When ends Trump means: continuity versus change in US counterterrorism policy

ABSTRACT

This article utilizes a historical materialist informed framework to analyse change and continuity in US counterterrorism policy. Although Donald Trump’s “America First” discourse conveyed a “new” approach to counterterrorism, in practice his administration has largely reinforced pre-existing tendencies, expanding the military campaigns against ISIS and al-Qaeda. In accordance with America’s longstanding objectives in the global south, which centre on stabilizing existing patterns of capitalist political-economic relations, the US continues to police transnational security challenges “from below”. The article calls for increased sensitivity to the means-ends calculus in American statecraft. It argues that tactical shifts at the policy level (the means) should be situated in relation to historical considerations and the structural and material factors (the ends) that impact US foreign policymaking across presidential administrations.

KEYWORDS:

• US foreign policy
• Trump
• counterterrorism
• historical materialism
• continuity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Rubrick Biegon is a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Kent. His research interests include US foreign policy, security strategy, and remote warfare.

Tom F. A. Watts is a Teaching Fellow in War and Security at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research interests include remote warfare, security force assistance, and historical materialist informed approaches to contemporary American foreign and counterterrorism policy.

ORCID

Rubrick Biegon http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4337-809X

Tom F. A. Watts http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5385-6334

Notes

1 In addition to intensifying the military response to transnational terrorist organizations—this article’s primary focus—the Trump administration has also securitized border control and immigration policy through the language of counterterrorism.

2 In making this argument, we are not dismissing the contention developed elsewhere in this special issue that Trump is a low-complexity individual (Siniver & Featherstone, this volume). As others have argued, whilst Trump may be an extraordinary character, his presidency, in terms of both outcomes and constraints, is fairly ordinary (Herbert, McCrisken, & Wroe, 2019). The actions of the American state, with its multiple bureaucracies and agencies, are not reducible to the president alone. Certain ideas and habits persist across administrations, carried by the individuals that staff key agencies and the beliefs they hold about appropriate American foreign policy (Porter, 2018). As Porter notes from outside the historical materialist tradition, the strategy of primacy pursed by the US since 1945 has involved a focus on “creat[ing] conditions optimal for the penetration of US capital” and “priz[ing] open markets and ensur[ing]investment opportunities and access to raw materials, a pursuit of openness on American terms” (Porter, 2018, p. 20).

3 As Herring notes (2013), historical materialism can be approached as a social science, a philosophy, and/or an emancipatory political project. As a social science, it is “assume[d] that fact and value (judgements of worth such as right and wrong) can be separated sufficiently to generate theoretically grounded claims that can be tested against evidence” (Herring, 2013, p. 153).

4 As illustrated by Fermor and Holland’s contribution to this special issue, Gramscian concepts are not the sole preserve of historical materialist approaches.