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LSE: Public lectures and events
Is there a Trump doctrine? Making sense of US foreign and security policy since Trump’s return to the White House
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Welcome to the LSE Events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.
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Welcome everyone. Thank you very much for coming to this hybrid event. My name is Rohan Mukherjee. I'm an Assistant professor in the International Relations Department and Deputy Director of LSE Ideas. I'm very pleased here to welcome our audience today, both in person and online. So before we get started, I would just like all of you, if you could, to please put your mobile devices on silent or flight mode. And I'm very happy to welcome here Professor Ronald Krebs, Dr. Catherine Miller, Dr. Luca Tardelli, and Dr. Bhram Lee, who are going to talk to us about an event that focuses on Donald Trump's return to the White House.
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Right.
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So. So I just want to quickly introduce the panel. I know they don't need any introduction, but I still should, so. Ronald Krebs is Distinguished McKnight professor and Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of the award winning book Narrative and the Making of US National Security and also the co editor of the Oxford Handbook of Grand Strategy. He has written extensively in various outlets on US Foreign policy, grand strategy, military recruitment and service, civil nature, relations, rhetoric, narrative and other topics. Catherine Miller is Associate professor of International Relations in the Department of International Relations at lse. Her interests lie in examining gendered cultural narratives underlying political violence and the modern collective use of force. Dr. Luca Tardelli is an Associate professor of Education International Relations. His research focuses on international security, military intervention and US Foreign policy. And he draws primarily on both realism and political sociology to study the practice of military intervention. And finally, Dr. Bhram Lee is Assistant professor in the Department of International Relations at lse. Her interests lie in how value based issues affect economic globalization and how industrialized democracies negotiate human rights, our environmental side agreements during trade negotiations to export those values to their trading partners. So that's our panel. What we'll do is begin with speech by Professor Krebs and then we move on to comments from the rest of the panelists in their chairs. And then we'll open it up to Q and A for the audience both here and online. If you're online and watching this right now, you can submit your questions through the event to the event via the Q and A feature, I'm told at the top left of your screen. And for those of you in the theatre, of course, I'll call on you. I'll take questions in groups and please do let us know your name and your affiliation both when speaking in the room and asking your question, and also when submitting your question online. That would help us a great deal. And for social media users, the hashtag for today's event is LSE Events or Lessee Events. This event is being recorded and will hopefully be made available soon as a podcast, subject to no technical difficulties. And that's as much as you're going to hear from me. I would love to hand over to Ron Krebs now. Thank you.
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Thank you, Ron, for that generous introduction and thank you all for having me here at the lse. Topic for today is Is there a Trump Doctrine? The easy answer is obviously no. Donald Trump is a singularly mercurial, egocentric, impulsive individual. The man cannot manage to pursue a train of thought for more than two sentences. He is constitutionally ill suited to maintaining, you might say, the singular focus, mental discipline, patience and long time horizons that pursuing a foreign policy doctrine would require. That's the easy answer, and I don't think it's the right answer. And so we need to start by asking, what do we mean by this thing called doctrine? Now, it should be noted that presidents in the United States have, especially since the Second World War, been obsessed with having a foreign policy and a national security doctrine. It's part of what it even means, I think, to occupy the role of president in the American context, in an American superpower, and failing to articulate a doctory performance on the national and international stage. Rightly or wrongly, US Presidents have seemed to think that being associated with a dominant way of thinking about the world, of approaching it, having a critical yardstick by which any policy proposal is measured and with which any policy proposal must be consonant. They seem to think that that is something very important. They think it's important for signaling America's intentions abroad to allies and adversaries alike. It's important, they seem to think, for aligning the bureaucratic behemoth that is the US Government's foreign policy, national security, and intelligence apparatus. It is important, they seem to think, because even a country as rich and powerful as the United States cannot do everything. Even the US Needs to make hard choices regarding how to spend its limited resources and at least at the margins. And doctrine is the key doctrine, articulates a hierarchy of interests, and it is as valuable for telling a country what it will not do as much as what it will do. Throughout the Cold War, the United States allegedly had a coherent doctrine known as containment of containing the spread of the communist monolith of the Soviet Union and its allies. 1969 Richard Nixon announces the Nixon Doctrine that the US will honor its treaty commitments through its nuclear shield or umbrella. America's allies though would take, Nixon said, primary responsibility for their own defense and especially in providing boots on the ground. The immediate purpose of course was to justify Vietnamization, I.e. that South Vietnam needed to take up more of the war's burden. But the larger purpose was to signal to everyone else that the United States would not was not going to fight another Vietnam. 1983. Reagan articulates what comes to be known as the Reagan Doctrine, reaffirming that the United States will not fight others wars and but that it saw the Nixon doctrine and other variants of containment as too passive, too focused on deterrence and defense. The US said Reagan needed to go on the offense to roll back Soviet influence, to roll back the evil empire. And it would do so by supporting anti communist insurgents around the world, most notably most famously in Nicaragua and Afghanistan. Since the end of the Cold War, this impulse to doctrine has has been underpinned by a very profound dose of containment envy. The idea that U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War hewed closely to the course prescribed by containment is of course a myth. Containment meant very different things from one administration to another. And it was a sufficiently protean concept that virtually anything could be justified in the name of containment. From providing generous development assistance, to battling public health challenges, to relying heavily on nuclear weapons, to waging war in Southeast Asia, to supporting rebels in Central America, to overthrowing left leaning leaders around the world, to investing in America's internal infrastructure and building the world's greatest university system that is now being destroyed, could be justified in the name of containment. But after the Cold War ended, containment myth though it was, was associated with success. Without a doctrine. It was thought you might win a battle, but how could you win a war? How could you be just a success as the nation's commander in chief? And as a result, the Clinton administration was utterly consumed by the need to produce a foreign policy doctrine. In the 1990s it cycled through one contender after another. National Security Advisor Tony Lake's notion of enlarging the world zone of free market democracies, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's imagining of the United States as the world's indispensable nation, focusing on battling rogue states or backlash states who did not adhere to the basic rules of the liberal international order, and so on. I tell all this history simply to emphasize that doctrine is part of the way in which official Washington talks about America's role in in the world. And on the very rare occasions that presidents expressly reject doctrine, they pay the price. Consider what happened in 2014 during a trip to Asia. In a fit of pique during a press conference with the Philippine President, Barack Obama defended his prudence in deploying military force by making an expressly anti doctrinal statement where we can make a difference using all the tools we've got in the toolkit. Well, we should do so. That may not always be sexy, that may not always attract a lot of attention. It doesn't make for good argument on Sunday morning shows, but it avoids errors. And then I apologize because this is the peculiar argot of Americans. We talk in baseball metaphors all the time. The Americans in the room and non Americans will recognize us. And so Obama says, you hit singles, you hit doubles. Every once in a while we may be able to hit a home run, but we steadily advance the interests of the American people and our partnership with folks around the world. This was, I think, a very sincere statement of Obama's pragmatic spirit, of his Niburian realism and modesty, and of his deep awareness of the limits of American power. It was often summarized, by the way within the White House as don't do stupid shit of a peace with no drama. Obama but the pest. The press conference outburst caused an uproar. Even his usual allies took issue with the modesty of Obama's vision. The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd ridiculed the president. A singles hitter, she wrote, doesn't scare anybody. What happened to crushing it and swinging for the fences? Where have you gone, Babe Ruth? Fareed Zakaria, who praised the substance of Obama's foreign policy, wrote that the president approaches his agenda cautiously, as if his heart isn't in it, seemingly pulled along by events rather than shaping them. And even Hillary Clinton implicitly criticized her boss a few months later when she said, great nations need organizing principles and don't do stupid stuff. That was the more tame form of the way it was actually said. Don't do stupid stuff is not an organizing principle. Presidents cannot be seen, or don't think they can be seen as pragmatic tinkerers, let alone as leaders who just lurch from crisis to crisis, who react to events rather than shape events. In reality, that may be what they often do, and yet it violates the tacit rules of the American presidency since World War II. Running for re election in 2012, Obama offered a confession of sorts. The