crisis are white men.” Such images have global implications, Brannen argued: “Instead of setting an example for the rest of the world, the United States, under Trump, is sanctioning a worldview that excludes women and people of color from positions of power and influence.” Indeed, Trump’s White House made a habit of releasing photographs of the president surrounded by teams of white men. And near the close of his term in office, Trump actively banned diversity and antibias training among federal contractors, the largest of which are in the defense industries. (President Joe Biden revoked this order on January 20, 2021.)10 In addition to the personnel on which Trump relied, we might point to the ideology that underpinned Trump’s worldview: “America First,” a term he used in his campaign and stressed in his inaugural address.11 Historians know that this term is closely entwined in the anti-immigration rhetoric and nativist animus of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Popularized by Woodrow Wilson when he still held to a policy of nonintervention in the Great War, the slogan was for a time subsumed under the equally racist slogan “100% American”—a term promulgated by the federal government to silence opposition of some immigrant communities toward the American war effort. The idea of “America First” flourished alongside a surge of nativism in the interwar period, reflected especially in the 1924 Immigration Act, which emerged at a time of widespread white anxiety about the immigration of Jews, Italians, and Slavs. The term became notorious in 1940, when the America First Committee mobilized a public relations campaign to oppose aid to the European nations then fighting Nazi Germany. And even though many members of the America First movement felt motivated chiefly by pacifism, some of the organization’s most visible spokespersons, such as the aviator Charles Lindbergh, embraced antisemitic conspiracies and spoke of the danger of “the Jews” leading America into war.12 An “America First” party ran Gerald L. K. Smith, a bilious antisemite and Nazi sympathizer, for president in 1944. And the Nixon-era speechwriter and television personality Pat Buchanan relaunched the slogan as his own when he ran for president in the early 1990s on a staunchly anti-immigration platform.13 The term “America First,” then, has long been associated with racist, antisemitic, and xenophobic beliefs.14

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“America First” as a slogan and an ideology defined Trump’s December 2017 National Security Strategy. In the foreword to this document, Trump declared that “my America First foreign policy . . . [is] prioritizing the interests of our citizens and protecting our sovereign rights as a nation.” He continued: The United States faces an extraordinarily dangerous world, filled with a wide range of threats that have intensified in recent years. When I came into office, rogue regimes were developing nuclear weapons and missiles to threaten the entire planet. Radical Islamist terror groups were flourishing. Terrorists had taken control of vast swaths of the Middle East. Rival powers were aggressively undermining American interests around the globe. At home, porous borders and unenforced immigration laws had created a host of vulnerabilities. Criminal cartels were bringing drugs and danger into our communities. Unfair trade practices had weakened our economy and exported our jobs overseas. Unfair burden-sharing with our allies and inadequate investment in our own defense had invited danger from those who wish us harm. Too many Americans had lost trust in our government, faith in our future, and confidence in our values.15

After one year in office, naturally, Trump claimed to have beaten back these threats, chiefly by “defending America’s sovereignty without apology.” He concluded vaguely by stating that his global strategy “puts America First.” Does this constitute racism? That depends on the reader’s willingness to place Trump’s language in context. On the face of it, racist remarks do not appear in the National Security Strategy. Yet the theme throughout is that the world beyond America’s borders poses only peril, that a militarized border and a massive defense apparatus provide the only means to protect the United States from this raging chaos, and that those who would prioritize international cooperation should not be entrusted with defense of the homeland—a homeland that Trump promised to make whiter, more Christian, and more “American.”16 If Trump carried with him into the White House a personal ideology of racial animus and white supremacy, how did this belief system influence his policies toward the external world? His immigration policies provide the obvious starting place. Trump’s first act as president was the January 27, 2017, Executive Order 13769 (“Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States”), which temporarily barred “immigrants and nonimmigrants” from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States; it also dramatically lowered the number of refugees allowed into the United States and suspended the entry of Syrian refugees indefinitely.17 Restricting the entry of aliens into the United States is hardly a new policy; in some form, it has been going on since the founding of the nation. Trump declared that “this is not about religion—this is about terror and keeping our country

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safe.”18 He also fended off criticism of his order by likening it to a 2011 order by President Obama, which halted Iraqis from receiving visas for six months. But Obama’s order was a response to a specific terrorist threat and was much narrower in scope, while Trump’s order appeared to fulfill a campaign pledge that Trump would ban Muslims from entering the United States.19 Taken at face value, one might plausibly argue that Trump’s Executive Order 13769 did no more than tighten entry rules for travelers from nations with significant terrorist activity, out of an abundance of caution for U.S. security. Yet historians know that presidential orders reflect a specific context. For Trump to sign a ban on entry by travelers from Muslim nations on his first day in office, following a presidential campaign steeped in racist language and dog-whistles (the Mexicans-as-rapists comment; his public statement that he personally witnessed “thousands and thousands” of Arab Americans cheering the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center; his allegations that immigrants, or Blacks, or Hispanics were “overwhelmingly” responsible for higher crime rates; his retweeting of white nationalists), suggests that Trump wished to send a deliberate message: all Muslims would be viewed as sympathetic with terrorism until proven otherwise.20 Certainly, that is how professional diplomats saw it. Over one thousand U.S. State Department employees immediately signed a circular letter criticizing the ban, saying it “runs counter to core American values of nondiscrimination, fair play, and extending a warm welcome to foreign visitors and immigrants.” The letter asserted that the ban would not make America safer—almost no attacks of any kind had been perpetrated on U.S. soil by nationals of the blacklisted nations—but would instead “sour relations” with valued partners in the Muslim world and increase anti-American sentiment. Likening the ban to the racist immigration policies of the 1920s and the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, the letter said that Trump’s ban “calls back to some of the worst times in our history.”21 Nevertheless, restricting the entry of Muslims to the United States became a signature policy for the administration. Even after the ban was challenged in court on the grounds that it used religion as a basis for halting entry, Trump pursued further restrictions in Executive Order 13780 and Presidential Proclamation 9645, the last of which was upheld by a divided U.S. Supreme Court in Trump v. Hawaii in June 2018.22 As Christy Thornton’s chapter in this volume makes plain, Trump’s obsession with the U.S. border reflects his ideology of racial hierarchy and white nationalism. Take Trump’s frequent public telling of a parable about a wounded snake that, after being rescued and nursed back to good health, bites its rescuer. The tale effectively warned his listeners about the mortal danger of immigration.23 His public remarks throughout his presidency emphasized the idea of “threat” from nonwhite people crossing into the United States. He made every effort to highlight this alleged threat, even in his inaugural address, when he

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vowed to “unite the civilized world against Radical Islamic Terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the Earth.” Trump wished to unite the “civilized world”—another venerable codeword for white—in a campaign to “eradicate” certain Muslims. Indeed, his inaugural address conjured up the looming specter of racial violence. America, he declared, was menaced by “the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen too many lives,” terms that harked back to his racist campaign statements about Mexican rapists and Black criminals. Other racialized threats loomed: He alleged that “foreign industry” had become wealthy at the expense of the United States and that the United States had “defended other nations’ borders while refusing to defend our own” and spent “trillions” on infrastructure for others while ignoring needs at home. The “wealth” of the nation had been handed over to foreigners, he asserted, and the only way to reverse the flow was to adopt a policy of “America First,” which, translated into emotional terms, meant this: “At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America,” implying that disloyalty and treachery lurked behind America’s decline.24 What nation, in Trump’s mind, stood out as threatening the wealth and prosperity of the United States? If “Mexico” had become shorthand for the immigration threat and “Muslim” came to stand in for the terrorism threat, “China” came to represent the nonwhite, non-Western economic threat to the birthright of American workers. Of course, it is possible to see China as an economic and geostrategic rival without being a racist. Much of the U.S. foreign policy and intelligence community depicts China as a significant military threat to U.S. interests and allies in the Asia-Pacific region.25 And U.S. economic policy toward China is shaped by the fact that China is the world’s second-largest economy and a direct competitor in global markets. U.S.-China economic competition long predates Trump’s presidency.26 Yet for Trump, threats from a foreign competitor had to be couched in racist terms if they were to become legible to his supporters, a base he taught to see the world as riven by racial conflict. Not surprisingly, Trump’s officials adopted his framing. In May 2019, the Trump State Department described the U.S.-China rivalry as “a clash of civilizations.” The Policy Planning Staff director, Kiron Skinner, said China “poses a unique challenge . . . because the regime in Beijing isn’t a child of Western philosophy and history.” The Cold War constituted “a fight within the Western family,” while the coming conflict with China is “the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian.”27 But the most egregious example of Trump’s use of racial epithets in the context of the U.S.-China rivalry was his persistent designation of the COVID-19 virus as the “kung flu” or “Chinese virus.” Administration spokespersons defended this blatant racism because the virus erupted first in Wuhan, China. But when confronted with data showing a clear correlation between such

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anti-China comments and a spike in hate crimes against Asian Americans, the administration did not change course; “it’s not racist at all,” Trump said.28 Yet clearly Trump’s anti-Chinese rhetoric sought to demonize China as a hostile civilization, a rival economy that threatened American workers, and the malevolent progenitor of a deadly virus that deliberately aimed to harm Americans. In Trump’s worldview, there was really no distinction between foreign economic or geostrategic threats and a racialized threat to the homeland. When arranging a hierarchy of global threats to the United States, what mattered most to Trump in assessing rivals was not military or economic power but the “enduring” characteristics of race. Finally, what about Africa, which Trump so rudely dismissed in his vulgar slur? Trump gave little time to Africa during his administration. In late 2018, National Security Adviser John Bolton laid out the administration’s approach: Africa was seen mainly as an arena of great-power competition, and Bolton urged African governments to choose the United States over China and Russia in this contest. The new strategy Bolton unveiled called for private-sector investment in economic development, while downgrading development and humanitarian aid. The human problems that beset many African nations—poverty, disease, resource depletion, ethnic and religious conflict, civil war, and so on— did not attract much attention from Bolton. Instead, he emphasized “America First” themes of a global conflict with China and “radical Islamic terrorism”; Africa was merely a backdrop for these great-power concerns.29 Significantly, the Trump administration asked Congress in 2018 to rescind funding for curbing the Ebola virus and prevented U.S. health experts from working on the frontlines of the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Shockingly, the administration also dismantled the global health security and biodefense directorate on the National Security Council, a move that had catastrophic effects during the global COVID-19 pandemic.30 It might not be an overstatement, then, to say that Trump’s racism contributed to a weakening of global health infrastructure, which in turn left America vulnerable to a global pandemic that so far has claimed over eight hundred thousand U.S. lives.31 The implications of incorporating race into analyses of diplomacy and strategy are significant. To make sense of the international history of the Trump era, scholars will find the conventional frameworks of great-power rivalry insufficient. The evidence suggests that Donald Trump understood world affairs chiefly as a conflict of “races,” and he sought to govern through a rhetorical strategy that emphasized a racial threat to the white homeland. He offered himself to his followers as the only one who truly perceived the threat and the only one who could halt it. Scholars who seek to unravel the priorities and objectives of Trump’s foreign policy must start here, with the former president’s ideology of white supremacy, his deployment of racial panic, and his reduction of world affairs to an existential struggle for survival among mythological races.

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Notes 1. “Donald Trump Announces a Presidential Bid,” Washington Post, June 16, 2015. For his birther remarks about Obama, see the Laura Ingraham Show, March 30, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqaS9OCoTZs. For a detailed analysis of Trump’s racist public statements, see German Lopez, “Donald Trump’s Long History of Racism, from the 1970s to 2020,” Vox, August 13, 2020, https://www.vox .com /2016/7/25 /12270880/donald-trump-racist-racism-history. For verification of Trump’s most notorious comments, see Ella Lee, “Fact Check: 12 of 28 Comments Deemed Racist on Viral List are Trump’s Direct Speech,” USA Today, October 30, 2020; and “Fact Check: Trump Had Been Accused of Racism by Contemporaries Prior to Presidential Campaign,” Reuters, May 6, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-trump-racism /fact - check - trump - had - been - accused - of -racism - by - contemporaries - prior - to -presidential-campaign-idUSL1N2MT312. For a similar inventory, see David Leonhardt and Ian Prasad Philbrick, “Donald Trump’s Racism: The Definitive List, Updated,” New York Times, January 15, 2018. On Trump’s use of white-nationalist tropes, see Rogers M. Smith and Desmond King, “White Protectionism in America,” Perspectives on Politics 19, no. 2 (2021): 460–78. 2. Charles Kamasaki, “US Immigration Policy: A Classic, Unappreciated Example of Structural Racism,” Brookings, March 26, 2021, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how -we -rise /2021 /03 /26 /us -immigration -policy-a - classic -unappreciated - example - of -structural-racism/. For up-to-date data on detention and deportation, see https://www .freedomforimmigrants.org/. See also Erika Lee, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2019); an epilogue on xenophobia during the pandemic appears in the 2021 paperback edition. On Trump’s public housing policies, see Tim Nelson, “Trump Administration’s Highly-Politicized Roll Back of Obama-Era Fair Housing Rule,” Architectural Digest, July 30, 2020; Laura Kusisto, “Trump Administration Plans Roll Back of Low-Income Housing Rules,” Wall Street Journal, January 6, 2020; National Low Income Housing Coalition, “Trump Administration Eliminates Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule, NLIHC and Other Advocates Condemn Action, Rhetoric,” July 27, 2020, https://nlihc.org/resource /trump-administration-eliminates-affirmatively-furthering-fair-housing-rule-nlihc -and-other. 3. Megan Guza, “President Trump Calls Pittsburgh Protesters ‘Anarchists,’ ‘Thugs,’ ” Trib Live, September  8, 2020, https://triblive.com / local /president-trump-tweets-about -pittsburgh-protesters/. Trump routinely fabricated statements allegedly made by the movement, claiming that “the stated goal of BLM organization, people, is to achieve the destruction of the nuclear family, abolish the police, abolish prisons, abolish border security, abolish capitalism, and abolish school choice—that’s what their stated goals are.” Daniel Villarreal, “Trump Says the Black Lives Matter Movement Is ‘Destroying Many Black Lives,’ ” Newsweek, September 25, 2020. 4. Nolan McCaskill, “Trump’s Policies for Black Americans,” Politico, November 1, 2020, https://www.politico.com /news/2020/11 /01 /trump -black-americans-policies-433744; Greg Miller, “Allegations of Racism Have Marked Trump’s Presidency and Become Key Issue as Election Nears,” Washington Post, September 23, 2020. On Trump’s gutting of the EPA, see Nadja Popovich, Livia Albeck-Ripka, and Kendra Pierre-Louis, “The Trump Administration Rolled Back More Than 100 Environmental Rules,” New York Times, January 20, 2021. For a detailed list of Trump’s weakening of civil rights rules and laws, see Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, “Trump

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Administration Civil and Human Rights Rollbacks,” https://civilrights.org /trump -rollbacks/. On the impact of Trump’s racism on millions of Americans generally, see Eddie Glaude, “Don’t Let the Loud Bigots Distract You. America’s Real Problem with Race Cuts Far Deeper,” Time, September 17, 2018. Ali Vitali, Kasie Hunt, and Frank Thorp V, “Trump Referred to Haiti and African Nations as ‘Shithole’ Countries,” NBC News, January 11, 2018, https://www.nbcnews .com /politics/white-house/trump-referred-haiti-african-countries-shithole-nations -n836946. For a now-classic work, see Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). On the long tradition of using race as a framework to define America’s place in the world, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000); and Paul Gordon Lauren, Power and Prejudice: The Politics and Diplomacy of Racial Discrimination (New York: Routledge, 1996). Examples of the rich literature on race as a feature of U.S. foreign relations in the Cold War include Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Brenda Gayle Plummer, Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1988 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). International relations scholars seem less inclined to give attention to race as a category of analysis in foreign policy. For a critique, see Kelebogile Zvobgo and Meredith Loken, “Why Race Matters in International Relations,” Foreign Policy, June 19, 2020. Jasmine Lee, “Trump’s Cabinet So Far Is More White and Male Than Any First Cabinet Since Reagan’s,” New York Times, March 10, 2017. Jake Bleiberg, Aaron Morrison, and Jim Mustian, “Trump’s Top Federal Prosecutors Are Overwhelmingly White Men,” AP, October 6, 2020, https://apnews.com/article /race-and-ethnicity-donald-trump-shootings-racial-injustice-george-w-bush-f6995e dcc2158df1f8b0cb4f9574bdaf. Pew Research Center, “How Trump Compares with Other Recent Presidents in Appointing Federal Judges,” January 13, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank /2021 /01 /13 / how -trump - compares -with - other -recent -presidents -in - appointing -federal-judges/. Kate Brannen, “Trump’s White, Male Team Is a Bad Look for America and Bad for National Security, Too,” USA Today, January 13, 2020. For further examples, see Mike Moore, “White House Releases Photo of Trump in Situation Room After Iran Attacks,” New York Post, January 9, 2020; Carlos Ballesteros, “Rex Tillerson Is Making the State Department a Lot More White,” Newsweek, November 26, 2017; Annie Lowrey and Steven Johnson, “The Very Male Trump Administration,” Atlantic, March 28, 2018. On Executive Order 13950 and its revocation, see U.S. Department of Labor, “President Biden Revokes Executive Order 13950,” https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ofccp /executive-order-13950. On his inaugural address, see David A. Graham, “ ‘America First:’ Donald Trump’s Populist Address,” Atlantic, January 20, 2017.

302 TH E E X PA N D I N G M E A N I N G O F I N T ERNAT IO NAL S EC URIT Y 12. For the text of Charles Lindbergh’s September 11, 1941, speech in Des Moines, Iowa, see https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org /lindbergh-accuses-jews-of-pushing-u-s-to -war. 13. E. J. Dionne, “Buchanan Challenges Bush with ‘America First’ Call,” Washington Post, December 11, 1991. 14. For a recent survey of the term and its historical roots, see Sarah Churchwell, Behold, America: The Entangled History of “America First” and the “American Dream” (New York: Basic Books, 2018), 39–61, 71–89, 213–40. 15. National Security Strategy of the United States, December 2017, https://trumpwhitehouse .archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf. 16. National Security Strategy of the United States, 2017. 17. Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States, https://www .federalregister.gov/documents /2017/02 /01 /2017-02281 /protecting-the -nation-from -foreign-terrorist-entry-into-the-united-states. 18. John Greenberg, “Trump’s Immigration Ban: 4 Key Questions Answered,” Politifact, January 29, 2017, https://www.politifact.com/article/2017/jan/29/trumps-immigration -ban-4-key-questions-answered/. 19. Glenn Kessler, “Trump’s Facile Claim That His Refugee Policy Is Similar to Obama’s in 2011,” Washington Post, January 29, 2017. On Trump’s campaign pledge that the United States needed “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” see Tessa Berenson, “Donald Trump Calls for ‘Complete Shutdown’ of Muslim Entry to U.S.,” Time, December 7, 2015. 20. Kessler, “Trump’s Outrageous Claim That ‘Thousands’ of New Jersey Muslims Celebrated the 9/11 Attacks,” Washington Post, November 22, 2015; James Walker, “Trump Tweet Blaming Crime on Blacks, Hispanics Resurfaces After ‘Least Racist Person’ Claim,” Newsweek, October 23, 2020; “Trump Retweets Video of Apparent Supporter Saying ‘White Power,’ ” NPR, June 28, 2020, https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates -protests-for-racial-justice/2020/06/28/884392576/trump-retweets-video-of-apparent -supporter-saying-white-power. 21. “Dissent Channel: Alternatives to Closing Doors in Order to Secure Our Borders,” not dated, https://s3.documentcloud.org /documents/3438487/Dissent-Memo.pdf; and see Jeffrey Gettleman, “State Department Dissent Cable on Trump’s Ban Draws 1,000 Signatures,” New York Times, January 31, 2017. 22. Relevant documentation for the case may be found at https://www.supremecourt.gov /docket/docketfiles/html/public/17-965.html. Executive Order 13780, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States,” https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/03/09/2017-04837/protecting-the-nation-from-foreign -terrorist- entry-into -the-united-states; Proclamation 9645, “Enhancing Vetting Capabilities and Processes for Detecting Attempted Entry Into the United States by Terrorists or Other Public-Safety Threats,” September 24, 2017, https://www.govinfo .gov/content/pkg /DCPD-201700685/pdf/DCPD-201700685.pdf. 23. Karen Pinchin, “Insects, Floods, and ‘the Snake’: What Trump’s Use of Metaphors Reveals,” PBS Frontline, October 22, 2019, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article /insects-floods-and-the-snake-what-trumps-use-of-metaphors-reveals/. 24. “President Trump’s Inaugural Address, Annotated,” January 20, 2017, https://www.npr .org /2017/01/20/510629447/watch-live-president-trumps-inauguration-ceremony. For an inquiry into Trump’s demonization of Latinos generally, see Stephanie L. Canizales and Jody Agius Vallejo, “Latinos and Racism in the Trump Era,” Daedalus 150, no. 2 (Spring 2021): 150–64.

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25. See, for example, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, “Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community,” April  9, 2021, https://www.dni.gov/files /ODNI/documents/assessments/ATA-2021-Unclassified-Report.pdf. 26. For a review of the debate, see Geoffrey Gertz, “Did Trump’s Tariffs Benefit American Workers and National Security?,” Brookings, September 10, 2020, https://www.brook ings .edu /policy2020/votervital /did-trumps -tariffs -benefit-american-workers -and -national-security. 27. Tara Francis Chan, “State Department Official on China Threat: For First Time U.S. Has ‘Great Power Competitor That Is Not Caucasian,’ ” Newsweek, May 2, 2019; Steven Ward, “Because China Isn’t ‘Caucasian,’ the U.S. Is Planning for a ‘Clash of Civilizations,’ ” Washington Post, May 4, 2019. 28. Kimmy Yam, “Trump Can’t Claim Kung Flu Doesn’t Affect Asian Americans in This Climate, Experts Say,” NBC News, June  22, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/news /asian-america/trump-can-t-claim-kung-flu-doesn-t-affect-asian-n1231812; Katie Rogers, Lara Jakes, and Ana Swanson, “Trump Defends Using ‘Chinese Virus’ Label, Ignoring Growing Criticism,” New York Times, March 18, 2020. On the rise in antiAsian hate crimes, see Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, “Anti- Chinese Rhetoric Tied to Racism Against Asian Americans,” Stop AAPI Hate Report, June 17, 2020, http://www.asianpacificpolicyandplanningcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/Anti -China _ Rhetoric _ Report _6_17_20.pdf; and Elizabeth Weise, “Anti-Asian Hashtags Soared After Donald Trump First Tied COVID-19 to China on Twitter, Study Shows,” USA Today, March 18, 2020. 29. John R. Bolton, “A New Africa Strategy: Expanding Economic and Security Ties on the Basis of Mutual Respect,” Heritage Foundation, December 13, 2018, https://www .heritage.org/sites/default/files/2019-02/HL1306.pdf; Mark Landler and Edward Wong, “Bolton Outlines a Strategy for Africa That’s Really About Countering China,” New York Times, December 13, 2018. 30. Jeremy Youde, “The U.S. Has Pulled Back Its Ebola Response in Congo,” Washington Post, November 8, 2018; Lauren Weber, “Sudden Departure of White House Global Health Security Head Has Experts Worried,” Huffpost, October 5, 2018, https://www .huffingtonpost .com .au /entry/tim-ziemer-global-health-security-leaves _ n _ 5af37df be4b0859d11d02290. 31. Jeremy Konydyk, “Lessons Ignored: John Bolton’s Bogus Defense of ‘Streamlining’ Away Our Bio-Readiness,” Just Security, March 16, 2020, https://www.justsecurity.org /69197/ lessons-ignored-john-boltons-bogus-defense-of-streamlining-away-our-bio -readiness/.

CHAPTER 27

RETHINKING VULNERABILITY Structural Inequality as National Insecurity JA S O N LU DWI G A N D R E B E CC A S L AY TO N

W

hile many threats have confronted the United States in the new millennium, two were particularly urgent during the transition from the presidency of Donald Trump to Joe Biden’s in 2021.1 First, the COVID-19 pandemic was ravaging the nation, killing more Americans in one year than all those who died in nearly four years of fighting in World War II. And second, disinformation on social media was throwing U.S. democratic institutions into crisis, as demonstrated by the rioters who falsely believed Biden lost the election and attempted an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. U.S. intelligence and security agencies have long recognized both kinds of threats. And while Trump largely dismissed the threats represented by COVID19 and the attempted insurrection, even the 2017 U.S. National Security Strategy formulated by his administration highlighted the need to combat pandemics and the potential for disinformation campaigns to “undermine faith and confidence in democratic institutions.”2 The strategy nonetheless failed to stop these threats under Trump, and Biden administration changes have been only moderately more successful to date.3 We argue that the U.S. approach to national security failed because it has focused primarily on countering threats, while ignoring the need to mitigate the vulnerabilities that those threats exploit. We further argue that structural inequalities embedded within civil society and its technological infrastructures comprise a major source of vulnerability that is typically neglected in national

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security strategy. These include inequalities between internet users and the companies that sell and manipulate their information, between White and nonWhite populations in the United States, and between wealthy and poor communities.4 And because the vulnerabilities experienced by particular communities within the United States are also vulnerabilities for the nation as a whole, national security strategy will only be effective when it goes beyond its focus on threats and mitigates these critical vulnerabilities. In what follows, we analyze how the national security strategy’s focus on threats and its relative neglect of vulnerabilities have spectacularly failed to secure American democratic institutions and public health. We argue that “human security” should not be understood as an alternative framework to national security but rather should be seen as an essential part of national security.

Election Interference, Redux In the aftermath of the Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, leaders in U.S. military and intelligence organizations focused growing attention on the threat of foreign disinformation campaigns that were designed to manipulate and undermine confidence in government institutions. Bolstered by the new strategy of persistent engagement and defending forward, which has given U.S. Cyber Command more freedom to conduct offensive cyber operations, Cyber Command actively worked to shut down Russian and other foreign disinformation operations in both the 2018 midterm elections and the 2020 presidential election.5 Many observers lauded these efforts not only for curbing disinformation but also for ensuring that polling stations were not hacked.6 And yet considerable evidence suggests that the greatest threat to the legitimacy and fairness of U.S. elections has come from domestic, and not foreign, actors. In the months leading up to the 2020 election, President Donald Trump repeatedly claimed that mail-in ballots, a well-established voting technology that saw a dramatic increase in use during the pandemic, were “a whole big scam” that would lead to the “most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history.”7 He instructed his supporters to “go into the polls and watch very carefully,” raising concerns about voter intimidation.8 And following Biden’s victory, Trump and his closest allies repeatedly alleged voter fraud, filed numerous lawsuits, and pressured Republican legislatures to overturn the results.9 While these efforts failed to change the election results—the courts rejected the lawsuits as baseless, and most Republican officials resisted political pressures to overturn the result—they succeeded in casting doubt for some

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Americans on the legitimacy of the Biden presidency and slowing the transition of power far more than Russian disinformation efforts could have. Indeed, Russia amplified false claims of election fraud that originated in the United States.10 How did the United States become so vulnerable to domestic disinformation and electoral interference? Some vulnerabilities lie in interactions between human psychology and the technological affordances of the internet, which readily contribute to the formation of echo chambers, the polarization of society, and a situation in which falsehoods spread more rapidly than truth.11 Other vulnerabilities can be found in a techno-legal regime that makes it impossible for internet users to understand how their information is exploited or to judge the authenticity of political advertising. Congressional efforts to pass legislation that would reduce some of these vulnerabilities, for example by increasing the transparency of political advertising, largely failed to pass the Republicancontrolled Senate during the Trump years.12 But the most fundamental vulnerability that disinformation campaigns target are fault lines within American society, particularly those arising from structural racism—the systems that place communities of color at greater risk of disease, unemployment, poverty, political repression, and other harms relative to White communities. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on Russian interference during the 2016 election concluded that no single group was targeted by disinformation operatives more than African Americans and that no single issue focused disinformation campaigns so much as racial inequality.13 One “troll factory” in St. Petersburg, for example, spent upward of $100,000 in promoting more than three thousand political ads from June 2015 to May 2017, with about half of the budget going to social posts touching on racial issues.14 The factory sought to erode trust in American political institutions, discourage African Americans from voting, and encourage racist violence.15 By discouraging Black people from voting, the Russians aimed to help Donald Trump, a candidate who was opposed by the overwhelming majority of African Americans in 2016.16 And for the same reason, in 2020 Trump falsely alleged voter fraud in predominantly Black cities, hoping to throw out the ballots of Black voters and thereby claim victories in battleground states such as Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. Foreign disinformation efforts that are aimed at racial inequalities are not new. Russian propaganda has highlighted racial violence and injustice in the United States since at least 1930 as a means of destabilizing the nation and diminishing America’s international standing.17 In 1997, Alexander Dugin, an influential Russian political strategist, recommended fomenting “all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements—extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the US.”18 These efforts have been successful

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because they exploit real vulnerabilities, such as the structural racism that continues to shape the various inequities experienced by Black American and other marginalized communities. Ironically, U.S. intelligence and security agencies tend to treat the grievances expressed by these communities as threats rather than a source of national vulnerability. Law-enforcement organizations have sought to disrupt activists working for racial equality since the 1950s, and these efforts continue today.19 As we have discussed elsewhere, both federal and local law-enforcement organizations have surveilled and harassed Black Lives Matter and other racial-justice activists, the vast majority of whom have explicitly committed their activity to nonviolent protest.20 Because these activists criticize police for racial brutality and discrimination, they have been far more subject to surveillance than White supremacists who accept the status quo and even organize under purportedly pro–law enforcement slogans like “Blue Lives Matter” and “Back the Blue.”21 By dramatically distorting perceptions of threat, structural racism has led to massive intelligence failures. Even though a largely White and male network of people including White supremacists openly discussed plans to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and despite having received warnings about this threat from multiple individuals and organizations, both the FBI and Department of Homeland Security astonishingly chose not to issue a formal intelligence assessment.22 Officials with both agencies later claimed that it was difficult to distinguish credible threats from rhetoric and that they were legally restricted from investigating activities that were protected by the First Amendment. Yet the FBI did search social media related to protests of the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man killed by a White police officer in May 2020, and charged four people under antiriot laws, based solely on online comments.23 Law enforcement’s well-documented tendency to cast greater suspicion on persons of color seems to have shaped intelligence gathering on activists across the spectrum and across the color line. These distorted perceptions of threat led to dramatically different responses to White supremacists and racial-justice activists. Police officers defending the Capitol on January 6, 2021, were bewildered to find themselves being attacked by people carrying the “thin blue line” flag, symbolizing support for police.24 The riots resulted in the deaths of five police officers and injuries to over 150 police officers, and the resultant persistent trauma led to the suicide of four officers.25 By contrast, mostly peaceful racial-justice demonstrations in the summer of 2020 were met by National Guard troops in the streets and military helicopters overhead.26 The Washington, DC, police made only sixty-one “unrest-related” arrests at the pro-Trump demonstration that led to the assault on the Capitol building, compared to 316 “unrest-related” arrests at a racialjustice demonstration on June 1, the day that park police dispersed a peaceful protest with tear gas—a more than fivefold difference.27

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The tendency of law-enforcement institutions to frame Black communities as threatening actually increases the vulnerability of those same communities. For example, Black men are 2.5 times more likely than White men to be killed by police over their lifetime; Black people shot by police are twice as likely as White people to have been unarmed; and officers, particularly White officers, are statistically more likely to use a gun in predominantly Black neighborhoods.28 Deception and disinformation campaigns launched by adversaries like Russia would be less effective in undermining U.S. democratic institutions if not for these and other forms of structural racism. And indeed, structural inequalities have already undermined democracy. Racialized voter suppression remains endemic to the American political system. According to an analysis by the Center for American Progress, 9.5 million American adults—most of whom were people of color—lacked full voting rights in 2016.29 And in 2021, lawmakers in nineteen states passed legislation making it more difficult for many Americans to vote, particularly persons of color and other marginalized communities.30 Lawmakers have attempted to justify these measures by parroting the Trump campaign’s baseless and debunked claims of widespread voter fraud in largely Black- and Latino-majority cities during the 2020 election.31 In sum, the United States is currently in the paradoxical situation of investing substantial effort into combating foreign election interference while at the same time ignoring the racial and structural inequalities that have created the opportunities for such interference and have already undermined democratic institutions more adeptly than any foreign adversary could.32 The American government needs to devote resources not only to protecting American political institutions from foreign interference but also to dismantling the domestic political repression that has disenfranchised Black and other marginalized communities and led to the divisions that are so easily exploited.

Going Viral: Deadly Disinformation and the Coronavirus The coronavirus pandemic is perhaps the deadliest threat to U.S. citizens outside of nuclear weapons, having killed more than 280 times as many Americans as the deadliest terrorist attacks in U.S. history. In keeping with its threatoriented approach to national security, the Trump administration’s primary response to the virus was directed toward other nations and peoples. Well after coronavirus began spreading within the United States, Trump framed it as the “Chinese virus” and attempted to fight it by blocking foreigners from entering the United States.33 This approach failed; in a highly interconnected world, this sole focus on external threats was utterly ineffective at defending the United States from a pandemic.

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By contrast, an approach that is focused on reducing national vulnerabilities to pandemic can be highly effective, as demonstrated by the relatively low levels of infection and death in nations such as New Zealand and South Korea. While the vulnerability-mitigation strategies of New Zealand and South Korea differ, at least three factors were key to their success.34 First, both nations demonstrated a rapid, decisive, and science-based response by the federal government. Second, the general population trusted government and media institutions enough to comply with mandates and follow good advice. And third, both of these nations have a substantial public health infrastructure, including universal health care, which enabled the rapid deployment and financing of testing and guaranteed affordable care for all citizens. By contrast, the United States lacks each of these essential aspects of vulnerability mitigation. The first sign of poor executive leadership came in 2018, when the Trump administration closed the National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, which had been created in the aftermath of the 2014 Ebola epidemics.35 This decision, which was criticized at the time, left the United States less prepared to rapidly detect and respond to disease outbreaks such as coronavirus. Additionally, even after the coronavirus began to spread like wildfire through the United States, Trump refused to take decisive action to slow transmission rates. Instead, the president repeatedly downplayed the seriousness of the virus,36 holding campaign rallies in virus hotspots,37 mocking those who wore masks,38 and repeatedly urging governors to reopen state economies rather than encouraging social distancing and other accepted measures that were known to halt the spread of the virus.39 Executive actions greatly exacerbated a second vulnerability in the United States: widespread mistrust in legitimate news and government institutions. Mistrust in journalistic institutions certainly did not begin with Trump, but the administration exploited and expanded this mistrust, repeatedly calling news organizations the “the enemy of the people” who purveyed “fake news” when he disliked the facts they reported. By 2018, 65 percent of Republicans polled stated that they had “hardly any” confidence in the media, compared with 28 percent of Democrats.40 Trump similarly dismissed reports of surging coronavirus infections as a “Fake News Media Conspiracy” and claimed that criticism of his response to the virus was a “hoax” conjured up by the Democratic Party to derail his reelection campaign.41 An “infodemic” on social media sites undermined public understanding of COVID risks, leading some Americans to refuse to wear masks or socially distance, even as COVID-related hospitalizations and deaths surged in their areas.42 Third, the United States is fundamentally more vulnerable to pandemics because of its complex and inefficient healthcare system that provides the least protection to the individuals who are most at risk. Essential workers are at the greatest risk of infection, yet they are also most likely to be uninsured and

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unable to pay for care or to take sick days. These inequalities intersect strongly with race, with Black workers doing a disproportionate amount of low-paying essential work that puts them at risk, while also having less access to health care.43 Longstanding systemic inequalities have also produced higher rates of underlying conditions such as diabetes and heart disease among Black and Hispanic Americans, further increasing their vulnerability. These are among the reasons that Black, Hispanic, and indigenous populations all have an ageadjusted death rate that is three or more times higher than that of White Americans.44 Failure to protect the most vulnerable groups undermines security for the entire nation. The health of the American public depends upon the well-being of millions of medical professionals, including nurses who are disproportionately Black or Hispanic.45 The nation also depends upon agricultural workers, who are disproportionately Hispanic and who have been hard-hit by the virus, partly because they lack basic workplace protections such as paid sick leave. While the United States has yet to experience major food shortages, the economic impacts of vulnerable agricultural workers are substantial; at the height of infections in the meatpacking industry, U.S. beef and pork production was down 40 percent.46 While wealthy individuals remain well positioned to avoid infection and to receive excellent healthcare if they are infected, they are nonetheless affected by high rates of infection and death among more vulnerable populations. Because the virus has been insufficiently suppressed in the United States, even the president and his associates were faced with a stark choice: curtail business as usual or risk infection. They chose the latter, with the result that Trump and many top officials were infected; by mid-November 2020, more than 130 Secret Service agents had also been infected or forced into quarantine.47 More broadly, national security has traditionally relied upon the military, which has been forced to modify or curtail exercises and operations to cope with the virus. While the relative youth of many in the armed services reduces their risk of death from COVID, military units remain vulnerable to rapid transmission of the virus because they are often unable to apply socialdistancing measures. For example, despite taking early precautions, more than 1,200 sailors became infected, and one sailor died, after coronavirus breached the USS Theodore Roosevelt.48 This involved only one-quarter of the ship’s crew, but the ship was nonetheless forced out of operation for more than two months.49 By January 2022, more than 250,000 U.S. military personnel had tested positive for the virus, and more than eighty died.50 And despite the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for federal workers, nearly forty thousand military personnel remained unvaccinated.51 In short, the novel coronavirus pandemic demonstrates the ways in which vulnerabilities within particular segments of the U.S. population are

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simultaneously vulnerabilities for the entire nation. When judged by its stated goals of protecting the American people and way of life, promoting American prosperity, and advancing American influence throughout the world, the threat-oriented approach of the U.S. national security strategy has utterly failed.

Conclusion One way to reduce vulnerability is to invest in infrastructure—the sociotechnical systems that enable goods and services to flow across space and time— and to ensure that infrastructure is equally accessible to all Americans. Infrastructure spending has widespread support in America and was a major talking point in the Trump administration, though little progress was made. The Biden administration has been more successful and in November 2021 signed off on a $1 trillion infrastructure bill that includes money for improving roads, bridges, mass transit, rail, and broadband internet.52 However, lawmakers have continued to debate the merits and costs of infrastructure proposals that aim to more directly reduce inequality. For example, in November 2021 the House of Representatives passed an infrastructure bill that provides paid leave, more affordable housing, reduced childcare costs, and similar measures through $2.2 trillion in spending over the next ten years, but it soon stalled in the Senate, with some senators arguing that the funds might be needed to respond to threats like war or terrorist attack.53 The much costlier threat-oriented military spending, however, continues to enjoy unequivocal bipartisan support. In December 2021, the House and Senate easily passed a bill that increases the Pentagon’s budget, potentially putting the nation on course for $9.2 trillion in military spending over the next ten years. This increase is not only greater than the Pentagon’s initial request, but it dwarfs proposals for spending on infrastructure and reductions in inequality.54 Most of this military spending is directed at countering threats outside of the United States, through military bases and deployments around the globe.55 The tendency of lawmakers to prioritize spending on projecting military power abroad over investments in domestic infrastructure underscores the dominance of a threat-oriented approach to national security and the neglect of vulnerabilities at home. Since the 1990s, scholars and policy makers have argued for a shift from the narrow conception of national security as something focused on protecting borders and governments toward the more comprehensive concept of human security, which focuses on the needs of the most vulnerable people within the nation-state and seeks to reduce structural inequalities.56 A human-security approach broadens conceptions of threat to include environmental hazards, disease, and political repression. It also broadens the options that are available for reducing insecurity from simply countering threats

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to mitigating the vulnerabilities that allow those threats to impact national security.57 Although the human-security framework has been used primarily to study the developing world, it is applicable to the United States, where various forms of human insecurity still exist. Some scholars have suggested that human security is a new area of security studies, one distinct from traditional state-centric approaches.58 In this chapter, however, we have highlighted the inseparability of national security, traditionally understood, and human security. Election interference and the contemporary pandemic both demonstrate that when particular communities within the United States are vulnerable, the nation as a whole is also vulnerable. As the Biden administration seeks to undo the damage of the previous administration, the physical assault on the U.S. Capitol and the horrific death toll from COVID-19 must serve as grave reminders that mitigating structural inequalities and the national vulnerabilities they create should be a top priority not only for human security but also for American national security.

Notes 1. We do not discuss the threat of climate change, although our argument about structural inequality and vulnerability is relevant to climate change as well. Poor and darkskinned people tend to be more vulnerable to the risks of climate change than wealthy and White people, both within the United States and around the world. This in turn reduces incentives for the wealthy populations who are most able to mitigate collective risk (e.g., by adopting initially expensive emission-reducing measures) to actually do so; instead, wealthy populations can purchase some forms of safety, for example by moving to regions with lower exposure to climate-change hazards. 2. National Security Strategy of the United States of America, December 2017, 31, https:// www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905-2.pdf. 3. These are three of the four goals identified in the strategy; we do not attempt to evaluate its success or failure in its additional goal of preserving “peace through strength.” 4. In this essay, we capitalize both “Black” and “White” when referring to racial categories, out of recognition of the power that both categories have in a society that is structured by systemic racism. While scholars have long capitalized “Black” to signal communities, it is relatively recently that scholars of race have begun to argue for capitalizing “White,” as a means of recognizing that it is not an invisible or neutral category. See Eve Ewing, “I’m a Black Scholar Who Studies Race. Here’s Why I Capitalize ‘White,’ ” July 3, 2020, https://zora.medium.com/im-a-black-scholar-who-studies-race-here-s -why-i-capitalize-white-f94883aa2dd3. 5. Ellen Nakashima, “U.S. Undertook Cyber Operation Against Iran as Part of Effort to Secure the 2020 Election,” Washington Post, November 3, 2020, https://www.washing tonpost.com/national-security/cybercom-targets-iran-election-interference/2020/11 /03/aa0c9790-1e11-11eb-ba21-f2f001f0554b_ story.html. 6. Ellen Nakashima, “U.S. Cyber Force Credited with Helping Stop Russia from Undermining Midterms,” Washington Post, February 14, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost .com /world /national -security/us - cyber -force - credited -with -helping -stop -russia

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17. 18. 19. 20.

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-from -undermining-midterms /2019 /02 /14 /ceef46ae -3086 -11e9 -813a - 0ab2f17e305b _ story.html. Eugene Kiely and Rem Rieder, “Trump’s Repeated False Attacks on Mail-In Ballots,” Factcheck .org, September  25, 2020, https://www.factcheck .org /2020/09/trumps -repeated-false-attacks-on-mail-in-ballots/. Daniella Silva, “Trump’s Call for Supporters to Watch Polls ‘Very Carefully’ Raises Concerns of Voter Intimidation,” NBC News, September  30, 2020, https://www .nbcnews .com /news /us -news /trump -s -call-supporters -watch-polls -very-carefully -raises-concerns-n1241613. Kyle Cheney, “Trump Calls on GOP State Legislatures to Overturn Election Results,” Politico, November 21, 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/21/trump-state -legislatures-overturn-election-results-439031. Sheera Frenkel, “Russian Internet Trolls Are Amplifying Election Fraud Claims, Researchers Say,” New York Times, November 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020 /11 /03 /us /politics /russian -internet -trolls - are - amplifying - election -fraud - claims -researchers-say.html. Social media contribute to the establishment of echo chambers and polarization, although the effects may not be as dramatic as some assume, as users already tend to seek out information that confirms their own views independently of social media, and this form of news consumption predominates over the consumption of news generated by social media. See Seth Flaxman, Sharad Goel, and Justin M. Rao, “Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Online News Consumption,” Public Opinion Quarterly 80, no. S1 (2016): 298–320. For more on the reasons that fake news spreads more quickly than true news, see Peter Dizikes, “On Twitter, False News Travels Faster Than True Stories,” March 8, 2018, https://news.mit .edu /2018/study-twitter-false-news-travels -faster-true-stories-0308. Lauren Feiner and Megan Graham, “Congress Has Failed to Pass Big Tech Legislation in 4 Years Leading Up to the Next Election,” CNBC, October 31, 2020, https:// www.cnbc .com /2020 /10 /31 /congress -fails -to -pass -big -tech -legislation - ahead - of -election.html. U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “Report on Russian Active Measures Campaign and Interference in the 2016 US Election,” 2019, https://www.intelligence .senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report _Volume2.pdf. Polina Rusyaeva and Andrey Zakharov, “RBC Investigation: How the ‘Troll Factory’ Worked in the US Elections,” RBC, November 2017, https://www.rbc.ru/magazine/2017 /11/59e0c17d9a79470e05a9e6c1. Rusyaeva and Zakharov, “RBC Investigation.” Alec Tyson and Shiva Maniam, “Behind Trump’s Victory: Divisions by Race, Gender, Education,” Pew, November 9, 2016, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank /2016/11/09 / behind-trumps-victory-divisions-by-race-gender-education/. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). Quoted in Spencer Ackerman, “How Russia Is Exploiting American White Supremacy,” Daily Beast, October 9, 2018. ACLU, “More About FBI Spying,” https://www. aclu .org /other/more -about-f bi -spying. Rebecca Slayton and Jason Ludwig, “Interrogating Information Infrastructure: Policing, Protest, and Structural Racism,” Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies Occasional Papers, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, forthcoming.

314 TH E E X PA N D I N G M E A N I N G O F I N T ERNAT IO NAL S EC URIT Y 21. Media coverage following the attempted insurrection at the Capitol focused on how Capitol police were surprised to be attacked with “Blue Lives Matter” flags: Dominick Mastrangelo, “Officer on Capitol Riot: ‘Is This America? They Beat Police Officers with Blue Lives Matter Flags,’ ” The Hill, February 22, 2021, https://thehill.com/homenews /news/539833-officer-on-capitol-riot-is -this -america-they-beat-police -officers -with -blue. 22. Phoebe Connelly et al., “Warnings of Jan. 6 Violence Preceded the Capitol Riot,” Washington Post, October  31, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive /2021/warnings-jan-6-insurrection/. 23. Some charges were then dropped, for example charges against someone who suggested he was organizing a “red action” and another person who posted a crude and publicly available recipe for napalm. See Cyrus Farivar and Olivia Solon, “FBI Arrests of Protestors Based on Social Media Posts Worry Legal Experts,” NBC News, June 19, 2020, https://www.nbcnews .com /tech /social-media /federal-agents -monitored-facebook -arrest-protesters-inciting-riots-court-records-n1231531. The U.S. Attorney General’s guidelines clearly authorize the FBI to “proactively” search for “publicly accessible websites and services” used for planning terrorism. Ken Dilanian, “Why Did the FBI Miss the Threats About Jan. 6 on Social Media?,” NBC News, March 8, 2021, https:// www.nbcnews .com /politics /justice - department /fbi- official-told- congress -bureau -can-t-monitor-americans-social-n1259769. 24. John Wagner et al., “Police Officers Deliver Emotional Testimony About Violent Day at Capitol,” Washington Post, July 27, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics /2021/07/27/jan-6-commission-hearing-live-updates/. 25. On injuries, see Michael Kaplan and Cassidy McDonald, “At Least 17 Police Officers Remain out of Work with Injuries from the Capitol Attack,” CBS News, June 4, 2021, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/capitol-police-injuries-riot/. On suicides, see Kevin Mangan and Dan Breuninger, “Two More Police Officers Die by Suicide After Defending Capitol During Riot by Pro-Trump Mob, Tally Now 4,” CNBC, August 2, 2021, https://www.cnbc.com /2021/08/02/3rd-police-officer-gunther-hashida-kills-himself -after-capitol-riot-by-trump-mob.html. 26. Brakkton Booker, “Protests in White and Black, and the Different Response of Law Enforcement,” NPR, January  7, 2021, https://www.npr.org /2021 /01 /07/954568499 /protests-in-white-and-black-and-the-different-response-of-law-enforcement. 27. Casey Tolan, “DC Police Made Far More Arrests at the height of Black Lives Matter Protests Than During the Capitol Clash,” CNN, January 9, 2021, https://www.cnn.com /2021/01/08/us/dc-police-arrests-blm-capitol-insurrection-invs/index.html. 28. Lynne Peeples, “What the Data Say About Police Brutality and Racial Bias—and Which Reforms Might Work,” Nature, June 19, 2020, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586 -020-01846-z. 29. Danyelle Solomon, Connor Maxwell, and Abril Castro, “Systematic Inequality and American Democracy,” Center for American Progress, August 7, 2019, https://www .americanprogress.org /issues/race/reports/2019/08/07/473003/systematic-inequality -american-democracy/. 30. “Voting Laws Roundup: October 2021,” Brennan Center for Justice, New York University Law School, October  4, 2021, https://www.brennancenter.org /our-work /re search-reports/voting-laws-roundup-october-2021. 31. Kristine Phillips, “ ‘Damaging to Our Democracy’: Trump Election Lawsuits Targeted Areas with Large Black, Latino Populations,” USA Today, December 1, 2020, https:// www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/12/01/trump-voter-fraud-claims-target

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34. 35.

36.

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-counties-more-black-latino-votes/6391908002/; “Refuting the Myth of Voter Fraud Yet Again,” Brennan Center for Justice, New York University Law School, https://www .brennancenter.org /our-work /research-reports/refuting-myth-voter-fraud-yet-again. Tim Starks, “Cyber Winners and Losers from Trump’s Budget,” Politico, February 11, 2020, https://politi.co/2OKAtuK. Jane Timm, “Fact-Checking President Donald Trump’s Claims About Coronavirus,” NBC News, April 2, 2020, https://www.nbcnews .com /politics/donald-trump/fact -check ing-president-donald-trump-s-claims-about-coronavirus-n1174356. As of the writing of this essay, the omicron variant had been detected and was causing havoc across the globe. Beth Cameron, “I Ran the White House Pandemic Office. Trump Closed It,” Washington Post, March 13, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook /nsc-pandemic -office-trump-closed/2020/03/13/a70de09c-6491-11ea-acca-80c22bbee96f_ story.html. Adam Nagourney and Jeremy W. Peters, “Denial and Defiance: Trump and His Base Downplay the Virus Ahead of the Election,” New York Times, September 21, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/us/politics/trump-base-virus.html. Natasha Korecki, “Coronavirus-Ravaged Wisconsin Sweats Trump Rallies,” Politico, October 1, 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/01/trump-rallies-wisconsin -covid-424650. Libby Cathey, “Trump, Downplaying Virus, Has Mocked Wearing Masks for Months,” ABC News, October 2, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com /Politics/trump-downplaying -virus-mocked-wearing-masks-months/story?id= 73392694. Felicia Sonmez, Meryl Kornfield, and Katie Mettler, “Trump Says It’s Safe to Reopen States as Governors Grapple with Loosening Restrictions,” Washington Post, May 3, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-says-its-safe-to-reopen-states -as -governors -grapple -with-loosening-restrictions/2020/05/03 /013ee34a-8d64-11ea -a0bc-4e9ad4866d21 _ story.html. Marc Hetherington and Jonathan M. Ladd, “Destroying Trust in the Media, Science, and Government has Left America Vulnerable to Disaster,” Brookings, May 1, 2020, https://www.brookings .edu / blog /fixgov/2020/05/01 /destroying-trust-in-the -media -science-and-government-has-left-america-vulnerable-to-disaster/. Berkeley Lovelace, “Trump Claims the Worsening US Coronavirus Outbreak Is a ‘Fake News Media Conspiracy’ Even as Hospitalizations Rise,” CNBC, October 26, 2020, https://www.cnbc .com /2020 /10 /26 /coronavirus -trump - claims -the -worsening-us -outbreak-is-a-fake-news-media-conspiracy-even-as-hospitalizations-rise.html; Derek Hawkins, “Eric Trump Claims Coronavirus Is Democratic Hoax, Will ‘Magically’ Vanish After 2020 Election,” Washington Post, May 17, 2020, https://www.washing tonpost.com/politics/2020/05/17/eric-trump-coronavirus/. Fabio Tagliabue, Luca Galassi, and Pierpaolo Mariani, “The ‘Pandemic’ of Disinformation in COVID-19,” SN Comprehensive Clinical Medicine, August  1, 2020, 1–3; Jane Galvão, “COVID-19: The Deadly Threat of Misinformation,” Lancet Infectious Diseases, October  5, 2020; Joel Achenbach and Lori Rozsa, “Some Americans Refuse to Wear Masks Even as Their Hometowns Become Covid-19 Hot Spots,” Washington Post, October 27, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/mask-wearing-coronavirus -hot-spots/2020/10/27/71001546-1883-11eb-82db-60b15c874105_story.html. Peggy Bailey, Matt Broaddus, Shelby Gonzales, and Kyle Hayes, “African American Uninsured Rate Dropped by More Than a Third Under Affordable Care Act,” CBPP, June 1, 2017, https://www.cbpp.org /research/health/african-american-uninsured-rate -dropped-by-more-than-a-third-under-affordable-care.

316 TH E E X PA N D I N G M E A N I N G O F I N T ERNAT IO NAL S EC URIT Y 44. “The Color of Coronavirus: COVID-19 Deaths by Race and Ethnicity in the US,” APM Research Lab, November 12, 2020, https://www.apmresearchlab.org /covid/deaths-by -race. More than 1 in 1,000 Black Americans have died of COVID, which is roughly twice the mortality rate experienced by White Americans. However, when these figures are adjusted for age, the disparity appears to be much larger. 45. Janet M. Coffman, Krista Chan, and Timothy Bates, “Profile of the Licensed Practical Nurse/Licensed Vocational Nurse Workforce, 2008 and 2013,” July 6, 2020, https:// healthworkforce .ucsf .edu /sites / healthworkforce .ucsf .edu /files / Report-Profile _ of _ the _ Licensed _ Practical _ Nurse _ Licensed _Vocational _ Nurse _Workforce _ 2008 _ and _2013.pdf. 46. Stephen Joyce and Megan U. Boyanton, “Reeling Midwest Farmers Look for Lawmakers’ Plan B as Aid Stalls,” September 16, 2020, https://about.bgov.com/news/reeling -midwest-farmers-look-for-lawmakers-plan-b-as-aid-stalls/. 47. Carol D. Leonnig and Josh Dawsey, “More than 130 Secret Service Officers Are Said to Be Infected with Coronavirus or Quarantining in Wake of Trump’s Campaign Travel,” Washington Post, November 13, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/secret - service - coronavirus - outbreak /2020/11 /13 /610eebcc -2539 -11eb -8672 - c281c7a2c96e _ story.html. 48. Matthew R. Kasper, Jesse R. Geibe, Christine L. Sears, et al., “An Outbreak of Covid19 on an Aircraft Carrier,” New England Journal of Medicine, 2020, https://www.nejm .org /doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2019375. 49. “Timeline: Theodore Roosevelt COVID-19 Outbreak Investigation,” USNI, June 23, 2020, https://news.usni.org /2020/06/23/timeline-theodore-roosevelt-covid-19-out break-investigation. 50. “Coronavirus: DOD Response,” US Department of Defense, https://www.defense.gov /Explore/Spotlight/Coronavirus/. 51. Melissa Hernandez, “How Politicized Has Vaccination Become? Thousands of U.S. Troops Are Disobeying Orders That They Get Shots,” Los Angeles Times, January 5, 2022, https://www. latimes .com /world-nation /story/2022- 01- 05/thousands - of-u-s -troops-defy-orders-to-get-covid-19-vaccine. 52. Laura Bliss, “How Trump’s $1 Trillion Infrastructure Pledge Added Up,” Bloomberg, November 16, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-16/what-did -all-those-infrastructure-weeks-add-up-to; Jim Tankersley, “Biden Signs Infrastructure Bill, Promoting Benefits for Americans,” New York Times, November 15, 2021, https://www. nytimes .com /2021 /11 /15 /us /politics / biden - signs -infrastructure -bill .html. 53. Emily Cochrane and Catie Edmondson, “Manchin Pulls Support from Biden’s Social Policy Bill, Imperiling Its Passage,” New York Times, December 19, 2021, https://www .nytimes.com/2021/12/19/us/politics/manchin-build-back-better.html; Joe Manchin, “Why I Won’t Support Spending Another $3.5 Trillion,” Wall Street Journal, September  2, 2021, https://www.wsj.com /articles/manchin-pelosi-biden-3-5-trillion-recon ciliation-government-spending-debt-deficit-inflation-11630605657. The “true” tenyear cost of the bill is highly contested. $2.2 trillion is the total value of the new government spending programs in the legislation, plus the value of the new tax cuts it includes. See Jim Tankersley, “How Much Does Biden’s Spending Bill Actually Cost?,” New York Times, November 20, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/20/us/politics / biden-spending-bill-cost.html. 54. Catie Edmondson, “House Passes $768 Billion Defense Policy Bill,” New York Times, December 7, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com /2021 /12/07/us/politics/defense-budget

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55. 56.

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-democrats-biden.html. Catie Edmondson, “Senate Passes $768 Billion Defense Bill, Sending It to Biden,” New York Times, December 15, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com /2021/12/15/us/politics/defense-spending-bill.html. The ten-year projection was made by the columnist Paul Waldman, based on typical increases of 4 percent per year for inflation. See Paul Waldman, “Opinion: Lawmakers Who Fret About Spending Quietly Pass Hundreds of Billions for ‘Defense,’ ” Washington Post, December 8, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost .com /opinions /2021 /12 /08 / hundreds - of-billions -for -defense/. Waldman, “Opinion.” The human-security approach is generally traced to the 1994 UN Human Development Report, http:// hdr.undp.org /sites/default /files/reports/255/ hdr_1994 _en _comp lete _ nostats.pdf. Sakiko Fukuda-Parr and Carol Messineo, “Human Security: A Critical Review of the Literature,” Centre for Research on Peace and Development (CRPD) Working Paper 11 (2012). Roland Paris, “Human Security: Paradigm Shift or Hot Air?” International Security 26, no. 2 (2001): 87–102.

CHAPTER 28

LIFTING THE VEIL ON RACIAL CAPITALISM American Foreign Policy Before and After Trump N IV I M A N C H A N DA

D

onald J. Trump is often viewed as an aberration or, at the very least, as someone whose presidency signaled a decisive shift in U.S. politics. A showman with little political experience, he was elected by a narrow margin on the back of “protest votes” by millions disillusioned by the established status quo.1 Although some worry that he has set the stage for other celebrity policy makers, thereby degrading the office of the president, the greater danger is that politics will go on as normal, but with ever greater legitimacy and space.2 Politics as usual amounts to the reinforcement of a (post)colonial and capitalist structure, a system that Cedric Robinson has so memorably and aptly termed “racial capitalism” and that many other scholars and activists have deployed to critique the perpetuation of a world order based on the twin dictates of racism and capitalism.3 Against this backdrop of global racial capitalism, Trump emerges as neither an exception nor the rule. His presidency was unprecedented because of his outrageous behavior, not because of his policies while he was in office. Trump became a white-nationalist symbol by playing up these themes rather than obscuring them behind expected political niceties. It is for this reason that his legacy will have ramifications for years to come. Trump represents a racist status quo in American foreign policy, a continuation rather than departure. Unlike other presidents, however, he advertised his racism and wore it as a badge of honor. As Audie Klotz argues in chapter 29: “The Trump administration leveraged racist underpinnings of policies that many other politicians and policy makers accept in code.” So, while many found him personally repulsive, his

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words and deeds made it hard to maintain the old façade that the United States stands for progress, development, and a humanitarian “liberalism.” Whether the repercussions are experienced as an intensification and bolstering of racial capitalism, with its attendant inequities and hierarchies, or as a breakdown of this established system is still open for debate and, importantly, yet to be determined. When Barack Obama was elected as president in 2008, commentators across the political spectrum hailed the beginning of an era of postracial America.4 Given the everyday interpersonal racism experienced especially by poor women of color, as well as the deeply institutionalized structural racism in the United States, these proclamations sounded at best naïve and at worst willfully misleading.5 With the passage of time, and as the collective shock of November 9, 2016, reverberated around the body politic, they appeared nothing short of outlandish. Postracial in this context can only ever be apprehended as a perpetuation, that is, the “post” signifying continuity with, rather than a departure from, what came before. Much as scholars of imperialism are at pains to situate the “post” in postcolonialism in a long lineage of extractive, violent, and racialized practices, the “post” in postracial only makes sense if it is there to highlight resonances and linkages, rather than dissonance and rupture. President Trump exemplified these continuities, albeit in a brasher and more aggressive manner than even his harshest critics had feared. If at home Trump ramped up his racist rhetoric and stoked far-right ressentiment, his actions abroad were entirely in keeping with those of his predecessors. For instance, one of Trump’s ostensible successes has been the Abraham Accords, which saw the “normalization” of relations between Israel ’48 (that is, the Israeli state that was constituted in 1948 after the war) and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and between Israel and Bahrain in 2020.6 The deal was negotiated by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a senior adviser, and signed by the UAE’s foreign minister, Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan; Bahrain’s foreign minister, Abdullatif bin Rashid Al Zayani; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel; and Trump.7 Buoyed by this achievement, Trump outlined his Middle East peace plan, formally known as “Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People.”8 This was Trump’s foray into “solving” the Israeli-Palestinian “conflict” and has the remarkable hallmark of having included no Palestinian authorities in the negotiations. It also recognized Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel and put the Haram al-Sharif area, including al-Aqsa Mosque, under Israeli sovereignty.9 Far from being a fundamental break with the past, Trump’s vision of peace in the Middle East is entirely consistent with years of U.S. foreign policy, both Democratic and Republican. In 2014, when the Israeli Defense Force killed two thousand Palestinians, including 550 children, over a period of fifty days, Obama pledged an additional $225 million in support of the Israeli army and

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maintained a stony silence on the question of dead Palestinian children.10 Trump’s peace plan, which is referred to colloquially as the “deal of the century,” was closely presaged by President Bill Clinton’s peace plan in 2000, which also proposed Israeli annexation of vast swathes of Palestine, with Palestinians forgoing their “right of return.”11 For Trump, as for Clinton, the diminutive Palestinian state would be entirely demilitarized, contain Israeli military installations, and would be a far cry from what international relations scholars and practitioners recognize as “sovereign.”12 Nor have we seen a departure in policy during the Biden administration. May 2021 witnessed an escalation of violence in Palestine/Israel, with Palestine once again bearing the brunt of the casualties, dispossession, and dislocation. The administration in the United States had changed, and so had its tone to some degree, but Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was quick to reiterate the U.S. commitment to Israel and Israel’s right to defend itself. In a single week, Washington blocked three UN statements condemning Israel’s campaign of bombardment and calling for an immediate ceasefire.13 U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world makes little sense outside the context of racism and capitalism. American exceptionalism is a gradated system; it is not simply the “U.S. and the Rest” but a hierarchy in which the United States at the top is closely followed by its Western European allies, with Africa and the Arab world somewhere at the bottom.14 This is because racism as a concept and structure is famously slippery and elusive, not static or fixed over time. In the current (white) American imaginary, exceptionalism has rearticulated itself by concerning itself primarily with nationalism and through the discourse of antiterrorism. As Nicholas De Genova argues, this exceptionalism remains the reigning leitmotif for American presidents, although its expression varies. On his account, in contrast to George W. Bush’s overt, racialized militarism, Barack Obama’s nationalism was allegedly “colorblind,” but ultimately it was the “war against terrorism [that] commits them together to a shared ethos of antiterrorism and a multifaceted material and practical program of securitization, ‘domestically’ and internationally.”15 This is a twenty-first-century American exceptionalism, one that pivots away from the avowedly Christian idiom of manifest destiny toward an imperial commitment to, and enforcement of, “the American way of life.”16 For De Genova, this is the “regime of capital accumulation and its regnant sociopolitical order,” which we can also refer to as the system of racial capitalism.17 In this schema, the United States oversees a global world order, acting as self-anointed policeman and flanked by its junior partners in Europe and parts of East Asia. While biblical elements of exceptionalism may have given way to asseverations of American supremacy couched in the grammar of liberalism, human rights, and antiterrorism, the religious undertones remain. For instance, in the Middle East, Islamophobia remains a motivating concern, and to that end

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Trump’s foreign policy record is unremarkable beyond Israel/Palestine. Although initially Trump had committed to withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, after being allegedly shown a photograph of women in the 1970s in Kabul wearing miniskirts, Trump reversed this.18 Hardly a candidate for sophisticated feminist (let alone intersectional) analysis, Trump couched his decision to keep U.S. forces in Afghanistan in the language of women’s rights, just as President George W. Bush and Obama had done. For some, Obama even retains pride of place as “drone warrior in chief,” having authorized ten times more drone strikes than Bush and painting all males of military age in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and perhaps Mali as potential “combatants.”19 As Medea Benjamin notes, the United States dropped 26,171 bombs in 2016 alone, as a result of the convoluted legal architecture the Obama administration constructed to legitimize its interventions, specifically its indiscriminate campaign of extrajudicial drone warfare with no geographic restrictions.20 Obama expanded the targeted remote-control killing program instituted by Bush, which Trump made more tentacular and less accountable.21 For much of the world, especially those who were branded enemies of the United States, the identity of the occupant in the White House is merely a matter of academic interest. Indeed, even Trump’s infamous “Muslim Ban” was merely a dreadful extension of an Obama-era policy. American empire neither began nor ended with Donald Trump, and spaces like the military prison in Guantanamo Bay remain a chilling reminder of the durable status quo bias in the upper echelons of policy making. Nevertheless, much of the world heaved a giant sigh of relief in November 2020, when voters chose Joe Biden to succeed Trump at the helm of this sprawling enterprise of American empire.22 How does one grapple with this paradox? If the Trump presidency was merely business as usual, then why are so many people so relieved to see him go? The answer, I submit, lies at least in part in what Obama memorably called “the optics” when he was caught playing golf immediately after discussing the beheading of an American journalist.23 Even not particularly canny observers of Donald Trump’s gaffe-prone speeches and incomprehensible rants on Twitter and of his lack of tact, nuance, and diplomacy in important matters have been quick to point out that he was the most “unpresidential” of presidents.24 Many on the left have rightly underscored the many ways in which the veneer of respectability—and its coarticulation through the discourse of “civility”—is precisely the mode through which politics as usual functions and the elite reproduces itself.25 Without diminishing the naked violence, racism, and misogyny that Trump personified, they question the value of a system that legitimates and romanticizes what came before (and, indeed, what is likely to come after)—the upholding and perpetuation of a system of oft-disguised exploitation, asymmetry, and oppression. This is the machinery of racial capitalism: the dominant mode of social, political and

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economic organization that works through the logics of bordering and the relegation of some populations as unworthy, “undeserving,” or “surplus.”26 Although one can be overwhelmingly in agreement with these commentators, it is important to remain cognizant of the emotive as well as tangible impact of “optics.” “Optics” as systems of representation contain within them the power of symbolism, which cannot be overstated. A Nazi salute met with tacit acceptance at a white-power rally in Charlottesville, the spotting of a “Camp Auschwitz” hoodie on a member of the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, and the first lady adorning a jacket with the caption “I really don’t care, do u?” during a June 2018 trip to a migrant child–detention facility cannot be dissociated from the contexts and situations within which they are embedded.27 The “optics” here go beyond the “simulacra” that Jean Baudrillard has shown saturate our reality, because the symbols themselves act as synecdoche of that very reality.28 As such, Trump’s foreign policy may not have been more lethal than other American presidents, but his symbolic embrace of the far right at home represents a significant and frightening change. Perhaps, just as Obama’s greatest victory was symbolic—being a Black man in power for eight years in an unapologetically white United States—so too is Trump’s biggest achievement his capitulating to the worst excesses of racism and right-wing propaganda. One can acknowledge the limits of the former while simultaneously conceding the absolute horror of the latter. The only way out of this (ultimately misleading) dichotomy between the “sameness” of neoliberal militarism on the one hand and extreme right-wing mania on the other is to reject the methodologically nationalist premise that these are the only politically viable options available to Americans and indeed that they are anathema to each other. Ironically enough, Trump’s performative and overthe-top race-baiting makes it harder to whitewash and paper over the persistence of the racial capitalist global system over which the United States presides. A qualitative change necessitates going beyond “the optics” and instead involves a commitment to abolition, to the dissolution of American Empire and its cognates, and an outright disavowal of global racial capitalism including in places like China, Russia, India, and Brazil. Movements such as Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, and Rhodes Must Fall were already beginning to “change everything” before the arrival of Trump both in the United States and elsewhere in the world.29 The rest of us merely need to get behind that agenda, an agenda that is global and much greater than simply about the occupant of the White House.

