The Ending of American Exceptionalism

My latest for Foreign Affairs. Read it and weep.

Photo by Lee Lawson on Unsplash

The good people at Foreign Affairs asked a bunch of smart people, like Peter Feaver and Kori Schake, what Trump 2.0 would mean for American foreign policy for the next four years. They also asked me, however, and so it would be safe to say that I wrote gloomy for them.

My essay, “The End of American Exceptionalism,” is now available to read. The nut pargraphs:

Any close observer of Trump’s first term should be familiar with his foreign policy preferences as well as his foreign policy process. However, there are likely to be three significant differences between Trump’s first- and second-term foreign policies. First, Trump will come into office with a more homogeneous national security team than he had in 2017. Second, the state of the world in 2025 is rather different than it was in 2017. And third, foreign actors will have a much better read of Donald Trump.

Trump will navigate world politics with greater confidence this time around. Whether he will have any better luck bending the world to his “America first” brand is another question entirely. What is certain, however, is that the era of American exceptionalism has ended. Under Trump, U.S. foreign policy will cease promoting long-standing American ideals. That, combined with an expected surge of corrupt foreign policy practices, will leave the United States looking like a garden-variety great power.

You’ll have to read the whole the whole thing to see the argument fleshed out more fully, but I did want to to stress two things. First, as ever, I relied on the prior work of others — in particular, Tom Wright’s January 2016 “Trump’s 19th Century Foreign Policy” essay for Politico, which has held up remarkably well, and Elizabeth Saunders’ latest in Good Authority, “On foreign policy, has Donald Trump become predictable?” Both are must reads to guide folks for the next four years.

Finally, I wanted to stress the corrupt foreign policy angle, because I haven’t seen it discussed at much length anywhere else. Here’s that section of the essay:

Former policy principals in prior administrations, from Henry Kissinger to Hillary Clinton, have profited from their public service through book deals, keynote speeches, and geopolitical consulting. Former Trump officials have taken this to a whole new level, however. Advisers such as Trump’s son-in-law and White House aide Jared Kushner and Richard Grenell, a former ambassador and acting director of national intelligence, leveraged the ties they made as policymakers to secure billions in foreign investment (including from foreign government investment funds) and real estate deals almost immediately after they left office. It will not be surprising if foreign benefactors approach Trump’s coterie of advisers with implicit and explicit promises of lucrative deals after their time in office—as long as they play ball while in power. Combine this with the expected role that billionaires such as Elon Musk will play in Trump 2.0, and one can foresee a dramatic increase in the corruption of U.S. foreign policy.

I will be happy if I am wrong in this prediction — but I don’t think I will be.

Anyway, read the whole thing!