biggest mistake of his first term. He said was not his policy, but his leadership style. The nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people, that it gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times. Obama, the campaigner of yes, we can, did this as few others had in American history. But Obama, the sitting president, weighed down by a very deep sense of responsibility, failed to tell that story. His foreign policy, as the New York Times columnist and Minnesota native, by the way, Tom Friedman wrote, was mostly nudging and whispering. So what do we mean by doctrine? Clinton, as I said, referred to the need for an organizing principle. Scholars of international security often speak of grand strategy, and in the inevitable nautical metaphor, the grand strategy is the North Star by which leaders are to guide the ship of state through the stormy seas of global politics. And if all this sounds a bit woolly, it's because it is a bit woolly. Doctrines and grand strategy, they're not rigid plans of action. They provide the principles that inform action. How they are applied in any circumstance depends on the details. And it would be foolish to rigidly adhere to any strategy, right? You need sometimes to tack with the winds. You need to show flexibility and responsiveness and adaptability. But if you adjust so much, then what kind of grand strategy are we really talking about? And so when I think about doctrine, I find it much more useful to shift us away from grand strategy and that way of thinking about doctrine into onto the terrain of narrative. And so I really think about doctrine or grand strategy as a dominant narrative of foreign policy and national security. Narrative is the universal human way of making sense of the world. It takes our countless disconnected experiences and imposes order upon them. The world is not already narrated. It approaches us as disordered. It is narrative that imposes order upon it. It fills out a cast of characters, it depicts a scene, and it tells a story about how these characters, working within that setting and scene act and how their actions are related. In the Middle Ages, for folks tended to write, historians didn't write sort of narrative history as we know it. They wrote in annals, a listing of events, one damn thing after another. But in narrative, events are not like that. In fact, one action leads to, it causes another. The literary theorist Frank Kermode put it beautifully, narrative goes nowhere without its doppelganger causality. And narratives, of course, are necessarily selective. A narrative about everything is a narrative about nothing. A doctrine or grand strategy, in other words, offers a way of talking about and making sense of an inherently disordered and complex world. It does not shut down all debate. It does not settle things. It doesn't, it doesn't align with a particular policy, but it constitutes the foundation for argument about foreign policy. Because only those policies that can be articulated in its terms, only they are going to gain a hearing. Having trouble advancing my page here. Technology doesn't want to advance. Okay. It is in this sense that I think that Donald Trump does have a doctrine, has a fairly coherent and stable narrative about the world. But before I tell you what that narrative is, I want to offer three important caveats. Caveat number one, the US in the 21st century is a really big country still with globe spanning interests. No single doctrine, no single narrative is going to encompass everything the US does in the world. We're looking here for, if you will, to use a metaphor, a kind of regression line through messy data, not an explanatory master key. That is true for all US Administrations, let alone caveat number two, that of Donald Trump, right? A singularly fickle, egocentric, impulsive individual. As I said, this is, after all, a president who has successfully pressed the U.S. treasury to print his image on both sides of a dollar coin in honor of America's 250th anniversary. A president who named himself head of the Kennedy center for the Performing Arts and who believes he should have won the Nobel Peace Prize this year. A president who is particularly responsive to ego stroking and flattery and who is, in classic narcissistic fashion, especially sensitive to slights. And this is a president who, in response to a mere advertisement during baseball's World Series sponsored by the government of Ontario that showed clips of Ronald Reagan endorsing free trade, immediately announced 100% additional tariffs on Canadian goods. Caveat number three. When you are a national leader, even of a country as powerful as the United States, you don't make all the rules and you don't set the agenda single handedly, as the saying goes. Right? The other guy gets a say. Barack Obama was definitely not interested in the Middle east, but the Middle east turned out to be interested in him. And so he found himself dragged against his inclinations into leading from behind in an intervention in Syria, in Libya, excuse me, waging a war in Syria against the Islamic State, and even more reluctantly, arming rebels in Syria. Joe Biden wanted to pivot firmly to Asia to address China as what his administration called a pacing challenge. But he found himself focusing intently on Europe and the war in Ukraine. The other guy gets a say. All that said, Trump seems to have embraced a particular historical narrative. And in a nutshell, the argument I'm going to develop over the next 15 minutes or so is that Trump is a 19th century man. But what makes him so dangerous is that he is the tools of a 21st century state at his disposal, like many prophets of American decline and renewal. And there's a long story to be told about that. Trump's vision is nostalgic. Nostalgia is always deeply conservative and revolutionary at the same time. It expresses the desire to return to the past, but to return to a past that is highly idealized, highly selective. In other words, the politics of nostalgia aims to return the nation to a time that never really existed. Trump's slogan and touchstone, as we all know, is make America great again. But when was that period for Donald Trump when America was great? When did things start to go off the rails in his first term? I thought, and I wrote an article to this effect in Foreign affairs, that it was the 1950s, largely because of obsession with manufacturing. This is the time in which what's good for General Motors is good for America. A time of expressly Post World War II, very traditional gender politics that seem to accord with Donald Trump's vision. But I now think that this is actually quite wrong, because for Trump, the immediate post war period is not the dream. It was in fact a tragic moment in American history, because that is the moment when the United States set up an international order that, in Trump's account, bled America dry. That is the moment, according to Donald Trump, when US Leaders snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. In Trump's account, the post war international order was not. It's not a story of America doing well for itself by doing good for the world. He sees it very simply as a raw deal in which the US did far more for others than it did for itself, in which the US Was played for the sucker. And it is a tragedy, an own goal, in his view, because it didn't have to be that way. The US Was at the apex of its power after the Second World War. It could have locked its gains in Trump's favored narrative. The world he is seeking to recreate as part of his nostalgic myth making is located significantly farther back in America's past in the late 19th and early 20th century. That's a moment when the US had not yet reached the apex of its power. At the apex of your power, you only have one place to go, and that's down. For Trump, the moment to make America great again is when the US Is still rising. A moment when the United States was no longer the deeply vulnerable, weak country of the early 19th century, when you all burned down our White House, right? But a continental behemoth for the first time in charge of an overseas empire. It was the moment when the United States really began to embrace its power. This was a time when the identity of the United States was that of a monochromatic democracy, not a plural democracy, white, Christian, unified. Remember Pete Hegseth's line? Our unity is our strength, says Hegseth. It's a time when there's a tremendous amount of anxiety about immigration by those then thought to represent people of color. Irish, Eastern and southern Europeans, Asian. This is a time a global setting which is populated. We often speak in our international relations courses as if it were populated by states, but it wasn't. It was a world populated by empires. That is Trump's cast of characters. A world of imperial powers, of metropoles and peripheries, of great powers and their satellites and other petty states, patrons and their subordinates who must on bended knee express gratitude, as we saw when Vladimir Zelensky came to the White House, when they even have to dress as the patron would like. Zelensky learned that too, the hard way, several months ago. It's a world of hierarchy, not a world as we often speak of in international relations, a world of anarchy. Trump's world is not populated by enemies and friends, by democracies and autocracies as it was for Joe Biden. It's a world populated of peers and non peers, of relative equals like China and Russia for him, and subordinates. And what is the character of those that cast of characters? Pure self interest and transactionalism. Trump's not a moralizer. He thinks that others will take advantage of the US whenever they can, just as the US will take advantage of them whenever it can. And that fits very well with the US vision of itself in Trump's narrative at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. The United States at that period, pre Woodrow Wilson was not a world orderer, didn't have a grand vision for the world. It was without the luxury of being able to work only with the ideologically like minded. It was a time when international politics seemed increasingly globalized, but was actually remained highly disconnected. And that's a critical feature of understanding Trump's vision of the world in his first term. Many of us were puzzled. If Trump was really so thought that it was so important to control, to deal with North Korea and the problem of nuclear weapons, why was he pursuing a trade war with China? He often seemed to think these things had one thing had nothing to do with the other. It now has become clear that Donald Trump presumes the world to be deeply disconnected. What the US Says and does with regard to one country and Trump's vision has little bearing on how others should relate to it in other domains. Which explains a mystery about why Donald Trump constantly contradicts himself, constantly changes his rhetorical tune, and yet thinks that others should take his threats and promises seriously. At the end of the day, right, he doesn't think it has repercussions. It is an international setting