Trump’s foreign policy abandoned the bipartisan liberal-hegemony consensus for unilateral nationalist imperialism.

Evidence

In a nutshell, illiberal hegemony translated into a policy of aggressive unilateralism and the abandonment of multilateral organizations, treaties, and economic pacts through which the United States had dominated the world. It was neoconservatism on steroids combined with Trump’s transactional approach to deal making. This marked a break with the bipartisan strategy of liberal or benevolent hegemony that the political class had pursued since the Cold War. Moreover, the multicultural and feminist imperialism of the post–Cold War era was replaced by white nationalism. Until the Trump administration, both parties were committed to the US state superintending global capitalism behind the veneer of benevolence. Their goal was to integrate the world’s states into a so-called rules-based neoliberal order of free trade globalization and to prevent the rise of any peer competitor or rival alliance of states. In place of this bipartisan consensus, Trump implemented a toxic combination of economic nationalism, unilateral imperialism, and a transactional relationship with all states in the world system. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 514

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Concrete definition of ‘illiberal hegemony’ as unilateralism plus transactional deal-making, contrasted against the prior liberal-hegemony consensus.
• XREF: Connects to arguments about how ‘rules-based international order’ rhetoric masks superpower control — relevant to imperial-state theory in Milgrom and other institutional readings.

Related

• Trump’s foreign policy swapped liberal for illiberal hegemony while keeping empire (similarity 0.92)
• Post-Cold War US imperial consensus traded liberal veneer for white nationalism under Trump. (similarity 0.91)
• Trump kept US hegemony aims while ditching multilateral institutions for nationalism (similarity 0.86)
• Trump’s America First foreign policy was illiberal hegemony, not isolationism. (similarity 0.85)
• Imperial ethnocratic racism spanned the pre-Trump bipartisan consensus (similarity 0.84)
• Trump’s nationalism contradicted US multilateral hegemony strategy but kept its coercive core. (similarity 0.82)
• Trump’s overt racism differed in style from prior administrations but not substance. (similarity 0.81)
• Post-Cold War US foreign policy was bipartisan and aimed at capitalist world integration (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Trump-era foreign policy replaced benevolent multilateral hegemony with aggressive unilateralism and white nationalism #corroborates (0.95)
• Trump replaced liberal benevolent hegemony with unilateral illiberal hegemony. #corroborates (0.92)