In their 2022 book, The Divider, journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser wrote: “The Trump era is not past; it is America’s present and maybe even its future.” I don’t think they would have wanted this prophecy to come true, but it has, possibly much to their chagrin.
On January 20, 2025, the Trump era officially became the US’s future for the next four years.
It was easy to miss all this in 2020. Biden had secured 81 million votes (51.3%), the highest in US history. To embellish the sophisticated liberal inclusiveness in contrast to Trump’s crassness, there was Kamala Harris, the first Asian-American woman to become the vice president of the US. The balance had been restored after the four-year oddity of Trump.
Except it wasn’t. For years we will get books and analyses trying to understand the Trump phenomenon or, if you will, how and why America lost the script. But whatever it is, it’s now in the Oval Office for another term. And going by what Trump says the repercussions of his actions are likely to last beyond his term.
His plans to reshape America internally are primarily for the Americans to agree to or rail against, though some of that will surely impact what he does externally. For the rest of the world, it’s his foreign policy choices that matter. I have previously argued in this space that he is not impulsive, even as he is dangerous and transactional. The bigger question is, is he very different from other presidents in how he approaches the world? Is he an isolationist when he talks about America-first? What does he mean by “We will measure our success, not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.” How does being a “peacemaker and unifier” square with building “the strongest military the world has ever seen?”
Speaking of Greenland and the Panama Canal, he told the world that if getting his desire to control those territories involved the use of military force and annexation, so be it. Is that compatible with not starting new wars? What about China? Is that only about ramping up the trade war or is there more to it?
If he is different from other presidents, it’s not because under him the US has or will shed its hegemonic designs but that he brags about it openly, mocking foes and friends alike and attempting to force everyone to acknowledge who the boss is
The Beltway pundits are wary. Last time round, John Ikenberry, a Princeton professor and liberal-internationalist, grumpily called Trump the “hostile revisionist power” that now “sits in the Oval Office, the beating heart of the free world.” He went on to say that while history is the tale of revisionist powers trying to bring down the existing hegemon, great powers “have usually ended in murder, not suicide.”
The structural realists, happy to see the end of liberal-internationalist outreach, the great delusion of constructing an international order on liberal dreams, to quote John Mearsheimer, nonetheless feared that Trump’s isolationism disturbed the “global balance of power that enhanced American security.” Great power rivalry is a tragedy but there’s no escaping it.
Trump himself talked about his “instincts” when presenting the comprehensive review of his administration’s Afghanistan strategy on August 21, 2017: “My original instinct was to pull out — and, historically, I like following my instincts.” He went along with his generals at the time, against his instincts. Later, he would call them “idiots.”
In the Middle East, Trump followed a policy that, in many ways, led to the October 7 Hamas attack. Even as he thought he was executing a comprehensive peace strategy by pushing for and facilitating deals like the Abraham Accords to normalise Israel’s relations with the Arab states, he was creating the conditions for war by subtracting the Palestinians from the equation.
But back to our question: is he different from other presidents?
Professor Jeanne Morefield has a great take on that. Writing on January 8, 2019, for Boston Review, Morefield argued that he isn’t. The problem is that the “‘intellectual middlemen’ who straddle the realms of academia, policy think tanks, and major news outlets,” cannot pigeonhole Trump into “mainstream academic frameworks for analysing and conducting foreign policy.” This is not the only problem, though, says Morefield. Their extreme discomfort is about watching Trump “destroy the cathedral.”
How? Presidents can be — and have been — nasty to other states, order invasions, start coups, pull out of multilateral agreements, enter into disputes with allies, and engage in protectionism and trade wars, but they are not supposed to be brazen about it. America must never be presented as a hegemon, only as a liberal, inclusive democracy that believes in a rules-based order and is prepared to, much to the annoyance of structural realists, export those values to the rest of the world.
In other words, America must be packaged carefully and neatly even when, as Biden recently did, it becomes complicit in genocide.
“Trump, by contrast, is a living nightmare. He opens his mouth and the things which must never be said simply fall out. Thus, when Bill O’Reilly asked him why he supported Putin even though he is a ‘killer,’ Trump shot back, ‘There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?’”
Gosh! How can the US have a president that lays bare the ugly contours of US imperialism? That’s for the Putins and Xis of the world.
Trump’s uncanniness, Morefield notes, has “precipitated an existential crisis in the international relations world,” or what “Robert Vitalis has called the ‘norm against noticing,’” the “gold standard of international relations.” What, pray, is this standard? This is where Morefield’s analysis becomes incisively pithy: “under its rules of play, IR experts act as if the United States has never been an imperial power and that its foreign policy is not, and has never been, intentionally racist. The norm against noticing thus distinguishes between the idea of the United States as a necessary world-historical actor and the reality of how the United States acts.”
Trump’s vision of the world and his candid expression of what the US stands for is “Like a funhouse mirror,” reflecting “a twisted image of US global politics that is and is not who we are supposed to be.”
If he is different from other presidents, it’s not because under him the US has or will shed its hegemonic designs but that he brags about it openly, mocking foes and friends alike and attempting to force everyone to acknowledge who the boss is. Whether he can make this approach stick going forward is of course another debate.