in the late 19th century without stable institutionalized alliances, just bilaterally negotiated deals, and a world without powerful international organizations. This is not the world. This is the world. Before Woodrow Wilson and his and his 14 points, this is a world the United States was not trying to build, a world of liberty under law. And the source of wealth and power in that world was things you can touch and feel, not ideas, not services provided. Materialism on steroids. Arguments over policy in Trump world take place largely, I think, on this narrative. So what does this help us understand? So why should we think about this as narrative? Well, I think it makes a whole lot of things fit together, not just Trump's foreign policy, but also his domestic policy. So I'm going to say a few words about domestic affairs before I spend most of my time talking about foreign policy. First question, why is Donald Trump, who made his own fortune in real estate, in self promotion and branding and in entertainment, so focused on bringing manufacturing back to the United States and on promoting natural resource exploitation? Because that's what powered the United states in the 19th century. Trump is not completely ignorant of technological change. He has leapt aboard the AI and microchip bandwagon, but he wants those CPUs and GPUs to be made in America, 21st century technology, 19th century vision. Second, why is Trump so opposed to forms of electricity production based on renewables rather than fossil fuels? Partly, of course, it's about doubling down on what he calls the hoax of global warming. But Trump has even canceled Biden administration's subsidies to renewable energy technologies that you might have thought he would embrace because they have implications for US Manufacturing and and competitiveness. He has cancelled some ongoing projects even near completion, like wind energy projects on which local interests have signed off. And he's done a lot of damage to red states where a lot of this industry is actually located. Now, part of this may simply be whatever Joe Biden wanted, I do not want, which seems to be, let's say, his attitude toward the chips act. But it may also reflect this 19th century man's instinctive belief that real wealth comes from natural resources, from things you can take out of the ground, and that the United States has a comparative advantage in a fossil fuel world. Third, why is Donald Trump, a man who could not be less religious in his personal life, so intent on empowering the Christian right and specifically its pronatalist and gender traditional trad wife wing? Partly, of course, this is good politics, but Trump could have mobilized a Christian right without putting them in charge of the hen house because the US in the late 19th century still very much defined itself as a Christian nation. Why is Donald Trump so intent on rolling back progress in civil rights for black people, on empowering racists and anti Semites like Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson on, as he put it in 2017 after the violent white nationalist demonstrations in Charlottesville and finding fine people on both sides? Partly, of course, this is a gam good politics. It costs Trump very little to shore up his southern base with symbolic acts like reverting to the previously purged names of US military bases or returning statues of mounted Confederate generals to their previous places. But Trump's embrace of racist provocateurs has also made trouble for him, potentially alienating independence. So why? Because the 1890s were a time of sectional reconciliation. This is the real end of Reconstruction. There's a cross class alliance of white people that is formed at the expense of black people. After the 1890s, veterans of the blue and the gray of the Union and Confederate armies, they came together to mourn their dead. This is the beginning of an agreement. On Memorial day in the 1890s, the south was rehabilitated. Revolution, Reconstruction became a distant memory, and black people became the victims of Jim Crow and of racial redlining. Let's turn to foreign policy. Donald Trump has, as you all know, expressed interest some time ago in annexing two territories to the United States, Greenland and Canada. And every so often, every so often, the Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, will say something. And Trump returns too. Gotta bring you know you really would do better being part of us. But why these two and these two alone? Again, there are good strategic reasons that we could articulate that might make sense of this having to do with global warming and the navigability of the Arctic. But Trump could have gotten what he wanted in a variety of other ways. But it fits with Trump's narrative. Manifest Destiny, that American belief in its own mission right to conquer the continent. There is nothing in Manifest Destiny that suggests that continental expansion should be limited, should stop at the 49th parallel. Second, economics. What do Canada and Greenland have in great abundance? Raw materials and natural resources which this 19th century mind greatly values. And if Manifest Destiny means the whole continent, why not Mexico? Because Mexicans are not white. The United States was always profoundly ambivalent about the empire it conquered in 1898. Recent work has argued, I think very persuasively because they held two commitments that it was difficult to reconcile democracy and racism, and it's very hard. They believed they needed to extend the vote to new territories if they were going to annex them, but they didn't want to give all those votes to people who were not white. Late 19th century Americans were not ambivalent about empire because they doubted whether it was worth the candle, but rather because they were simultaneously committed small d democrats and racists. 2. Why is Donald Trump, who is people used to think was kind of interested in restraint? Why has Donald Trump devoted substantial military resources to Latin America, almost certainly illegally been bombing supposedly suspected drug smugglers? Why has he designated Venezuela a narco state, openly admitted to authorizing covert action to overthrow the Maduro regime? Someone should tell him the whole point of COVID action is plausible deniability and moved substantial naval resources to the Caribbean. Now all this of course indicates that Trump is not interested in a grand strategy of restraint, even though in his inaugural address he declared we will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end and and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into. But the late 19th and early 20th century was the time that in the Trumpian narrative, the Monroe Doctrine was finally brought to life. Don't need to tell a British audience in 1894 the Venezuela crisis was the time that Britain actually acknowledged for the first time implicitly that the United States did have a special role in the Western Hemisphere, acknowledged implicitly the rights expressed by the US in the Monroe Doctrine. And the era of American gunboat diplomacy in Latin America begins very soon thereafter. This is the period when Latin America comes to be known as America's backyard, a term that Pete Hegseth literally revived just the other day. And it is the vision of American hemispheric dominance that Trump embraces. What about the Middle east, you will ask?
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Right?
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Trump administration has devoted significant resources to Israel's war in Gaza, envisions a major role in post war investment in Gaza, and then joined Israel's war against Iran. Partly, probably domestic politics, Trump wants and needs evangelical support. But it also fits with America's 21st century capacities. The definition and understanding of America's backyard has simply expanded. It doesn't have to be quite as geographically close as it once was. This is part of the American sphere of influence. Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, other states, they have long been American protectorates and probably a whole lot easier to deal with than Latin America. And Trump's approach to the Middle east is more early 20th century hierarchy than the 20th century, than the later 20th century and the 21st century pretense of equality. Joe Biden comes to Saudi Arabia, fist bumps MBS while pretending to hector him about human rights. Trump, as you saw in the images from the White House just yesterday, makes absolutely no such pretense. While hitting Saudi Arabia and others up for cold hard investment cash, Trump is running an old fashioned protection racket. Right? Biden often treated Netanyahu like a chum. Trump gives Netanyahu free reign until he makes clear what the limits are and Netanyahu transgresses them. The bombing of Qatar, right? And Trump says, as if it were his, to say, I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank. Don't worry about the West Bank. Israel's not going to do anything with the West Bank. Tariffs straight out of the 19th and early 20th century playbook. Remember, the US does not have an income tax in the late 19th and early 20th century. To the extent that the US government gets any money and any revenue, it comes about through tariffs, non tariff barriers, that is so 1980s and 1990s, counting services as a form of trade, so 2000s. And finally restricting immigration. That's of course partly domestic politics, but it is part and parcel of those long standing concerns in the late 19th and early 20th century about immigrants introducing impurities into white Christian America. This was true, by the way, even of the progressives of the period. They didn't want to restrict immigration, but they wanted to find a way to more effectively assimilate immigrants. Some, like Teddy Roosevelt, called for universal military training at the time to reproduce that European vision of the military as a school for the nation. And of course, in 1924, the Johnson act, the United States essentially severely limits immigration from all those that it deems not white. Trump's narrative is that ever since that moment, since that Pre World War I period, the 1890s, 1900s up to 1917 or so, that the United States has been in decline. It has been in decline since. Since it embraced non Christian and non white immigration and therefore diversity. Since it embraced grand ideological aspirations, beginning with Wilson, to construct a world that advanced what it believed to be the common good and since its ambitions became global rather than regional, since it abandoned the Monroe Doctrine and stopped focusing on hemispheric hegemony, Trump's ambition is to recreate 19th century America in a 19th century world, albeit with 21st century technology and capacities. And that is part of what makes that narrative so dangerous. We can't overemphasize how different the American state was in the late 19th and early 20th century. The US state was extremely small with relatively few employees. Right. The largest number of federal employees were all located in anybody know the Postal Service?
