Trump’s America First foreign policy was illiberal hegemony, not isolationism.
Evidence
Trump gained national prominence by amplifying right-wing attacks on Obama and the claim that he was Muslim and therefore more loyal to Muslim-majority countries than the United States. Along with Fox News, Trump popularized a conspiracy theory known as “birtherism” that claimed Obama was born in Kenya and therefore could not be president. Despite the release of Obama’s birth certificate, documenting his birth in Hawaii, Trump remained popular with the right-wing electoral base that brought him to power in 2016. Trump broke with the dog-whistle racism of the Republican Party, resorting instead to blatant right-wing racism and nativism. His domestic and foreign policy involved making “America Great” by putting “America First.” This stance was interpreted in some quarters as a return to isolationism, a policy among some conservatives in an era before the rise of the neocons. In reality, as political scientist Barry Posen argued in Foreign Affairs, Trump adopted a different strategy for global dominance, one that might better be described as “illiberal hegemony.” — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 513
Trump broke with the dog-whistle racism of the Republican Party, resorting instead to blatant right-wing racism and nativism. His domestic and foreign policy involved making “America Great” by putting “America First.” This stance was interpreted in some quarters as a return to isolationism, a policy among some conservatives in an era before the rise of the neocons. In reality, as political scientist Barry Posen argued in Foreign Affairs, Trump adopted a different strategy for global dominance, one that might better be described as “illiberal hegemony.” — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 525
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- DEFINE: Introduces Posen’s ‘illiberal hegemony’ as a corrective to the common misreading of Trump’s America First as isolationist.
Related
- Trump’s foreign policy swapped liberal for illiberal hegemony while keeping empire (similarity 0.87)
- Trump’s foreign policy abandoned the bipartisan liberal-hegemony consensus for unilateral nationalist imperialism. (similarity 0.85)
- Post-Cold War US imperial consensus traded liberal veneer for white nationalism under Trump. (similarity 0.82)
- Trump’s overt racism differed in style from prior administrations but not substance. (similarity 0.82)
- Trump kept US hegemony aims while ditching multilateral institutions for nationalism (similarity 0.82)
- Imperial ethnocratic racism spanned the pre-Trump bipartisan consensus (similarity 0.79)
- Trump’s nationalism contradicted US multilateral hegemony strategy but kept its coercive core. (similarity 0.79)
- Liberal hegemonic soft power rhetoric masked imperial ethnocentric racism. (similarity 0.79)
Broader Connections
- Trump replaced liberal benevolent hegemony with unilateral illiberal hegemony.
#corroborates(0.95) - Trump’s nationalism contradicted US multilateral hegemony strategy but kept its coercive core.
#corroborates(0.92) - The entire US foreign policy establishment shared soft-power dominance assumptions until Trump
#complicates(0.75)