Abstract
Presidential doctrines are the foremost expression of a venerable tradition by which the United States issues statements of power and purpose to the wider world. In design, the Trump Doctrine rejects both an imperial America that remakes the world and a cosmopolitan America remade by the world. Such “vulgar realism” privileges deals over ideals, diminishing the strategic value of support for democracy and human rights. Yet it also heeds Henry Kissinger’s caution that American universalism established a destabilizing element in international politics by framing every non-democratic government as inherently illegitimate. To this extent, Trump has departed the ideational moorings of traditional US statecraft. His conservative nationalism resembles an imperfect vessel to forge a more “normal” nation—an unexceptional superpower that eschews exporting the self-evident truths it still holds to be universal. But in execution, like prior doctrines, domestic politics, and geo-politics have rendered its application inconsistent and incomplete.
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