Current US President Research Articles

Метафорическое моделирование образа президента США Джо Байдена в англоязычном политическом медиадискурсе

This paper dwells on the metaphorical representation of the image of the current US president, Joe Biden, in contemporary English-language political media discourse. The study aimed to describe and systematize the metaphorical models of Biden’s current media image as well as explicate its perception reflected in the national worldview of the native speakers of English. The article considers conceptual metaphor as one of the main image-creating tools in media texts having considerable pragmatic potential. A variety of scientific methods were used in the research: continuous sampling to select texts published from Biden’s inauguration to the present day; cognitive discursive interpretation of metaphorical models to describe their frame structure; component analysis to identify the source domain of the metaphorical expansion of some concepts and their contents (pragmatic meanings); classification method to systematize the models and their representations. The research results show a dominance of the metaphorical models that engender a negative image of the 46th US president in contemporary English-language media. These models actualize the negative signs of being too old, aggressive and unfit for ruling, as well as intellectual decay and some other negative traits of his image, which demonstrates a clear dislike of Biden in the English-language political media discourse and can indirectly cause corresponding reactions and attitudes towards him in society. The comparison of the subspheres of metaphorical expansion showed that the source domain Society has the highest productivity and a slight positive potential. This domain’s representations demonstrate an attempt at a positive conceptualization of Biden’s personality in American discourse. Furthermore, comparing the subspheres of metaphorization contributes to a better understanding of conceptual metaphor functions and common tendencies towards metaphorical representation of a political figure in mass media discourse.

Israel's national security, the Arab position, and its complicated relations with the United States

Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has prioritized its national security in the face of several threats, including terrorism, sizeable weapons arsenals and existential nuclear risks. Ehud Eilam's new book provides a meticulous analysis of Israel's national security challenges in the last decade. The author tackles issues ranging from Iran's nuclear programme, Hezbollah's rockets and missiles and Egypt's internal affairs. The book is divided into nine chapters, beginning with a study of Israel's troubled relationship with Iran. Then, the author turns to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), analysing their military strategies towards Hamas and Hezbollah. The remainder of the chapters explore, in turn: the civil war in Syria; the issue of the Golan Heights; Egypt's economic problems; Egyptian relations with the United States; and the question of a Palestinian state. Tracing the history of the Iranian–Israeli conflict from its start in 1979, Eilam argues that ‘Iran's nuclear project is the most important challenge Israel has been facing in recent decades’ (p. 11). As the author explains, Iran has three main goals that would be detrimental to Israeli interests and that would foster regional instability: to expel the US from the Middle East; to overthrow the governments of Arab states and replace them with pro-Iranian leaders; and to destroy Israel. Eilam emphasizes how Israel tries to handle the Iran question with US support. However, both the Obama and the Trump administrations, as well as that of the current US President Joe Biden, have been reluctant to attack Iran's nuclear sites or let Israel carry out those operations on its own. Additionally, stressing the IDF's success in high-intensity wars against Arab militaries in the past, Eilam illustrates ‘how the IDF plans to gain a fast victory over its elusive and well-armed foes’—pro-Iranian groups like Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah (p. 39). According to Eilam, such a victory for the IDF will ‘reduce both the casualties and the damages Israel will absorb’ and ‘creates deterrence, which could postpone the next war’ (p. 40).

A CRITICAL APPRAISAL OF THE UNRWA-USA FRAMEWORK FOR COOPERATION (2021-2022) REGARDING PALESTINIAN REFUGEES

Recently, issues related to Palestinian refugees have been diminishing in support due to multiple attempts made by the United States and Israel, which include measures to restrict the activities of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA). These attempts escalated when former US President Donald Trump announced a complete suspension of funding for the UNRWA in 2018, plunging the Agency into an unusual financial crisis that harmed the assistance to refugees in its operation areas. However, the current US President Joe Biden announced his intention to resume funding for the UNRWA and, in July 2021, signed a cooperation framework known as "framework agreement" but its terms and details were widely rejected by the Palestinians and the general public because of political and security reasons. According to the Agreement, individuals receiving military training under the UNRWA programmes are not eligible for UNRWA health or educational assistance. The framework agreement between the US and the UNRWA tries to change UNRWA's operating mandate without the authorisation of the United Nations General Assembly. Therefore, this article follows a doctrinal analytical approach to both the framework agreement and the UNRWA's operational mandate. It also critically appraises this Agreement in light of international humanitarian law and verifies its impact on the human rights of both beneficiaries and UNRWA workers, including rights to education and freedom of speech. This article concludes that the Agreement violates the norms of public international law by switching the Agency's missions and avoiding the need for an important decision-making process.

