Donald Trump’s grand strategy defies easy categorization. That is by design. Trump believes that ambiguity and flexibility are critical sources of bargaining leverage, an idea he gathered as a real estate developer long before his political career began. Keeping his true preferences hidden keeps his counterparts off-balance and prevents them from driving up the price…
Category: Policy Series
Jervis Forum Roundtable 17-45 on Spruyt, The World Imagined
The traditional foundations of international order are undergoing fundamental changes, wrought simultaneously by American unilateralism, the rise of China, decaying international institutions, and the open disregard for international law and norms by major powers. This has led to suggestions that the Western-underwritten order is dying, if not already dead.[1] This perceived terminal decline has also shifted…
Jervis Forum Chaos Unleashed: “Trump’s Commercial Realism”
During his first term as president, Trump proved that he was truly unique among modern US leaders. Unlike any president before him in the post-1945 era, he was skeptical of treaties and alliances, preferring competition to cooperation. He defined the national interest to exclude goals such as spreading liberal values and military or humanitarian interventions….
Jervis Forum Policy Series: Populism, Alliance Resilience, and the Future of Global Order
The contemporary electoral successes of populist leaders, most notably Donald Trump in the United States, have strained long-standing international alliances and institutions in ways not seen since the early postwar era. The commitment of populists to national sovereignty, their skepticism of elites, and their preference for unilateralism directly clash with the foundational principles of multilateral…
Jervis Forum Chaos Unleashed Policy Series: “America First” in the Second Trump Administration
How wrong can one be? In my contribution to the second volume in this series, I questioned the extent to which US foreign policy was determined by individual presidents, and also how much the coming into office of a different administration led to significant changes in the character or direction of policy.[1] It still seems…
Chaos Unleashed Policy Series Introductory Essay: Emerging Master Narratives of IR Theory in the Age of Trump
Building on the first two books in the Jervis Forum’s series about Donald Trump’s impact on international politics, our forthcoming set of essays and planned third volume take stock of the even more turbulent impact of Trump’s foreign policy in his second term.[1] These developments fundamentally challenge how we think about the international system at…
Policy Series 2021-61: Militarized Policing in the Trump Era and Beyond
After the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, demonstrations against police brutality and in support of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement broke out across the United States.[1] In response to the demonstrations, President Donald Trump sent federal police wearing camouflage and equipped with tactical gear to Portland, Oregon, Washington, D.C., and dozens of…
Policy Series 2021-60: Trump and Russia—Less than Meets the Eye
After all the controversy, accusations, angry tweets, impeachment hearings, and conspiracy theories, how is the Trump administration’s Russia policy to be assessed? Russia consumed an unprecedented amount of domestic energy during Trump’s presidency, casting a shadow over the White House during the four years Trump lived there. And yet there has been scant systematic analysis…
Policy Series 2021-59: Racialized Threats and Security Rationales in U.S. Immigration Policies
In late August 2021, Afghans huddled in military airplanes amidst a massive evacuation. Crowds at the airport gates were denied access, then targeted by suicide bombers. These dramatic images encapsulate how security studies scholars typically view migration: refugees as a collateral consequence of conflict; innocent women and children in need of humanitarian assistance; asylum applicants…
Policy Series 2021-58: Liberal Internationalism and Partisan Discontents into the Post-Trump United States
We completed this article in September 2021, just as the Taliban defeated the American-supported government of Afghanistan, and the United States worked to transport all of its citizens out of the country along with the people of Afghanistan who worked for and with its troops, contractors, and officials. On the liberal internationalism front, this is…