Liberal hegemonic soft power rhetoric masked imperial ethnocentric racism.
Evidence
Toward the end of the 1990s, the Clinton administration stated that the United States was an “indispensable nation” and that because of its unmatched power and its values it could “stand taller and see farther” than others. Therefore, its dominance of the world was necessarily benign: it was not based on coercion but rather on the attractiveness of American values, commodities, and popular culture. This is what Joseph Nye refers to as “soft power.” (Nye served in the Clinton administration and is on the board of the CFR.) While they might quibble over the details, this vision of US dominance was shared by all sections of the foreign policy establishment; that is, at least until Trump departed from this consensus, creating a new era of blatant racism and a rejection of the humanitarian mission of the post–Cold War era. While Trump’s racism was obvious, imperial ethnocentric racism has informed US policy from the Cold War on. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 472
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- XREF: Extends the book’s ongoing point that liberal Islamophobia and imperial racism span Democrats as well as Republicans, tying to Kumar’s ch9/clinton soft-power and ch10 claims.
Related
- Soft power frames US dominance as attractiveness rather than coercion (similarity 0.84)
- Imperial ethnocratic racism spanned the pre-Trump bipartisan consensus (similarity 0.82)
- Trump’s overt racism differed in style from prior administrations but not substance. (similarity 0.80)
- Obama-era policy reports rejected clash-of-civilizations thinking for liberal imperialism (similarity 0.80)
- Only post-Cold War unipolarity let US elites openly embrace empire language (similarity 0.80)
- Post-Cold War US imperial consensus traded liberal veneer for white nationalism under Trump. (similarity 0.79)
- Post-Cold War unipolarity made US elites willing to openly embrace the word empire. (similarity 0.79)
- Trump’s America First foreign policy was illiberal hegemony, not isolationism. (similarity 0.79)