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Right.
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In this very large country, it had no income tax, so it had extremely limited revenues. In order to have an income tax, the US had to pass a constitutional amendment. It had a very limited vision, no social safety net to speak of, while social safety nets were taking real shape all around Europe. Very few safety regulations, very limited provision of public goods like public health and education, no sponsorship of higher education. And the US military was extremely small in the late 19th and early 20th century. Its mission throughout the 19th century was conquering the west, fulfilling the mission of manifest Destiny, pacifying the Indians. That was the language also known as massacring them. A time of very small scale activity in Latin America. But for all of Trump's 19th century sensibility, including stripping down key, key parts of America's infrastructure, providing public goods like clean water, clean air, safe medicines, and so on, Trump has shown zero interest in eroding those parts of the state that bequeath to him the power to coerce his enemies. Trump, as, by the way, the presidency was not where the action was in the 19th century. The creation of the imperial presidency throughout the Cold War, its revival from the 1980s forward. Trump is doing just the opposite.
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Right.
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So what does Trump want to do? He wants to continue to build up the military. He proudly, somewhat falsely declares a 1 trillion dollar budget thanks to him. Loosening wants to loosen legal constraints on the use of force and use the military in virtually unprecedented ways in the domestic arena. He has no desire to shrink the military in its global footprint back to the 19th century. He wants to. For someone who seems to want to shrink the federal government, Trump has been doing a remarkable job exploiting federal funding and regulations to bend higher education to his will, to coerce democratic cities and states to pursue the policies he favors, and to weaken the civil service. Trump has no desire to recreate the presidency of the 19th century. The presidency is extraordinarily so much more powerful today than it was 130 years ago. Now, point is, there is a Trump doctrine you maybe. I certainly think his underlying narrative is outmoded and foolish, normatively offensive, and frankly, a recipe, there could not be a better recipe for making America less great. Donald Trump may not be entirely conscious of that doctrine. He probably couldn't fully articulate it. And I don't want to say that that vision is really motivating his policies. But there is an intellectual architecture, a narrative architecture, undergirding those various initiatives. There's a narrative with which they certainly seem to fit and in which they make sense. We tend to talk about Donald Trump as if he were driven by ID alone. And he is, of course, in so many ways driven by id. But that should not blind us to the Trumpian superego, to the vision of perfection that drives him to the narrative underpinnings of the Trump administration's foreign and domestic policies. It was often said during his first term that people's mistake was taking Donald Trump literally but not seriously. I don't think very many people take Trump literally anymore, but there are still plenty of people who don't take him sufficiently seriously. They and we should thank you so much.
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B
Thank you, Ron, for that very engaging talk. All the more so without slides. So, you know, wonderful, really. We just were focused on your remarks, which was excellent. I will now hand over to Dr. Catherine Miller. Kate, over to you.
- [38:58]
E
Brilliant. Thank you so much, Ron, for such a wonderful talk. Rohan, for chairing, and of course, for the opportunity to join this discussion this evening. Ron, your remarks, of course, open up many angles for conversation. I'm sure the audience is going to want to pursue several of them. Unsurprisingly, I'm going to pick up on one bit in particular, which is the framing of Trump as 19th century man and what that framing sort of, or narrative, we could say, implies about the administration's worldview and in particular its understanding of political agency, what it means to act in the world politically. Now, from a substance perspective, I broadly agree with the features you identify in terms of sort of a 19th century understanding of what it means to hold conventional, organized political power. And I won't speak about that more because I know Luca is going to comment on that a bit, in part because it also lets me get to my sort of the substance of my remarks, which is I want to suggest or ask if we can push this historical reading of Trump's politics and policies more, the politics and policies probably back further when it comes to his expressed, or we could say, lay theory of politics and thus understanding the way that this articulates in a foreign policy Something that might be a Trump doctrine. I want to suggest we can productively understand Trump's worldview, or in particular, if we like, his operant narrative of cause as that of an 18th century man. What do I mean by that? So, a couple of years ago, Professor Julia Costa Lopez at Groningen and I wrote a piece about the rise of a particular form of conspiratorial thinking in contemporary international politics and the right. And we approach the study of conspiracy by taking that, the idea of theory, seriously, very seriously. This is why we don't take Trump seriously, actually. And so drawing on political scientists, Sunstein, Vermilion, just to remind us, right, we can think of a conspiracy as an effort to explain some event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people who attempt to conceal their role.
- [41:16]
D
Right.
- [41:16]
E
Oh, we all broadly know what that is. But what I want to focus on is the epistemology of conspiracy. So its theory of knowledge and the social world, not its substance per se. And that goes beyond the sort of substantive criteria of the identification of supposedly secret elites. This idea implies a distinct philosophy of history and a distinct understanding of human agency. It's a narration of cause. It just is often hidden in some arguably fringy sounding substance some of the time. So in conspiratorial thought, what we usually see is history is understood as stable, cyclical and mechanistic, right? This is sort of a vision of historical change driven by what historian Hayden White once described as general laws of cause and effect that are universally operative throughout all of history. Now, crucially, though, while those events are imagined as cyclical and predictable. So I like this idea of the 19th century, come back around. Their causes are understood as agential, not structural. Or if you want to break it down further, usually as individual, not as social. Okay, so conspiracy epistemologies typically deny, and actually, that's the premise of the conspiracy usually typically deny, the existence of complex social, social, economic or political structures. Instead, they attribute events and political outcomes to deliberate human action, usually by malign actors. Now, for those of you that have joined us at LSE as students and alumni, you will of course know that this is a pretty significant departure from the way social science understands agency, right? Which is typically some version of proposive action shaped by structural constraints, opportunities working in concert, and so forth. Instead, conspiratorial agency, what my colleague and I cheekily termed hyper agency, resembles the understanding of human action found in early modern secular Enlightenment thought. I realize we're going really far afield. We're bring it back in a Second, in that view, moral responsibility and political efficacy lie entirely with free, free acting, largely unconstrained individuals who are understood to have basically heroic control over the environment. So absent divine will or coincidence, which are ruled out, events are presumed to be caused by human intention, such that if direct intention cannot be identified, then deception must be at work. As historian Gordon Wood demonstrates, this was the common epistemology of like really conventional 18th century thinkers and politicians. So why does that matter for the Trump Understand the Trump doctrine. It's worth noting that in the 18th century, this way of interpreting events was not fringe. Again, as I just said, this was mainstream. Leaders of the American Revolution themselves thought this way, articulated this way, theorize politics in this way. Right? The idea is political outcomes reflect the will, morality and intentions of men to the extent that politics was often and quite typically literally conceived of as conspiracy. Trump's logic, I think, operates within a similar framework. Right. The implicit theory of politics visible in his foreign and domestic policy rests on the belief that the world is controlled by hyper agential power, powerful men, okay? This produces, as phrased by Richard Hofstadter about earlier moments in US politics, a paranoid strain of policy and approach to public discourse, one that denies structural explanations, crucially for inequality and discrimination, and therefore interprets all negative outcomes as intentional acts by bad actors who must be punished.
- [45:19]
F
Punished.
