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

handle is hein.journals/fora97 and id is 238 raw text is: 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 complaints about allies and skepticism of unfettered trade to claim that the administration has effectively withdrawn from the world and even adopted a grand strategy of restraint.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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