Trump’s U.S. Is a Hegemon and a Revisionist All at Once

Shortly after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, a European friend asked me: Why is the United States acting like a reactionary power when it clearly benefits from the status quo? The only answer I could give was that American leaders, rightly or wrongly, no longer viewed the status quo as beneficial in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

The September 11 attacks crystallized some then-contemporary anxiety that had not previously been translated into policy—the idea that threats to America’s post-Cold War global supremacy were accumulating and that an aggressive approach to averting these threats was warranted.

Shortly after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, a European friend asked me: Why is the United States acting like a reactionary power when it clearly benefits from the status quo? The only answer I could give was that American leaders, rightly or wrongly, no longer viewed the status quo as beneficial in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

The September 11 attacks crystallized some then-contemporary anxiety that had not previously been translated into policy—the idea that threats to America’s post-Cold War global supremacy were accumulating and that an aggressive approach to averting these threats was warranted.

Since then, US supremacy has remained surprisingly stable, and we have not witnessed a catalytic incident of similar importance as 9/11. Yet reactionary temptations remain. The United States is never completely satisfied, and the great powers may be dissatisfied by nature. Just 10 months into President Donald Trump’s second term, the White House has announced renewed sanctions on Russia, military escalation in Latin America, and trade wars with geopolitical rivals like China and neighbors like Canada. Who knows what next week will bring.

Are the Americans actually getting a raw deal of nominal priority? Is it a deal that benefits a very small number of the country’s citizens? Or is the United States simply leaving so much money on the table that the terms of hegemony are ripe for renegotiation? Few leaders tend to obsess over that last question as much as Trump does, but those broader doubts have been swirling around American strategic discussions for some time now.

Revisionism in itself is not noteworthy; It stands to reason that rising powers would have an incentive to challenge the prevailing order – such as the Tatalia and Barzini families The godfatherOr Sparta before the Peloponnesian War, or Germany before World War I. It is noteworthy for a superpower to do so, especially when it played a strong role in establishing this regime.

At the same time, there is no getting around the unique personality of the current occupant of the White House. There is no Trumpism, only Trump. There have already been numerous attempts to dispel the strategic justification for decisions taken on a presidential whim. Political scientist Siva Gonitsky wisely cautioned against exaggerating the coherent strategic logic behind Trump’s preferences.

At the same time, these preferences do not arise in a vacuum. Yes, there is something personal about many of Trump’s actions Ideas fixessuch as his frequent hostility toward Canada. But its popular appeal, going back a decade now, has always been a reflection of discontent (Michael Anton’s article “The Flight 93 election” is a metaphor), and some of that discontent was bound to have a geopolitical dimension.

The recent tremors share a certain logic with post-9/11 expectations, which can be expressed in two questions. First, does the status quo serve US interests more than those of any other power? Second, is the status quo sustainable, or is it leading us towards future risks that would be better dealt with now? The Trump administration appears to have responded with “no” and “the last.” This means, from the administration’s perspective, that the status quo does not adequately serve U.S. interests — and in addition, unmanaged threats, primarily a rising China, loom large.

This revisionist view has domestic and international sources, and they are overlapping. Essentially, this view is that previous US administrations – and indeed the entire structure of the international political economy that supported them – facilitated the rise of a strategic competitor at the expense of American workers and the country’s future in general.

A strong case for revisionism is that the decades-old status quo is hollowing out the source of America’s strength – domestic manufacturing and the middle class – and that those who wish to preserve it are actively contributing to relative national decline. Indeed, the head of the Council of Economic Advisers gave a briefing at the White House in early April, where he argued that the reserve function of the US dollar – long viewed as a key pillar of US hegemony – is actually a net cost to the country.

Many analysts now claim that codifying China’s “most favored nation” status in 2000 was a huge mistake exacerbated by broader failures to adapt strategically to the remarkable growth China has achieved in the past quarter century. If you accept this argument, the status quo looks much less attractive.

At the same time, it is largely unclear whether the current trade disputes represent an initial step towards such an adjustment or are merely a distraction from it. Moreover, there is no guarantee that reversing those liberal trade policies will necessarily reverse the outcome they produced. This means that Chinese expansionism may simply be a fact of global politics at this point (or it may be the result of confrontational economic policies as much as it is induced by cooperative economic policies).

Some—mostly leftists and paleoconservatives of various stripes—have long believed that hegemony may have been good for America but not for Americans. They argue that the American imperial project operates at purposes at odds with the United States as a nation, and those whose careers are tied to that project—in finance, defense contracting, and the like—have achieved success at the expense of those who are not. Thus, revisionist policies that weakened US hegemonic power would actually benefit the country as a whole. Those who do not have personal or professional interests in its international bodies do not necessarily benefit from, and are often harmed by, its established commitments abroad and its commercial arrangements.

The great strategist George Kennan went even further, believing that the size of the United States and its imperial interests had become a threat to the traditional American way of life, to the point that he urged the division of the country into six or so smaller regions. Now, this goes further than anything the Trump administration is currently considering. But it is an indication of the continuing tension – especially since the end of the Cold War – in the United States’ dual identity as a country and as a world hegemon.

In any case, current revisionism reflects this tension even as it attempts to alleviate it by insisting that its domestic and international goals are ultimately identical. On the other hand, whatever happens in the coming months with regard to tariffs and an increasingly frank approach to friendly powers, and whatever happens with Trump himself, fundamental doubts about the status quo are likely to remain.

There is a lesson here for those who do not support revisionism, which is that the benefits of a favorable status quo are not alone sufficient to ensure its stability. The goal of political discourse should be to make persuasive claims on behalf of the current system, especially to those who derive less obvious benefit from it.

There is no doubt that stagnation is dangerous, especially when it comes to the field of international politics, which is characterized by volatility and change and requires flexible policies to keep pace. As the famous line in Cheetah He says: If we want things to remain as they are, everything must change.

In this sense at least, revisionism may be only temporary, even though it risks appropriating its own reality – in other words, it may aim primarily to preserve the status quo even as it inadvertently contributes to upending it. Soviet policies Glasnost and PerestroikaUltimately, these attempts were not aimed at radically changing the international system, but rather failed attempts to restore stability to a listed superpower. This is the basic gamble of the revisionist strategy. The danger is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Of course, even if this is true in a directional sense, the issue of separation of strategic priorities remains, especially when it comes to domestic policy. Indeed, this has been a major criticism of previous administrations by certain figures in Trump’s orbit, such as Elbridge Colby: that Washington devoted US resources to secondary or even tertiary conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East while failing to direct them against the more significant threat posed by China in the Pacific.

Even if the United States could identify these priorities, the need to realign key features of international relations in the postwar period contributed to the country engaging with former trading partners and allies in more overt ways. Internet commentator Nicolo Soldo predicted in a much-discussed article that the logic of hegemony would push the United States to begin imposing more explicitly extractive policies on once-friendly nations, and this appears increasingly to be the case.

All of this illustrates a particular feature of American supremacy, largely in great power politics: that it operates as a protection racket. Strong states maintain their position by denying space to rivals and extracting rents from weaker allies under their protection – a tradition that goes back at least to the time of Pericles in Athens.

But Washington has generally benefited from not insisting on this reality. Given this comparison between statecraft and gangsterism, one cannot help but recall Henry Hill’s final monologue in Good guys We wonder whether Washington will look back in the same way as the country follows its current revisionist path: “We had it all, just for the asking…and now it’s all gone.”