- [45:20]
E
As an early modern thought, these bad actors are frequently, though not always, but frequently racial, religious, gendered or sexualized others, right? Whether international adversaries or domestic movements like Black Lives Matter, feminism, some imagined, often quite anti semitic version of Marxism and so forth, right? These become reinterpreted not as social movements challenging and critiquing hierarchical social structures like, like capitalism or indeed sort of the complex workings of ancient structures and material processes together, like climate change, but the intentional plots of directly threatening groups. Now, what I want to put across is the idea that hyper agency, and I'm wrapping it up, Rohan, I promise, is that the idea of hyper agency and this idea of conspiratorial epistemology also helps us understand all of the characteristics Ron was describing and its substantial stand up commitment to 19th century ideas, which is that narratively and in action, Trump's public Persona seeks to act and become a hyper agent, to inhabit and exist as the great man, to identify other great men with whom the deal can be struck, to exercise total control over politics and foreign policy, to combat these prescribing others and to take hold of history. Right. Now, just to wrap it up, my suggestion is not that Trump is a conspiracy theorist in the strictest literal sense, though certainly we know he's benefited from the circulation of conspiratorial narratives, but rather that understanding the Trump Doctrine is assisted by unpacking its implicit theory of knowledge and political agency that was relatively common in the late 19th, pardon me, late 17th and 18th centuries, and today survives primarily, but not exclusively within conspiratorial thinking.
- [47:16]
F
Thanks.
- [47:16]
B
Thank you so much.
- [47:21]
A
Hi. I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question like why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for lseiq wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the event.
- [47:52]
B
Hyper Agential Powerful men. I will remember that phrase. Thank you, Luca. Dr. Tylerly, over to you.
- [47:59]
D
Yes, thank you so much to everyone. First of all for being here and for Rowan for inviting me here, and especially to Ronald for the conversation. I had the brilliant idea of agreeing to give my remarks just after Dr. Miller, Kate, which whatever I say, I think will sound silly compared to that. But I'll try to do my best. And I would say, first of all, I would start with a thank you note, Ronald, because you don't know this, but I'm currently teaching an American grass strategy course, and one of the biggest challenges I have, usually when we talk about Trump is to convince students that indeed has a grand strategy or a doctrine. So you've done the work for me, so thank you for that. The only thing that I would say I think is less about maybe Trump himself, but also what does it all tell us about the job of strategy making when even somebody like Trump can make grand strategy like that can make these big narratives? I think we tend to think of strategy making in this very complex endeavor, you know, where only the best and the brightest are involved. Maybe not. We have reconsider that. But more onto your point, I'm interested in the way in which this works in practice. So this would be more a kind of a straightforward question before I move to the actual comments, which is how does it work? And does it work well when you have a doctrine or a narrative, you know, like in the Trump case, as you mentioned, where this narrative is a bit scattered throughout different actions, speeches, reactions. Doesn't usually work better when you have a proper doctrine enunciated in a document or in a speech. All the other cases you mentioned, for instance, the Nixon doctrine, this was done in a very clear speech. It was articulated in A very kind of clear way, an organized way, for whatever the reasons. And I wonder whether it works in the same way when that doesn't happen in that way, whether basically the narrative is much more fragmented and much less cogent. I would say. So this is more of a practical question. But onto your points, I would say my comments fall under two main points. The first one is already what Kate has mentioned and a bit of the kind of spoiler alert about the 19th century. I won't go as far as the 18th century, but I would say as you were discussing this point and you said, you know, Trump is a 19th century man or he thinks of themselves like that, my mind immediately went to all the comparison and Trump's interest in Andrew Jackson as a president. This was especially in the first Trump administration. But in his inaugural address he went straight to McKinley. I thought, you know, if there is an example supporting your argument is exactly the inaugural address when he said, you know, McKinley was a great president, he was a businessman, he knew how to use power and all of that. So I buy into that argument. I can see that where I'm less probably convinced, I raised this more as a question for further comments. Also to open this up is to what extent he's thinking about a 19th century world or I would say he has a very, very selective and minimalistic understanding of the 19th century. And what I mean by that is something that came into your, I think in your presentation, which the 19th century is Empires is hierarchy, but it's also a lot of interconnection is the beginning of the so called first globalization is the beginning of a lot of those global changes that have shaped the 20th century. And not surprising, some former colleagues here in at the LSE and the International Relations department, Barry Bazan and George Lozon wrote a major book on the 19th century as the Global Transformation. So I'm mentioning this not just in terms of how we understand the 19th century, which could be of interest to some of us, but maybe not to all of us, but also because I'm raising this as the extent to which basically there is a delusion here that you can bring the United States and the world back to some of those features without all the rest. And what is all the rest is the fact that 19th century with all its, you know, I won't go into the obvious, you know, from slavery, from, you know, empire, from all of that, but it's also a century of major ideologies of progress. You know, whether it's liberalism or what is socialism and all of that you talked about the reconstruction, of course, which I fully agree in the way, by the way you describe it. But we have a reconstruction because we had a civil war. And we had a civil war because of the issue of emancipation as well. Right. The issue of slavery. So there is a tension, a big tension in the 19th century. And I wonder whether these upturn this narrative in a sense about the 19th century is delusional and is more than just nostalgic in a sense. And something I'll come back to it, which is to what extent is straightforward reactionary in this kind of sense, connected to this. I thought that when you said Trump likes the 19th century because it can go back to a time and place where the United States was rising and it's white and it was Christian and it was using its power. And I thought that to me is a very interesting story in itself. But also because you're appointed figure, finger onto something that I think is crucial to understand and to talk about Trump, which is relationship with power and US Power. I think we're not understanding Trump, if we understand the way he thinks about power and American power and how to leverage it is central to him. Where this, however, unravels for me a little bit is does it help to think of the United States as a rising power and does Trump think in that way? What I mean by that to, to me a major narrative here is the narrative of self imposed decline. Right. He mentioned this also in the inaugural address. Right. We want to be a growing nation, but you know, American decline is over. We will reclaim the rightful place. This understanding is slightly different from the understanding of a power that is just rising. Because if you look at the United States policy and discourse at the time, a rising power is also an unsafe, doesn't still know how to use that power. And there's a lot of reflections which was happening, by the way, at least I would say since 1848. What shall we do with this growing power like 1848 with revolutions in Europe? Shall we go to the side of the liberal forces in Europe or shall we not do that? Shall we use our power to expand the empire also in the Caribbean, or not do it? But a reemerging power pushing back, sorry, against decline is a much more dangerous power for me. It's a power that knows its strength, thinks, knows its strength, by the way. Maybe, you know, that's not the right way of thinking of it, but it's also a power that looks at things, looks at the world with a sense of entitlement. And I just Wonder whether, you know, that is how he conceptualizes or thinks about Americans place and the role. Yes, and this goes back to your point, Kate, about agency. I mean, a lot of his discourse is really about, you know, previous administration didn't do it, right? Didn't know how to do it. Obama, Biden, you know, they didn't know how to do it. So this fits into the kind of agency that Dr. Miller is talking about. But for me, I want to point this out in terms of our understanding of Trump, understanding of power, how he thinks about the US Position of the world, and to what extent this makes Trump's foreign policy and strategy much more dangerous. I mean, because the only example that I can think of right now comparable to that is not China, in fact, is Russia. This idea of an emerging power that wants something back, something wants a place at the table or wants its power to be recognized. And then this moves to my next point, which is to what extent this 19th century narrative and ideas may lead us to overlook maybe some more, much more recent examples and models for Trump. One obvious one is Nixon to me, and not for the usual Nixon, not for the usual reasons. Why this is done usually is because of, you know, the possibility of Trump doing Nixon in reverse by opening to Russia against China and all of that, but because of the Nixon doctrine, right. The idea that allies should be, should fend off on themselves, the madman approach. But also, you know, reminded that recently Dick Cheney has passed away. And, you know, this has led us a little bit to rethink how much of what Trump can do today is because of the changes made by 2011, especially by the George W. Bush administration. So you mentioned about this kind of 20th century state, but this 20th century state has been shaped by the Cold War, but also by the global war on terror. And I just wonder whether we should look more there rather than the 19th century to understand more what he's doing. And finally, just a question. When you were speaking, I was so pleased, so pleased that you didn't mention, if I'm right, populism once. And I thought, thank God, finally, we need to move away a little bit from this understanding of populism as something that may tell us something important about Trump. But there was one big ism that wasn't there, and I thought, why not? Which is nationalism. If I have to understand Trump, it seems to me that nationalism is a very important key. And I just wonder, and I pose this as a question, why you didn't go there? Because it seems to be that also the very few attempts at rationalizing Trump. And I'm thinking here about Michael Antoine, who is very recently the director of policy planning, State Department. He wrote his piece in foreign policy in 2019. You can check, maybe now you can say I was wrong. But he wrote in the Trump Doctrine and all the piece was about the nation state against globalism, against imperial structures. And it seems to be a central element to this narrative. And I wonder what you think about that. And of course, I don't mention the bigger ism, which some people may go to, which is maybe authoritarianism for some is even fascism, even if you don't go there. I just wonder whether the far right elements of the second Trump administration matter. And I'm mentioning this because it seems to be that Trump has a very particular understanding of the nation in the way that you define it, by the way, which I agree, which is very exclusionary, but it's also not just in terms of of race is not just about but also in terms of ideologies. And it's interesting that recently the administration has gone to the point of listing some antifa groups as terrorists, but then is inviting the alternative for Deutschland back in Washington. So I wonder whether that ism is also something we may need to talk about.
