Trump’s Legacy and the Liberal International Order: Why Trump Failed to Institutionalise an Anti-global Agenda

ABSTRACT

Donald Trump was expected to repeal the internationalist approach that had dominated US foreign policy since the end of the Second World War, but his impact was narrower than is commonly supposed. On the one hand, the problems of the liberal international order predate Trump and probably will outlive his presidency. He was more a symptom than the cause of those difficulties, thus his responsibilities should not be overstated. On the other hand, despite several renegotiations and accusations against its partners, the US involvement in multilateral organisations remains solid and its engagement overseas remarkable. Overall, Trump’s performance in shifting US foreign policy toward an anti-globalist stance was quite poor. Contrary to mainstream accounts of Trump’s foreign policy, the president’s revisionism has arguably been thwarted less by the internationalist approach within the foreign policy establishment than by his own personality and his policy-making attitudes.

KEYWORDS:

• Donald Trump
• US foreign policy
• liberal international order
• leadership traits
• populist dilemma

Notes

1 PolitiFact is an independent fact-checking website run by the Poynter Institute (https://www.politifact.com/).

2 In our analysis, we will pay closer attention to security-related foreign policy issues. Others, like trade and health will be considered only in passing. We have dealt with the differences across issue areas in Carati and Locatelli (2022).

3 The two-year delay was due to the dispositions of the agreement: Article 28 of the Treaty mandated that notice of intent to withdraw could be filed no sooner than a minimum of three years after the agreement came into effect.

4 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/969525362580484098.

5 The mismatch between rhetoric and behaviour is still under investigation: Sperling and Webber (2019), for instance, suggest that this is rational voice-oriented behavior. Others would rather focus on the domestic restraint imposed by the foreign policy establishment. As we will see next, we argue that none of these views are entirely satisfactory: the first hypothesis may be correct with reference to NATO, but it cannot account for other failed discontinuities. The second overlooks Trump’s own idiosyncratic limits.

6 Full Transcript and Video: Trump’s Speech on Afghanistan, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/world/asia/trump-speech-afghanistan.html.

7 Obviously, other elements combine to define a populist agenda (most importantly anti-pluralism) and create variations along the Left-Right spectrum. However, following a growing literature, we will refer to the thin ideology outlined in the text. For a more direct investigation of populist parties’ foreign policy, see Veerbek and Zaslove (2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrea Locatelli

Andrea Locatelli is an Associate Professor at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy.

Andrea Carati

Andrea Carati is an Associate Professor at University of Milan, Milan, Italy. Email: [email protected]