Notes 1. Although Trump won 304 electoral votes, he lost the popular vote by a significant 2.9 million. “2016 Presidential Election Results,” New York Times, August 9, 2017, https:// www.nytimes.com/elections/2016/results/president.

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2. See, for instance, Brendan O’Conor, “What Does Trump’s Rise Mean for the Past, Present, and Future of Celebrity Politics?” The Conversation, September 25, 2016, https:// theconversation.com/what-does-trumps-rise-mean-for-the-past-present-and-future -of-celebrity-politics-65159. 3. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed, 1983). 4. For a thorough rebuttal of triumphal postracialism, see Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Race to the Bottom,” The Baffler, June 16, 2017, https://thebaffler.com /salvos/race-to-bottom -crenshaw. 5. Obama’s own frequent invocation of “American exceptionalism” can also be read as complicity in the perpetuation of a racialized myth. 6. On this topic, see chapter 30 in this volume, by A. Dirk Moses and Victor Kattan, as well as their article “The Trump Presidency, the Question of Palestine, and Biden’s Business as Usual,” https://issforum.org /ISSF/PDF/PS2021-34.pdf. 7. The complicity of Arab states in the “unraveling” of Palestine has a long and checkered history, which ultimately amounts to an abandonment of Pan-Arabism for an integration into the world economy and domestic stability. This is consistent with the demands and exigencies of colonialism and capitalism. For a detailed historical account, see Avi Shlaim and Eugene L. Rogan, eds., The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). The introduction to the volume lays the failure of Arab solidarity with Palestine in its stark worldhistorical context. 8. The White House, “Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People,” January 28, 2020, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov /peacetoprosperity/. 9. Robin Wright, “Trump Unveils the ‘Giveaway of the Century,’ ” New Yorker, January 29, 2020. 10. Cornell West, “Pity the Sad Legacy of Barack Obama,” Guardian, January 9, 2017, https://www.theguardian .com /commentisfree /2017/jan /09 / barack- obama -legacy -presidency. 11. Jeremy Bowen, “Trump’s Middle East Peace Plan: ‘Deal of the Century’ Is Huge Gamble,” BBC, https://www.bbc.co.uk /news/world-middle-east-51263815. 12. Nathan Thrall, “Trump’s Middle East Peace Plan Exposes the Ugly Truth,” New York Times, January 29, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/opinion/trump-peace -plan.html. 13. “Israel-Palestine: US Blocks Third UN Statement in a Week,” Al Jazeera, May 17, 2021, https://www.aljazeera .com /news/2021 /5 /17/no -us -action-after-third-unsc-meeting -on-israel-palestine. 14. This is necessarily a simplistic portrayal of racial hierarchy and American exceptionalism. Nonetheless, the notion that American exceptionalism is inherently racist is hardly new. See James W. Ceaser, “The Origins and Character of American Exceptionalism,” American Political Thought 1, no. 1 (2012): 3–28; and Nicholas De Genova, “Antiterrorism, Race, and the New Frontier: American Exceptionalism, Imperial Multiculturalism, and the Global Security State,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 17, no. 6 (2010): 613–40. 15. De Genova, “Antiterrorism, Race, and the New Frontier,” 615. 16. Admittedly, as is the contention of this piece, Trump has preferred to revert to the vocabulary of naked racism. Nonetheless, the belief in American superiority and exceptionalism remains steadfast. 17. De Genova, “Antiterrorism, Race, and the New Frontier,” 614.

324 TH E E X PA N D I N G M E A N I N G O F I N T ERNAT IO NAL S EC URIT Y 18. See Nivi Manchanda, Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 223–24. 19. Medea Benjamin, “America Dropped 26,171 Bombs in 2016. What a Bloody End to Obama’s Reign,” Guardian, January  9, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com /com mentisfree/2017/jan/09/america-dropped-26171-bombs-2016-obama-legacy. See also Jeanne Morefield, “Business as Usual,” Disorder of Things (blog), December 15, 2016, https://thedisorderofthings .com /2016/12 /15 / business -as -usual- donald-trump -and -american-empire/. 20. Benjamin, “America Dropped 26,171 Bombs.” 21. Human Rights Watch has documented some of the legal chicanery that has accompanied the expansion of the drone program by Obama. For one prominent example, which involved the droning of a wedding procession in Yemen, see Human Rights Watch, “A Wedding That Became a Funeral,” February 19, 2014, https://www.hrw.org /report /2014 /02 /19/wedding-became-funeral /us-drone-attack-marriage-procession -yemen. 22. Biden’s decision to pull out troops from Afghanistan is an interesting one. It is too early to say whether this is the beginning of the end to American “forever wars,” but my gut instinct and Biden’s motto (“America is back”) suggest otherwise. 23. NuNu Japaridze, “Obama: Golfing After Foley Statement Was a Bad Idea,” CNN, September 8, 2014, https://edition.cnn.com/2014/09/07/politics/obama-golfing-optics/index .html. 24. For a comprehensive list, see China Miéville, “One Thinge That Ouerthroweth All That Were Graunted Before: On Being Presidential,” Salvage, January 30, 2018, https://salvage.zone/ i n-print/one-thi nge-that- ouerthroweth-all-that-were-graunted-before- on-beingpresidential/. 25. Morefield, “Business as Usual”; Miéville, “One Thinge.” 26. See Gargi Bhattacharya, Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018); and Robbie Shilliam, Race and the Undeserving Poor: From Abolition to Brexit (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 27. For more on each of these instances see “White Supremacist Gives Nazi Salute in Charlottesville,” ABC News, August 18, 2013, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-13/white -supremacist-gives-nazi-salute-in-charlottesville/8802292; “Man in ‘Camp Auschwitz’ Sweatshirt During Capitol Riot Identified,” CNN, January  20, 2021, https://edition .cnn .com /2021 /01 /10 /politics /man - camp -auschwitz - sweatshirt- capitol -riot-iden tified/index.html; “Melania Trump Says ‘Don’t Care’ Jacket Was a Message,” BBC, https://www.bbc.co.uk /news/world-us-canada-45853364. 28. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020). 29. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition (Chicago: Haymarket, 2021).

CHAPTER 29

RACIALIZED THREATS AND SECURITY RATIONALES IN U.S. IMMIGRATION POLICIES AU D I E K LOT Z

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n late August  2021, Afghans huddled in military airplanes amid a massive evacuation. Crowds at the airport gates were denied access, then targeted by suicide bombers. These dramatic images encapsulate how security studies scholars typically view migration: refugees as a collateral consequence of conflict, innocent women and children in need of humanitarian assistance, asylum applicants vetted to filter potential terrorists. Too often, academics simply mirror how policy makers and the media talk about migrants as threats. Deportation flights filled with Haitians in September 2021 provide another recent example of imagery overriding analysis.1 Recent polls show public support for the admission of Afghans who worked with the U.S. military, unlike Haitians or Syrian refugees.2 In contrast, this brief chapter excavates two embedded and intertwined procedures upon which U.S. immigration policy relies extensively: executivebranch decisions and overt security exceptions. Executive discretion determines which groups the United States deems a threat to society and, conversely, who counts as worthy of admission. Specifically, I argue that the Trump administration leveraged racist underpinnings of policies that many other politicians and policy makers accept in code.3 While the Biden administration disagrees on some of these controversial policies, others remain in place. Yet to gauge the Trump effect, we need to go beyond a tally of procedural changes to see that the terms of debate—public vocabularies about migration, not just their content—also shifted profoundly. Already strained, the asylum process at the southern border is now broken, with little pretense of providing

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anyone with an opportunity to claim a credible fear of persecution. And commentaries on pandemic-generated employment appear remarkably unconnected to immigration policies generally or the heightened internal policing of recent years. How many undocumented workers fear getting vaccinated? How many “essential” workers were deported or died? We should continue to shine a spotlight on these concerns, regardless of the administration in power, because discriminatory legacies span political parties across historical eras. Setting aside partisan talking points about successes or failures reveals how administrations past and present have regularly resorted to executive orders when faced with legislative stalemate over immigration.4 Critics across the board have pointed to the legal extremism of the Trump administration’s attempts to bar almost all migration using executive orders. First came court battles over the so-called Muslim Ban, then outrage over illegal detention of unaccompanied children.5 However, the Obama administration’s popular DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program also filled a gap when the Dream Act lacked sufficient votes in 2010.6 Many countries use executive discretion to provide greater flexibility in implementing provisions of their migration policies, so we know that such variations in content and scope matter. What distinguished the Trump administration was its deep dive into the microprocedural details of implementation to leverage every possible tool of exclusion.7 Here, we begin to see the roots of contemporary policies. Without dedicated refugee legislation until 1980, the United States necessarily relied on executive discretion, and many of these procedures remain intact. One key component, the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952, added unprecedented and extensive presidential discretion, previously permitted only during wartime.8 While immigration policies already provided extensive tools of exclusion, policy makers worried about loopholes that might still enable entry of certain suspicious Europeans, especially Jewish refugees and diplomats from communist countries. By the 1960s, acceptable refugees mostly comprised people who fled communism, especially well-educated Cubans, Hungarians, Czechs, and Soviet Jews. Such ideological and religious filters were hardly new. A similar convergence drove xenophobia in the 1920s. Nationality quotas limited the entry of undesirable Eastern and Southern Europeans, whom lawmakers viewed as a motley mix of swarthy Catholics and Jewish subversives. Yet attention to the content of these prejudices can deflect from proper scrutiny of the tools used to exclude them. For example, communism had little to do with the Clinton administration’s discretionary decision to block Haitians in the early 1990s or the subsequent invocation of security threats by multiple administrations directed at Muslims. Going further, the Trump administration prioritized the protection of Christian minorities.9

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Legacies of naturalization laws and immigration quotas include the ongoing reliance on nationality categories in most aspects of U.S. migration policy. When nationality fails as a filter, discretion frequently comes into play. Consequently, using nationality to categorize migrants can easily obscure other rationales for a policy. The Trump administration demonstrated this dynamic in reverse: it started with an overtly discriminatory ban on people from Muslimmajority countries but, after effective court challenges, ended up with an odd mix of country-designated security threats including Venezuelans and North Koreans. This brazen approach shocked many people—from legal experts and partisan critics to journalists and the informed public—because official rationales for exclusion had, since the 1960s, became subtler in order to evade charges of overt racism. We can see a gradual shift away from blatant racism in the convoluted evolution of Chinese exclusion policies, starting in 1882.10 Categorization was uniquely complicated, because policies used “Chinese” as a racial designation divorced from location or citizenship. In the 1800s, Chinese migrants had settled across the entire Pacific area, from Southeast Asia to South America, as well as U.S. territories, notably Hawaiʻi. Since the Naturalization Act of 1790 explicitly applied only to free white people, Chinese families could rarely immigrate based on citizenship. As congressional support for additional immigration restrictions grew in the early 1900s, the federal government extended antiChinese measures to all Asians. This outright exclusion made nationality quotas irrelevant. Yet alliances do sometimes matter.11 The cumulative impact of World War II, the Chinese Communist Revolution, and the Korean War generated modest reforms. In December 1943, alongside the formal repeal of the Exclusion Acts, a new quota allowed a scant 105 immigrants, calculated proportionally based on a very small population recorded in the 1920 census, to be split 75 percent for people from the country of China and 25 percent for Chinese from all other countries. Another concession, the War Brides Act of 1945, addressed a new domestic constituency: servicemen who had married Asian women. Previously, almost all Chinese women had been presumed to be prostitutes; very few wives of merchants had been allowed. Even wives of U.S. citizens had a tough time entering, both before and after the quota. The near total ban on women and widespread antimiscegenation laws led to the absence of families with children, which explains the tiny Chinese population recorded in the 1920 census. Thus, the substitution of a quota in 1943 accomplished the same restrictive goal, while removing an overt stigma and making possible an exception for wives of soldiers. Although one of the cowriters of the 1952 Act, Senator Patrick McCarran, claimed that the law eliminated racism and sexism, quotas for Asians in fact remained minimal and still disregarded Chinese nationality based on location

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rather than lineage.12 This legislation also added unprecedented restrictions within the Caribbean, especially because prerevolutionary Cuba served as a significant transit country.13 The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 converted country quotas to regional caps, including the Western Hemisphere for the first time. It also bolstered emphasis on family ties, aimed at desirable European immigration, but the unintended consequence was a substantial increase in immigration from Asia and the Americas. Since Congress had only inadvertently diversified immigration, it still relied on covertly racialized categories, as evident in policies about refugees. Images of the Kabul evacuation in August 2021 resonate with those who remember broadcasts of the April 1975 embassy airlift in Saigon, but the connection to Vietnam is much more than a metaphor or analogy. Around the world, that war transformed many migration policies. Some countries created new policies; other countries reduced barriers to Asian immigration. The United States finally converted its ad hoc approach into legislation that built on international definitions of persecution and procedural norms.14 Coincidentally, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan led to the arrival of a modest number of Afghan refugees in the 1980s, but many more fled to Pakistan or Iran, as occurs today. Although the Refugee Act of 1980 provided legal infrastructure for processing asylum claims, administrations still determine how many and which refugees to accept. Such discretion is central to current controversies related to the southern border. In January 2019, the Trump administration created the Migration Protection Protocols (MPP) as part of its broader agenda to preclude entry via Mexico (hence MPP is known as the Remain in Mexico policy). MPP prevented asylum seekers from crossing the border or deported those who did get across without adequately reviewing their claim to credible fear of persecution. Instead, potential refugees were required to wait across the border for an appointment. Noting the dangers migrants faced while in Mexico, critics portrayed MPP as a violation of the principle of nonrefoulement (which precludes preemptively sending someone back to a dangerous place). Courts have ruled multiple ways over MPP, from injunction to reinstitution. Upon taking office in January 2021, the Biden administration halted implementation of MPP but subsequently, in response to adverse court rulings, modified it and even expanded its scope to Haitians.15 Adding complications, in March 2020, the Trump administration invoked section  265 of Title 42, an obscure health regulation, linking its border policy to the pandemic. The Biden administration initially maintained this rule.16 Both administrations have faced criticism for justifying this restriction based on evocative tropes of disease-carrying migrants that have only tenuous connections to substantive health concerns. In early October  2021, Harold Koh, a senior State Department official and eminent human rights lawyer, offered a blistering internal memo about Title 42, in which he detailed multiple violations of domestic and international law, while also offering rights-respecting alternatives.17

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Much as critics within the Biden administration demand a frank reckoning with discriminatory premises of restrictions such as Title 42, security studies scholars need to do their own scrutiny of embedded assumptions. While the Trump administration’s disregard for domestic or international legal commitments may not surprise anyone, procedural debates over immigration and asylum still matter as domestic articulations of national identity, with implications for foreign policy.18 Because racist policies did not emerge in a vacuum, we must revisit the past to grasp the wider effects of Trumpism for the future.19 Sidelining migration as a domestic policy issue exacerbates amnesia about unapologetic imperialism, whereas global migration history underscores that Pax Britannica provided the architecture for Pax Americana. Ambivalent about its own expansionism, particularly in the Philippines, the United States both responded to and bolstered key norms of that imperial world order.20 For example, as president during the restrictive turn of the early 1900s, Woodrow Wilson, who was a blatant segregationist, ensured the demise of Japan’s proposed racial-equality clause at the League of Nations.21 Also, Wilson’s concept of selfdetermination evinced racial hierarchy: only European nations deserved selfdetermination. Even then, he opposed decolonization of territories controlled by the victors, despite pleas from white ethnic nationalists such as the Afrikaners in South Africa, not to mention the Irish.22 Wilson’s ghost haunts the field of international relations. As part of the recent movement to remove Confederate monuments and honorifics to Jim Crow segregationists, Wilson’s domestic record has garnered renewed attention. Princeton University reluctantly took his name off its renowned public policy school, an overdue acknowledgment of his efforts to exclude Blacks and Jews while president of the university. Meanwhile, without irony, IR continues to routinely reference Wilson as a leading voice for a liberal order, sometimes even turning his name into an adjective: Wilsonian idealism.23 Portrayed as a tragic figure because the Senate rejected the League of Nations, his failure fuels the field’s foundational narrative privileging realism: later the United States created the United Nations based on power politics. Overturning illiberal inequality requires much more than fixing migration policies and procedures.

Notes 1. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, “Biden Administration Doubles Down on Title 42 as Del Rio Expulsions Draw to a Close,” Immigration Impact (American Immigration Council), October 8, 2021, https://immigrationimpact .com /2021 /10/08/ biden-administration - doubles - down - on -title -42 - as -haitian - expulsions - draw -to - a - close /#.YWhVZS2 ZM0R. 2. Craig Kafura, “Republicans and Democrats Support Evacuating, Relocating Afghans to the United States,” Chicago Council on Global Affairs (blog), September  3, 2021, https://www.thechicagocouncil .org /commentary-and -analysis / blogs /republicans

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3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

-and-democrats-support-evacuating-relocating-afghans. Notably, while the Vietnamese American community is directly connecting their experiences to calls for help with Afghan resettlement, the award-winning novelist Viet Nguyen has been a prominent critic of any metric of worthiness; see https://viets4afghans.medium .com/. Thanks to Rich Friman and Wendy Wong for helping me hone these arguments; any errors are mine. Immigration reform requires exceptionally difficult cross-partisan coalitions in Congress. See Desmond King, Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Daniel Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Aristide Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); and Susan Martin, A Nation of Immigrants (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). The architect of those radically restrictive policies, former White House advisor Stephen Miller, also commented publicly against resettling any Afghan evacuees in the United States. Despite extraordinary churn among staff, Miller remained the one constant. The Southern Poverty Law Center has documented his connections to previously marginalized anti-immigration activists. Barack Obama, The Promised Land (New York: Crown, 2020), 616–19. Sarah Pierce and Jessica Bolter, “Dismantling and Reconstructing the U.S. Immigration System: A Catalogue of Changes Under the Trump Presidency,” Migration Policy Institute, July 2020; https://www.migrationpolicy.org /research /us-immigration -system-changes-trump-presidency. H. Richard Friman, “An ‘Untrammeled Right’? The McCarran Immigration Subcommittee and the Origins of Presidential Authority to Suspend and Restrict Alien Entry Under §1182(f),” Journal of Policy History 31, no. 4 (2019): 433–63. Historically, Christian minorities from the Middle East and North Africa (the former Ottoman Empire) did not fit easily within the racial coding of U.S. naturalization policies, but lawsuits led to their categorization as white by the early 1900s. David Theo Goldberg, “States of Whiteness,” in Between Law and Culture: Relocating Legal Studies, ed. David Theo Goldberg and Lisa Bower (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 184. General immigration books typically cover the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and key court rulings. See Estelle Lau, Paper Families: Identity, Immigration Administration, and Chinese Exclusion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), esp. the legislative history in chap. 1 and the nuanced explication throughout of procedures, based on rich archival evidence. See also Maddalena Marinari, Madeline Hsu, and Maria Cristina Garcia, eds., A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: U.S. Society in the Age of Restriction, 1924–1965 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press). On alliances generally, see Lamis Abdelaaty, Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). On U.S. reforms related to Chinese, see Lau, Paper Families; and Marinari, Hsu, and Garcia, Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered. Zolberg, Nation by Design, 311–12. Marinari, Hsu, and Garcia, Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered. Gil Loescher and John Scanlon, Calculated Kindness: Refugees and America’s HalfOpen Door, 1945 to the Present (New York: Free Press, 1986); Laura Madokoro,

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15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

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“Contested Terrain: Debating Refugee Admissions in the Cold War,” in Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered, ed. Marinari, Hsu, and Garcia, chap. 3. Muzaffar Chishti and Jessica Bolter, “Court Ordered Relaunch of Remain in Mexico Policy Tweaks Predecessor Program, but Faces Similar Challenges,” Migration Policy Institute, December 2, 2021, https://www.migrationpolicy.org /article/court- order -relaunch-remain-in-mexico; Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, “Biden Reinstates the ‘Remain in Mexico’ Program,” Immigration Impact, December 3, 2021, https://immigration impact.com/2021/12/03/ biden-reinstates-remain-in-mexico/#.YbJQLi2ZNxg. As of September 2022, court disputes and policy modifications continue. American Immigration Council, “A Guide to Title 42 Expulsions,” October 15, 2021, https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil .org /research /guide -title -42-expulsions -border. On broader responses to the pandemic, see chapter 27, by Jason Ludwig and Rebecca Slayton, in this volume. Politico first reported on Koh’s memo, along with access to the document, on October  4, 2021: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/04/top-state-adviser-leaves-post -title-42-515029. His memo circulated just days after the special envoy to Haiti, Daniel Foote, resigned in protest over deportations; the journalist Yamiche Alcindor first reported his resignation on Twitter (September 23, 2021), with a copy of the resignation letter: https://twitter.com/Yamiche/status/1441004994694631428. Audie Klotz, “Migration,” in The Oxford Handbook of International Security, ed. Alexandra Gheciu and William Wohlforth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), chap. 30. On the intersection of domestic racism and foreign policy, see chapter 4, by Deborah Avant, in this volume. Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015). See also chapter 2, by Michael N. Barnett, and chapter 28, by Nivi Manchanda, in this volume. Christopher Lasch, “The Anti-Imperialists, the Philippines, and the Inequality of Man,” Journal of Southern History 24, no. 3 (1958): 319–31; Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019); and Richard Maass, The Picky Eagle: How Democracy and Xenophobia Limited U.S. Territorial Expansion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020). For an account that stresses the racial-equality clause as a direct response to discrimination against Japanese migration, see Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Despite the invocation of treaties affirming sovereignty, the Iroquois, too, were summarily dismissed: Yale Belanger, “The Six Nations of Grand River Territory’s Attempts at Renewing International Political Relationships, 1921–1924,” Canadian Foreign Policy Journal 13, no. 3 (2007): 29–43; Mark Pearcey, “Sovereignty, Identity, and IndigenousState Relations at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century: A Case of Exclusion by Inclusion,” International Studies Review 17, no. 3 (2015): 441–54. Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics, provides a few examples (4, 75), but variations of this phrase pervade textbooks as well as writing on democratic peace. For a less U.S.-centric yet similar view, see Vineet Thakur and Peter Vale, South Africa, Race, and the Making of International Relations (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), 32–34.

CHAPTER 30

THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY, THE QUESTION OF PALESTINE, AND BIDEN’S BUSINESS AS USUAL A . D I R K M OS E S A N D V I C TO R K AT TA N

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sraelis and Palestinians have both suffered greatly from their longstanding and seemingly interminable conflict,” begins Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People, the Trump administration’s 181-page policy document on the subject, informally called “The Deal of the Century.”1 To resolve the conflict, it identified and proposed to solve two problems: the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians and that between Israel and the Muslim world. The latter solution manifested itself in the so-called Abraham Accords: bilateral economic, cultural, and trade agreements establishing diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, and Morocco, which were signed in 2020.2 As Charles S. Maier aptly puts it in chapter 42, the agreement represents “a latter-day Holy Alliance sanctimoniously named for the spiritual ancestor of the three monotheistic faiths.” The “Deal of the Century” offered what it called a “realistic two-state solution,” meaning that Palestinian self-government was limited by “Israeli security responsibility and Israeli control of the airspace west of the Jordan River.” Although referring to a “Palestinian state,” the document acknowledged that the state would lack “certain sovereign powers.” In the place of actual sovereignty, it proposed a three-pronged “Trump Economic Plan.” The Biden administration’s posture to President Donald Trump’s innovations reveals the deeper continuities of U.S. policies. At the time of writing, September 6, 2022, the Biden administration has accepted and indeed seeks to expand the Abraham Accords by courting Indonesia. By contrast, for all the

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criticism that President Joe Biden received in seeming to indulge Israeli aims in its bombing of Gaza between May 10 and 19, 2021, and between August 5 and 7, 2022, it is easy to imagine a Trump administration actively encouraging them. However, this continuity is hardly a return to an “honest broker” position that some in Washington like to imagine for the United States. Despite the death toll, the Biden administration refrained from criticism of Israel’s bombing of Gaza, its institutionalized system of racial discrimination, and increasing settler-colonial violence, notwithstanding expressions of concern about “violence in Jerusalem.”3 If, like any president, Biden’s room for maneuver is limited by domestic and international considerations, they are largely the same ones faced by Trump. Did Trump’s style conceal continuities of substance, as Nivi Manchanda and Audie Klotz argue in their chapters? Because any peculiarities of the Trump administration’s policy on Palestine and Israel can only be discerned in light of U.S. policy since he left office in January  2021, it is necessary to attend briefly here to the Biden presidency. Dramatic events that have unfolded under Biden’s watch allow some perspective on both presidencies. In particular, the asymmetric exchange of missiles between Hamas in Gaza and Israel in May 2021 and August 2022 has its roots in the expansionist Israeli policies in Jerusalem and the West Bank that were greenlit by the Trump administration and that the Biden administration has not rolled back. In not doing so, it is adhering to long-set patterns of U.S. foreign policy.

The Foreign Policy of the Trump Presidency Toward Palestine From the time of Ronald Reagan’s administration, successive Republican presidents, buoyed by Evangelical Christian support from the Bible Belt and the appointment of prominent neoconservatives to government positions, took overtly and unabashed pro-Israel points of view in matters of foreign policy toward the Israel-Palestine dispute. That said, no other Republican president aligned himself with the Israeli right wing to the same extent that Trump did. To placate his Evangelical electoral base and his financial backers (which included the late casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson), Trump promised to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.4 These partisans of “Greater Israel” both sought U.S. backing for Israeli politicians who fostered settlements in, and annexation of, Palestinian territory while making Jerusalem the “eternal capital” of Israel. As Christian Zionists, many Evangelicals believe that God gave the land to “the Jews” as an irrevocable gift that cannot be vitiated by Palestinians, despite the fact that they have long lived there and formed a majority of 90 percent of the population over a century ago.5 Moreover, they believe that biblical prophecy will be realized when

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Jews converge in the Holy Land and rebuild the Second Temple (thus destroying the Dome of the Rock mosque), thereby inaugurating Christ’s “Second Coming,” the mass conversion of Jews (and the destruction of those who do not convert), and his thousand-year reign.6 In doing so, Evangelicals ignore the centuries-long presence of Palestinian Christians who naturally do not subscribe to their doomsday eschatology. When in power, Trump broke precedent and moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, despite warnings from King Abdullah II of Jordan and other Arab leaders not to do so. As Trump boasted: “We moved the capital of Israel to Jerusalem,” before adding, “that’s for the evangelicals.”7 Again breaking precedent, the evangelical secretary of state, Michael Pompeo, visited the Israeli settlement of Psagot in November 2020, marking the first visit by a senior U.S. diplomatic official to one of the settlements, which are illegal under international law.8 A year earlier, he had claimed that the settlements did not violate international law after all, reversing decades of settled State Department policy on the subject.9 Consistent with this posture, the “Deal of the Century” endorsed the annexation of the Jordan Valley and other parts of Area C, which amount to 61 percent of the West Bank, cantonizing Palestinian zones into disconnected parts. It mooted the idea of stripping Israeli citizenship from the Arab citizens of Israel who resided in the so-called Triangle, and it was unclear as to whether Israeli citizenship would be offered to Palestinians who inhabit the areas that would be annexed to Israel.10 In short, the plan endorsed the establishment of what looked to many observers like an apartheid Bantustan.11 The apartheid issue confronted the Biden administration, as we will discuss in what follows. This was not all. Consistent with Israeli policy, in November 2020 the Trump administration resolved to support the controversial “working definition of antisemitism” of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in moving to ban the funding of organizations that support the Palestinian global boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. Under the Trump administration, diplomatic relations with the Palestinians came to a complete standstill. It withdrew funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA)12 and closed the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) mission in Washington.13 The “Deal of the Century” was a far cry from what any Palestinian leader could have accepted and was far removed from previous proposals to resolve the conflict endorsed in United Nations’ resolutions. Since their establishment in the late 1980s, U.S.Palestinian relations had never been worse.14

What the Biden Administration Has (Not) Said and Done So Far Does the Biden administration differ from Trump’s both in style and substance? Certainly, the tone has changed. Secretary of State Antony Blinken soon

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confirmed that the Biden administration would restore ties with the Palestinian Authority, which were hardly cordial under the Trump administration; resume aid; and reject unilateral actions, such as construction of Israeli settlements on occupied territory.15 However, during the clash between Israel and Hamas, the Biden administration sounded eerily similar to previous Republican and Democratic administrations in mouthing platitudes about Israel’s inherent right of self-defense from rocket fire from Gaza while ignoring its enabling context: Israel’s more-than-half-century annexation of Jerusalem and attempts to reduce its Palestinian population by various measures, the occupation of the West Bank and the occupation and blockade of Gaza, and increasing settler violence against Palestinians both in the West Bank and in the so-called mixed cities. To date, Biden has indicated that he will not be returning the U.S. embassy to Tel Aviv, even though very few American allies have moved their embassies to Jerusalem, out of respect for the special regime enshrined in UN General Assembly resolution 181 of 1947, which Israel had itself acknowledged for seventy years by recognizing the status accorded to the consulates that form the Consular Corp of the Corpus Separatum.16 The Biden administration has also condemned the investigation by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) into crimes committed in the West Bank and Gaza.17 To be sure, Biden’s opposition to the ICC investigation is a continuation of longstanding U.S. opposition to that court by previous Democratic and Republican administrations. The recognition of Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights by the Trump administration was another attempt to legitimize a situation that was brought about by a violation of international law. When questioned on CNN as to whether the Biden administration would reverse Trump’s blessing of the annexation, Blinken stopped short of endorsing the move, given legal considerations.18 But he did not say that he would reverse it. Intriguingly, the Biden administration has welcomed the Abraham Accords, but it is unclear how the accords will lead to a resumption of talks between Israel and the Palestinians, given their association with the much discredited “Deal of the Century.” Morocco’s recognition of Israel came in exchange for the Trump administration’s recognition of Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara.19 This quid pro quo was explicitly mentioned in Morocco’s acceptance of the Abraham Accords.20 This was yet another attempt by the Trump administration to legitimize an illegal act in international law, and again, it remains unclear whether the Biden administration will reverse this decision. Beyond domestic Israeli and Palestinian politics, the Biden administration’s policies toward Palestine could also be shaped by the officials it appoints to government positions. These include Hady Amr, deputy assistant secretary for Israeli-Palestinian Affairs; Robert Malley, the U.S. envoy to Iran; Maher Bitar, senior director for intelligence programs at the National Security Council;

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Reema Dodin, deputy director of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs; and Dana Shubat, senior legislative affairs adviser at the White House.21 It is clear that the new administration will seek to work with the Palestinian Authority, which is a welcome development after the hostility displayed toward Palestinian national aspirations by the Trump administration. Taken as a whole, however, the Biden administration’s Palestine policy indicates a “business as usual” approach of familiar, patterned responses.

Back to Business as Usual For all these differences between the Trump presidency and those of Obama and Biden, then, questions of substance and form remain because of significant areas of ideological and policy convergence. The nonpartisanship on Israel that obtained before Obama’s election has returned in the joint opposition of the Republican and Democratic parties to the ICC investigation.22 What is more, Democratic politicians have also been active in clamping down on First Amendment protections of Americans who support BDS by supporting laws that penalize businesses that decline to trade with Israeli businesses in the illegally occupied West Bank.23 Major donors to the Democratic Party formed “The Democratic Majority for Israel” in January 2019 to resist rare leftist efforts to pressure Israel on settlements, so far to great effect.24 Blinken is well known for having organized the congressional underwriting of arms deliveries to Israel in the last Gaza conflagration in 2014.25 In the middle of the latest Israeli bombing of Gaza, the Biden administration announced its approval of $735 million of precision-guided weapons to Israel, which were also supported by Democratic and Republican leaders of the congressional foreign affairs committees that review such sales.26 Blinken was also quick to condemn BDS: “Will we stand up forcefully against it and try to prevent it, defuse it and defeat it? Absolutely,” he told listeners in March 2020.27 A year later, responding to the American Zionist Movement (AZM), he wrote, “As the stepson of a Holocaust survivor,” he would oppose “bigotry, intolerance and those who seek to undermine democracy.”28 Accordingly, Blinken signaled his support for the IHRA’s working definition of antisemitism despite the opposition of liberal Jewish organizations like J Street, Americans for Peace Now, and the New Israel Fund, thereby aligning the Biden presidency with the establishment Israeli advocacy organizations and the policies of the Trump administration.29 On April 27, 2021, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released an explosive 213page report, “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution.” So far, the Department of State has not issued a considered response. In the interim, the White House signaled its disagreement with

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the report’s findings, although in relatively mild language.30 The report finds that “Israeli authorities have deprived millions of people of their basic rights by virtue of their identity as Palestinians.” HRW claims that in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, “movement restrictions, land expropriation, forcible transfer, denial of residency and nationality, and the mass suspension of civil rights constitute ‘inhuman[e] acts’ set out under the Apartheid Convention and the Rome Statute.”31 The report also includes an analysis of the status and treatment of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, in part because the Basic Law: Israel—The Nation-State of the Jewish People (“Nation-State Law”), passed in 2018, dispenses with the idea of equality between citizens. Pro-Israel advocates are confident that Israel and its supporters can see off the report and hope the apartheid claim goes away.32 After all, it is not new, and such controversies have come and gone in the past. Yet given the treatment of the HRW report in the New York Times and Washington Post, the publication of a similar report by Amnesty International in February 2022,33 and the support of progressive Jewish organizations, it might not fade.34 The Israeli human rights nongovernmental organizations Yesh Din and B’Tselem had previously accused Israel of implementing apartheid policies, and even the former CIA director John Brennan signaled his displeasure with U.S. policy in an editorial in the New York Times.35 The 2021 Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza similarly split Jewish organizations and led progressive Democrats to protest the Biden administration’s tepid response to the gross disparity in civilian casualties—more than twenty times more Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, more than half of whom are civilians, including sixty-six children.36 In the UN Security Council, the administration repeatedly scuppered moves for a ceasefire statement, causing dismay among American liberals who had hoped that the administration’s declaration about its values-led (that is, human rights–based) foreign policy would extend to the “Question of Palestine.” Pressure mounted from within. On May 14, 2021, Democratic senator Edward J. Markey of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee called for a ceasefire. While condemning Hamas, he observed the causal connections: “There is no question that actions in Israel over the last few weeks, including attempts to forcibly remove Palestinians living in Sheikh Jarrah, as well as a violent raid by Israeli authorities on al-Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan, were wrong and have led to this current crisis.”37 Increasingly, sections of the U.S. media are registering the structural inequality and lived reality endured by Palestinians, meaning that returning to the status quo is increasingly viewed as untenable. As Sarah Leah Whitson from the Democracy in the Middle East Now (DAWN) research organization has observed, words like “apartheid,” “land theft,” and “ethnic cleansing” have entered the mainstream conversation.38 Following the brutal police killing of George Floyd, Biden publicly aligned himself with Black Lives Matter. In so

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doing, he will have difficulty disassociating Israeli police brutality against Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinian ID holders in Jerusalem from the mistreatment leveled by American officers against Black Americans, which increasing numbers of Democratic congressmen are linking. As Representative Jamaal Bowman, a freshman Democrat from New York who unseated longtime Democratic representative Eliot L. Engel, a staunch Israel defender, put it: “As a Black man in America, I understand on a personal level what it means to live in a society designed to perpetuate violence against people who look like me. . . . My experience of systemic injustice, including being beaten by police at 11 years old, informs my view of what’s happening right now in Israel and Palestine.”39 Responding to internal party disquiet, Biden announced on May 17, 2021, that he would be supporting a ceasefire after all, making apparently ever-firmer calls to Netanyahu. Biden is a proponent of “quiet diplomacy,” eschewing the application of public pressure for the “reassuring arm” around his Israeli counterpart.40 For others, it appeared that Biden was appearing virtually as a supplicant rather than the leader of a superpower who was addressing a client state that benefits from $3.8 million of U.S. aid annually. This intimacy was on full display in the U.S. support of the preemptive—meaning unprovoked—Israeli bombing of Gaza between August 5 and 7, 2022, which killed seventeen Palestinian children. Israeli forces falsely attributed the killing of five of these children in a single instance to misdirected Islamic Jihad rockets but later admitted responsibility.41 In response, Biden issued this statement that made plain U.S. policy: My support for Israel’s security is long-standing and unwavering—including its right to defend itself against attacks. Over these recent days, Israel has defended its people from indiscriminate rocket attacks launched by the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the United States is proud of our support for Israel’s Iron-Dome, which intercepted hundreds of rockets and saved countless lives. I commend Prime Minister Yair Lapid and his government’s steady leadership throughout the crisis. The reports of civilian casualties in Gaza are a tragedy, whether by Israeli strikes against Islamic Jihad positions or the dozens of Islamic Jihad rockets that reportedly fell inside Gaza. My Administration supports a timely and thorough investigation into all of these reports, and we also call on all parties to fully implement the ceasefire, and to ensure fuel and humanitarian supplies are flowing into Gaza as the fighting subsides.42

The signs are, then, that things are moving back to business as usual: consider the U.S. “ironclad commitment to Israel’s security,” as Blinken put it a day after Biden’s declaration, coupled with the occasional disapproval of Israeli policies

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that are only voiced when they affect American citizens or are difficult to justify to Western publics.43 Consequently, the United States merely demanded an explanation when on October 19, 2021, Israel’s defense minister Benny Gantz designated six leading Palestinian human rights and civil society groups as “terrorist organizations” under Israel’s domestic Counter-Terrorism (Anti-Terror) Law (2016). Although Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, signaled her support for the human rights organizations in a tweet, this hardly constituted a deterring rebuke in view of the designation’s gravity.44 The condemned groups include al-Haq, a leading Palestinian human rights organization, and the Palestine section of Defence for Children International, a prominent international NGO that has been promoting and protecting children’s rights for thirty-five years. (In accusing Israel of the crime of apartheid, the HRW Report cited accounts by al-Haq and Defence for Children International.) Nine European states and the United States ultimately rejected the Israeli claims and continued working with the NGOs. When Israeli authorities again shut down these organizations (and another, for seven in total) as “terrorist” in a series of raids in August 2022, European states issued a statement saying they were “not acceptable.” By contrast, American authorities in the State Department said that they were “concerned” and requested more information, which they ultimately regarded as insufficient.45 No one apart from partisans for the current Israeli government takes seriously its claims about the “terror designation” accorded these Palestinian NGOs. As in other instances, some Democrats called for greater U.S. action and, with progressive Jewish organizations, also demanded the Biden administration do more to press the Israelis on the murder of the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. After sustained international publicity and, apparently, behind-the-scenes U.S. pressure, Israeli authorities eventually admitted it was “highly probable” that an IDF soldier shot her in a case of mistaken identity.46 As one Israeli commentator observed when the Israeli report was released on September 5, 2022, “It is likely that if Abu Akleh had not been American then this chain of events including the admission that Israel was likely responsible would not have occurred.”47 The United States immediately greeted the report, which followed its own public determination in early July that Israeli forces were probably responsible for the shooting, thereby foreshadowing the Israelis in arguing that the killing was unintentional. “We welcome Israel’s review of this tragic incident,” declared the State Department official on the same day, “and again underscore the importance of accountability in this case, such as policies and procedures to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future.”48 In fact, there had been little accountability: no charges were laid, although it is highly improbable that the shooting of a clearly marked journalist

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wearing a protective vest and helmet was anything other than a precision headshot. U.S. senator Chris van Hollen challenged the Israeli report on Twitter, saying “The crux of the ‘defense’ in this IDF report is that a soldier was ‘returning fire’ from militants. But investigations @NYTimes @AP @CNN @ washingtonpost & @UN found no such firing at the time. This underscores need for independent U.S. inquiry into this American journalist’s death.”49 Now that the Israeli investigation has concluded, the American authorities could claim that no further pressure was necessary and put the incident behind them. Abu Akleh’s family called the American statement “totally unacceptable” and “an affront to justice that enabled Israel to avoid accountability for Shireen’s murder.”50 On a few occasions, the Biden administration signaled displeasure with the short-lived Israeli Bennett-led and then Yair Lapid–led government. While there are well-known differences on Iran policy and empty warnings about settlement expansion, the U.S. State Department included extensive detail on settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank in its annual terrorism report and sanctioned Israeli Pegasus spyware companies, while reportedly considering reestablishing its consulate in Jerusalem.51 However, these actions would not amount to a realignment of basic U.S.-Israel policy settings. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, the infrastructure of those settings includes intense Christian Zionist activism. If anything, those efforts are being redoubled as others on the left succeed in raising doubts about the future of human rights in Israel.52 As the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported: “Officials of the Biden and Bennett governments are endeavoring to keep any bickering behind closed doors, wishing to avoid the open confrontations that marked the 12 years that Benjamin Netanyahu was prime minister.”53 More recently, in early September 2022, the United States disapproved of Israeli plans to more heavily regulate foreign visitors to the West Bank, including those who had informal “love” relationships with Palestinians, because it would affect U.S. citizens, leading to some Israeli concessions.54 Over all, U.S. support for Palestinians is limited to the humanitarian but not the political sphere.55 Plus ça change.

Conclusion We began by speculating that Trump would have actively and enthusiastically encouraged Israel’s bombing of Gaza and the crackdown on Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank, with the implication of further civilian death and infrastructure destruction. In doing so, however, it is important to recall that the conflict with Hamas in Gaza, in 2014, which lasted about five times longer and caused tenfold Palestinian deaths, occurred during the Obama presidency. The signs are that, notwithstanding a minor revolt by some progressive

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Democrats, the Biden administration’s answer to the “Question of Palestine” will be much the same as those of previous U.S. administrations. With its attention trained on Russia and China and with lukewarm support for the Palestinians in the Arab world, U.S. leaders are not prepared to rock the boat with Tel Aviv even if it disapproves of much Israeli policy.56 Yet, cleaving to the two-state idea as envisaged in the 1993 Declaration of Principles, when the Israeli government plainly disregards it and when many others have long noted its practical impossibility, enables settlement expansion and de facto annexation.57 At the same time, the violence against Palestinians in all territories controlled by Israel makes a shared future vision in a single state difficult to imagine.58 Following a long-set pattern, the Biden administration has done nothing to compel Israel to withdraw from the territories that it occupied in the June 1967 war, still less repeal the Nation-State Law, although in contrast to the Trump administration, Biden has condemned Israel’s settlement activity, to be sure in mild language and without material consequences.59 But if the two-state solution remains the preferred solution for the “international community,” then the Biden administration’s refusal to rein in Israeli expansionism that goes beyond issuing empty words will surely signal its official demise.

Notes 1. The White House, Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People, January 2020, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content /uploads/2020/01/Peace-to-Prosperity-0120.pdf. 2. Department of State, “The Abraham Accords Declaration,” https://www.state.gov/the -abraham-accords/. The countries are listed in the order they signed. Unlike the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco, Sudan did not establish official diplomatic relations with Israel. See their carefully worded statement on the Abraham Accords: https://www.state.gov /wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Sudan-AA.pdf. 3. Department of State, “Violence in Jerusalem,” May 7, 2021, https://www.state.gov /violence-in-jerusalem/. 4. Jeremy H. Peters, “Sheldon Adelson Sees a Lot to Like in Trump’s Washington,” New York Times, September  22, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com /2018/09/22/us/politics /adelson-trump-republican-donor.html; Joshua Mitick, “Dead Men Don’t Testify,” Foreign Policy, February  8, 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/08/dead-men-dont -testify/; “Jewish Orgs. Hold Memorial Marking End of Sheldon Adelson’s Shiva,” Jerusalem Post, January  24, 2021, https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/jewish-orgs-hold -memorial-marking-end-of-sheldon-adelsons-shiva-656489. 5. When the British Empire issued its Balfour Declaration on November 2, 1917, the Jewish population of Palestine, mostly non-Zionist and Arabic speaking, formed 93 percent of the population. See Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate (New York: Columbia University Press 1990), table 2.2, 26. 6. Mairav Zonszein, “Christian Zionist Philo-Semitism Is Driving Trump’s Israel Policy,” Washington Post, January 28, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com /outlook

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/2020/01/28/trump-thinks-supporting-israel-means-letting-it-do-whatever-it-wants /; Samuel Goldman, God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); Stephen Spector, Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Gershom Gorenberg, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Graig Graziosi, “Why Is Jerusalem So Important to American Evangelical Christians?,” Independent, August 18, 2020, https://www.independent.co.uk /news/world/americas /us -politics /jerusalem -history- explained -religion - evangelical - christians - donald -trump-a9676756.html. Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Advisory Opinion, ICJ Reports 2004, 136 at 184, para. 120, https://www.icj-cij.org /public/files/case-related/131/131-20040709-ADV-01-00-EN.pdf. The Trump administration did not publish the legal justification for Israel’s settlement policy. The consistent view of the State Department from 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank, until November 2019, when Mike Pompeo said that settlements were “not per se inconsistent with international law,” was that the establishment of settlements violated article 49, paragraph 5, of the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949). See Victor Kattan, “Israeli Settlements, US Foreign Policy, and International Law,” Insight Turkey 22, no. 1 (2020): 47–57, https://www.insightturkey.com /commentary/israeli -settlements-us-foreign-policy-and-international-law. See Victor Kattan and Andrew Dahdal, “As Israel Moves to Annex West Bank Territory, How Will International Community Respond?,” South China Morning Post, April 30, 2020, https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3082216/israel-moves -annex-west-bank-territory-how-will-international. See the comments by a former Israeli ambassador to South Africa: Alon Liel, “Trump’s Plan for Palestine Looks a Lot Like Apartheid,” Foreign Policy, February 27, 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com /2020 /02 /27/trumps -plan -for-palestine -looks -a -lot-like -apartheid/. See also the comments of the veteran Arab diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, in Randa Takieddine, “ ‘Palestinians Have to Work and Fight Together,’ Middle East’s Elder Statesman Lakhdar Brahimi Tells Arab News,” Arab News, January 30, 2020, https://www.arabnews.com/node/1620146/middle-east. Hady Amr, “In One Move, Trump Eliminated US Funding for UNRWA and the US Role as Mideast Peacemaker,” Brookings Institution, September 7, 2018, https://www .brookings .edu / blog /order-from-chaos/2018/09/07/in-one-move-trump -eliminated -us-funding-for-unrwa-and-the-us-role-as-mideast-peacemaker/. Carol Morello and Ruth Eglash, “PLO Mission in Washington is a Ghost of an Office 2 Weeks Before Closing,” Washington Post, September  21, 2018, https://www .washingtonpost .com /world /national - security /plo -mission -in -washington -is - a -ghost- of-an - office -2 -weeks -before - closing /2018 /09 /21 /dba01b18 -bdad -11e8 -be70 -52bd11fe18af_ story.html. Unofficial U.S. contacts with the PLO predate the 1980s, but it only became official after the Palestinians indicated their willingness in 1988 to recognize Israel, abandon armed struggle, and accept UN Security Council resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973) as a basis for negotiating a lasting peace. For early U.S. contacts with the PLO, which date to the 1970s when the PLO provided security to help 263 American citizens flee Lebanon’s civil war, see Kai Bird, The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (New York: Broadway Books, 2014), 176–77. According to Bird, Kissinger’s first overture to the PLO was in 1973, when the CIA established contact.

Trump, Palestine, Biden 343 15. “Blinken Stops Short of Endorsing Trump Recognition of Golan Heights as Israel,” Reuters, February  28, 2021, https://www.reuters.com /article/us-usa-israel-blinken -idUSKBN2A82N5. 16. Only the United States and Guatemala have moved their embassies to Jerusalem. “Why Have More Countries Not Moved Their Embassies to Jerusalem,” Jerusalem Post, July 28, 2019, https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/why-have-more-countries-not-moved -their-embassies-to-jerusalem-report-596969. 17. See Statement of ICC Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, respecting an investigation of the Situation in Palestine, March 3, 2021, https://www.icc-cpi.int/Pages/item.aspx?name = 210303-prosecutor-statement-investigation-palestine. For the U.S. reaction: Laura Kelly, “Biden Admin: International Criminal Court ‘Unfairly’ Targeting Israel,” The Hill, March 3, 2021, https://thehill.com/policy/international/541480-biden-state-depart ment-international-criminal-court-unfairly-targeting-israel-probe. 18. “Blinken Stops Short of Endorsing Trump Recognition of Golan Heights as Israel.” 19. Nicholas Niarkos, “How Biden Can Ease Tensions That Trump Stoked in Western Sahara,” New Yorker, February  10, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com /news/daily -comment/how-biden-can-ease-tensions-that-trump-stoked-in-the-western-sahara. 20. See Joint Declaration: the Kingdom of Morocco, the United States of America, and the State of Israel, December 22, 2020, https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021 /01/Joint-Declaration-US-Morrocco-Israel.pdf. 21. “Biden Appoints Palestinian-American as Senior Intelligence Director,” Middle East Monitor, January  25, 2021, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com /20210125-biden -appoints-palestinian-american-as-senior-intelligence-director/. 22. Yonah Jeremy Bob and Lahav Harkov, “ICC Prosecutor Announces Formal Investigation Into Israeli ‘War Crimes,’ ” Jerusalem Post, March 3, 2021, https://www.jpost .com / breaking-news /icc -prosecutor-announces -formal -investigation -into -israeli -war-crimes-660818. 23. Chistina Marcos, “House Passes Bill Opposing BDS, Exposing Divide Among Democrats,” The Hill, July  23, 2019, https://thehill.com / homenews/ house/454399-house -passes-bill-opposing-bds-exposing-democratic-divides; “US: States Use Anti-Boycott Laws to Punish Responsible Businesses,” Human Rights Watch, April 23, 2019, https:// www.hrw.org /news/2019/04 /23/us-states-use-anti-boycott-laws-punish-responsible -businesses. 24. Democratic Majority for Israel, https://demmajorityforisrael.org /; Daniel Marans, “Pro-Israel Democrats Coach Presidential Candidates on Handling Left-Leaning Activists,” Huffington Post, July 10, 2019, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/democratic -majority-for-israel-memo -attacks -if-not-now-left-leaning-jewish-group_ n _ 5d264 9c2e4b0cfb596000899. 25. Jacob Magid, “In Tapping Blinken Biden Will be Served by Confidant with Deep Jewish Roots,” Times of Israel, November 20, 2020, https://www.timesofisrael.com /in -tapping-blinken-biden-will-be-served-by-confidante-with-deep-jewish-roots/. 26. Patricia Zengerle, “Biden Administration Approved $735 Million Arms Sale to Israel,” Reuters, May  17, 2021, https://www.reuters.com / business/aerospace-defense/ biden -administration-approved-735-million-arms-sale-israel-sources-2021-05-17/. 27. Jacob Kornbluh, “Tony Blinken’s Biden Spiel,” Jewish Insider, October 28, 2020, https:// jewishinsider.com/2020/10/tony-blinkens-biden-spiel; Ali Harb, “Biden Will Not Condition Aid to Israel ‘Period, Full Stop,’ Campaign Adviser Says,” Middle East Eye, May 18, 2020, https://www.middleeasteye.net /news/us-election-2020-joe-biden-will -not-condition-aid-israel-campaign-adviser-says.

344 TH E E X PA N D I N G M E A N I N G O F I N T ERNAT IO NAL S EC URIT Y 28. Omri Nahmias, “Blinken: US ‘Enthusiastically Embraces’ IHRA Definition of Antisemitism,” Jerusalem Post, March 3, 2021, https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism / blinken-us-enthusiastically-embraces-ihra-definition-of-antisemitism-660768. Blinken’s stepfather was Samuel Pisar (1929–2015), a prominent international lawyer who cofounded Yad Vashem-France and was active in Holocaust education: “A Tribute to Dr.  Samuel Pisar,” Yad Vashem, https://www.yadvashem.org/friends/recent -events-and-visits/pisar-tribute.html. 29. Melissa Weiss, “Biden Admin ‘Enthusiastically Embraces’ Full IHRA Definition of Antisemitism,” Jewish Insider, March 1, 2021, https://jewishinsider.com/2021/03/tony -blinken-biden-ihra-definition-antisemitism/. 30. Human Rights Watch, “A Threshold Crossed Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution,” April 27, 2021, https://www.hrw.org /sites/default /files /media _2021/04/israel _palestine0421_web_0.pdf; “US Rejects Human Rights Watch’s Accusation of Israeli ‘Apartheid,’ ” Times of Israel, 29, April 2021, https://www.time sofisrael.com/us-rejects-human-rights-watchs-accusation-of-israeli-apartheid; Omar Shakir in conversation with Peter Beinart, Zoom meeting hosted by Jewish Currents, April 30, 2021. 31. Human Rights Watch, “A Threshold Crossed Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution,” 203. 32. Herb Keinon, “The HRW Apartheid Report: Does It Matter?—Analysis,” Jerusalem Post, April 27, 2021, https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/the-hrw-apartheid-report-does -it-matter-analysis-666521. 33. Amnesty International, “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: A Cruel System of Domination and a Crime Against Humanity,” February 1, 2022, https://www.amnesty .org /en / latest /news/2022 /02 /israels -apartheid-against-palestinians -a-cruel-system -of-domination-and-a-crime-against-humanity/. 34. Patrick Kingsley, “Rights Group Hits Israel with Explosive Charge: Apartheid,” New York Times, April 27, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com /2021 /04 /27/world /middleeast /israel-apartheid-palestinians-hrw.html; Ishan Tharoor, “Israel Is Committing the Crime of Apartheid, New Report Says,” Washington Post, April 27, 2021, https://www .washingtonpost.com//world/2021/04/27/israel-report-apartheid/. 35. Yesh Din, “The Occupation of the West Bank and the Crime of Apartheid: Legal Opinion,” July 9, 2020, https://www.yesh-din.org/en/the-occupation-of-the-west-bank -and-the-crime-of-apartheid-legal-opinion/; B’Tselem, “A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This Is Apartheid,” January 12, 2021, https://www.btselem.org /publications/fulltext/202101 _this _is _ apartheid; John Brennan, “Why Biden Must Watch This Palestinian Movie,” New York Times, April 27, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/opinion/biden-palestine-israel-the-present .html. 36. “Biden Administration Must Change Course, Take Stronger Action to Secure Immediate Ceasefire and Address Root Causes of Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” J Street, May  17, 2021, https://jstreet .org /press-releases/ biden-administration-must-change - course -take - stronger - action -to - secure -immediate - ceasefire - and - address -root -causes-of-israeli-palestinian-conflict /#.YKLQo-spD_ R; Bernie Sanders, “The U.S. Must Stop Being an Apologist for the Netanyahu Government,” New York Times, May  14, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com /2021 /05/14 /opinion / bernie-sanders-israel -palestine-gaza.html. 37. “Senator Edward J. Markey Statement on Escalating Crisis in Israel and the Palestinian Territories,” May 14, 2021, https://www.markey.senate.gov/news/press-releases

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/senator -markey - statement - on - escalating - crisis -in -israel - and -the -palestinian -territories. Sarah Leah Whitson, “The Israel-Palestine Narrative Has Evolved: How Words Like ‘Apartheid,’ ‘Land Theft,’ and ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ Have Entered the Mainstream Conversation,” Prospect, May 18, 2021, https://prospect.org/world/israel-palestine-narrative -has-evolved/. Sean Sullivan and Cleve R. Wootson Jr., “ ‘From Ferguson to Palestine’: How Black Lives Matter Changed the U.S. Debate on the Mideast,” Washington Post, May 22, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/gaza-violence-blm-democrats/2021/05/22 /38a6186e-b980-11eb-a6b1-81296da0339b_ story.html. “Diplomat Discusses Next Steps for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” NPR, May 22, 2021, https://www.npr.org /2021/05/22/999491556/diplomat-discusses-next-steps-for-israeli -palestinian-conflict. Patrick Kingsley, “Israel Strikes Gaza as Tensions Rise,” New York Times, August 5, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/ live/2022/08/05/world /israel-gaza-airstrikes; Office for the High Commissioner of Human Rights, “Bachelet Alarmed by Number of Palestinian Children Killed in Latest Escalation, Urges Accountability,” August 11, 2022, https:// www . ohchr . org /en / press - releases /2022 /08 / bachelet - alarmed -number -palestinian-children-killed-latest-escalation-urges; “Israel Carried Out Gaza Strike That Killed 5 Children, Report Says,” PBS, August  16, 2022, https://www.pbs.org /newshour/world/israel-carried-out-gaza-strike-that-killed-5-children-report-says. “Statement by President Biden on the Ceasefire in Gaza, 7 August 2022,” https://www .whitehouse . gov / briefing -room /statements -releases /2022 /08 /07 /statement - by -president-biden-on-the-ceasefire-in-gaza/. Antony  J. Blinken, “Welcoming the Ceasefire Agreement in Gaza and Israel, 8 August 2022”: “The United States remains dedicated to our ironclad commitment to Israel’s security and will remain fully engaged in the days ahead to promote calm.” Harriet Sherwood, “Israel Labels Palestinian Human Rights Groups as Terrorist Organisations,” Guardian, October 22, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com /world /2021 /oct /22 /israel-labels-palestinian-human-rights-groups-terrorist-organisations; Jacob Magid, “In Rebuke, US Demands Israel Explain Terror Listing for Palestinian NGOs,” Times of Israel, October 24, 2021, https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-rebuke-us -demands-israel-explain-terror-listing-for-palestinian-ngos/; Ron Kampeas, “Is the Biden-Bennett Honeymoon Over?,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, December 2, 2021, https://www.jta .org /2021/12/02/politics/is-the-biden-bennett-honeymoon-over-here -are-6-us-israel-issues-that-are-raising-tensions. Hagar Shezaf, “ ‘Not Acceptable’: Nine European States Slam Israeli Raids of Palestinian NGOs,” Ha’aretz, August  20, 2022, https://www.haaretz .com /world-news /europe/2022-08-20/ty-article/.premium /nine-eu-states-slam-israeli-raids-of-pales tinian-ngos/00000182-bbb4-dc1b-a197-bbfd42de0000; “US Lawmakers Denounce Blacklisting of Palestinian NGOs by Israel,” Al Jazeera, July  18, 2022, https://www .aljazeera .com /news/2022/7/18/us-lawmakers-denounce-blacklisting-of-palestinian -ngos-by-israel; Roman Meitev, “Israel Shuts Down 7 Offices of Orgs. in W. Bank Designated ‘Terrorist,’ ” Jerusalem Post, August  18, 2022, https://www.jpost.com / breaking-news/article-714975; Jacob Majid, “US Says Concerned by Israel’s Raid on Palestinian NGOs, Not Convinced by Prior Intel,” Times of Israel, August 19, 2022, https://www.timesofisrael .com /us -says -concerned-by-israels -raid- on-palestinian -ngos-not-convinced-by-prior-intel/; Ben Samuels, “U.S. Says Israeli Info on Palestinian NGOs Not Enough, ‘Concerned’ Over Raids,” Ha’aretz, August  18, 2022,

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47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

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53. 54.

55.

56.

57.

58.

https://www.haaretz .com /us-news/2022-08-18/ty-article/.highlight /u-s-says-israeli -info -on-palestinian-ngos-not-enough-concerned-over-raids/00000182-b234-d1ed -a38e-f6ffb4730000. “J Street Welcomes Strong Senate Call for US Investigation Into Abu Akleh Killing June  23, 2022,” J Street, https://jstreet.org /press-releases/j-street-welcomes-strong -senate-call-for-us-investigation-into-abu-akleh-killing/#.YxONovHMLPY; Ben Samuels, “Behind the Scenes U.S. Pushed Israel on Abu Akleh Probe,” Ha’aretz, September 5, 2022, https://www.haaretz .com /us-news/2022- 09- 05/ty-article/.premium / behind -the-scenes -u-s-pushed-israel-on-abu-akleh-probe/00000183– 0db0 -da56 -a9ef-4df 60b2c0000. Seth Frantzman, “What Must Israel Learn from Abu Akleh Killing?—Analysis,” Jerusalem Post, September 5, 2022, https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-716373. Department of State Press Statement, “IDF Releases Shireen Abu Akleh Report,” September 5, 2022, https://www.state.gov/idf-releases-shireen-abu-akleh-report/. Chris Van Hollen tweet, September 5, 2022, https://twitter.com/ChrisVanHollen/status /1566943549924458496. Yaniv Kubovich, Jack Khoury, and Ben Samuels, “Israeli Military Admits ‘Highly Probable’ IDF Soldier Mistakenly Killed Journalist Shireen Abu Akleh,” Ha’aretz, September 5, 2022, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2022-09-05/ty-article/.premium /israel -admits -highly-probable -soldier-mistakenly-killed -journalist-shireen -abu -akleh/00000183-0c94-dd51-ada7-6eff54180000. Ron Kampeas, “In Reset to Pre-Trump Norm, State Department Terrorism Report Includes Extensive Reporting on West Bank Settler Violence,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, December 17, 2021, https://www.jta.org/2021/12/17/united-states/in-reset-to-pre -trump -norm-state-department-terrorism-report-includes-extensive-reporting-on -west-bank-settler-violence. Lazar Berman, “From Iron Dome to Supply Chains, US Christian Group Quietly Shaping US-Israel Ties,” Times of Israel, January 7, 2022, https://www.timesofisrael.com /from-iron- dome -to -supply- chains -us - christian-group - quietly-shaping-us -israel -ties/. Kampeas, “In Reset to Pre-Trump Norm.” Tovah Lazaroff, “US Monitoring ‘Onerous’ IDF Limits on Foreign Visits to West Bank Palestinians,” Jerusalem Post, September 4, 2022, https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli -conflict/article-716318. The White House, “FACT SHEET: The United States-Palestinian Relationship July 14, 2022,” https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/07/14/fact -sheet-the-united-states-palestinian-relationship/. U.S. ambassador to Israel Tom Nides at the “World Summit on Counter-Terrorism,” Herzliya, Israel, September 11, 2022, https://ict.org.il/world-summit-home-program/; Joseph Krauss and Jalal Bwaitel, “At Least 85 Palestinians Killed this Year as Israel Steps Up West Bank Raids,” PBS, August 31, 2022, https://www.pbs.org /newshour/world/at -least-85-palestinians-killed-this-year-as-israel-steps-up-west-bank-raids. A. Dirk Moses, “Empire, Resistance, and Security: International Law and the Transformative Occupation of Palestine,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 8, no. 2 (2017): 379–409. Shira Hanau, “Violent Attacks by Settlers Against Palestinians in the West Bank Are up Nearly 50% from Last Year,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, December 15, 2021, https:// www.jta.org /2021/12/15/israel/violent-attacks-by-settlers-against-palestinians-in-the -west-bank-are-up-nearly-50-from-last-year.

Trump, Palestine, Biden 347 59. Simon Lewis and Humeyra Pamuk, “Biden Administration Issues Sharpest Rebuke Yet to Israel Over Settlements,” Reuters, October 27, 2021, https://www.reuters.com /world /middle -east /us -voices - opposition-israels -plans -new-west-bank-settlement -homes-2021-10-26/; Jacob Magid, “US Slams Slated Settlement Approvals: ‘Deeply Damages Prospect for 2 State Solution,” Times of Israel, May 7, 2022, https://www .timesofisrael.com /us-slams-slated-settlement-approvals-deeply-damages-prospect -for-2-state-solution/.