- [57:54]
B
Pro.
- [57:55]
D
Talk to Matriz. I'll stop there, thank you very much.
- [58:01]
B
A very good point about the fine line between nostalgia and delusion. Right. So we've had 20th century, 19th century, 18th and 17th century. Are you going to talk about the 16th century? Well, Dr. Lee, over to you. Bahram.
- [58:13]
F
I have very little knowledge about 16th or 17th century. I will actually I'd like to talk a little bit more about future but before we get there, I am specialist or expert on trade matters, so I don't have much to say about national security. But I agree with Ron broadly on surprisingly though, I think Trump has a very clear doctrine and narrative about trade. But that's quite surprising for a lot of international political economy scholars because unlike national security issues, trade is where a lot of businesses and individuals have just so much more information about how a certain trade policy affects the their bottom lines and pocketbook calculations. National security issues policymakers, like presidents, have just so much more information than lay public. So maybe narratives can just shape the policy or support for a certain policy, but not as much in trade was how people, especially IP scholars have been thinking. But then, as we observe, there have been a couple of key characteristics about Trump's trade doctrine. As you probably know, tariffs is a good tool to build fair trade order. Second, countries with high current Account surpluses vis a vis the US they are the villains and friends and enemies. The division of those friendships or enemy does not fall alone. Geopolitical lines or whether they share common values, there are only those villains who take advantage of the United States. And third, the WTO and the international system are rigid and enforcement of any rules does not stem from the letter of the law. It's all about coercion and negotiation. Bilateral. So but then if you think about this narrative, it's a quite sharp departure from the previous administration's narratives about trade. Clinton in the 1990s and liberal Democrats in those eras, they had this savior narrative, if you will. And if we trade more with China and if we trade more with Mexico, we can turn them into a democracy with a golden human rights practice. And that's very much along the lines of this commercial peace hypothesis. But then George W. Bush of course hated incorporating anything that's non trade in trade negotiations. And his narrative was actually much more security oriented trade deals with Jordan and South Korea. They are important because they are key US allies and trade is a great tool to cultivate geopolitical friendship. But Obama, I agree with Ron on this point as well. Obama was like in the middle of these two some somehow he never talked about how the Trans Pacific Partnership can actually turn those countries, the, the partner countries into a democracy or how they can enhance human rights practices of those member countries. It's much more about rewriting the trade rules to benefit American workers. And also this is a strategic pivot to the Asia Pacific region. So he just tried to draw from the security narrative, but also try to talk about it in light of American like working class or high income individuals who might prefer those fair trade rules. But then my question here is so we were living in this area era where presidents just never, almost never given up the trade as a economic statecraft too. But now the rise of this Trump narrative, the 19th century narrative, is quite surprising. So where did it come from and why, why is it so appealing to so many American people? Is. Although Luca just didn't like the idea of bringing in populism. Again, I'd like to just raise this question about the coalitional aspect of narrative. So I mean these narratives that Trump has been talking about just did not arise from a social vacuum. Actually, I'm reading a lot of documents by labor groups in the United states in the 2000s and 2010s. Some of them already talk about these issues and they talk about tariffs, they talk about how the current account deficit is a great problem. But then there is a key difference between these labor groups narratives and Trump's narrative. Labor groups, oftentimes they liaise with labor groups in other countries, like partner countries. They would join hands with labor unions in Chile, Peru, Colombia, and they would form these transnational alliances. But then Trump's narrative kind of overshadows those narrative and then just create this world of us versus them. I mean, it doesn't matter whether those workers in Peru and Colombia persecuted by their governments. It's just those Peru and Colombia, they are just unitary actors who are taking advantage of the United States. So Trump's narrative kind of picks up from those left leaning workers, but then just erases all those details and put them on stage like creating this us versus them divide. But also one thing that I'd like to highlight here is that that's not really emphasized here is it's such a powerful story because it presents a clear villain. And the villain here as Ron's remark and Kate's remarks actually talked about, is that these outsiders who are non white, non American and developing countries who are just taking advantage of the United States market. But then so to the future. So how, what should people do if they want to challenge this narrative? And how does a narrative decline? Because now it looks like this Trump trade narrative seems just so powerful. And Biden kind of tried to do that by pushing for industrial policies, CHIP Search act, ira, Inflation Reduction act, and they try to negotiate this ipf, Indo Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity in a very careful way. But then the problem there is that they just do not present a clear villain that is much more powerful than the Trump story. And here, like Catherine Tai, who was the US top chief trade negotiator, she lamented at the end of the Biden administration that the US public just does not get enough information about how the Biden administration actually worked hard to improve labor standards in Mexico. And she considered it as a communication problem. But I don't think it's a communication problem or an information problem. It a story problem. They just do not have a clear villain that is stronger and cohesive and credible to the American public's eyes. And the Democrats are very resistant and reluctant to point their fingers to the American billionaires and multinational companies who actually offshore their jobs to other countries where the labor is cheap. And the taboo word in the Democratic politics, Democrat, Democratic party in the US is still the socialism. So I'd like to just end my remark there and let's maybe talk about the future if you have the time. So that's my Last point.
- [66:15]
B
It's a really good, really good point about the securitization of the trade narrative. Even before during. Obama reminded me of Ash Carter, Secretary of Defense, describing the Trans Pacific Partnership as as valuable as an aircraft carrier in the Pacific. Right. So there's. You're absolutely right. Okay, so we're going to open up for questions. We have about 20 minutes, so I'll take them in groups of three and we'll take some from the online as well. So let's start. And, and please tell us your name and your affiliation. So in the front here in the black.
- [66:44]
G
Yeah, thank you. My name is Mabo. I'm professor from China's Nan University. I'm also an alumni of LSE for master degrees many years ago. So I'm very interested. You talk about second Trump's administration's strategy, but I think one thing you didn't lay out too much is about Trump's Asia Pacific strategy. He liked to use the term Indo Pacific. That's a term created by its ally, then popularized in the first administrations. But then I think he. You made your point because it seemed that you suggest he's doing these main road doctrines. And a couple of weeks ago, he and President Xi meeting Busan, he offered the idea of G2, which is. Obama used to say that 2009 to then Prime Minister of China, but China said no. But if Trump mentioned this G2 Again, that means China and the US will rule the world. So it seemed that now Trump wants to do more on the Western hemisphere and leave the rest to China. Do you have a comment on these ideas?
- [67:45]
B
Great, someone in the middle here. Yeah, in the front here.
