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97 Foreign Aff. 20 (2018)
The Rise of Illiberal Hegemony: Trump's Surprising Grand Strategy

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The Rise of

Illiberal Hegemony

Trump's Surprising
Grand Strategy

Barry R. Posen
On the campaign trail, Donald
        Trump vowed to put an end
        to nation building abroad and
mocked U.S. allies as free riders. 'America
first' will be the major and overriding
theme of my administration, he declared
in a foreign policy speech in April 2016,
echoing the language of pre-World
War II isolationists. The countries we
are defending must pay for the cost of
this defense, and if not, the U.S. must
be prepared to let these countries defend
themselves;' he said-an apparent refer-
ence to his earlier suggestion that U.S.
allies without nuclear weapons be allowed
to acquire them.
   Such statements, coupled with his
mistrust of free trade and the treaties and
institutions that facilitate it, prompted
worries from across the political spectrum
that under Trump, the United States
would turn inward and abandon the
leadership role it has played since the
end of World War II. The US is, for
now, out of the world order business,
the columnist Robert Kagan wrote days
after the election. Since Trump took office,
his critics have appeared to feel vindicated.
They have seized on his continued

BARRY R. POSEN is Ford International
Professor of Political Science and Director of the
Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.


complaints about allies and skepticism
of unfettered trade to claim that the
administration has effectively withdrawn
from the world and even adopted a grand
strategy of restraint. Some have gone so
far as to apply to Trump the most feared
epithet in the U.S. foreign policy estab-
lishment: isolationist.
   In fact, Trump is anything but.
Although he has indeed laced his speeches
with skepticism about Washington's
global role, worries that Trump is an
isolationist are out of place against the
backdrop of the administration's accel-
erating drumbeat for war with North
Korea, its growing confrontation with
Iran, and its uptick in combat operations
worldwide. Indeed, across the portfolio
of hard power, the Trump administra-
tion's policies seem, if anything, more
ambitious than those of Barack Obama.
   Yet Trump has deviated from tradi-
tional U.S. grand strategy in one impor-
tant respect. Since at least the end of the
Cold War, Democratic and Republican
administrations alike have pursued a
grand strategy that scholars have called
liberal hegemony. It was hegemonic
in that the United States aimed to be
the most powerful state in the world by
a wide margin, and it was liberal in that
the United States sought to transform
the international system into a rules-
based order regulated by multilateral
institutions and transform other states
into market-oriented democracies freely
trading with one another. Breaking with
his predecessors, Trump has taken much
of the liberal out of liberal hegemony.
He still seeks to retain the United States'
superior economic and military capability
and role as security arbiter for most
regions of the world, but he has chosen
to forgo the export of democracy and


20  FOREIGN AFFAIRS

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