CHAPTER 31

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S INSIDIOUS APPROACH TO HUMAN RIGHTS SA R A H B . S N Y D E R

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s Donald  J. Trump took office on January  20, 2017, observers expected little from his administration’s human rights policy— traditionally the extent to which government officials take account of human rights violations and protections as they formulate foreign policy. Specifically, few anticipated that the administration would weigh the human rights records of foreign governments as it determined military and economic assistance, formal as well as informal alliances, and high-level visits. The prospect of such an approach raised concerns, as it would have represented a break from decades of U.S. foreign policy. The administration’s record ultimately exceeded anxious speculation—not only was the United States largely unconcerned with the protection of human rights internationally, but also observance of human rights in the United States was undermined in many ways, and the administration laid a foundation for drastically revising American human rights commitments had the president won a second term. Many Americans have long conceived of human rights violations as an external phenomenon, but during the Trump presidency, human rights were under assault at home and abroad. In many ways, the Trump administration pursued a “values-free foreign policy,” driven by a primarily transactional view of international relations.1 One of the principal reasons Trump was not guided by ideas in his foreign policy formulation was that, in contrast to his predecessors, the president did not subscribe to the idea of American exceptionalism. Trump’s antiexceptionalist vision manifested itself in a reluctance to criticize other leaders and an affinity

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for dictators such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.2 Defending his admiration for Putin, Trump told Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, “We have a lot of killers . . . you think our country is so innocent?”3 Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson, embraced the president’s transactional approach to foreign policy, and specifically the ways in which attention to human rights could inhibit the advancement of a narrow conception of American interests. Later, Trump’s second secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, pursued selective attention to human rights, largely focused on issues of interest to him and his evangelical Christian brethren, and he undertook an effort, motivated by those beliefs, to reframe how the United States defined human rights. Although during his confirmation hearings Tillerson had said that “Our approach to human rights begins by acknowledging that American leadership requires moral clarity. We do not face an ‘either or’ choice on defending global human rights. Our values are our interests when it comes to human rights and humanitarian assistance,” most other early signals did not assuage the concerns of human rights observers.4 For example, in the White House, new nomenclature on Trump’s National Security Council suggested a downgrading of attention to human rights: the term was deleted from a special assistant’s title.5 Similarly, in his first year as secretary of state Tillerson did not attend the State Department’s rollout of its annual reports on individual countries’ human rights records. His absence, which broke with the precedent of his Democratic and Republican predecessors, drew rebukes and the claim that Tillerson’s actions indicated a downgrading of attention to human rights at the State Department.6 Tillerson declared his position on human rights and his support for Trump’s brand of transactional foreign policy in his first remarks to State Department employees in May 2017. In a seeming direct refutation of his comments during his confirmation hearings, he argued that advancing “values” “creates obstacles to our ability to advance our national security interests, our economic interests.”7 Balancing values and national security, as Tillerson framed it, is a challenge that has confronted U.S. administrations for decades. But rarely had a president or his secretary of state argued that human rights had no place at all in U.S. policy. We now know that Tillerson’s remarks led to an effort to educate the secretary on the intersection of human rights and U.S. foreign policy. State Department Policy Planning Staff director Brian Hook drafted a memo, entitled “Balancing Interests and Values,” which offered a rationale to Tillerson for some increased attention to human rights. Hook argued that the United States did not face a choice between interests and values in connection with its adversaries; he wrote, “We do not look to bolster America’s adversaries overseas; we look

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to pressure, compete with, and outmaneuver them. For this reason, we should consider human rights an important issue in regard to U.S. relations with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran.” He concluded, “Pressing those regimes on human rights is one way to impose costs, apply counter-pressure, and regain the initiative from them strategically.”8 Trump’s potential inattention to human rights could have been mitigated, as when President Ronald Reagan tried to downgrade attention to human rights upon assuming office. Along with many members of his new administration, Reagan had criticized elements of Jimmy Carter’s human rights policy before entering the White House, charging that Carter had not improved human rights meaningfully and had neglected the U.S. national interests. Furthermore, Reagan’s aides suggested at the outset of his presidency that Reagan wanted to emphasize spreading democracy and defeating terrorism rather than championing human rights. After the withdrawal of Reagan’s first nominee for assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs in the face of widespread congressional and public opposition, the administration recognized the salience of human rights, and the White House worked to convey its concern for the issue to Congress, the American public, and an international audience.9 The administration learned from the experience, appointed a new candidate who garnered unanimous support, and leaked parts of a State Department memorandum entitled “Reinvigoration of Human Rights Policy,” which stated, “human rights is at the core of our foreign policy.”10 More significantly, when George Shultz replaced Alexander Haig as secretary of state, he proposed greater U.S. attention to human rights in its bilateral relations with the Soviet Union and made human rights one of the four points on the agenda he formulated for all subsequent discussions with the Soviet Union.11 In the months following Tillerson’s speech, there were some signals that the Trump administration might follow a pattern similar to Reagan’s. The secretary sought to assure critics that he recognized the significance of human rights and would advance the issue internationally. He publicly presented a report on human trafficking, noting the ways in which it threatened national security and victimized “the most vulnerable.”12 Tillerson also expressed U.S. “concern” about “atrocities” in Myanmar and called for an independent investigation of abuses there.13 In November 2017 remarks at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Tillerson said, “You can’t de-prioritize human rights,” and on international human rights day, Tillerson issued a statement asserting, “Standing up for human rights and democracy is a foreign policy priority that represents the best traditions of our country.”14 Each of these instances suggested that Tillerson may have been trying to change the narrative on his approach to human rights. Despite the shift in Tillerson’s rhetoric regarding human rights, the Trump administration continued to telegraph its move away from championing the

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issue. In a notable step, the United States withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council, arguing that the body protected human rights violators and was marked by anti-Israel bias.15 Here, as in other instances, the Trump administration seemed more interested in defending governments from criticisms of their human rights records than concerned about the humans whose rights were being violated. In what is likely the most significant instance of Trump seeking to buffer allies from unwanted examination of their human rights records, in the wake of the murder of the journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi officials, the president prioritized preserving strong SaudiAmerican ties over any concerns about state-sanctioned murder. As Trump recounted to the Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward regarding Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, “I saved his ass.”16 Several foreign policy makers, however, pursued alternative approaches, including the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (UN) Nikki Haley and members of Congress. In New York, Haley focused on the plight of Syrian refugees, human rights violations in Venezuela, and violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar.17 Her attention to human rights may have been driven by her role at the international organization, and her physical distance from Washington may have granted her more latitude to press the issue. Members of Congress from both parties also increasingly worried about the administration’s commitment to protecting human rights. Raising their concerns publicly, whether in op-eds like Senator John McCain’s piece in the New York Times or the bipartisan letter sent by fifteen senators to the president, members of Congress argued that U.S. support for human rights had historical precedent and “strengthens the security, stability, and prosperity of America.”18 Moving beyond rhetoric, members of Congress repeatedly sought to limit U.S. support for Saudi Arabia, given the manner in which it waged war against the Houthis in Yemen. Most notably, in 2019 Congress passed legislation preventing arms sales to Saudi Arabia and calling for the removal of U.S. forces from the conflict; Trump vetoed both bills.19 Such actions signaled an awareness that too closely aligning the United States with repressive governments presented real threats to the U.S.—specifically to its military and its international reputation. The last time the United States was led by such transactionally minded officials, President Richard Nixon and national security advisor and later secretary of state Henry Kissinger, Congress initiated legislation that was intended to safeguard American values by preventing U.S. military and security assistance to governments that engaged in “a consistent pattern of gross violations of human rights.”20 Then, as in the Trump presidency, members of Congress argued the United States should not be in the business of supporting regimes that violated human rights. After the president fired Tillerson on March 31, 2018, U.S. policy evolved. In contrast to Tillerson, who seemed threatened by the idea of human rights, Mike

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Pompeo, who was sworn in as secretary of state on April 26, 2018, lavished concern on several issues. Most striking was the secretary’s focus on religious freedom. Pompeo signaled his attention through bureaucratic reform, raising the profile of the Office of International Religious Freedom and repeatedly holding ministerial meetings on religious freedom. Elliott Abrams, Reagan’s first assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, said that during the first year and a half of the Reagan administration, “There was no human rights policy. There was a critique of Carter [administration] policy, combined with an instinctive distrust of the phrase, crowd, and community associated with it.”21 Abrams’s reflection offers an instructive parallel to the evolution from Tillerson’s approach, which could be characterized as only a critique of earlier policy that purportedly threatened American interests through its pursuit of values and ideas, to Pompeo’s, which advanced an ideologically driven approach to U.S. foreign policy. In a positive step, Pompeo finally participated in the unveiling of the annual human rights country reports in 2019. The elevation of the reports, however, coincided with an increasing politicization of their content. For example, observers lodged multiple complaints about the reports’ characterization of gender rights, such as renaming a section on “Reproductive Rights” as “Coercion in Population Control.”22 Under Pompeo, the Bureau of Democracy, Rights, and Labor, which is responsible for drafting the annual human rights country reports and monitoring human rights abuses internationally, finally received the administration’s first Senate-confirmed assistant secretary of state, Robert Destro, on September 23, 2019. Yet, as Trump’s four years in office progressed, interested observers learned that inattention to human rights internationally was not the worst outcome of a transactional foreign policy. Grave threats to American identity, values, and security came from two avenues—policies that increased violations of human rights domestically and efforts to limit formally the American commitment to human rights. In the 2016 presidential campaign and in his first weeks in office, Trump repeatedly disregarded American political norms and increasingly put domestic civil rights and international human rights at risk. The president’s assaults on the press, efforts at voter suppression, forced family separation at the border, indefinite detention of children, limits on travel from majority-Muslim countries, and drastic decreases of refugee admissions flouted longstanding American practices and policies.23 These Trump administration policies potentially contravened a range of rights articulated in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including Article 3—“the right to life, liberty and security of person”; Article 5—freedom from “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”; Article 9—freedom from “arbitrary arrest, detention or exile”; Article 14—“the right

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to seek and enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution”; Article 18— “the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion”; Article 19—“the right to freedom of opinion and expression”; and Article 21—“the right to take part in the government of his country.” With less visible immediate impact but the potential for far-reaching consequences, especially if Trump had won a second term, Pompeo’s State Department initiated efforts in 2019 to redefine the meaning of “human rights” for U.S. foreign policy with the establishment of the Commission on Unalienable Rights to guard against human rights being “corrupted or hijacked or used for dubious or malignant purposes.”24 The commission reported to the Policy Planning Staff, bypassing the expertise that existed in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Moreover, its title suggested that the department might redefine more narrowly the content and origins of human rights despite the United States’ longstanding international and national commitments to respecting human rights, universally and indivisibly. Pompeo’s Commission on Unalienable Rights threatened the United States’ international reputation in that it politicized U.S. attention to human rights. The most striking claims in the commission’s report suggested that the true unalienable rights were “negative rights,” or the right to be free from something; that the most significant unalienable rights in the U.S. context were property rights and the right to religious liberty; that definitions of “positive rights,” or the right “to” something, say healthcare, might vary by country; that a prioritization of rights was “desirable”; and finally that it was “reasonable for the U.S. to treat economic and social rights differently from civil and political rights.”25 The potential consequences of such an approach could have been far reaching. For example, by articulating a hierarchy of rights, the initiative implied that human rights are divisible. Second, by suggesting that rights might vary based on the national context, the commission undermined the claim that human rights are universal. The commission sought to narrow conceptions of human rights, contravening longstanding efforts to expand definitions of human rights and seek greater observance, not less, of existing, internationally agreed-upon rights. In the end, the commission’s report was one more piece of evidence that the Trump administration was an unreliable international ally. Human rights were under threat throughout Trump’s presidency and potentially faced even graver consequences if he had been reelected. His administration’s actions, and inaction, led to abuses domestically and reduced the consequences for violations internationally. As a result, the reputation of the United States as an observer, protector, and champion of human rights eroded. Democratic presidential candidate Joseph Biden declared during the campaign that human rights would be “at the core of U.S. foreign policy.” President Biden’s secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, used his appearance at the unveiling of the 2020 country reports on human rights to draw a sharp distinction

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between the Trump and Biden administrations’ approaches.26 Rhetorically Blinken disavowed the absence of values in U.S. foreign policy in the previous four years, declaring, “Standing for people’s freedom and dignity honors America’s most sacred values.” He committed the Biden administration to the universal and indivisible nature of human rights, condemned the Commission on Unalienable Rights, and announced its disbandment. Blinken pledged that sections on women’s rights, withdrawn from the country reports in the Trump years, would be restored. Furthermore, he acknowledged the deficits in the United States’ own record on human rights and pledged to address them “with full transparence.” Finally, he signaled that the Biden administration intended to resume working within the UN Human Rights Council, with Congress, and with civil society to advance human rights.27 In office Biden and Blinken have fulfilled many of the president’s campaign promises, including by holding the Summit for Democracy in December 2021. Biden’s administration has recognized the need to redress problems in the U.S. human rights record at home and abroad, and in June 2022, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator Samantha Power announced a range of initiatives focused on domestic and international democracy promotion.28 Yet, shortly thereafter, Biden visited Saudi Arabia, which he had described as a “pariah,” given Khashoggi’s murder, while on the campaign trail.29 Biden’s shift suggests that the United States continues to balance its commitment to human rights with other principles, such as lowering energy prices. In this respect, Biden’s approach to human rights is in line with that of his recent predecessors, with the exception of Trump.

Notes 1. Jackson Diehl, “How Trump Could Lead on Human Rights. Really.” Washington Post, May 14, 2017. 2. Michael Posner, “Trump Abandons the Human Rights Agenda,” New Yorker, May 26, 2017. 3. Abby Phillip, “O’Reilly Told Trump That Putin Is a Killer. Trump’s Reply: ‘You Think Our Country Is So Innocent?’ ” Washington Post, February 4, 2017. 4. Rex W. Tillerson, Confirmation Hearings, January 11, 2017, https://www.foreign.senate .gov/imo/media/doc/011117_Tillerson _Opening _ Statement.pdf. 5. David Corn, “Trump Drops ‘Human Rights’ from Top White House Job,” Mother Jones, May 3, 2017. 6. Nahal Toosi, “Rubio Chides Tillerson Over Absence on Human Rights Report’s Launch,” Politico, March 3, 2017; Carol Morello, “Rex Tillerson Skips State Department’s Annual Announcement on Human Rights, Alarming Advocates,” Washington Post, March 3, 2017; Human Rights First Statement, March 3, 2017. 7. Rex W. Tillerson, Remarks, May 3, 2017, https://2017-2021.state.gov/remarks-to-u-s -department-of-state-employees/index.html.

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8. Hook to Tillerson, May 17, 2017, https://www.politico.com/f/?id= 00000160-6c37-da3c -a371-ec3f13380001. 9. Sarah B. Snyder, “The Defeat of Ernest Lefever’s Nomination: Keeping Human Rights on the United States Foreign Policy Agenda,” in Challenging US Foreign Policy: America and the World in the Long Twentieth Century, ed. Bevan Sewell and Scott Lucas (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 136–61. 10. William Safire, “Human Rights Victory,” New York Times, November 5, 1981. 11. George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: Diplomacy, Power, and the Victory of the American Ideal (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), 266n; Sarah B. Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 163. 12. Tillerson Remarks, June  27, 2017, https://2017-2021.state.gov/remarks-at-the-2017 -trafficking-in-persons-report-launch-ceremony/index.html. 13. Antoni Slodkowski, “Tillerson, in Myanmar, Calls for Credible Probe of Atrocities,” Reuters, November 14, 2017. 14. Tillerson Remarks, November 28, 2017, https://2017-2021.state.gov/the-u-s-and-europe -strengthening-western-alliances/index.html; and Tillerson Statement, December 10, 2017, https://az .usembassy.gov/statement-secretary-tillerson-international-human -rights-day/. 15. Lauren Wolfe, “Trump’s Insidious Reason for Leaving the UN Human Rights Council,” Atlantic, June 20, 2018. 16. Will Inboden, “Jamal Khashoggi’s Disappearance Is a Slap in the Face to the United States,” Foreign Policy, October 8, 2018; John Hudson, “Trump Threw Saudi Arabia a Lifeline After Khashoggi’s Death. Two Years Later, He Has Gotten Little in Return,” Washington Post, October 2, 2020. 17. Nahal Toosi, “The Trump Administration’s Lonely Voice for Human Rights,” Politico, June 4, 2017; Elsina Wainwright, “Human Rights and the Trump Administration,” United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, July 2018. 18. John McCain, “Why We Must Support Human Rights,” New York Times, May 8, 2017; and Rubio et al. to Trump, May 3, 2017, https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/_cache /files/07d6ba61-7421-4316 -9f3f-d4485e7529bf /ABA64081874BD3513AB936690A9E8F 3A.5-3-17-letter-to-potus-re-human-rights-and-democracy.pdf. 19. S.J. Res. 7; 116 S.J. Res. 36. 20. Sarah B. Snyder, From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists Transformed U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 162. 21. Kathryn Sikkink, Mixed Signals: U.S. Human Rights Policy and Latin America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 148. 22. Diane Taylor, “Trump Administration Alters and Downplays Human Rights Abuses in Reports,” Guardian, October  21, 2020; Liz Williams, “Trump Administration Excludes Key Human Rights Issues from Its Reports,” OpenDemocracy, October 28, 2020. 23. For more on how racism shaped these policies, see chapter 26, by William I. Hitchcock, in this volume. 24. Robin Wright, “The Unbelievable Hypocrisy of Trump’s New ‘Unalienable Rights’ Panel,” New Yorker, July 9, 2019. 25. Report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights, https://www.state.gov/wp-content /uploads/2020/07/Draft-Report-of-the-Commission-on-Unalienable-Rights.pdf. 26. Joseph R. Biden Jr., “Foreign Policy,” New York Times, February 6, 2020.

356 TH E E X PA N D I N G M E A N I N G O F I N T ERNAT IO NAL S EC URIT Y 27. Secretary Anthony J. Blinken on Release of the 2020 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, March 30, 2021, https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-on -release-of-the-2020-country-reports-on-human-rights-practices/. 28. Samantha Power, “A Global Revolution of Dignity,” June 7, 2022, https://www.usaid .gov/news -information /speeches/jun-7-2022-administrator-power-remarks -global -revolution-dignity. 29. Transcript, Presidential Debate, November 20, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com /politics/2019/11/21/transcript-november-democratic-debate/.

PART VI

IS LIBERAL INTERNATIONALISM STILL ALIVE?

Editors’ Note The essays in Part VI offer three approaches to the issue of the future of liberal internationalism, which continues to draw the attention of IR theorists, historians, and critics of U.S. foreign policy. In chapter  32, Joshua Busby and Jonathan Monten warn that Trump’s actions will constrain his successors from restoring predictability to U.S. diplomacy. They argue that “although Trump failed to persuade a majority of Americans to support his America First agenda, his reliance on deepening partisan division and his assault on America’s democratic institutions may be his most enduring foreign policy legacy, damaging the ability of future U.S. presidents to craft a coherent and stable international strategy for years to come.” Stephen Chaudoin, Helen  V. Milner, and Dustin Tingley present a more optimistic assessment in chapter 33, noting that after the Russian invasion, “the norms enshrined in the Liberal International Order (LIO) are showing their force.” They tentatively conclude that the United States and its allies “have come together strongly to oppose this violent attack on another nation and on the LIO. The military attack on a sovereign nation has galvanized many nations and underlined the continuing relevance of the LIO and its institutions.” Georgios N. Georgarakis and Robert Y. Shapiro, however, argue that it is too soon to tell whether the liberal rebound will last (chapter 34). As they put it, “the rise of illiberal democracies and autocracies around the globe

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foreshadows the defining clash of the twenty-first century. The longer-term consequences of these shocks for the American public and liberal internationalism are open questions to be answered by future opinion-survey data and other evidence.”

CHAPTER 32

TRUMP’S FOREIGN POLICY LEGACY J OS H UA B U S BY A N D J O N ATH A N M O NTE N

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our 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 chapter, 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. In just four years, the Trump administration sought to dismantle and undermine a number of international institutions and agreements, including arms control, free trade, global health, and climate change. While some of these changes are ephemeral, the Trump administration may prove hugely consequential for hastening a power transition between the United States and China and precipitating a wider decoupling of the two countries’ economies. The failure of the United States and other democratic governments to forge an effective collective response to the COVID-19 pandemic may unravel interconnections in trade and travel that previously knit the world together and thus also undermine public confidence in democracies around the world. Yet, the American public by and large did not embrace a number of President Trump’s key foreign policy positions, notably his hostility to NATO, free trade, and immigration. Surveys of U.S. foreign policy leaders also revealed limited support for these positions.2 Moreover, although the president succeeded in cultivating a number of high-level Republican supporters—such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Senator Lindsey Graham—to support or

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implement his agenda, many of Trump’s foreign policy views did not attract majority support even within the Republican Party. Although Trump failed to persuade a majority of the U.S. public to support his attack on the pillars of U.S. liberal internationalism, the Trump presidency accelerated a different threat to the United States’ ability to maintain a stable and coherent foreign policy: the threat of rising partisan polarization and antidemocratic practices at home (see also chapter  27, by Jason Ludwig and Rebecca Slayton, in this volume). President Trump’s relentless efforts to salt domestic divisions, accentuated by his responses to the COVID-19 crisis and his own electoral loss, may ultimately be his most lasting and important legacy, complicating the country’s ability to forge coherent policies and detracting from the international appeal of America’s democracy and its economic system. This domestic dysfunction and polarization, perhaps even more than the rise of a peer competitor in China, may prove to be the biggest challenge facing the Biden administration and successors in years to come.

The View from Four Years Ago As we wrote four years ago, Trump’s approach to foreign policy politicized core elements of the liberal order, not simply the margins. We warned that Trump’s hostility to NATO, opposition to free trade, and embrace of authoritarian leaders could potentially deliver fatal blows to key elements of the post–World War II American project. The president’s transactional approach to foreign policy suggested that longstanding relationships with allies might be renegotiated on the basis of new bargains that suited the president’s perception of America’s interests. Trump’s version of strongman populism seemed to be very much on the march around the world, with the emergence of similar leaders in other democracies including Brazil, Hungary, Turkey, the Philippines, and India. Based on our survey work with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, we noted that public opinion still showed reservoirs of support for elements of the liberal order and that despite some differences, elites still broadly supported traditional internationalist policies such as an open global economy and working through multilateral alliances like NATO.3

Trump’s Legacy Subsequent surveys by the Chicago Council repeatedly showed that the public was generally unconvinced by key aspects of President Trump’s foreign policy agenda.4 As we wrote on Election Day, 2020, large majorities of foreign

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policy elites and the public support the United States playing an active role in the world. Majorities of both also support internationalist positions on trade, immigration, and alliances such as NATO.5 Among elites, partisan differences remain, but many of these—on climate change, Iran, and Israel—reflect longstanding sources of division rather than new ones.6 Although Trump likely accentuated partisan friction among leaders on how to handle China’s rise, some partisan differences over how to respond to growing geostrategic tension with China would have likely occurred even without Trump in the White House. While survey evidence suggests that public and leader support for internationalist policies has been durable, the relatively free hand of the executive on foreign policy allowed President Trump to announce a number of policy departures from those of his predecessor. The United States has long had a habit of “exemptionalism” from international agreements and a tendency to pursue unilateral initiatives,7 but the Trump administration took this to the next level, with withdrawal from a variety of arms-control agreements including the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on Iran’s nuclear program, withdrawal from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, and announced withdrawal from the World Health Organization in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak. By the end of his presidency, Trump was a diminished figure internationally, skipping a G7 meeting in August 2020 on climate change8 and ducking out of most of a G20 meeting in November  2020 on the coronavirus to play golf.9 Some of Trump’s initiatives, like withdrawal from the Paris Agreement10 and the announced departure from the World Health Organization,11 have already been undone by the new Biden administration. President Joe Biden also signaled a pause on the announced withdrawal of 12,000 American troops from Germany12 and raised the limit on refugees to 62,500 in fiscal year 2021, an increase from President Trump’s 15,000, though still below the 110,000 set during the last year of the Obama presidency.13 Here, we are less convinced than some of our colleagues in this volume that President Trump was as constrained internationally and domestically from pursuing his “America First” agenda. We share Robert Jervis’s assessment in this volume that President Trump was able to exercise lasting influence in areas that he cared a great deal about, where likeminded subordinates were able to move the bureaucracy to implement his views. For example, while it is true that the courts rebuked some of the Trump administration’s efforts in the immigration space, the Biden administration has found it challenging to undo policies in this arena, namely, the “remain in Mexico” policy that forces migrants to await their court date in Mexico rather than the United States. In 2021, a court found that the Biden administration had violated federal law by the way it rescinded

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the policy, ordering it restored, at least until the administration can provide new guidance to revoke the policy.14 These legacy effects are evident in other arenas. The Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal made it difficult for the United States to reengage with the international community and left U.S. leaders with less of an understanding and monitoring of Iran’s nuclear program than it once did.15 Other changes are also far reaching and perhaps irreversible. As Stephen Chadoin, Helen V. Milner, and Dustin Tingley argue in chapter 33, Trump was least constrained in the trade space to pursue his protectionist agenda. The U.S. trade war with China disrupted trade relations between the two countries, and the souring of relations more broadly over cybersecurity issues, the South China Sea, and treatment of the Uyghurs, among other tensions, may mean that the former degree of trade integration never recovers. With the COVID-19 crisis underscoring the risks of supply-chain interdependence, the United States and China appear poised to pursue a wider partial decoupling of their economies.16 More broadly, trade disputes have weakened the World Trade Organization, leaving its incoming director general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala facing a globaltrading order in crisis.17 The COVID-19 crisis created the greatest challenge to the world perhaps since the Second World War, and global efforts to contain (and respond to) the virus were largely ineffective, as countries closed borders and focused on their own internal situations.18 Rife with domestic divisions and a leadership that downplayed the virus, the United States did not perform well in its public health response, accounting for a disproportionate global share of infections and deaths.

Come Home America and Go Forth The Biden administration faces the two simultaneous challenges of national recovery at home and global problems like COVID-19 and climate change abroad. While the former reinforces the need for the United States to get its domestic house in order, these international challenges cannot be ignored. While foreign policy experts typically look to the external landscape for the biggest national security threats facing the country, the lack of internal cohesion may have been the biggest impediment facing the United States, even before the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2020, that President Trump himself fomented.19 While the notion of politics stopping at the water’s edge was always something of a myth,20 there has been some continuity between U.S. administrations on the fundamental pillars of U.S. foreign policy, such as trade policy, alliance commitments, and, more recently, counterterrorism. Many international

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relations scholars argue that democracies are more credible partners for cooperation because though they are slow to make agreements, internal checks and balances ensure that commitments once made are durable.21 But what if the United States is increasingly incapable of making credible commitments? As Kenneth A. Schultz warns, “As the parties become more ideologically distinct, there is a danger of greater swings from one administration to the next if the party in power changes. And as Congress loses its bipartisan center, it becomes less of a stabilizing force to keep swings in check.”22 In this volume, George N. Georgarakis and Robert Y. Shapiro also warn of the dangers of polarization as increased partisan sorting and ideological homogeneity extend to a range of foreign policy issues. As other intermestic issues like climate change increase in salience and partisan division intrudes into more aspects of U.S. foreign policy, there is greater risk of partisan oscillation in U.S. foreign policy as the presidency rotates between parties. The international image of the United States declined precipitously during the Trump administration.23 Although the United States has observed such swings in its popularity before, notably during the George W. Bush administration and the Iraq war, it remains to be seen whether international partners will have confidence that President Biden can deliver on his commitments and that those will have staying power beyond his administration. Here, developing a consistent approach to China’s rise could prove especially tricky. Across the political spectrum, there is rising appreciation among elites of more adversarial relations with China. In our 2020 survey, we found that most foreign policy leaders expected that major action would be likely in the next two years to counter China’s rise and that those expecting action thought it would be bipartisan.24 This survey also contains some sources of partisan division, however, with Republicans being much more hawkish on containing China’s rise than Democrats.25 If the boundaries of China policy, like other elements of U.S. foreign policy, become a major source of partisan differentiation, Republicans will be tempted to outbid the Democrats with an anti-China policy as a means of winning the presidency. If Democrats feel that this position would pose a political risk, a bipartisan hardening of the U.S. approach to China policy may occur that makes cooperation on shared challenges like climate change more difficult. Alternatively, we could see partisan sorting on China policy. Thus far, the public has largely been slower than elites to see China as a threat. However, in the wake of disputes during the last administration and more overt anti-China rhetoric from the previous president, that is starting to change, and U.S. public perceptions of China have deteriorated, particularly among Republicans.26 On one level, this paled in comparison to the internal challenges the Biden administration faced in dealing with the COVID-19 crisis and getting its own economic house in order. This was not simply an internal challenge. China

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largely was able to get the pandemic under control and return to normal economic activity. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy, when Biden assumed office, was in a state of suspended animation, as the lives and livelihoods of American citizens remained disrupted as of early 2021. As we know, countries can respond to a rising challenger through two primary means, internal balancing and external balancing.27 Polarization and a weak post-COVID-19 economic recovery complicated the ability of the United States to counter China through internal balancing. The Biden administration thus had to pursue a more robust effort to address the COVID-19 crisis and stimulate an economic recovery. This had international implications for the country’s ability to counter the rising challenge from China. As contemporary challenges like COVID-19 and climate change cannot be resolved by any single country, the Biden administration did not have the luxury of purely turning inward. Given that over four years Trump cultivated grievances and domestic divisions that culminated with an assault on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters, the Biden administration had its work cut out for it. The early passage of additional COVID relief and later congressional passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill suggest that the United States may still have the capacity to carry out important domestic legislation to jumpstart and invest in itself. That said, they were relatively modest government spending packages compared to some of China’s state-directed investment efforts, and the Biden administration, as of this writing, was still struggling to marshal fifty votes in the Senate to pass its Build Back Better agenda, which would enhance other aspects of the social safety net and address the problem of climate change.

Democracy in Trouble Despite the passage of legislation to address the COVID crisis and shore up America’s crumbling infrastructure, the decline in the country’s democratic institutions was perhaps the most significant domestic and foreign policy legacy of the Trump years. While Trump attempted to run roughshod over the checks and balances of democratic institutions during his time in office, his more lasting impact is his conduct in the aftermath of the election, when he successfully persuaded a supermajority of self-identified Republicans that the election was stolen. As of July-August  2021, two-thirds of Republicans said that the 2020 election “was rigged and stolen from Trump.”28 In the wake of the election, Republicans in a spate of states have sought to both audit the 2020 election and impose new rules that would impede voting and potentially even allow legislatures to overturn election results.29 Independent democracy monitors have taken note. In December 2021, for example, the European

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think tank International IDEA labeled the United States a “backsliding democracy.”30 The deterioration in American democracy has global repercussions. Over the past few years, the United States and its allies like Turkey and the Philippines were responsible for a significant share of democratic decline globally, a trend that predated Trump but accelerated during his presidency.31 Should this deterioration continue, it will be difficult to mobilize a coalition of democratic governments to contest the authoritarianism of geopolitical rivals such as China and Russia. Some have questioned the merits of elevating the clash of democratic and authoritarian systems as a foreign policy strategy, but even if this critique is valid, the erosion of democratic governance and trust in elections fomented by former president Trump has been hugely consequential.32 In early 2022, Russia launched an invasion of neighboring Ukraine in a bid to extend its sphere of influence over parts of the former Soviet Union and reclaim its empire. This move galvanized the community of democracies to resist this attempt to challenge Ukraine’s sovereignty and threaten European security through comprehensive sanctions on Russia and a willingness to arm the Ukrainians. While realists have blamed NATO expansion as a source of Russia’s security fears,33 Russian president Vladimir Putin’s effort to conquer its neighbor through violence shocked the world from complacency and may lead to unpredictable, far-reaching changes in the international system, including a greater decoupling of national economies. Domestically, there has largely been bipartisan opprobrium for Putin’s invasion, though a significant fringe of the Republican Party, including influential parts of the right-wing media, such as Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, has become more supportive of Putin. As of this writing, the situation is extremely dangerous, given Putin’s possession of nuclear weapons and the risk of escalation.

Concluding Thoughts America’s domestic problems—including partisan polarization, the lingering effects of the pandemic, racial inequities in policing and public health, and the emergent threat of right-wing extremism—pose grave threats to the country’s ability to forge coherent economic and social policies at home. Those risks for the United States include delayed economic recovery that hastens a power transition from the United States to China. Although Trump failed to persuade a majority of Americans to support his America First agenda, his reliance on deepening partisan division and his assault on America’s democratic institutions may be his most enduring foreign policy legacy, damaging the ability of future U.S. presidents to craft a coherent and stable international strategy for years to come.

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Notes 1. Joshua Busby and Jonathan Monten, “Has Liberal Internationalism Been Trumped?,” H-Diplo/ISSF Policy series 1-6 (2017), “Is Liberal Internationalism Still Alive?,” ed. R.  Jervis and D. Labrosse, March  17, 2017, http://issforum.org /ISSF/PDF/Policy -Roundtable-1-6.pdf; Joshua Busby and Jonathan Monten, “Has Liberal Internationalism Been Trumped?,” in Chaos in the Liberal Order: The Trump Presidency and International Politics in the Twenty-First Century, ed. R. Jervis, F. J. Gavin, J. Rovner, and D. Labrosse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 49–60. 2. Joshua Busby et al., “Coming Together or Coming Apart? Attitudes of Foreign Policy Opinion Leaders and the Public in the Trump Era,” Chicago Council on Global Affairs, March 5, 2020, https://www.thechicagocouncil.org /research/public-opinion-survey /coming-together-or-coming-apart. 3. Joshua Busby et  al., “How the Elite Misjudge the US Electorate on International Engagement,” RealClearWorld, November 8, 2016, http://www.realclearworld .com /articles/2016/11 /07/ how_the _ elite _ misjudge _the _us _ electorate _on _ international _engagement _112112.html. 4. Joshua Busby, Dina Smeltz, and Jordan Tama, “Trump and His Advisers Are Probably Wrong About What Foreign Policy Americans Want,” Washington Post, July 3, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/07/03/trump-his-advisers-are -probably-wrong-about-what-foreign-policy-americans-want/. 5. Jonathan Monten et  al., “Americans Want to Engage the World,” Foreign Affairs, November 3, 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-11-03 /americans-want-engage-world. 6. Jonathan Monten et al., “Foreign Policy Is Biden’s Best Bet for Bipartisan Action, Experts Say—but GOP Is Unlikely to Join Him on Climate Change,” The Conversation, December 9, 2020, http://theconversation.com/foreign-policy-is-bidens-best-bet -for -bipartisan - action - experts - say -but- gop -is -unlikely -to -join -him - on - climate -change-150508. 7. Andrew Moravcsik, “The Paradox of US Human Rights Policy,” in American Exceptionalism and Human Rights, ed. Michael Ignatieff (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 147–97. 8. Kevin Liptak, “Trump Skips G7 Climate Summit with Aides Claiming Scheduling Conflict,” CNN, August 26, 2019, https://www.cnn.com /2019/08/26/politics/donald -trump-g7-climate-summit/index.html. 9. Lauren Aratani, “Trump Skips G20 Pandemic Event to Visit Golf Club as Virus Ravages US,” Guardian, November 21, 2020, http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020 /nov/21/donald-trump-g20-pandemic-golf-club. 10. Joshua Busby and Johannes Urpelainen, “What Biden Faces If He Wants to Get the Climate Change Effort Back on Track,” Washington Post, January 21, 2021, https://www .washingtonpost .com /politics/2021 /01 /21 /what-biden-faces-if-he-wants-get-climate -change-effort-back-track/. 11. Emily Rauhala, “Biden to Reengage with World Health Organization, Will Join Global Vaccine Effort,” Washington Post, January 20, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com / world / biden - administration -who - covax /2021 /01 /20 /3ddc25ce - 5a8c -11eb - aaad -93988621dd28_ story.html. 12. Helene Cooper, “Biden Freezes Trump’s Withdrawal of 12,000 Troops from Germany,” New York Times, February 4, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/us/politics / biden-germany-troops-trump.html.

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13. Priscilla Alvarez, “Biden Administration to Propose Significant Increase in Refugees Admitted to US,” CNN, February 6, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/05/politics /refugee-cap-biden/index.html. 14. Priscilla Alvarez, “Biden Administration Expected to Restart ‘Remain in Mexico’ Policy Next Week,” CNN, November, 24, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/24/politics / border-biden-remain-in-mexico/index.html. 15. Omri Nahmias and Tovah Lazaroff, “JCPOA Withdrawal Left ‘Unconstrained’ Nuclear Iran—US Official,” Jerusalem Post, December  18, 2021, https://www.jpost.com /american -politics /us - official -seventh -round - of-talks -was -better -than -it-might -have-been-689080. 16. “U.S.- China Decoupling Raises Risks for European Firms,” Bloomberg, January 13, 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com /news/articles/2021-01-14 /u-s-china-decoupling -raises-risks-for-european-firms. 17. Concepción de León, “Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala Set to Become  W.T.O.’s First Female Leader,” New York Times, February  5, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com /2021 /02/05 / business/ngozi-okonjo-iweala-world-trade-organization.html. 18. Joshua Busby, “What International Relations Tells Us About COVID-19,” E-International Relations (blog), April 26, 2020, https://www.e-ir.info/2020/04/26/ what-international-relations-tells-us-about-covid-19/. 19. Joshua Busby et al., “Coming Together or Coming Apart? Attitudes of Foreign Policy Opinion Leaders and the Public in the Trump Era,” Chicago Council on Global Affairs, March 5, 2020, https://www.thechicagocouncil.org /research/public-opinion-survey /coming-together-or-coming-apart. 20. Brian C. Rathbun, “Is Liberal Internationalism Still Alive?,” H-Diplo 1-6 (2017), http:// issforum.org /ISSF/PDF/Policy-Roundtable-1-6.pdf; Brian C. Rathbun, “Does Structure Trump All? A Test of Agency in World Politics,” in Chaos in the Liberal Order, ed. R. Jervis et al., 49–60. 21. John R. Oneal and Bruce Russett, Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations (New York: Norton, 2000). 22. Kenneth A. Schultz, “Perils of Polarization for US Foreign Policy,” Washington Quarterly 40, no. 4 (October 2, 2017): 7–28. 23. Richard Wike, Janell Fetterolf, and Mara Mordecai, “U.S. Image Plummets Internationally as Most Say Country Has Handled Coronavirus Badly,” Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project (blog), September 15, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org /global /2020/09/15 /us -image -plummets -internationally-as -most-say- country-has -handled-coronavirus-badly/. 24. Monten et al., “Foreign Policy Is Biden’s Best Bet for Bipartisan Action.” 25. Craig Kafura et al., “Divisions on US-China Policy: Opinion Leaders and the Public,” Chicago Council on Global Affairs, February 1, 2021, https://www.thechicagocouncil.org /research/public-opinion-survey/divisions-us-china-policy-opinion-leaders-and-public. 26. Dina Smeltz and Craig Kafura, “Do Republicans and Democrats Want a Cold War with China?,” Chicago Council on Global Affairs, October  13, 2020, https://www . thechicagocouncil . org /research / public - opinion - survey /do - republicans - and -democrats-want-cold-war-china. 27. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979). 28. Caitlin Dickson, “Poll: Two-Thirds of Republicans Still Think the 2020 Election Was Rigged,” Yahoo! News, August 4, 2021, https://news.yahoo.com /poll-two-thirds-of -republicans-still-think-the-2020-election-was-rigged-165934695.html.

368 I S LI B E R A L I N T E R N AT I O N A L I S M STILL ALIVE? 29. Amy Gardner, Kate Rabinowitz, and Harry Stevens, “How GOP-Backed Voting Measures Could Create Hurdles for Tens of Millions of Voters,” Washington Post, March 11, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/voting-restrictions -republicans-states/; Aaron Blake, “How Republicans Seek to Make It Easier to Challenge—and Even Overturn—Election Results,” Washington Post, October 14, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com /politics/2021 /10/14 / how-republicans-seek -make-it-easier-challenge-even-overturn-election-results/. 30. Mano Sundaresan and Amy Isackson. “Democracy Is Declining in the U.S. but It’s Not All Bad News, a Report Finds,” NPR, December 1, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021 /12 /01 /1059896434 /united-states -backsliding-democracy-donald-trump -january-6 -capitol-attack. 31. Max Fisher, “U.S. Allies Drive Much of World’s Democratic Decline, Data Shows,” New York Times, November 16, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/16/world/americas /democracy-decline-worldwide.html. 32. Thomas Pepinsky and Jessica Chen Weiss, “The Clash of Systems?,” Foreign Affairs, June 11, 2021, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-06-11/clash -systems. 33. John Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin,” Foreign Affairs, September/October  2014, https://www .foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2014-08-18/why-ukraine-crisis-west-s-fault.

CHAPTER 33

“AMERICA FIRST” MEETS LIBERAL INTERNATIONALISM S TE P H E N C H AU D O I N , H E L E N V. M I L N E R , A N D D U S TI N TI N G L E Y

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s both a presidential candidate and then president, Donald Trump advocated for a dramatic change in the direction of American foreign policy, which he labeled “America First.” His vision stood in stark contrast to the liberal internationalism pursued by most presidents since World War II. Under this vision, unilateralism would replace multilateralism; retrenchment would replace 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 countless smaller steps taken across many areas and partnerships. A central claim we made before the start of Trump’s term1 was that his attempts to change American foreign policy would be constrained by domestic and international forces. In terms of domestic constraints, elements of American democracy—its checks and balances—would make radical change difficult. As we will show, agents within key institutions did in fact push back against many of the Trump administration’s policy changes. The usual suspects, like Congress, interest groups, and the American foreign policy and military bureaucracies, played large roles. The judicial system was a surprisingly strong and unexpected constraining force. The media also kept keen attention on the changes proposed by the administration. Trump would have been able to make many more changes had he faced fewer domestic constraints. As Robert Jervis argues in chapter 1, “some realities proved obdurate.”

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The second set of constraints arose from international pressure on the United States, especially in the reactions to confrontational and unilateral policies that Trump pursued. Trump wanted to change relations with U.S. allies by making them do more for themselves and pay more; he also wanted to negotiate new deals with the country’s partners, competitors, and enemies. But the United States’ allies and enemies remain the same today as they were four years ago. Our interdependent planet favors engagement, cooperation, and multilateralism. Unilateral policies are unlikely to advance America’s main goals; indeed, they are likely to backfire and undermine its security and prosperity. A belligerent Russia and a rising China make American cooperation with its allies ever more important. And so multilateral engagement remains in America’s national interest as the best strategy for securing peace and prosperity. Overall, Trump was unable to fundamentally change the direction of U.S. foreign policy. While the tone did change, the underlying policies were often constrained, as we expected. At the same time, Trump’s foreign policy weakened the United States. His undiplomatic rhetoric, his norm-breaking behavior, and his inconstant policy maneuvers alienated America’s allies and friends and instilled greater boldness in its competitors and enemies. All of this left the United States with a less secure position in world politics at a time when China’s rise creates new uncertainties.

Taking Stock We proceed by breaking apart U.S. foreign policy into separate domains and comparing Trump’s claims about what his administration would accomplish and what it actually did. Predictions are difficult to make and interpret, especially when the specific foreign policy issues and crises that will arise during an administration are unknown ex ante. We therefore focus on benchmarking our arguments by assessing the degree to which domestic and international constraints limited Trump’s policy-altering ambitions. We focus on trade, immigration, and international institutions. Our previous article showed support for our claims around foreign aid and largely supported our claims in the case of climate change.2

Nonmilitary International Institutions For several important international institutions, including the World Trade Organization (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF), International Criminal Court (ICC), and World Health Organization (WHO), Trump’s efforts

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at dismantling these multilateral institutions met with domestic and international constraints. In terms of its engagement with nonmilitary international institutions, the Trump administration was frequently adversarial, though its largest threat of withdrawal from the WTO never materialized. Even as late as the spring of 2020, some Republican senators called for full withdrawal. Anticipating the certain failure of such a move and not wanting to force its senators to take an official stance, the GOP, leveraging its control of the Finance Committee, used parliamentarian maneuvering to scuttle a vote.3 The Trump administration did, however, succeed in hamstringing the Dispute Settlement Understanding’s Appellate Body in late 2019 by blocking the appointment of new judges. After several judges stepped down, as scheduled, this left the body without enough judges to rule. (It is worth remembering that the practice of blocking Appellate Body judges began with President Obama.)4 While this put the body on indefinite hiatus, international constraints have blunted its overall impact. In April 2020, the European Union and fifteen other WTO members formed the multiparty interim appeal arbitration arrangement, which functions as a parallel appellate body among its members. The United States tried to block a popular candidate for secretary general of the WTO, but Dr. Okonjo-Iweala was ultimately appointed. Given candidate Trump’s antipathy toward international economic institutions, the IMF seemed a likely target for Trump’s ire. In the early years of the Trump administration, the leadership of both the IMF and the World Bank took a quiet tack, avoiding any provocation of Trump.5 From 2018 and through the pandemic of 2020, the Trump administration’s record with respect to the IMF was mixed. When the pandemic hit, Congress increased IMF funding as part of the CARES Act. Many foreign policy elites and IMF member governments called for a tremendous expansion in the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights, which allow governments to access a fund of “synthetic” currencies. The Trump administration blocked this effort because most of these funds would have been made available to countries outside of the low-income brackets, which did not need them.6 The administration also opposed funding that would eventually go to Iran and Venezuela. The constraints of the international system appear to have been the biggest check on Trump’s potential antagonism toward the IMF. Its president, Christine Lagarde, mused in 2017 that she could imagine IMF headquarters moving to Beijing by 2027, with the implication that should the United States withdraw from the IMF, China was waiting in the wings.7 IMF voting rules also heavily favor the United States, which controls a 16.5 percent voting share. Since decisions require approval from 85 percent of voting shares, the United States holds a de facto veto over many IMF decisions, and this in turn helps avoid antagonism.

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With respect to the International Criminal Court (ICC), unlike the Obama administration’s approach to the ICC, which included tacit support and even behind-the-scenes assistance, Trump and his team took unprecedented, scorched-earth antagonistic steps. In 2019, the United States denied Fatou Bensouda, the ICC chief prosecutor, a U.S. visa, though this was largely symbolic, since she could still visit and address the UN General Assembly. In 2020, however, the United States placed Bensouda and another ICC official on a State Department sanctions list that had previously been reserved for terrorists and narcotraffickers. The sanctions were harsh, resulting in the freezing of the targets’ bank accounts and credit cards, and the move was globally criticized as a naked use of power to antagonize the court.8 Despite domestic opposition and international consternation, the United States also withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council (HRC). The U.S. courts, however, issued an injunction against Trump’s executive order on the grounds that it limited free speech. The Biden administration rejoined the UN HRC and removed the ICC sanctions, though it remains opposed to ICC probes in Afghanistan and Palestine. The Biden administration has openly backed ICC investigations into Russian war crimes in Ukraine. Trump took several strong steps against Chinese human rights abuses, sanctioning several companies and individuals for their participation in oppressing Uyghurs in Xinjiang Province. The United States also revoked Hong Kong’s “special status,” a move designed to counter Chinese crackdowns on democracy. Both bipartisan moves originated in Congress, where domestic constraints forced the president to take action on these egregious human rights violations. With regards to the World Health Organization and global health in general, the Trump administration initially took antagonistic steps but then backed down. In early 2018, the Trump administration surprised global health officials by recommending that Congress cut funding for Ebola preparedness and prevention, even as the disease was showing signs of resurgence. Shortly thereafter, Trump rescinded the budget cuts, obviating the need for Congress to decide on whether to keep the funding.9 The administration had a brief spat with the WHO over breastfeeding recommendations, which Trump eventually denied starting and did not pursue.10 COVID-19 triggered the largest battle between Trump and the WHO, as Trump accused the WHO of shielding China from scrutiny about the origins of the virus. He suspended funding to the organization, issued a lengthy list of demands, and then promptly announced plans for a U.S. withdrawal. However, Congress—albeit the 1948 Congress—provided an unexpected check on Trump’s efforts. That year, both chambers passed a resolution requiring a one-year waiting period before withdrawing from the WHO and paying any outstanding funding promises. Under President Biden, the United States remains part of WHO.

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U.S. Security, NATO, and Other Military-Oriented Institutions Trump campaigned on the obsolescence of the Atlantic alliance and the failure of European countries to pay their fair share. As Stanley R. Sloan notes, Trump openly questioned whether the United States would honor its collective defense obligations.11 As president he continued this grumbling, but with waning intensity. By the end of 2020, the complaints had largely subsided, and both the United States and Europe increased their monetary contributions to NATO. Both domestic political constraints and the international system explain why few threats against NATO under Trump materialized. On the domestic side, “defenders of the alliance [came] out of the woodwork, especially in the US Congress,” according to Charles Kupchan, who provides myriad examples of how domestic political actors defended the value of NATO, constraining President Trump’s worst impulses. There [was] virtually no support—in his own administration, among the American public, or in Congress—for taking a wrecking ball to NATO. Even as Trump cycles through foreign policy advisers of various ideological persuasions, they are all competent enough to understand the abiding strategic value of NATO. The electorate similarly knows better than Trump. . . . Congress, though currently a wasteland when it comes to cooperation across the aisle, has responded to Trump’s NATO-phobia by becoming a bipartisan cheerleading squad for the alliance.12

As Susan Colbourn notes in chapter 15, Trump’s anti-NATO rhetoric found little traction with the electorate, too. On the international side, NATO’s value and the danger it counters provided constraints on any significant pullback. The presence of Russia as a strategic rival made clear the consequences of weakened commitments. Only a few years removed from the initial Russian invasion of Crimea in Ukraine, it was abundantly clear that Russia would happily step into any void left by the United States. Defense spending among NATO allies naturally increased as “they [reassessed] their presumption that Western Europe is safe from outside threats.”13 Quarrels over burden sharing within NATO have been commonplace throughout its history and will likely continue. As we argued in our original piece, “the Trump administration . . . [found] it in their own interests to maintain many existing elements of US foreign policy.” The value and underlying integrity of NATO has again been on display following the broader invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022. Ukraine has received substantial support from NATO as well as other countries, representing a much more unified response than had been expected by many analysts.

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U.S. Military Deployments In his 2019 State of the Union speech, Trump claimed that he would be proactive in bringing troops home. As one commentator put it, “But after nearly three years in office, Trump’s promised retrenchment has yet to materialize. The president hasn’t meaningfully altered the US global military footprint he inherited from President Barack Obama.”14 Data from the Defense Manpower Data Center shows that overseas deployments remained relatively flat during this period (and are more so if one factors deployments in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, which the Trump administration stopped reporting in December 2017).15 Nor has Trump shifted the costly burden of defending U.S. allies. To the contrary, he loaded even greater military responsibilities on the United States, while either ramping up or maintaining U.S. involvement in the conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere.16 Trump also claimed that he would invest more in the military after the Obama administration had allegedly decimated spending. Unsurprisingly, military spending remained relatively flat.17 Trump’s whiplash approach to drawing down troops and then reversing his decision characterized most of his administration’s tenure. In both Syria and Afghanistan, Trump made sudden announcements of withdrawal, only to later reverse course. These efforts were repeatedly stymied by bipartisan congressional opposition to dramatic changes. Congress used a number of legislative vehicles, including mandating that such efforts be certified as not negatively affecting U.S. national security. Coupled with little in the way of a Trump administration strategy and a lack of interagency coordination, the president’s efforts fell short of his promises.18 These constraints were more relaxed for President Biden, whose party controlled the House and had half of the Senate; he withdrew from Afghanistan. Biden faced strong bipartisan criticism, though it centered on his execution of the withdrawal more so than the decision to withdraw itself. And while the United States has not deployed troops to Ukraine following the invasion by Russia, it has to date sent substantial sums of aid and provided important intelligence. These efforts received substantial bipartisan support.

International Trade Policy Our arguments found partial support in the area of international trade policy. Trump opened up a multifront trade war with virtually all major trading partners. The ensuing foreign retaliation, as we predicted, targeted geographic areas in the United States, with the goal of maximizing Trump’s political pain. The major trade policy changes were less consistent with our predictions because we expected Trump and the Republican Party to engage in “backwards

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induction” by recognizing the consequences of a widespread trade war and therefore choosing not to start one in the first place. Analyzing the 2018 midterm elections, researchers estimate that the trade war cost Trump approximately five seats in the House of Representatives.19 We incorrectly anticipated that this type of cost—stemming from international and domestic constraints— would dissuade Trump from starting a trade war. Congressional pushback against the trade war and industry opposition did materialize, but it failed to fully constrain Trump. All told, Trump had relatively free rein to conduct an unsuccessful trade war. This may have been attributable to the fact that over time even more aspects of trade policy have been delegated by Congress to the president, thus eroding constraints on the executive. Ironically, even with the most significant trade war in over three decades, the U.S. trade deficit grew slightly. U.S. exports and imports remained relatively stable until the pandemic hit in 2020.20 While the COVID-19 pandemic clearly had a tremendous effect on global trade, Trump’s trade war did not achieve its main goals of shifting the U.S. balance of trade. Additionally, Congress passed the United States–Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA, or the “New NAFTA”) by substantial bipartisan margins. In terms of its substance, the USMCA drew heavily from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an Obama-era agreement that Trump left in his first year in office. However, the United States missed opportunities, and China proved willing to forge ahead while the United States sat on the sidelines. In late 2020, most of the largest Asian economies signed onto the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. President Biden signaled interest in reengaging with partner countries in Asia but so far has not made any progress toward joining the Comprehensive Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (the renamed TPP).

Immigration The Trump administration’s efforts on immigration policy were probably the most contentious of any policy area. While many of these efforts were ultimately thwarted, they nonetheless were disruptive. The U.S. court system provided the largest check, even if it allowed some policies to proceed. These checks came in several forms: judicial rebukes based on the policies themselves and rebukes based on various procedural mistakes made by Trump. The “Muslim travel ban” went through a series of transformations and saw a string of judicial rebukes. The policy came before the Supreme Court several times. Ultimately, in mid-2018, the court upheld the policy, based on the administration’s claim that travelers from these countries were a security threat. The five-justice majority decision argued that the executive branch has the right to set policies pertaining to national security.21 Upon taking office, Biden immediately rescinded this policy.

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Trump also targeted the Obama administration’s 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy. While he was able to implement various restrictions, DACA remains in place. In June 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that the administration’s attempt to terminate the program was judicially reviewable and violated the Administrative Procedures Act, given its “arbitrary and capricious manner.”22 In December  2020, a federal judge ordered the administration to begin allowing new applicants to the program.

Visas Trump also targeted the various visa programs for the entry of foreign workers. The three main visa programs are the H-1B (specialty occupations such as technology), H-2A (temporary agricultural workers), and H-2B (temporary nonagricultural workers). Throughout the majority of Trump’s tenure, all of these programs had similar or even higher levels of approved petitions.23 The only exception occurred in 2020, when Trump began to especially focus on decreasing H-2B visas.24 The Trump administration tried a variety of ways to reduce the ability of U.S. firms to use H-1B visas. He faced strong resistance from companies relying on the program for technical talent in short supply from American workers.25 Trump’s H-1B efforts also faced substantial judicial pushback. For example, in order to redirect firms toward domestic labor, the administration tried to substantially increase the required wages of H-1B visa holders. Court challenges led to a string of losses, in part again because of violations of the Administration Procedures Act. Ultimately, the Biden administration stopped defending the rule changes in court.26 The Trump administration’s approach to the H-2A visa program also sparked resistance. At one point, the administration halted a biannual survey of wages, with the expectation that this act would lead to pay decreases for H-2A holders. A range of actors opposed this effort, and it faced challenges in court.27 Supported by agricultural producers, the Trump administration took a different tack and simply froze wages.28 The Biden administration quickly rolled back these proposed rules.29 H-2B visas for nonagricultural temporary workers in fact grew under Trump. In 2017, he expanded the program, which was immediately followed by an expanded request from Trump’s hotel properties.30 However, in 2020 the Trump administration tried both to expand the program31 and to reduce it.32 As with other visa programs, corporations and organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposed restrictions on H-2B visas.33 In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration tried to prevent foreign students who were studying at U.S. universities from being

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able to remain in the United States if their schools were holding classes online. Essentially, their visa status would be revoked if they did not either leave the country or transfer to an institution offering in-person classes. Harvard University and MIT initiated a lawsuit, later joined by universities across the country, challenging the rule in federal court. The Trump administration reversed course. Immigration policy does not exist in a vacuum, and powerful international economic forces are important. For example, research suggests that restrictions on H-1Bs will simply lead to more offshoring of work.34 This trend could even accelerate, since many firms gained substantial remote work experience during the pandemic.

Border Restrictions and the Wall Perhaps the most symbolic piece of the Trump administration is “the Wall.” Trump repeatedly asserted that Mexico would pay for the border wall, which, of course, it did not. Furthermore, Congress introduced substantial barriers to its funding, forcing the administration to use other fiscal accounts (like military construction and U.S. Treasury forfeiture accounts). A 2020 bipartisan spending bill included money for the wall. Most of the construction progress has been made in terms of rebuilding or enhancing existing barriers rather than new construction.35 Despite the wall being largely a flop, the Trump administration was successful in implementing restrictions targeting migration from Mexico and Central America. These included changes to asylum policies that made it difficult or impossible to qualify, as well as requirements that asylum seekers remain abroad while their cases were heard. The administration also stepped up interior enforcement by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.36 While some municipalities pushed back on these efforts, the numbers of noncriminal arrests increased during the Trump administration until the COVID-19 crisis. The Trump administration notoriously pursued deplorable tactics aimed at deterring migration, such as the separation of families.

The Future Trump’s claims to be leading an “America First” foreign policy and the policy outcomes from his administration were not consistent. While Trump was, by and large, unable to change U.S. foreign policy in terms of resources and policies, the tenor of his administration differed radically from that of previous ones and was often poisonous to American interests.

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While Trump was unable to dismantle and destroy many of the institutions that play a prominent role in international relations, those institutions did face challenges. Biden’s administration may seek to restore their place in American diplomacy. But many international institutions need reforms in order to adapt to global changes. China is now attempting to displace the United States in many institutions that undergird the liberal international order. Were China just another large capitalist democracy this would cause problems, but given its state-led economy and autocratic regime, the problems are profound. During the Cold War, institutions containing both the United States and USSR were often hamstrung. Chinese engagement in these institutions may however spur U.S. reengagement in order to avoid displacement. On the domestic front, we expect the constraints that bound Trump also to operate for Biden. In Trump’s case, the constraints operated to prevent more of a turn to America First policies. As noted, the U.S. bureaucracy, Congress, the courts, the media, and public opinion to some extent blocked Trump’s pursuit of retrenchment. This was an unusual position; in most administrations since World War II, the executive branch has been more internationalist than most other domestic actors. Domestic pressure against more global engagement, more multilateralism, and more military and foreign-aid spending has been predominant in the past. We expect a return to this posture. The Biden administration, while pursuing internationalist policies, will need to tailor that engagement to ensure better and fairer outcomes for the median U.S. voter. Openness to trade, immigration, and foreign investment will need to be tempered, since those areas have redistributive effects within society. Asserting more demands for improving the treatment of labor, the environment, human rights, and other regulatory priorities in agreements with other countries in exchange for access to the U.S. market will be important. Conditional openness is likely to be a robust part of Biden’s foreign policy. Much of our analysis considers the role of domestic and international institutions. Further scholarship on the design of these institutions is warranted. For international institutions, the Trump presidency brought a number of questions to the fore. For example, how can escape and exit clauses37 be specifically designed to maintain international cooperation while facilitating the participation of various countries in the first place? How much influence should powerful countries, like the United States, have in these organizations? While allowing a great power to occupy an influential role in an institution can increase that power’s incentives to meaningfully engage, it can also disincentivize other countries. Designing institutions to deal with this fundamental tradeoff remains important. Domestically, scholars and policy makers must consider a number of questions around institutional design. Some of these are more pertinent to purely domestic issues, like rule of law and corruption, which is important given Trump’s disregard of previous rules and norms.38 But others bear more directly

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on foreign policy. The relative roles of Congress and the presidency in shaping American foreign policy remain contested. For example, the party out of power always laments presidential reliance on executive orders. These orders are used to circumvent constraints yet can be undone by the next administration. Can American political institutions be established that appropriately limit this dynamic and provide more consistency and credibility to American foreign policy? If not, the United States may become more inconstant than ever. Its domestic politics are polarized between two similarly sized electoral groups that may alternate in office. In this situation, it is not clear how U.S. foreign policy, and its threats and promises, can be credible. A return of Trump to the presidency in 2024, which is possible, may bring new challenges to all aspects of U.S. foreign policy. Another issue is the relative role of interests and norms. Trump challenged and broke a number of norms in both domestic and foreign politics. We have focused in this chapter on policy changes because we believe them to be very important; even so, norms are also important. Trump and his administration have criticized and violated many longstanding norms, which has been and will continue to be costly to the United States. American soft power has been hurt. Other countries can point to Trump’s words and behavior to justify their norm breaking, and America’s ability to name and shame others has been diminished. On the normative side, the Trump administration has had a sizable negative impact. Can these norms be reconstructed for the changed world we inhabit? As an update in August 2022 to our arguments, we note that while the war in Ukraine is deeply troubling, the norms enshrined in the Liberal International Order (LIO) are showing their strength. Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022, did not change the dynamics we describe in this chapter. In the United States, the massive sanctions placed on Russia enjoy bipartisan support among lawmakers and the public.39 European countries have also taken a remarkably united stance against the war and in favor of strong economic sanctions. Even Switzerland broke with its longstanding neutrality to participate in the sanctions regime, while EU countries pledged to increase their defense spending.40 NATO countries are working together tightly, and more countries are in the process of joining. The United States and its allies have come together strongly to oppose this violent attack on another nation and on the LIO. The military attack on a sovereign nation has galvanized many nations and underlined the continuing relevance of the LIO and its institutions.

Notes A longer version of this chapter was published online. See Stephen Chaudoin, Helen V. Milner, and Dustin Tingley, “ America First’ Meets Liberal Internationalism,” H-Diplo/ ISSF Policy Series, ed. D. Labrosse, March  5, 2021, https://issforum.org /ISSF/PDF /PS2021-11.pdf. We would like to thank Tom Cunningham for research assistance and

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David Baldwin, Robert Jervis, Robert Keohane, Colin Chia, Anne Jamison, Nikhil Kalyanpur, and Paul Poast for comments on the previous long-form chapter. Stephen Chaudoin, Helen V. Milner, and Dustin Tingley, “A Liberal International American Foreign Policy? Maybe Down but Not Out,” in Chaos in the Liberal Order: The Trump Presidency and International Politics in the Twenty-First Century, ed. R. Jervis, F. J. Gavin, J. Rovner, and D. Labrosse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 61–97. In this chapter, we review some of the same areas that we focused on in our earlier essay. Readers interested in a more complete accounting—including across a larger range of issue areas—can find them in the online article. See Chaudoin, Milner, and Tingley, “‘America First’ Meets Liberal Internationalism.” Doug Palmer, “New Ruling Quashes Hawley’s Hope for Senate WTO Withdrawal Vote,” Politico, July 1, 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/01/ruling-quashes -hawley-hope-senate-wto-withdrawal-347732. Keith Johnson, “How Trump May Finally Kill the WTO,” Foreign Policy, December 9, 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/12/09/trump-may-kill-wto-finally-appellate-body -world-trade-organization/. Stewart M. Patrick, “Trump, the World Bank, and the IMF: Explaining the Dog That Didn’t Bark (Yet),” Internationalist (blog), Council on Foreign Relations, October 11, 2017, https://www.cfr.org / blog /trump-world-bank-and-imf-explaining-dog-didnt -bark-yet. Adam Tooze, “A Global Pandemic Bailout Was Coming—Until America Stopped It,” Foreign Policy, April 17, 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/17/global-pandemic -bailout-imf-world-bank-meetings-america-sdrs/. Avantika Chilkoti, “International Monetary Fund Based in Beijing? Maybe, Its Director Says,” New York Times, July  24, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/24/us /politics/christine-lagarde-international-monetary-fund.html. Kelebogile Zvobgo and Stephen Chaudoin, “Despite US Sanctions, the International Criminal Court Will Keep Investigating Alleged War Crimes in Afghanistan,” Monkey Cage (blog), Washington Post, June 16, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com /politics /2020/06/16/despite -us -sanctions -international- criminal-court-will-keep -investigating-alleged-war-crimes-afghanistan/. K. Riva Levinson, “By Reversing Course on Ebola Funding, Trump Brings Compromise,” The Hill, June 11, 2018, https://thehill.com /opinion /international /391644-by -reversing-course-on-ebola-funding-trump-brings-compromise. Tara McKelvey, “Trump Denies US Opposition to WHO Breastfeeding Resolution,” BBC News, July 9, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44772686. Stanley Sloan, “Donald Trump and NATO: Historic Alliance Meets A-historic President,” H-Diplo ISSF Policy Series, April 8, 2021, ed. D. Labrosse, https://issforum.org /ISSF/PDF/PS2021-20.pdf. Charles Kupchan, “NATO Is Thriving in Spite of Trump,” Foreign Affairs, March 20, 2019, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2019-03-20/nato-thriving-spite-trump. John Dowdy, “More Tooth, Less Tail: Getting Beyond NATO’s 2 Percent Rule,” in The World Turned Upside Down: Maintaining American Leadership in a Dangerous Age, ed. Nicholas Burns, Leah Bitounis, and Jonathon Price (Washington, DC: Aspen Institute, 2017), 151–66. Paul K. MacDonald and Joseph M. Parent, “Trump Didn’t Shrink US Military Commitments Abroad—He Expanded Them,” Foreign Affairs, December 3, 2019, https:// www . foreignaffairs . com /articles /2019 -12 - 03 /trump - didnt - shrink - us -military -commitments-abroad-he-expanded-them.

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15. Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Eric Schmitt, “Despite Vow to End ‘Endless Wars,’ Here’s Where About 200,000 Troops Remain,” New York Times, October 21, 2019, https:// www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/world/middleeast/us-troops-deployments.html; Kate Brannen and Ryan Goodman, “We’re Suing the Pentagon to Find Out Where US Troops Are Deployed,” PostEverything (blog), Washington Post, October  7, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost .com /outlook /2020/10/07/were -suing-pentagon -find -out-where-us-troops-are-deployed/. 16. MacDonald and Parent, “Trump Didn’t Shrink US Military Commitments Abroad.” 17. Christopher Giles, “US Election 2020: Has Trump Kept His Promises on the Military?,” BBC Reality Check (blog), BBC News, October 16, 2020, https://www.bbc.com /news /election-us-2020-54060026; Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Military Expenditure Database, https://www.sipri.org /databases/milex. 18. Katie Bo Williams, “To Block Trump’s Troop Withdrawals, Congress Turns an Old Tactic Upside Down,” Defense One, July 14, 2020, https://www.defenseone.com/policy /2020 /07 /unconventional -tactic - becomes - congresss - go -weapon - against -troop -withdrawal/166880/. 19. See Emily  J. Blanchard, Chad  P. Bown, and Davin Chor, “Did Trump’s Trade War Impact the 2018 Election?,” working paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2019, 26434, https://doi.org/10.3386/w26434; Sung Eun Kim and Yotam Margalit, “Tariffs as Electoral Weapons: The Political Geography of the US-China Trade War,” International Organization, January 2021, 1–38, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818320000612. 20. Census Bureau via Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis FRED Database, “Trade Balance: Goods and Services, Balance of Payments Basis (BOPGSTB),” https://fred.stlouisfed .org /series/BOPGSTB. 21. American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, “Timeline of the Muslim Ban,” https:// www.aclu-wa.org /pages/timeline-muslim-ban; Amy Howe, “Divided Court Upholds Trump Travel Ban,” SCOTUSblog (blog), June 26, 2018, https://www.scotusblog.com /2018/06/opinion-analysis-divided-court-upholds-trump-travel-ban/. 22. National Immigration Law Center Alert, June 22, 2020, https://www.nilc.org /issues /daca/alert-supreme-court-overturns-trump-administrations-termination-of-daca/. 23. See Chaudoin, Milner, and Tingley, “ ‘America First’ Meets Liberal Internationalism.” 24. Processing times of petitions by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) did slow substantially during the Trump administration. 25. Grady McGregor, “Big Tech Defends H-1B Visas Against Trump’s ‘Un-American’ Crackdown,” Fortune, August 11, 2020, https://fortune.com/2020/08/11/trump-h1b-visa -crackdown-big-tech-defense/. 26. Stuart Anderson, “Judge Kills the Last Trump H-1B Visa Rule Left Standing,” Forbes, September 17, 2021, https://www.forbes.com /sites/stuartanderson /2021 /09/17/judge -kills-the-last-trump-h-1b-visa-rule-left-standing/. 27. Nick Cahill, “Judge Orders Trump Administration to Reinstate Farmworker Wage Survey,” Courthouse News Service, October 28, 2020, https://www.courthousenews .com/judge-orders-trump-administration-to-reinstate-farmworker-wage-survey/. 28. Dan Charles, “Farmworkers Say the Government Is Trying to Cut Their Wages,” National Public Radio, November 11, 2020, https://www.npr.org /2020/11/11/929064527 /farm-workers-say-the-government-is-trying-to-cut-their-wages. 29. Karina Andrew, “Utah Farmers Hoped for a Streamlined System for Hiring Migrant Workers. It Didn’t Happen,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 26, 2021. 30. Alexia Fernandez-Campbell, “Trump Lifted the Cap on H-2B Worker Visas. Then His Businesses Asked for 76 of Them,” Vox, July 20, 2017, https://www.vox.com/policy-and -politics/2017/7/20/16003254/trump-h2b-visa-program.

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31. Camila DeChalus, “Trump Administration Allows 35,000 More H-2B Seasonal Worker Visas for the Year,” Roll Call, March 5, 2020, https://www.rollcall.com/2020 /03/05/trump-administration-allows-35000-more-h-2b-visas-for-the-year/. 32. Julia Ainsley, “Trump Signs Order Freezing Visas for Foreign Workers Through the End of the Year,” NBC News, June  22, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com /politics /immigration /trump -sign-order-freezing-visas-foreign-workers-through-end-year -n1231782. 33. Gillian Friedman, “Companies Criticize Visa Suspensions, but Impact May Be Muted for Now,” New York Times, June 23, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/ busi ness/economy/visa-suspensions-companies-react.html. 34. Britta Glennon, “How Do Restrictions on High-Skilled Immigration Affect Offshoring? Evidence from the H-1B Program,” working paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2020, 27538, https://doi.org /10.3386/w27538. 35. William L. Painter and Audrey Singer, DHS Border Barrier Funding, Congressional Research Service Report no. R45888 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2020), https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R /R45888. 36. Sarah Pierce and Jessica Bolter, Dismantling and Reconstructing the US Immigration System: A Catalog of Changes Under the Trump Presidency (Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute, 2020), https://www.migrationpolicy.org /sites/default/files/publi cations/MPI _US-Immigration-Trump-Presidency-Final.pdf. 37. Peter B. Rosendorff and Helen V. Milner, “The Optimal Design of International Trade Institutions: Uncertainty and Escape,” International Organization 55, no. 4 (Autumn 2001): 829–57. 38. Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, “How to Reform the Presidency After the Wreckage of Trump,” New York Times, December 18, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12 /18/opinion/trump-presidency-reform.html. 39. Henry J. Gomez, “Ukraine Dents ‘America First’ Thinking Deep in the Heart of Trump Country,” NBC News, March 14, 2022, https://www.nbcnews.com /politics/politics -news/ukraine-dents-america-first-thinking-deep-heart-trump-country-rcna19441. 40. Nouele Illien, “Switzerland Joined in Sanctions, but Russia’s Oil, Metals and Grains Still Trade There,” New York Times, March 7, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03 /07/ business/russia-switzerland-sanctions.html. Hans von der Burchard, “In Historic Shift, Germany Ramps Up Defense Spending Due to Russia’s Ukraine War,” February 27, 2022, Politico, https://www.politico.eu /article/germany-to-ramp-up-defense -spending-in-response-to-russias-war-on-ukraine/.

