Trump kept US hegemony aims while ditching multilateral institutions for nationalism

Evidence

Trump abandoned the project of superintending global capitalism through multilateral institutions and alliances for a project of US nationalism. This meant abandoning some, but certainly not all, multilateral deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. To maintain hegemony in the MENA region, Trump supported Israel and Saudi Arabia as counterweights to Iran and gave a green light to the use of military means to shore up their interests. He escalated Obama’s drone war and Special Forces operations as the principal means for neutralizing non-state threats like al-Qaeda and ISIS. He took this several steps further by carrying out extrajudicial assassinations of state leaders such as Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force, a division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards responsible for extraterritorial and clandestine operations. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 518

Categorization

• XREF: Sharply corroborates and qualifies the vault claim about Islamophobia as imperial policy: Trump’s shift is nationalist-imperial rather than multilateral-imperial, complicating Aziz/Razack/Rana’s continuity framing. This is material for the active dialogue. — connects to: Trump’s foreign policy swapped liberal for illiberal hegemony while keeping empire — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 514; Trump replaced global economic stewardship with nationalist unilateralism yet kept MENA hegemony; Trump’s nationalism contradicted US multilateral hegemony strategy but kept its coercive core. (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Trump’s nationalism contradicted US multilateral hegemony strategy but kept its coercive core. #corroborates (0.95)
• Trump replaced global economic stewardship with nationalist unilateralism yet kept MENA hegemony #corroborates (0.90)
• Trump’s foreign policy abandoned the bipartisan liberal-hegemony consensus for unilateral nationalist imperialism. #corroborates (0.90)
• Trump replaced liberal benevolent hegemony with unilateral illiberal hegemony. #corroborates (0.85)
• Trump’s America First foreign policy was illiberal hegemony, not isolationism. #corroborates (0.85)
• Post-Cold War US imperial consensus traded liberal veneer for white nationalism under Trump. #corroborates (0.85) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 526
• Trump-era foreign policy replaced benevolent multilateral hegemony with aggressive unilateralism and white nationalism #corroborates (0.80)