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ABSTRACT
This article sets out a novel constructivist conception of how we can analyse continuity and change in US foreign policy, and sets out the US relationship with the Middle East within the context of world history. It shows how the US has worked towards an imperium and deployed an imperial right over the long durée. The Trump administration has maintained this tradition. However, by better understanding the role and impact of crises, it is argued that analysts can be far more sensitive to the role of ideas and how reasons for action shape foreign policy. It is shown that the Trump administration adopts an America first policy-paradigm that moves away from a focus on free trade imperialism and towards indirect rule through authoritarian strongmen. Using advanced computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software it is demonstrated that the Global Financial Crisis opened a period of paradigm contestation.
Acknowledgement
I wish to thank the journal editor and the anonymous reviewers in the first instance for the excellent feedback and process they have provided in helping this article come about. Importantly, I would also like to thank Steven Hurst, Nick Kitchen, Christopher Featherstone, Asaf Siniver, Hilde Restad, Matthew Hill and Jack Holland for organizing and participating in the various rounds of reviews, feedback and workshops that shaped this piece.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Oz Hassan is an associate professor in National Security, whose research focuses upon the transatlantic relationship with the Middle East and North Africa (West Asia).
Notes
1 The term ontologically subjective is made in reference to a specific understanding of philosophical realism and social ontology as set out by Searle (Citation2007, pp. 82–84).
2 It should be noted that Mahan was an American naval officer and historian.
3 The campaign and Presidential documents were separated, so they could be analysed together and separately.
4 Significantly, we can see this period as constructive, but as Complexity theory suggests we need to consider lag occurring within any complex adaptive system. This is consistent with Kuhn’s theory and institutional theory more widely. Just as switching on the thermostat does not make a room instantly warm, paradigms take time to be constructed while they challenge dominant paradigms. As such, the time discrepancy between the crash and Trump’s success is itself an indicator of paradigm contention rather than a challenge to the theory being presented.
5 “Forgotten man” is used 23 times within the corpus, and of particular note is how candidate Trump notes that “ We call them the forgotten man” – demonstrating collective social effort in the DIF construction.
6 The term people is disproportionately used 22953 times within the Corpus. The TF-IDF weight is 502.5. Standing for “term frequency–inverse document frequency” this statistic provides a weight for the importance of terms within the corpus. The algorithm measures the importance of a term by working out term frequency rather than simply counting the usage of the term. The higher the TF-IDF score, the more important the term is within the corpus.
7 Money and People co-occur within the corpus 1003 times.
8 Rigged and System co-occur within the corpus 339 times.
9 The term “globalist” is used four times within the corpus and is defined by Trump as “You know what globalists are? Who want to the strip the jobs and the wealth from our country and give them to every other country.” The first usage was from Alex Jones, and Trump's trialling of the term was unsuccessful, yet tropes associated with it were frequent. Jobs for example are referred to 3284 times. The term immigrant was used 233 times.
10 The TF-IDF weight for Make America Great Again is 242.2, with 700 occurrences within the corpus.
11 TF-IDF weight 119.8, with 142 occurrences.
12 TF-IDF weight 105.8, with 115 occurrences.
13 TF-IDF weight 101.2, with 100 occurrences.
14 TF-IDF weight 116.2 with 110 occurrences.
15 Within Candidate Trump’s Corpus, “take”, and “oil” co-occur on 191 occasions out of the 393 times the term oil is used.
16 Within Candidate Trump’s Corpus, this term appears on 202 occasions, concerning the JCPOA, but also towards Free Trade Agreements such as NAFTA.