CHAPTER 34

LIBERAL INTERNATIONALISM AND PARTISAN CONFLICT IN THE POSTTRUMP UNITED STATES G E O R G E N . G E O R GA R A K I S A N D R O B E R T Y. S H A P I R O

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p until the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, which occurred after the completion of the research and writing for this chapter, the Trump administration represented perhaps the hardest test yet for the liberal international order in the twenty-first century—a conjecture that one of us (Shapiro) shared with Joshua Busby and Jonathan Monten in their contribution to the 2018 volume.1 We will return to the invasion of Ukraine at the end. The election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth U.S. president was met with disbelief and despondency among publics around the world. This was especially pronounced among key American allies and partners, who increased their confidence in the United States only after Joe Biden’s victory in 2020.2 Assuming power after President Barack Obama, a vocal advocate for liberal internationalism, Trump was unable or unwilling to take up the role of the leader of the free world, which was soon claimed by German chancellor Angela Merkel.3 Despite the increasing gridlock in Congress, Trump was able to push through a plethora of policies that aimed at unraveling (albeit not always successfully) many of the Obama-era foreign policy landmarks (as Stephen Chaudoin, Helen V. Milner, and Dustin Tingley also argue in chapter 33 of this volume). Trump’s “America First” vision manifested itself in foreign policies that aimed to disengage the United States from global politics and shook longstanding alliances. On the one hand, the Trump administration withdrew from or reversed many important agreements that regulated international cooperation. In just four years, Trump withdrew from numerous international agreements, such as the

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Trans-Pacific Partnership, the United States–Korea Free Trade Agreement, the North American Free Trade Agreement (which was subsequently replaced by the United States–Mexico-Canada Agreement in 2018), and the Paris Agreement to combat climate change. Moreover, he threatened to leave the UN Human Rights Council and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Trump also took a firm stance against China by entering a long and costly trade war and later blaming Chinese authorities for the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, Trump suspended funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) over its coronavirus response and its alleged failure to attribute responsibility to China for not containing the outbreak and letting it spread to other countries to become a pandemic. On the other hand, Trump had a mixed and somewhat unpredictable approach to solving international conflicts. In 2017, he aggressively confronted the administration of North Korea, and Vice President Mike Pence even paid a visit to the Korean demilitarized zone. During the first years of his presidency, he adopted a similar hard line in the Middle East. In retaliation for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s atrocities against civilians, Trump authorized a cruisemissile strike on Syrian soil and accelerated the U.S.-led campaign against the Islamic State, which led to its territorial collapse in Syria. In a controversial move, he officially recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and announced the relocation of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Trump also had a confrontational approach to Iran, which manifested itself in the suspension of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, known as the Iran Nuclear Deal, and the unilateral assassination of the Iranian major general Qasem Soleiman in January 2020. Nonetheless, the Trump administration took many steps in foreign policy that were aligned with its neoisolationist agenda. In the Middle East, he withdrew a significant number of U.S. forces from Syria and Afghanistan and pushed through the Abraham Accords, which established direct diplomatic and economic relations between Israel and Arab/African countries for the first time in twenty-five years. Further, he tried to deescalate tensions with North Korea by repeatedly meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and even becoming the first U.S. president to set foot in North Korea. Throughout his presidency Trump had a conciliatory approach to Russian president Vladimir Putin, which smoothed out the differences between the two countries but also raised questions of U.S. national security and vulnerability to international pressure. Just as Trump’s foreign policy represented the negation of Obama’s international vision, Biden’s victory signaled the return of the United States to the front line of liberal internationalism. Biden has been trying to build back a liberal democratic alliance that could effectively address the threat of the rising global autocracy. Indeed, the emerging Biden Doctrine argues that the defining challenge of this century is whether democracies will prevail over autocratic

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regimes.4 This doctrine offers the political framework to link together Biden’s foreign policy agenda, which emphasizes the needs of the U.S. middle class, cooperation among democracies, the defense of human rights, trade protectionism, and the improvement of U.S. competitiveness through investment in public infrastructure and research and development. However, these initiatives require a broader partisan consensus than what currently exists. While the challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of autocratic regimes, climate change, and globalization represent are substantial, their effects will become even more devastating unless partisan conflict subsides significantly.

The State of Partisan Conflict and Liberal Internationalism in American Public Opinion In our analysis, we find mixed results about the state of liberal internationalism and the partisan conflict over it.5 In principle, Americans express support for the basic tenets of liberal internationalism, but they express substantial partisan disagreement over the role of the United States in world affairs and defense spending. A large majority of Americans understand the need to coordinate domestic and foreign policy to secure the major role that the United States plays in the international arena, but they do not want the United States to meddle with other countries or foreign powers to meddle with U.S. domestic affairs. Since 2016, partisan divergence in public opinion around foreign policy issues has increased slightly, while in certain policy areas these differences have remained the same or even decreased. This political polarization is largely symmetric with Republicans and Democrats similarly moving in opposite directions; the few asymmetries are driven mostly by Democrats changing opinions and Republicans remaining essentially unchanged. To look further at these dynamics, we organize our discussion by policy areas and, where possible, examine changes over time.6

Foreign Policy and International Organizations Overall, the biggest partisan split involves whether the United States should play a major role in the international arena and coordinate and collaborate with international organizations to solve global issues. In fact, a 2017 Pew Research Center poll showed that 83 percent of Democrats and only a third of Republicans thought that diplomacy was the best way to ensure peace.7 Although large majorities of Democrats and Republicans (85 percent and 60 percent, respectively) wanted to either maintain the U.S. commitment to NATO or increase

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it, the 25-point partisan gap found in a 2020 Chicago Council (CCGA) survey is the widest it has been since 1974.8 Similarly, Democrats were consistently more favorable toward the United Nations, the WHO, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) than Republicans, with partisan differences ranging between 23 and 39 percentage points in 2020. Significant partisan divides exist on U.S. foreign policy priorities as well as on the country’s effectiveness in successfully coping with global threats. In a survey conducted by the Center for American Progress in 2019, Democrats placed a higher premium on combating global climate change, stopping Russian interference in U.S. government and politics, and improving relationships with U.S. allies, while Republicans were more concerned about reducing illegal immigration, dealing with terrorist threats, and protecting jobs for American workers.9 Importantly, Democrats favored more conciliatory foreign policy tools than Republicans, who tended to agree that aggressive and punitive measures against adversaries are more effective than signing international agreements or maintaining existing alliances.

Globalization and Free Trade During the past fifteen years, Americans have grown increasingly apart in their attitudes toward globalization and free trade. In a 2020 CCGA survey, threequarters of Democrats stated that globalization, especially the increasing connections of the American economy with others around the world, was mostly good for the United States.10 In contrast, only 55 percent of Republicans agreed with that statement, the lowest percentage in a decade. This divergence is particularly striking as two-thirds of both partisan publics admitted that the foreign policy decisions made by the American government affected their lives and those of their families. Similarly, a slim majority of the public across both parties believed that America was stronger when it took a leading role in the world to protect its national interests and advance common goals with other countries. Despite the fact that Trump was elected as a staunch critic of free-trade agreements, which he often described as the cause of massive job losses in the United States, his presidency surprisingly transformed how the American public perceived free trade in a positive way (regarding the gap between public opinion and President Trump’s key foreign policy positions, see Joshua Busby and Jonathan Monten’s contribution to this volume). Between 2016 and 2020, Democrats and Republicans in Gallup polls increased their support for the general idea of free trade by 20 and 28 percentage points, respectively, reaching a thirty-year high of almost 80  percent.11 This increase was particularly pronounced among Republicans, which suggests that they came to see the

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prospects for free trade differently in the hands of the more protectionist Trump administration. In 2021, Republicans’ skepticism about free trade being an opportunity for the American economy rebounded to a twelve-year low. Republicans were supportive of certain protectionist measures even when they took a positive stance toward free trade, according to Pew Research Center surveys.12 In 2018 and 2019, they were five times more likely than Democrats to think that increasing the tariffs between the United States and its trading partners was a good thing for the United States. Accordingly, Republicans in a 2020 CCGA survey expressed strong support for producing critical goods in the United States and not buying or selling them overseas, ensuring the national supply, even if this meant higher prices.13 In response to the COVID19 pandemic, 47 percent of Republicans but only a quarter of Democrats agreed that individual countries should themselves make all the goods they need in order to ensure that a crisis or disaster in one place would not hurt the global supply of goods.

Use of Military Force and U.S. Bases Abroad During the survey period, Republicans and Democrats shared similar perceptions concerning the potential for war. In the 2018 General Social Survey, almost half of all partisans expected the United States to fight in another world war within the next ten years.14 Nevertheless, Democrats and Republicans disagreed on how much to spend for national defense. Indeed, there was a 24-percentage-point gap in party opinions about national spending on national defense, with 45 percent of Republicans but only 21 percent of Democrats agreeing that the United States spends too little on the military, armaments, and defense. Overall, Americans’ support for intervention abroad depended on which country was involved. According to CCGA surveys conducted between 2018 and 2021, solid majorities of Democrats and Republicans supported the use of troops if a U.S. ally were invaded, if another country seized the territory of a U.S. ally, or if North Korea invaded South Korea or Japan.15 However, partisans were more skeptical about a possible intervention if China invaded Taiwan or if China initiated a military conflict with Japan over their disputed islands. In contrast to Democratic elites, who partially shared the skepticism of the general public, Republican elites16 overwhelmingly reported that the United States should send troops to support Japan or Taiwan in case China threatened them.17 Democrats and Republicans were most notably divided regarding military intervention and bases in the Middle East. Seven out of ten Republicans favored the use of U.S. troops if Israel were invaded by a neighbor, while only 46 percent

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of Democrats agreed with this course of action.18 Large differences could also be observed in opinions about military bases in Iraq and Kuwait. Roughly 70 percent of Republicans but only half of Democrats supported the United States having long-term bases in both countries.19 Finally, Republicans were 20 percentage points more likely than Democrats to favor long-term military bases in Afghanistan.20

Allies and Foreign Aid Relations with U.S. allies and foreign assistance continued to be divisive issues. Since 2016, Democrats who believed that the United States spent too much money on foreign aid and assistance to other countries declined by 12 percent; the 28-percentage-point partisan gap found in GSS is the widest of the last fifty years.21 Notwithstanding, majorities on both sides in a 2019 Pew survey favored greater cooperation with Germany, though Democrats by 12 points more than Republicans.22 Partisans on both sides ranked Germany as the fifth most important foreign policy partner. South Korea and Japan have long been the principal allies of the United States in Asia. In a 2020 CCGA survey, almost 80 percent of partisans on both sides (up from 66 percent in 2018) agreed that it was important for the United States to build strong relations with traditional allies like South Korea and Japan, even if this might challenge U.S. relations with China.23 In addition, large majorities in CCGA and Gallup surveys of partisans indicated that good relations with Japan were important for the economy and national security of the United States and expressed positive views about Japan.24

China An increasing share of Americans described China in negative terms. In January 2020, roughly 40 percent of Democrats and Republicans saw China as a critical threat to the vital interest of the United States. However, in a July 2020 CCGA survey conducted after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, this share increased by 9 and 26 percentage points respectively, hitting a twentyyear high.25 A solid majority of supporters of both parties in this survey as well as in a 2021 Pew study perceived China as a rival of the United States, thought that China should be less involved in addressing the world’s problems, and believed that limiting its power and influence should be given top priority as a long-range foreign policy goal.26 However, Republicans in a Pew 2020 survey were much more likely to support hard-line policies on economic issues, while majorities of all partisans favored negotiating arms-control agreements, placing

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sanctions on the Chinese officials who were responsible for human rights abuses, working with China to limit climate change, and prohibiting U.S. companies from selling sensitive high-tech products to China and Chinese technology companies from building communication networks in the United States.27 Further, in a 2020 CCGA survey, large majorities of Republicans, but not Democrats, favored increasing tariffs on products imported from China, reducing trade between the United States and China, restricting the exchange of scientific research between the United States and China, and limiting the number of Chinese students studying in the United States.28

Russia The Trump presidency reshaped how the American public viewed Russia and its relation to the United States. In a 2019 Pew Research Center survey, nearly 70 percent of the general public thought of Russia as an adversary or a serious problem, a rise of four percentage points since 2016. This large majority masked important partisan divergence, with 83 percent of Democrats versus 61 percent of Republicans thinking of Russia in negative terms.29 Until Trump’s election, both Democrats and Republicans were similarly concerned about Russia representing a threat to the United States, but during Trump’s presidency the partisan gap grew wider and reached a fifteen-year high.

Iran The Trump presidency was a major test for U.S.-Iranian relations. In a 2020 Pew survey, overwhelming majorities of Democrats and Republicans were consistently critical of Iran.30 In a 2019 survey of the same firm, almost 57 percent of partisans on both sides (up from 51 percent in 2017) believed that Iran’s nuclear program was a major threat to the United States.31 Although 74 percent of Democrats supported the return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, or the Iran nuclear agreement) in a 2021 CCGA survey, only 39 percent of Republicans (down from 53 percent in 2018) expressed positive views.32

Afghanistan and Iraq Americans remained divided about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In a 2018 Pew survey, two-thirds of Republicans thought that the United States had made the right decision in 2001 to use military force in Afghanistan, while less than a third of Democrats shared this opinion.33 This is the widest gap since 2006.

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The recent military evacuation of Afghanistan brought America’s longest war to an end and affected public opinion on the war. In a Pew Research Center survey conducted between August 23 and 29, 2021, Democrats were less likely than Republicans to view Taliban control of Afghanistan as a major threat to the national security of the United States.34 In fact, Democrats evaluated domestic terrorism as a more critical threat than international terrorism—an opinion that is in stark contrast with how Republicans perceive the relative risk. Republicans and Democrats also disagreed about whether the U.S. decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan was the right one: almost two-thirds of Republicans disagreed with this initiative, while 70  percent of Democrats favored the end of the war. Nevertheless, most partisans were united in thinking that the United States mostly failed to achieve its goals in Afghanistan and that the Biden administration had not handled the U.S. exit from Afghanistan in a positive way. Public opinion on Iraq exhibited similar dynamics. In a 2018 Pew survey, 61 percent of Republicans (up from 52 percent in 2014) but only 27 percent of Democrats reported that the United States had made the right decision in engaging in invading Iraq.35 Moreover, 48 percent of Republicans (up from 38 percent in 2014) and just 30 percent of Democrats (down from 36 percent in 2014) answered that the war in Iraq was mostly successful. Overall, in a 2020 CCGA survey, 46 percent of Republicans and almost 80 percent of Democrats suggested that the war in Iraq had not been worth fighting.36

Immigration and Refugees Immigration remains one of the most divisive issues in contemporary American politics. Although the coronavirus outbreak in 2020 reduced public concerns about immigration, the share of Americans in a 2021 Pew survey who thought that illegal immigration was a very big problem in the country increased from 28 percent to 48 percent, a five-year high. More specifically, 72 percent of Republicans (up from 43 percent) and 29 percent of Democrats (up from 15 percent) declared illegal immigration to be a very big national problem.37 A more macroscopic view offered by a 2018 CCGA study reveals that polarization on immigration is asymmetric: since 1998 Republicans’ opinions on the issue has remained almost unchanged, while after 2002 Democrats become less concerned about the number of immigrants and refugees coming into the United States, and increasingly so after 2010.38 The importance of controlling and reducing illegal immigration marked a similar trend in the same survey. Despite the fact that Democrats and Republicans differed in their attitudes toward immigration, there is evidence that common ground existed in certain policy areas. In a 2021 Pew survey, solid

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majorities of partisans on both sides favored increasing staffing and resources available to patrol and police the U.S.-Mexico border and to process unaccompanied minors more quickly, reducing the number of people coming to the United States to seek asylum, and providing safe and sanitary conditions for asylum seekers once they arrived in the country.39 In contrast, wide partisan gaps existed on the topics of making it easier for asylum seekers to be granted legal status; providing more assistance to countries in places like Central America, where many asylum seekers originate; not allowing people to seek asylum in the United States; and building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.40

The Future of Liberal Internationalism: The COVID-19 Pandemic, Climate Change, Globalization, and the Rise of Autocratic Regimes During the first months of Joe Biden’s presidency, public opinion seems to have been more confident about the position of the United States in global affairs. In a 2021 Pew survey, a majority of Americans expressed confidence in Biden’s ability to handle international affairs.41 This majority is not as large as the one that Barack Obama enjoyed at the beginning of his term, but it is significantly larger than that of Donald Trump. Nevertheless, following a trend that dates back at least to the administration of George W. Bush, there are vast partisan differences in public trust in the president to handle foreign policy. Throughout his presidency, Democrats were skeptical of Trump’s capacity to do the right thing regarding world affairs, while Republicans were clearly more confident. In the beginning of 2021, this dynamic reversed: 88 percent of Democrats but only 27 percent of Republicans expressed confidence in Biden’s handling of international affairs. Moreover, there are stark partisan divides over foreign policy priorities and in terms of public confidence in Biden’s decision making and ability to deal effectively in different policy areas. Democrats and Republicans disagreed on the issues of improving relationships with U.S. allies; maintaining the U.S. military advantage over all other countries; limiting the power and influence of China, Iran, and Russia; reducing illegal immigration into the United States; dealing with global climate change; and getting other countries to assume more of the costs of maintaining world order. In contrast, solid majorities favored giving top priority to protecting the jobs of American workers, taking measures to protect the United States from terrorist attacks, reducing the spread of infectious diseases, and preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Smaller percentages of partisans on both sides gave top priority to reducing the trade deficit with other countries, limiting the power and influence of North Korea, reducing U.S. military commitments overseas, aiding refugees fleeing

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violence around the world, reducing legal immigration into the United States, promoting democracy in other nations, strengthening the United Nations, and promoting and defending human rights in other countries. These dynamics of public opinion hint that the perseverance of liberal internationalism is still at stake. The COVID-19 pandemic continues to pose a major challenge to the world order. Since 2018, an increasing number of Americans from both parties have agreed that reducing the spread of infectious diseases should be given top priority as a long-range foreign policy goal. Perhaps the most polarizing issue relating to the COVID-19 pandemic is the role of China. Republicans agreed that the United States should limit the power and influence of China at a much higher rate than Democrats. Accordingly, in a 2020 Pew survey they expressed more negative views about China and its handling of the COVID-19 outbreak.42 Although Democrats in a 2020 AP/NORC survey blamed the U.S. government for the coronavirus situation during the first months of the health crisis, Republicans were more likely to criticize the governments of other countries and the WHO.43 In response to the pandemic, 80  percent of Democrats in a 2020 CCGA survey wanted the United States to coordinate and collaborate with other countries to solve global issues, while roughly 60 percent of Republicans preferred the United States to be self-sufficient as a nation so that Americans did not need to depend on others.44 In a 2020 AP/NORC survey, partisans on both sides overwhelmingly agreed that the United States should have a major role in developing the coronavirus vaccine, but only Democrats favored allowing other entities (such as the WHO, the European Union, or China) to contribute to this effort.45 Similar disagreement existed on who should benefit from the vaccines: 70  percent of Republicans said that the United States should keep any vaccines it produces for Americans first, while Democrats were divided over whether the United States should make any vaccine it developed immediately available to other countries. Despite the challenges of the pandemic for the international community, climate change has been considered the most important threat that humans will have to face in the near future. Since the early 2000s, however, Republicans have grown more skeptical about climate change, as shown in a 2020 Stanford University, Resources for the Future, and ReconMR study.46 Nowadays, Democrats almost unanimously believe that the world’s temperature has probably been increasing over the past hundred years; only half of Republicans share this belief. However, among those who believe that the global warming exists, solid majorities of Americans from both parties attribute the rise of temperature to human activity. In a 2021 CCGA survey, the divide between Democrats and Republicans who thought that climate change was a critical threat for the United States hit a thirteen-year record high of almost 66  percentage points.47 Most

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worryingly, a similar gap exists regarding preferences about the actions that the U.S. government should take to fight climate change: Republicans are consistently reluctant to support a green policy agenda; Democrats are enthusiastic about it. In addition, it is crucial to redress the widening inequalities between the losers and winners of globalization. To deal with this urgent issue, Republicans in a 2021 Pew survey preferred a more protectionist approach, whereas Democrats opined that these problems could be better solved with greater integration at the international level.48 Perhaps Republicans’ skepticism about the forces of globalization better manifests itself in the low ratings party members give to international organizations such as the WHO, the United Nations, and NATO. Finally, two-thirds of Republicans agreed the United States should pay less attention to problems overseas and concentrate on domestic policy issues, while at the same time the same share of Democrats wanted the United States to be active in world affairs.

Conclusion Recent developments highlight the importance of shocks in determining the international politics of the United States and bear on the current state of liberal internationalism. One is the COVID-19 pandemic, with its domestic and global public health and economic consequences. The second is the defeat of the United States and its allies in Afghanistan. The third is the Russian invasion of Ukraine, an ongoing crisis. The liberal internationalism that was able to endure the Trump administration and that could rebound through the efforts of the Biden administration has been weakened by these three developments. The COVID-19 crisis was engulfed in the continuing partisan conflict in the United States that Trump inflamed and will endure for as long as Trump remains on the political scene and beyond. The partisan repercussions of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan are readily apparent and have ramifications for the next congressional and presidential elections. And what about the ongoing invasion of Ukraine by the world’s most dangerous autocrat, Vladimir Putin? Only so much can be said at this point, as this threat to the world plays out in real time, with the end unknown. This requires a much longer discussion. Clearly, in the current international context, new types of authoritarian regimes offer an alternative Hobbesian vision of the world, one that often embraces economic freedom but consistently undermines fundamental political and social rights—and now national sovereignty, in the case of Ukraine and the entire liberal international order and the lives of its inhabitants, given the possibility that the current crisis could escalate to the use of nuclear weapons. The rise of illiberal democracies and autocracies around

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the globe foreshadows the defining clash of the twenty-first century. The longerterm consequences of these shocks for the American public and liberal internationalism are open questions to be answered by future opinion-survey data and other evidence. The enormous shock of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has to this point shown that liberal internationalism, upheld by NATO and supported by the American public—and, stunningly, most of the rest of the world—is holding its ground. The reason for this alone may be the injustice and outrageousness of Putin’s horrendous actions, which simply speak for themselves. More important is the consensus among the leaders of NATO countries and those of most of the rest of the world. This elite-level agreement has in turn produced the agreement of much of public opinion worldwide, most importantly in the United States. Elite consensus can most impressively lead public opinion.49 We see this in the striking bipartisan support of public opinion in the United States regarding sanctions and other actions against Russia, short of the use of American and NATO troops. This support differs sharply from the partisan conflict that has engulfed American public opinion on so many domestic policy and foreign and national security policy issues. While it may not hold, it nonetheless marks an important moment.

Notes We want to thank Diane Labrosse and Robert Jervis for their comments and encouragement. For their public opinion data figures and tables, we are most grateful to the Pew Research Center, Gallup, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA), the NORC General Social Survey (GSS), the NPR/PBS News Hour/Marist Poll, AP/NORC, the Center for American Progress and GBAO, and Stanford/Resources for the Future/ReconMR. At these organizations we thank Dina Smeltz, Frank Newport, Vallerie Nottage, Claudia Deane, Rene Bautiste, Tom Smith, Trevor Tompson, John Halpin, Lee Miringoff, Jon Krosnick, and Bo MacInnis. All analyses and interpretations are our own. 1. Joshua Busby and Jonathan Monten, “Has Liberal Internationalism Been Trumped?,” H-Diplo 1-6 (2017), https://networks.h-net.org /node/28443/discussions/171265/issf -policy-roundtable-1-6-2017-liberal-internationalism-still#_Toc477097021; Joshua Busby and Jonathan Monten, “Has Liberal Internationalism Been Trumped?,” in Chaos in the Liberal Order: The Trump Presidency and International Politics in the TwentyFirst Century, ed. R. Jervis, F. J. Gavin, J. Rovner, and D. Labrosse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 49–60; Robert Y. Shapiro, “Liberal Internationalism, Public Opinion, and Partisan Conflict in the United States,” in Chaos in the Liberal Order, 104–22, https://issforum.org /essays/cr4. 2. Richard Wike et al., “America’s Image Abroad Rebounds with Transition from Trump to Biden,” Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project, June 10, 2021, https://www . pewresearch . org /global /2021 /06 /10 /americas - image - abroad - rebounds -with -transition-from-trump-to-biden/. 3. Richard Wike et al., “Trump Approval Worldwide Remains Low Especially Among Key Allies,” Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project, October  1, 2018,

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4. 5.

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15.

16. 17. 18.

https:// www . pewresearch . org /global /2018 /10 /01 /trumps -international -ratings -remain-low-especially-among-key-allies/. Hal Brands, “The Emerging Biden Doctrine,” Foreign Affairs, June 29, 2021, https:// www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-06-29/emerging-biden-doctrine. All figures and tables used in this analysis can be found in the appendix of an extensive online version of this chapter at https://issforum.org /roundtables/policy/ps2021 -58. The supporting opinion data appear more fully in the many figures and tables in an earlier and more detailed version of this report; see George N. Georgarakis and Robert Y. Shapiro, “Liberal Internationalism and Partisan Discontents into the PostTrump United States,” H-Diplo/ISSF Policy Series: America and the World: The Effects of the Trump Presidency, 2021. We owe a great debt to the organizations that have conducted the surveys that have provided these data. Pew Research Center, “The Partisan Divide on Political Values Grows Even Wider: 3. Foreign policy,” October 5, 2017, https://www.pewresearch.org /politics/2017/10/05/3 -foreign-policy/. Dina Smeltz, Ivo Daalder, Karl Friedhoff, Craig Kafura, and Brendan Helm, “Divided We Stand: Democrats and Republicans Diverge on US Foreign Policy,” Chicago Council on Global Affairs, September  17, 2020, https://www.thechicagocouncil.org /sites /default/files/2020-12/report _2020ccs _ americadivided _0.pdf. John Halpin, Brian Katulis, and Peter Juul, “America Adrift: How the U.S. Foreign Policy Debate Misses What Voters Really Want,” Center for American Progress, May 5, 2019, https://www.americanprogress.org /article/america-adrift/. Smeltz et al., “Divided We Stand.” Mohamed Younis, “Sharply Fewer in U.S. View Foreign Trade as Opportunity,” Gallup, March 31, 2021, https://news.gallup.com/poll/342419/sharply-fewer-view-foreign -trade-opportunity.aspx. Amina Dunn, “Climate Change and Russia Are Partisan Flashpoints in Public’s Views of Global Threats,” Pew Research Center—U.S. Politics & Policy, July 30, 2019, https:// www.pewresearch .org /politics/2019/07/30/climate-change-and-russia-are-partisan -flashpoints-in-publics-views-of-global-threats/. Smeltz et al., “Divided We Stand.” General Social Survey Data Explorer, NORC at the University of Chicago, https:// gssdataexplorer.norc.org /trends/Current%20Affairs. Jonathan Schulman, “Americans’ Support for Trade and Intervention Abroad Depends on Which Country Is Involved,” LSE Blog, September 7, 2020, https:// blogs.lse.ac.uk /usappblog /2020 /09 /07 /americans - support -for -trade - and -intervention - abroad -depends-on-which-country-is-involved/; Craig Kafura and Karl Friedhoff, “As China Rises, Americans Seek Closer Ties with Japan,” Chicago Council on Global Affairs, December 11, 2018; https://globalaffairs.org /research /report /china-rises-americans -seek-closer-ties-japan. “Leaders” as defined and sampled by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. See Craig Kafura, Dina Smeltz, Joshua Busby, Joshua D. Kertzer, Jonathan Monten, and Jordan Tama, “Divisions on US- China Policy: Opinion Leaders and the Public,” Chicago Council on Global Affairs, February 1, 2021, https://globalaffairs.org /research/public -opinion-survey/divisions-us-china-policy-opinion-leaders-and-public. Kafura et al., “Divisions on US-China Policy.” Kafura and Friedhoff, “As China Rises, Americans Seek Closer Ties with Japan.” Dina Smeltz and Craig Kafura, “American Public Support for US Troops in Middle East Has Grown,” Chicago Council on Global Affairs, February 10, 2020, https://www

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19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

.thechicagocouncil .org /sites/default /files/2020 -12 /report _ american-support-grows -for-american-troops-in-middle-east _20200210.pdf. Eliza Posner, “Despite Unfavorable Views of the War in Afghanistan, Americans Split on Complete Withdrawal,” Chicago Council on Global Affairs, March 20, 2020, https:// globalaffairs .org /commentary-and-analysis / blogs /despite -unfavorable -views -war -afghanistan-americans-split-complete. General Social Survey Data Explorer. Jacob ADDIN ZOTERO_BIBL {“uncited”:[],“omitted”:[],“custom”:[]} CSL_BIBLIOGRAPHY Poushter and Mara Mordecai, “Americans and Germans Differ in Their Views of Each Other and the World,” Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project, March 9, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org /global/2020/03/09/americans-and -germans-differ-in-their-views-of-each-other-and-the-world/. Dina Smeltz and Craig Kafura, “Do Republicans and Democrats Want Cold War with China,” Chicago Council on Global Affairs, October 13, 2020, https://www.thechica gocouncil.org /research /public-opinion-survey/do-republicans-and-democrats-want -cold-war-china. See Kafura and Friedhoff, “As China Rises, Americans Seek Closer Ties with Japan”; R.J. Reinhart, “On Eve of Summit, Americans Still View Japan Positively,” Gallup, April 14, 2021; https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/347090/eve-summit-americans -view-japan-positively.aspx. Smeltz and Kafura, “Do Republicans and Democrats Want a Cold War with China.” “Majority of Americans Confident in Biden’s Handling of Foreign Policy as Term Begins,” Pew Research Center, February  24, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org /politics /2021 /02 /24 /majority - of - americans - confident -in - bidens - handling - of -foreign-policy-as-term-begins/. Laura Silver, Kat Devlin, and Christine Huang, “Americans Fault China for Its Role in the Spread of Covid-19,” Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project, July 30, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org /global/2020/07/30/americans-fault-china-for-its -role-in-the-spread-of-covid-19/. Smeltz and Kafura, “Do Republicans and Democrats Want a Cold War with China.” Dunn, “Climate Change and Russia Are Partisan Flashpoints.” Mara Mordecai, “Iran Widely Criticized in Fourteen Advanced Economies,” Pew Research Center, December 2, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org /fact-tank /2020/12 /02/iran-widely-criticized-in-14-advanced-economies/. Dunn, “Climate Change and Russia Are Partisan Flashpoints.” Dina Smeltz, Amir Farmanesh, and Brendan Helm, “Iranians and Americans Support Mutual JCPOA Return,” Chicago Council on Global Affairs, https://www .thechicagocouncil . org /sites /default /files /2021 - 03 /report _ iranians - americans -support-mutual-JCPOA-return.pdf. J. Baxter Oliphant, “After Seventeen Years of War in Afghanistan More Say U.S. Has Failed Than Succeeded in Achieving Its Goals,” Pew Research Center, October 5, 2018, https:// www . pewresearch . org / fact - tank /2018 /10 /05 /after -17 -years - of -war - in -afghanistan-more-say-u-s-has-failed-than-succeeded-in-achieving-its-goals/. Ted Van Green and Carroll Doherty, “Majority of U.S Public Favors Afghanistan Troop Withdrawal, Biden Criticized for His Handling of Situation,” Pew Research Center, August 31, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org /fact-tank /2021/08/31/majority-of-u-s -public-favors-afghanistan-troop -withdrawal-biden-criticized-for-his-handling-of -situation/.

Liberal Internationalism and Partisan Conflict 397 34. J. Baxter Oliphant, “Iraq War Continues to Divide U.S. Public Fifteen Years After It Began,” Pew Research Center, March 19, 2018, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank /2018/03/19/iraq-war-continues-to-divide-u-s-public-15-years-after-it-began/. 35. Smeltz and Kafura, “Report: American Support for American Troops in Middle East Has Grown.” 36. See “Most Americans Are Critical of Government’s Handling of Situation at U.S.Mexico Border,” Pew Research Center, May  3, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org /politics /2021 /05 /03 /most - americans - are - critical - of - governments -handling - of -situation-at-u-s-mexico-border/. 37. Craig Kafura and Dina Smeltz, “Majority of Americans Oppose Expanding U.S.Mexico Border Wall,” Chicago Council on Global Affairs, December 24, 2019, https:// www.thechicagocouncil .org /research /public- opinion-survey/majority-americans -oppose-expanding-us-mexico-border-wall. 38. “Most Americans Are Critical of Government’s Handling of Situation at U.S.-Mexico Border.” 39. Kafura and Smeltz, “Majority of Americans Oppose Expanding US-Mexico Border Wall.” 40. “Majority of Americans Confident in Biden’s Handling of Foreign Policy.” 41. Silver, Devlin, and Huang, “Americans Fault China for Its Role in the Spread of Covid-19.” 42. Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, University of Chicago, October 2, 2020; https://apnorc.org /wp-content/uploads/2020/10/HarrisForeignPolic yPollReport2Oct2020-fixed.pdf. 43. Smeltz et al., “Divided We Stand.” 44. Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, University of Chicago, “Americans Split on U.S. Role in Combatting Coronavirus and Relationship with Russia,” 2020; https://apnorc.org /wp-content/uploads/2020/10/HarrisForeignPolicyPoll Report2Oct2020.pdf. 45. Bo MacInnis and Jon A. Krosnick, “Climate Insights 2020: Partisan Divide,” October 13, 2020, https://media.rff.org/documents/Climate_Insights_2020_Partisan_Divide.pdf. 46. Dina Smeltz, Emily Sullivan, and Colin Wolff, “Republicans and Democrats in Different Worlds on Climate Change,” Chicago Council on Global Affairs, October 2021, https://www.thechicagocouncil.org /sites/default /files/2021-11 /Final%20Climate%20 Brief.pdf. 47. “Majority of Americans Confident in Biden’s Handling of Foreign Policy.” 48. For the relevant theory, see John R. Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 49. For the latest data at this writing, see, for example, Anthony Salvanto and Fred Backus, “CBS News poll: Strong Support for Russian Sanctions Even If Gas Prices Increase,” CBS News, March 13, 2022, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/russia-ukraine-sanctions -gas-prices-opinion-poll-2022-03-13/; Pew Research Center, “Public Expresses Mixed Views of U.S. Response to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine,” Pew Research Center, March 15, 2022, https://www.pewresearch.org /politics/2022/03/15/public-expresses -mixed-views-of-u-s-response-to-russias-invasion-of-ukraine/.

PART VII

LOOKING FORWARD The Prospects for Joe Biden’s Presidency

Editors’ Note The penultimate section assesses whether the Biden presidency will move the United States back toward a liberal internationalist posture. Just before this book went to press, our contributors added updates on the war in Ukraine, which jolted the international community into action and altered U.S. relations with Russia, China, the European Union, and NATO. Many observers who had predicted the long-term resilience of the liberal international order believe that liberal internationalism has roared back, even while recognizing the danger of this moment. Other contributors disagree, given that the consequences of great-power competition lie beyond any particular president. In chapter 35, Robert Legvold notes that this is just one more example of a delicate balancing act between the United States and Russia. Like his predecessors, Biden must walk a fine line between deterring malign Russian actions while achieving agreement on critical issues such as nuclear proliferation and climate change. On Putin’s war, Legvold concludes that it will “almost surely . . . leave the relationship irreparably damaged, at least for years to come, and U.S. policy makers preoccupied with the means and methods of combating the Russian threat in a new form.” James Goldgeier notes (chapter 36) a growing push toward great-power competition with China and that the Biden administration faces increased domestic pressures to engage in a competition between democracies and autocracies. Even given the historic importance of the Russian invasion, Goldgeier concludes

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that “President Biden will ultimately be judged less on how the United States fares in the global competition between democracies and autocracies, which will be a long-term endeavor, than on whether his administration can ensure victory for democracy at home at this decisive moment.” Alessandro Brogi concludes his discussion on transatlantic relations in chapter  37 on an optimistic note, writing that the memory of Trump must not occlude “the resilience of American democracy” and “U.S. stability and the transatlantic dialogue” or the fact that Trump’s presidency was an “inept farce.” American politics and transatlantic relations can bounce back in tandem. Important changes in other regions set the terms for the Biden administration’s diplomatic agenda. For example, James R. Stocker judges in chapter 38 that “Biden’s foreign policy rightly recognizes that some things have changed in the Middle East, and not all for the worse. The four years of the Trump administration left its mark on the region, notably by changing the relationship between Israel and other Arab countries and making autocracy great again.” He calls for the administration to look to the future and set new policy based upon the realities in the region. Echoing the contributors who argue that the Biden administration can buck this trend, Elizabeth Economy argues that “the damage President Trump and his administration inflicted on the fabric of U.S. standing in the world and its relations with its allies and partners was profound. However, it may not be irreparable” (chapter 39). Calling for a new U.S. approach to world leadership, which she calls “The United States 2.0,” she cautions that the “long-term viability of this leadership . . . will depend both on the Biden administration fulfilling its near-term objectives of domestic renewal and on consistency in the U.S. commitment to allies and institutions in the post-Biden era.”

CHAPTER 35

THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION AND RUSSIA Deeper Into a U.S.-Russia Cold War R O B E R T L E GVO L D

A

fter President Donald Trump’s four years in office, the U.S.Russian relationship ended where it began: hostile, recriminatory, unproductive, and disengaged. Thus, as Angela Stent describes in detail in chapter 17, the Biden administration started from where roughly the Obama administration left off, only the hole was deeper, because Russia’s cyber intrusions had added a paralyzing dimension to the mix of problems. Then less than two years into Biden’s new term, the bottom fell out. Russian president Vladimir Putin’s decision in February 2022 to invade Ukraine sent relations careening into a far darker place and blew up the new administration’s freshly deployed Russia strategy. Biden and his team were left surveying a relationship in ruins, as, if not more, dangerous than the bleakest moments in the original Cold War. What follows explores Biden’s assessment of the Russian challenge as he entered office, his aims and expectations for the relationship, and the strategy he fashioned to deal with Putin’s Russia. All this, however, quickly became history, and the subsequent story features a vastly altered U.S.-Russia policy in a vastly altered international context—its future opaque but doubtlessly grim. The course of U.S.-Russian relations during Trump’s tenure, as in so many other areas of foreign policy, formed a strange, destructive ellipsis. The four years began with gauzy hopes on both sides. Vladimir Putin and those close to him, who were pleased that they had unexpectedly avoided what they believed would be an aggressively hostile Clinton administration, thought they saw in

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Trump someone unencumbered by the problems roiling the relationship and persuaded that, as he put it, “getting along with Russia is a good thing.”1 The newly elected president, for his part, seemed convinced that if the United States backed off and shed some of the sanctions imposed on Russia, and if Congress would let him deal with Putin, the two would be able to do business, although what precisely that business would entail remained a bit of a mystery.2 Almost from the start, however, notions of what should change and any real steps to bring it about collided with new sources of friction. Moments of guarded optimism were soon followed by renewed anger and snap back. In May 2017, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov appeared at the White House with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak, smiles all around, and praised the progress they had made in creating “de-escalation zones” in Syria. Then in July, the two presidents met for their much-anticipated Helsinki summit, and afterward Putin enthused, “If we can build a relationship along the lines of our conversation yesterday, then there is every reason to believe we can restore, at least to a certain degree, the level of co-operation we need.”3 Less than a month later, however, Putin ordered the United States to cut its embassy and consular personnel by 755. He was retaliating for the sweeping sanctions that the U.S. Senate had just passed, which were in retaliation for Russian interference in the 2016 election. But the driving force behind the Senate action was the election issue, and its not-so-subtle subtext was a determination to constrain what Senate Democrats and hard-line Republicans regarded as Trump’s readiness to give the Russians a pass.4 U.S.-Russia policy had become U.S domestic politics. When Trump arrived in the White House, relations with Russia had already cratered because of the crisis that had erupted in Ukraine in 2014, and they remained immobilized by a series of stalemates over the war in Syria, Russia’s alleged violation of the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty (INF), and the U.S. plans for missile defense. But the election-interference issue overwhelmed all else. By 2020, Putin had long accepted that, whatever Trump’s visceral preferences, little would change. When expelling U.S. diplomatic personnel in July 2017, he said, “We were waiting for quite a long time that maybe something would change for the better, were holding out hope that the situation would change somehow.”5 The two sides were like a truck attempting to climb an icy hill, wheels spinning, slowly sliding backward. The election issue engulfed the relationship and turned Congress into an alternate author of U.S. Russia policy. Its policy agenda dealt almost exclusively with Russia’s malign behavior, at the center of which were Russia’s cyber intrusions into U.S. domestic politics. Congress’s principal policy tool was sanctions. In addition to the set of sanctions the Obama administration had imposed on Russia over its seizure of Crimea and military intervention in Donbas, halfway into Trump’s first year Congress tacked on the

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Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) and followed this by pushing for a fresh layer of sanctions after each new offending Russian action. In fact, over the last two years of the Trump administration, Russia faced not two but three U.S. Russia policies. In addition to the president’s rather rubbery inclinations and the sanctions-saturated approach of Congress, other portions of the administration had still different preoccupations— preoccupations that drove the relationship deeper into the hole. Russia’s alleged violations of the INF treaty had been a contentious issue from early in Barack Obama’s first term in office, but, with the arrival of John Bolton as national security advisor in the spring of 2018, the fate of the treaty took a grim turn, and with it the prospects for arms control of any kind. By October 2018, Bolton, who had long been opposed to the treaty, persuaded the president, over resistance elsewhere in the administration, to abandon it. Only the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) agreement remained of the patch-quilt nuclear arms-control regime negotiated over the fifty years beginning with the first Strategic Arms Limitations Talks Agreement (SALT I) in 1972, and its five-year extension before its February 2021 expiration was left in doubt throughout the remainder of the Trump presidency. To complete the dismantling of arms control as a guardrail, in November 2020 the administration withdrew from the 1992 Open Skies Treaty, the arrangement allowing Russia and NATO members to carry out aerial surveillance of each side’s military activity, a decision it took without consulting the United States’ European allies. The thrust of the three policies, however, converged around a single fundamental strategic proposition, one that sharply distinguished the perspectives early in Obama’s presidency from those at the end of Trump’s and that set the framework within which the new administration would formulate its Russia policy. As reflected in the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review and in the glow of the so-called reset of relations, the Obama administration began by stressing working with Russia to enhance strategic stability and jointly to reduce the number and role of nuclear weapons because “Russia and the United States are no longer adversaries, and prospects for military confrontation have declined dramatically.”6 By 2018, every part of the government, including most of Congress, had come to a very different assessment. The new nuclear-posture review asserted that there had been “a rapid deterioration of the threat environment since 2010” and a “return to great power competition,” with “potential adversaries,” in particular Russia and China, “expand[ing] and moderniz[ing] their nuclear forces” in ways designed to degrade the U.S. nuclear deterrent and its ability to defend regional allies.7 Both Russia and China, it was said, have “made clear they seek to substantially revise the post-Cold War international order.” The claim reflected a view that had congealed in Congress and across much of the media. Trump then introduced a further twist. Fixated on his increasingly

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hostile attitude toward China, by 2018 he was insisting that China, not Russia, was the primary problem.

The Biden Administration’s Starting Point Unlike any other post–Cold War U.S. president, Joe Biden began his administration by making plain that no “reset” of the U.S.-Russian relationship would be in the offing. Along with the rest of his team, he, the herald of the original Obama-era “reset,” reflected the qualitative turn that relations between the two countries had taken over the prior six years. Neither Moscow nor Washington harbored hopes that the frictions in the relationship could be easily surmounted and the relationship put back on a constructive path. Still, neither leadership  could have imagined how calamitous the ultimate collapse of relations would be. When Putin delayed congratulating Biden on his election victory, he dismissed the damage this might do by saying, “You can’t spoil a spoiled relationship. It is already spoiled.”8 Biden, in his first call to Putin, was blunter: “I made it clear to President Putin, in a manner very different from my predecessor, that the days of the United States rolling over in the face of Russia’s aggressive actions—interfering with our elections, cyberattacks, poisoning its citizens— are over.”9 The other side of his message was more accommodative. In the months before the election, Biden and his people had signaled their support for an extension of the New START agreement, and they did so again ahead of the president’s telephone conversation with Putin. The two also agreed to “explore strategic stability discussions on a range of arms control and emerging security issues.”10 Both parts of Biden’s message foreshadowed the outline of the administration’s forthcoming Russia policy. The formula was not new: cooperate where we can, push back where we must. Virtually every U.S. administration, tracing back to that of Bill Clinton, had embraced some version of this stance, particularly when relations hit a rough patch. In the case of the Biden administration, if this were to be the guide for future policy, it would face important challenges and suffer from significant lacunae. The administration referred to the second half of this two-sided approach as “holding Russia to account” when its actions threaten U.S. or allied interests. The challenge was how to do this with success, something that had largely eluded prior administrations. Three months into Biden’s tenure, the way the administration intended to go about a dual-track Russia policy was coming into clearer view. While sanctions followed an April 13 telephone conversation with Putin, the tone of the call differed fundamentally from that in January. Biden assured his Russian

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counterpart that the United States wanted “a stable and predictable relationship with Russia consistent with U.S. interests,” proposed a near-term presidential summit, and suggested that the focus should be on a “strategic stability dialogue.”11 Two days after this call, the administration announced the new round of sanctions. It received a predictably irate response from Moscow and a tit-for-tat expulsion of U.S. diplomats. Indeed, Russia’s ill-humor in this case appeared as simply the next angry stage after Russia’s recall of its ambassador from Washington a month earlier in response to Biden’s frank, if undiplomatic, characterization in a television interview of Putin as a “killer.”12 The April sanctions, however, came with a dual message. That the administration would impose costs for malign Russian behavior was one; the other signaled a determination to act with restraint in order to avoid adding to existing tensions. When announcing the sanctions, Biden and senior White House officials went out of their way to stress that the measures they had taken were “measured and proportionate,” that they could have inflicted harsher penalties but chose not to because “we do not desire a downward spiral,” and that they did not want “to be in an escalatory cycle with Russia.”13 After Washington acted and Moscow reacted, attention shifted to preparing for a June summit. The outsized role of sanctions, however, was and would have remained a complex burden on Biden’s Russia policy had the whole issue not been transformed scarcely two months into Biden’s second year in office when Russia invaded Ukraine. By the time Biden entered office, Russia was laboring under five different layers of U.S. sanctions that had targeted nine hundred individuals, a vastly larger number of Russian officials and entities than was ever sanctioned during the Cold War. The sanctions had been applied to a range of offending Russian behavior, from Ukraine to interference in U.S. elections; from Syria to the 2018 poisoning of Sergey Skripal, the former Russian military intelligence officer residing in Great Britain; from the hacking of U.S. infrastructure to human rights violations. This raft of sanctions, as Nicholas Mulder describes in chapter 14, were not well crafted. An omnidirectional, overworked instrumentality needed to be rationalized, priorities needed to be set, criteria for assessing success needed to be established, and the conditionality for easing sanctions needed to be refined. Sanctions remained both a central factor in the Biden administration’s Russia policy and an albatross. Little evidence suggested that the administration was any readier than its predecessors to distinguish between the pain that sanctions inflict and the change in behavior that they do or do not bring about. The pain was obvious. A November 2018 Bloomberg Economics study claimed that U.S. and EU sanctions may have cut Russian economic growth over the four years after the eruption of the 2014 Ukrainian crisis by 6 percent.14 Evidence of a shift in Russian behavior, however, was slim to nonexistent. All of that, however, became beside the point after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in

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February  2022. Sanctions, now massive and comprehensive, were no longer designed to alter Russian behavior. They were expressly intended to strangle the Russian economy and reduce Russia’s weight as an international actor. The albatross remained, however, in the inflexibility built into the sanctions themselves, nearly all of which were fixed in law with no clear path to their removal, thus denying the president the ability to invoke, adjust, or ease them as he saw fit to serve specific diplomatic objectives. Compounding this handicap, policy makers and politicians gave little thought to how the often vague conditionality for lifting sanctions could be sharpened and then employed to create positive incentives, rather than simply inflicting punishment, were, say, a diplomatic opening to occur in the Ukrainian war. Even less was this something they wanted to consider, when the singular objective became inflicting the greatest possible long-term damage on Russia for Putin’s disastrous decision to invade Ukraine. Had Russia’s actions in February not utterly destroyed the prospect, the Ukrainian imbroglio offered a good illustration of how a potentially more productive approach to sanctions could intersect with the needed reframing of a major source of tension in U.S.-Russian relations. Rather than making the full implementation of Minsk II (the February 2015 agreement spelling out the steps for the reintegration of the separatist regions) the prerequisite for easing the Russia-U.S./EU conflict over Ukraine, the Biden administration would have been wiser to shift the framework. Elements of the Minsk process were essential, but the prospect that the agreement itself would ever be fulfilled grew steadily more remote. It would have been better, therefore, that key parts of the agreement, such as a secure ceasefire, greater Ukrainian access to its border with Russia, restraint in Moscow’s support of the separatists, and the facilitation of humanitarian assistance to the region, had been folded into a larger objective. Logic suggests that it was neither in Russia’s nor Ukraine’s interest, nor that of the United States and even less the Europeans, to see the bitter hostility between the two countries continue to deepen and then harden into a permanent locus of tension. Admittedly, logic may not have been a feasible guide when emotions on both sides dominated decision making. Writing this, when Russia’s war against Ukraine has turned logic on its head and made a deep enduring animosity between the two countries an inevitability, underscores how much the realm of the thinkable has changed. Before February 24, it may have been a reach too far, but it was not fanciful to argue that a friction-laden, crisis-prone relationship with Ukraine’s first- and Russia’s second-most-important neighbor guaranteed a loss of flexibility in critical dimensions of each country’s foreign policy. Therefore, to avert this, a sensible, albeit challenging, goal would have been to normalize relations despite the ongoing underlying conflicts. Normalization might have focused on

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assuring Ukrainian access to the Sea of Azov through the Kerch Strait, establishing confidence-building measures (CBMs) that would give transparency and predictability to each side’s military actions, facilitating rather than blocking water supplies to Crimea, repairing the desirable industrial and economic ties that had been severed over the last several years, dampening the information war each was conducting against the other, and relinking multiple agencies of the two governments in dialogues aimed at finding areas of potential cooperation. The key parts of the Minsk agreement would have figured both as a necessary component and a potential beneficiary of the process, but not as its precondition. In this context, the reconceived role for U.S. and EU sanctions would have been to encourage these steps and reward them when they were taken. Events, however, have turned thinking of this sort into a purely heuristic exercise. As for the other half of a difficult juggling act—countering while cooperating with Russia—the administration’s readiness to engage on issues of vital importance to both countries, beginning with the challenge of managing their nuclear relationship, bore what hope there might have been for a more positive turn in U.S.-Russian relations during Biden’s four years in office. Having bought time by extending New START, the administration was ready to begin exploring the shape that a follow-on phase of nuclear arms control, the first in ten years, might take. This would be complex, because the parameters of a new arrangement—the kinds of weapons systems to be limited; the qualitative, no longer merely quantitative, metrics used; the relevant domains, including new frontiers such as space and cyber; and the range of relevant parties—have all changed. And the United States and Russia had different priorities and concerns with respect to many of these elements. Hope rested on the apparent readiness of both leaderships to take the issue seriously, even if they remained wary of how willing the other side was to search for common ground. Salvaging the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the imperiled agreement to constrain Iran’s potential nuclear weapons program, constituted a second key area of possible U.S.-Russian collaboration. The path forward turned out to be rocky, and, with the election of a new hard-line Iranian government in June, hopes for a resolution dimmed. As both governments recognized, whatever chances remained required U.S.-Russian cooperation, and even in the white heat of the Ukrainian crisis, they continued to struggle to find ways to save the agreement. The challenge posed by climate change formed the third and suddenly prominent area of potential U.S.-Russian cooperation. Given the priority the Biden administration has assigned this issue and the belated but rising concern of the Russian leadership over its consequences for Russia, it could well have assumed special prominence in the relationship. When in his first days in office, John Kerry, the administration’s special envoy for climate, telephoned Lavrov, his

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former counterpart as foreign minister, to discuss the significance of the U.S. return to the Paris Climate Agreement, potential areas of cooperation within the Arctic Council during the two years Russia would hold the council’s chairmanship, and preparations for the November UN Climate Change Conference, a fundamentally new area of opportunity seemed at hand. That prospect too perished when Russian tanks rolled across Ukrainian borders.

Constraints and Obstacles From its inception, the Biden administration did not have a free hand when dealing with Russia. Congress intended to stand as a warden overseeing policy, not least because for its members Russia’s intrusion into U.S. domestic politics had a special immediacy. Hard-line Republicans, whose party holds half of the Senate’s seats, watched for any sign that the Democratic president wanted to compromise with Russia and then readied themselves to resist any armscontrol deal he might negotiate. Leading Democrats on the key House and Senate committees, who were preoccupied with sanctioning Russia for its misbehavior, were not likely to have much interest in testing where give and take might produce progress. The media, steeped in a tenaciously grim view of Russia, offered no refuge for ideas on how to improve the relationship. Adding to the list of impediments, at a time when the new administration sought to restore cooperation with European allies, EU relations with Russia had sharply deteriorated over the Navalny affair. Then suddenly, with the invasion of Ukraine, the scene shifted fundamentally, and these constraints lost their immediate relevancy. So too did the obstacles the administration had imposed on itself. To that point, the assumptions underlying the administration’s approach to Russia constituted the most serious burden. With notable uniformity, senior echelons of the administration viewed the essence of the Russian challenge to be the nature of the Russian regime, with Putin as its embodiment and sovereign. His regime, which was seen as thoroughly corrupt and increasingly authoritarian, was judged to be motivated almost wholly by a determination to preserve the system that Putin and the oligarchs who surround him have built. Its foreign policy, particularly its aggression against neighbors along with its efforts to disrupt U.S. alliances and undermine the American democratic system, had in their view unfolded as a function of this overarching preoccupation. The war Putin unleashed doubtless cast these beliefs in concrete, and whatever the war’s outcome they will certainly remain in place. The war also rendered vastly more caustic an already poisonous dynamic. When relations are as hostile as those between the United States and Russia, a critical casualty on both sides is inevitably the shrunken capacity for empathy

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and introspection. As relations deteriorate, each side makes less effort to put itself in the other’s shoes and puts more effort into ignoring its own role in the deterioration. The assumptions underlying recent U.S. policy, which were matched by those driving Russia policy and potentially those of the Biden administration, suffered from that deficit. The war made both aspects far worse. Originally other harms to the Biden administration’s emerging policy agenda were inherent in the framework guiding its nascent Russia policy. The corruption and authoritarian reflexes that were thought to drive Russia’s behavior also raised the possibility, in the minds of the president and his advisers, that this might be a vulnerability. One way to pressure Putin’s regime, they assumed, was by the United States engaging Russian civil society, exposing the regime’s malign behavior, and laying out what a more constructive course might deliver. Biden earlier stressed that “we’ve got to make this about a conflict between the Russian kleptocracy and oligarchy and the Russian people.”15 Others made the point more softly. “Washington and its allies,” Victoria Nuland argued, should “resist Putin’s attempts to cut off his population from the outside world and speak directly to the Russian people about the benefits of working together and the price they paid for Putin’s hard turn away from liberalism.”16 The problem was that the United States had long ceased to be either a model or a tutor for the bulk of the Russian population. Faced with the misinformation spewing from the Russian media once the war began, tutoring the Russian public gave way to a far more urgent task. Now the administration found itself pressed not only to counter the information war Moscow was waging against the United States and its European allies but somehow to penetrate the barrier created by a Russian public seemingly brainwashed into accepting the regime’s rationale for the war, a narrative continuously promoted on radio, television, and in heavily censored newspapers. A second potential harm stemmed from a curious paradox. While placing Russia first among the countries threatening the integrity of the U.S. political process and the stability of its alliances, Biden saw Russia as a weak and declining country. “I would not want,” he said at one point, “to be in a position . . . of having to lead Russia,” a country that is in “enormous decline.” Notwithstanding its formidable nuclear arsenal, its “efficacy,” its “capacity is de minimis compared to ours.”17 Until overwhelmed by the post–February 24 reality, viewing Russia in this light was likely to warp U.S. policy in two ways. First, the image of Russia as weak but threatening would incline the administration to care less about cooperating with a crippled Putin regime and more about cracking down on it. Balance in a policy that set out to combine a search for common ground with the imperative to “hold Russia to account” would be lost. Second, a diminished Russia would make China a policy priority, to the derogation of Russia as a policy concern. The two characterizations risked keeping U.S. policy toward the

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two countries in separate silos, when increasingly policy toward them should have been made in tandem.18 As Russia and China, the other most important global military powers, draw closer together, creating a challenge for U.S. policy greater than either alone, Washington needed to break out of the bilateralism that hobbled policy and think trilaterally. Nearly all the issues that were and remain central to the U.S.-Russian relationship—from managing nuclear weapons to weighing more broadly the threats to strategic stability; from addressing cybersecurity concerns to dealing with terrorism; from coping with climate change to interdicting the harmful global flow of humans, drugs, and arms—have a Chinese dimension. Finally, as Biden stressed when addressing the February 2021 Munich Security Conference, the United States and its democratic allies needed urgently to “renew” their weakened economic and political institutions and unleash their capacity for innovation, while girding themselves to compete with and, where necessary, counter the authoritarian alternative.19 He had pledged while a presidential candidate to convene the democracies of the world in a working conference, a summit which the administration then held in December 2021. It was a fraught idea, not only because deciding on which countries were qualified to attend raised awkward questions but because predictably Moscow (and Beijing) saw it setting up a sharp bipolar confrontation between a contingent of U.S.rallied states and Russia and China. Here too the war rewrote this script. On the one hand, Putin’s tragic decision proved the extent to which he was willing to go to destroy a prospective democracy on Russia’s doorstep. At the same time, however, despite China’s initial acceptance of Russia’s explanation for the war, as the danger of the war’s further escalation grew, so did the desperate hope that China, at some point, would step in and mediate a retreat from the violence.20 Thus the war also demonstrated that the Manichean notion of a world reduced to a struggle between democracies and autocracies has its limitations.

The Record In his press conference after meeting with Putin in Geneva in June 2021, Biden said that it might be six months or more before one could tell whether things were changing for the better.21 The balance sheet, as he ended his first year in office, was decidedly mixed. The two sides were now more intensively engaged at multiple levels. The national security advisors of both countries, Jake Sullivan and Nikolai Patrushev, spoke regularly; senior officials from many different agencies, not just the State Department, had developed and were addressing practical agendas with their Russian counterparts. In the second of two

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plenary sessions in July and September of the strategic stability talks, led by Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and First Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov, the sides set up two working groups—the Working Group on Principles and Objectives for Future Arms Control and the Working Group on Capabilities and Actions with Strategic Effects—and the two described the dialogue as “intensive and substantive.”22 During Kerry’s July visit to Moscow, he and his counterpart, Ruslan Edelgeriyev, agreed to work together on a range of issues including satellite monitoring of emissions, reducing emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas methane, and climate finance. But neither side claimed that progress had been achieved in any of these areas, unless identifying where the positions of each diverged constituted progress. On the critical issue of cybersecurity, U.S. officials said that the Russian government had done nothing to curb the activity of Russian-based ransomware groups, nor had it halted intrusions by Russian security agencies into U.S. infrastructure or their disinformation efforts in U.S. social media.23 Steps to restore diplomatic staffs and facilities to a working level were going nowhere. Then it all collapsed. On February 24, 2022, Putin demolished what hope there had been that Russia’s December 17 treaty proposals to NATO and the United States and their responses might provide a path out of the crisis generated by Russia’s mass mobilization of forces on the Ukrainian border.24 Neither side had shown much readiness to cut to the core of the problem by addressing the linked problems of the burgeoning Ukrainian crisis, the underlying larger Ukrainian question, and the contentious state of Europe’s security architecture.25 Instead Russia abandoned this last sliver of diplomacy and submerged the relationship in war, upending the whole of Biden’s Russia policy. If the administration thought that its dual approach to Russia—pushing back on its malign behavior but also looking for areas of cooperation, such as on nuclear arms control and climate change—would help park the relationship and allow the administration to focus on the China challenge, that prospect vanished. The administration now had a single mission: to foil Russia’s aggression and do that by isolating Russia; making it a global pariah; weakening it as much as possible, particularly economically; and counterattacking tous azimuts. U.S.-Russia policy was not only back to square one, but square one took on the dark tones of the early days of the original Cold War. Now, as then, if rules governing the confrontation existed, they were not evident. Putin was even said to believe that his grievance with the United States had descended into a reality without rules.26 Whatever the expectations for putting the process of nuclear arms control back on track had been, they were replaced by a sudden reanimation of fears that the two sides could stumble into an inadvertent nuclear war. Thoughts of proceeding with a strategic dialogue to explore ways of managing their relationship in a more complex and dangerous multipolar world gave way

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to the urgent task of establishing direct contact between their military leaderships lest control of the war be completely lost. Even here the engagement was fleeting and with no signs of success. However the war turns out, what will follow is, as of this writing, completely unpredictable. Almost surely it will leave the relationship irreparably damaged, at least for years to come, and U.S. policy makers preoccupied with the means and methods of combating the Russian threat in a new form. The unanswered questions are large and world changing. Will the United States be dealing with a Europe whose security is now threatened by a Russia that had prevailed militarily in whole or in part, however immense the price? Or by a Russia that had failed and ruined itself while trying? In either case, the guardrails that before the war, albeit in a weakened state, had offered some protection against the rupture of European peace, lay in ruins. When and in what fashion will the United States begin to put the pieces back together, and how will it reconceive its relationship with Russia in doing that? Could the two somehow return to the arduous process of seeking mutual constraints on their nuclear weapons programs, or will these run unconstrained? Will an eight-year-old cold war, which has now deepened and hardened, intersect with an equally fraught potential U.S.-China cold war, transforming the international system once more into a bipolar one?27 A nervous world waits.

Notes 1. Steve Holland, “Trump Says He Thinks He Could Have a Good Relationship with Putin,” Reuters, April 3, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia - putin / trump - says - he - thinks - he - could - have - a - good -relationship -with - putin -idUSKCN1HA2D8. 2. Fiona Hill, who was in Trump’s White House, has since argued that Trump did have serious, if largely unrealizable aims: first among them an agreement that would eliminate the nuclear menace as he remembered it from the 1970s and 1980s, but also to rally Russia to the U.S. side against both Iran and China. “Transition Series: How to Deal with Russia,” Virtual Meetings, Council on Foreign Relations, February 22, 2021, https://www.cfr.org /event/transition-2021-series-how-deal-russia. 3. Guy Chazan and Demetri Sevastopulo, “Putin Praises Trump and Hails New Era of Cooperation,” Financial Times, July 8, 2017. 4. During the May 2017 White House meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak, Trump had reportedly said that he was unconcerned about Moscow’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election because the United States did the same in other countries. Shane Harris, Josh Dawehy, and Ellen Nakashima, “Trump Told Russians That Interference Not a Concern,” Washington Post, September  28, 2019. Two years later, when asked by reporters at the Osaka G20 summit whether he would press Putin on election interference, he responded, “ ‘Yes, of course, I will,’ drawing a laugh from Putin. Trump then turned to Putin. ‘Don’t meddle in the election, please,’ Trump said.” Roberta Rampton, “Trump, with a Wag, Asks Putin Not to Meddle in U.S. Elections,” Reuters, June 28, 2019.

The Biden Administration and Russia 413 5. Max Seddon and David J. Lynch, “Putin Orders Drastic Reduction in US Diplomatic Presence in Russia,” Financial Times, July 30, 2017. 6. U.S. Department of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review Report, April 2010, iv. 7. U.S. Department of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review, February 2018, 6–12. 8. “Putin Says No Hidden Motive in Not Congratulating Biden,” RadioFreeEurope/ RadioLiberty, November  22, 2020, https://www.rferl .org /a /putin-says-no -hidden -motive-in-not-congratulating-biden /30963116.html. Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, offered a particularly dour assessment: “We obviously do not expect anything good. It would be strange to expect anything good from people, many of whom have built their careers on Russophobia, and slinging mud at my country.  Therefore, if they show their own, so-to-say, vested interest in having a meaningful discussion with us, not by means of slogans but a substantive conversation, we will always be ready for that.” “Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov: Russia Should Shift to a Policy of Deterrence and Engagement in Relations with the U.S.,” Interfax, December 25, 2020, https://interfax .com /newsroom /exclusive-interviews/70696/. 9. “Remarks by President Biden on America’s Place in the World,” speech at the U.S. Department of State, February 4, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/ briefing-room /speeches -remarks /2021 /02 /04 /remarks -by-president-biden- on-americas -place -in -the-world/. 10. “Readout of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. Call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia,” White House Briefing Room, February 26, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov / briefing-room /statements-releases/2021 /01 /26/readout-of-president-joseph-r-biden -jr-call-with-president-vladimir-putin-of-russia/. 11. “Readout of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. Call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia,” White House Briefing Room, April 13, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing -room /statements -releases /2021 /04 /13 /readout- of-president-joseph-r-biden-jr-call -with-president-vladimir-putin-of-russia-4-13/. 12. Isabelle Khurshudyan, “Putin Responds to Biden Comment That He’s a Killer: ‘I Know You Are, but What Am I?,’ ” Washington Post, March 18, 2021. 13. “Remarks by President Biden on Russia,” White House Briefing Room, April 15, 2021, https://www.whitehouse .gov/ briefing-room /speeches -remarks/2021 /04 /15/remarks -by-president-biden-on-russia/; “Background Press Call by Senior Officials on Russia,” White House Briefing Room, April 15, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing -room /press-briefings/2021 /04 /15/ background-press-call-by-senior-administration -officials-on-russia/. 14. Natasha Doff, “Here’s One Measure That Shows Sanctions Are Working,” Bloomberg News, November 16, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-16/here -s-one-measure-that-shows-sanctions-on-russia-are-working. 15. “Foreign Affairs Issue Launch,” Foreign Affairs, January 23, 2018. 16. Victoria Nuland, “Pinning Down Putin,” Foreign Affairs, July/August, 2020, 94. 17. “Foreign Affairs Issue Launch.” 18. Thomas Graham and Robert Legvold, “It’s Better to Deal with China and Russia in Tandem: Putting China and Russia Into Policy Silos Will Be Counterproductive,” Politico, February 4, 2021, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/02/04/china -russia-tandem-policy-465616. 19. Remarks by President Biden at the 2021 Virtual Munich Security Conference, February 19, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/02/19 /remarks-by-president-biden-at-the-2021-virtual-munich-security-conference/.

414 LOOK I N G FO RWA R D 20. Wang Huiyao, “Its Time to Offer Russia an Offramp. China Can Help with That,” New York Times, March  13, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com /2022/03/13/opinion /china -russia-ukraine.html; Stephen S. Roach, “How China Can End the War in Ukraine,” Project Syndicate, March 10, 2022, https://www.project-syndicate.org /commentary /china-can-take-three-steps-to-end-ukraine-war-by-stephen-s-roach-2022-03. 21. Remarks by President Biden in Press Conference, June 16, 2021, https://www.whitehouse .gov/ briefing-room /speeches -remarks /2021 /06/16/remarks -by-president-biden -in -press-conference-4/. 22. Joint Statement on the Outcomes of the U.S.-Russia Strategic Stability Dialogue in Geneva on September 30, September 30, 2021, https://www.state.gov/joint-statement - on -the - outcomes - of -the -u - s -russia - strategic - stability - dialogue -in - geneva - on -september-30/. 23. Joseph Marks, “Still No Signs of Russian Cooperation on Ransomware,” Washington Post, September 15, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/09/15/still-no -signs-russian-cooperation-ransomware/. 24. Andrew E. Kramer and Steve Erlanger, “Russia Lays Out Demands for a Sweeping New Security Deal with NATO,” New York Times, December 17, 2021, https://www.nytimes .com/2021/12/17/world/europe/russia-nato-security-deal.html; Hibai Arbide Aza and Miguel Gonzalez, “US Offered Disarmament Measures to Russia in Exchange for Deescalation of Military Threat in Ukraine,” El Pais, February 2, 2022, https://english . elpais . com / usa /2022 - 02 - 02 / us - offers - disarmament - measures - to - russia - in -exchange-for-a-deescalation-of-military-threat-in-ukraine.html. 25. Robert Legvold, “Ukraine and the European Security Crisis,” European Leadership Network, January 28, 2022, https://www.europeanleadershipnetwork.org/commentary /ukraine-and-the-european-security-crisis/. 26. Farida Rustamova, “Тщательно выговаривают слово п****ц” (They utter carefully the word p****ts), Faridaily, March 1, 2022, https://faridaily.substack .com /p/-?utm _campaign= post& utm _ medium=web&s =r. 27. Robert Legvold, “The New Cold Wars,” National Interest, September/October 2022, 22–32; Robert Legvold, Return to Cold War (London: Polity, 2016).

