De Trumping U S Foreign Policy

America’s reputation and power fell to new lows during Trump’s presidency. Militarily, the United States held its own, but its soft power suffered mightily. President Biden pledges to work with the international community, rely on cooperation with like-minded allies, challenge adversaries, and restore American democracy, society and economy to levels that will once again command international respect. De-Trumping U.S. Foreign Policy will address the objectives, obstacles, and potential outcomes of this attempt over the next few years. Sloan evaluates both elite and public opinion from democratic allies around the world, plus elite opinions from states less friendly to the United States. He documents and analyses Biden’s approach to foreign policy and his goals for the U.S. role in the world. The volume will also examine how Biden’s domestic policy objectives, in the areas of the pandemic, systemic racism, political equity, the economy and climate change, relate to his foreign policy goals. The early steps made by Biden will be laid out and evaluated and hidden chances of success or failure will be measured, with a striking analysis of what failure might mean for the USA and the world.

This deeply researched book offers a comprehensive analysis of the domestic politics and international consequences of Trump’s foreign policy. Mel Gurtov provides detailed case studies of policy toward key countries and regions, including China, Russia, North Korea, Europe, and the Middle East. He makes a vigorous argument, centered on human-interest priorities and values, for rejecting a foreign policy of neglect and ineptness when it comes to the major issues of our times: climate change, China’s rise, multiple US wars, human rights, authoritarian leadership, and nuclear weapons. Gurtov argues that Trump is a nationalist and illiberal populist whose policy views have been molded chiefly by his business practices, leading to an obsession with “winning,” elevation of ego and loyalty over expertise, and preference for threats over diplomacy. Trump holds to a few simple ideas about the US role in the world: too expensive, too subject to other countries and institutions, and too influenced by “globalist” concerns such as democracy, climate crisis, human rights, and the rule of law. Trump will leave a deeply negative mark on the reputation and credibility of the United States, and on its policy-making process. But Gurtov concludes that a liberal successor should be able to reverse the worst features of the Trump era and restore foreign policy to its true purpose: exemplifying America’s commitment to humane and democratic governance and cooperative economic relations with allies and economic partners.

As America’s first president never to have served in government or the military, Donald Trump entered the White House with an unformed foreign policy position. Yet he was confronted by a wide range of developing issues; the rise of China, Russian-United States relations, the resurgence of nationalism in Europe, U.S. Foreign Policy in Latin America, environmental challenges, terrorism, security challenges of failing states, cyber security threats, and challenges in international political economy. This volume focuses on these sensitive foreign policy issues that determine the prospects for American decline or continued hegemony. Contributions are divided into ‘regional’ and ‘functional’ issues, exploring the nature and significance of the challenge, the previous response, and President Trump’s policies and their consequences. Topics have been selected to address political, military, economic, and social factors in global politics and the book will appeal to undergraduates and scholars of U.S. foreign policy at all levels.

Did Donald Trump decisively transform and alter the course of US foreign policy? All presidents promise change, but few presidents promise changes as radical as Trump did during his presidency. The extent to which Trump delivered on that promise, however, remains hotly debated with little or no agreement. The chapters in this edited volume argue that much of this debate is a dialogue of the deaf where scholars speak past rather than to each other, where the basis for claims about change or continuity is unclear and where the argument and knowledge, consequently, fails to progress. At its heart, this is a problem of theory and methods. Employing a diverse range of theoretical and methodological perspectives, this book seeks to move the debate beyond a superficial focus on events to more fundamental questions of how change is defined, measured and explained and in doing so, attempts to advance understanding of foreign policy change and the extent to which Trump can really be considered to have been a transformative president. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Global Affairs.

The decision to mount an armed foreign intervention is one of the most consequential that a US president can take. This book sets out to explain why and when presidents choose to use force. The book examines decisions to use force throughout the post-Cold War period, via flashpoints including the Balkans, the ‘War on Terror’ and the Middle East. It develops new explanations for variation in the use of force in US foreign policy by theorizing and demonstrating the effects of the displacement and repression of ideas within and across different US presidential administrations, from George H.W. Bush to Donald Trump. For students, scholars and anyone with an interest in international relations and global security, this book is an original perspective on a defining issue of recent decades.

This book investigates the drivers, tactics, and strategy that propel the Trump administration’s foreign policy. The key objective of this book is to look beyond the ‘noise’ of the Trump presidency in order to elucidate and make sense of contemporary US foreign policy. It examines the long-standing convictions of the president and the brutal worldview that he applies to US foreign policy; and his hard-line negotiation tactics and employment of unpredictability to keep America’s major foreign interlocutors off-guard, such as NATO members, China, Mexico, Canada, North Korea, and Iran – each of which are considered here. In strategy terms, the book explains that the president is responding to a new multipolar structure of power by engaging a Kissingerian strategy that eschews liberal values and seeks to adjust great power relations in Washington’s favor. By drawing upon a range of evidence and case studies, this book makes a number of compelling and provocative points to offer a new vector for debate about the workings, successes and failures, and ultimately the long-term implications for the world, of the Trump presidency. This book will be of much interest to students of US foreign policy, security studies, and IR in general.

This book offers a serious investigation of one of the most controversial contemporary American Studies issues: President Donald Trump's foreign policy. Actually, an ambiguous, inconsistent uncertainty would best describe President Trump's approach to foreign affairs. This book investigates Trump's foreign policy agenda, style, principles, priorities, and patterns. The main challenge of this book is to check whether President Trump's foreign policy initiatives are faithful to the traditional and modern-era foreign policy schools (such as 'America First'), or whether they are merely inconsistent, impulsive, incoherent initiatives which lack the complexity of a serious foreign policy agenda or doctrine? This book puts the nature of Pax-Americana and US Exceptionalism face to face with the assumption of a post-American world. It also examines the 'Trump Doctrine' as what Trump himself described as a 'brand new' foreign policy. Thus, this book offers a further assessment of the assumption that Trump is establishing a new school of American foreign policy.

This book offers a comprehensive explanatory account of Trump's foreign policy by assessing its nature, determining the extent to which it broke with the policy of preceding presidencies, and explaining how this shift came about. We argue that Trump has succeeded in remaking America’s grand strategy by unmaking its long-standing strategy of what we call Open Door Globalism, a strategy of economic expansionism through the promotion of open markets across the globe and its institutionalization into a US-led liberal world order. Trump has broken with Open Door Globalism in probably lasting ways by adopting an outlook and strategy of neo-mercantilist economic nationalism based upon an ‘America First’ redefinition of US sovereignty and national interests. We explain this Trumpian shift in US foreign policy by focusing on the social sources of Trump’s foreign policy-making elite’s agency, analysing it both in terms of foreign policy-makers’ embeddedness in elite networks and within the changing global and domestic context. The latter, coupled with a crisis of established elite power, also indicates why Biden has not returned to Open Door Globalism but doubled down on some aspects of the Trumpian economic nationalist break.