US Imperialism, the Korean Peninsula and Trumpian Disruption

ABSTRACT

Donald Trump has disrupted US imperialism and fractured the cultural hegemony of the foreign policy elite. His incompetence has produced Russiagate and Ukrainegate as the establishment attempts to remove him from office fearful that he will further diminish American power. He essentially continues US policy but in an incoherent and disjointed fashion. His use of military, economic and financial power is relatively conventional but his deployment of the various aspects of soft power—where America’s greatest advantage lies—is severely dysfunctional. In particular, he mishandles the imperial alliance system and its concomitant control over civil and military elites through much of the world, and the dominance of global media and international bodies. Trump does not realise that he is running an empire with the constraints and overwhelming advantages that entails. His administration’s policy towards North Korea is basically the same as that of his predecessors but more maladroit. Ostensibly an attempt to force unilateral disarmament but also an acceptance that the current state of tension on the Korean peninsula is an essential component of the wider strategy of containing China and Russia and locking South Korea and Japan into the imperial power structure.

KEYWORDS:

• Donald Trump
• US imperialism
• disruption
• North Korea
• containment of China

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Tim Beal is a retired New Zealand academic who has researched and written widely on Asia and in particular its interaction with the West. He has a special focus on US imperialism and the Korean peninsula within the context of policy towards East Asia. His most recent publications are “Korea and Imperialism” (collected in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), and “The Angler and the Octopus” (Monthly Review, November 2019). He maintains the Asian Geopolitics website at http://www.timbeal.net.nz/geopolitics/.