CHAPTER 36

JOE BIDEN, AMERICAN DEMOCRACY, AND THE CHINA CHALLENGE JA M E S G O L D G E I E R

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resident Joe Biden has called the current moment an “inflection point,” both domestically and internationally.1 In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, some forces within the Republican Party made clear that they no longer believe democracy is in the best interests of their party. Rather than adjusting their message and policies to broaden their base of support, many in the GOP have doubled down in support of baseless claims of electoral fraud to enact voter-suppression laws in the hopes of increasing their odds of success at the ballot box in the 2022 midterm elections and beyond.2 President Biden has thus framed the primary domestic and global fault line as a competition between democracy and autocracy.3 He talks about demonstrating that democracies can deliver for all of their citizens, not just a wealthy few (through broad-based economic growth, the provision of COVID-19 vaccines, and sought-after infrastructure improvements, for example). If democracies fail to deliver, Biden fears that the trend toward authoritarianism at home and abroad will continue; Freedom House reports that freedom across the globe has declined for fifteen consecutive years.4 The president and his team also have emphatically declared that America is back as the leader of the world’s democracies, working through multilateral institutions to maintain a “rules-based” international order, by which they mean one in which the democracies, not the autocracies, set the rules.5 Fulfilling a campaign promise, Biden hosted a virtual Summit for Democracy on December 9–10, 2021, to which more than one

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hundred world leaders were invited, along with representatives from civil society and the private sector.6 To build support for their initiatives, Biden and his team have promoted a “foreign policy for the middle class” that is focused on rebuilding ties to America’s democratic allies and partners to combat the challenge to the country’s prosperity and security posed by China, the globe’s leading authoritarian power.7 Biden’s approach toes a fine line: he wants to build support for his foreign policy among American workers without fueling fears among allies and partners that his policy will be no different than Donald Trump’s “America First” strategy. Biden also wants to harness the bipartisan domestic political consensus behind the belief that China poses the primary geostrategic threat to American interests in order to get key legislation passed, as he did with his infrastructure bill, even as he needs to pursue cooperation with Beijing to combat climate change, one of the administration’s top objectives.

A Foreign Policy for the Middle Class After the 2016 election, a bipartisan group of former U.S. officials that included Salman Ahmed, who joined the Biden administration as the State Department director of policy planning, and Jake Sullivan, who became Biden’s national security adviser, sought to understand how middle-class Americans viewed foreign policy, in the hopes of informing a strategy of global engagement that would receive broad-based popular support. Working under the auspices of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, they released a report in 2020 after extensive meetings with voters in Nebraska, Ohio, and Colorado.8 In formulating what they described as “a foreign policy for the middle class,” the Carnegie group rejected three competing approaches: 1990s-style liberal internationalism, which they defined as assuming that promoting U.S. business interests and American values would help the middle class; the Trumpist America First approach, which they saw as taking a zero-sum view of the world and through protectionist policies promoted some middle-class interests over others; and the Democratic Party’s progressive wing’s goal of cutting U.S. defense spending in order to focus on economic, social, and racial justice as well as on climate change. Instead, the authors argued that a foreign policy that works better for the middle class would preserve the benefits of business dynamism and trade openness—which does not feature prominently enough in the progressive agenda—while massively increasing public investment to enhance U.S. competitiveness, resilience, and equitable economic growth. It would sustain U.S. leadership in the world, but harness it toward less ambitious ends, eschewing regime change and the transformation of other

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nations through military interventions. And it would recognize that a foreign policy that works for the middle class has to be connected to a domestic policy that works for the middle class.9

A big takeaway from the Carnegie report is the dependence on defense-sector jobs in so many communities across America. A foreign policy for the middle class in their view is thus explicitly opposed to the kinds of cuts in defense spending that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party has called for in the past. But a strong defense is not simply about middle-class jobs. The report states that given the high stakes involved, the United States must seek to deter major power conflict and ensure freedom of access in all major arteries of global commerce. To do that, the U.S. military will need to retain dominance within the global commons and sustain alliances that provide critical platforms to project power globally— even though the Chinese will often construe these measures as hostile.10

The effort to retain military dominance and utilize alliances for power projection has been standard fare for American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War and is now being adapted for the competition with China. The Biden foreign policy approach led Vermont senator Bernie Sanders to complain, “It is distressing and dangerous . . . that a fast-growing consensus is emerging in Washington that views the U.S.-Chinese relationship as a zero-sum economic and military struggle.”11 Relatedly, John R. Allen, Ryan Hass, and Bruce Jones of the Brookings Institution wrote in November 2021 that the United States and China both need to “recognize the merits of bounding and managing competition, and enable both sides to pursue calibrated coordination on shared challenges.”12

The Nature of the U.S.-China Competition The China challenge is broad and deep: it ranges from unfair trade practices and human rights violations, to threats to cyber networks and supply chains, to efforts to coerce and intimidate American allies and partners in the region and beyond. The Cold War’s end led the United States to believe that these types of global competitions are to be won or lost, and such language infuses the way the Biden administration often talks about the future. To gain congressional support for its legislative priorities, the administration stresses the need to win the competition. For example, the White House fact sheet on the Bipartisan

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Infrastructure Framework declared that “the Framework will position American workers, farmers, and businesses—small and large alike—to compete and win in the 21st century.”13 Secretary of State Antony Blinken similarly argued that “it’s difficult to imagine the United States winning the long-term strategic competition with China if we cannot lead the renewable energy revolution.”14 Perhaps a better term for the relationship going forward is strategic rivalry. Each will pursue its interests, find areas where cooperation is possible, while engaging in a military, economic, and technological rivalry that likely won’t end as the Cold War did—with one system vanquished and the other victorious—but rather will become a set of indefinite challenges. Conflict will define the relationship, but fears of the existential threat of climate change will join the avoidance of nuclear war as fueling a need for cooperation even among rivals. Some may argue that the eventual demise of the Soviet system demonstrates that the United States does not have to settle for indefinite great-power rivalry. But the events in Europe in 1989–1991 may have created an illusion that other competing powers are bound to collapse and disappear if only Americans put enough effort into proving the superiority of their political and economic system. The primary goals of any presidential administration are to promote the security and prosperity of the United States, with the new burden of doing so in a way that ensures the sustainability of the planet. The American people should expect a prolonged period of rivalry with a country that defines its interests very differently, that will pose significant challenges to American interests and values across a wide spectrum, and whose leadership may be able to maintain one-party rule for an extended period of time. White House Indo-Pacific coordinator Kurt Campbell has talked of the challenges for the United States and China “coexist[ing] and liv[ing] in peace . . . for this generation and the next,” which may be less satisfying than talk about winning but provides Americans with a sense of the likely longevity of this rivalry.15 China is not the Soviet Union, which was always threatened as a political unit by its nationalities problem and whose political leadership could not sustain economic growth during a period of technological change. China is ruthlessly carrying out a genocide against Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang, while its political system has enabled entrepreneurship to flourish despite one-party control.16 And unlike that of the Soviet Union, China’s economy is deeply intertwined with the American economy and those of its allies.

Avoiding a Major Crisis Outside of the Indo-Pacific Talk of rebalancing and focusing U.S. foreign policy toward the Indo-Pacific isn’t new; it informed the thinking of the Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Trump administrations, all of which viewed major opportunities

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and challenges emanating from that region as eclipsing traditional areas of focus like Europe and the Middle East in their importance to American interests. In an attempt to learn from the past, the Biden team came into office determined not to be distracted from its focus on the China challenge by conflicts or crises in other parts of the world. It is striking to compare U.S. foreign policy when the administration entered office to that of the end of the Cold War. Thirty years ago, Europe and Russia were at the center of U.S. foreign policy, as they had been throughout the post– World War II period (even though the major American wars of the Cold War occurred in Asia). As communist regimes crumbled, the United States saw an opportunity to “fix” the problems Europe posed during the twentieth century, when conflicts in the center of the continent gave rise to two world wars and the Cold War. In May 1989, George H. W. Bush expressed hope for a Europe “whole and free” in a speech in West Germany that formed the basis for U.S. policy toward the region for the next quarter-century.17 This strategic frame led to a number of U.S. policies in the 1990s, including NATO expansion, the effort to build a new relationship with a democratic and market-oriented Russia, and the decisions to end the war in Bosnia and to go to war with Serbia to prevent genocide in Kosovo.18 The Biden administration’s initial policies toward Russia and Europe were best understood as not really about Europe and Russia per se but rather as part of the competition with China: Biden sought to keep things with Russia “stable and predictable”19 and get Europe on board with a common approach toward China on trade and technology.20 The president’s June 2021 visit to Europe demonstrated his emphasis on cooperation with democratic allies in order to focus on China, such as the suspension of the Boeing-Airbus trade dispute, so as to better combat the threat from the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, which will soon release a competitor to the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320.21 More difficult was Biden’s goal of creating a stable and predictable relationship with Russia, as he worked to do in his meeting with President Vladimir Putin in Geneva in June 2021. If it wasn’t clear then, it certainly is now: Putin does not want to go along with this approach; when he put significant numbers of troops on the Ukrainian border in the fall of 2021, Biden and his team were forced to scramble to prevent another Russian military invasion of Ukraine, as the president sought to bring “down the temperature on the eastern front.”22 Despite the U.S. and European efforts to get Russia to pursue a diplomatic track in the winter of 2022, Putin chose instead to launch a massive military assault on Ukraine, not only creating a tragedy of horrific proportions but also one that consumed the attention of Biden and his top officials. The Russian invasion signaled that U.S. policies toward Europe and Russia had once again to be viewed in their own context, not through the prism of the Indo-Pacific strategy alone. Early in the administration, officials like Kurt Campbell were determined to make clear that the Biden team was going to shift priorities away from

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previous areas of deep U.S. involvement to the Indo-Pacific. In remarks to the Asia Society in July 2021, for example, Campbell stated, “You’ll see this movement from the Middle East, and it will be painful, in all likelihood. We’ll see some real challenges in places like Afghanistan, but a much greater focus on the Indo-Pacific.”23 In the first months of the administration, its initial hands-off responses to crises that emerged in places like Gaza and Haiti demonstrated how important it was to Biden and his team not to get sidetracked in their rebalancing of U.S. foreign policy toward the Indo-Pacific, as did the hasty and chaotic departure from Afghanistan. The February  2022 brutal and unprovoked Russian military attack on Ukraine upended that strategy. The idea that somehow the United States could develop a stable and predictable relationship with Putin fell by the wayside. Once again, America was fully engaged in Europe, coordinating with NATO allies to push back against Russian aggression through a combination of providing much greater military assistance to the Ukrainians as well as imposing punishing sanctions on Moscow. It was an impressive display of leadership by the Biden administration. At the same time, it also meant that despite the administration’s best efforts during Biden’s first year in office, a major world crisis outside of the Indo-Pacific had brought them back to engaging in European security in a way that the United States had not done since the Balkan wars of the 1990s, and this time against a major nuclear-armed adversary. In his 2022 State of the Union address, Biden opened with a lengthy discussion of the war in Ukraine; the speech contained only three sentences on China.24 We should not lose sight of the fact that when we talk about foreign policy crises, there could, of course, be a crisis with China. In 1999, the United States accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo War, and in 2001, an American EP-3 reconnaissance plane was forced to land on Hainan Island after colliding with a Chinese fighter. Such a crisis would be far more dangerous today, and a serious U.S.-China clash over Taiwan remains a real possibility.

Conclusion The Biden administration has geared up for a long-term strategic competition with China, seeking to demonstrate the effectiveness of democracy in providing for the middle class and building support for American global engagement after the four years of his predecessor. The president sees the country and the world as being at an inflection point, and he is particularly concerned about support for democracy in the United States itself. Biden has absorbed the arguments in Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s bestseller How Democracies Die.25 American democracy survived the 2020 presidential election, thanks in

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large part to a bipartisan group of state and local officials who were responsible for ensuring a free and fair election throughout the country. As Biden said in July 2021, the election should have been cause for celebration: Americans went to the polls, with record numbers of Democrats and Republicans voting for president, in the midst of a pandemic and without fraud.26 Yet thanks to the loser’s inability to accept defeat graciously, Republican officials have repeated the Big Lie that the election was stolen and are working to make it harder for ethnic and racial minority voters to cast their ballots in the next election. President Biden’s priorities in office in his first year were mainly domestic ones: getting the population vaccinated, generating broad-based economic growth, and rebuilding America’s infrastructure. The administration claimed some important early foreign policy victories to demonstrate that it can deliver for the middle class (such as the agreement with the European Union on the Boeing-Airbus dispute and winning international backing for a global minimum corporate tax). Even in the face of a major foreign policy crisis like the Russian war against Ukraine, President Biden will ultimately be judged less on how the United States fares in the global competition between democracies and autocracies, which will be a long-term endeavor, than on whether his administration can ensure victory for democracy at home at this decisive moment.

Notes

1. 2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

The author is grateful to Lucy Seavey for research assistance and to Agneska Bloch and Elizabeth Saunders for their helpful comments. Interim National Security Strategic Guidance, White House, March 2021, https://www .whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/NSC-1v2.pdf. For President Biden’s remarks on this subject, see “Remarks by President Biden on Protecting the Sacred, Constitutional Right to Vote,” July  13, 2021, https://www.white house.gov/ briefing-room /speeches-remarks/2021 /07/13/remarks-by-president-biden -on-protecting-the-sacred-constitutional-right-to-vote/. Hal Brands, “The Emerging Biden Doctrine: Democracy, Autocracy, and the Defining Clash of Our Time,” Foreign Affairs, June 29, 2021, https://www.foreignaffairs.com /articles/united-states/2021-06-29/emerging-biden-doctrine; Thomas Wright, “Joe Biden Worries That China Might Win,” Atlantic, June 9, 2021, https://www.theatlantic .com/international/archive/2021/06/joe-biden-foreign-policy/619130/. Sarah Repucci and Amy Slipowitz, “Democracy Under Siege,” Freedom House, 2021, https://freedomhouse.org /report/freedom-world/2021/democracy-under-siege. Anne Gearan, “In Foreign Policy, Biden Adopts Elements from Former Boss Obama— and from Former Rival Trump,” Washington Post, April  26, 2021, https://www .washingtonpost .com /politics / biden-foreign-policy-100 -days /2021 /04 /24 /453a1fac -a216-11eb-85fc-06664ff4489d _ story.html. U.S. Department of State, “Summit for Democracy,” December 9, 2021, https://www .state.gov/summit-for-democracy/.

422 LOOK I N G FO RWA R D 7. This developed from work done by Biden aides during the previous administration. See Salman Ahmed, Wendy Cutler, Rozlyn Engel, et al., Making US Foreign Policy Work Better for the Middle Class (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2020), https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/09/23/making-US-foreign -policy-work-better-for-middle-class-pub-82728. 8. Making US Foreign Policy Work Better for the Middle Class. 9. Making US Foreign Policy Work Better for the Middle Class, 5. 10. Making US Foreign Policy Work Better for the Middle Class, 27. 11. Bernie Sanders, “Washington’s Dangerous New Consensus on China,” Foreign Affairs, June 17, 2021, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2021-06-17/washingtons -dangerous-new-consensus-china. 12. John R. Allen, Ryan Hass, and Bruce Jones, “Rising to the Challenge: Navigating Competition, Avoiding Crisis, and Advancing US Interests in Relations with China,” Brookings Institution, November 2021, https://www.brookings.edu/research/rising-to -the-challenge-navigating-competition-avoiding-crisis-and-advancing-us-interests -in-relations-with-china/. 13. “FACT SHEET: President Biden Announces Support for the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework,” White House, June 24, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room /statements-releases/2021 /06/24 /fact-sheet-president-biden-announces-support-for -the-bipartisan-infrastructure-framework/. 14. Antony J. Blinken, “Tackling the Crisis and Seizing the Opportunity: America’s Global Climate Leadership,” speech, Remarks at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, April 19, 2021, https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-remarks-to-the-chesapeake -bay-foundation-tackling-the -crisis -and-seizing-the -opportunity-americas -global -climate-leadership/. 15. David Brunnstrom and Humeyra Pamuk, “China, US Can Coexist in Peace but Challenge Is Enormous—White House,” Reuters, July  6, 2021, https://www.reuters.com /world/china-us-can-coexist-peace-challenge-enormous-white-house-2021-07-06/. 16. Daniel C. Mattingly, The Art of Political Control in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Chris Buckley and Keith Bradsher, “China’s Communists to Private Business: You Heed Us, We’ll Help You,” New York Times, September 17, 2020, https:// www.nytimes.com/2020/09/17/business/china-communist-private-business.html. 17. George H. W. Bush, “A Europe Whole and Free,” speech, remarks to Citizens in Mainz, May 31, 1989, https://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/ga6-890531.htm. 18. These elements of a “Europe whole and free” strategy are developed in more detail in James M. Goldgeier, Not Whether but When: The US Decision to Enlarge NATO (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999); James  M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul, Power and Purpose: US Policy Toward Russia After the Cold War (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003); and Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier, America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008). 19. “Holding Russia to Account,” U.S. Department of State, April 15, 2021, https://www .state.gov/holding-russia-to-account/. 20. “Remarks by President Biden at the 2021 Virtual Munich Security Conference,” White House, February 19, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks /2021 /02 /19 /remarks -by-president-biden -at-the -2021-virtual -munich -security-con ference/. 21. Jennifer Hillman, “Biden’s Trade Policy for the Middle Class Takes Shape—and It Begins in Europe,” Council on Foreign Relations, June 18, 2021, https://www.cfr.org / blog / bidens-trade-policy-middle-class-takes-shape-and-it-begins-europe.

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22. “Remarks by the President before Marine One Departure,” December 8, 2021, https:// www.whitehouse . gov / briefing -room /speeches -remarks /2021 /12 /08 /remarks - by -president-biden-before-marine-one-departure-10/. 23. Ken Moriyasu, “US Does Not Support Taiwan Independence: Kurt Campbell,” Nikkei Asia, July 7, 2021, https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/Biden-s -Asia-policy/US-does-not-support-Taiwan-independence-Kurt-Campbell. 24. Full transcript of Biden’s State of the Union Address, New York Times, March 1, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/us/politics/ biden-sotu-transcript.html. 25. Susan B. Glasser, “American Democracy Isn’t Dead Yet, but It’s Getting There,” New Yorker, May 27, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washing ton/american-democracy-isnt-dead-yet-but-its-getting-there. 26. “Remarks by President Biden on Protecting the Sacred, Constitutional Right to Vote,” July 13, 2021. For a discussion of the international election monitoring of the “uneventful” election day, see Susan D. Hyde, “The US Election Is Over. What Did International Observers Think?,” Monkey Cage (blog), Washington Post, November 9, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost .com /politics/2020/11 /09/us-election-is-over-what-did -international-observers-think/.

CHAPTER 37

TRANSATLANTIC RELATIONS AFTER TRUMP Mutual Perceptions and Strategy in Historical Perspective A L E S SA N D R O B R O G I

A

merica has committed its share of sins, many of them forgiven largely because of its countervailing virtues. But now the United States stands in stark relief against an unforgiving world, or at least a skeptical one. In particular, European allies’ doubts about the global role of the United States have grown to unprecedented levels. The norm-breaking presidency of Donald  J. Trump may have had lasting consequences that the Biden administration will find hard to reverse. That is why scholars are still wondering if we may have witnessed the final unraveling of what was once recognized as America’s “liberal hegemony,” in which the United States “identif[ied] its own national interests with the openness and stability of the larger system,”1 a system that was consensually based on multilateral, rulebased, international cooperation advancing free trade and democracy. With the even graver norm-breaking conduct of the Russian regime haunting Europe and the world, the prospect of a polarized, dysfunctional United States could then be catastrophic. And large majorities of public opinion in Europe recoil at the thought that had Trump been reelected, he would be handling the crisis, much like they worry about his possible return to the White House in 2025.2 Trump’s transgressions were not an aberration but rather the extreme manifestation of a growing distance between transatlantic partners. The rift has been widening not just over strategic or economic matters but over a whole set of problems that marked, to use a Freudian application to geopolitics suggested by Peter Baldwin, “the narcissism of minor differences.” While minor, Freud

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argued, those differences fostered “group solidarities against an outsider who was perhaps not as ‘other’ as his would-be enemies would have liked. His foreignness therefore had to be narcissistically elaborated in lavish detail.”3 It is on these mutual perceptions that I will focus. In a broad cultural sense, the very idea of American exceptionalism has paradoxically survived better in Europe than in the United States—at least one based on high hopes or expectations of the United States maintaining its role as liberal hegemon and norm setter. Since the standards have been set so high, the disillusion has been bitter every time the United States has failed to pass muster.4 Europe’s disappointments have grown deeper since 2017, as the “minor differences” have caused a wider gap, both because the assertions of “group solidarities” have become stronger and because the differences are perhaps no longer so minor. This alleged anti-Americanism has its counterpart in growing antiEuropeanism. Part of the reactive, if not reactionary, side of the American right—but also much of the entire political spectrum—has been informed by fear that America might become another Europe. It is a fear that has been voiced loudly, starting at the turn of the twentieth century, by Progressive reformers ranging from the settlement activist Jane Addams to President Theodore Roosevelt, mirroring what the British journalist William Stead then called, for the first time, “the Americanization of the World.”5 The American identity relied on this negation, or counteridentity (of being a non-Europe). To that it added an affirmation of universality—first with President Woodrow Wilson’s liberal internationalist agenda—thus becoming the beacon for Europe, then for the rest of the world. For the past three decades, America’s conservatives have been particularly vehement against the excesses of Europe’s welfare state and statutory regulations.6 With the response to COVID-19, that criticism has reached a crescendo. Even the nominally progressive Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, in his sparring debate with Bernie Sanders in March 2020, chastised the Vermont senator’s Medicare for All proposal, comparing it balefully to the single-payer system in Italy—as an example of how not to handle the virus (to which Italian commentators sharply objected).7 At the same time, America and its European allies have remained bonded by what, starting in the 1950s, became broadly defined as a “political” or “Atlantic Community.” This was not merely a security arrangement, balanced, in realist terms, against the perceived threat of Soviet communism. It was also, as Karl Deutsch suggested in 1957, a “pluralistic security community,” whose shared values helped develop a sense of “we-ness,” one that was further nourished by currents of trade, tourism, and cultural and intellectual exchange at every level—a community constantly reinforcing the liberal institutions that generated “dependable expectations of peaceful exchange.”8 NATO in this sense

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was to keep the Europeans together (mainly against their fickle electorates) even more than keeping the Russians out, by also keeping the Americans in.9 Far from homogenized, it was the “pluralistic” nature of this community, beyond its security considerations, that allowed it to overcome so many quarrels.

NATO: The Rift Involved Much More Than Burden Sharing Complaints about Europeans “free-riding” on American military commitment to NATO are as old as the alliance itself. There was nothing new in the Trump administration, as the chapters in Chaos in the Liberal Order amply demonstrate.10 Yet for all the mutual grievances, the transatlantic divide over expenses or strategies was never perceived as an existential threat, not even during the clash in 2003–2004 over the war in Iraq. Donald Trump made the break seem catastrophic at times. The problem of a neglect of, if not potential divorce from, NATO was bad enough. But Trump further shunned organizations or agreements that underpinned the transatlantic consensus on liberal internationalism, such as the Paris Climate Accords, the UN Human Rights Council, the Global Compact on Migration, the Iran nuclear deal, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the World Health Organization, and even COVAX, a 184-nation initiative aimed at accelerating the distribution of vaccine doses against COVID-19. And then there was, of course, economic retribution of the most transactional type, with retaliatory tariffs on European wine, cheese, and food imports. Trump’s disdain for most European allies remained unaltered from when, as presidential candidate in 2016, he infamously sputtered, “NATO is obsolete. It’s old. It’s fat. It’s sloppy.”11 Four years later the president seemed to come fully around, when he pressed for an institutionalized role in the Middle East for NATO: “call it NATOME!” he said in an interview. The actual proposal did not add anything new from what the alliance had done since its 2002 Prague Summit coordinated the fight against terrorism.12 What distinguished Trump’s endorsement of NATO, rather, was his effort to alleviate American responsibility in the Middle East and, even more, his persistent “profit-oriented, transactional” approach to alliance.13 Indeed, the president continued to frame shared defense obligations as “past dues” owed to the organization and the United States in particular. Trump, in sum, continued treating allies “as tributary states rather than partners.”14 All this was aggravated by Trump’s refusal to challenge Russia on its aggression against Ukraine or its threats to NATO allies. These attitudes reflected Trump’s own personal interests or even his ostensible preference for strongmen over allied democracies.15 At the infamous Helsinki summit with Vladimir Putin in July 2018, Trump paid homage to the Russian president, while calling

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the European Union America’s “greatest foe” on military budget matters and trade policies.16 After the Trump presidency, the transatlantic disengagement seemed to gain momentum, becoming increasingly reciprocal. Europeans—save NATO members bordering Russia—seemed no longer to feel the need for a U.S. security guarantee as much as they used to. Their mistrust of the United States persisted.17 Former German chancellor Angela Merkel’s repeated assertions, throughout the Trump years, that Europe could no longer count on the U.S. military umbrella were not entirely superseded by her hopes of better ties with the Biden administration.18 French president Emmanuel Macron, even while hailing Biden’s declared return to NATO, doubled down on his previous calls for a European “strategic autonomy.” Macron made this call following the rather unilateral and poorly executed American withdrawal from Afghanistan, and, even more strongly, after the U.S.-UK-Australia security partnership that excluded France from a previous submarine deal with Canberra. After so many promises by the new American administration, the French felt “betrayed,” in the words of the recalled French ambassador Philippe Etienne. But France’s relative isolation within Europe made the spat, like many others in past U.S.French relations, blow over within a few weeks.19 Reconciliation, if not an absolute consensus within NATO, was made possible by two other developments. First, there was a convergence, especially following the Rome G20 summit of October 2021, on broad strategic questions, such as the fight against climate change, resumption of talks on the Iran deal, coordination for an anti-COVID vaccine response, and for an international tax system on multinationals. This marked a notable reversal from the Trump years, in which, as some authors have noted here,20 the European allies could go along with Washington on small issues but diverged on the larger questions. Second, as has often been the case with NATO, the conduct of its main original adversary has galvanized a united front. Putin’s attack on Ukraine in February 2022 was immediately met not with NATO disarray but with its unanimous determination to counter the invasion with unprecedented sanctions and military support to the allies on its eastern flank. The Russian leader, like many of his predecessors, did not anticipate so much resolve in the West—and, even more, the Biden administration’s capacity to rally the allies in support of Ukraine. NATO also continues to offer cautionary tales about such unity. The buildup to the conflict in Ukraine gradually revealed three broad positions, with the Anglo-Americans being the most unyielding; the former Soviet satellite nations naturally being the most solicitous for help against potential aggressions; and a group centered on France, Germany, and Italy, with strong commercial ties to Russia, championing a diplomatic dialogue with Moscow.21 Those fissures may reemerge. Most concerning is of course the economic blowback, particularly with the skyrocketing energy prices in Europe.22 Those

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costs, cyberwarfare, or yet another refugee crisis may all undo NATO unity. But as of late 2022, NATO has come together, overcoming hesitations, such as Germany’s own on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which has been suspended as part of the concerted sanctions against Moscow. Even more strikingly, Berlin then decided to finally ramp up its defense spending to the levels requested by the United States for so long.23 And the European Union, in its Versailles declaration of March  11, 2022, not only reaffirmed its support of Ukraine but also drafted a plan aimed at “bolstering defence capabilities, reducing energy dependencies and building a more robust economic base.”24 Within the G7, too, the geostrategic cooperation has strived to set limits on Putin’s economic blackmail.25 So here we have a president who, faced with a threat without precedent since the peak of the Cold War, has rallied the allies together, while his predecessor continued to deride them. Trump, who as president held up military aid to Ukraine as a political lever, after the invasion actually praised Putin. Even granting Trump’s posturing the most benign interpretation possible—that he expressed admiration for the rogue leader’s presumed strategic acumen rather than for his ethics—this reaction confirmed all the worst expectations transatlantic allies may have harbored about the former president.26

Unilateralism and Insults Turning inward has had different meanings on each side of the Atlantic. Even while questioning certain effects of globalization (or taking independent actions within it), European nations have remained essentially multilateralist. For America, the inward trend, which has been growing since the end of the Cold War,27 has reflected a general public reluctance to maintain the burdens of hegemony in a multilateral setting—as seen in excesses of unilateralism in the aftermath of 9/11 or, just as significantly, during the America First years of Trump. Trump’s neglect did not mean isolationism, at least not in the same sense invoked by the “America First Committee” that opposed American entry in World War II. It reflected rather Trump’s transactional type of nationalism— one that manifested itself in his knack for bilateral deals with a unilateral bent. And it is the U.S. attack on multilateral institutions that has defined Europe’s fears of, as French foreign minister Hubert Védrine put it, American “hyperpuissance.”28 Accepting America’s hegemony, NATO allies from the start also championed integration and multilateralism within that covenant, in order both to overcome the excesses of their own balance of power policies and to mitigate the influence of U.S. power. This was particularly the case with all presidential

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“doctrines,” which often worried America’s Western allies. First, they shifted U.S. strategies away from Europe. Second, they reiterated the unilateralist bent of American foreign policy, coated with a certain sense of morality. From the Eisenhower Doctrine to President George W. Bush’s “War on Terror,” NATO’s most prominent allies—including, during the 1950s and 1960s, the most defiant one, France under President Charles de Gaulle—tried to use opposition or cooption to bend America’s unilateral designs toward cooperative ventures involving integrative economic cooperation or shared military strategies.29 Similarly, an emerging Biden Doctrine, while attempting to lead democracies toward common strategies against autocracies, also has had to adapt to a multilateral framework within the G7 and NATO that still fosters compromises with some of those regimes.30 For America’s neoconservative authors (and policy makers), Europe resorted to multilateralism to substitute for the power it no longer has.31 Despite Europe’s pragmatic approach to the liberal order—often adjusting it, especially on economic issues, to realist considerations—the popular impression in America, so well utilized by conservatives (“neo” or traditional), is that Europe has “played” the United States, promoting “Kantian” welfare states that have flourished “under the umbrella of American power exercised according to the rules of the Hobbesian order.”32 It is because of their abiding faith in alternatives to war, the argument now goes, that the Europeans (and their American allies in the Democratic Party) were caught off-guard and ill-prepared to confront yet another display of military might from Russia. One can question how anemic economic sanctions and “indignant speeches” can be in such circumstances.33 The most eloquent argument against this position actually dates back to the end of the Cold War, when the political scientist John Mueller stressed that the European democracies’ “retreat” from warfare since World War II has constituted not just their main economic asset but also a successful approach to international affairs, with or without nuclear deterrence, an approach that also built up their soft power.34 Their magnetism toward other aspiring nations— including Ukraine—became manifest after the end of the Cold War. Of course, the European Union now also understands the importance of military preparedness to protect those values. Yet, this understanding still upholds deterrence more than resort to armed conflict. America’s allies also keep stressing a multilateral approach, remaining wary of those in the United States who still cherish unilateral, if not reckless responses.35 Trump, it is useful to recall, took to an extreme the Hobbesian view of the world, one in which each nation pursues its own self-interest, with wide disregard of multilateral cooperation. Aside from the substantial risks of a zerosum approach to foes and allies alike, how this policy was broadcast had its tangible effects, too. Style can become substance, as the often abrasive administration of George W. Bush had already shown. Trump’s rabid-tweet style

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tended to magnify normal disagreements among allies. To reduce those communications to matters of mere style presumes that the issues of contention were personal, with only superficial effects on the structural issues. But consider just one of the major structural changes: with the collapse of Communism in Europe, the end of the U.S.-European mutual dependence that was dictated by the Cold War. Open disdain toward allies became a heavy liability after the collapse of the external and existential threat that had made transatlantic relations so impervious to slights and insults (whether the current threat posed by Russia’s aggression is just as existential as the actual Cold War confrontation remains to be seen). Moreover, for most of NATO’s history, even at the peak of transatlantic discontent, leaders in Washington always catered to their allies’ self-respect, ostensibly raising rather than dismissing their status in international forums: prestige concerns figured prominently—and still do—for formerly leading world powers. Trump’s truculent tones against those closest to the United States further delegitimized America’s leading role in the global community.36

The Hegemon as “Flawed Democracy” There are deeper reasons why transatlantic relations have grown tenser than ever. In the past the arguments grew heated in diplomatic or congressional circles. In the Trump era, they have become a populist outcry that invokes not just the controversies over financial responsibilities or multilateralism but a whole set of issues revolving around popular resentment in the United States against all the setbacks brought about by economic and cultural globalization. In an increasingly multipolar world, Europe, too, faces the consequences of declining global competitiveness. Europe’s popular and political attitudes have varied, but with nationalism now being generally stronger than it had ever been during the Cold War. It is difficult to establish who emulated whom in this mutual nationalist feedback.37 But Trump certainly has been recognized as the catalyst for a renewed transatlantic right-wing populist animus. The “lure of authoritarianism,” as Anne Applebaum has aptly called it, has broadly affected the Western world. And it originates from both the antielitist populist bottom and the ideologues—journalists, writers, and political and corporate representatives—who orchestrate them.38 In part, it concerns what on both sides of the Atlantic has been frequently called “the Politics of Cultural Despair,” using the title of Fritz Stern’s seminal book, in a perhaps overly facile analogy with pre-Nazi Germany.39 By 2018, eight of the EU countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia) were ruled by xenophobic parties or by  coalitions including them. While most of those coalitions unraveled, with

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moderate reshuffles, the influence of right-wing populism in all those countries remains strong. In France, the National Front lost the presidential runoff election in 2017, but only after reaching a high of 34 percent of the vote; that same year, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland gained a presence in the Bundestag with 13 percent of the vote.40 And of course, there was also Brexit, in part driven by what Fintan O’Toole called “the fatal attraction of heroic failure,” equating British nationalism to “hysterical self-pity.”41 And long before Trump, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi had reintroduced certain plebiscitary aspects in democracy that faintly—or for some not so faintly—invoked old fascist archetypes. Indeed, since the time of Trump’s election, several commentators have thrown in more or less apt analogies between the two tycoons-made-politicians.42 One notable difference in Europe, where extreme right-wing unrest occurred, is the speed with which remedies have been devised. The example of Germany, after the assault on the Reichstag in August 2020 to protest anti-COVID restrictions, is now brought up in comparison to the U.S. response to the Capitol insurrection, as are the antiterrorist responses in Norway and New Zealand, on how to tackle the global challenge, with a “wide-ranging reform agenda that treats far-right extremism as not simply a security threat but a societal problem.” In Germany’s election in October 2021, for example, the setback of AfD had as much significance as the gains for the Social Democrats of Olaf Scholz.43 Macron, to be sure, was barely reelected. Losses in the National Assembly, while reflecting a quick generational, populist turnover, have not, however, produced any political disaster, stagnation, or lack of resolve in foreign policy.44 The pandemic emergency also helped redirect populist conservatism in Europe. A maverick like Boris Johnson, shortly before his downfall, had somewhat revamped his credentials—and possibly, those of the Conservative Party—with a moderate approach to government response, pledging the United Kingdom to “build better, build greener, build faster.”45 The inclusion of the sovereignist Northern League of Italy in the coalition led by Mario Draghi, a former president of the European Central Bank, may have been too short-lived to be considered as an expanding pro-EU consensus. And the polls for the September 2022 national elections accurately indicated a winning right-wing coalition led by the far-right party Brothers of Italy, with the League as its main ally, thus giving Italy its first female prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.46 But for all the pessimistic assessments of Italy, this is less an impending revolution than the reflection of a chronic, unstable political situation in which even an extreme right-wing populist leadership will have to adapt and muddle through on NATO and EU matters as much as on domestic issues.47 Since 2020, in the index of democracies the United States has ranked as  “flawed”—next to, in Western Europe, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and France. To a large extent, the shortcomings of the Western European

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democracies have been attributed to severe lockdowns related to the pandemic. There are instead a variety of causes for the United States’ modest performance. First is the democratic erosion that has been constant in the United States since 2017. Second, while political engagement has been high, particularly in 2020 and 2022, it has also reflected a societal polarization, compounded by a deep dysfunction in the government. Civil liberties have also not scored optimally.48 And then, of course, there were the events of January 6, 2021. Europe’s lower expectations of the United States are also nurtured by analyses that dig deeper into the social and demographic currents that propelled Trump to power. In this view, the mob produced Trump as much as Trump led the mob.49 Clearly, the populist phenomenon did not suddenly surface with him. It is rooted further into the end of Cold War centrist consensus, the Moral Majority’s appropriation of the discourse on the “American family” (particularly working-class white families), and the campaign style of Newt Gingrich and his 1994 “Contract with America” pledge.50 Whether or not one agrees that Trump echoed the “Paranoid Style in American Politics”—in Richard Hofstadter’s famous description of right-wing populism51—most Europeans would concur with Jonathan Kirshner that the United States has entered “an age of unreason, with large swaths of its population embracing wild conspiracy theories.”52 Moral decline has been compounded with incompetence. At the peak of the pandemic mismanagement by the Trump administration, it was common to say in Europe, “The world has loved, hated and envied the U.S. Now, for the first time, we pity it.”53 It may not be the first time that the world replaced prevailing envy with incredulous pity toward the United States. But even in the worst moments of America’s fall from hubris (in Vietnam) or institutional disarray (during Watergate or the 2000 elections), global perceptions never focused so much on the ineptitude at the White House, combined with widespread ignorance (or dishonesty) of conspiracy theorists or their fervent followers. Europe’s critique of America may now, with more ease than in the past, conflate what America is—or is alleged to be—with what America does (the specific actions of the U.S. government).54 A large majority of Europeans are disturbed by the knowledge that 74 million people voted for Trump and find little solace in knowing that Biden earned 81 million votes. And with the prospect of the “lure” of authoritarianism, or even mere right-wing populism metastasized from its most powerful center through Europe’s own manifestations of the same, the fear is widespread and almost prejudicial. Anti-Americanism could indeed evolve fully to be about what America is, not about its transient leaders and policies, but its essence, its way of life, the set of values that Seymour Martin Lipset called the “American Creed.”55 And of course European observers can relish both clever tropes and base stereotypes to confirm that

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the “minor differences” with Europe are actually a new civilizational rift of gaping proportions.

“Two Americas” One of the greatest saving graces for America has been its exceptional countenance of self-criticism and dissent. At the peak of the political divide caused by the Vietnam War, Senator J. William Fulbright embodied that critical stance. In his famed Arrogance of Power, he reminded the public, at home and abroad, that there were “two Americas,” the “self-righteous” and the “self-critical” one; “one is inquiring, the other pontificating,” and “one is judicious and the other arrogant in the use of great power. . . . Both are characterized by a kind of moralism, but one is the morality of decent instincts tempered by the knowledge of human imperfection and the other is the morality of absolute self-assurance fired by the crusading spirit.”56 Regardless of his record on civil rights, the Arkansas senator remained a model—one of the very few U.S. senators to become a global household name—of America’s self-inquiry and self-correcting mechanisms. The dialectics of American politics have been long celebrated in Europe. The European left in particular praised the country for its vigorous dualism between conservatism and progressivism, for America, as an Italian writer put it in 1946, was “an immense theater where our common drama was played out with greater frankness than elsewhere.”57 In the immediate postwar years, French visitors, including Jean-Paul Sartre, correcting the Tocquevillian view of American democracy as stifled and conformist, acknowledged the new country of “untamed cosmopolitanism,” of “infinite possibilities,” with a “pride [that was] sometimes tragic and menacing, and sometimes attractive.”58 Even a critic like the British intellectual Harold Laski highlighted the self-adjusting, somewhat bridled, but still genuine mechanisms of the American two-party system.59 All this presumed a certain atonement for Europe’s previous decades of tragic authoritarianism or, at best, jaded approaches to democracy and pluralism. These European notions of a “frank” dialectic between the “two Americas,” one entrenched, the other emancipating, have endured. Echoing Fulbright, the Italian historian Alessandro Portelli thus reminisced about his years as a radical student in the 1960s: “America was . . . both the disease and the antidote: racism and civil rights, napalm and pacifism, the Hays codes and Marilyn Monroe, and so on. There was no need to go beyond America to find alternatives to America.”60 Even better, what mattered then and matters now was that the “alternatives” came from powerful places in America, from the political and media establishment, that having figures like Fulbright, General James Gavin,

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CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, and Senator Robert Kennedy all express their dismay at an “arrogant” America proved that dissent could be an integral part of foreign policy making and emblematic of a higher patriotism. For those working within the establishment, the point was not so much about finding an “alternative” America but instead the genuine one, true to its original values and standards. Likewise, most European critics were not prejudicially antiAmerican. They rather hoped, sometimes demanded, that the United States remain consistent with its values.61 America’s recognition of its own limits and contradictions still constitutes one of the aspects of its soft power. As Peter Beinart noted, “the irony of American exceptionalism is that by acknowledging our common fallibility, we inspire the world.”62 So now there are abundant calls for a return to “morality” in foreign policy,63 to a liberal internationalism that celebrates how “[Woodrow] Wilson [still] matters,”64 to reflections on “America’s exceptionalism” less based on its “military strength” than on “its cultural and ethnic diversity.”65 The global impact of Black Lives Matter, especially its echoes in Europe, seems to confirm Portelli’s quip about Europe’s searching for its own answers in the frankness of America’s political debate. But the echoes come also from a reactionary America, one now more vocal, and even violent, than ever. With the polarization of American politics as it stands, America’s contradictions have appeared more freakish than frank. Political discord at this level can be paralyzing. And none of the United States’ closest allies in Europe can rest assured that the continuity of America’s commitment to a liberal global order won’t be shattered again by a Trumpist return in 2025. As the European Council on Foreign Relations summarized after the events of January 6, 2021, “majorities in key member states now think the U.S. political system is broken, and that Europe cannot . . . rely on the U.S. to defend it.”66

It May Not Be All That Bad The Trump administration’s chaos will have enduring effects—this opinion is widely shared on both sides of the Atlantic.67 There are other contingent and general reasons for such pessimism, besides all of Europe’s realizations noted in this chapter and the specter of a 2024 electoral turnaround. Repairing America’s global presence won’t be easy, given its domestic priorities, which compel moderation on the foreign policy agenda. Furthermore, the Biden administration’s accomplishments, modest so far, have not yet managed to drive a highly polarized polity toward a new domestic consensus. U.S. demographics also do not bode well for an enduring “special” connection with Western Europe. For decades now the large population growth of the

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United States has shifted in two ways: to the west and south and toward a less European ethnic composition. Both are reflected in a diminished interest in and focus on European affairs, which has been traditionally stronger from the Eastern and Midwestern states. President Barack Obama’s pivot to Asia was mainly driven by international developments—but the changing demographics at home contributed, too. Conservative commentators such as Walter Russell Mead, who favor strong transatlantic ties, note the commercial and geopolitical reasons that forced backpedaling on Biden’s multilateralism.68 European governments expected Biden to continue a rather protectionist trend in U.S. trade policies. And, while seemingly united in setting aside many commercial interests with Russia, they are not renouncing their pragmatic needs, continuing to engage China and other “rogue” nations economically, regardless of Washington’s call for unity against those nations’ human rights or trade violations, putting into question the idealism of the rule-based international order. Idealist or realist, the liberal order has been the lynchpin of transatlantic relations for over seventy-five years. It is rather common, however, to see it as never fully recovered from its first deep crisis during the Vietnam War years. Like its domestic equivalent, New Deal liberalism, it is often mourned, perhaps a victim of reaction, or of its own contradictions, or its excesses—carried out as it was in distorted, aggressive, and burdensome ways, especially after the attacks of 9/11. Ironically, it appears to have been a casualty of its own success, too: its expansion to include states with a broader array of ideologies and agendas has undermined the authority of its original champions.69 With all these reconsiderations, liberal internationalism may even be cast as the true exception to a rather transactional approach to foreign policy, a product of Cold War imperatives, and, as has been noted, “an artifact of the Cold War’s immediate afterglow.”70 One cannot dismiss these general assumptions about an enduring crisis of liberal internationalism, about America’s institutional incapacity, and, consequently, its troubled legitimacy. But is it as bad as it looks? Here I suggest a few points of departure from somber assessments of the potential of the United States to restore collaboration with its main allies—including that sense of “weness” that transcended many tensions in the past. In terms of global leadership, the United States should perhaps drop the claim altogether (as some have suggested)71 and resort to partnership instead, accepting much of the multilateralist frameworks upheld by its transatlantic allies. The so-called unipolar moment has been known more for its setbacks than its benefits. Europeans have been able to act in concert without the United States. But its partnership and solidarity with the world, or lack thereof, are still the most consequential among all powers, and the standards expected of the United States are still the highest.

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America’s institutional capacity can also be mended. Despite the political discord that is reigning in the United States, the pursuit of bipartisanship can work both ways. It can moderate Republicans out of fear of appearing too parochial and hawkish, much as it can moderate Democrats out of fear of appearing too globalist and dovish. Outside the issue of climate change (which surely has created partisan divide), foreign policy agendas, including the restoration of alliances and resistance against foreign aggression, show more common ground between the two parties than domestic issues. American demographics, with an increasingly multiethnic composition, while ostensibly set against certain Eurocentric orientations of U.S. foreign policy, can also move the United States closer to the liberal internationalist and welfare ideas of Europe. Diversity within the United States and the concomitant issues of refugees and economic inclusion can make American cosmopolitanism less the exclusive prerogative of Eastern elites. This globally inclusive orientation is not contradicted but buttressed by the return of Europe-versed, elite-bred personalities who are at the helm of U.S. foreign policy. Schooled in his youth in Paris, Secretary of State Antony Blinken—a clear contrast to his predecessors, the Kansas conservative evangelist Mike Pompeo and ex-CEO Rex Tillerson—is not only fluent in French but also fluid in the mild manners that are closer to the norm in European diplomatic circles. In part this moral compass comes from his family upbringing. The son of a diplomat, he had a Polish-born stepfather who survived Auschwitz. He also was raised in France during a time (the post-Vietnam years) in which America’s moral reputation was low and France had led much of the critique against U.S. choices.72 National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, a Yale graduate and Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, also has an extended European pedigree, yet, when working in 2016 as a senior campaign adviser for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, he dealt with domestic issues such as healthcare, gun control, and immigration. In his outlook, “national security lies primarily in a thriving American middle class, whose prosperity is endangered by the very transnational threats the Trump administration has sought to downplay or ignore.”73 Engaging NATO allies, and doing so with persuasion, perhaps through multilateral action rather than handpicked bilateral deals, certainly does not mean renouncing the persistent demand for burden sharing.74 That persuasion did assist Europe’s newly found resolve against Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Antielitist views can also change more rapidly than expected, given the pandemic tragedy that is making knowledge and expertise a cooperative endeavor. While it is true that skepticism about executive power, technocratic expertise, and social democracy has grown, feeding populist, mostly right-wing trends, we are also witnessing the resilience of that very technocracy and inclusive social “engineering” that the populists assailed—in part thanks to the need for

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scientific certainties in the pandemic era. In a way, COVID-19 has had some psychological and social effects comparable to those caused by the Great Depression. While politics remain highly polarized, faith in social progress is rising out of the pandemic ashes on both sides of the Atlantic. This also means that Washington’s focus on domestic priorities can bode well. Competence at home is indeed the premise for global responsibility, especially for the nation that is held so accountable for its exemplary role and for the impact its own domestic equilibrium has abroad. At the start of the Biden administration, former American ambassador to the UN Samantha Power recommended restoring the credibility of the United States as the “Can Do Nation.” Its example would offer efficient global leadership on a whole set of issues ranging from vaccine distribution to improving academic excellence by easing visa hurdles for study in the United States, and from cutting gas emissions to promoting corporate transparency.75 Indeed, this is not the first time that allies excoriated the United States for its ineffectiveness as much as its morality. Obama took several years to restore the country’s credibility with allies after the damage of the invasion of Iraq and the financial meltdown of 2008. The same could be said about the NATO rift over the war in Vietnam. In that case, transatlantic cooperation, while sometimes fraught, was restored quickly in strategic terms, on détente, and economic terms, through the new G7 gatherings. While even more formidable, the current challenges have also underscored the importance of both intensified transatlantic cooperation and its shared values. The Russian war in Ukraine has had the effect of redrawing global attention to the urgency of preserving the liberal international order. Indeed, the main threat to Putin’s regime has been less the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders than the extension of democracy and pluralism next to his autocratic model.76 Just as important and, again, a matter of competence and even grand strategy has been to oppose the invasion without getting bogged down in the clash. This balancing act is currently being done also with particular attention to the economic weight of a united liberal democratic front, leaving China in limbo, wondering whether economic, if not political and strategic alignment with Moscow, is a wise choice.77 Furthermore, no matter how ill-managed NATO expansion may have been since the 1990s,78 its rationale in favor of self-determination and democracy is more resolute now than it was at its first assertion, when the former Soviet satellite nations were included. Rather than bringing a modernizing and aggressive tsarist empire onto the world scene, Putin’s Russia resembles a retrograde Russian empire in reactionary mode against modernizing influences: more Nicholas I’s starting the Crimean War in 1853 than Peter the Great’s 1709 triumph at Poltava, Ukraine.79 The technological and economic competition with China, compounding the strategic and political tension over Taiwan, is another challenge with even

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broader long-term implications. If played in transactional or antagonistic ways, it adds to the difficulties of the post-Trump transatlantic reset.80 U.S.-EU cooperation could offset this competition; it can do so by laying down the political norms of international liberalism, but only if it is trusted on an enduring and predictable basis and thus can act on issues ranging from the global response to recurring pandemics to internet security, from trade to digital currencies. The failure of scholars and policy makers to predict the popular appeal of the Trump anomaly still haunts us. Now the essence of what makes U.S. politics unpredictable, their volatility, seems to be the “new normal” and a reason for Europe’s wait-and-see attitude. But the failure to predict the worst risks becoming the failure to predict the best: the resilience of American democracy. After all, much of Trump’s assault on democracy, while leaving its mark, was ultimately delusional, an inept farce.81 It would be just as unwise to now play the role of doomsayer of U.S. stability and the transatlantic dialogue. More than optimism, this is a warning that sober and competent minds—from either party—should be in charge in Washington to preserve that stable dialogue, as volatility from the other side of the European continent threatens the institutional framework and the mindset that, for almost eighty years, have been so central to the presumed “long peace”82 among the major world powers.

Notes 1. G. John Ikenberry, “Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2004, 149. Ikenberry developed a more pessimistic view in “The Plot Against American Foreign Policy: Can the Liberal Order Survive?,” Foreign Affairs, (May/June 2017); and A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020). See also chapter 34, by George N. Georgarakis and Robert Y. Shapiro, in this volume. 2. See, for example, Gilles Paris, “La guerre en Ukraine souligne l’urgence d’un réveil des démocraties,” Le Monde, March 7, 2022; “Trump fait l’éloge de l’intelligent Vladimir Poutine, critique les Occidentaux ‘si bêtes,’ ” editorial, Le Soir (Brussels), February 27, 2022; Francesco Olivieri, “Il partito mancante,” Centro Studi di Politica Internazionale (CeSPI), March 21, 2022, https://www.cespi.it /it /eventi-attualita /taccuino -americano/il-partito-mancante. 3. Peter Baldwin, The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How America and Europe Are Alike (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 10. 4. For similar observations, see Jessica Gienow-Hecht, “Always Blame the Americans: Anti-Americanism in Europe in the Twentieth Century,” American Historical Review 111, no. 4 (October 2006): 1070. 5. William T. Stead, The Americanization of the World (New York: H. Markley, 1901). 6. Of course, this is not to imply that the whole European Union is modeled on welfare statism. In particular, some of the new members from the east have been oriented primarily toward the free-market American model.

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7. See, e.g., Giacomo Gabbuti and Lorenzo Zamponi, “Joe Biden Lied in Last Night’s Debate—Italy’s Public Health Care Is Saving It from Collapse,” Jacobin, March 16, 2020, https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/joe-biden-italy-coronavirus-public-health-care -debate; and Vale Disamistade, “No, Italy Is Not the Case Against Medicare for All,” Nation, April 14, 2020. 8. Karl Deutsch, Political Community and the North Atlantic Area (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957); see also Geir Lundestad, The United States and Western Europe Since 1945: From “Empire” by Invitation to Transatlantic Drift (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 65–66; Thomas Risse Kappen, Cooperation Among Democracies: The European Influence on US Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). 9. On this see, recently, Timothy Andrews Sayle, The Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019). 10. See esp. William R. Keylor, “The Future of the Atlantic Alliance Under President Trump,” and Stanley R. Sloan, “Donald Trump and NATO: Historic Alliance Meets A-historic President,” both in Chaos in the Liberal Order: The Trump Presidency and International Politics in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Robert Jervis et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); and chapter 15, by Susan Colbourn, in this volume. See also Stanley R. Sloan, Defense of the West: NATO, the European Union, and the Transatlantic Bargain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), chap. 2; Kori Schake, “NATO’s in Crisis (Again!),” Foreign Policy, February  16, 2017, https:// foreignpolicy.com/2017/02/16/natos-in-crisis-again/. 11. For Trump’s statement of March 29, 2016, and its subsequent reiterations in the following months (including the president’s retraction on April 12, 2017), see https://www .msnbc .com / brian-williams/watch /candidate -trump -nato -is -obsolete -pres -trump -no-it-isn-t-920138819701. 12. Trump, quoted in Ari Shapiro, “Former NATO Commander on President Trump’s Changing Messages About the Alliance,” All Things Considered, NPR, January 10, 2020, https://www.npr.org /2020/01 /10/795366617/former-nato-commander-on-pre sident-trumps-changing-messages-about-the-alliance. See also James M. Goldgeier, “Trump Goes to Europe,” Washington Post, July 10, 2018, https://www.cfr.org /article /trump-goes-europe; “Donald Trump’s Baffling Proposal to Withdraw Troops from Germany,” Economist, June 27, 2020; Tim Stanley, “Trump Departure: ‘Rarely Has a President Shown Such Little Personal Evolution in Office,’ ” Telegraph, January 18, 2021. 13. Qtd. in Sloan, “Donald Trump and NATO,” 225. 14. Qtd. in Hal Brands, “The Last Chance for American Internationalism: Confronting Trump’s Illiberal Legacy,” Foreign Affairs, January 20, 2021, https://www.foreignaffairs .com/articles/united-states/2021-01-20/ last-chance-american-internationalism. See also Colbourn’s chapter in this volume. 15. “Les liaisons dangereuses de Donald Trump et Vladimir Poutine,” editorial, Le Monde, July 17, 2018; Krishnadev Calamur, “Nine Notorious Dictators, Nine Shout-Outs from Donald Trump,” Atlantic, March 4, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/international /archive/2018/03/trump-xi-jinping-dictators/554810/. On the prospects of a more productive trilateral cooperation among China, Russia, and the United States, see Robert Legvold, “US-Russia Relations Unhinged,” in Chaos in the Liberal Order, ed. Jervis et al., 294–99. 16. Andrew Roth, David Smith, Edward Helmore, and Martin Pengelly, “Trump Calls European Union a ‘Foe’—Ahead of Russia and China,” Guardian, July  15, 2018,

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17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

https://www.theguardian .com /us -news /2018/jul /15 /donald-trump -vladimir-putin -helsinki-russia-indictments. Van Krastev and Mark Leonard, “The Crisis of American Power: How Europeans See Biden’s America,” policy brief, European Council on Foreign Relations, January 19, 2021, https://ecfr.eu /publication /the-crisis-of-american-power-how-europeans-see -bidens-america/; Daniel Baer, “America Is Back. Europe, Are You There?,” Foreign Policy, February 9, 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/09/america-europe-biden -transatlantic-alliance/. For a critical look at Merkel’s and Macron’s positions, see Barbara Kunz, “The Evolving Transatlantic Link: What European Response? Disentangling the European Security Debate,” in Alliance and Power Politics in the Trump Era, ed. Maud Quessard, Frédéric Heurtebize, and Frédéric Gagnon (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 33–51. See Gideon Rachman, “Angela Merkel’s Blunder, Donald Trump and the End of the West,” Financial Times, May 29, 2017; “Europe Can’t Count on US Protection Anymore: Merkel,” Straits Times, May 11, 2018, https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe /europe- cant-count- on-us-protection-any-more-merkel; and “ ‘Together We Are Stronger’— Germany Bets on Better US Ties Under Biden,” Reuters, January 25, 2021. See also chapter 21, by William Glenn Gray, in this volume. Macron, in Roger Cohen, “Macron Tells Biden That Cooperation with US Cannot Be Dependence,” New York Times, January 29, 2021; see also, after submarine deal, Roger Cohen, “Macron Takes on US, a Big Gamble Even for a Bold Risk-Taker,” New York Times, September 20, 2021; and Piotr Smolar, Claire Gatinois, and Philippe Ricard, “Sous-marins australiens: en rappelant ses ambassadeurs, la France formalise sa colère contre les Etats-Unis et l’Australie,” Le Monde, September 18, 2021. For a more detailed analysis of U.S.-French relations, see chapter 22, by Kathryn C. Statler, in this volume. See esp. chapters 21 and 22 in this volume. For analyses of this contrast, see Ralf Neukirch, “European Unity Tested by Russian Aggression,” Der Spiegel International, February 23, 2022; Mario Del Pero, “Ucraina: quattro chiavi di lettura della lontananza transatlantica,” Atlante, February 15, 2022, https://www.treccani . it /magazine /atlante /geopolitica / Ucraina _ quattro _ chiavi _ lettura.html; and Kristi Raik and Merili Arjakas, “What Went Wrong with Macron’s Diplomacy vis à vis Russia?,” International Centre for Defense and Security, EESTI, Estonia, February 14, 2022, https://icds.ee/en /what-went-wrong-with-macrons-dip lomacy-vis-a-vis-russia/; cf. David Remnick, “Putin’s Bloody Folly in Ukraine,” New Yorker, March 7, 2022. David Wallace-Wells, “Europe’s Energy Crisis May Get a Lot Worse,” New York Times, August 10, 2022; Alys Davis, “EU Faces Awful Winters Without Gas Cap,” BBC News, August 29, 2022, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62710522. Christopher Schuetze, “Russia’s Invasion Prompts Germany to Beef Up Military Funding,” New York Times, February 27, 2022. Statement of the heads of state or government, meeting in Versailles, on the Russian military aggression against Ukraine, March 10, 2022, https://www.consilium.europa .eu /en /press /press -releases /2022 /03 /11 /statement- of-the -heads - of-state - or-govern ment-on-the-russian-aggression-against-ukraine-10-03-2022/. Alan Rappeport and Jim Tankersley, “Price Cap on Russian Oil Wins Backing of G7 Ministers,” New York Times, September 2, 2022; Amy M. Jaffe and Joseph Webster, “Europe’s Reverse Leverage: Gazprom Can’t Shift Its Gas,” Politico, August 24, 2022, https://www.politico.eu/article/europes-reverse-leverage-gazprom-cant-shift-its-gas

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26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

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/; Adam Tooze, “The Second Coming of Nato: The Alliance Has Been Revived—but It Can’t Save the West,” New Statesman, May 18, 2022. Christiaan Hetzner, “Trump Cheers on Putin’s ‘Savvy’ Invasion of Ukraine. ‘This Is Genius,’ ” Fortune, February 23, 2022; Hugh Tomlison, “Donald Trump Praises Vladimir Putin’s ‘Genius’ Move on Ukraine,” The Times, February 24, 202; Hélène Vissière, “Aux Etats-Unis, l’invasion russe en Ukraine déchire le parti de Donald Trump,” L’Express, March 3, 2022; Juan Tovar Ruiz, “Estados Unidos, Rusia y la política internacional de las grandes potencias,” El País, March 3, 2022. See similar observations in T. G. Otte, “2016 Revisited: The Trump Presidency in Perspective,” ISSF Policy Series America and the World—the Effects of the Trump Presidency, February 18, 2021, https://networks.h-net.org /node/28443/discussions/7266056 /policy-series-2012-8-2016-revisited-trump-presidency-perspective. “To Paris, US Looks Like a ‘Hyperpower,’ ” International Herald Tribune, February 5, 1999. For an analysis of Europe’s attempts to manage the Eisenhower Doctrine, see Alessandro Brogi, “ ‘Competing Missions:’ France, Italy, and the Rise of American Hegemony in the Mediterranean,” Diplomatic History 30, no. 4 (September 2006): 741–70. On de Gaulle in general, see also, most recently, William R. Keylor, Charles de Gaulle: A Thorn in the Side of Six American Presidents (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020). For a different viewpoint on de Gaulle, see Thomas  G. Weiss, “Democrats and Trump: Multilateralism Should Not Be Ignored,” The Global, February  4, 2020, https://theglobal.blog/2020/02/04/democrats-and-trump-mu ltilate ra lism-should-not-be-ignored/. Hal Brands, “The Emerging Biden Doctrine: Democracy, Autocracy, and the Defining Clash of Our Time,” Foreign Affairs, June 29, 2021; Madeleine K. Albright, “The Coming Democratic Revival: America’s Opportunity to Lead the Fight Against Authoritarianism,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2021. Cf. Yascha Mounk, “The Faltering Fight for Democracy: Biden’s Mixed Record on Democratic Renewal,” Foreign Affairs, December 7, 2021; Anne Applebaum, “The Bad Guys are Winning,” Atlantic, November 15, 2021; James Traub, “Biden’s Truman Moment Has Arrived in Ukraine,” Foreign Policy, February 15, 2022; Husain Haqqani, “Biden Now Needs a Plan to Deter China,” Foreign Policy, March 2, 2022; Fareed Zakaria, “Why Are So Many Democracies Unwilling to Condemn Russia?,” Washington Post, April 28, 2022. Robert Kagan, “Power and Weakness,” Policy Review, June/July 2002; “America’s Crisis of Legitimacy,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2004; Robert Kagan and William Kristol, “Burden of Power Is Having to Wield It,” Washington Post, March  19, 2000; Charles Krauthammer, “A World Imagined,” New Republic, March 15, 1999; Norman Podhoretz, “Strange Bedfellows: A Guide to the New Foreign-Policy Debates,” Commentary, December 1999. On neoconservatives, see also Justin Vaïsse, “Why Neoconservatism Still Matters,” Policy Paper no. 20, May 2010, Foreign Policy at Brookings, https://www. brookings . edu / wp - content /uploads /2016 /06 /05 _ neoconservatism _vaisse.pdf. Robert Kagan, Of Power and Paradise: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York: Knopf, 2003), 73. Niall Ferguson, “Vlad the Invader: Putin Is Looking to Rebuild Russia’s Empire,” Spectator, February 26, 2022. John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989).

442 LOOK I N G FO RWA R D 35. Matthias Gebauer and Ralf Neukirch, “Wie Putin die Nato wiederbelebt hat,” Der Spiegel, February 25, 2022; “Vladimir Putin Has Rallied the West,” editorial, Economist, February 27, 2022; Caroline de Gruyter, “Putin’s War Is Europe’s 9/11,” Foreign Policy, February 28, 2022; Corentin Pennarguear, “Ukraine: après l’invasion russe, le grand réveil militaire de l’Europe,” L’Express, February 28, 2022; Jennifer Rubin, “Ukraine Buries ‘America First’ for Good, We Hope,” Washington Post, March 3, 2022; “Survive and Thrive: A European Plan to Support Ukraine in the Long War Against Russia,” policy brief, European Council on Foreign Relations, September 9. 2022, https://ecfr .eu /wp -content /uploads/2022 /09/Survive-and-thrive-A-European-plan-to -support -Ukraine-in-the-long-war-against-Russia.pdf. 36. Brands, “The Last Chance”; Nicholas Burns, “Trump Violates Diplomacy’s Golden Rule: At the NATO Summit, the President Publicly Heaped Abuse on America’s Closest Friends,” Atlantic, December 4, 2019. I analyzed the impact of status and prestige in Cold War relations among NATO allies in Alessandro Brogi, A Question of SelfEsteem: The United States and the Cold War Choices in France and Italy, 1944–1958 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002). 37. Former chief strategist of the Trump administration Steve Bannon has traced his main inspiration to the French right-wing thinker and leader of the Action française Charles Maurras. Guy Sorman, “La source française du Trumpisme,” France-Amérique, February 16, 2017, https://france-amerique.com/fr/the-french-source-of-trumpism/. 38. Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (New York: Doubleday, 2020). 39. Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study of the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961). See, e.g., Enzo Traverso, The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right (London: Verso, 2019); Emily TurnerGraham, “The Politics of Cultural Despair: Britain’s Extreme Right,” in The New Authoritarianism, vol. 2: A Risk Analysis of the European Alt-Right Phenomenon, ed. Alan Waring (Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2019). 40. On this see also Traverso, The New Faces of Fascism, 3–8; Andrea Mammone, “RightWing Nationalists Are on the Rise in Europe—and There’s No Progressive Coalition to Stop Them,” Washington Post, April 7, 2019. In Bulgaria, the role of “United Patriots” in Boyko Borisov’s government was far more marginal than that of other far-right parties in coalitions elsewhere. 41. Fintan O’Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (London: Apollo, 2019). In some respects, O’Toole echoes the similar arguments once made by Robert Gildea on France: “The collective memory of defeat,” in that case, “ha[d] itself served as a crucible of national solidarity and national revival.” Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 133–34. 42. See, for example, Roger Cohen, “The Trump-Berlusconi Syndrome,” New York Times, March 15, 2016; Celestine Bohlen, “For Italians, Donald Trump’s Act Is Familiar,” New York Times, August 8, 2016; Beppe Severgnini, “What a Trump America Can Learn from a Berlusconi Italy,” New York Times, November 15, 2016; Stephanie Kirchgaessner, “If Berlusconi is Like Trump, What Can America Learn from Italy?,” Guardian, November 21, 2016; Rachel Donadio, “Berlusconi Was Trump Before Trump,” Atlantic, April 13, 2019. For a critique highlighting differences between the two leaders, see “Is Trump a Berlusconi? Let a Berlusconi Expert Explain,” interview with Paul Ginsborg, Washington Post, November 16, 2016. For broader analogies with other rightwing European leaders, see Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Co-opt & Corrupt: How Trump Bent and Broke the GOP,” New York Review of Books, August 12, 2020.

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43. Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Daniel Koehler, “A Plan to Beat Back the Far Right Violent Extremism in America Demands a Social Response,” Foreign Affairs, February 3, 2021, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-02-03/plan-beat-back-far -right; see also Rafaela Dancygier, “Germany’s Far-Right Party Lost Seats in Last Week’s Election. Here’s Why,” Washington Post, October 5, 2021. For a more pessimistic view of the spread of the right in Europe, see Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nexon, Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 137–58. 44. Bruno Cautrès, Vincent Martigny, and Olivier Rozenberg, “Législatives 2022: une Assemblée jeune avec un renouvellement au-dessus de la moyenne de la V୿ République, porté par les oppositions,” Le Monde, June 21, 2022; “Macron Plugs ‘Diplomacy of Combat,’ Vows Long-Term Support for Ukraine,” 2022 Conference of Ambassadors, September 9, 2022, https://www.france24.com/en/france/20220901-live-macron-lays -out-french-foreign-policy-priorities-amid-multiple-crises. For a critical look, see Bart M. J. Szewczyk, “Scholz and Macron Have a Perilous Ambition for Europe,” Foreign Policy, September 8, 2022. 45. “In Full: Boris Johnson’s ‘Build Back Better’ Speech,” July 1, 2020, Sky News, https:// skynews.detops.net/qqqbrb-ksqh7q6c/in-full. 46. This chapter was completed on September 9, 2022, ahead of the elections held on September 25. 47. David Broder, “The Future Is Italy, and It’s Bleak,” New York Times, July 22, 2022; Paul Krugman, “Wonking Out: What’s the Matter With Italy?,” New York Times, July 22, 2022; Jeremy Cliffe, “Will Giorgia Meloni Be the Next Prime Minister of Italy?,” New Statesman, August 31, 2022. 48. See Democracy Index 2020, The Economist—Intelligence Unit, https://www.eiu.com /n/campaigns/democracy-index-2020. For subsequent analysis, see Larry Diamond, “All Democracy Is Global: Why America Can’t Shrink from the Fight for Freedom,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2022. 49. Fintan O’Toole, “The Trump Inheritance,” New York Review of Books, February 25, 2021; Chiara Migliori, “ ‘He’s one of us’: pandemia, proteste e il significato della figura di Donald Trump per i suoi elettori,” Acoma 19 (2020); Mario Del Pero, “USA 2016, sfida tra due Americhe: con Donald i bianchi antisistema, per Hillary le élite e le minoranze,” Il Messaggero, November 5, 2016; cf. Jeff Manza and Ned Crowley, “Ethnonationalism and the Rise of Donald Trump,” Contexts 17, no. 1 (2018): 28–33. 50. McKay Coppins, “The Man Who Broke Politics: Newt Gingrich Turned Partisan Battles Into Bloodsport, Wrecked Congress, and Paved the Way for Trump’s Rise. Now He’s Reveling in His Achievements,” Atlantic, October 17, 2018; Julian E. Zelizer, Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker and the Rise of the New Republican Party (New York: Penguin, 2020); cf. Arlie R. Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: New Press, 2016); Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012); Dominic Sandbrook, Mad as Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right (New York: Random House, 2011); George Packer, “The Uses of Division,” New Yorker, August 11 & 18, 2014. 51. For a critical analysis of the comparison, see Leo Ribuffo, “Donald Trump and the ‘Paranoid Style’ in American (Intellectual) Politics,” in Chaos in the Liberal Order, ed. Jervis et al. For an argument dissecting Trump’s approach to politics following the “paranoid style,” see esp. Roderick P. Hart, “Donald Trump and the Return of the Paranoid Style,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 50, no. 2 (June 2020).