- [67:50]
C
So just. Good evening, Professor Cripp. My name is Bill Yang. I'm the master student at lse. So I study astropology. My question relates to the nationalism and charisma because this is one of the perspective I study. Actually. Many of Chinese people, they love Trump because they think Trump reminds me, reminds them of Chairman Mao. They're both, you know, the combination of personal charisma and also the nationalist view. From my perspective, you know, the role of China in the American ideological framework is changing from strategical partner to civilizational competitor. So my question is, how do you think Trump's personal charisma contribute to this reforming process? Or with or without Trump's personal charisma, this reforming process will eventually happen. Thank you.
- [68:43]
B
And one from that side. Yeah, in the front here. Red and blue stripes.
- [68:48]
E
Hi, my name is Shreya. I'm a second year IR student at LSE and I had a question regarding media and in specifically how Trump's relationship to journalism and media, media shapes or misleads foreign policy in terms of looking at international views and especially in regards to the context of Fox News and right now BBC.
- [69:09]
B
Okay, thank you. Ron, would you like to lead off on any of those, whatever you feel comfortable answering?
- [69:15]
G
Sure.
- [69:16]
A
I want to pick up on this question because you often hear it as part of the. Part of the way of understanding Trump that has become very popular is sort of the understanding that Trump has spheres of influence. Right. And that this is in fact the way to understand the way Trump thinks about the world. And that in fact, Trump's vision, as you were just articulating, is a bit of sort of almost a great power concert, if you will.
- [69:38]
D
Right.
- [69:38]
A
And this I'm not persuaded of. I think it's very clear that Trump wants to see Latin America fall within the US Sphere of influence. But on the whole, I think Trump's approach and the administration's approach seems to be we care about the rest of the world from the perspective of trade and everything else, we don't really care. You guys work it out. So I don't think that sort of, that Trump and XI get together and sort of imagine sort of there's a napkin, right. Like Churchill and Stalin divvying things up. I have yet to see that napkin. But I do suspect, I think that it's more a matter of that everything else sort of very limited conception of the national interest. Right. That doesn't. So I don't know that. I guess I'm not persuaded that Trump wants to leave the rest of the world to China as much as Trump sort of doesn't really care as long as the United States has access to markets.
- [70:31]
B
Right.
- [70:32]
A
And that again, very 19th century vision. The question of Trump's role and relationship vis a vis journalism in media I think is absolutely fascinating. And in some ways what I think is most fascinating is the ways in which Donald Trump really wants to simply avoid the media entirely.
- [70:48]
B
Right.
- [70:48]
A
He communicates directly with popular tens of millions of people around the globe through social media and that his role and his relationship to the rest of media is mostly for the purposes of demonizing. Right. So the very fact that the BBC, this scandal with the BBC is completely like catnip to Donald Trump.
- [71:09]
B
Right.
- [71:09]
A
The idea that the media, that the lamestream media, as he would put it, or his supporters would put it, is entirely out to get to get Trump. If I may, I wanted to sort of maybe pick up on a Couple of the comments that the colleague. A couple of those comments, I think just to move backwards and just to pick up a couple. I think that Bhoram. I'm not sure that I entirely see the difference, see the Biden administration as being really at odds with the Trump administration on questions of trade. I think there's been, and you know this better than I, sort of a fundamental shift with regard to the understanding of globalization. That is, is globalization something that is an unalloyed good in which a rising tide lifts all boats? Or rather, is it about a story of what Ross Perot 35 years ago called the giant sucking sound? Right. That shift, massive shift of wealth. And I think there's been a huge shift in larger discourse, at least in the United States, that globalization is no longer an unalloyed good did bring about a massive shift of wealth, which many economists were very resistant for a very long time to acknowledging. And that we've moved away from sort of notions of free trade much more toward managed trade and industrial policy, which is not that different between the Biden and the Trump administrations. So that's of my only thought in that regard. I want to let everyone else. I have more things to say. I'll bring them in as time goes on.
- [72:32]
B
Sure, Maybe. Kate, on the question of Trump and Mao is like hyper, hyper. Actually, I wanted to talk about agential men and media. Okay, yeah, please.
- [72:43]
E
I think it's the Trump and Mao I think is a really apt one for a variety of reasons. Sort of centrists or more left wing political forces struggling to find a narrative. It's partly, I think, the idea of the villain, but also potentially partly because some of the sort of tools, concepts, yeah. Aesthetics, emotions and so forth that used to be part of, for lack of a better word, the good liberal story are now being used more successfully by actors more conventionally affiliated with the right, which also makes it really hard to get narrative traction. And then I don't want to talk too long, but if I can talk with the point about media, and this is a really good point and actually I want to pivot it slightly to suggest in my other life I work on like international cybersecurity governance, I want to suggest that this is something we could think about as actually part of a foreign policy doctrine is a state's relationship to. It's usually called misinformation, but like information integrity, in part because we usually think about misinformation as things that are strictly false, but it makes experts usually think about it more as made up of misleading Information, deliberately false information. The chilling effect on what can be said that is true and is accurate, as well as sort of a volume like let's just flip, flood the zone with nonsense. Right. Which we can see to some degree in American politics. All of that is usually understood to be an authoritarian approach to information, though it also exists in democracies. And so I would say that like part of, well, totally agreeing with Trump's sort of personal relationship with the media. We can also think about the way the failure to regulate the information economy within the US has facilitated Trump's rise because it has killed off the market viability of conventional media, which shouldn't be romanticized, but it's really raised the cost on getting accurate information, which isn't something that is currently part of U.S. foreign policy. Their information foreign policy is currently doesn't really exist. They seem to have forgotten about it. But it is a part of other states foreign policies very deliberately. China, Russia, etc. So it's really worth keeping an eye on.
- [75:06]
B
Should we take a few more questions? Can we do one from the online and then we'll get to the room.
- [75:11]
E
Again, We've had a few questions online about Taiwan, so I'll try to group them. And it said, based on Trump's pursuit of personal glory and so called peacemaking, even at the expense of national interests, can you comment on Trump's desired end state for Ukraine, Palestine and particularly Taiwan? Quite broad question.
- [75:31]
B
Okay, wow. All right. It's hard for anyone to top that question. Yeah, please, over here.
- [75:37]
A
Hi, I'm Sam, I'm a banker, but also a psychology. Neuroscience perhaps mentioned that the other side gets votes. And I wonder what the panel think of to what extent events like the US being condemned for moving the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem or the the invasion of Ukraine by Russia showed that soft power is like a mirage. It disappears exactly when you must need it.
- [76:01]
B
All right, excellent. Over here? Yeah, back there in the black.
- [76:05]
H
Thank you. My name is Zuran Werheim, I'm an LSE alumni. I would like to ask a question to Professor Krebs and Dr. Tadelli. Since you brought up the notion of Trump as a 19th century man, and I would like to phrase it slightly provocatively by now, a lot of the modern understanding of a liberal international order where the US builds institutions, works with other countries, are products of the bipolar world and the unipolar movement following that. Now, the 19th century was a very different world where, yes, we had kind of the Britain as kind of a hegemon, but there were lots of other Powers, for example, they had France as a rival colonial empire. They didn't have any access to the European continent where Germany and the Austro Hungaria were kind of in place. They also had very little role in South America and in the modern United States. And the Russian Empire existed and so on and so forth. Now that we are moving into a. Once again, into a more multipolar world where China rising, Russia reasserting itself, potentially India becoming another major power, is that world going to be looking more similar to the 19th century than what we had over the past 80 years? And if yes, could. Here's the provocative question. Is Trump perhaps ahead of other Western leaders by correctly identifying the doctrine needed for the moment?
- [77:38]
B
Excellent. And let's do one last from the stack there and the. Actually, in the corner, the white. Yeah, there we go. Thanks.
- [77:44]
E
Hi, my name is Maria Bykova. I go to sixth form at Francis Holland. I just wanted to ask more, kind of about American people. So this whole narrative, how and why are so many kind of American people who support Trump? Why do they kind of support this narrative, and how do they support it? Like, how was it born within specifically American citizens who, like, support Trump?
- [78:12]
B
Thank you very much. All right, so we have a question about personal glory and those conflicts, soft power, multipolar world of the 19th century, and the US public and why they support Trump. So have at it, whoever wants to jump in. Luca, why don't you start? Because one of the questions was addressed to you about the 19th century century.
