Trump and the Liberal International Order

Abstract

ABSTRACT According to leading cosmopolitan liberals, the post–WWII order has been a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity. The main threat to this Golden Age, they maintain, is right-wing populist nationalism in general and Donald Trump in particular. I argue that their position is a Eurocentric ideological inversion of reality. In truth, Trump is not a threat to the liberal-capitalist order, but a pure expression of its life-destructive competitive dynamics. His “America First” foreign policy is a response to the contradictions of global political economic forces. The paper begins with an examination of the real drivers of the liberal-capitalist system, confronts the ideological illusions of liberal cosmopolitanism with these darker realities, argues that an empirical examination of Trump’s record reveals that he is more consistent with than an opponent of post-war political economic dynamics, and concludes with a review of the manifold life-destructive effects that order has had on the peoples of the Global South and workers everywhere.