Beyond the New Deal Order: U.S. Politics from the Great Depression to the Great RecessionCapitalism Contested: The New Deal and Its Legacies

Beyond the New Deal Order: U.S. Politics from the Great Depression to the Great RecessionCapitalism Contested: The New Deal and Its Legacies

Первый год Джозефа Байдена в Белом доме

The article analyzes major trends in domestic, social, economic, trade and foreign policy of the USA in 2021. The past year turned out to be unexpectedly successful for the Democratic administration of Joseph Biden, who managed to use his party's almost maximum control over the federal government to lay the legislative foundation for the implementation of one of the priority items on the election agenda and began the transformation of the foreign policy strategy of the US global leadership. His first year was really eventful — in the difficult conditions of the ongoing pandemic, he opened a new stage of social and foreign policy transformations. The current US President came to the White House with a large-scale social agenda, on which the Democratic Party has been working all 4 years of Trump's presidency in anticipation of revenge. The ambitious plans, in addition to fighting the pandemic, included the subsequent reform of the healthcare system launched by Barack Obama, ensuring racial equality and social justice, updating the country's long and seriously worn out infrastructure, launching a ‘green transition’ and reforming the country's immigration system. All these reforms are long overdue and really needed. However, since the beginning of the XXI century the reform efforts of presidents traditionally produce very little results — an average of one large-scale reform for each president. The list of changes required by the country is growing, but the speed of its implementation is only falling. The reason for this slowdown lies in partisan polarization and radicalization, which grew rapidly during the same period, shrinking the space for compromise, a key condition for reform efforts under the American separation of powers. The Democrats with J. Biden won their chance for a blitz in 2020, however, not only the Republicans, whose numerical minority made it possible to worry less about their resistance, but also the unity of the Democratic Party itself, were on the way to its implementation. Over the past four years, the left wing of the party has expanded its membership in Congress and has become a powerful force, ready to resist even its own president. The large-scale social agenda proposed by J. Biden during the election campaign, which implies the expansion of the social responsibility of the state, eventually caused serious objections from both left-wing Democrats and Republicans. The first considered it insufficient, for the second it offered too revolutionary changes. Biden's centrist position in the face of radicalization proved to be more of an obstacle to pushing forward reforms than an opportunity to implement them. As a result, all participants had to compromise. Paradoxically, radicalization, which destroyed opportunities and room for compromise, itself became a compromise factor in a situation where changes could be too drastic for both the government itself and society. Finally, the Biden administration was able to seize a unique moment of democratic control over federal power to implement an important part of its social agenda. Biden's original plan to reform the country's infrastructure has seriously changed over this year of cross-party agreements, but in general, the adopted ‘Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act’ launches large-scale changes in several areas at once, on which the further development and competitiveness of the United States depend. Despite a relatively quick recovery, the US economy continues to face major challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic: high inflation and disruption in production chains. The new model for maintaining and expanding US global leadership, formulated and gradually implemented by Joe Biden’s administration, is based on the creation of a single ideological and technological space of allies in opposition to China and other authoritarian states challenging the US. The anti-Chinese vector determines the main directions of the US foreign policy strategy: returning to traditional allied relations, expanding alliances, ending protracted military campaigns, minimal strategic involvement in long-term conflicts, targeted interaction with competitors and adversaries, and controlled confrontation. This article is a result of a collective multi-aspect research of transformations taking place in the US on a real-time basis. The analysis is built methodologically on the systemic approach to studying American political, social and economic trends, both domestically and on an international level.

DPRK and the U.S.: Is Dialogue Possible?

The article focuses on the current state of the US-DPRK dialogue. The paper depicts North Korean perspective on possible interaction with the United States, which is derived from the key characteristics of Pyongyang as a political counterpart, from North Korea’s reaction to earlier experiences in comparison to the actions of the current US president. New Law on DPRK’s Policy on Nuclear Forces is another factor to influence the perspectives of the dialogue. As a conclusion the author reflects on the role of the Republic of Korea in mediation of the process.

The successes and failures of the Joe Biden administration in the efforts to implement the anti-crisis social package

The article highlights the first steps of US President Joe Biden, including emergency measures intended to offset the negative effects of the pandemic on the labor market and employment. A special section is devoted to conceived for the future infrastructure and social plans of the White House under the slogan “Build back better”; in addition to updating the road transport network, the plan provides the restoration and construction of housing, the provision of paid sick leave and child care, financial ensuring of universal preschool education, increasing student grants, expanded health care programs and creating millions of jobs by increasing the tax burden on medium and large businesses and highly paid Americans. A separate section is devoted to factors influencing the spread of freelancing – free and not tied to a location form of employment in the context of the formation of a new economic model. Biden's social and economic policy in general can be described as a change of eras: from Reaganomics, with its perception of the state power system as "part of the problem, not the solution," back to the Keynesian model, the strengthening of the role of state regulation and budget financing. The author maintains that Franklin Delano Roosevelt serves as a role model for the current US president. The question that naturally arises in this connection – whether Biden can align with F.D.Roosevelt – involves an analysis of the balance of power in the US Congress, given the unforeseen obstacles that the White House has faced in trying to get approval of social plans in the Senate even before the midterm elections this year to the US legislature.