- [78:30]
D
Yeah, I like that question a lot. Thank you for that. And I don't start from the assumption that because Trump is Trump, we will not get anything right. Actually, I fear the opposite every day. So that's why I like your question. I would say this, okay. There is an assumption in everything you just said, and I know this is shared by many, which is the world is becoming more multipolar. Are we so sure? What I mean by that is it's almost now a given that we say, well, there are more powers. The United States is relative decline. Yes, but there are two points here. There might be more centers of power, but it seems to me that there is a qualitative difference here between the United States still. And if you want China and the rest, I think in case, I would put Russia as a kind of, you know, very peculiar kind of military power. So I think there's still a big, big, you know, clear hierarchy between this. So this changes things. And it's not a typical. By the way, even the 19th century, the, you know, the multipolar 19th century Great Britain was clearly beyond the others, especially after point two. But I'm just mentioning this because I think in general we're too quick to say that this is becoming a multipolar world. There were times in the 70s where the same things were set, you know, about Germany, Japan, didn't quite work that way. So I wouldn't discard the possibility that this kind of very, I would say skewed tilted multipolarity, if you want, or even, you know, others call it unipolarity, will continue for a while, even because of some of the measures taken by Trump. This opens up, of course, a question of whether, you know, the measures taken by Trump would backfire immediately or will prolong from bit this thing. So that's where I would push back. Where not, because it's not. Is not. You know, I think he's not getting, if he thinks in that way, is probably not getting this right, but also is not what he wants. I don't think he wants a multipolar world. I don't think I agree actually with what you just said before about the fact that, you know, it doesn't look for this kind of concert of great powers because that will require recognition for everybody, but also would require multilateralism and cooperation with China, with other others. I don't think that's the world that he looks for. So that would be my two cents. There was also a question about military power. That is soft power. Soft power. I would say the quick answer for me is yes. I think if anything, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, what is happening in Sudan and everything. I think the lessons that many are taking is that might come to before anything else, rights and everything else. I think that's the scary part of the story today is that, you know, soft power, you know, what does it give you? And I think that this is a lesson that many leaders are learning that probably also we as scholars working on international affairs, we need to look at, namely to what extent we just overestimated soft power. The only thing that we say about the United States is that United States has an incredible ability to recoup, you know, after George W. Bush, soft power America, soft power is really at its lowest. And then you have Obama, it's very elastic. It takes very little for America's soft power to recover. Maybe not the same for others.
- [81:36]
B
Stop there. Do you want to add something on the soft power question?
- [81:39]
F
Actually, I might slightly disagree, but then that's because I have a very peculiar conception of soft power. People tend to view soft power as A completely positive and benign thing. But I think actually the social fabric and the fundamentals of soft power can be very intrusive and racialized a lot of times. And if you read Joseph Nye's book Soft Power, like American TV shows, universities, they present a very selective view of America. White actors, just very few non white actress or actors appearing in those shows. So people who do not have any experience of America has a very peculiar view of what the United States stands, stands for. And quite surprisingly, although the examples that you mentioned, yes, it speaks to the downfall of soft power as an analytical concept. But I was quite surprised that in South Korea, where I'm from, during the first Trump presidency, when Trump actually visited Korea and he shook hands with Kim Jong Un, a lot of South Koreans actually welcomed that gesture. And the sentiment towards Trump is not as it's more complicated than it is in the us. And of course, if you look at Pew Research polls this year, there is a general decline of the support for the US or favorability of the US this year compared to the last year, maybe due to the Liberation Day tariffs, I don't know. But I think it's very difficult to answer whether soft power was a mirage just by looking at what's happening right now, because we don't know the counterfactual world where soft power was not at play. But yeah, I'll stop there.
- [83:28]
B
Great, Kate. And then we'll let Ron bring us home after that.
- [83:32]
E
I'm going to talk about soft power really fast too, which is to add a further complication which is the way we, because soft power has been theorized, as we just heard, from a very specific understanding of what the US is and what the US's sources of soft power power are, which were meant to be, depending how you render it, like progress, material, well being a particular form of capitalism, but also like human rights, like universe. This is what I want to say. The way we talk about soft power, what we usually mean is liberalism. Do people like liberalism? Tricky, because these implicit exclusions, racializations and so forth at work here. But what I want to suggest, kind of, I'm rescuing the concept of soft power, but what I want to suggest is if you take the idea of soft power seriously, but take out the content, I think there's like a case to be made that the soft power of the right, the soft power of illiberalism, if we're thinking about this as like persuasiveness, attractiveness, et cetera, is on the rise and facilitate some of the, or arguably all of the events you referred to, that's a case that's unfortunately we're taking seriously.
- [84:47]
B
Thanks, that's great. Ron, you have the floor.
- [84:50]
A
All right, last couple of comments. It is really remarkable, right, that Donald Trump, a man who lives so much in the moment, seemingly has really been very concerned with his place in history, including beyond life, imagining where, what might be his future in heaven. Does he have a place? Now, look, I think what I actually think, this whole stuff with the Nobel Peace Prize, I think is Trump being a troll. And I think Trump is being a troll because it serves and this relates, I think maybe to a point you were making Luca much earlier about the role of globalism. There is no event, no annual event or award or, or moment in which the west or the self proclaimed defenders of the west articulate their values more than in their moment of the Nobel Peace Prize. And so what is Donald Trump doing when he says I should win the Nobel Peace Prize? He knows that they will give him the Nobel Peace Prize over their dead bodies. What he is really saying is when they do not. That is the difference between me and the nationalist, the anti globalist and those globalizers right now. It serves the purpose of sort of clearly articulating who is the US and who is the them in the Trump narrative. I do want to sort of raise also speak a little bit to the point that Kate raised earlier about Trump's vision of the super agent. I actually, I have two points that I would make and we'll continue the discussion later. Certainly one really, this vision that you're laying out, it strikes me is essentially the great man view of history, which is not exactly a conspiracy or exclusive to the conspiratorial understanding of history. It is in fact the very traditional liberal American understanding of history that is of the super, of what Tom Friedman would call the super empowered individual. Right? That is that Trump actually strikes me in a peculiar way as a deep fatalist, that Trump, I don't think, if you notice that Trump does not articulate a grand view that if only one integrates China into the larger radius anti engagement. Right? But more broadly, there is no sense in which Trump believes he can fundamentally change the historical pathway of nations. And in that way, I think that Trump is in fact very much and deeply a fatalist, which runs counter to the view of the hyper agentic super empowered individual. And the final thing, I'll say the very important question that was raised about what do the American people possibly find attractive about this vision? Now I think it's really important to Remember that, that there is a kind of a pattern with Donald Trump, that people like Trump in the aggregate more than they do in the details and that in every policy, right? Think about Trump's railing against Obamacare in the first administration. If you look at the public opinion data, people became much more positive about Obamacare once they realized that Trump act actually was serious about getting rid of the damn thing. Trust in American higher education has been falling until the Trump administration decided to put higher education in the crosshairs. And suddenly in the last year, Trump trust in American higher education has been rising, including amongst both Democrats and Republicans. And I think that the same thing is true, true with regard to foreign policy, right? That in fact we've seen great. In the first administration, we saw that the more Trump spoke about a vision that was deeply nationalist, that in fact tried to undercut those international institutions from which America had profited and were key power multipliers for the United States, the more people believed Americans started to believe, believe in international engagement. I've not seen the latest data in the last less than a year, but I suspect that we will find that the same is true, that what people really appreciate about Donald Trump, what they find attractive is the tone, the pugnaciousness, the nationalism, but that the details themselves, at the end of the day, prove to be deeply unappealing.
- [89:25]
B
Perfect. Thank you. I just wanted to thank the LSE Public Event staff for all your help. Nita Lumi of the IR Department for organizing this event, Ronald Krebs for visiting us, and our wonderful panelists for commenting on his work. And to you all, thank you.
- [89:45]
A
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