444 LOOK I N G FO RWA R D 52. Jonathan Kirshner, “Gone but Not Forgotten: Trump’s Long Shadow and the End of American Credibility,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2021, 23. 53. Fintan O’Toole, “Donald Trump Has Destroyed the Country He Promised to Make Great Again,” Irish Times, April 25, 2020. 54. On this distinction, see esp. Robert O. Keohane and Peter Katzenstein, “Introduction: The Politics of Anti-Americanisms,” in Anti-Americanisms in World Politics, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein and Robert O. Keohane (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007). 55. Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: Norton, 1996). 56. J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power (New York: Random House, 1966), 245–46. 57. Cesare Pavese, La letteratura americana e altri saggi (Turin: Einaudi), 194; cf. Italo Calvino, “Hemingway e noi,” Il Contemporaneo, November 13, 1954. 58. Jean-Paul Sartre, “American Novelists in French Eyes,” Atlantic Monthly 178 (August  1946); Jean-Paul Sartre, “Individualism and Conformism in the United States” (1945), in Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. Annette Michelson (London: Rider, 1955), 110–11; Claude Roy, “Le ciel est ma frontière,” Les Lettres Françaises, November 1, 1946; Simone de Beauvoir, America Day by Day (1954), trans. Carol Cosman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 59. Harold Laski, American Democracy (New York: Viking, 1948). 60. Alessandro Portelli, “The Transatlantic Jeremiad: American Mass Culture, and Counterculture and Opposition Culture in Italy,” in Cultural Transmissions and Receptions: American Mass Culture in Europe, ed. Rob Kroes, Robert W. Rydell, and D. F. J. Bosscher (Amsterdam: UV Press, 1993), 131. 61. On this, see also Max Paul Friedman, Rethinking Anti-Americanism: The History of an Exceptional Concept in American Foreign Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), esp. 157–89. 62. Peter Beinart, “The Rehabilitation of the Cold War Liberal,” New York Times, April 30, 2006. 63. Joseph S. Nye Jr., Do Morals Matter? Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). 64. Tony Smith, Why Wilson Matters: The Origin of American Liberal Internationalism and Its Crisis Today (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). 65. Jeffrey D. Sachs, A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 219. 66. Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard, “The Crisis of American Power: How Europeans See Biden’s America,” ECFR, January 19, 2021, https://ecfr.eu /publication /the-crisis-of -american-power-how-europeans-see-bidens-america/. 67. For the European perspective, see esp. Valerie Höhne, Ralf Neukirch, René Pfister, Alexandra Rojkov, and Alexander Sarovic, “The Mess Created by Trump Will Be with Us for Years,” Spiegel International, October 30, 2020, https://www.spiegel.de/inter national /world /the -mess - created-by-trump -will-be -with-us -for-years -a-e6a059c1 -3422-4c19-b3c3-4e4b726f7820; “La défaite de Trump signe-t-elle un recul du populisme?,” France Culture, November  10, 2020, https://www.franceculture.fr/emis sions/ le-temps-du-debat / la-defaite-de-trump -signe-t-elle-un-recul-du-populisme; Ana Alonso, “¿Sobrevivirá el trumpismo global sin Donald Trump en el poder?,” El Indipendiente, January 23, 2021; Massimo Teodori, “Stati Uniti, ancora faro di democrazia?,” Ispionline, January  20, 2021, https://www.ispionline.it /it /pubblicazione/stati

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68.

69. 70. 71.

72.

73.

74.

75.

76.

77.

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-uniti-ancora-faro-di-democrazia-28965; the essays in Quessard et al., eds., Alliances and Power Politics; see also Kirshner, “Gone but Not Forgotten.” Walter Russell Mead, “Biden’s Rough Start with the World,” Wall Street Journal, February 15, 2021; “The COP26 Summit and the Global Age of Shams,” Wall Street Journal, November 15, 2021; “Biden Needs a ‘Pivot’ to the World,” Wall Street Journal, February 28, 2022; and, for a longer-term perspective, Walter Russell Mead, “A Feckless American Foreign Policy’s Legacy: U.S. Post–Cold War Complacency Made Today’s Menacing World Possible,” Wall Street Journal, July 18, 2022. On this last point, see Ikenberry, A World Safe for Democracy, 257–59; and chapter 40, by Jeremy Adelman, in this volume. Michael Beckley, “Rogue Superpower: Why This Could Be an Illiberal American Century,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2020. See esp. Peter Beinart, “Biden Wants America to Lead the World. It Shouldn’t,” New York Times, December 2, 2020; Aaron David Miller and Richard Sokoloski, “Opinion: With Biden, America Is Back—but Not at the Head of the Table,” NPR, December 2, 2020, https://www.npr.org /2020/12/02/940807637/opinion-with-biden-america -is-back-but-not-at-the-head-of-the-table; “After the Chaos of the Trump Era, What Can Joe Biden Hope to Achieve?,” editorial, Economist, January 23, 2021. Robert Kagan insists that a world that is not U.S.-led suffers from “unwarranted optimism”: Robert Kagan, “A Superpower, Like It or Not,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2021. “Antony Blinken, Courtly New Top US Diplomat, Preaches Humility and Intervention,” France 24, January 26, 2021, https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210126 -antony-blinken-courtly-new-top-us-diplomat-preaches-humility-and-intervention. Natasha Bertrand, “The Inexorable Rise of Jake Sullivan,” Politico, November 27, 2020, https://www.politico .com /news /2020/11 /27/jake -sullivan -biden -national -security -440814. Some saw prospects of transatlantic reconciliation even under a second Trump mandate. It might not have been the type of “charm offensive” attempted by George W. Bush in 2005, but it was based on realist assumptions of shared interests: Bruce Stokes, “What Would a Less Europhobic Trump Look Like—If He Wins?,” Foreign Policy, October 22, 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/10/22/trump-europe-election/. Samantha Power, “The Can-Do Power: America’s Advantage and Biden’s Chance,” Foreign Affairs, January/February  2021. In May  2021, Power took office as Biden’s administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. See also Richard Haass, “Repairing the World: The Imperative—and Limits—of a Post-Trump Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, November  9, 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles /united-states/2020-11-09/repairing-world. On the U.S. potential role in the global fight against the pandemic, see also Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World (New York: Norton, 2020); and Hal Brands and Francis J. Gavin, eds., COVID19 and World Order: The Future of Conflict, Competition, and Cooperation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020). See, for example, Kori Schake, “Putin Accidentally Revitalized the West’s Liberal Order,” Atlantic, February 28, 2022; Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Goldgier, “Europe Strong and Safe: To Deter Russia, America Must Help Revive the Region’s Security Architecture,” Foreign Affairs, January 5, 2022; Timothy Snyder, “Ukraine Holds the Future: The War Between Democracy and Nihilism,” Foreign Affairs, September/ October 2022. Jude Blanchette and Bonny Lin, “China’s Ukraine Crisis: What Xi Gains—and Loses— From Backing Putin,” Foreign Affairs, February 21, 2022; Kevin Varley, “China Steps

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78.

79.

80.

81. 82.

Away from Russia, Finally Calling the Invasion of Ukraine a ‘War,’ ” Fortune, March 2, 2022; Tiejun Zhang, “China Is Not Russia; Taiwan Is Not Ukraine,” The Diplomat, July  25, 2022; Alexander Gabuev, “China’s New Vassal: How the War in Ukraine Turned Moscow Into Beijing’s Junior Partner,” Foreign Affairs, August 9, 2022. Mary E. Sarotte, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post–Cold War Stalemate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021); Michael Kimmage, “Time for NATO to Close Its Door,” Foreign Affairs, January 22, 2022. See, for the critical views of George Kennan in particular, Paul C. Atkinson, “What Would George Kennan Say About Ukraine?,” The Hill, January 28, 2022, https://thehill.com /opinion /national-security/591787-what-would-george-kennan-say-about-ukraine. For a military assessment addressing both the advantages and the perils for the new democracies of Eastern Europe, see Jerad I. Harper, “Insurgency in Ukraine Could Lead to Major War in Europe,” Foreign Policy, February 23, 2022. Ferguson, “Vlad the Invader,” compares Putin to Peter the Great; cf. Simon Shuster, “How Volodymyr Zelensky Defended Ukraine and United the World,” Time, March 2, 2022. Jessica Chen Weiss, “The China Trap: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Perilous Logic of Zero-Sum Competition,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2022; Jacquelyn Scheider, “Would We Really Defend Taiwan?,” Hoover Institute Digest, July 15, 2022, https://www .hoover.org /research/would-we-really-defend-taiwan. For a different opinion urging a more muscular U.S. approach to the Taiwanese crisis, see esp. “How to Prevent a War Between America and China Over Taiwan,” editorial, Economist, August 11, 2022. On this, see esp. (aside from some other dubious assertions) Barton Swain, “Trump and the Failure of the Expert Class,” Wall Street Journal, January 22, 2021. Often poorly interpreted as optimistic if not even whiggish is the kind of historical analysis (a warning rather) offered in Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (London: Viking, 2011); see also Joshua S. Goldstein, Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide (London: Plume, 2012); John L. Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries Into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); and Yuval Noah Harari, “What’s at Stake in Ukraine Is the Direction of Human History,” Economist, February 10, 2022.

CHAPTER 38

ONE EYE ON THE REARVIEW MIRROR The Middle East from Trump to Biden JA M E S R . S TO C K E R

D

uring his 2020 campaign, President Joe Biden announced his intention to “repair the damage wrought by President Trump and chart a fundamentally different course for American foreign policy.”1 At the time—and since—both proponents and critics of President Donald Trump’s “America First” approach charged that Trump had taken American foreign policy in an entirely new direction, whether dangerous or long overdue.2 Others, myself included, disagreed, suggesting that domestic and international factors had compelled Trump to continue many of the same policies as his predecessors. With the advent of the Biden administration, we are now in a better position to understand how Trump changed U.S. foreign policy and the impact of those changes. Can Biden simply go back to the status quo ante? Events thus far suggest that in some ways, he is not turning back the clock as much as expected, while in others a reversion to the past is simply impossible. Back in 2017, I offered a set of predictions about Trump’s approach to the Middle East, arguing that overall there would be more continuities than most expected.3 I examined five areas of Middle East policy: the level of American military and political engagement in the region, policies toward Syria and Iraq (at the time closely linked by the threat of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS), policy on Iran, involvement in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and democracy promotion. My point was not that there would be no change whatsoever but that there were powerful incentives in place to continue policy along the same lines.

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In this chapter, I first offer a review of Trump’s Middle East policy, then examine how the Biden administration is attempting to steer regional policy in a new direction. In retrospect, Trump did face pressure to continue U.S. foreign policy in certain directions, but in other areas, he and his advisors managed to set U.S. policy on a new course that is not easily reversed. Other scholars with chapters in this volume also agree that there would be significant continuity from Obama to Trump. On the Middle East, F. Gregory Gause judged that the Trump administration made relatively few changes in its overall approach, with the exception of policy toward Iran and its nuclear program.4 While I agree with this point on Iran, in my view, Trump also took a markedly different approach on two other issues: the Arab-Israeli conflict and human rights. The degree of change is demonstrated not only by Trump’s own record but by the Biden administration’s struggle to restore old policies. While Biden has been able to move away from the Trump legacy in some areas, in these other areas, the impact of the forty-fifth president has been lasting, in part because of changing conditions in the region.5 For the most part, Biden is moving forward, but in several areas, his team arguably has an eye on the rearview mirror, fixated on a past that no longer exists. A mixture of ideology, domestic politics, and personal interests drove the Trump administration’s approach to the Middle East. As president, Trump did not have a formal ideology, but a clear set of ideas animated his policy: America’s interests took priority over those of others; allies had been taking advantage of the United States; autocrats were more reliable partners than democratically elected leaders; and multilateral arrangements were suspect, unless negotiated by Trump himself. Moreover, Trump’s international stances were nearly always aligned with domestic priorities. Strong support for Israel, for instance, stemmed less from respect for its history or people than from a need to satisfy an electoral constituency.6 Personal interests were important, too. Many, for instance, have suggested that American accommodation of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan reflected business arrangements that the Trump Organization maintains in that country.7 These forces and trends have pushed hard against the continuities I outline, but they brought about bigger changes in some areas than others. The first continuity is the deep level of American military engagement in the region. Would Trump draw down or increase troop levels, and how would he use them? Would restraint be the order of the day, or would he follow a “madman” strategy of threatening violence to achieve a policy goal without having to use overwhelming force?8 Over most of Trump’s time in office, the number of U.S. troops in the Middle East remained roughly the same, with only a slight decline in troop levels near its end that may have been, at least in part, ordered for electoral purposes.9 At times, Trump even increased troop levels in the

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region, including during a mini-surge in early 2020 following attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq.10 Thus, while Trump left somewhat fewer troops than his predecessor, he did not manage to truly extricate the United States from any of the regional conflicts in which it was involved. While the Trump administration never quite went “full madman,” it did both threaten and employ violence in a limited fashion to achieve policy goals. First, Trump ordered missile strikes in April 2017 following the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons.11 This was repeated the following year.12 Second, and more importantly, after U.S. military forces and the U.S. embassy in Iraq came under attack, Trump ordered a drone strike that killed the Iranian leader of the Quds Force, General Qassem Soleimani, as well as several high-level Iraqi militia leaders.13 In response, Iran lobbed a volley of missiles at U.S. bases that resulted in no deaths but left more than one hundred troops with traumatic brain injuries.14 Trump did not escalate further. On the whole, the Trump administration surprised many by largely limiting the scope of force used in the region; he could correctly take credit for starting “no new wars.”15 In the second area, in Syria and Iraq, the Trump administration inherited flawed policies toward countries in conflict. Syria remains in the midst of a ruinous civil war, encouraged by half-hearted Obama-era policies that were largely reactive rather than assertive. Trump touted the December 2018 defeat of ISIS in Syria and Iraq as a major victory; in reality, this reflected progress in a difficult battle whose tide had already turned at the time Trump won office.16 If Trump had his way, American troops would have exited before this.17 Meanwhile, a decade and a half after the U.S. invasion, Iraq has acquired a degree of dysfunctional stability. As Max Boot has suggested, Iran aimed for a sort of Lebanonization of the country, funding and arming a set of militias that hold the true power, while allowing a civilian government to remain nominally in charge.18 Ultimately, Iraq virtually disappeared as a U.S. priority in the aftermath of Soleimani’s death. The Trump administration even contemplated abandoning the U.S. embassy there, suggesting how far the country had fallen in American strategic priorities.19 On the third issue, Iran, the Trump administration did indeed embark on a new path. The Obama administration believed that preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon required international cooperation, including European countries, Russia, and China. American diplomacy led to the creation of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which placed significant restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program. During his campaign, Trump promised to withdraw from this agreement, which he claimed would neither stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon nor address other Iranian military activities in the region. Though it took two and a half years, the Trump administration finally abandoned its participation in the JCPOA in May 2018.20 By the time it left office, the Trump administration discovered that the U.S.

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alone could not implement an effective sanctions program toward Iran. Ironically, U.S. diplomats were forced to invoke the deal their own president had renounced in a failed effort to reimpose so-called snapback sanctions on Iran authorized by the JCPOA framework.21 On the fourth issue, the U.S. role in the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Trump administration made bigger changes than most observers anticipated, myself included. The Trump administration had “inherit[ed] a legacy of intense American engagement” that aimed for a negotiated two-state solution between Israel and Palestine, which would then lay the basis for opening relations between Israel and other Arab states. Although U.S. policy arguably long tilted toward Israel, Trump’s advisors abandoned all pretense of impartiality in the case of Israel-Palestinian relations.22 Nominally, Trump’s team supported the creation of a Palestinian state, proposing the so-called Deal of the Century in January 2020. Unlike previous American efforts, however, Trump’s plan did not even pretend to be balanced. It offered Israel almost only carrots, most of which were delivered in advance of the deal’s announcement, including moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, and abandoning the longstanding position that Israel’s West Bank settlements are illegal.23 Under the plan, Israel would annex some 20 percent of the West Bank and maintain full control over security, borders, and airspace, with only a few restrictions on Israeli settlements. The Palestinians, by contrast, found mostly sticks awaiting them. Not only did they have to accept the imposed territorial limitations, a permanent Israeli military and security presence on their territory, and the abandonment of any right to a national military, but the entire deal was contingent on the willingness of the Islamic militant group Hamas—the Palestinian Authority’s rival in control of the Gaza Strip—to abandon violence against Israel. In exchange, Israel and the Trump administration would recognize a Palestinian state, which would then receive massive economic aid.24 After receiving signs that the Palestinians were not interested in a deal along these lines and instead would be pleading their case to the International Criminal Court, the Trump administration closed the Washington, DC, office of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).25 The United States also cut aid to the Palestinian territories, as well as for Palestinian refugees in neighboring countries.26 Had the situation remained as such, this would have been evidence that the Trump administration was unable to avoid the trap of failed negotiations that previous administrations had fallen into. As it happened, behind-the-scenes negotiations resulted in the most surprising development in decades: the socalled Abraham Accords, under which Israel opened relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain (followed later by Sudan and Morocco). Granted, these countries were not at war with Israel and had been displaying peaceful intentions for years.27 And Arab leaders may have been at least as instrumental

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in negotiations leading to the agreement as the Americans.28 Still, these agreements are of enormous strategic and psychological significance. They marked the first opening of relations between Israel and Arab countries since the 1994 Israel-Jordan Peace Deal, signaling both an unprecedented acceptance of Israel in the Arab world and the death knell for the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, which offered recognition in return for the resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict with a two-state solution on the 1967 borders.29 What the accords did not do is resolve a fundamental issue underlying the Arab-Israeli conflict: the status of the Palestinian people. Indeed, by circumscribing the territory of a potential Palestinian state and legitimizing Israel’s settlements, the Trump administration’s policies have virtually eliminated whatever slim possibility remained of a just, two-state solution. Moreover, while the Abraham Accords were signed by the governments of authoritarian states, Arab publics still overwhelmingly reject normalization with Israel, suggesting that Trump’s achievements are far from consolidated.30 Perhaps these developments should have been anticipated in the context of U.S. democracy promotion and human rights in the Middle East. It might be easy to roll one’s eyes at the U.S. policies in this area, given the largely negative American record in recent years, including the George W. Bush administration’s efforts to impose democracy by force, as well as the failure of the Obama administration to effectively support the Arab Spring uprisings. However, Trump’s abandonment of any interest in democracy and human rights showed that the opposite attitude can be equally destructive, as his administration doubled down on relationships with authoritarian regimes in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain and expressed little support for democratic movements in Egypt, Lebanon, and elsewhere. The nadir for this was Trump’s nonchalance in the aftermath of the murder of U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post journalist, who was killed and dismembered in a Saudi consulate after issuing the mildest of criticisms of the regime.31 The United States also continued to facilitate the Saudi-led war in Yemen, which by the end of 2020 had resulted in the deaths of more than 120,000 people and produced the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.32 Finding reliable pro-Israel, anti-Iran partners trumped virtually any other consideration in U.S. policy in the region. All in all, Trump’s legacy in the Middle East does represent a departure from previous patterns, though not in all the areas I outlined. The United States was unable to withdraw a significant number of troops from the region. It could not yet fully step away from Syria and Iraq, even as conflicts in those countries wound down. Trump did make a remarkable amount of progress in bringing about recognition for Israel from other Arab states, even if he left the IsraeliPalestinian conflict in an even more intractable state than before. On Iran, Trump abandoned efforts to reach a modus vivendi via an agreement on nuclear activities, but he got no closer to reaching a satisfactory resolution to this

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challenge than did his predecessors. Moreover, the U.S. government spent four years largely ignoring human rights violations that were committed by countries other than Iran or its allies. As Joe Biden took over the presidency, many in the region and beyond looked to see how American policy would change. Though Biden is an establishment figure—there are few remaining politicians in Washington with more experience in the legislative and executive branches—it is clear that while in some ways the United States will revert to its old role, in others there is simply no going back. A hesitancy to come to terms with the new reality on the ground, combined with the strains of domestic politics, has thus far limited Biden’s ability to make big changes in the American approach to the region. In terms of reducing the American footprint in the Middle East and on U.S. policy toward Syria and Iraq, Biden has to this point stuck to patterns seen under Trump. In the short to medium term, strong pressure to maintain similar levels of American military engagement in the region remains.33 True, the Biden administration withdrew U.S. troops from Afghanistan, along the timeline that Trump had planned—and disaster ensued as the Taliban quickly took over.34 Following this embarrassment, the administration has been hesitant to make further withdrawals. Fighting in Syria continues, and though the lines of conflict have remained largely static, Turkey still seems to be contemplating the expansion of its so-called buffer zone.35 The Biden administration remains unwilling to engage with the Syrian regime, which it and many of its allies find abhorrent. Meanwhile, around a thousand U.S. troops remain on the ground in eastern Syria.36 In Iraq, conflict with ISIS has subsided, but the country must address the status of its militia groups, which continue to challenge the sovereignty of the state. In December  2021, the Biden administration announced that it is ending the combat role for American troops in Iraq. However, 2,500 American troops remain in that country, and the administration plans to leave them there for the present.37 Even if troops remain, Biden has substantially reduced the U.S. use of force in the region. It was not always apparent that this would be the case. After all, as a senator, Biden voted for both Iraq wars and often took a hawkish position on the use of force. Yet in recent years, his attitude toward the use of force has been somewhat more restrained. He was a leading advocate for withdrawal from Afghanistan, and he has blamed military policies about burning trash for the cancer that killed his son Beau.38 Since taking office, he has quietly toned down a drone war that killed thousands of civilians over the previous two decades.39 While this may not be enough to satisfy some critics, the change is notable. Syria and to a lesser extent Iraq seem to be exceptions, as U.S. forces continue to launch attacks periodically against alleged ISIS leaders and Iranian-backed militias.40

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On Iran, the administration has worked hard to revert the situation to the status quo ante, without much success. Diplomats are trying to work out a new agreement similar to the JCPOA. After nearly a year and a half of start-andstop negotiations, the two parties are still deadlocked on key issues of sanctions relief and the role of the IAEA verification.41 In the meantime, there are fears that Iran is closer than ever to accumulating enough material to quickly create a nuclear device.42 Biden has reportedly considered “other options” to deal with Iran’s nuclear program, including a possible military strike; however, the administration insists that it prefers diplomacy.43 By contrast, the Biden administration has done little to change the course of U.S. policy on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Biden was never expected to rock the boat on this issue; he is as pro-Israel as an American leader can be. While most of the world recognizes that the “two-state solution” has become an increasingly empty slogan, other possibilities, such as the creation of a single, binational state or a permanent Palestinian political entity subordinate to Israel, remain unpalatable. Biden has returned some aid to the Palestinian Authority, and his cabinet members have attempted to put discussion of Israeli settlement activity on an equal footing with Iran, but he has done nothing to roll back Trump’s changes in U.S. policy, such as moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. The administration barely lifted a finger during an eleven-day-long clash between Israeli forces and Hamas in the Gaza Strip and has not uttered a word of condemnation for efforts to evict Palestinians in the Sheikh al-Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem or the spurious classification of six Palestinian civil society organizations as terrorist organizations.44 And, most notably, the State Department whitewashed an investigation into the killing of the American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank.45 Very little suggests that this issue is a priority for the administration. Biden has reassessed U.S. relations with autocratic regimes and with states that have experienced serious democratic setbacks. The president has kept his distance from leaders with problematic histories, including Turkey’s Erdoğan, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, and Egypt’s Abdul Fatah al-Sisi, but U.S. diplomats otherwise continue relations in a relatively similar matter to previous years. U.S. relations with Turkey, a formal NATO ally that is no longer a close partner, remain on a transactional basis. While the United States has formally withdrawn its support for the so-called offensive portion of the war in Yemen, it continues to provide some logistical support to Saudi Arabia’s military actions there and even recently agreed to a package of so-called defensive weapons to the Saudis.46 U.S. relations with Egypt, too, remain largely transactional, despite efforts to produce movement on human rights.47 All of this points to the fundamental tension between interests and principles in foreign policy—it is difficult to ask for things from other countries while criticizing them.

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Biden’s foreign policy rightly recognizes that some things have changed in the Middle East, and not all for the worse. The four years of the Trump administration left its mark on the region, notably by changing the relationship between Israel and Arab countries and by making autocracy great again. The U.S. military role in the region continues to slowly shrink, which just about everyone welcomes. Biden’s attempts to shift back to Obama-era engagement with Iran, while laudable, may or may not succeed, leaving it with few good options, while efforts to promote democracy and human rights are not likely to gain much traction, either. Perhaps most significantly, an increasingly indefensible attachment to a two-state policy solution in Israel-Palestine makes any progress in that area unlikely at best. One could argue that these failures are rooted in the intractable nature of the challenges themselves, rather than in any tactical missteps. But until the administration looks to the future rather than the past, the end result is likely to be frustration.

Notes 1. This quotation is from his campaign website. See https://joebiden.com /american leadership. 2. See David Friedman, Sledgehammer: How Breaking with the Past Brought Peace to the Middle East (New York: Broadside, 2022); Jared Kushner, Breaking History: A White House Memoir (New York: Broadside, 2022), 6. 3. James R. Stocker, “Trump and Historical Legacies of US Middle East Policy,” H-Diplo/ ISSF Policy Series, ed. D. Labrosse, April 19, 2017, https://issforum.org/ISSF/PDF/Policy -Roundtable-1-5AE .pdf. See also Patrick Porter, “ ‘Stuck: America First’ and the Middle East,” H-Diplo/ISSF Policy Series 2021, ed. D. Labrosse, September 30, 2021, https:// issforum.org /roundtables/policy/ps2021-54. 4. See his chapter in this volume, as well as F. Gregory Gause, III, “The Trump Administration and the Middle East,” H-Diplo/ISSF Policy Series 2017, ed. D. Labrosse, August 14, 2017, http://issforum.org /ISSF/PDF/Policy-Roundtable-1-5AV.pdf. 5. See his chapter in this volume, as well as Robert Jervis, “The Trump Experiment Revisited,” H-Diplo/ISSR, February 11, 2021, https://issforum.org /ISSF/PDF/PS2021-7.pdf. 6. “Why Is Jerusalem So Important to American Evangelical Christians?,” Independent, August 18, 2020, https://www.independent.co.uk /news/world /americas/us-politics / jerusalem - history - explained - religion - evangelical - christians - donald - trump -a9676756.html. 7. Eric Lipton and Benjamin Weiser, “Turkish Bank Case Showed Erdogan’s Influence with Trump,” New York Times, October 29, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10 /29/us/politics/trump-erdogan-halkbank.html. 8. On Nixon’s “Madman” theory, see Timothy Naftali, “The Problem with Trump’s Madman Theory,” Atlantic, October  4, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/international /archive/2017/10/madman-theory-trump-north-korea/542055/. 9. A New York Times article recently estimated that the United States maintains around 45,000 to 65,000 troops in the Middle East at any given time. Eric Schmitt, “Top General in Middle East Says US Troop Levels Will Drop in Iraq and Syria,” New York

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10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

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Times, August 12, 2020; Eric Schmitt, “US to Reduce Troops in Iraq to 3,000, Helping to Fulfill a Goal on Overseas Cuts,” New York Times, September 10, 2020. Lolita C. Baldor, “US General Says Troop Surge in Middle East May Not End Soon,” AP News, January 23, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/2208d8645ac0437024ac71c06fcfb8e1. Michael R. Gordon, Helene Cooper, and Michael D. Shear, “Dozens of US Missiles Hit Air Base in Syria,” New York Times, April 6, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04 /06 /world /middleeast /us - said -to -weigh -military -responses -to - syrian - chemical -attack .html. Arms Control Association, “Timeline of Syrian Chemical Weapons Activity, 2012– 2020,” https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Timeline-of-Syrian-Chemical-Weapons -Activity. “Soleimani ‘Days Away’ from Killing Americans,” Daily Telegraph, January 8, 2020. Shawn Snow, “American Troops Had Only Hours to React to Iranian Ballistic Missile Attack,” Military Times, April 21, 2020, https://www.militarytimes.com /flashpoints /2020/04 /21 /american-troops -had-only-hours -to -react-to -iranian-ballistic-missile -attack-heres-what-they-did/. “Trump Touts Record of ‘No New Wars,’ Standing Up to China in Farewell Address,” France24, January 19, 2021, https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20210119-trump -touts-record-of-no-new-wars-standing-up-to-china-in-farewell-address. “ISIS Fighters Are Gaining Strength After Trump’s Syria Pullout, US Spies Say,” Time, November  19, 2020, https://time.com /5732842 /isis-gaining-strength-trump -syria -pullout. John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020), 40. Max Boot, “Iran-Backed Militias in Iraq Poised to Expand Influence,” Council on Foreign Relations, October  13, 2020, https://www.cfr.org /in-brief/iran-backed-militias -iraq-poised-expand-influence. Humeyra Pamuk and Jonathan Landay, “US Pleased Iraq Doing More to Protect US Embassy—Pompeo,” Reuters, October 14, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/usa -iraq-pompeo-int-idUSKBN26Z2I3; Scott Peterson, “Ultimatum Signals Modest US Goal in Iraq: Avoid Defeat,” Christian Science Monitor, October 15, 2020, https://www .csmonitor.com/ World /Middle-East /2020/1015/Ultimatum-signals-modest-US -goal -in-Iraq-Avoid-defeat. Kelsey Davenport and Julia Masterson, “Iran’s Nuclear Program Remains on Steady Trajectory,” Arms Control Now, September 10, 2020, https://www.armscontrol.org / blog /2020-09-10/irans-nuclear-program-remains-steady-trajectory. Nike Ching, “US Imposes Sweeping New Sanctions on Iran,” Voice of America, September 21, 2020, http://www.voanews.com /middle-east /voa-news-iran /us-imposes -sweeping-new-sanctions-iran. Kushner, Breaking History, 115. Alexia Underwood, “The Controversial US Jerusalem Embassy Opening, Explained,” Vox, May 16, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/5/14/17340798/jerusalem-embassy-israel -palestinians-us-trump; “Golan Heights: Trump Signs Order Recognising Occupied Area as Israeli,” BBC, March 25, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east -47697717; “US Says Israeli Settlements Are No Longer Illegal,” BBC, November 18, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-5046802. Lahav Harkov and Herb Keinon, “The ‘Deal of the Century’: What Are Its Key Points?,” Jerusalem Post, January 29, 2020, https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/the-deal -of-the-century-what-are-its-key-points-615680.

456 LOOK I N G FO RWA R D 25. Karen DeYoung and Loveday Morris, “Trump Administration Orders Closure of PLO Office in Washington,” Washington Post, September 10, 2018, https://www.washing tonpost .com /world /national-security/trump -administration-orders-closure-of-plo -office-in-washington/2018/09/10/7410fe6c-b50c-11e8-a2c5-3187f427e253_ story.html. 26. Hady Amr, “In One Move, Trump Eliminated US Funding for UNRWA and the US Role as Mideast Peacemaker,” Brookings, September 7, 2018, https://www.brookings .edu/ blog /order-from-chaos/2018/09/07/in-one-move-trump-eliminated-us-funding -for-unrwa-and-the-us-role-as-mideast-peacemaker/; Yolande Knell, “US Stops All Aid to Palestinians in West Bank and Gaza,” BBC, February 1, 2019, https://www.bbc .com/news/world-middle-east-47095082. 27. Steven A. Cook, “What’s Behind the New Israel-UAE Peace Deal?” Council on Foreign Relations, August 17, 2020, https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/whats-behind-new-israel -uae-peace-deal. 28. Jacob Magin, “UAE Ambassador: ‘Abraham Accords Were About Preventing Annexation,’ ” Times of Israel, February 2, 2021, https://www.timesofisrael.com/uae-ambas sador-abraham-accords-were-about-preventing-annexation/. 29. On the Arab Peace Initiative, see “The Arab Peace Initiative,” Al-Jazeera, March 28, 2010, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2010/03/28/the-arab-peace-initiative. 30. Dylan Kassin and David Pollock, “Arab Public Opinion on Arab-Israeli Normalization and Abraham Accords,” Fikra Forum, July 15, 2022, https://www.washing tonin stitute .org /policy -analysis /arab -public - opinion -arab -israeli -normalization -and -abraham-accords. 31. Peter Kenyon, “Justice Efforts for Jamal Khashoggi Were Hindered by Trump Administration’s Response,” NPR, October 1, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/10/01/766176676 /justice-efforts-for-jamal-khashoggi-were-hindered-by-trump-administrations-respo. 32. Edward Wong, “US Rationale for Military Aid to Saudis in Yemen War Is Fraying,” New York Times, September 23, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/us/politics /yemen-us-weapons-saudi-arabia.html. By the end of 2021, the war was expected to have caused the deaths of more than 370,000. “Yemen War Deaths Will Reach 370,000 by End of the Year: UN,” Al-Jazeera, November 23, 2021, https://www.aljazeera.com /news/2021/11/23/un-yemen-recovery-possible-in-one-generation-if-war-stops-now. 33. Charles A. Kupchan, “America’s Pullback Must Continue No Matter Who Is President,” Foreign Policy, October 21, 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/10/21/election -2020-smart-retrenchment/. 34. David Rohde, “Biden’s Chaotic Withdrawal from Afghanistan Is Complete,” New Yorker, August 30, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com /news/daily-comment / bidens -chaotic-withdrawal-from-afghanistan-is-complete. 35. Ellen Ioanes, “Why the US Doesn’t Want Turkey to Invade Syria,” Vox, Jul 17, 2022, https://www.vox .com /2022/7/17/23259615/why-the-us-doesnt-want-turkey-to-invade -syria. 36. Matthew Ayton, “US Military Exit from Syria Unlikely Anytime Soon, Officials Say,” Al-Jazeera, October 26, 2021, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/26/will-us-leave -syria. 37. “US Announces End to Combat in Iraq, but Troops Will Not Leave,” New York Times, December 10, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/09/world /middleeast /us-iraq -combat-mission.html. 38. Matt Viser, “Biden Wonders Publicly Whether Burn Pits Caused His Son’s Death,” Washington Post, November 28, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden -beau-burn-pits/2021/11/27/894b382a-4973-11ec-b8d9-232f4afe4d9b_ story.html.

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39. Ryan Cooper, “Biden Nearly Ended the Drone War, and Nobody Noticed,” The Week, December 1, 2021, https://theweek .com /foreign-policy/1007579/ biden-nearly-ended -the-drone-wa, r-and-nobody-noticed. 40. See Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt, “Biden Orders Strike in Syria Targeting IranBacked Militias,” New York Times, February26, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021 /02/26/us/politics/ biden-syria-airstrike-iran.html; Geoff LaMear, “Biden Orders Airstrikes on Iran-backed Militants in Iraq and Syria,” NBC News, June 28, 2021, https:// www.nbcnews .com /think /opinion / biden- orders -airstrikes -iran-backed-militants -iraq-syria-it-s-ncna1272539; Tess Bridgeman and Brianna Rosen, “Still at War: The United States in Syria,” Just Security, April 29, 2022, https://www.justsecurity.org/81313 /still-at-war-the-united-states-in-syria/. 41. Philippe Errera, “Is Restoring the Iran Nuclear Deal Still Possible?,” Middle East and North Africa Brief 87 (September 12, 2022), https://www.crisisgroup.org / b87-middle - east-north -africa /gulf-and -arabian -peninsula /iran /restoring -iran -nuclear- deal -still. 42. W. J. Hennigan, “They’re Very Close,” Time, November 24, 2021, https://time.com /6123380/iran-near-nuclear-weapon-capability 43. Mike Wagenheim, “Biden Moving Closer to Israel’s Call for ‘Plan B’ on Iran,” Jerusalem Post, December 12, 2021, https://www.jpost.com /middle-east /iran-news/ biden -moving-closer-to-israels-call-for-plan-b-on-iran-analysis-688520. 44. See Shibley Telhami, “Biden’s Bungled Response on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” Brookings, May 20, 2021, https://www.brookings.edu/ blog /order-from-chaos/2021/05 /20/ bidens-bungled-response-on-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict. For background on Sheikh al-Jarrah, see Paul Adams, “Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah: The Land Dispute in the Eye of a Storm,” BBC News, May 26, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle -east-57243631. 45. See Ned Price, “On the Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh,” State Department press release, July 4, 2022. 46. Mike Stone and Patricia Zengerle, “Saudi Gets First Major Arms Deal Under Biden with Air-to-Air Missiles,” Reuters, November 5, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/world /middle - east /us - state - dept- okays - 650 -million -potential - air -to - air -missile - deal -saudi-arabia-2021-11-04/. 47. Tamara Cofman Wittes, “The Needed Reset for the US-Egypt Relationship,” Brookings, September 10, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2020/09 /10/the-needed-reset-for-the-us-egypt-relationship.

CHAPTER 39

RECLAIMING AMERICA AND ITS PLACE IN THE WORLD E LI Z A B E TH E CO N O M Y

I

n his video address before the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in September 2020, President Donald Trump summed up his views on the COVID-19 pandemic: the world must hold China accountable for covering up the virulence of the virus, the United States had effectively mobilized its resources to meet the challenge, and the world’s leaders should follow the example of the United States by putting their own citizens first and rejecting the pursuit of “global ambitions.”1 The president’s remarks, coming at a time when the virus was ravaging the world, and in particular the United States, were jarring but unsurprising. For several months, the president had blamed mounting U.S. deaths on collusion between China and the World Health Organization (WHO). He had also announced that the United States, which provided approximately 15 percent of the WHO’s total funding, would withdraw its financial support and terminate its participation in the organization over the WHO’s failure to undertake a set of unspecified reforms.2 And just before his UNGA appearance, the president confirmed that the United States would not participate in the COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access Facility (COVAX), an initiative sponsored by the United Nations and several international organizations to help vaccine manufacturers ensure equitable access to safe and effective vaccines for all countries.3 Trump’s disinterest in leading the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic was matched by a similar reluctance to lead at home. Instead of providing the model for how to address the pandemic, the United States—the world’s

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largest economy, leading scientific power, and champion of democracy— delivered an unscientific, chaotic, and ultimately deadly response. The president called the virus the “Democrats’ new hoax,” politicized the distribution of state aid, ignored medical officials’ advice on the necessity of masks and social distancing, and was slow to ramp up production of personal protective equipment, leaving doctors and other frontline medical professionals unprotected.4 The president also did little to ameliorate the political and racial polarization that flared throughout the pandemic. Instead, his often inflammatory rhetoric and insistence on labeling the virus the “China virus” or “Kung flu” exacerbated tensions and likely contributed to the dramatic increase in attacks against Asian Americans.5 Writing in Slate in April 2020, the political commentator Fred Kaplan gave voice to the fear of many Americans and U.S. allies that the COVID-19 pandemic would mark the “final shift of global power away from the United States.” Kaplan underscored the pivotal point that although Trump’s retreat from traditional U.S. foreign policy may have made allies and partners yearn for a return to U.S. leadership, the failure of the United States to respond effectively to the pandemic at home had led it to the “brink of irrelevance” by undermining the essential element of leadership: the ability of the United States to inspire by virtue of its model.6 For the rest of the world, the U.S. response, both domestically and on the global stage, raised several profound questions: Had the international community just witnessed the end of U.S. leadership of the rules-based order? Was the American model of liberal democracy irrevocably broken? And what lay in wait? Was China ready and able to replace the United States—as world leader, political model, or both?

The Trump Doctrine Trump’s response to the pandemic reflected the broader trends in U.S. foreign policy that he set in motion during the first years of his administration. Adopting the mantra of “America First,” Trump argued that the United States had sacrificed its own interests in support of others—that it had maintained an unfair share of the burden of global security and that others had taken advantage of the United States through unfair trade deals. He viewed allies and multilateralism as constraints on American power rather than as enablers of U.S. influence, casting the European Union as a competitor rather than a partner and NATO as a drain on U.S. financial wherewithal.7 And he introduced a transactional and unpredictable approach to diplomatic engagement that opened a fresh page in American foreign policy, one in which everything appeared open to negotiation.

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“America First” translated immediately into a dramatic shift in U.S. foreign policy. On just his third day in office, Trump withdrew from the endstage negotiations around the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the twelve-nation trade deal that would have been the largest regional trade accord in history. He also threatened to withdraw troops from Japan and South Korea if the two countries did not increase their financial share of maintaining the alliance. In short order, he began the process of withdrawing the United States from the 2016 Paris Climate Agreement; pulled the United States out of the International Postal Union, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), and the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement with Iran; and raised the possibility of withdrawing the United States from the World Trade Organization and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). As he stated in a 2019 speech before the UN General Assembly, “The future does not belong to globalists; the future belongs to patriots.”8 Not all ties were cut. Despite Trump’s disinterest in multilateral institutions and alliances, many of his foreign policy advisers believed that the United States should continue to uphold the current rules-based order. Senior administration officials and members of Congress stressed that the United States placed a high value on its strategic partnerships and that the United States remained committed to its Asian allies. The officials traveled widely throughout Asia, reiterating calls for a rules-based order, freedom of navigation, free trade, and political freedoms. In particular, they worked closely with Japan, Australia, and India to revive and energize the 2007 Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) initiative. Nonetheless, without leadership from the top, U.S. relationships throughout Asia remained tenuous. Trump’s domestic governance also diminished the United States’ global standing. The president attacked the freedom of the press and encouraged voter suppression; the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol in many respects epitomized the president’s failure to support democracy and the rule of law during his tenure.9 Trump also exalted brutal authoritarian leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, and China’s Xi Jinping, leading former French official Manuel Reinert to note that when the Trump administration “coddle[s] violent authoritarian leaders while condemning others on human rights grounds, its moral compass becomes clouded. The U.S. needs to lead by example.”10 Even before the pandemic, international perceptions of Trump were overwhelmingly negative. In the spring of 2019, a survey of thirty-two countries revealed that a median of 64 percent had no confidence in the U.S. president, even as 54 percent still retained a favorable view of the United States.11 By the summer of 2020, however, confidence in Trump had plunged even further to 16 percent, and the favorability of the United States had fallen to 34 percent.12

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The China Factor Trump’s abdication of U.S. global leadership left a significant vacuum that Chinese president Xi Jinping sought to fill. Although Xi had previously claimed leadership on global climate change and globalization, he had not delivered results in a meaningful way. The COVID-19 pandemic offered Xi another chance to lead the world in responding to a global challenge and to demonstrate the merit of its development model. China’s aggressive and effective campaign to control the spread of the virus domestically enabled it to open up faster than any other major economy. Once it had controlled the virus within its own borders, it became the most important source of personal protective equipment for the rest of the world, provided teams of doctors and medical equipment to scores of countries, and served, at least initially, as the most important source of vaccines for many countries throughout the developing world. China’s success and the United States’ failure in responding quickly and effectively to the COVID-19 pandemic created a sense within China—and in other parts of the world as well—that China was on a trajectory to surpass the United States in not only economic power but also political influence. As Xi and other officials reiterated with increasing frequency: “the East is rising and the West is declining.”13 Nonetheless, China’s lack of transparency around the origins of the virus, aggressive “wolf warrior” diplomacy, human rights abuses in Xinjiang, and repressive approach to Hong Kong undermined much of the soft power it otherwise might have garnered from its COVID-19 leadership.14 Instead of applause for its assistance, China received criticism for its bullying behavior and human rights practices.

The United States 2.0 At the conclusion of his Slate piece, Kaplan held out a sliver of hope that American leadership could still prevail if Donald Trump did not. Trump’s 2020 election loss and Joe Biden’s win, however, do not guarantee that the United States will regain all or part of its moral authority and standing as a global leader. President Biden made such ambition a central element of his foreign policy strategy and has articulated an approach that is rooted in democratic values and centered on allies, partners, and multilateral institutions. The administration’s Interim National Security Strategic Guidance also underscored in bold print a determination to “earn back our position of leadership in international institutions.”15 Within the first two months of the Biden presidency, the United States confirmed its continued membership in the Paris Climate Agreement, rejoined the UNHRC and the WHO, and attempted to restart negotiations

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over Iran’s nuclear program. Biden also held a summit of democracies, a climate summit, and established new partnerships with democratic allies to help coordinate technology standards to ensure shared norms around internet openness, data privacy, and security. The president has also taken steps to signal the priority of alliances in its foreign policy. His first significant international engagement was a virtual summit with the Quad members, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia, and Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga of Japan. Together the leaders agreed to support an initiative to provide one billion vaccine doses for South and Southeast Asia.16 The initiative represents a fundamentally new model of partnership, in which the United States and Japan will provide the financing, India will manufacture the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, and the United States and Australia will lead on delivery of the vaccine. Even more boldly, in September  2021, the White House established a new defense pact with Australia and the United Kingdom (AUKUS), in which the three countries will deepen intelligence sharing and integration of their militaries. As a result of technology sharing through the pact, Australia will also become only the seventh nation in the world to possess nuclear submarines. Building new bridges with Europe, where some countries are now calling for “strategic autonomy,” may be more challenging.17 In his speech before the February 2021 Munich Security Conference, Biden stated, “The partnership between Europe and the United States, in my view, is and must remain the cornerstone of all that we hope to accomplish in the twenty-first century, just as we did in the twentieth century.”18 And the next month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to Europe to meet with the United States’ NATO partners and delivered a speech in which he acknowledged that trust among the allies had been “shaken.” Nonetheless, he called for a renewed allied commitment based on shared democratic values and confronting external threats like China and Russia, as well as transnational challenges.19 The establishment of the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council in September  2021, which is designed to align practices around supply chains, investment screening, artificial intelligence, and export controls was an important step forward in meeting Blinken’s call to action. The credibility of U.S. leadership will depend above all on repairing the damage to the United States’ democratic model. At the March meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, between senior Chinese and American officials, senior Chinese foreign policy advisor Yang Jiechi underscored the weaknesses in the U.S. model, asserting, “Many people in the United States have little confidence in the democracy of the United States,” and he criticized U.S. human rights practices, including the failure to address the concerns of Black Americans.

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The Biden administration’s Interim National Security Strategic Guidance directly addressed Yang’s criticism by underscoring the importance of healing the polarized American nation, ensuring equitable and inclusive growth, and providing investment to encourage innovation and good-paying jobs. According to Biden, all are essential to regaining America’s global authority. In addition, the administration has proposed a massive new infrastructure bill that will help address these issues.20 These are only first steps, however, in rebuilding the United States and the world’s trust in it. Although competition between the United States and China around values, norms, and policy preferences will be fierce, there is also the potential for the two countries to find common ground and purpose. At the conclusion of the Anchorage summit, Blinken suggested that despite the fact that the two sides are “fundamentally at odds,” there is room for cooperation on North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan, and climate change.21 Such efforts are unlikely to ameliorate the great-power competition underway, but they could play an important role in helping develop the guardrails necessary to stabilize the relationship and prevent it from spiraling down into kinetic conflict.

Conclusion The damage President Trump and his administration inflicted on the fabric of U.S. standing in the world and its relations with its allies and partners was profound. However, it may not be irreparable. Pew polls undertaken early in the Biden administration, for example, signal significant optimism among citizens in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom concerning both President Biden and the United States. Fully 84 percent of citizens in Germany and France and 72 percent of those in the United Kingdom report feeling “generally optimistic” about relations with the United States. Equally important, the percentage of those who have confidence in President Biden to do the right thing range from 65 percent in the United Kingdom to 79 percent in Germany. This marks a vast improvement from the less than 20 percent confidence earned by President Trump in all three countries.22 China’s ability to lead—much less to replace the United States—depends, in turn, not only on its willingness and capability to assume the mantle of global leadership but also on the strength of its domestic model and the desire of other countries to follow. Global polling suggests that China lags significantly behind the United States, the European Union, and Japan as a trusted partner or model. A fall 2020 survey of Southeast Asian elites revealed that more than 63 percent did not trust China as a strategic partner, while over 67 percent trusted Japan; moreover, 61 percent favored aligning with the United States over China if they

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were forced to choose.23 Similarly, among the world’s advanced democracies in Asia, North America, and Europe, negative views of China jumped precipitously from 2019 to late 2020, even as China was leading the global pandemic response. Across all fourteen countries surveyed, the percentage of citizens expressing “no confidence in Xi Jinping to do the right thing” ranged from 70 percent in the Netherlands to 84 percent in Japan.24 There is no returning to the pre-Trump global status quo. China’s relative gain in power, Europe’s calls for strategic autonomy, and the United States’ own changed understanding of its domestic and international priorities have created a new balance of power. Nonetheless, global opinion polls, as well as the early successes of the Biden administration in forging consensus with Asian and European allies on the pandemic response and Chinese human rights abuses, suggest that room remains for the United States to lead on the global stage. The long-term viability of this leadership, however, will depend both on the Biden administration fulfilling its near-term objectives of domestic renewal and on consistency in the U.S. commitment to allies and institutions in the post-Biden era.

Notes 1. Alex Ward, “Trump at the UN: America Is Good, China Is bad,” Vox, September 22, 2020, https://www.vox.com/world/2020/9/22/21450727/trump-unga-speech-2020-full -text-china. 2. Andrew Joseph and Helen Branswell, “Trump: US Will Terminate Relationship with the World Health Organization in Wake of Covid-19 Pandemic,” Stat, May 29 2020, https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/29/trump-us-terminate-who-relationship/. 3. Scott Neuman, “U.S. Won’t Join WHO-Led Coronavirus Vaccine Effort, White House Says,” NPR, September 2, 2020, https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates /2020 /09 /02 /908711419 /u -s -wont-join -who -led - coronavirus -vaccine - effort-white -house-says. 4. Lauren Egan, “Trump Calls Coronavirus Democrats’ ‘New Hoax,’ ” NBC, February 28, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com /politics/donald-trump/trump-calls-coronavirus -democrats-new-hoax-n1145721. 5. Charles Davis, “Trump ‘Seemingly Legitimising’ the Rise in Hate Crimes Against Asian Americans, According to a UN Report,” Business Insider, October 15, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com.au /un-report-trump-seemingly-legitimizing-hate -crimes-against-asian-americans-2020-10. 6. Fred Kaplan, “The End of American Leadership,” Slate, April 13, 2020, https://slate.com /news-and-politics/2020/04/american-leadership-coronavirus-china.html. 7. Nicholas Burns, “Trump Violates Diplomacy’s Golden Rule,” Atlantic, December 4, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/at-nato-summit-trump-abu ses-americas-closest-friends/602959/. 8. “Trump Tells US: ‘The Future Does Not Belong to Globalists,’ ” CBS, September 24, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 7wJ8tdxDVgI.

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9. Julia Jacobo, “A Visual Timeline on How the Attack on Capitol Hill Unfolded,” ABC News, January 10, 2021, https://abcnews.go.com/US/visual-timeline-attack-capitol-hill -unfolded/story?id= 75112066. 10. Manuel Reinert, “America’s Democratic Shortcomings and the Liberal International Order,” E-International Relations, November 13, 2020, https://www.e-ir.info/ 2020/11 /13/opinion-americas-democratic-shortcomings-and-the-liberal-internatio nal-order/. 11. Richard Wike, Jacob Poushter, Janell Fetterolf, and Shannon Schumacher, “Trump Ratings Remain Low Around Globe, While Views of US Stay Mostly Favorable,” Pew Research Center, January 8, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org /global /2020/01 /08 /trump -ratings -remain -low - around - globe -while -views - of -u - s - stay -mostly -favo rable/. 12. Richard Wike, Janell Fetterolf, and Mara Mordecai, “U.S. Image Plummets Internationally as Most Say Country Has Handled Coronavirus Badly,” Pew Research Center, September  15, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org /global /2020/09/15/us -image -plummets-internationally-as-most-say- country-has-handled- coronavirus -badly/. 13. William Zhang, “China’s Officials Play Up ‘Rise of the East, Decline of the West,’ ” South China Morning Post, March 9, 2021, https://www.scmp.com /news/china /dip lomacy/article/3124752/chinas-officials-play-rise-east-decline-west. 14. Yun Sun, “China’s ‘Wolf Warrior’ Diplomacy in the COVID-19 Crisis,” ASAN Forum 9, no. 2 (March/April 2021), http://www.theasanforum.org /chinas-wolf-warrior-dip lomacy-in-the-covid-19-crisis/. 15. The White House, “Interim National Security Strategic Guidance,” March 2021, https:// www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/NSC-1v2.pdf. 16. “First Quad Summit: One Billion Vaccine Doses for Asia, Cooperation on Approach to China,” The Wire, March 13, 2021, https://thewire.in/diplomacy/first-quad-summit -vaccine-asia-chinese-activities. 17. Richard Youngs, “The EU’s Strategic Autonomy Trap,” Carnegie Europe, March 8, 2021, https://carnegieeurope.eu/2021/03/08/eu-s-strategic-autonomy-trap-pub-83955. 18. “Remarks by President Biden at the 2021 Virtual Munich Security Conference,” February 19, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/02 /19/remarks-by-president-biden-at-the-2021-virtual-munich-security-conference/. 19. Anthony Blinken, “Reaffirming and Reimagining America’s Alliances,” Speech at NATO Headquarters, March  24, 2021, https://ru .usembassy.gov/reaffirming-and - reimag in ing - americas - alliances - speech - by - secretary - blinken - at -nato - head quarters/. 20. Javier Zarracina, Joey Garrison, and George Petras, “Joe Biden Wants to Spend $2 Trillion on Infrastructure and Jobs. These 4 Charts Show Where the Money Would Go,” USA Today, April 1, 2021, https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/politics/2021/04 /01/2-trillion-infrastructure-bill-charts-detail-bidens-plan/4820227001/. 21. Humeyra Pamuk, David Brunnstrom, Michael Martina, “ ‘Tough’ US-China Talks Signal Rocky Start to Relations Under Biden,” Reuters, March  19, 2021, https://www .reuters .com /article/us-usa-china-alaska /tough-u-s-china-talks-signal-rocky-start -to-relations-under-biden-idUSKBN2BB216. 22. Richard Eike, Janell Fetterolf, and Christine Huang, “British, French and German Publics Give Biden High Marks After US Election,” Pew Research Center, January  19, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org /global /2021 /01 /19/ british-french-and-german -publics-give-biden-high-marks-after-u-s-election/.

23. ISEAS, “The State of Southeast Asia: 2021 Survey Report,” February 10, 2021, https:// www.iseas.edu.sg /wp-content/uploads/2021/01/The-State-of-SEA-2021-v2.pdf. 24. Laura Silver, Kat Devlin, and Christine Huang, “Unfavorable Views of China Reach Historic Highs in Many Countries,” Pew Research Center, October 6, 2020, https://www .pewresearch .org /global /2020 /10 /06 /unfavorable -views - of - china -reach -historic -highs-in-many-countries/.

PART VIII

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Editors’ Note The authors in this concluding section of the book examine the long-term effects of the Trump presidency on the United States and the liberal international order itself. In chapter 40, Jeremy Adelman argues that the post-Trump United States requires a new national narrative, which “means letting go of old binary swings between exceptionalist stories of an America leading a needy world or declinist fables of a world sponging off America.” A new narrative might help, especially if it inspires a broad commitment to fundamental democratic principles. But much depends on the character of future presidents, given the deep political polarization and institutions under strain. In chapter 41, Sir Lawrence Freedman concludes that with the election of Biden, “in many respects relations picked up where they had left off in 2016.” Yet he leaves us with a disquieting question for the post-Trump future, one that Robert Jervis also raises: “Perhaps equally unnerving as the prospect of Trump’s return is the possibility that the Americans might elect a future president with similar prejudices and policies but also more intelligence, competence, and discipline.” Charles S. Maier sees an opportunity for a root-and-branch reappraisal, a painful but necessary historical reckoning that might lead to a more coherent approach to U.S. foreign policy (chapter 42). The Trump presidency, he writes, “may have done one indirect public service through all its brutal disruptions if

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it compels a rethinking of what foreign policy the American imperial republic can and should defend.” Finally, in chapter 43 Martin Conway puts the liberal international order in historical parentheses. Conway argues that Trump’s ascendance is not an anomaly but an outgrowth of a new twentieth-century historical narrative in which social democracy and liberalism are declining. Noting the inability of historians to come to terms with Trump’s election and popular appeal, Conway calls for “a new narrative, one that can explain the history of now” and accounts for the unpredictability of the politics of this moment. He concludes that “it suffices to recognize that the mentality of incremental reformist change that was embedded in the machinery of West European and American politics in the later twentieth century has in large part disappeared. The future could be many things, but it seems highly unlikely that it will be social democratic.”

CHAPTER 40

WORLD HISTORY, THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT, AND THE GIBBON PARADOX JEREMY ADELMAN

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merica and the world stand at a narrative impasse. For most of the past seven decades, if not more, there has been a basic alignment of liberal stories about America and the world. That is, the narrative of liberal opening—of markets, of personal freedoms, of representative government—of the world overlapped with the narrative of American exceptionalism. It came to dominate the twentieth century, from 1898 through to the end of the Cold War. There was the familiar framing of America as a beacon of liberty and making the world safe for democracy; there was its twin about a world coming out of the interwar darkness and then threatened by a Cold War menace that summoned American leadership to rescue and to safeguard a liberal world order. Both those stories are not only exhausted; there is no basic narrative alignment any more between America’s self-understanding as a world power and the world’s needs for American power. And finally, there seem to be no compelling sequels. The plot of a world needing America at the helm is hackneyed. President Barack Obama subscribed to it with ambivalence. His successor trashed it and replaced it with a different story about an anarchic world of winners and losers, predators and prey. Now, President Joe Biden harks to an earlier era of leadership, pulling the pendulum back to the more familiar, if fatigued, place. But not since the 1940s has there been so much popular antipathy or indifference in America to global happenings; so, too, in the past two decades, the global expectations of American leadership have dimmed.

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The point is: Donald Trump may have been reckless and feckless. But this chapter, along with Charles S. Maier’s in this volume, underscores some basic continuities in the trajectory of American power, which, as John A. Thompson also argues here, has been one of gradually weakened capacity and a fundamental tilt in the global balance of power. Ironically, while President Trump proclaimed a return to greatness with outsized bravura, he in fact buried the old narrative. He also laid a trap, unintentionally. Trump’s antics made liberal internationalists nostalgic for a revival of the old narrative, to reduce Trump, as Frank Ninkovich notes in his chapter about Biden’s rhetoric, to an “aberrant moment.” This suited Biden and the Democrats on the campaign trail: with their electoral triumph, the United States, its allies, and not a few rivals welcomed a return to normal. The sigh of relief was palpable at the virtual summit of world leaders on April 22–23, 2021, when “America Is Back” was the mantra.1 Back to what? This narrative of a planet needing America and America poised to lead, a plotline developed in the early twentieth century and refined during the Cold War, is no less troubling than Trump’s view of the world as a state of nature. Ousting Trump does not make Biden a restorer; if Trump did not make America great again, removing him does not make America great again either. What is needed is a new narrative, one that is more than a 2.0 version of the old script of American leadership of a needy planet. This requires squaring up to a new understanding of global interdependence and America’s place in the middle of it. What is needed is a format for thinking not just about global America but world history. As America wavers over how to heal domestically while reconnecting externally, it will need different directions on the global stage. What is more, it is not just America that needs new coordinates; so too does the rest of the world. In fact, one may speculate about what will be harder in the coming years: a redimensioned America or a world learning to live without a hegemon.

History Searching for a Story The overheated Trump era has left Americans and the world in a fog, caught between two myths incongruent with reality. The result has been to unsettle how Americans see themselves on the world stage and to leave the rest of the world befuddled and uncertain. The proliferating rivals to the Liberal International Order and liberals in general are gloating: uncertainty has a multiplier effect for those who traffic in illiberal means to make order amid the confusion they create. It is true that Russian president Vladimir Putin’s new military and moral morass in Ukraine may have stalled the autocratic turn; China’s economic slowdown and difficulties escaping from its zero-COVID box have put the brakes on its triumphalism. But liberals and champions of

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American leadership cannot, and on the whole do not, see a return to a glorydays equilibrium of a new Pax Americana. At stake is nothing less than the most familiar of modern plotlines of American—and world—history: exceptionalism. The plot of America as a beacon, a model for others, was important to the story of the nation and its unique destiny to bring light to a darkened world and make it safe for democracy. The exceptionalist credo, however, was always two stories in one: a story about American greatness and a story about world need. Start with the founding document of the exceptionalist credo: the Declaration of Independence. The “first modern nation” became the emblem of self-determining peoplehood for the rest of the planet; President Woodrow Wilson gave it new meaning in 1919. At the same time, however, all declarations of independence are also declarations of interdependence. To secede from an empire or a tyrant requires recognition by other states for legitimacy. Accordingly, this founding document of the creed always harbored two parallel meanings, one about a shared internal faith about what makes America special and one about the need for others’ acknowledgment of American sovereignty.2 In the wake of the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Trump added a twist to the formula about 1776, a move that was less original than a reaffirmation. “The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission” released a report on the heels of the Capitol violence insisting that the nation’s “birthday” was an assertion of principles, the nascence of a people of principle, while declaring the ethos to be universal. Not only did a nation seek recognition on a larger stage; it came to imagine itself as morally—and later militarily—bound to shape that stage in its mind’s eye. This was the appeal of exceptionalism. It worked both ways, as a claim for insiders to feel blessed by their membership in the nation and as a promise to outsiders that they too could aspire—if they followed the script—to bask the same light. It accounted for what was nationally special and for what was universally possible at the same time.3 This is familiar territory to students of American history. But the narrative is at odds with the prevailing sentiment. It has receded and rekindled in the past, too. Indeed, exceptionalism tends to take a beating when it is hard to feel good about the country’s official imaginary. This is what happened in the 1930s when, in the gloom, America looked like all of the other tired industrial nations with closed frontiers. When times were good, the credo could be dusted off. When times dim, America Firstism tends to come storming back. This is true in many countries: harsh times compel governments to be seen to protect their citizens against risks and threats beyond borders. But the past seven decades held these forces at bay. The comforting certainties that guided Pax Americana through the Cold War and global hegemony through the neoliberal era extended the shelf life of exceptionalist claims. Now they feel drained once more. A noless-simple picture takes its place: a needy planet becomes a vulturine place,

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lately filled with desperate refugees, Chinese tech thieves, and Russian hackers. Out with the light and in with the darkness, and instead of a new dawn, decline.4

Decline, Again Faced with the sense of the eclipse of America’s providential role in the world, liberals have to contend with a chorus of critics and doomsayers from the left and right. Strange bedfellows, both sides point to American demise as an ineluctable fate of the erstwhile Imperial Republic. For the left, it is a tale of expansionist quagmire and the inevitable crash of capitalism. That it doesn’t turn out as predicted is less important than how confirming it is of one’s biases. For Wolfgang Streeck, the German sociologist and prophet, the choice is stark: capitalism or democracy. It’s time to dispense with liberal fictions of trying to have it both ways. Like many declinist postures, his presents us with one-orthe-other scenarios, purgatory or paradise.5 And like so many revolutionaries before him, Streeck insists that we have passed through the vestibule of the inferno. “Before capitalism will go to hell,” he claims, “it will for the foreseeable future hang in limbo, dead or about to die from an overdose of itself but still very much around, as nobody will have the power to move its decaying body out of the way.”6 For the right, declinism has more to do with moral limitations and corruptions. Writers invented “Western” civilization out of a looming sense that it was in peril because humans were bound to follow the natural laws of biological decay. This is as true today as it was a century ago. Oswald Spengler published the first volume of his influential The Decline of the West in 1918, believing that cultures were bound by predetermined lifespans—and predicted that eventually Western societies would succumb to charismatic strongmen who promised to save their people from the abyss—only to hasten the decline.7 The chestthumpers of our times carried the right to power in Washington, Rome, London, Budapest, and beyond in order to rescue the West from a calamitous fate. It is an irony of current conservatism, however, that in its moment of triumph it frets more than ever about the coming danger (which is why it has to inflate conspiracies to explain why the prophecies failed). One of the leaders of the Republican anti-Trump brigade, the Fox “analyst” and National Review editor Jonah Goldberg, argues that we are not just witnessing the decline of the West (with America as its standard bearer) but its suicide.8 Declinisms share some traits. They have more purchase in times of turmoil and uncertainty, like ours. They are prone to thinking that the circles of hell can only be avoided with a great catharsis or a great charismatic figure. But most of all, they ignore signs of improvement that point to less drastic ways out of

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trouble. Declinists are attracted to daring, total, all-encompassing alternatives to the humdrum grayness of modest solutions. Why go for partial and piecemeal when you can overturn the whole system and rescue the nation, Steve Bannon–style, by exposing an invisible cabal of globalists? Does the narrative menu have to be so short, as if what is tragic for one means triumph for another? The point of the original script around independence in 1776 was that it was also about interdependence, of mutual recognition.9 The world became ever more complex. But lately, the main lines of American storytelling among fatigued exceptionalists and gloating declinists have gotten more simplistic and unhinged from modern world history.

Power Reflex Part of what makes finding a post-America storyline so vexing is that it cannot be national or global; it needs to be both, yet the identification of the national with the global was so tethered to a specific notion of world leadership that needs to be reimagined. More on that shortly when we contend with the “Gibbon Paradox.” What is important to underscore first is how the ability to keep the nation and the world in the same frame has gotten harder as the challenge has become more vital. All one has to do is look at the crossed paths of the two men who pulled Americans through the last electoral cycle and who, at least at the moment, look like the leading contenders for the next round. It seems fitting that both the former and current presidents, Trump and Biden, have been scarred by modern America’s two most unheroic wars, Vietnam and Iraq. Often seen as inflexions in the declinist slide, these conflicts might be seen as moments that realigned national and global narratives. These two wars battered the myths of American exceptionalism and eventually forced a reckoning. Indeed, in the November 7, 2020, victory speech that Biden gave in Wilmington, Delaware, to his supporters, the exceptionalist imaginary was invoked once more, in a downsized form.10 It is worth pausing over Biden’s subtle recognition of the nation’s redimensioned imaginary. He claimed that America would lead through the power of its example, not by the example of power. For a victory speech, it was a concession to the reality of a trimmed America on the global stage. This did not mean that the United States was no longer an example: after all, the whole world watched the spectacle of American democracy at work in fascination and dread. It simply could no longer wield the same kind of power. This is why, for all the bad optics of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, few in the right, left, or hobbled middle made the case for staying.11 In past conjunctures that placed American grandeur on the line, the reflex was to return to power. Fear of the nuclear gap in 1960 spurred an arms race

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and broke the fiscal back of the Soviet Union; fear of Third World radicalism in 1980 turned swaths of Latin America, Africa, and Asia into battlegrounds to roll back revolution; fear of terrorism after 2001 once again bulked up the security state. The power reflex has been a through line for both Trump and Biden. Both, in the end, have admitted its limits in ways that their predecessors, Democrat and Republican alike, never could. Consider Trump’s story and storytelling. Caught between a myth of soldierly gallantry and the crowd of naysayers when Vietnams, Iraqs, and Afghanistans turned into fiascos, he flipped and flopped and rewrote history to serve the thing that mattered most: himself. Trump celebrated American muscularity in the abstract while keeping it under wraps in practice, just as he did when he dodged serving in Vietnam. Obsessed with trade deficits, which he imagined were the index of America’s problems with the world, he went on the hustings to promote exports of the country’s latest bauble: liquefied natural gas. When the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, visited Washington in May  2017 to discuss the North Korean threat, he knew enough to preempt Trump’s whining about how U.S.Korean trade was “a rough deal for the United States.”12 Five days before going to the White House, he inked a twenty-year contract to buy a half a billion dollars of American gas per year. This preempted Trump’s threat to withdraw troops and leave the peninsula prey to the missile launchers of the North. It was also consistent with the way in which Trump weaponized the declinist narrative for a retail brand of statecraft that relied on threats and exits to make America great again. Biden’s trajectory also zigzags through American military history. Like Trump, but in a less feckless way, Biden has agonized since Vietnam over America’s place on the world stage. In a way, he was also in the sales business.13 The son of a used car dealer and less known for his ideological convictions, Biden was a man of the political center—of a center that moved around with the times, from the Cold War concern with power balance, to the post–Cold War bravura, and to the ongoing uncertainty since 2008. He opposed the first Gulf War in 1991 but supported the second in 2003; he supported the intervention in Kosovo but resisted involvement in Libya. In between, Biden reached his summit as a foreign policy voice at a time in which American power seemed to have no parallel since that of Imperial Rome. Indeed, there was a lot of analogizing in 2001 to the way the Roman Empire was the template for a hegemony that rolls around once a millennium.14 I will return to the American-Roman parallel shortly. But this had the effect of placing Biden at the interventionist end of a foreign policy spectrum, a stance eased by the collapse of the Soviet Union but before the rise of China. Even as late as 2007, Biden advocated a federalist solution to Iraq’s meltdown, with autonomous regions for Kurdish, Sunni, and Shia peoples, a new version of the

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Iraqi state as a ward of American largesse; Biden also favored boots on the ground in Sudan’s Darfur region.15 But since the financial crackup of 2008, Biden’s appetite mirrored America’s: he grew ever more reluctant to intervene; he grew more cautious about the power reflex. Nowadays, the idea of manning-up with more bombs, Green Berets, and tough love in faraway places is so inconceivable that retreat seems to be the one thing upon which polarized America actually agrees. But rather than settle for a lesser story, why not explore a different one altogether?

