Is anybody still a globalist? Rereading the trajectory of US grand strategy and the end of the transnational moment

ABSTRACT

After the two-fold crises of the liberal world order in the first decade of the twenty-first century, including the debacle of the Global War on Terror and the global financial crisis around 2008, we are witnessing a combined crisis of US hegemony and the transnational moment, along with the explosion of populism across the Atlantic world. In this context, this research not only analyses how the United States has designed and maintained the liberal interstate order and globalization but also the way the hegemon proactively starts to destroy its cross-national project today. Therefore, I aim to fathom the future of globalization by interrogating the current US state's key strategies that express America's changing national identity and self-role conception under shifting structural imperatives from unipolarity to the emerging multipolar world.

KEYWORDS:

• Globalization
• US grand strategy
• populism
• Donald Trump

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 John Kelly left his position on January 2019.

2 For comprehensive surveys of the globalization debate, see Held and McGrew (2003, 2007).

3 As we will see, realist and Marxist commentators have paid attention to new strategic environments, such as the US relative decline after the unipolar moment and crippled neoliberal globalization exemplified in the 2008 global financial meltdown, in order to account for Trump's surprising victory in the 2016 election and the administration's subsequent break with standard grand strategic orthodoxy.

4 Here, I draw on ‘role theory’ that focuses on the way a nation views itself and its role in world politics shapes national behaviour. According to K. J. Holsti’s (1970, pp. 245–246) original explanation, a national role conception means ‘the policymaker's own definitions of the general kind of decisions, commitments, rules and actions suitable to their state, and of the functions, if any, their state should perform on a continuing basis in the international system’. In addition, it is posited that a ‘nation's leaders rise in part because they articulate a vision of the nation's role in world affairs that corresponds to deep, cultural beliefs about the nation’ (Hudson, 1999, p. 769). What is notable here is that American exceptionalism or liberal internationalism that has been deeply entrenched in the American people's symbolic universe is now in profound distress after the ‘twin crises’, so that Trump represents this American identity turmoil or a rapidly changing national role conception, which leads to a great transformation of US foreign behaviour today.

5 In addition, we can approach this Trumpist turn in economic policy from a lens of shifting sectors in the US economy. The very fact that Trump denigrates ‘new’ Silicon Valley in favour of ‘old’ heavy industries evidently shows that his economic view is based on the so-called ‘producerism’ which is a hallmark of Jacksonian populism. This right-wing political economy traditionally argues that industrial capital and labour ‘involved in the production of real material goods that address specific needs’ are genuine value producers, i.e. the guardian of social virtues (Shantz, 2017). Of course, such a reactionary, Luddite-like understanding of late-modern economic conditions cannot properly solve the dire situations of Trump supporters in the Rust Belt. Furthermore, it is highly likely that Trumpist focus on illiberal mercantilist strategies will simply disturb the existing world economic order and deteriorate US economy as a whole.

6 For classical explanations of hegemonic stability theory, see Kindleberger (1986) and Gilpin (1981).

7 As one anonymous reviewer pointed out, the institutions and agencies of global governance are themselves now somewhat autonomous agents in the global scene and have at least some counterweight to the unilateral actions of the United States. However, as Michael Zürn (2018a, p. 141) stresses, we should note that ‘the features of the current global governance system have endogenously produced’ contestations against the existing global structure. Indeed, the recent rise of right-wing populist leaders is ‘a product of the deficiencies associated with the global governance system that emerged in the 1990s’ (Zürn, 2018b). Thus, we need to talk not just about the resilience of global institutions but more about growing competitions between pro-globalization forces and anti-globalization ones at this particular historical juncture, generated from the very processes of the transnationalization project.

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Taesuh Cha

Taesuh Cha (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Sungkyunkwan University. He holds a B.A. and an M.A. in international relations from Seoul National University. He has served as a full-time instructor at the Republic of Korea Air Force Academy, a researcher at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, and a senior research fellow at Chung-Ang University. His works on American foreign policy and international relations theory have been published in numerous journals, such as European Journal of International Relations, Political Studies Review, International Politics, Korean Journal of Defense Analysis, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, and The Washington Quarterly.