Trump Thread

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Trump is a geopolitical neophyte. His base's orientation is much more isolationist than any candidate since Buchannon an any President since Hoover.

[Montmorency]

Trump is a geopolitical neophyte. His base's orientation is much more isolationist than any candidate since Buchannon an any President since Hoover.

Misconception! Trump is not an isolationist at all in mindset, rhetoric, or policy - he is a unilateralist.

His understanding of strength, because he is a weak and insecure man, is embodied through throwing our weight around and intimidating other countries (especially friendly ones).

An isolationist does not see an active role for a country in world affairs. Trump merely intensifies the logic of American interventionism as a mechanism to deliver goodies. There is no pretense that multilateral arrangements should be something other than tribute-taking exercises. Recall the infamous blog in 2011 in which brainstormed occupying Libya in exchange for "half their oil".

Don't call Trump an isolationist, it's not evidenced. This is his vision for American participation:

[Husar]

Well, yes, "America First".

Of course many say that every leader should think like that, to which I say we had them shortly before WW1, see how that turned out.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Misconception! Trump is not an isolationist at all in mindset, rhetoric, or policy - he is a unilateralist.

His understanding of strength, because he is a weak and insecure man, is embodied through throwing our weight around and intimidating other countries (especially friendly ones).

An isolationist does not see an active role for a country in world affairs. Trump merely intensifies the logic of American interventionism as a mechanism to deliver goodies. There is no pretense that multilateral arrangements should be something other than tribute-taking exercises. Recall the infamous blog in 2011 in which brainstormed occupying Libya in exchange for "half their oil".

Don't call Trump an isolationist, it's not evidenced. This is his vision for American participation:

I tend to think of him as a Russell Mead "Jacksonian" isolationist. I don't think you and I are far off on this, but I do take your point.

[Montmorency]

I tend to think of him as a Russell Mead "Jacksonian" isolationist. I don't think you and I are far off on this, but I do take your point.

I read the article I inferred you were referring to. It has a serious lmitation: it doesn't at any point elaborate what Jacksonian foreign policy was, nor what connections can be made to either Trump's rhetoric or administration. As it turns out, I have no knowledge of Jackson's particular foreign policy record other than the typical antebellum conflicts being fomented over Texas on one hand and the Canadian border on the other.

That's a weakness of these kinds of micro-profile articles [didn't I just write on the Org recently about having written this phrase on the Org before???] is they're more concerned with painting a picture of the subject and conveying an impression to the reader rather than relaying many facts of the underlying matter.

The fairest simple apprehension may be to take into account the differing baselines between time periods. In the pre-liberal United States, isolationism meant something with respect to European geopolitics specifically. Pretty much everyone in the young United States favored expansion within the Western hemisphere on the other hand. Today however almost no one is really an isolationist in that sense. Not even Ron Paul believed that the United States could or should simply ignore great power politics in the world. The term probably should not be applied anymore unless proceeding from a unique contemporary distinction.


Another way to put this is that Trump carries the 'one step forward, two steps back' logic of US internationalism to its logical conclusion. That is, the US created a law-based, norm-based, rights-based international order, and then proceeded to undermine it very cynically to the point that lawless gangsterism became the real norm. Trump merely finally came forward and proclaimed, 'Hell yeah I'm a gangster too. My dream is to become the biggest gangster ever, dattebayo!' *raises fist for bump from Duterte, Putin, etc.*

For example, the US had criticized Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba, among other countries - including John Bolton referring to them as a "troika of tyranny" a few months ago - for rejecting the authority of Latin American transnational human rights frameworks like the Organization of American States Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Now the US under Trump has the same kind of posture as Cuba does, and is ranked among the bottom tier by those same human rights bodies.




EDIT: Meanwhile, here is the President suggesting that he might invoke national emergency powers to proceed with construction of the "Wall".

Meanwhile meanwhile, here is an essay published a few weeks ago describing the hundreds of emergency powers the office of POTUS is imbued with that could literally be used to instate a totalitarian system of government if the office holder were so inclined.

Happy New Year everybody, welcome to 20XX

[Gilrandir]

EDIT: Meanwhile, here is the President suggesting that he might invoke national emergency powers to proceed with construction of the "Wall".

[Seamus Fermanagh]

The Jacksonian thing is to mostly avoid foreign entanglement. When forced to act, smack the crap out of them hard (unconditional surrender), but then Jacksonians tend to opt out and go home.

[Beskar]

Trump actually signed something productive into law.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-...bill/2076/text