Goodbye to All That? World Order in the Wake of Trump

Among its many implications, Donald Trump’s election as president calls into question the open liberal international order this country has championed and defended for more than seven decades. The edges of that order were already fraying, thanks to disenchantment with the global economy and the return of geopolitical competition, particularly with Russia and China. Trump’s triumph will accelerate its disintegration, by undermining the network of rules, institutions, and alliances that twelve presidents, Republican and Democratic alike, have nurtured since 1945.  The results of the election suggest that the main threats to the liberal world order are no longer foreign but domestic.

Trump won because he recognized and tapped into deep public anxieties about the direction of the United States and its role in the world. Specifically, he understood that a growing number of Americans mistrust globalization, are weary of overseas commitments, and are determined to reassert sovereign control over U.S. borders. The U.S. political and economic establishment consistently underestimated the strength of Trump’s populist appeal, in part because elites (including this author) were not looking in the right places or listening to the right people. In the wake of the candidate’s stunning victory, those of us who still believe that the United States has an international vocation abroad need to turn our gaze homeward.

Trump’s victory suggests just how hard it has become to reconcile U.S. politics with multilateral cooperation. To bridge this domestic-international divide, internationally-inclined Americans must confront three public attitudes on dramatic display during the 2016 election cycle—and which helped propel Trump to victory.

For U.S. internationalists, the election of Donald Trump poses a monumental challenge—albeit one with roots in U.S. history. What Trump proposes is essentially a return to what the scholar Walter Russell Mead terms the “Jacksonian” tradition in U.S. foreign policy. This populist strain in U.S. diplomacy, dating from the presidency of Andrew Jackson, depicts the outside world as an alien and dangerous place. Jacksonians tend to advocate an insular foreign policy, while lashing out with a “don’t tread on me” ferocity when challenged from abroad. This detached, unpredictable, and reactive style stands in stark contrast to the dominant strain of internationalism that has marked U.S. foreign policy since the days of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman—and which has long reassured partners and allies.

The effort to rebuild a bipartisan internationalist consensus in the United States cannot begin soon enough. But it can only succeed if its would-be architects take seriously the popular anxieties that Trump has channeled and exploited in his rise to the world’s most powerful office. This means doing three things.

First, internationalists must seek a more humane world economy that provides tangible benefits not only to well-connected elites but also to working people. This implies forging a new social bargain at home to reconcile the world economy with protections for American workers and communities. Fortunately, there is a historic precedent here. When the Roosevelt administration, along with Great Britain, laid the foundations for the postwar world economy at Bretton Woods in 1944, they took it for granted that the global market needed to be tempered, and that national governments would need policy space to intervene in the market to pursue full employment and other social welfare goals. But that bargain—which scholars call the “compromise of embedded liberalism”—has largely disintegrated in recent decades. Global trade and capital has been liberalized and titans of finance have flourished, but too often the “little guy” has been left behind. Restoring faith in the global economy will require persuading U.S. citizens that new international trade agreements crafted to make them less vulnerable can help to deliver on the American Dream.

Second, internationalists will need to persuade a skeptical U.S. electorate that alliances are deeply in the U.S. national interests—and should not be transformed into a cynical protection racket. This will not be easy. For most of American history, the United States, following the admonitions of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, steered clear of “entangling alliances.” That pattern broke dramatically after World War II. The question now is whether the United States will go “back to the future,” adopting a policy of retrenchment or even isolation. That would be a disaster for both the nation and indeed the world, which depends on the United States to serve—out of enlightened self-interest—as the ultimate guarantor of global order. At the same time, international and domestic realities will force internationalists to scale down the scope of their globalist ambitions and advocate more prudent policies. The lesson of recent U.S. misadventures in the Middle East is that there are limits to U.S. power—and to the patience of the American people.

Finally, internationalists must come to terms with a sovereignty-minded public that insists on controlling the U.S. border, retaining freedom of action abroad, and safeguarding U.S. constitutional liberties from foreign encroachments both real and imagined. The United States was the first republic founded on the principle of popular sovereignty, which implies that governments reflect the consent of the governed and the will of the people. And in this election the people who supported Donald Trump had a lot to say. Some of it was tinged with an ugly nativism, and occasionally racism. But it boiled down to this: we want our country back—from illegal immigrants, from international treaties and organizations, and from global elites who neither understand nor care about us. For internationalists, this may be the hardest nut to crack: Persuading the American electorate that sustained international cooperation, rather than unilateral action, is the most promising path to U.S. security, prosperity, and well-being—and that entering into international agreements is not an abdication of sovereignty, but indeed its exercise.