The Gibbon Paradox There is an alternative framing available to the history—and future—of America in the world, one that relies less on myths of providential leadership or raw power in a state of nature. It would be a framing that reckons with the realities of interdependence, that is, where America and the world have shaped each other more than either the exceptionalist or declinist narrative can admit, to remind us that the nation has always yearned for a sense of place and recognition in something wider; the need, in short, flowed both ways between the country and the world. The architecture of world order since 1945 was above all American, though others would play crucial parts. The United States contributed to a world order, and, as Ludovic Tournés has shown in Américanisation: une histoire mondiale XVIIe–XXIe siècles, this order rested on a complex process of Americanization. This does not mean simple emulation or replication but adapting, translating, and reinterpreting to create something new in order to make Americana global.16 While America shaped the world, the world also changed America; Americana was also a global product. Americanization of the world came with the globalization of America, including being vulnerable to a disease that started in Wuhan, China, or jammed supercargo vessels in the Suez Canal. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the American narrative and the world narrative are together at impasses. This helps explain why Argentines, Canadians, and Germans, for example, were as fixed to CNN during election week of November 2020 as many Americans were. The same audiences were horrified at the spectacle of the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot and watched it on television as if it were part of their own history. Behind the scenes, global interdependence takes new forms and urgencies. Who knows, for instance, about the Open Skies Treaty, a fascinating, if unacknowledged, experiment in mutual observation and military transparency that cleared room for innovative thinking about shared security in the global age?17 If Donald Trump simply accelerated the closure of the idea of the “American century,” how should we think about the nation in the world, with the

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United States gripped by patriotic angst and the globe facing existential challenges like climate change and a global migrant crisis? One might imagine a basic choice between, as Ninkovich notes in his chapter, a nationalist slide or a turbocharged internationalism for the twenty-first century. But there is a third alternative: muddling through. Either way, we are going to be confronted with a lot of groping for new narrative coordinates, ones that align the national selfconception with emergent global realities and pressures. One way to start that future-oriented chronicle begins with an acknowledgment that these two processes, one a national story and the other global, can be merged into the same frame and not separated in the way old habits once were, as if the world would implode without American leadership or as if the world stood by to leech off the United States. Neither reckoned with how America has needed the world it shaped. In fact, going back to Rome and the epic tradition of that empire’s decline can be illuminating. One of the greatest of historians of Rome, Edward Gibbon, left us with a paradox that might help us think about national power on the world stage and the ways in which global processes affect—and infect—the nation. We tend to read Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) as a chronicle of expansion, overstretch, and sclerosis, charted in biological metaphors of growth and decline that were informing narrative practice during the Enlightenment.18 We might also read it for what it has to say about greatness and the global condition. Becoming a great power means globalizing the nation in a way that erases the boundaries between the international and the national. The Roman Empire sutured the world together and gave it strength, resilience, and a system of Roman globalization that sprawled well beyond the Mediterranean. The Empire stabilized, exported, and enforced the rules. In the Emperor Justinian’s day, “no restraints were imposed on the free and frequent intercourse,” Gibbon noted.19 Rome, like America, made integration possible while integration was the premise of grandeur. All openings, however, yield hazards. To be interdependent—even to need some other power’s recognition of independence—means ceding control. Gibbon saw how Roman integration opened up the Roman world to new perils, for instance, tracking how disease lurked in the fringes of the empire. But it was imperial integration that allowed those distant viruses to become a plague. The Justinian Plague of the sixth century may have killed up to 100 million people. According to Gibbon, it culminated centuries of Roman expansion that he felt brought grandeur and risk at the same time. “The nations were mingled and infected by wars and emigrations,” Gibbon wrote, “and the pestilential odour which lurks for years in a bale of cotton, was imported by the abuse of trade into the most distant regions.”20

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Gibbon turned his story to Africa—redoubling myths about the dangers of trade with and migration from lands beyond the Sahara and relying on racialized notions of the “other.” For Gibbon (as for Thucydides, whom he was reading at the time), the tropics had always been the origin points of the plague; it was Roman hubris and avarice that drove traders into these fringes in search of people and goods; they brought the disease back with them. From the Serbonian bog and the east channel of the Nile, this fatal plague moved downstream into the capillaries of Roman globalization. “In a damp, hot, stagnating air, this African fever is generated from the putrefaction of animal substances, and especially from the swarm of locusts, not less destructive to mankind in their death than in their lives.”21 Back then, it was the Nile. In 2020, it was Wuhan. Here was Gibbon’s paradox. Going global opened the Roman Empire up to the world it had created and made both splendid. But interdependent systems thereby became vulnerable to threats and risks, seen and unseen, from places beyond. The splendor required openness, but openness imperiled the splendor. It is worth underscoring the racialized tropes about the dangers of global spread into the tropics. They have had a long run, from Gibbon to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Black Hawk Down.22 In fact, it has been handy to view risks as posed by integrating outerworlds into the comforts of an inner one and to forget that the outerworld was a condition of the innerworld’s comforts. It conveniently projects the source of risk onto strangers. One point from Gibbon for Joe Biden is this: globalization, whether Roman or American, means that the fate of the nation and the fate of the globe cannot be separated, that the temptation to think about the greatness of one as separate from the greatness of all amounts to taking a cognitive shortcut to easy answers that do not explain very much. That is what was so utterly self-defeating about America Firstism: in a desperate and unseemly effort to get back to first place in line, the departing regime created so many hostilities and exhausted so many allies that it left the United States even more vulnerable, and it made the world order more precarious. Admittedly, the narrative is more complex, with no simple heroes or villains. But it means we should think of America and the world of which it is a part as an open system in which each has shaped the other. This means letting go of old binary swings between exceptionalist stories of an America leading a needy world or declinist fables of a world sponging off America. This impasse can be seen as a crisis. And for good reason, as the world’s parts grow more competitive and bristling, as interdependence becomes more weaponized. It can also be seen as an opportunity to explore alternative storytelling habits of the nation in the world, one that sheds appeals of triumph or tragedy in favor something more complex, more humble, and more humane.

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Notes 1. Leaders Summit on Climate, https://www.state.gov/leaders-summit-on-climate/. 2. David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 3. Daniel Rodgers, “American Exceptionalism Revisited,” Raritan Quarterly 24, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 21–47; The 1776 Report, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content /uploads/2021/01/The-Presidents-Advisory-1776-Commission-Final-Report.pdf. 4. Godfry Hodgson, The Myth of American Exceptionalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 5. Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (New York: Metropolitan, 2008). 6. Aditya Chakrabortty, “Wolfgang Streeck: The German Economist Calling Time on Capitalism,” Guardian, December 9, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2016 /dec/09/wolfgang-streeck-the-german-economist-calling-time-on-capitalism. 7. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West: Form and Actuality (London: George Allen Unwin, 1918); Jeremy Adelman, “Why the Idea That the World Is in Terminal Decline Is So Dangerous,” Aeon, November 1, 2017, https://aeon.co/ideas/why-the-idea-that-the -world-is-in-terminal-decline-is-so-dangerous. 8. Jonah Goldberg, The Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Nationalism, Populism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy (New York: Crown, 2018). 9. Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006). 10. Amber Phillips, “Joe Biden’s Victory Speech, Annotated,” Washington Post, November 7, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com /politics/2020/11 /07/annotated-biden -victory-speech/. 11. There were some, however, committed to staying, including a former Trump official, Lisa Curtis, now at the New American Security think tank. Alex Ward, “The Best Case Against Withdrawing All US Troops from Afghanistan,” Vox, March 17, 2021, https:// www.vox.com/22327124/afghanistan-troop-withdrawal-biden-lisa-curtis-stay. 12. Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations (New York: Penguin, 2020), 39. 13. Michael Hirsh, “Is Biden Haunted by Vietnam? Should He Be?,” Foreign Policy, July 9, 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/07/09/is-biden-haunted-by-vietnam-should-he -be/. 14. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Harold James, The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 15. Greg Bruno, “Plans for Iraq’s Future: Federalism, Separatism, and Partition,” Council on Foreign Relations Backgrounder, October 17, 2007, https://www.cfr.org /back grounder/plans-iraqs-future-federalism-separatism-and-partition; Statement by Senator Joe Biden Calling for Immediate Intervention in Darfur, April 18, 2007, American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-senator -joe-biden-calling-for-immediate-intervention-darfur. 16. Ludovic Tournès, Américanisation: une histoire mondiale XVIIe-XXIe siècles (Paris: Fayard, 2020). 17. Bonnie Jenkins, “A Farewell to the Open Skies Treaty,” Brookings Institution, June 16, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2020/06/16/a-farewell-to-the -open-skies-treaty-and-an-era-of-imaginative-thinking/.

History, the President, and the Gibbon Paradox 479 18. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Penguin, 2000). 19. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 581. 20. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 581. 21. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 580. 22. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Modern Library, 1999); Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (New York: Grove, 2010).

CHAPTER 41

TRUMP’S LIMITED LEGACY L AW R E N C E F R E E D M A N

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onald Trump’s final disgraceful weeks in office displayed him at his narcissistic worst, encouraging the storming of the Capitol by his supporters and leaving a legacy of damaging claims about the electoral process that will take time to dispel. Though the manner of his going was shocking, it was not surprising. Inflammatory rhetoric, extravagant promises, and disdain for convention had all been present in his election campaign. They were at the fore in his January 2017 inauguration address. And so it continued. In the ISSF essay I wrote in the summer of 2018 I noted Trump’s “embrace of nationalist impulses, his contempt for his political opponents and the rule of law, his incessant boastful, malevolent, and false statements, his lack of empathy and curiosity.”1 There was no drift back to the center. His strategy for a second term involved enthusing his supporters by continuing as before rather than reaching out to doubters. It almost worked. For America’s allies and partners, a president in this mode was frustrating and alarming. The mantle of “leader of the Free World” might hark back to a simpler geopolitical time, but the idea that the U.S. president should exemplify the virtues of Western democracies and uphold international institutions was deeply embedded. It certainly came as a shock to come up against an individual who did not see his role in that way. They shared the hope of the foreign policy establishment in the United States that somehow Trump would be sufficiently awed by the responsibilities of the office and allow his rough edges to be smoothed over by those appointed to the key posts in the State and Defense Departments, as well as the White House.

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At first Trump at least seemed interested in meeting the leaders of America’s most important allies, especially if they were male and played golf or put on a good parade, but he soon realized that they sought continuity while he wanted change. They spoke of the value of free trade and alliances, both of which are central to America’s position in the international order yet were distrusted by Trump. He saw them as requiring excessive concessions and subsidies by the United States. As a result he came to consider his fellow Western leaders to be soft and feckless. By contrast he gave the impression of envying authoritarian leaders and in particular their ability to remove all obstacles to staying in power and to impose their own version of events as truth while dismissing all others as “fake.” His political agenda was largely self-centered, involving no new ambition for his country other than a vague sense of “greatness.” All political relationships, including with foreign leaders, were framed in transactional terms. Trump’s proudest boast, for which there was scant evidence, was that he could do the best deals.2 Ideologically, therefore, the allies had little in common with Trump. This was true even of the two post-Brexit prime ministers in the United Kingdom— Theresa May and Boris Johnson—with whom he might have expected to get more support. They too did not want to travel too far away from the Western policy framework that Trump wished to abandon. With every move he made—on relocating the U.S. embassy from Israel to Jerusalem, abandoning the Paris climate change targets, walking away from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal with Iran—the allies opposed him and refused to follow the U.S. lead. Soon they were largely into damage limitation, hoping that Trump would turn out to be a one-term president and that something of the established international order could be preserved for when normality returned. Although Trump mused aloud at one point about the possibility of withdrawing from NATO, he was dissuaded from taking such a step.3 Could he have resisted the temptation for the entirety of a second term? Allied leaders and Trump’s foreign policy team colluded in damage control by pretending that there was more continuity in U.S. foreign policy than was in fact the case. The stories of the first eighteen months were of cabinet members and White House staff developing stratagems to keep Trump occupied and take advantage of his inattention to avoid implementing what they believed to be his more harmful policies. One intriguing counterfactual is what might have happened if Trump had mastered the detail of policy, ensured that loyal and competent staff stayed with him all the way, and concentrated on the process sufficiently to ensure that his will was enforced.4 One can look back at the 2017 National Security Strategy and see elements of an approach based on “America First,” including taking seriously great-power competition and encouraging a rebalancing of the international trading and alliance systems, which would have required a degree of adjustment from other countries.5

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Trump often had grounds for his complaints—China’s unfair trading practices, for example, or the reluctance of European governments to raise their defense spending. Trump therefore provided an interesting case study of how the bureaucracy can thwart and distract a president. This phenomenon is not new. All presidents claim to find the Washington machine unresponsive, unwilling to move from past practices and, if pushed to do so, ready to call on friends in Congress or the media to help them resist. But Trump did not understand how to use the available levers of power. The churn in staff and the reluctance of qualified people to join the administration meant that the White House became less effective even if more attuned to his wishes after the 2018 congressional elections. The great coronavirus pandemic of 2020, which was an opportunity to forge national unity against a shared threat and show competence where it mattered, was poorly handled. One problem was that Trump was unwilling to accept the economic costs of controlling the disease, but even when his administration was trying to do the right thing and get a grip on events Trump’s commentary on the spread of the disease could be in turns negligent and bewildering. He continually promised that everything was under control, proposed quack remedies, only to be caught out by the spread of cases.6 In the past, for example with Ebola, the United States would have led the world response to a new, deadly pandemic. While an unremitting focus on calculations of power and interest might be seen as the hallmarks of a “realist” approach, describing situations as you wish them to be rather than how they actually are is hardly realistic, and this tendency led to inappropriate policy choices. This can be seen in the two important nuclear nonproliferation calls made by Trump that I discussed in 2018. After abandoning the JCPOA to restrict Iran’s nuclear program and preparing to reinstate severe sanctions, he met in Singapore on June 12, 2018, with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to agree on North Korea’s “denuclearization.” Offering summits to apparently implacable foes was perfectly in line with Trump’s belief in himself as the “master of the deal.” Even after lambasting Iran at the 2017 United Nations General Assembly (“a corrupt dictatorship behind the false guise of a democracy”), he decided on a whim to seek an immediate meeting with Iranian president Hassan Rouhani in his New York hotel room. French president Emmanuel Macron was enlisted to act as a go-between.7 The Iranians dismissed the idea as an insult. Even if they had been tempted, they knew how badly any meeting would have gone down with the hardliners back in Teheran. That should have been a clue that if the United States abandoned the JCPOA the Iranians would not be interested in granting Trump any concessions that he could turn into a victory. As it had been difficult enough to get Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei to agree to the first deal, it was going to be even harder to get him to agree to a second one, just after the United States

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had walked away from the commitments made in 2015 without being able to point to instances of Iranian noncompliance. The JCPOA had not led to a wider détente. Iran had not reduced its interventions in regional affairs, and this was one reason why local American partners (who also happened to be close to Trump), such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), supported this hostile stance. In 2018 I raised questions, without answers, as to whether there was a risk of escalation to an all-out regional war, how far the administration would push for regime change in Iran, and whether the pressure might aggravate its internal weaknesses sufficiently to coerce the country into a more compliant stance. The administration, however, asked for too much for a serious negotiation. It made demands that Teheran was never likely to accept, requiring it not only to accept greater restrictions on its nuclear facilities but also to abandon its activist foreign policy. The logic of the U.S. position, reinforced by severe economic sanctions, pointed to regime change.8 The other parties to the JCPOA, including the major European countries, sought to sustain it. Iran responded by enriching its uranium to even higher levels and producing more of it. With sanctions biting in 2019 it began to lash out, attacking tankers and, through its Yemeni proxies, facilities in Saudi Arabia. At one point, after a U.S. drone had been shot down in June 2019, which Trump described as a “big mistake,” he ordered but then withdrew at the last minute a retaliatory military strike on several Iranian radar and missile sites, against the advice of Secretary of State Pompeo, National Security Adviser John Bolton, and CIA Director Gina Haspel.9 This was an interesting example of Trump’s equivocal attitude to the use of force. In this case he was worried about civilian casualties, yet he also eased rules of engagement for drone strikes and backed use of the so-called mother of all bombs—the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast—against an Islamic State (ISIS) cave complex in Afghanistan in April 2017.10 At the start of 2020 he struck a real blow against the Iranian regime when he approved the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) who was responsible for Iranian overseas operations. This was followed by attacks by Iranian proxies on U.S. bases in Iraq.11 One of the few foreign policy achievements of Trump’s administration is its use of the shared enmity with Iran to forge a new set of relationships between Israel and the Arab states. This led to the August 2020 Abraham Accords, which saw the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain normalize diplomatic relations with Israel, with others, such as Sudan, indicating that they might follow.12 This was done despite a lack of progress on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, where Trump had promised that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, could achieve a historic breakthrough but failed to do so. The only benefit to the Palestinians from the accords was that Israel held back from annexing territory on the West Bank.

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Trump put his greatest personal effort into reversing North Korea’s nuclear program. In 2018 he sent word (through a UN official) about a possible meeting with Kim Jong-un.13 The North Koreans wanted a summit. The leader of a small, poor, and oppressive country was pleased to meet on equal terms with the U.S. president. When a formal proposal was made through the South Koreans, whose leader, President Moon Jae-in, wanted to revive intra-Korean talks, Trump accepted with alacrity. Internationally there was surprise but also relief, as 2017 had been marked by a vicious war of words over the North’s nuclear weapon and missile tests. The president clearly enjoyed the drama and the attention when the two men met in Singapore. I warned at the time that the risks of the summit lay “not in diplomacy, unless concessions to the North become excessive, but the consequences of an eventual U.S. discovery that North Korea has no intention of denuclearizing except in unlikely conditions.”14 There was never much chance that Kim would agree to dismantle the only asset that gave him any international standing, and so it proved. Trump spoke of his attachment to the young tyrant in terms more appropriate for a teenage romance,15 but by the end of his term no substantive progress had been made.16 One consequence of the direct diplomacy between the United States and North Korea is that Trump no longer needed China to pressure Kim into making concessions. It is important to recall that Trump made a big pitch to impress the Chinese leader Xi Jinping when he welcomed him to the garish splendor of his Florida retreat, Mar-a-Lago. By 2018 he was engaged in a tariff war to force changes in China’s unfair trade practices. The effects were limited by the impact of China’s retaliatory tariffs on the U.S. agricultural sector and Trump’s readiness to pick fights with allies on trade issues (even under the guise of national security threats). Regardless of who held the presidency, there was bound to be growing tension with China at this time, as the consequences of both its economic strength and Xi’s more assertive policies. China represents a serious global economic competitor to the United States and a geopolitical competitor, at least in what is now commonly described as the “Indo-Pacific region.” In 2018 I observed that China was “not itching for a fight” but was happy to wait as Trump damaged the position of the United States. “Patience,” I noted, was “likely to be rewarded as countries begin to lean more towards Beijing, accepting its largesse and favors in return for whatever political demands it may impose without the U.S. being able or willing to act as a counter.” This now seems wrong. While Beijing sought to present itself as the new guarantor of multilateral diplomacy, in practice Xi encouraged a more aggressive diplomacy, refusing to yield on any matter of interest, and in particular showed extreme sensitivity to any criticism of his policies, such as the oppression of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang Province. This was further complicated by China’s role as the source of COVID-19 and Trump’s determination to continue to point this out.

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The other large question was how Trump would deal with Russia. There were claims from the start of his presidency that Trump owed his position in part to Russian interference. The various investigations were suggestive if not conclusive. Trump clearly wanted to improve relations with Russia and was unsurprisingly ready to accept President Putin’s assurances that there had been no interference. He was caught not only by the fact that such suspicions would be confirmed by his excessive warmth toward Putin but also by the general wariness among Senate Republicans when it came to Russian intentions. In 2018 I wondered doubtfully whether a deal would be possible whereby sanctions were lifted in return for the separatist enclaves in Ukraine being abandoned. There was no deal. Trump reluctantly agreed to join in the diplomatic expulsions that followed the attempted poisoning in March 2018 of the former intelligence agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury in the United Kingdom.17 When the big test came, faced by the Biden administration in February 2022 when Putin committed further Russian aggression against Ukraine, Trump made clear he would not have taken a strong stance. He praised Putin as someone with a lot of “charm and a lot of pride” who “loves his country.” When Putin endorsed the independence of the enclaves in the Donbas, Trump declared the move to be “smart,” “genius,” and “very savvy.”18 Even from Trump’s own perspective, there were few positive achievements in the area of foreign policy. Trump can claim to have encouraged attention to the strategic challenge posed by China; to have helped improve relations between Israel and the Arab world, albeit not with the Palestinians; to have helped allies defeat ISIS in Iraq and to have reduced its influence in Syria; to have been ready to take risks in talking to adversaries such as Kim Jong-un and in setting up a withdrawal from Afghanistan, even though his deal with the Taliban made it more likely that it would chaotic. He also removed restrictions on drone attacks, yet, despite his presumed belligerence, he held back from new large-scale military operations. The underlying question I raised in 2018 was whether Trump was as much of an aberrance as America’s allies hoped. When Biden became president, he announced that America was “back,”19 and in many respects relations picked up where they had left off in 2016, with many individuals who had served under Obama moving into key positions. Alliances were celebrated rather than qualified. Multilateralism returned. The United States rejoined the Paris climate accords and the World Health Organization, and Biden ended hostility toward the International Criminal Court. His administration revived an interest in human rights and democracy as goals of foreign policy. Yet confidence in the United States has been shaken. The abrupt and disorderly end to decades in Afghanistan in the summer of 2021 shook allied confidence in Washington’s judgment and encouraged talk of reduced strategic dependence on the United

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States. Then the Biden administration rose to the challenge posed by Russia’s war against Ukraine. It did this first by providing accurate intelligence on Moscow’s capabilities and intent and then, after a slow start, providing huge amounts of economic and military assistance to Kyiv. At the same time, it went out of its way to provide Russia with no excuse for nuclear escalation by refusing to intervene directly. The disagreements within Europe on whether some deal with Russia was possible (which subsided as it became clear that there was no deal to be had) undermined further confidence in a united European response to comparable future crises. Nonetheless, Washington’s main strategic preoccupation was China. Once the war in Ukraine is over, especially if it leaves Russia a much diminished power, it is still likely to leave European countries with more responsibility for local security as well as wondering whether they need to do more in the Indo-Pacific region. Thoughts of how Trump would have managed Russia’s aggression reinforced their relief that Trump had not achieved a second term. There remains the fear of his return or else further arguments over the U.S. electoral process that cast more doubt on the American claim to be leader of the democratic world. And perhaps as equally unnerving as the prospect of Trump’s return is the possibility that the Americans might elect a future president with similar prejudices and policies but also more intelligence, competence, and discipline.

Notes 1. Lawrence Freedman, “Authentic Trump Versus the Trump Administration: Donald Trump as Foreign Policy Disrupter,” July  18, 2018, https://issforum.org /ISSF/PDF /Policy-Roundtable-1-5BH.pdf. 2. A number of books told similar stories about Trump’s views and conduct as president, including Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (New York: Henry Holt, 2018); Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), and Anonymous, A Warning (New York: Twelve, 2020). 3. Brooke Lapping Productions, Trump Takes on the World, episode 1, BBC, February 27, 2021, https://www.bbc.co.uk /programmes/m000s5zl. 4. See chapter 1, by Robert Jervis, in this volume. 5. The White House, National Security Strategy of the United States of America, December 2017, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content /uploads/2017/12/ NSS -Final -12-18-2017-0905.pdf. 6. Christian Paz, “All the President’s Lies About the Coronavirus: An Unfinished Compendium of Trump’s Overwhelming Dishonesty During a National Emergency,” Atlantic, November  2, 2020, https://www.theatlantic .com /politics/archive/2020/11 /trumps-lies-about-coronavirus/608647/. 7. Trump Takes on the World, episode 2, BBC, March 4, 2021, https://www.bbc.co.uk /programmes/m000sct9. 8. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: “What can change is that people can change the government. What we’re trying to do is create space for the Iranian people.” Cited in

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9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

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Philip H. Gordon, Losing the Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East (New York: St. Martin’s, 2021), 5. Michael Shear et al., “Strikes on Iran Approved by Trump, Then Abruptly Pulled Back,” New York Times, June  20, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com /2019/06/20/world /mid dleeast/iran-us-drone.html. Helene Cooper and Mujib Mashal, “US Drops ‘Mother of All Bombs’ on ISIS Caves in Afghanistan,” New York Times, April 13, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com /2017/04 /13 /world /asia /moab-mother-of-all-bombs-afghanistan.html. Trump had relaxed the rules of engagement. It is not clear that he formally authorized this operation. Helene Cooper et al., “As Tensions with Iran Escalated, Trump Opted for Most Extreme Measure,” New York Times, January 4, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/04/us /politics/trump-suleimani.html. U.S. Department of State, Abraham Accords Declaration, https://www.state.gov/the -abraham-accords/. Trump Takes on the World, episode 3, BBC, March 11, 2021, https://www.bbc.co.uk /programmes/m000sln7. Freedman, “Authentic Trump Versus the Trump Administration.” “Trump Hails ‘Very Beautiful Letter’ from Kim and Says Additional Talks Likely,” Guardian, August 9, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/09/trump -kim-jong-un-letter-talks. See chapter 19, by Dayna Barnes, in this volume. “London was pushing for the White House to expel dozens of suspected Russian operatives, but Mr. Trump was skeptical. He had initially written off the poisoning as part of legitimate spy games, distasteful but within the bounds of espionage. Some officials said they thought that Mr. Trump, who has frequently criticized ‘rats’ and other turncoats, had some sympathy for the Russian government’s going after someone viewed as a traitor.” Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman, “Gina Haspel Relies on Spy Skills to Connect with Trump. He Doesn’t Always Listen,” New York Times, April 16, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/us/politics/gina-haspel-trump.html. David Edwards, “Trump Praises Putin’s ‘Genius’ Plan to Invade Ukraine: ‘You Gotta Say That’s Pretty Savvy,’ ” Raw Story, https://www.rawstory.com/trump-putin-ukraine/. The White House, “Remarks by President Biden on America’s Place in the World,” February 4, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/ briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/02 /04/remarks-by-president-biden-on-americas-place-in-the-world/.

CHAPTER 42

AMERICAN CONSTRAINTS Trump’s “Legacy” or Inexorable History C H A R L E S S . M A I E R

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bout fifteen years ago I participated in a conference whose contributions were published under the title To Lead the World.1 When I wrote the chapter for this volume over a year ago, such a title would have seemed a bitter comment on the reduced role that the Biden administration was currently playing. The decision to withdraw the remaining American forces from Afghanistan between July and August 2021—whatever its merits—could hardly be seen as an act of leadership, and its likely consequence, the Taliban takeover, was easily anticipated. Had we not all watched on television the earlier version of the frantic exodus from Saigon in 1975? Ironically, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022, has helped, at least in the short term, revive a concept of American leadership. Ukrainian bravery and determination has compelled President Joe Biden to bring us back from our vacation from history and to walk a fine line between the support Ukraine morally deserves and the prudence that this indirect conflict with Moscow also demands. In the latter half of 2022, it is impossible to predict the dénouement of the war in Ukraine, but it appears for now to have reversed some of the disarray that former president Donald Trump’s casual and personal approach bequeathed. Nonetheless, I was asked originally to address the legacy of the Trump administration for American foreign policy, and I will focus on that interlude. For now it seems strangely irrelevant. Who now would trust the former president’s confidence that he understood how to do business with Russian president Vladimir Putin? His complaints that NATO allies were just seeking a free

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ride also seem out of date, above all with respect to the German reticence about hard power. In short, Trump’s legacy in foreign policy may well turn out to be an evanescent departure from geopolitical sobriety. But was it? We cannot calculate Trump’s mortgage on the American future simply by describing his diplomacy while he was in power. It was crudely transactional and often naïve, but it is still too early to know what long-term consequences might emerge. My own admittedly nonimpartial view is that Trump’s domestic legacy is more damaging and dangerous than his international one. With his wanton disregard for truth, his use of social media to spread vituperation and contempt, whether for opponents or supporters who fell out of favor, and his winking at practitioners of political violence, he simply trashed the norms needed for a functioning democracy—and that is not to mention the protracted challenges to the 2020 election results, which have left many in his party convinced that the outcome was “stolen.” This poison will be in the American political system a long time.2 More intriguingly, Trump’s domestic calculations led to partial realignment of traditional political stances on foreign policy. Concerns about Russia, China, and North Korea abated among his supporters in the Republican camp, leaving Democrats to appear the more confrontational party at the same time that it has fallen to them to avoid or deter outright military confrontation. The impulsiveness of Trump’s foreign policy, exemplified by the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) Iranian nuclear framework, along with the coarsening of rhetoric— yes, words matter—damaged America’s stature as a reliable partner (or adversary) in foreign affairs.3 By the end of Trump’s first term, an impartial observer might plausibly have believed that the United States was a danger to global peace not because the country intended a war—George W. Bush was far clearer about that goal in 2003—but because the country’s leader was brutally confrontational and, like every American president, possessed extraordinary constitutional power over foreign policy and military decisions. To my mind, as a historian of Europe, American behavior during the Trump years sometimes recalled the Germany of Kaiser William II—a country, like the United States, that was given to revering its military forces and was saddled with a mercurial ruler, unpredictable and heedless of the lamentable impression it was making abroad. Fortunately, the American Defense and State Department bureaucracies were inertial or intelligent enough to resist some, though not all, White House whims. And even President Trump managed to resist the potential for untethered policy making from aides such as his national security advisors Michael Flynn or John Bolton. Much of the behavior that dismayed those who prize a collaborative relationship with allies and friends involved style more than substance and so can probably be repaired. Nevertheless, as the Trump presidency fades into

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history—assuming that he will not successfully run again in 2024 or that his approach to U.S. international behavior will not be reproduced under a Republican successor—it is also evident that the considerable challenges now facing the Biden administration are not simply legacies from the Trump administration. They remain agonizing issues that transcend the question of which president is in power, including relations with an economically and politically powerful China, squaring the needs for security and justice in the Middle East, and trying to find an appropriate Russian policy, among others. President Barack Obama could not resolve them before Trump’s administration, and it is hardly clear that President Biden can either. To be sure, Trump denied their gravity and believed he could overcome them on the basis of vague threats or of personal bonding with one or another dictator. As chapter 13, by Richard H. Immerman, in this volume emphasizes, Trump considered the intelligence agencies to be a hostile emanation of a “deep state.”4 Still, the issues involved would have vexed, and will vex, even the wisest leadership. And to judge from initiatives taken so far, the Biden administration has not figured out or believed it appropriate to stake out positions that are fundamentally different. This chapter was originally drafted not only before the Ukrainian crisis but also before President Biden’s decision suddenly to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan, but a final version must take account of that defeat. One can argue that the Trump administration’s signing of a peace accord with the Taliban in 2020 that promised no more than immunity for American forces and preventing al-Qaeda’s return foreclosed Biden’s options. But enough maneuverability remained in terms of timing and residual-force levels to leave the current president some freedom of action. Biden, however, like Obama—with respect to Syria—and perhaps like Trump, saw the alternative as a “forever war” that could yield no decision. I appreciate the reasoning that led to this disengagement but fear that a generation of aspiring Afghan women and those citizens who wagered on presidential assurances will pay a heavy price for sudden U.S. abandonment. Biden has claimed that the country will no longer be an alQaeda haven (just as Trump declared that the danger of ISIS had ended), but that proclaimed goal has long been less compelling now that terrorist networks subsist in many different territories. The greater consideration is perhaps that both the Trump and Biden administrations decided that if the Afghans could not finally defend themselves, they did not deserve to be forever defended by the United States. This is a justification, however, that ignores the role of the allies of the United States and the sacrifices the Afghans have made. Defenders of the sudden withdrawal also stressed that the United States was unlikely to turn the country into a functioning democracy. But acknowledging this limitation did not have to mean that the United States could not have helped preserve a nonauthoritarian and more tolerant regime at an acceptable cost.

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That admittedly less exalted mission has now been foreclosed, and the decision is in line with Trump’s policies, even if Biden faced up to them more honestly. For better or worse, American policy in the Middle East and Central Asia has long been a messy bipartisan one. It has occasionally been mendacious and disastrous, such as in the case of the 2003–2004 war in Iraq, which was also supported on both sides of the aisle. More often it has been one of temporizing, what the British called cunctation—kicking the can down the road, which works until it doesn’t. This approach has characterized the U.S. approach to the Saudi regime, and it has characterized the government’s unwillingness to pry Israel from its policies that appear determined to forestall any viable Palestinian national structure. Cunctation may be the only realistic policy with respect to the other issues Biden must face. In the long run, the United States is unlikely to overcome the assertiveness of China in geopolitical and economic terms, the resistance of both China and the Soviet Union to human rights, and the global turn to authoritarianism more widely. With respect to international economic and social issues, the major Western nations will all confront throngs of migrants fleeing collapsing or abusive state authority in Central America and the Middle East as well as the war in Ukraine; they have already had a hard time facing the global health issues raised by the COVID-19 pandemic, and all of them are struggling to institute the collective action needed to mitigate the massive impact of climate change. The harsh truth is that every president inherits a heavily encumbered international situation and must judge what to accept and what to contest. And much is up in the air. Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden had accepted Germany’s plan to move ahead with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia as a “fait accompli.” Now the Germans themselves have shut down Nord Stream 2.5 Nonetheless, despite ritual denials, NATO partners in general, including the United States, have apparently accepted Russian control if not formal annexation of Crimea as a fait accompli. Despite the impact of Ukraine, swallowing the fait accompli may become a leitmotif of U.S. decline, even though acceptable American political rhetoric will never allow it to be confessed openly. President Trump did nothing to reverse this melancholy prospect. His massive overconfidence in his mastery of the art of the deal and his personal presence led him to believe that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un would succumb to his blandishments and renounce his country’s nuclear program. He was foolish to think so and to have disregarded the unsettling impact it would have on the delicate triangle with South Korea and Japan.6 Still, if it had been adequately prepared, I would not condemn the wager on a personal meeting as such. The underlying problem is that Trump seemed to have little capacity to understand the “structural” limits to personal cajolery. So long as Kim Jong-un remains

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willing to disregard the economic costs to his population, his nuclear arsenal provides him with a power and status he has no reason to renounce. The Chinese could change his calculus, but why should they bring Pyongyang to heel so long as it remains an irritant to the United States, South Korea, and Japan? Someday Beijing may judge that its overall relationship with Washington requires leashing Kim; meanwhile, Kim has no motive to make life easy for Washington. Whether Japan and South Korea will or can forbear from acquiring their own arsenals over the next decade or so remains a major question. Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA framework with Iran, I believe, left the United States in a far more difficult position than it would have been otherwise. It gave Iran the opportunity to press on with its nuclear program and made further sanctions the only recourse for Washington. The question was (and remains) whether the JCPOA was really likely to forestall Teheran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons in the long run. Detractors of the agreement believed that its fifteen-year limit was dangerously brief. Supporters wagered that somehow Iran’s rulers would find it in their interest to renew its terms. The Biden administration has not rushed to rejoin the agreement unconditionally, and Iran has stated that it will not negotiate anew until sanctions are lifted. In both cases, the wager is on the long-term nature of the Iranian regime. Is it realistic for the United States to seek long-term cooperation from Iranian moderates? Or should it accept their weakness in the current institutional structure and simply confront the hardliners with ever-harsher sanctions (assuming that the United States and its Israeli allies forswear the option of a preemptive strike, with all the incalculable consequences that would entail)? Obviously, the division between hardliners and moderates is far too crude and allows for no evolution of positions. There is another alternative: simply accept that after fifteen years the Iranians may well acquire nuclear weapons and that thereafter the Islamic Republic’s potential adversaries—including Saudi Arabia and the UAE as well as Israel—will have to rely on the balance of terror to keep them from being used. This is, after all, the regime that India and Pakistan, China, Russia, France, Britain, and the United States have relied on since 1945. Before insisting that it remains unacceptable in the case of Iran or North Korea, we have to ask what feasible and acceptable alternative promises greater stability. In any case, the nonproliferation regime, which has been in theory a bipartisan commitment of U.S. foreign policy, is always going to be vulnerable short of global nuclear disarmament. It establishes a hierarchy of great powers that second-rank authoritarian powers will be tempted to challenge. In practice it is a regime of slowed proliferation, in which one or two new nuclear powers have been allowed to emerge every couple of decades. The major deterrent to acquisition, aside from cost, has been the quite rational conclusion that to possess atomic weapons is likely to make one a target for other nuclear powers.

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Trump apparently asked his advisers why, if the United States has nuclear weapons, it doesn’t use them. The question suggests that the rationality needed for a deterrence regime may not be foolproof. The Soviets and Americans preserved a mutual deterrence regime for some seventy years, but it can only be judged successful if it lasts forever. Israel may ultimately have to live with such a Damoclean status quo. The debate that Trump’s legacy should reopen is whether the United States should strive for universal nuclear disarmament, including its own arsenal, if it would keep countries such as Iran from acquiring atomic weapons. A hierarchical system of limited access to weaponry is unlikely to provide stability forever. Trump’s decision to withdraw from the JCPOA had, of course, wider implications in terms of regional Middle Eastern politics. It further cemented an alignment with former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli policies, a clear choice to write off any remaining tattered hopes for a two-state solution and to humiliate the Palestinians. Trump’s turning over a highly complex set of questions to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was not unprecedented (Italian dictator Benito Mussolini also relied on his son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano as foreign minister . . . before he had him shot for supporting his ouster), but it revealed again how all complex issues were filtered through personal relationships.7 Nonetheless, an implicit strategy emerged for the Middle East from Kushner’s bricolage. The administration in effect brokered an alignment of authoritarian Gulf rulers, the Saudis, and Netanyahu to tamp down the troublesome (and yes, sometimes terrorist) subaltern peoples of the region—whether Palestinians or the non-Arab proletariats of the Gulf. Having an authoritarian regime in Egypt preoccupied with its own repressive agenda, a hapless Iraqi state, and an epic tragedy in Syria helped facilitate this combinazione. It took further shape with Israel’s opening to the United Arab Emirates. Probably any international agreements involving Israel and the other Middle Eastern powers should be welcomed, and the threat of Iran’s ambitions created a common menace. Nonetheless it leaves unaddressed the ethical issues that have been present in the Palestinian question since 1948. The United States learned to leave the questions of justice for Native Americans unresolved; it looks as if it will learn to live that way with the Palestinian question.

✳✳✳ When it comes to foreign policy, certainly outside Europe, it seems to me that several fundamental choices currently face the United States, independently of Donald Trump’s dismaying intermezzo. Unfortunately they are often obfuscated by worn-out slogans proffered by both parties. Does the United States wish to retain its “global leadership”? Is it in fact an “indispensable nation”?

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Does it advance the country’s best interests for political leaders to insist that its “greatest days lie ahead”? I am not sure what global leadership consists of these days. If it involves military preponderance, the United States may still retain it, but an edge in hardware probably means less than it once did. How long it retains it is also in question. China’s hypersonic missiles represent a qualitative arms advance. If North Korea managed to land nuclear missiles on any American city, the result would be disastrous, no matter what vengeance the United States might choose to exact. If Moscow-protected cyber outlaws brought down urban transportation and medical systems, the consequences would be catastrophic. Rather than insisting on primacy, the role of the United States should be what the Biden administration has been groping toward—helping to structure a multilateral world that will respect as great a liberal-democratic sphere of values as possible without major war. It has been evident for over half a century that the United States could not maintain its post–World War II share of global production and wealth and that the real success of foreign economic policy would be a more universal economic development. If moral “leadership” is at stake—which is where Trump failed most egregiously—then the United States has serious tasks ahead: closing Guantanamo, reforming the country’s incarceration system (to be fair, it is largely beyond federal jurisdiction and more the product of the Clinton years than Trump’s administration—indeed, it is one area where Trump gave hope of some meaningful reform), and trying—as all wealthy countries shall ultimately have to—to sustain a generous system of migration.8 It must measure success by raising the health, education, and welfare levels of the world’s poorest, including America’s own. And what about the constitutional provisions for setting American foreign policy? After the Vietnam War, Congress moved to reclaim more power over American military interventions abroad—a tendency that was reversed again after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Normally vigorous congressional oversight should seem desirable.9 But let us be candid, Congress supported the Cold War engagement that liberals called for during a period when Democrats still ruled a one-party South and segregationist senators chaired key committees concerned with foreign policy and defense. Do supporters of a strong presidential role really want congressional oversight when Trump’s legacy still seems so strong over a Southern white electorate? On the other hand, whether speaking as historian or citizen, I am not ready to endorse the calls for a withdrawal from international commitments to the degree that has now become fashionable among some in both conservative and progressive circles.10 Aside from the global upheavals that might follow, I do not believe that American politics would witness a succession of uncontested catastrophic outcomes, whether in the Middle East, or Taiwan, Ukraine, or elsewhere, without descending into a series of domestic witch hunts or ultimately

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giving way to a sudden reversal of security policy from an objectively disadvantaged position. Graham Allison has suggested that the United States finds itself in a “Thucydides Trap” vis-à-vis China—that of the declining power trying to sustain its preeminence against an ambitious rising rival without engaging in a systemic war, and he cites Britain’s situation before 1914 as corroboration. It seems to me that for the moment the situation is more akin to that of the late 1930s, when the Western powers faced an Axis determined to revise the status quo of 1918–1922. At that juncture, E. H. Carr implied that it was foolish to bottle up vital revisionist powers.11 Appeasement proved a dangerous and probably shortsighted policy, but there were persuasive reasons to refrain from an early recourse to war. The United States, moreover, has an advantage over Britain; the relative preponderance of American strength is far greater than what Britain possessed. But Chinese power will continue to grow, and—another irony of the current situation—if Putin’s Ukrainian venture fails, or even if it succeeds, Russia’s role in the Chinese-Russian alignment will shrink with respect to China’s. China will be the big winner of the current crisis. I believe it is appropriate to defend values as well as interests, although to what degree military force should be engaged has to be weighed case by case. There is a case for speaking loudly against aggression or repression even when one refrains from wielding a big stick. Threatening the big stick when one is not prepared to use it, as does the rhetoric of “red lines,” is not useful, and in that respect President Obama also contributed to the current difficulties for American policy. But I would submit that reaffirming liberal values is the best choice for dealing with China and Russia even when force cannot be used. Ultimately it is the choice that American public opinion will probably demand. Human rights cannot be the only guideline for policy, but neither can acceptance of the fait accompli. As Stephen Krasner has pointed out, organized hypocrisy has a role to play in international affairs. He has shown its importance for maintaining practices and concepts of sovereignty. It applies to the defense of rights and liberty as well.12 How the balance should be struck in particular cases, alas, can only be judged in retrospect. If, for instance, the defense of Taiwan required a war on the scale of Korea, it might be judged acceptable (although perhaps not by the Taiwanese); if it escalated into a wider conflict, it would be a disaster. But for assessing the calculus beforehand, I would rather place the decision in the hands of a restrained leader who had lived with human tragedy than an impulsive one who believed he was a genius. If the United States defends values, then ultimately its citizens have to place their hopes in the popular forces that challenged the Soviet sphere in the 1950s, 1968, and the late 1980s; the Chinese Communist Party in 1989; the Iranian theocracy in 2009–2010; and the Arab rulers in 2011. It is sobering to remember that in the last decade they were all set back except in Eastern Europe, as

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were the challengers to the Holy Alliance in 1820, 1830, and 1848–1849. But history did not end in 1849. Public opinion loves to find a suitable “doctrine” for foreign policy—the Monroe Doctrine, the Truman Doctrine, the Nixon Doctrine, etc.—but case-by-case wisdom is probably more useful and will certainly be more necessary. Ironically, the Trump presidency may have done one indirect public service through all its brutal disruptions if it compels a rethinking of what foreign policy the American imperial republic can and should defend.

Notes 1. Charles S. Maier, “Beyond Statecraft,” in To Lead the World: American Strategy After the Bush Doctrine, ed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Jeff Legro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 60–84. 2. Martin Conway has it right in chapter 43 of this volume. The Trump phenomenon, like populist successes elsewhere, is not a fascist rerun but a genuinely new constellation of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. For an early prefiguring of my own, see Charles S. Maier, “Democracy and Its Discontents,” Foreign Affairs 73, no. 4 (July/August 1994): 48–64. 3. My judgments in this brief chapter largely align with those of Lawrence Freedman’s overall assessment, chapter 41 in this volume, which is built upon his 2018 judgments: “Authentic Trump Versus the Trump Administration: Donald Trump as Foreign Policy Disrupter,” July 18, 2018, https://issforum.org/ISSF/PDF/Policy-Roundtable-I-SBH .pdf. But the limits also exist because the dilemmas remain structurally inherent in America’s international situation. 4. See chapter 13, by Richard H. Immerman, in this volume. 5. “European Gas Prices Rise After German Concerns Over Nord Stream 2,” Financial Times, December 13, 2021. See also Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock’s exchange with Sergei Lavrov, DW (Deutsche Welle), December 14, 2021. 6. Robert Jervis in his, alas, final considerations as a theorist in chapter 1 in this volume raises the issue of how the role of a powerful and idiosyncratic leader affects the role of theory in international relations. Historians perhaps can bypass the question—they rely on sequencing for explanation—but even for IR theorists the issue is different in kind from the need to explain stochastic events in general. IR theorists have long had to do a workaround for the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in 1914. 7. I realize that this critique dissents from the general approval of the Abraham Accords, but see also chapter 30, by A. Dirk Moses and Victor Kattan, in this volume for similar concerns. 8. On the growth of mass imprisonment, see Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); for a plea on migration, see Giles Merritt, “The Economic Case for Migration,” Financial Times, December 114, 2021. 9. Chapter 12, by Matthew Evangelista, in this volume provides a careful framework. For the case law of the “war on terror,” see Allan A. Ryan, The 9/11 Terror Cases: Constitutional Challenges in the War against Al Qaeda (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015). On the muddy status of the War Powers Resolution of 1973, see Charlie Savage,

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“Decades of Memos Trace Effort to Reshape the Power to Make War,” New York Times, September 17, 2022. 10. For leading arguments in this vein, see Andrew Bacevich, After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed (New York: Macmillan, 2021); Andrew Bacevich, The Age of Illusions (New York: Henry Holt, 2020); Andrew Bacevich, The Long Wars: A New History of US National Security Policy Since World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); and Stephen Wertheim, Tomorrow the World: the Birth of US Global Supremacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). 11. Graham T. Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017); Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations Between the Two World Wars (London: Macmillan, 1940). 12. Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

CHAPTER 43

MAKING TRUMP HISTORY M A R TI N CO N WAY

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istorians have long seemed to have a problem with Trump. I do not mean by this their almost unanimous personal and partisan hostility toward a president who reciprocated by treating them and their discipline with a casual disdain. Trump, it is clear, has only the most superficial interest in history and none whatsoever in those who would seek to explain it. But the more substantial problem posed by Trump for many historians is that he simply should never have been able to become president. That the election of 2016 could lead—albeit against the weight of individual votes—to the victory of a candidate who through his words and actions conveyed his distaste for a broad range of liberal goals seems to be the negation of the historical development of the United States across the half-century since the 1960s. This attitude is partly a response by historians to Trump’s character and style of politics. His undisguised disregard for legal constraints during his presidency and his crude attempts to subvert the inauguration of his successor refuted deeply held assumptions about how the democratic politics of the United States are supposed to work. But the larger problem is one of narrative. Whatever the many reverses that have occurred along the way, the span of U.S. history since the aftermath of the Second World War has been held to be one by which the current of history has been slowly and imperfectly flowing toward social and racial equality, increased rights, and the deepening of democratic practices. However, as Trump’s narrow defeat by Biden in 2020 served to confirm, that current has changed direction. This is a change that is larger than the man. Especially once he was stripped of the ill-fitting trappings of office, he has been

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revealed as the boorish and insubstantial figure he always was. But, regardless of whether Trump succeeds in rebuilding his political coalition in time for the election in 2024, it is already clear that the next Republican presidential candidate will be defined—in policies and in political personality—by the heritage of Trump. In short, the recognition that Trump was not a parenthesis has become part of the new orthodoxy that has been endlessly repeated by political commentators since November 2020.1 That is their responsibility, and they are right to explore where it might lead. But the rather different task that falls to historians is to analyze the historical processes from which the Trump phenomenon emerged. In short, we need a new narrative, one that can explain the history of now. That challenge is much wider than the specific contours of U.S. politics. Trump has provided the Western European political elite with ample opportunity to find in the corruption and charlatanism of his presidency familiar demonstrations of the crudity of American politics, contrasted against the supposed sophistication of the European model. Their grounds for doing so are, however, distinctly insecure. As Jonathan Sperber argues eloquently, the Brexit referendum result in 2016 and the electoral victory of Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom in 2019 are just two of the most visible manifestations of the wider vulnerability of European democratic structures to challenge from below, through the emergence of movements of economic and political protest across southern and central Europe, or from above, through—as in Hungary and Poland—the dismantling of constitutional and judicial structures.2 In Germany, France, and the institutions of the European Union in Brussels, the logics of centrist deal making remain for the moment rather uncertainly in place, but the established political class risks becoming the ancien régime as the rumble of a new European 1848 draws closer. How might historians seek to understand this change? Probably they should start by throwing away the templates and narratives of the twentieth century. Yes, of course, there was much in the actions and rhetoric that surrounded the chaotic invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, that recalled the street violence of the Nazi Party, but such analogies can easily be stretched far beyond the plausible. Occasional favorable references among fringe politicians to the fascist past in Germany, Austria, and Italy aside, there is little to suggest that the new politics has its origins in Europe’s mid-twentieth-century past. That, of course, is one of the secrets of its success. Like Trump’s approach to the U.S. Civil War, Europe’s populists wear their history lightly, seizing opportunistically on the injustices of the Treaty of Trianon in Hungary, the legacies of communist rule in Poland, or the supposed grandeur of Benito Mussolini’s fascist empire in Italy to invest their present-day campaigns with some historical depth of field. But this is not the main story. Their politics is part of a new history, that of the twenty-first century.3

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Historians therefore need to terminate their narrative of the twentieth century. They can squabble politely over whether its endpoint lay in the demise of the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989, the great implosion of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, or the new challenges so powerfully expressed by the attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11 and the subsequent surges of radicalized Islamic violence in Europe.4 But what matters, in Europe as in America, is less the choice of dates than the way these events form part of a larger process: the emergence of a new era, one we might term the History of the Present. There are multiple aspects to this new historical era: the financial crash of 2008–2009, the emergence of an authoritarian China with massive economic power, and the sudden and disruptive transition from a print and televisual culture rooted in languages and national borders to a global and digital world. But, to understand the new politics of Trump and his European equivalents, three elements provide the trig points from which we can map the uncharted landscape. The first is the demise of stable meanings of democracy and, indeed, of the political. The creation of a formal and disciplined political sphere was one of the great legacies of the modernization of the West from the 1860s to the 1960s. As expressed by the complex organizational charts of European and American governments that illustrated political science textbooks of the later twentieth century, it conveyed a message of democratic politics as complex, managerial, and above all inherently solid.5 But that machinery has now gone. The old politics continues to happen, but it does not rule. Power has shifted from parliaments, parties, and the conventional institutions of political debate—notably the political press—to new spaces, some community based, others digital, which lack the organizational skeleton of the politics of the twentieth century. They are amorphous and fast-changing currents that can carry individuals and issues such as Black Lives Matter and QAnon to transitory prominence, but after their demise, they leave little by way of organizational structures behind them. This is the new unpredictable reality of democratic politics, yet it is neither obviously democratic nor clearly political. Instead, it effaces the divisions between the political and the wider worlds of communication and the entertainment media, creating new spaces in which sports stars, TV celebrities, and rap artists communicate more directly and effectively with the public than those who remain constrained within the label of “politician.” It is easy to bemoan these changes and to see in them the demise of the democratic politics of old.6 But it is also pointless to do so. Democratic politics has burst its banks and has become part of a much wider public sphere, in which the democratic process has been adulterated through the addition of a much wider range of emotions, grievances, and forms of identity, as well as dreams of a better world, both collective and individual.

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The second trig point is therefore the emergence of new forms of citizenship. Once again the term forms part of the political past, redolent of Enlightenment assumptions of the rational (male) citizen participating with appropriate seriousness in the formal political process. This model was challenged fundamentally by the comradeship of the communist revolutionary project and by the racial identities of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, but it reemerged to form a central building block of the democratic politics of the second half of the twentieth century. The duties of these citizens were manifold: they were required to vote soberly and with due decorum, to pay their taxes, to obey the laws and the comprehensive regulatory structures of modern societies, and in the case of young men in many states, to serve in the conscript armies. But that, of course, was only half of the deal. The other half was the provision by the state of a predictable personal and collective world, through an ever wider range of social goods in the form of housing and education, as well as the safety nets of welfare and health provision that mitigated the anxieties that had haunted previous generations. That model reached its high point around the 1970s, with the construction in the United States and Europe of larger and more complex institutions of government that anticipated the needs of citizens and provided solutions that were far beyond the resources of citizens to bring about themselves.7 But, since the 1980s, this model has everywhere been in retreat. Government—as we have learned painfully through the current pandemic— does not possess the resources to provide reliably for the health of its citizens. Under the pressure of neoliberalism and marketization, state institutions have been emptied out of much of their former power and have been replaced by market-driven companies and a range of semipublic and semiprivate institutions, which compete to supplant provision by the state. Few citizens positively willed this change, but they have adapted rapidly to its reality. And, if the state provides so much less, so the citizens are less willing to pay its taxes, obey its laws, or respect its leaders. This is the mentality of what is often called the new populism—a term that seems inescapable in describing the politics of the present but that simultaneously risks defining it in too narrowly political terms.8 What is different about the politics of Trump, Italy’s Matteo Salvini, or Hungary’s Viktor Orbán is not that they seek to use mendaciously the language of the common man or woman—the real majority—against some form of privileged elite. Most of their supporters can see such claims as the all-tootransparent forms of marketing that they are. But those who vote for them choose to do so because they find in their forms of antipolitics the expression of their grievances against a wider regime—an order, a set of rules—that they do not think is on their side. In sum, they do not, for the most part, seek to will revolutionary change, but they enjoy expressing their grievances against

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those—bureaucrats in Brussels or Washington, or closer to home in national political capitals—who embody the established order. Historians underestimate at their peril the seriousness of these choices. Their decisions might be distracted at times by the slogans and emotions of outmoded nationalist or ethnic languages, but at heart most twenty-first-century citizens know what they want and indeed what they do not want. If there is one conclusion that emerges loud and clear from the great weight of studies that have been undertaken on the electorate of the Rassemblement National in France since the 1980s and the studies of subsequent surges in populist political movements up to Trump and Brexit,9 it is that the electors who voted for them knew what they were doing and why they were doing it. Three themes dominate: security, control, and the primacy of the personal. These citizens want protection from crime, from immigration and its perceived socioeconomic consequences, and from the alien threats—racial, environmental, and cultural—that stalk a much less predictable world. They consequently also want control: control of their local neighborhood and their national society but also the control to decide what they want for themselves, rather than what others might deem to be good for them. These are not proud Know Nothings, but they are deeply impatient of Know Alls. They therefore also want the right to make their own decisions— call it freedom, if you want—be that in terms of their identity, sexuality, and values or, more prosaically, in how they live their daily lives. Political commentators often focus on the authoritarian and intolerant aspects of the new politics, as reflected in protest campaigns against the rights of gender or of race, but at the core of the new politics is often a surprising willingness to accept diversity, as long as it does not prejudice the wider unity of society. This, then, is the third trig point of the new politics. The agenda of politics has disappeared and has done so in ways that exclude any return to the political frontiers of left and right of the twentieth century. Many of the old issues have not gone away: in a time of economic insecurity, present and future, the mobilizing power of class will remain evident. But its force manifests itself not through the representative institutional hierarchies of old but through the new protest campaigns of factory gates and direct action, as well as the denunciation of the oligarchical wealthy through the tools of social media. Class, moreover, is no longer the reliable determinant of political identity that it once was. As the chaotic exuberance of the movement of the gilets jaunes in France in 2018–2019 demonstrated, it coexists with other bearers of identity, be they ethnic, gendered, or community based: the intoxicating solidarity of the imagined “we” against the army of “them.” The new politics therefore lacks what would have been regarded until recently as a coherent agenda. The short attention span encouraged by a digital universe is replicated in politics through the shifting shapes of a rapidly moving succession of primarily visual images. This, of course, is what Trump understood

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quicker than most. Coherence and policy making matter much less than the empty gesture or the transient announcement: declaring you are going to build a wall does not require you to build one. Indeed, one suspects that very few of his supporters thought that he would build the wall, just as one might question how far those who voted leave in the Brexit referendum campaign actually intended to bring about the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union. The one figure who seems not to have learned this new truth is Russian president Vladimir Putin. Having built up the rhetorical case for an attack on Ukraine, he then proceeded in February 2022 to launch a large-scale invasion, which has rapidly turned into a military and economic quagmire. Whether Putin will find the means to escape from it with his power intact remains difficult to predict. But the larger truth is surely that in this new era leaders should not seek to achieve what they say they want to, especially if it imposes large-scale sacrifices on their citizens. Political action is now more about the theater than the end result: Hamilton on stage rather than at the ballot box. The gilets jaunes who occupied traffic circles on the edges of French provincial towns might appear to have been rather ineffectual compared with their predecessors of more than two hundred years earlier who stormed the Bastille. But to regard such actions as naïve or ineffectual is to misunderstand their purpose. They are the means of expressing an identity or grievance, rather than the conventional pursuit of a goal, still less a wish to take power. The era when political and ideological affiliations were for life has largely evaporated. Instead, increasingly large numbers of citizens lend their votes and support to a series of diverse causes—often through a momentary liking of a tweet or a signature on a digital petition—which respond to their emotions, group identity, or aspirations.10 There is much that is disconcerting in the new politics, but it would be wrong to dismiss it as the rise of a new barbarism. The devil has not once again acquired all of the best tunes, and the new political world is one that can generate a wide range of outcomes.11 Nor will it be necessarily as radical as it currently seems. With time, the disruptive impact of figures such as Trump may be channeled within new norms, enabling a continuity of institutional structures to reassert itself, within or without the Republican Party. But, for now, it suffices to recognize that the mentality of incremental reformist change that was embedded in the machinery of Western European and American politics in the later twentieth century has in large part disappeared. The future could be many things, but it seems highly unlikely that it will be social democratic.12 This requires historians to change their focus. Institutional structures, ideological traditions, and indeed democratic norms have been replaced by a less disciplined and more open politics, in which the aspiration to save the planet and end racism can coexist alongside the wish to reassert the nation-state and to control immigration. The incoherence between and within such attitudes matters less than the

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pervasive sense of a daily referendum in which new practices of direct democracy coexist with a visual theater of rhetoric and gesture. With greater skill than his many detractors would readily admit, Trump provided a first sketch of the character of the new politics. But he too will quite rapidly come to seem out of date. The unpredictable history of the present has only just begun.

Notes 1. Samuel Moyn, “Biden Says ‘America Is Back.’ But Will His Team of Insiders Repeat Their Old Mistakes?,” Guardian, December 1, 2020. 2. Jonathan Sperber, “The Ideals of 1989 Carried to the Grave,” H-Diplo/ISSF policy series, ed. D. Labrosse, April 6, 2021, https://issforum.org /ISSF/PDF/PS2021-19.pdf. 3. This is similar to the point well made by Thomas G. Otte in “2016 Revisited: The Trump Presidency in Perspective,” H-Diplo/ISSF policy series, ed. D. Labrosse, February 18, 2021, https://issforum.org /ISSF/PDF/PS2021-8.pdf. 4. See, notably, Eric J. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914– 1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994); and Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992). 5. I have written about a characteristic example of these texts, Herman Finer, The Major Governments of Modern Europe (London: Methuen, 1960), in Martin Conway, “Democracy in Western Europe After 1945,” in Democracy in Modern Europe: A Conceptual History, ed. J. Kurunmäki, J. Nevers, and H. te Velde (New York: Berghahn, 2018), 231–56. 6. See, for example, A. C. Grayling, Democracy and Its Critics (London, 2017). 7. I have written about this in Martin Conway, Western Europe’s Democratic Age, 1945– 1968 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 199–254. 8. Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 9. Pascal Perrineau, Le symptôme Le Pen: radiographie des électeurs du Front National (Paris: Fayard, 1997); Harold D. Clarke, Matthew Goodwin, and Paul Whiteley, Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, “The Grip of Populism,” Sunday Times, October 7, 2018. 10. The concept of voters lending their support to a political party was articulated explicitly by Boris Johnson on the night of the result of the 2019 election, to describe the votes gained by the Conservative Party in areas of the north of England that had formerly voted for the Labour Party: “You may only have lent us your vote, you may not think of yourself as a natural Tory and you may intend to return to Labour next time round.” Guardian, December 13, 2019. 11. Charles S. Maier writes about this with characteristic vigor in chapter  42 of this volume. 12. Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise on Our Present Discontents (London: Allen Lane, 2010).

CONTRIBUTORS

Jeremy Adelman is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and the director of the Global History Lab at Princeton University. His recent books include Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (2013) and Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: The History of Humankind from Origins to the Present, 6th ed. (2020). Lindsay Aqui joined the University of Westminster in 2020 as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, following an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. Her most recent book, The First Referendum: Reassessing Britain’s Entry to Europe, 1973–75, was published in 2020. She is currently writing a history of the first generation of British officials and politicians that went to Brussels to work in the institutions of the European Community. Emma Ashford is a senior fellow in the New American Engagement Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. Her most recent book is Oil, the State, and War: The Foreign Policies of Petrostates (2022). Deborah Avant is the Sié Chéou-Kang Chair and director of the Sié Center for International Security and Diplomacy at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver. Her most recent publications are Civil Action and the Dynamics of Violence in Conflicts (with Marie Berry, Erica Chenoweth, Rachel Epstein, Cullen Hendrix, Oliver Kaplan, and Timothy Sisk, 2019) and The New Power Politics: Networks and Transnational Security Governance (with Oliver Westerwinter, 2016). Dayna Barnes is an associate professor in the College of International Security Affairs at the National Defense University. She is the author of Architects of Occupation:

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Contributors

American Experts and Planning for Postwar Japan (2017) and is currently writing a new global history of the Second World War in Asia. Michael Barnett is University Professor of International Affairs and Political Science at George Washington University. Among his books are Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (2011) and The Star and the Stripes: A History of the Foreign Policies of American Jews (2016). Alessandro Brogi is professor of history at the University of Arkansas. He is the author of several books and articles on French and Italian relations with the United States, including Confronting America: The Cold War Between the United States and the Communists in France and Italy (2011, 2nd ed. 2014). He recently he coedited (with Giles Scott-Smith and David J. Snyder) an essay collection entitled The Legacy of J. William Fulbright: Policy, Power, and Ideology (2019). Joshua Busby is associate professor of public affairs at the University of Texas–Austin and a nonresident fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Stephen Chaudoin is an assistant professor in the Department of Government at Harvard University. His research analyzes the conditions under which international institutions affect state behavior, with an emphasis on international political economy and international legal institutions. Susan Colbourn is associate director of the Program in American Grand Strategy at Duke University. She is the author of Euromissiles (2022). Martin Conway is professor of contemporary European history at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. His books include The Sorrows of Belgium: Liberation and Political Reconstruction, 1944–1947 (2012) and Western Europe’s Democratic Age, 1945–1968 (2020). Jonathan M. DiCicco is professor of political science and international relations at Middle Tennessee State University, where he teaches in the international affairs MA program. A senior fellow with the TransResearch Consortium, DiCicco researches power transitions, leaders and leadership, and international rivalries, current and historical. Representative works appear in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Studies Quarterly, Political Research Quarterly, and The Oxford Handbook of US National Security (2018). Elizabeth Economy is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. She is the author of The World According to China (2021), as well as several other books, most recently The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State (2018). She also is a member of the Aspen Strategy Group. Matthew Evangelista is President White Professor of History and Political Science in the Department of Government at Cornell University, where he served as department chair and as director of the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. He teaches at the ASERI Graduate School of Economics and International Relations of the Catholic University of Milan and serves on the comitato scientifico of the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi in Turin.

Contributors

507

Sir Lawrence Freedman was professor of war studies at King’s College London from 1982 to 2014. He was the official historian of the Falklands Campaign and a member of the official UK Inquiry into the Iraq War. In addition to the Future of War: A History (2017), he published Strategy: A History in 2013. F. Gregory Gause III is professor of international affairs and John H. Lindsey ’44 Chair in the Department of International Affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University. He also serves as the department head and as a faculty affiliate of the school’s Center for Grand Strategy. His most recent book is The International Relations of the Persian Gulf (2010). George N. Georgarakis holds a joint PhD in political science from Columbia University and Sciences Po, Paris. His principal research interests lie in public opinion, the psychology of political behavior, persuasion, framing, emotions, and the design and analysis of randomized experiments. James Goldgeier is a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor of international relations at American University’s School of International Service, where he served as dean from 2011 through 2017. Stacie E. Goddard is the Mildred Lane Kemper Professor of Political Science and Paula Phillips Bernstein ’58 Director of the Madeleine K. Albright Institute at Wellesley College. Her articles have appeared in outlets such as International Organization, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, International Theory, Security Studies, as well as in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Foreign Affairs. Her most recent book is When Right Makes Might: Rising Powers and World Order (2019). William Glenn Gray is an associate professor of history at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. He has published books, articles, and book chapters on various facets of German foreign relations. His new monograph, Trading Power (2022), draws this material together into an interpretation of German grand strategy from Adenauer to Schmidt. His current book project is entitled “Continental Giants: West German Capitalism and Brazil’s Development Dictatorship, 1949–1990.” William I. Hitchcock is the William W. Corcoran Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Among other works, he is the author of The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II (2008), a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s (2018), which was a New York Times bestseller. He is now writing a book on American reactions to the rise of fascism in the 1930s. Richard H. Immerman, a former president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) and recipient of its Stuart Bernath Book and Lecture Prizes and Peter Hahn Distinguished Service Award, has written about intelligence and foreign policy for four decades. Now retired from Temple University, his academic appointments included the Francis Deserio Chair in Strategic

508

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Intelligence at the U.S. Army War College and the Stanley Kaplan Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Williams College. Immerman also served as an assistant deputy director of national intelligence and chaired the Department of State’s Historical Advisory Committee. Ryan Irwin is an associate professor at the University at Albany-SUNY and the author of Gordian Knot: Apartheid and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order (2012). Robert Jervis was Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Politics at Columbia University. His most recent book is How Statesmen Think (2017). He was president of the American Political Science Association in 2000–2001 and was the founding editor of the International Security Studies Forum. He received career achievement awards from the International Society of Political Psychology and ISA’s Security Studies Section, the Grawemeyer Award for the book with the Best Ideas for Improving World Order, and the National Academy of Science’s triannual award for behavioral sciences contributions to avoiding nuclear war. He was a member of the British Academy, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences. Victor Kattan is senior research fellow at the University of Nottingham School of Law. His work has been published in leading academic journals, including the American Journal of International Law, the Leiden Journal of International Law, and the Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law, as well as blogs, including Opinio Juris. His latest book, edited with the late Peter Sluglett, is Violent Radical Movements in the Arab World: The Ideology and Politics of Nonstate Actors (2019). Audie Klotz is a professor of political science in the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. Her award-winning work spans theories of international relations, qualitative methods, transnational activism, global migration, and identity politics, with an overarching emphasis on race. She builds upon a specialization in the Southern African region and more broadly the former British Empire. Diane N. Labrosse is the executive and managing editor of H-Diplo and senior editor of H-Diplo/ISSF. She is coeditor, along with Robert Jervis, Francis Gavin, and Joshua Rovner, of Chaos in the Liberal Order: The Trump Presidency and International Politics in the Twenty-First Century (2018). Robert Legvold is Marshall D. Shulman Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. His most recent book is Return to Cold War (2016). Jason Ludwig is a doctoral student in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. He researches the history of governmental efforts to find computational solutions to social problems in the United States. Charles S. Maier received his PhD from Harvard University in 1967 and is currently Leverett Saltonstall Research Professor of History at Harvard University. His most recent books are Once Within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging Since 1500 (2016) and The Project State and Its Rivals: A New History of the 20th and 21st Centuries (2023).

Contributors

509

Nivi Manchanda is a reader in international politics at Queen Mary, University of London. She is interested in questions of racism, empire, and borders. She is the coeditor of Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line (2014). Her most recent book is Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge (2020). She sits on the editorial board of International Studies Quarterly, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, and Security Dialogue. She was the coeditor in chief of the journal Politics from 2018 to 2021. Helen V. Milner is the B. C. Forbes Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and the director of the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. She has written extensively on issues related to international and comparative political economy, the connections between domestic politics and foreign policy, and the impact of globalization on domestic politics. Jonathan Monten is associate professor of political science and codirector of the International Public Policy Program at University College London. A. Dirk Moses is Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His latest book is The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (2021). He edits the Journal of Genocide Research. Nicholas Mulder is assistant professor of history at Cornell University and the author of the forthcoming The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War (2022). Michelle Murray is associate professor of politics at Bard College. She is author of The Struggle for Recognition in International Relations: Status, Revisionism, and Rising Powers (2019), which argues that the struggle for recognition and status is an important determinant of the outcomes of power transitions. Frank Ninkovich is professor emeritus of history at St. John’s University, New York City. His next book will offer a history of U.S. foreign relations since the year 2000. Joshua Rovner is associate professor in the School of International Service at American University. He is the author of Fixing the Facts: National Security and the Politics of Intelligence (2011) and coeditor of Chaos in the Liberal Order: The Trump Presidency and International Politics in the Twenty-First Century (2018). Randall L. Schweller is professor of political science, director of the Program for the Study of Realist Foreign Policy, a Social and Behavioral Sciences Joan N. Huber Faculty Fellow at Ohio State University, and former editor in chief of Security Studies. He is the author of Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple: Global Discord in the New Millennium (2014), Unanswered Threats: Political Constraints on the Balance of Power (2006), and Deadly Imbalances: Tripolarity and Hitler’s Strategy of World Conquest (1998).

510

Contributors

Sarah B. Snyder teaches at American University’s School of International Service. She is the author of two award-winning books, From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists Transformed U.S. Foreign Policy (2018) and Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (2011). Robert Y. Shapiro is the Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government, professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University, and the president of the Academy of Political Science. His research has focused on the interplay of public opinion, policy making, political leadership, and the mass media in the United States. His most recent book is Perspectives on Presidential Elections, 1992–2000 (2021). Rebecca Slayton is associate professor at Cornell University, jointly appointed in the Science and Technology Studies Department and the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Her first book, Arguments That Count: Physics, Computing, and Missile Defense, 1949–2012 (2013), shows how the rise of computing expertise reshaped public policies and perceptions about the risks of missile defense in the United States. She is currently working on Shadowing Cybersecurity, a book that examines the history of cybersecurity expertise through the interplay of innovation and repair. Jennifer Spindel is assistant professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire, where her work focuses on international security, foreign policy, and the arms trade. She is working on a book manuscript about signaling in international politics, using arms sales to show how states rely on symbols and shared understandings to communicate their intentions and beliefs. Kathryn C. Statler is professor of history at the University of San Diego. She is the author of Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam (2007) and coeditor (with Andrew Johns) of The Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, and the Globalization of the Cold War (2006), as well as numerous articles and book chapters. She is currently at work on a manuscript titled “Lafayette’s Ghost: How Women and War Kept the Franco-American Alliance for 250 Years.” Angela Stent is professor emerita at Georgetown University and a senior nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution. She is the author, most recently, of Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and with the Rest (2020). James R. Stocker is associate professor of global affairs at Trinity Washington University. He is the author of Spheres of Intervention: US Foreign Policy and the Collapse of Lebanon, 1967–1976 (2016). John A. Thompson is an emeritus reader in American history and an emeritus fellow of St Catharine’s College at the University of Cambridge. His principal research interests have been American liberalism and U.S. foreign policy. His publications include Reformers and War: American Progressive Publicists and the First World

Contributors

511

War (1987), Woodrow Wilson (2002), A Sense of Power: The Roots of America’s Global Role (2015), and numerous articles and book chapters. Christy Thornton is an assistant professor of sociology and Latin American studies at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy (2021). Dustin Tingley is professor of government in the Government Department at Harvard University. Dustin is deputy vice provost for advances in learning. His research interests include American foreign policy, attitudes toward global climate technologies and policies, and the intersection of causal inference and machinelearning methods for the social sciences. Thomas W. Zeiler is a professor of history and the director of the Program in International Affairs at the University of Colorado–Boulder. He will publish his latest book, Capitalist Peace: A History of American Free-Trade Internationalism, in 2022. Samuel Zipp is a writer and historian, author of The Idealist: Wendell Willkie’s Wartime Quest to Build One World (2020) and other works on twentieth-century culture, ideas, politics, and urbanism, including Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (2012) and the coedited volume Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs (2016). He is professor of American studies and urban studies at Brown University.

INDEX

Abraham Accords, 25, 192, 274, 275–276, 292, 384, 450–51, 483, and Biden, 332, 335 Abrams, Elliot, 192, 281, 352 Abu Akleh, Shireen, 339–40, 453 Acheson, Dean, 99–100 Afghanistan: American withdrawal from, 20, 23, 25–26, 43–44, 67, 121, 135, 146, 157, 225, 230, 242–43, 255, 374, 390, 393, 420, 427, 452, 473, 495; Biden administration policy toward, 43–44, 146–47, 372, 374, 420, 452; India and, 223–24, 226–27, 229, 230; terrorism in, 94; Trump administration policy toward, 20–21, 30, 120, 132–33, 223–24, 226, 242, 271, 321, 374, 384, 474, 483, 485; Soviet invasion of, 328; war in, 116, 117, 120, 131–33, 374, 384; U.S. public opinion, 388, 389–90, 473–474. See also Taliban al-Qaeda, 24, 147, 490 Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), 240, 243, 431. See also populism America First, 110, 295, 471, 477; America First Committee, 295, 428–29; America First Party, 295; consequences of, 43–44, 46; Trump’s, 2, 16–19, 41, 55–57, 65–66, 78, 80, 108, 112, 116, 119–120, 163,

199–200, 218, 237, 238, 263, 295, 299, 357, 361–62, 365, 369–70, 377–78, 383–84, 416, 428, 447 459–60, 481–82; Wilson’s, 295 American Civil War, 87, 122, 499 American exceptionalism, 88, 99, 320, 361, 425, 434, 469, 471; and Biden, 86, 473, 477; and Trump, 348; Trump’s, 56 American Zionist Movement (AZM), 336 Amnesty International, 337 Áñez, Jeanine, 282 antisemitism, 16, 32, 295, 334, 336 Arab Peace Initiative, 451 Arab Spring, 451 Arab-Israeli Wars: Six-Day War, 341; 1973 Arab-Israeli War, 274 artificial intelligence (AI), 57, 463 Asia, 71, 80, 230, 320, 388, 419, 463–64, 473–474, 491; and American immigration policy, 327–38; Asians in the United States, 299, 459; and Biden, 419–20, 462; and economy/trade, 56, 78, 120, 153, 154, 157, 214–15, 375; and Obama, 6, 69, 121, 197, 435; and security, 187; and Trump, 6, 56, 78, 89, 109, 120, 218–19, 223–24, 228, 229, 460; and the United States, 117

514

Index

Asia-Pacific, 121, 181, 211–12, 216, 217, 219; and security, 212, 298. See also Indo-Pacific Assad, Bashar al-, 132, 191, 384 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 214 Australia, 96, 223, 264; and AUKU.S., 218, 255–56, 265–66, 427, 462; and nuclear submarine deal, 22–23, 44, 218, 255, 265, 427, 462; and “the quad” relationship, 217, 225, 229–30, 460, 462 Austria, 240, 499; Freedom Party of Austria, 240; and right-wing populism, 430–31 Austria, 499 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), 130 Bahrain, 169, 170, 192, 270, 271, 274, 276, 319, 332, 450, 451, 484 Bannon, Stephen, 108, 276, 473 Barr, William, 153 Belgium, 239, 430, 431 Bensouda, Fatou, 372 Berlusconi, Silvio, 431 Biden Doctrine, 384–385, 429 Biden, Joe: administration, 9; campaign, 470; climate change, 8; domestic policy, 311; economy/trade, 23, 62, 265; election, 2, 22–23, 82–83, 93, 236, 404, 415, 420–21, 467, 489, 498–99; foreign policy, 67, 384–85, 474–75, 477, 485–86; immigration, 25, 31, 281–82, 325; public opinion of, 391, 463; responses to Trump’s policies, 6, 22–26, 31, 43, 61, 62, 67, 80, 93, 121–22, 145–47, 165, 171–72, 173–74, 202–3, 254–55, 274, 285, 312, 328, 332–34, 353–54, 375, 485; State of the Union address, 420; statements, 62, 68, 86, 165, 404. See also under specific entries bin Laden, Osama, 147 bin Salman, Mohammed (MBS), 42, 142, 273–74, 275, 352, 453 Biodefense, 299, 309 Bismarck, Otto von, 73, 97 Black Lives Matter, 33, 293–94, 307–8, 322, 337–38, 434, 500 Blinken, Antony, 132, 320, 334–35, 336, 338–39, 353–54, 418, 436, 462, 463

Boehner, John, 85 Boeing, 77, 173, 419; Boeing-Airbus trade dispute, 419, 421 Bolivia, and Trump, 282–83 Bolsonaro, Jair, 282; and Trump, 282 Bolton, John, 280; and Africa, 299; and arms treaties, 187, 403; and democracy promotion, 282; memoir, 185, 189; and the Middle East, 192; national security advisor, 16, 19, 186, 403, 482, 489; resignation, 30; statements, 154–55, 188, 191, 225, 279–80 borders, 55, 61, 109, 157, 202, 216, 237, 240, 274, 296, 298, 311, 362, 408, 437, 450–451, 461, 471, 500 Bosnia, 88, 419 Brazil, 322; and past U.S. foreign policy, 282; and Trump, 282, 360 Brennan, John, 139, 140, 141, 337 Brexit, 499, 503; after, 23, 263, 264–67, 481; and the EU, 343; and populism, 431, 502; and Trump, 4, 182, 260–63, 263–64, 267. See also Great Britain Brothers of Italy, 431. See also populism Brussels, 263, 499, 501–502; and NATO, 248–49. See also European Union Buchanan, Patrick, 83, 295 Bureau of Democracy, Rights, and Labor, 353 Burns, William, 146, 147 Bush, George H. W., 281, 419 Bush, George W., 23, 79, 117, 120, 121, 128, 130, 146, 280, 294, 320, 321, 498; administration, 5, 69, 130, 131–32, 153, 363, 418–19, 429; and Afghanistan, 131, and China, 69; and the Middle East, 131, 275, 451; and public opinion, 391 Cameron, David, 164 Campbell, Kurt, 418, 419–20 Canada, 266; G7, 41, NAFTA, 79, 127, 384; and Trump, 58, 77; and United States–Mexico-Canada Agreement (U.S.MCA), 79, 127, 285, 375, 384 capitalism, 201, 472; market capitalism, 87, racial capitalism, 318–19, 320–22 Capitol riots/insurection (January 6, 2021, insurrection), 2, 31, 48, 83, 85 106, 291, 304, 312, 431, 499; consequences of, 83,

Index 113; domestic politics, 112; groups in, 84, 105; international reaction, 475; and race, 105–7, 307, 322; and Trump, 33, 82, 104–5, 146, 193, 200–201, 218, 362, 364, 460, 471, 480. See also white supremacy CARES Act, 371 Carlson, Tucker, 161, 240, 365 Carter, Jimmy, 117; administration, 164, 350, 352 Castro, Fidel, 280, 281 Central America, 391, 491, and Trump, 16–17, 279, 283–85, 377; and U.S. policy, 154–55, 281, 283, 284 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 135, 138, 141–42, 186; and Biden, 142, 146, 147; black sites, 131; DCIA, 139, 140, 141, 142, 147, 294 337, 483; drones, 147; and Russian election interference, 139–40, 141, 143; Russian invasion of Ukraine, 147, 148, and Trump, 138–40, 141–43, 145, 147, 294–95 Chaos in the Liberal Order, 1–2, 85–86, 426 Charlottesville, 106, 322 Chávez, Hugo, 280, 281 Cheney, Dick, 130 Chicago Council (CCGA) 2020 survey, 386–91 China, 7, 43, 119, 158, 322; and Biden, 73, 202–3, 417–421; COVID-19, 8, 48, 118, 202, 219, 223, 252, 363–64, 372, 392, 458, 461, 470, 475; economy and trade, 16, 22, 23, 25, 57–58, 61–62, 77–78, 79–80, 88, 119, 212, 214–15, 362, 371, 375, 470, 484, 500; and Europe, 435; and France, 255; human rights, 30, 199, 243, 349–50, 362, 372, 418, 464, 484, 491; and India, 223–28, 230; and Latin America, 213; rise of, 61, 68–69, 70, 223–24, 361, 363, 364–65, 370, 378, 459, 463–64, 474; nuclear weapons, 187, 198–200, 449, 492; and Russia, 6–7, 186, 203–4, 410, 437, 495; sanctions, 24, 156–57, 158, 172, 196, 388–89; sanctions against the U.S., 173; and Taiwan, 6, 71, 170, 172–73, 211, 215–16, 387, 395, 411, 412, 420, 437–38; tariffs, 16, 25, 58, 77, 118, 156, 196, 199, 389, 484; threat of, 2, 6, 69, 71–72, 89, 118–19, 120, 121, 243–44, 365, 403–4, 409–10, 416, 486, 490, 494; treatment of

515

the Uyghurs, 30, 199, 362, 372, 418, 484, and Trump, 6, 8, 16, 18, 21, 24, 30, 48, 58, 70, 72–73, 76–78, 79, 109, 156–57, 163, 196–97, 200, 202, 212, 216, 218–19, 226, 298–99, 359–60, 361, 362, 372, 384, 458–59, 460, 482, 484, 485, 489; and the UK, 264; and the United States, 68–73, 89, 122, 197–98, 200–202, 204, 214, 217, 242, 276, 327, 341, 363–64, 388–89, 391, 399, 462–63, 491, 405; U.S. public opinion on, 388–89 Chinese Communist Party, 200, 495 Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, 327 Clapper, James, 139, 141 Claver-Carone, Mauricio, 279 climate change, 49, 50, 51, 97, 257, 284, 370, 418, 476; and Biden, 254, 362, 364, 399, 407–8, 416; and China, 461; international cooperation, 8, 119, 238, 254, 363, 388–89, 407–8, 410, 416, 427, 463, 491; and Trump, 7–8, 17, 56, 58, 128, 251, 291, 359, 361, 384, 481; and U.S. public opinion, 386, 391, 392–93, 436 Clinton, Hillary D. R., 16, 68, 237; and elections, 69, 138, 184, 436; foreign affairs, 132, 401; politics and policy of, 17; and Trump, 190, 283 Clinton, William (Bill) J., 83, 128, 130, 237, 275, 276, 283, 320, 418, 494; administration of, 60, 211, 294, 326, 404 Coates, Ta-Nehesi, 47, 85, 88 Cold War, 4–5, 66, 73, 86, 97, 203, 279, 298, 401, 419, 428, 435; and Brazil, 282; and liberalism, 110, 471; and nationalism, 430; and NATO, 60, new/second, 7, 57, 68, 89, 118–19, 122, 201–4, 212, 216–17, 218–19, 298, 378, 411–12, 417; post–Cold War period, 61, 70, 71, 95, 97, 99, 116, 118, 198–99, 403–4, 417–18, 429–30, 474, postwar period, 119; rhetoric, 279–81; and the United States, 56, 87, 89, 93–94, 95, 99–100, 111, 122, 430, 432, 469, 470, 471, 474, 494; and the UK, 263; and U.S.-European relations, 55, 263, 430; and U.S.-Russian relations, 405, 411–12; and U.S.-Soviet relations in, 94, 117, 118–19, 201, 378 Colombia, 280, 281 Comey, James, 139, 140

516

Index

Commission on Unalienable Rights, 353, 354 Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), 211–12, 214, 264 Congress (U.S.), 129–30, 133, 155, 264, 281, 327, 328, 336, 350, 351, 363, 379, 494; during the Biden administration, 24, 26, 148, 336, 354, 364, 417; and Democrats, 272, 338; and January 6 insurrection, 80, 85; during the Obama administration, 130–31, 132, 187, 408; during the Trump administration, 18–22, 71, 95, 132, 134–35, 141, 142–43, 146, 164, 171, 187, 188–89, 193, 226, 282–83, 299, 306, 351, 369, 37, 372–73, 374, 375, 377, 378, 383, 402–3, 460, 482; and Trump’s impeachment hearings, 186, 252 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, 129 Coolidge, Calvin, 95 cosmopolitism, 55, 56, 79, 94, 433, 436 Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), 155, 188, 227, 402–3 COVAX, 426, 458 COVID-19 pandemic, 2, 7–8, 253, 385, 501; and Biden, 25, 121, 230, 362, 363–64, 415; and Bolsonaro, 282; hydroxychloroquine and, 29, 229; international consequences of, 55, 59, 93, 97, 230, 359, 361, 459, 491, 494; international response to, 8, 426, 427, 431–32, 458, 464; and oil, 272; protests over, 243, 431; psychological impact of, 436–37; and trade, 77, 156–57, 375; and Trump, 7–8, 29–30, 48, 78, 143, 145, 193, 203, 226, 253, 284, 299, 304, 308–11, 360, 361, 371, 432, 458–59, 460, 482; and Trump and China, 77–78, 118, 119, 196, 202, 298–99, 308 372, 384, 458, 484; and Trump and immigration, 328, 376–77; U.S domestic response, 95, 96, 106–7, 112, 218, 325–26, 364, 387, 388, 392, 393, 425. See also under specific entries Crimea, 190, 406–7; Russian annexation of, 155, 185–86, 203, 373, 402–3, 491

Crimean War (1853), 437 Cuba, 192; and the United States, 24, 154–55, 279–80, and U.S. immigration, 283–84, 326, 328 Cuban Missile Crisis, 96, 148. See also Cuba cybersecurity, 6–7, 224, 305, 362, 410, 411; cyberattacks, 97, 141, 188, 192–93, 401, 402, 404, 417, 494 da Silva, Ignacio, 282. See also Bolsonaro, Jair; Brazil Declaration of Independence, 471 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), 326, 376 de Gaulle, Charles, 254, 262, 429 Democracy in the Middle East Now (DAWN), 337 Democratic Party: and Biden, 61, 80, 470; and Biden administration, 24, 90, 203, 266–67, 337–41, 391; and climate change, 392–93; and China, 363, 388, 392; and conspiracies, 95, 309, 459; and COVID-19, 391–92, 459; domestic policy of, 237; electoral base, 385–93; foreign policy of, 273, 385–91, 416–17, 429, 436; and Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, 16; and Israel, 336–39; and Russia, 408; and Trump, 21–22, 107, 142, 184, 185, 260, 309, 402, 489; and voting, 84, 421 Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK): and Biden, 157–58; and China, 196, 223, 463; and nuclear weapons, 212, 215, 482, 484, 492, 494; and sanctions, 152–53, 155, 157–58; and Trump, 21, 22, 24, 30, 76, 120, 141, 212, 215, 219, 223, 384, 460, 482, 484, 489, 491; and the United States, 242, 349–50, 387, 463, 484, 492; and U.S. intelligence, 145. See also nuclear weapons Democratic Republic of Congo, 299 Denmark, 262, 430 Department of State: “Balancing Interests and Values” memo, 349–50 Department of State, 328, 334, 336, 339, 340, 350, 410; and Biden, 86, 416; Policy Planning Staff, 296, 349, 353, and Trump, 171, 186–87, 242, 297, 298, 353, 349–50, 353, 489

Index DeSantis, Ron, 32 Destro, Robert, 352 deterrence, 6, 7, 73, 128, 148, 211, 429, 493 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 29 disinformation, 304, 305–7, 308, 411 Draghi, Mario, 431 Dream Act, 326 Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), 286 Du Bois, W. E. B., 106 East Asia, 120; and China, 463–64; and COVID-19, 462; and Trump, 56; and the United States, 117–18, 121, 320; and U.S. immigration policy, 327. See also Asia Eastern Europe, 495–96, 500. See also Europe Ebola virus, 299, 309, 372, 482 Egypt, 22, 155, 276, 451, 453, 493 Eisenhower, Dwight, 15–16, 164; Eisenhower Doctrine, 429 El Salvador, 281, 283, 294 Environmental Protection Agency, 294 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip, 20, 42, 348–49, 448, 453 Espionage Act, 134 Étienne, Philippe, 255, 257, 427 Eurasia, 186 Europe, 468; and American exceptionalism, 425; and Biden, 22–23, 25, 43–44, 121, 165, 236, 243–44, 254, 256, 408, 419, 435, 462; climate change, 96–97; Cold War, 122, 430; COVID-19, 256, 392, 431–32, 464; and India, 230; and Israel, 339; and NATO, 43–44, 59, 76, 120, 162–163, 164, 238, 249, 252, 254, 256, 261, 373, 425–28, 462; post–Cold War, 55, 70, 418, 419, 503; postwar, 117, 147, 425, 429; and right-wing populism, 80, 240, 257, 430–31, 432, 499; and Russia, 153, 155, 240, 257, 266, 365, 409, 424, 427, 429, 436, 486; and sanctions, 153, 155, 379; and security, 69, 154, 163, 165, 244, 252, 254, 255, 256, 411, 412, 464; socialism, 500; and Trump, 6, 18, 40–41, 56, 58, 69, 76–77, 120, 147, 154, 163–64, 187, 188, 238–39, 243, 249, 252–53, 373, 403, 424, 426–28, 432–33, 482, 489, 499,

517

500; and the United States, 433–35, 438, 501; and U.S. immigration, 326, 328; U.S. foreign policy and, 59, 61–62, 70, 165, 237, 320, 329, 412, 418–20, 428–29, 495–96; and war in Ukraine, 50, 182, 257, 365, 406, 411, 436, 486; World War II, 108, 110. See also European Union European Union (EU), 22, 428, 429, 431, 463–64, 499; and Biden, 266–67; and Brexit, 23, 182, 254, 260–67, 499, 503; and China, 22, 437–38; and COVID-19, 8; embargos, 171, 173; and Iran Nuclear Deal, 449; and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Actions (JCPOA), 154, 272, 449, 483; and Russia, 379, 405–7, 408; sanctions, 266, 379, 405; tariffs, 58, 77, 253, 426; and Trump, 41, 58, 238, 261, 459; and the United States, 6, 190, 242, 254, 261–62, 295, 399, 421, 437–38, 462; Versailles declaration, 428; weakening of, 23, 429; and the World Trade Organization, 371. See also Europe executive orders, 84, 134, 187, 188, 296–97, 326, 372, 379 Facebook, 84 Farage, Nigel, 260–61. See also United Kingdom Independence Party fascism, 80, 113, 431, 499; and Trump, 66, 105, 113 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 47, 95, 139, 185, 307; and the capitol riots, 85, 307; Mar-a-Lago raid, 125, 144–45 feminism, 48, 50, 321 Flournoy, Michèle, 73 Floyd, George, 7, 307, 337 Flynn, Michael, 20, 139 489 Fox News, 385, and Trump, 84, 161, 163, 260, 349; and the Trump administration, 240 France: and Biden, 254–57, 427, 463; and COVID-19, 431–32; and China, 224; elections, 431, 502; and the European Union, 499; and India, 230; nuclear, 255, 494, and Trump, 163, 249–54; and the U.S.-UK-Australian security partnership, 255, 265–66, 247; and the United States, 429, 436, 463; war in Ukraine, 427

518

Index

Freud, Sigmund, 424–25 Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), 280–81 Fulbright, William J., 433–34 Gates, Robert, 164 Geneva Conventions, 128, 129–30 genocide, 33, 49, 86, 217, 416, 419, Genocide Convention, 34, 129 Georgia (country), 71 Georgia (state), 306 Germany, 32, 73, 191, 295, 430, 499; arms ban, 171, 173–74; and Biden, 243, 361, 463, 491; and climate change, 238; and COVID-19, 8, 431; and domestic politics, 240, 243, 431; and economy/ trade, 188, 238, 240, 244, 427–28, 491; and European cooperation, 165, 244; and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), 191, 272; military spending, 59–60, 121, 244; and NATO, 41, 59–60, 121, 238–39, 427–28, 488–89; post-WWII, 95; and Trump, 139, 163, 185, 188, 236–244, 489; and the United States, 96, 143, 237, 240–41, 242, 388, 419 Ghana, 146 Gibbon, Edward, 476–77 Gibbon Paradox, 89–90, 473, 475–77 gilets jaunes movement, 251–52, 502, 503 Gingrich, Newt, 46, 432 Giuliani, Rudy, 190 Global Compact on Migration, 40, 426 globalism, 59, 436; antiglobalism, 4, 55, 92, 95, 109, 460, 463 globalization, 66, 86, 92–94, 97, 99, 113, 238, 385, 428, 475; antiglobalization, 108, 113; and China, 461; and COVID-19, 59, 475, public opinion of, 95, 97, 98, 386–87, 393, 430; theory of, 92, 95, 98, 100–101, 476–77, and Trump, 55, 78, 92–93, 94–95, 108, 110, 112, 113, 121, 238;. See also internationalism GOP, 83, 84, 85, 90, 143, 371, 415. See also Republican Party Great Britain, 73, 218, 506. See also United Kingdom Great Depression, 76, 78, 80, 437. See also New Deal; Roosevelt, Franklin D.

great power competition (GPC), 6–7, 8, 48, 55–56, 65, 67–73, 197–204, 216, 299, 399–400, 403–4, 463, 481–48, 492 Great Recession, 107 Grenell, Richard, 143, 235, 239–241 G7/G8, 243, 266, 428; and Biden, 254, 429; and Russia, 56, 157, 185–86; and Trump, 41, 56, 163, 253, 361; and the United States, 427 G20, 427; and Biden, 256; and Trump, 238, 250, 361 Guaidó, Juan, 191, 281 Guatemala, 283, 284 Haines, Avril, 146, 147 Haiti, 31, 34, 70, 279, 383, 384, 420; Haitians, 294, 325, 326, 328, 383 Haley, Nikki, 284, 351 Hart-Celler Act, 328 Haspel, Gina, 141–42, 294, 483 Hass, Ryan, 201, 417 hate groups/hate crimes, 47, 105– 6, 298– 99 Hawley Smoot Tariff, 80 Helsinki Summit, 140–42, 184–85, 186, 189, 402, 426–27 Hernández, Juan Orlando, 282–83 Hezbollah, 191, 242 Hitler, Adolf, 42, 70, 122 Hobbes, Thomas, 393, 429 Hofstadter, Richard: “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” 432. See also populism Homeland Security, 294, 307 Honduras, 282–83, 284 Hong Kong, 375; and China, 30, 216, 461 Hoover, Herbert, 76 House of Representatives (U.S.), 47, 84, 140, 190, 311, 374, 375 Huawei, 156, 216, 240, 243, 264 Human Rights Watch (HRW), 336–37 human rights, 60, 86, 217, 462, 491; abuses of, 25, 154, 169, 292, 339, 351, 371, 388–89, 405, 417, 461, 464; and Biden, 201, 385, 435, 453–54, 485; and Europe, 243, 251, and the Trump administration, 31, 42, 76, 173, 174, 199, 218, 291, 348–54, 451–452, 460; and U.S. foreign policy, 3,

Index 22, 25, 34, 169–70, 337, 350, 351, 352, 451, 495; and the U.S. public, 84, 117, 122, 391–92 Hungary, 360, 430, 400, 501 Hussein, Saddam, 131, 139, 272–73 Immigration Act of 1924, 225 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 47, 377 Immigration and Nationality Act 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952, 326 India, 58, 322, 360, 492; and Afghanistan, 223–24, 226–27, 229, 230; and Biden, 174, 230, 256; and COVID-19, 226, 230, 462; and China, 223–28, 230; Citizenship Amendment Act, 224; and France, 230; and “the quad,” 217, 225, 460, 462; and Russia, 155, 171, 227; and Trump, 121, 181, 218, 222–230 Indonesia, 332 Indo-Pacific, 60, 223, 224, 227, 255, 484, 486; and Biden, 256; and Trump, 69, 216, 218, 228; and the United States, 72, 227, 229, 418–20 intelligence. See U.S. intelligence Inter-American Development Bank, 279 Interim National Security Strategic Guidance, 461, 463 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, 127, 163, 187, 402, 403, 426 international affairs, 3, 49, 72, 119, 391, 429, 496 international agreements, 17, 38, 158, 165, 227, 361, 383–84 international arena, 385 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 453 international constraints, 2, 30, 370–71 international cooperation, 8, 95, 424, 449; and Trump, 56, 256, 369, 378, 383–84 International Criminal Court (ICC), 129, 152–53, 335, 336, 370, 372, 450, 485 international development, 87, 299, 354 international economy, 58, 371, 491 international engagement, 462 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), 334, 336

519

international institutions, 1, 4–5, 86, 87, 97, 153, 480; and Biden, 378, 461; and Trump, 17–18, 31, 40, 152–53, 359, 370–72, 378 internationalism, 61, 476; American, 97–98, 99, 110–11; and Biden, 86, 158, 384–85, 391, 393; and COVID-19, 392; critiques of, 98–99, 100; and trade, 79, and Trump, 65, 76, 92, 94–95, 153; and the United States, 94–95 internationalists, 97, 99, 107, 110–11, 211, 257–58, 425, 436; and Biden, 378, 399; critique of, 98–99; pro- vs. antiinternationalism, 79, 80, 93, 94–95, 100, 157, 470; public opinion of, 360–61. See also internationalism; liberal internationalism international law: and Trump, 125, 127, 128, 130, 132, 133–34, 334, 335; and the United States, 3, 69, 87, 128–35, 225, 328, 335 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 242, 370–371; Special Drawing Rights, 371 international norms, 1, 71, 132, 153 international order, 4–5, 32–35, 39–40, 403, and Biden, 415, 435; and Trump, 3, 28, 34, 38–39, 40–44, 242, 481; and the United States, 61, 117, 122, 218. See also liberal international order international organizations, 254, 315, 385–86, 393, 458 international partners, 58, 266, 363 international politics, 5, 7, 10, 26; and COVID-19, 59; and Trump, 1, 9, 168, 243, 361; and the United States, 39, 199, 393 international relations (IR), 111; and racism, 48–49, 291; scholars/study of, 48–51, 68, 86, 98, 168, 291–92; theories of, 4, 6, 9, 13, 28–35, 77; and Trump, 7, 13, 22, 28–35, 48, 68, 119, 348, 378; and the United Nations, 129, and the United States, 1–2, 46, 98, 329 international security, 291–92, human security, 7, 46, 49, 312; study of, 7, 50 international society, 39 international system, 7–9, 15, 20, 21, 57, 61, 69, 73, 365, 371, 373, 412 international terrorism, 24, 390 international trade, 80, 374–75

520

Index

Iran Nuclear Deal. See the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) Iran, 142, 145, 328, 451, 463, 495; and Biden, 23, 24, 249, 335, 340, 427, 453, 454, 461–62, 492; and COVID-19, 272, and Europe, 239, 242, 253, 254; INSTEX, 154; Iran-Contra affair, 281; nuclear deal and program, 17, 24, 141, 191, 242, 248–49, 251, 272–73, 275, 384, 389, 407, 448, 449–50, 452, 453, 460, 483, 489, 492–93; public opinion, 389, 391; and Russia, 192, 226; sanctions, 17, 23–24, 120, 152, 153–54, 157, 191, 227, 243, 272, 449–50, 453; and terrorism, 24, trade/ economy, 154, 157, 227, 239, 272; and Trump, 17, 24, 30, 40, 76, 120, 133, 141, 144, 154, 191–92, 226, 250–51, 253, 270–73, 275, 295, 361, 371, 384, 447–48, 449, 451–52, 482–83; and the United States, 153, 155, 243, 257, 249–50, 389, 452, 492, 493; U.S. withdrawal from nuclear deal, 17, 40, 58, 118, 153, 158, 227, 249, 361, 362, 384, 426, 481, 482–83, 492. See also Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA); nuclear weapons Iraq, 99, 154, 273; and Biden, 452, 474–75, civil war, 449, ISIS in, 20; public opinion, 388, 389–90; and Trump, 20, 30, 116, 271, 273, 447, 448–49, 451, 483; and the United States, 70, 94, 117–18, 130, 131, 321, 473 483; U.S. public opinion of war, 390; U.S. withdrawal from, 121; war in, 84, 87–88, 116, 131, 255, 275, 296–97, 363, 374, 426, 437, 449, 474; and weapons of mass destruction, 131, 139, 391 Ireland, 262, 264, 265, 266 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), 273, 483 Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS/ Daesh), 447; and campaign against, 25–26, 30–31, 133, 134, 191, 271, 384, 452, 483; decline of, 275, 449, 452, 485, 490; and Obama, 130, 133; and Russia, 191; and the United States, 26, 133, 275, 452; and Trump. 20, 30–31, 128, 191, 271, 275, 449, 483, 485, 490 Islamic State. See Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS/Daesh)

isolationism, 69; neoisolationism, 61, 92–93, 384; and public opinion, 94–95; and Trump, 78, 92–93, 94–95, 120, 384, 428; and the United States, 16, 93, 95 Israel, 242, 483, 492; annexation of the Golan Heights, 335, 450, and Biden, 25, 292, 332–33, 334–36, 337–39, 340–41, 453–54, 491; 1993 Declaration of Principles, 341; Hamas, 333, 335, 337, 340, 450, 453; Israeli Defense Force, 319–20; Nation-State Law, 341; nuclear weapons, 493; and Palestine, 270, 274–76, 319–20, 332–41, 450, 451, 453–54, 483; relations with Arab and African states, 25, 182, 192, 270, 274–76, 319, 335, 384, 447, 448, 450–52, 453–54, 483, 485, 492, 493; and Russia, 192; terrorism law, 339; and Trump, 25, 31, 182, 270, 274–76, 319, 321, 332–34, 335, 336, 340, 351, 400, 448, 450–51, 385; two-state solution, 25, 292, 332, 341, 450, 451, 454, 453, 493; and the United States, 31, 117, 271, 319–20, 339–40, 361, 387–88, 451; and U.S. foreign policy, 333, 336–37; violence against Palestinians, 335, 337–38, 340–41, 453; West Bank, 333, 334, 335, 336, 340, 450, 453, 483. See also Abraham Accords; Jerusalem; Palestine; Peace to Prosperity Israel-Jordan Peace Deal, 451 Jaish-e-Mohammed, 225 Japan: and China, 397, 464, 492; “the quad,” 219, 225, 229–30, 460, 462; racial equity clause, 329; and Senkaku Islands, 397; security, 223, 225, 491; and Southeast Asia, 463–64; and tariffs, 77, 109, 213; trade/economy, 264–65, and Trump, 109, 162, 213, 218, 460; and the United States, 212, 387, 388; and World War II, 93, 122, 297 Jerusalem, 25, 333, 335, 338, 340, 453; as capital of Israel, 118, 275, 319, 333, 334, 384; Consular Corp of the Corpus Separatum, 335; United States embassy, 283, 333–34, 335, 384, 450, 453, 481 jihad, 271, 338 Johnson, Boris, 252, 264, 265–66, 431, 481, 499

Index

521

Kaplan, Fred, 459, 461 Kelly, John, 191 Kerry, John, 279, 407–8, 411 Khamenei, Ayatollah, 482–83 Khan, Imran, 226 Khashoggi, Jamal, 25, 42, 142, 170, 171, 173, 274, 351, 354, 451 Kim Jong-un, 30, 42, 120, 384, 482, 484, 485, 491–92 Kissinger, Henry, 60, 351 Koh, Harold Hongju, 130–31, 328 Korean War, 327. See also Democratic People’s Republic of Korea; Republic of Korea Kosovo, 241, 474; Kosovo War, 60–61, 419, 420 Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 104–5 Kurds, 20, 30, 120, 211, 474 Kushner, Jared, 273, 274, 319; Kushner Plan, 25; and Russia, 192; and Trump, 274–75, 282, 483, 493. See also Abraham Accords Kuwait, 270, 271, 273, 388

public opinion of, 385; and Trump, 360, 369–79, 426; and the United States, 34, 391–94, 416, 425. See also internationalism; internationalists liberal international order (LIO), 9–10, 357, 379, 393–94, 399, 437; and Biden, 61–62; and China, 378; demise of, 14, 33–35, 61–62, 359; and race, 33–35; and Trump, 1–4, 13–14, 32, 56, 200, 260, 359, 383, 468; and the United States, 22, 32–34, 357, 470–71. See also liberalism liberalism, 13, 33–35, 58, 65, 85, 112, 117, 409, 468; and America, 28–29, 31, 33, 34, 87, 110, 319, 320, 435; neoliberalism, 55, 56–57, 62, 84, 87, 106–7, 322, 471, 501. See also liberals liberalization, 60 liberals, 472; and American politics, 1–10, 22, 32–35, 38, 41, 43, 82, 86, 87, 89, 93, 200, 494, 496; and Biden, 6, 9, 25, 82–83, 86, 158, 337, 384–85, 494; and democracy, 60, 459, 494; economic, 218; hegemony, 424, 425–426; illiberal, 4, 32, 33, 34, 42, 62, 329, 357–58, 393–94, 470; illiberalism and the United States, 43, 292–93; neoliberal, 55–56, 62, 84, 87, 106–7, 322, 471, 501; norms, 4, 84; states, 32–33; and Trump, 4, 5, 9, 42–43, 56–57, 85, 94, 112–13, 119, 318–19, 360; values, 1, 4, 35, 60, 495; world order, 66, 86, 87–88, 89, 110–12, 329, 360, 429, 434, 435, 437, 469, 470–71 Libya, 70, 88, 130–31, 271, 276, 321, 474 Lindbergh, Charles, 295 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 432 López Obrador, Andres Manuel, 284–86

Laski, Harold, 433 Latin America, 473–74; and Trump, 182, 278–86, and the United States, 278–79. See also specific countries Lavrov, Sergei, 402, 407–8 League of Nations, 34, 329 Lebanon, 273, 449, 451 Le Pen, Marine, 256, 257. See also National Front; populism liberal internationalism, 83, 85–87, 89, 383, 399; American, 357–58, 369, 434; and Biden, 86, 158, 384–85, 391, 393; liberal internationalists, 96, 157, 399, 436, 470;

Maas, Heiko, 188, 239, 242, 243, 244 Macron, Emmanuel: and Biden, 254–58; and climate change, 248–49, 250, 256; domestic politics, 251–52, 253, 256, 431; European security, 163, 165, 252, 254, 255, 256, 257, 427; Franco-American relationship, 249, 250–51, 252, 253–54, 255, 256–57; Iranian nuclear agreements, 248–49, 250, 251, 253, 482; and NATO, 248, 252; and nuclear energy and weapons, 44, 163, 255, 265, 427; and Russia, 257; and Trump, 163, 182, 248–54, 256, 257–58

Johnson, Lyndon B., 96, 262 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), 154, 242, 248–249, 276, 407, 449, 483; and Biden, 24, 453; and Trump, 17–18, 153, 158, 251, 272–73, 276, 449–50, 481, 482–83, 489; U.S. public opinion, 389; U.S. withdrawal from, 17–18, 154, 191, 251, 272, 361, 362, 384, 449, 481, 482, 489. See also Iran; nuclear weapons jus ad bellum, 128, 129, 132, 134 jus in bello, 129–30, 132, 341

522

Index

Maduro, Nicolás, 155, 192, 280, 281–82 Maguire, Joseph, 142–43 Marshall Plan, 242 Mattis, James: as moderating influence, 67; postresignation, 48, secretary of defense, 16, 20, 31, 164, 227, 272 May, Theresa, 263–64, 481 McCain, John, 85, 351 McCarthy, Joseph, 184, 201 McConnell, Mitch, 85 McKinley, William, 95 McLaughlin, John, 140 McMaster, H. R., 16, 71, 182, 186, 272 Mead, Walter Russell, 435 Meloni, Giorgia, 431 Merkel, Angela, 283; and arms bans, 171, 172; and Biden, 172, 236, 243, 254; climate change, 238; domestic security, 241, 244; European security, 41, 238, 241, 427; and Grenell, 240, 241; refugees, 237; and Trump, 163, 182, 185, 188, 236–38, 242–43, 244, 253 Mexico, 182; and Biden, 286; and migration to the U.S., 16–17, 25, 284–86, 328, 361–62, 377; and security, 285–86, and tariffs, 58, 77, 285; and trade, 58, 79, 285; Trump antagonizing, 25, 109, 279, 285–86, 293, 298, 377; U.S. border issues, 278, 284–86, 390–91. See also NAFTA; United States–Mexico-Canada Agreement Middle East, 256, 490, 491; and Biden, 121, 400, 418–19, 420, 452–454, 491; nuclear, 158; and Russia, 69, 191; terrorism in, 296; and Trump, 20–21, 25, 31, 132–33, 182, 191–92, 270–76, 292, 319, 320–21, 384, 426, 447–52, 493; and the United States, 60, 61, 121, 182, 270, 271, 273, 276, 296, 320, 387, 451 494. See also Abraham Accords; specific countries Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), 284–85, 328. See also Trump, Donald migration, 65, 325–26, 328, 329, 477; and Biden, 25; and Trump, 16–17, 237–38, 326, 377, 494; and the United States, 17, 34, 88, 291–92, 325–29 Miller, Stephen, 278 Modi, Narendra: and Biden, 462; and Trump, 22, 223–25, 228, 229

Monroe Doctrine, 279, 496 Montenegro, 161 Moon, Jae-in, 474, 484 Morales, Evo, 282–83 Morocco, 192, 274, 276, 332, 335, 450 Morrison, Scott, 462 Mueller, Robert, 140, 143, 185, 429 multilateralism, 58–59, 225, 428–29, 484; and Biden, 44, 62, 80, 254–55, 415, 429, 435, 461, 485, 494; economics/trade, 22, 56, 62, 211–12, 279; and the global order, 3–4, 38, 86, 424, 435; and Trump, 56, 58–59, 153, 187, 200, 203, 211–12, 213–14, 227, 241–42, 248–49, 253, 272, 369, 370–71, 428, 429–30, 448, 459–60; and the United States, 86, 153, 183–84, 242, 360, 370, 378, 424, 428–29, 430, 436 Munich Security Conference, 190, 410, 462 Mussolini, Benito, 493, 499 Myanmar, 157, 350, 351 National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), 144 National Center for Counterterrorism (NCTC), 143 National Front (France), 431. See also Le Pen, Marine; populism National Guard (U.S.), 307 National Security Agency (NSA), 139, 225, 226 national security, 7, 50–51, 244, 254, 311–12; American, 49, 69, 71, 255, 291, 351, 362, 388, 390, 394; human security, 291, 305, 311–12, 436; and Biden, 147, 410, 461–63; and Russia, 192, 410; and Trump, 6, 16, 42, 46, 56, 67, 77, 144, 190, 216, 225, 294, 308, 374, 375, 384, 484; Trump administration, 170, 174, 213, 218, 304–12; Trump’s national security advisors, 16, 19, 20, 30, 71, 139, 147, 154, 185, 225, 228, 241, 279, 299, 403, 483, 489 National Security Council, 143–43, 228, 279, 282, 299, 309, 335–36, 349; Directorate for Global Health Security, 309 nationalism, 8, 80, 86, 92, 97–98, 352, 431; American, 89, 320; economic, 55, 58, 76, 78; the rise of American, 110–11; rise of, 9, 97, 430; Trump’s, 2, 4, 55, 58, 65, 76–80, 98, 108, 112, 163–64, 237, 297, 428

Index Naturalization Act of 1790, 327 Navalny, Alexei, 187, 408 Navarro, Peter, 16 Nazi, 33, 70, 50, 139, 295, 322, 430, 499, 501; neo-Nazi, 105 Netanyahu, Benjamin: and Biden, 338, 340; and Trump, 31, 275, 319, 493 Netherlands, 152, 464 New Deal, 107, 110, 435 New START, 23, 187–88, 403, 404, 407 New York Times, 42, 84, 128, 131–32, 134, 143, 162, 217–18, 337 New Zealand, 265, 431; and COVID 19, 309 Nicaragua, 154–55, 280 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 59 Niger, 135 Nixon, Richard, 47, 96, 138, 238–39, 256, 262, 295, 351; arms-control treaties, 187; Nixon doctrine, 496; Watergate, 112, 432 North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 17; overhaul of, 79, 127, 285; Trump position toward, 285. See also the United States–Mexico-Canada Agreement North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 22, 153, 164, 173, 428–29, 431, 436; Article 5, 43–44, 161, 249; and Biden, 23, 121, 254, 256, 427, 453; post– Cold War, 60– 61; and Russia, 6, 69, 72–73, 189– 90, 203, 242, 244, 365, 373, 394, 407, 411, 426–28, 437, 491; and security, 18–19, 261, 169, 266, 420, 425–26; and Trump, 4, 18, 41, 56, 60, 67, 76, 109, 120, 161– 64, 165– 66, 189– 90, 238, 239, 248, 249, 261, 359, 360, 373–74, 384, 426, 459, 460, 481, 488–89; and Trump’s tweets about, 1, 162, 163, 252; U.S. commitment to, 40, 59, 126, 162, 242, 254, 256, 261, 360, 385–86, 393, 394, 419, 427, 462; war in Vietnam, 437; war in Ukraine, 121, 147–48, 157, 191, 203, 244, 373, 379, 394, 399, 411, 420, 427–28, 430 Northern League (Italy), 431 North Korea. See Democratic People’s Republic of Korea Norway, 283, 294, 431

523

Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), 129 nuclear weapons, 6–7, 57, 61, 73, 96, 119, 308, 412, 418, 429, 473–74; and China, 6, 187, 409–410; disarmament, 492–93; and Iran and Biden, 23, 275, 453, 461–62; modernization of, 6, 133, 403; and North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, 30, 42, 141, 212, 215, 482, 484, 491–92, 494; and nuclear arms treaties, 127–29, 163, 187–88, 402–3, 407, 426; Nuclear Posture Review, 403; and nuclear submarines, 44, 218, 255, 265, 462; prevention of, 492; proliferation, 89, 97, 399, 492–93; and Russia, 6, 365, 393, 403; Russia and Biden and, 399, 407, 409–410, 411, 420, 486; Russia and Trump and, 186; and Trump, 18, 109, 133, 141, 144, 212, 215, 273, 275, 426, 483, 484, 491, 493; and Trump’s statements on, 128, 133, 153, 272, 296. See also Democratic People’s Republic of Korea; Iran; Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action Nunes, Devin, 140 Obama, Barack, 17, 69, 84, 87, 128, 188, 230, 279, 319, 322, 336, 371, 391, 401, 404, 454, 469, 485, 490; and campaign, 85; domestic policy of, 78, 83, 294, 320; and drones, 131–32, 134, 237, 321; immigration policy of, 31, 89, 284, 297, 326, 361; and international law, 130, 131, 321, 372; foreign policy of, 79, 120, 153, 172, 190–91, 227, 237, 280, 320–21, 383, 384, 402–3, 437, 495; and the Middle East, 20, 31, 121, 130–32, 133, 169, 191, 271, 275, 276, 319–20, 340, 448, 449, 451, 490; and NATO, 18, 164; and nuclear weapons, 133, 141, 191, 276, 403, 449; pivot to Asia, 6, 69, 121, 181, 197, 211–12, 418–17, 435; and Russian election interference, 138–39, 184, 187; and Trump, 85, 134, 139, 281, 293, 296–97, 374, 375, 376 Okonjo-Iweal, Ngozi, 362, 371 One China Policy, 215 Orban, Victor, 507. See also populism Organization of American States (OAS), 282

524

Index

Pakistan, 60, 147, 154, 321, 328, 492; and India, 223, 224, 226, 229; and Kashmir, 224, 225, 229; and Trump, 60, 224, 225, 226, 229 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), 334, 450 Palestine, 292; and Biden, 25, 320, 332–33, 334–39, 340, 341, 372, 453–54, 491; and boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement (BDS), 335, 336; and human rights groups, 336–37, 339; Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 319–20, 332–33, 336–37, 338, 483, 493; Palestinian Authority, 275, 334–35, 336, 450, 453; Palestinian state, 320, 332, 450, 451; and Trump, 274–75, 276, 319–20, 332, 333–34, 450–51, 485, 493; and U.S. foreign policy, 270, 319–20; U.S. public response, 334, 336, 337, 338; West Bank, 333, 334, 335, 336, 340, 450, 453, 483. See also Abraham Accords; Israel; and Peace to Prosperity Panama, 88, 154–55 Paris climate agreement: and Biden, 43, 249, 407–8, 461, 485; European commitment to, 238, 248–50, 251, 252; and Trump, 4, 17, 40, 58, 118, 127, 227, 238, 249, 383–84, 426, 460, 481, 482, 489 Patrushev, Nikolai, 192, 410 Pax Americana, 55, 329, 470–72, 475 Pax Britannica, 329 Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People, 31, 275, 292, 319–320, 332, 334, 450 Pelosi, Nancy, 266–67 Peña Nieto, Enrique, 284 Pence, Michael, 190, 249, 384 Pew Research Center, 387, 389, 390 Philippines, 365; dictator, 348–49; and past U.S. foreign policy, 213, 329; populism, 360; and “the quad,” 225; and Trump, 213, 348–49; and U.S. foreign policy, 135 Poland, 190, 239, 241, 430, 499 polarity: bipolarity, 61, 196, 410, 412; multipolarity, 61, 69, 100, 411–12, 430; unipolarity, 61, 69, 121, 435 polarization, in America, 23, 46–49, 66, 84, 96, 200, 203, 230, 306, 360, 363, 364, 365,

379, 385, 390, 424, 432, 434, 463, 467, 475, and COVID-19, 392, 437, 459; and Russia, 183, 184–85 Pompeo, Mike: as director of the CIA, 141–42, and human rights, 22, 349, 352–53; and the Middle East, 141, 154, 272, 334, 483, and Russia, 186–87; as secretary of state, 16, 19, 21, 23–24, 141, 236, 241–43, 281, 351–52, 359 436; statements by, 22, 24, 216, 225, 242; and Taiwan, 24, 216 populism, 31–32, 62, 84, 237, 436–37; in American history, 83, 85, 432; in Austria, 240; in China, 201; in Germany, 240, 243, 431; in Italy, 431; resistance to, 285; right-wing populism, 201, 430–31, 432, 436; Trump’s, 2, 4, 83, 95, 200, 237, 240, 261, 360, 430; Western resurgence of, 261, 267, 430–32, 499, 501–2 Portugal, 431 Power, Samantha, 354, 437 Prague Summit, 426 protectionism, 56, 65; and Biden, 62, 385; Trump’s, 17, 76, 78, 79–80, 95, 362, 416 Putin, Vladimir, 470; and Biden, 193, 399–400, 401–2, 404–5, 409, 410–11, 419; and China, 203–4; invasion of Ukraine, 6, 50–51, 84, 148, 191, 203, 365, 393–94, 401, 406, 419, 427, 485, 488, 503; public opinion of, 84, 203, 365; relations with Europe, 237, 428; relations with the United States, 19–20, 120, 155, 186, 191–92, 399, 402, 411, 420; and the Russian military, 50; and Trump, 19, 30, 41–42, 47, 120, 139, 140–42, 155, 181, 183–93, 203, 261, 348–49, 384, 401–2, 426–27, 428, 460, 485; and U.S. election interference, 184–85; war in Ukraine, 9–10, 148, 184, 203, 408, 409–10, 411, 437, 495 QAnon, 105, 107, 243, 500 Qatar, 132, 134, 270–71, 273 racism in America, 2, 7, 33–34, 46–47, 48, 49, 50, 217, 291–92, 295, 306–8, 310–11, 318–19, 325, 433, 502; and COVID-19, 309–10; as foreign policy, 34, 86, 291, 294, 320; as immigration policy, 34, 294, 295–99, 325–29; teaching of, 48–50; and

Index Trump, 32, 46, 47–48, 66, 106, 108, 291, 293–95, 296–99, 318, 322, 327 Ratcliffe, John, 143 Reagan, Ronald, 30, 55, 104–5, 117, 186, 256, 279, 281, 294, 333, 350, 352 realism, 111, 329; New Realists, 130; realist, 4, 34, 60, 61, 97–98, 116, 243, 365, 425, 429, 435, 482; theory of, 49, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 98, 198, 199; and Trump foreign policy, 14, 55–62, 80 Red Scare, 93–94 Refugee Act of 1980, 328 Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), 212, 214, 375 Republic of Korea (ROK), 212–13, 214, 229–230, 388, 460, 474, 491–92; and North Korea, 213, 387, 474, 484 Republican Party, 47, 69, 365; and Democrats, 142, 145, 146, 155, 158, 164, 183, 203, 273, 319, 335–36, 349, 385, 421, 436, 472, 474, 489; and the January 6 insurrection, 84, 105; Republicans, 14, 24, 26, 31–32, 83, 84, 95, 127, 187, 281, 294, 305, 306, 333, 359, 371, 408, 415, 421, 485, 490, 499; and Trump, 22, 59, 61, 67, 95, 105, 143, 146, 161, 190, 196, 237, 261, 278, 305, 333, 359–60, 374–75, 402, 503; values, 31, 61–62, 112, 130, 309, 363, 364–65, 385–393; and Willkie, 110–11 revisionism, 69, 70–72, 73 Rogers, Mike, 139 Roman Empire, 476–77 Rome Statute, 129, 337 Romney, Mitt, 85 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 76, 110, 117 Roosevelt, Theodore, 425 Rosnef, 186, 192 Rouhani, Hassan, 272, 482 Rousseff, Dilma, 282 Russia: American public opinion of, 31–32, 203, 386, 389, 408; arms control treaties, 23, 40, 127, 187–88, 402, 403, 404, 407–8, 449; arms deals, 155, 169, 174, 227; and Biden, 23, 43, 340–41, 404–6, 407, 408–9, 410–12, 419, 490; and China, 226, 403–4, 410, 495; and COVID-19, 8, 193; as cyber threat, 141, 188, 192–93, 401, 402, 404, 411, 494; and Donbas, 191, 402, 485; economy, 155, 157, 188, 405–6; and

525

Europe, 163, 182, 252, 406, 408, 412, 427, 429, 435, 462; and the G7, 41, 56, 196, 428; and international politics, 69, 70–71, 72; and the Middle East, 191–92, 226, 276, 402; Minsk II, 188, 191, 406; and NATO, 69, 189–90, 203 242, 373, 425–26; and Nord Stream pipelines, 186, 188, 240, 244, 428, 491; and nuclear technology, 6, 403 492; and Obama, 403; sanctions on, 152, 153, 155–56, 157–58, 186–87, 188–89, 203, 242, 365, 389, 402, 403, 405–6, 408; sphere of influence, 72–73, 203, 365; and Trump, 19–20, 24, 30, 40, 183–93, 226, 401–2, 403, 426–27, 485; and the United States, 6, 9, 68, 73, 168, 182, 183–84, 192–93, 349–50, 365, 399, 401–2, 411, 419; U.S. election interference, 138–41, 184–85, 186–87, 305, 306, 402, 485; and Venezuela, 192. See also Crimea; Putin, Vladimir; war in Ukraine Ryabkov, Sergei, 187, 410–11 Salvini, Matteo, 501. See also populism Sanders, Bernie, 112, 280, 417, 425 Sanner, Beth, 144, 145 Santos, Juan Manuel, 280–81 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 433 Saudi Arabia, 492; and arms sales, 169, 170–74, 453; and arms sale bans, 142, 171–72, 173, 351; and Biden, 274, 354, 453; and geopolitics, 155; and sanctions, 171, 483; and Trump, 22, 142, 169, 182, 270, 273–74, 451; and the United States, 60, 132, 145, 174, 273–74, 351, 354, 483 Scholz, Olaf, 182, 243–44, 431 Senate (U.S.), 34, 84, 402, 429; during the Biden administration, 311, 364, 374, 408; during the Trump administration, 142, 143, 187, 188, 190, 294, 306, 352, 485 September 11, 2001, attacks, 5, 94, 96, 117, 130, 131, 161, 271, 273, 297, 428, 435, 494, 500 Serbia, 241, 419 Shia, 474 Singapore, 30, 482, 484 Skripal, Sergei, 186, 188, 405, 485 Snowden, Edward, 237 Social Democrats, 243, 431 Soleimani, Qasem, 154, 273, 384, 449, 483

526

Index

South Asia, 223, 228 South China Sea, 118, 122, 198, 225 South Korea. See Republic of Korea (ROK) Soviet Union. See Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) Spain, 431 Spengler, Oswald, 472 Stalin, Joseph, 42 State Department. See Department of State Steele, Christopher, 139, 185; Steele dossier, 139, 184, 185 Stoltenberg, Jens, 162, 166 Strategic Arms Limitations Talks Agreement (SALT I), 187, 403 Streeck, Wolfgang, 472 Sudan, 130, 192, 274, 276, 450, 483, Darfur, 475 Suga, Yoshihide, 462 Suleimani, Qassem, 120 Sullivan, Jake, 255, 410, 416, 436 Summit for Democracy, 31, 201, 202, 354, 415–16 Sunni, 474 Supreme Court (U.S.), 297, 375, 376 Switzerland, 157, 379 Syria, 130, 273, 275, 493; and Biden, 135, 405, 452, 490; refugee crisis, 87, 237, 296, 351; Russian involvement in, 19, 191–92, 402; and Trump, 20, 120, 125, 132, 191–92, 211, 271, 374, 384, 402, 449, 451, 485; United States involvement in, 132, 134, 242, 276, 325, 374, 402, 447, 451; violence in civil war, 327, 449. See also Islamic State of Iraq and Syria Taiwan, 211, 215, 420, 437–38, 495; and Trump, 24, 77, 170, 172–173, 213, 213, 215–16, 218, 219; and the United States, 24, 69, 71, 215–16, 387, 420, 437–38, 494–95. See also China Taliban, 20, 25–26, 30, 43, 89, 121, 146, 147, 157, 223–24, 226, 390, 452, 485, 488, 490 terrorism, 94, 96, 224, 226, 410, 426, 490, 493; and Biden, 23–24, 147, 338, 340; counterterrorism, 68, 135, 143, 224, 225, 248, 257, 271, 273–74, 362–63, 431; and international law, 129, 130–32, 372; and NATO, 426; and Trump, 20, 23–24, 31, 225, 248, 275, 294, 296–99; and the United States, 47, 254, 281, 311 320, 325,

350, 386, 390, 391, 494; “war on terror,” 31, 111, 122, 131, 320, 429. See also September 11, 2001, attacks Thatcher, Margaret, 55 “Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution, A” 336–37 Thucydides, 477; Thucydides trap, 495 TikTok, 216 Tillerson, Rex, 352, 436; and Russia, 186, 191; as secretary of state, 16, 19, 141, 186, 223, 241, 272, 349, 350–51 Title 42, 284, 328–29. Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), 237 Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), 214; American withdrawal from, 77, 120, 211–12, 213; and Biden, 80, 214, 375; and China, 214; and Trump, 77, 80, 214, 215. See also Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership Treaty on Open Skies, 127, 187, 403, 475 Truman, Harry, 15–16, 34, 55, 93, 95, 99, 117; the Truman Doctrine. 496 Trump, Donald, 502–3, 504; administration, 16–17, 325; and arms sales, 168–71; and Biden’s election, 29, 31, 139, 193, 218, 280, 304, 305–6, 364, 420–21, 489; and climate change, 7–8; and domestic politics, 127, and economy/trade, 17, 77–79, 374–75; election of, 5–6, 92; and “fake news,” 139, 163, 218, 282, 309, foreign policy of, 76, 109, 120, 280, 348–50, 369–70, 374, 474, 480–82; and human rights, 22, 30; and immigration, 16–17, 326, 328, 375–77; impeachment of, 47, 142–43, 183, 186, 190, 218, 252; and international relationships, 40–43; “Muslim ban,” 296–98, 321, 326, 327, 352, 375; and National Security Strategy, 6, 67–68, 156, 216, 226, 296, 304–5, 481; and “national security tariffs,” 213, 484; and “The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission,” 471; and public opinion, 460 498; and race, 8, 13, 34, 47–48, 108, 278, 282, 283–84, 291, 293–99, 306, 318–19, 321, 322, 325, 327; statements by,

Index 56, 59, 92, 100, 109, 128, 139. 140, 162, 163, 188, 192, 212, 213, 216, 217–18, 237, 238, 251, 272, 282, 293, 296, 298, 305, 351, 484, 485; State of the Union speech, 374; “Remain in Mexico” policy, 25, 284–85, 328, 361; and “the Wall,” 278, 284, 377, 503; and women, 7, 47–48, 108, 295, 321, 354; and U.S. supremacy, 110; vetoes by, 142, 171, 351; and xenophobia, 108, 182, 278, 283–84, 286, 295. See also under specific entries Trump, Ivanka, 229. See also Kushner, Jared Truss, Liz, 266–67 Turkey, 32, 171, 360, 452; and Biden, 43, 453; and defense spending, 60; and Russia, 155, 169; and Trump, 20, 22, 348–49; and the United States, 132, 169, 365 tweets, of Donald Trump, 127, 128, 139, 144, 161, 162, 163, 183, 196, 213–14, 219, 237, 238, 239, 241, 252, 261, 273, 280, 285, 297, 321, 429–30 UK-Japan Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement, 265 Ukraine: and Hunter Biden, 190; and COVID-19, 491; domestic politics, 50; military of, 148; refugees, 50; and Russia, 71, 373, 406–7, 470; and Trump, 19, 186, 190; and the United States, 168, 182, 190–91; and the West, 266, 406. See also war in Ukraine; Zelenskyy, Volodymyr UN General Assembly resolutions, 181, 335 unilateralism, 80, 97 428; and Donald Trump, 5, 62, 110, 158, 369 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR): collapse of, 5, 94, 183, 418, 474; after collapse of, 365, 437, 500; communism in, 4–5, 119, 425; mention of, 30, 148, 326, 328, 418, 491; and the United States, 88, 94, 111, 117, 119, 184, 185, 187, 201, 217, 350, 378, 473–74, 493, 495. See also Cold War unipolarity. See polarity United Arab Emirates (UAE), 270–71, 276, 319, 332, 483, 493; and Trump, 192, 273, 274, 319, 451, 483 United Kingdom: and COVID-19, 8; economy/trade, 261, 264–65; and the

527

EU, 182; and France, 22–23, 265; foreign policy of, 224; and nuclear technology, 255, 265, 427, 462; politics of, 431, 499; public opinion of the U.S., 463; and security, 255, 265, 266, 427, 462; and the “special relationship,” 182, 261–67; and Trump, 261, 264, 481. See also Brexit; Great Britain United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), 260. See also populism United Nations, 171; and COVID-19, 265, 266, 458; charter of, 129; institutions of, 40; Human Rights Council, 40, 351, 354, 372, 384, 426, 460, 461; Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), 334; resolutions, 334; Security Council, 131, 153, 172, 191, 272, 337; talks given in, 279, 458, 482; and Trump, 59, 224, 242, 279, 283, 334, 372, 458, 460, 482; and the United States, 110, 111, 148, 329, 339, 351, 386, 391–92, 393 United States Agency for International Development (USAID), 354 United States–Korea Free Trade Agreement, 384 United States–Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), 79, 285, 375, 384 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 352–53 Uribe, Álvaro, 280–81 U.S. Central Command, 134 U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council, 462 U.S. intelligence, 42, 59, 95, 141; and Biden, 146–48, 335–36, 486; and China, 293; and disinformation, 304–6; House Permanent Subcommittee on Intelligence (HPSCI), 140; and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), 139, 143, 146; racism, 306–7; and Russian interference, 139–41, 184–85, 305, 306; and Saudi Arabia, 142, 274; Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), 140; and sharing, 224, 225, 374, 426; and Trump, 125–26, 138–47, 186, 190, 241, 294, 490. See also Central Intelligence Agency; Federal Bureau of Investigation; Homeland Security; National Security Agency

528

Index

U.S.-France Bilateral Clean Energy Partnership, 256 U.S.-Poland Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, 190 USS Maine, 96 USS Theodore Roosevelt, 310 Vandenberg, Arthur, 95 Védrine, Hubert, 428 Venezuela, 351; and Biden, 157, 158; and COVID-19, 281; sanctions, 24, 120, 154–58, 227; and Russia, 192; and Trump, 74, 120, 154–55, 192, 227, 279–80, 281–82, 327, 371 Vietnam, 58, 61; and Biden, 473, 474; post-Vietnam war, 436; and Trump, 227, 256, 473, 474; and United States, 84, 87, 99, 112, 328, 432 437; Vietnam War, 94, 117, 122, 433, 435, 437, 473, 494 Wallace, Harry, 110 Walt, Stephen, 18, 49, 59. See also realism Waltz, Kenneth, 56, 57, 60; on levels of analysis, 15. See also realism War Brides Act of 1945, 327 war in Ukraine, 50–51, 406–7, 503; and Biden, 73, 125, 147–48, 203, 257, 372, 374, 401, 411, 419, 421, 486, 488; international response to, 122, 157, 182, 203, 257, 266, 379, 405–406, 428; and NATO, 73, 121, 147, 148, 157, 243–44, 365, 373, 394, 420, 427, 436, 437; and Russia-EU relations, 408; Russian invasion, 2, 50, 68, 72–73, 84, 147, 383, 393–94, 411; Russian public opinion on, 409, and Trump, 191, 203, 428, 485; U.S. domestic response to, 365; and U.S.-Russia relations, 156, 184, 193, 203, 357, 399, 408–10, 411–12 Washington, DC, 42, 48, 49, 67, 164, 252, 255, 307, 450 Washington Post, 142, 162, 218, 274, 337, 351, 451

Watergate. See Nixon, Richard Western Europe, 117, 122, 254, 256, 320, 373, 431–32, 434, 499, 503. See also Europe white supremacy, 90, 105–7, 296, 299 Willkie, Wendell, 110–111, 112; One World, 110, 111 Wilson, Harold, 262 Wilson, Woodrow, 34, 117, 122, 291–92, 295, 329, 425, 434, 471 Woodward, Bob, 185, 351 World Bank, 242, 371 World Health Organization (WHO): and Trump, 109, 370–71, 372, 384, 426; and the United States, 485; U.S. public opinion of, 386, 392, 393; U.S withdrawal from, 18, 40, 43, 48, 361 World Trade Organization (WTO): and Biden, 62; disputes, 77, 362; Dispute Settlement Understanding’s Appellate Body, 371; and the European Union, 77, 371; public opinion of, 386; and Trump, 4, 18, 40, 62, 227, 370–71, 460; and the United States, 77 World War I, 249, 250, 253, 257, 295 World War II, 70, 96, 239, 304; anniversary of, 193; post-, 3, 34, 38, 79, 86, 109, 110, 117, 212, 242, 360, 369, 419, 429; pre-, 16; and the United States, 87, 92–93, 119, 122, 297, 378, 438, 494, 498 Xi Jinping, 70; public opinion of, 464; and Trump, 21, 77–78, 118, 172, 212, 223, 226, 460–61, 484 Yang, Jiechi, 462–63 Yemen, 154, 275, 483; and Biden, 171–72, 173–74, 274, 453; and Trump, 24, 171, 274; and the United States, 130, 135, 321, 453; war in, 142, 171–72, 173–74, 272, 351, 451 Zawahiri, Ayman al-, 147, 148 Zelenskyy, Volodymyr, 50, 142, 190, 252