The Trump Paradox: How Cues from a Disliked Source Foster Resistance to Persuasion

We usually reject information from sources we dislike. But what if those same sources explicitly disagree with that information? Are we more likely to be persuaded by information that is opposed by someone we dislike? We present results from an experimental study with a convenience sample of 199 Dutch students. Respondents were exposed to counter-attitudinal information on climate change in an attempt to generate persuasion, and in a second time exposed to a tweet from the current US president, Donald J. Trump, as a positive or negative endorsement of the counter-attitudinal. Results show that positive endorsements reduce the persuasive power of counter-attitudinal information, whereas negative endorsements (marginally) increase its persuasive power. These results have important implications in today’s politics, where “disliked” figures—most of the time referred to as “populists”—play an increasingly central role in framing the terms of the debate on the most salient issues.

Semantic and Structural Aspects of Donald Trump’s Neologisms

The article exposes the semantics and structure in neologisms of current US President Donald Trump. The analysis of Donald Trump’s authorial neologisms as a leading political figure on a global scale, whose language influences the English-speaking world, shaping his picture, seems significant and timely. The aim of the study is to identify and systematize the semantic and structural features of D. Trump’s neologisms. The tasks are to analyze the lexical content of public speeches, interviews and posts on D. Trump’s social networks in order to identify new lexical units created by him and to summarize them; to define the semantics and structure of D. Trump’s neologisms. The findings are 30 new lexical units attributed to D. Trump. Their analysis makes it possible to organize them into usual (which are already in the dictionaries of modern English), discursive (which function in the discourse but are not yet fixed in Oxford dictionary), and new lexical units of indefinite nature. The analysis of the semantics in found neologisms has revealed what they describe the new realities of contemporary political life in the United States of America. The analyzed neologisms have predominantly a negative connotation. The conclusion of the paper is D. Trump’s neologisms have structural differences as the following: they are either phraseological neologisms or morphological neologisms built by the affixed method, either as abbreviations, or as a play on words.

King Lear

Reviewed by: King Lear Benjamin Broadribb King LearPresented by the Stratford Festivaland broadcast by StratFest@Home. 04 23- 05 14, 2020. Directed by Antoni Cimolino. Directed for film by Joan Tosoni. Cinematography by Joe Interisano. With Colm Feore (King Lear), Maev Beaty (Goneril), Sara Farb (Cordelia), Liisa Repo-Martell (Regan), Stephen Ouimette (Fool), Jonathan Goad (Kent), Scott Wentworth (Gloucester), Evan Buliung (Edgar), Brad Hodder (Edmund), and others. The announcement of the indefinite closure of theaters worldwide in March 2020 led to several big-name theaters around the globe making their previously filmed content available online, in many cases free of charge. Whilst most opted for a series of discrete screenings, Stratford Festival went one step further by curating "StratFest@Home"—a series of twelve "watch parties" streamed free on their YouTube channel. As well as a screening of a previously filmed Stratford Festival production, each watch party offered additional live content before and after the "premiere" of each film, including interviews and Q&A sessions with cast members and directors. Joan Tosoni's 2015 filmed version of Antoni Cimolino's 2014 production of King Learwas selected as the first of the twelve, with a Zoom-facilitated conversation between Cimolino and his Lear, Colm Feore, taking place half an hour before the screening of the film. Even before considering the global pandemic which took hold this year, 2014 feels like a considerably different place looking back from [End Page 515]where humanity is now. A world before most of us had heard of social distancing, before the election of President Trump, before Brexit. It is intriguing therefore that, in making the film of Cimolino's production of Learavailable, Stratford Festival chose to emphasize its resonance with our 2020 world. In an article for The Globe and Mailpublished in the run-up to the event, Cimolino suggested that Lear"seems almost prophetic" in its depiction of "not only the breakdown of an old king … but also the disruption of an entire country" (Cimolino, 2020). Interesting also was Stratford Festival's choice to curate its filmed content together under what Cimolino in his introduction to the screening described as "distinct themes that have something to say to the world that we live in today." Learwas the first of three productions released under the banner of "Social Order and Leadership," followed by Coriolanus(2017, directed by Barry Avrich and Robert Lepage) and Macbeth(2017, directed by Shelagh O'Brien and Antoni Cimolino). The chosen theme came out further in the pre-film conversation between Cimolino and Feore. The actor reflected on his portrayal of the king as an aging warrior, spurred on by Lear's reference to his "good biting falchion" (5.3.274) when thinking back to his youth. Considering the grouping of Lear, Coriolanus, and Macbethtogether, Cimolino suggested that "Shakespeare seems to want to examine what happens when we put a warrior in a leadership position" and "how … they manage in a civil society"—to which Feore responded that "generally they manage very badly." Cimolino drew out the contemporary parallels further, suggesting that "we are finding today that some people have been elected into leadership positions for all sorts of different reasons, but empathy, compassion, vision, leadership, aren't their thing." Feore compounded this further, citing historical US presidents as examples of great leaders in times of crisis, and stating: "we need intelligent philosopher kings for guidance; we can't have cretinous buffoons—it just doesn't work." Despite the production having been performed two years before Trump's inauguration, the pre-show conversation repositioned Cimolino's Learfirmly (albeit without mentioning Trump by name) as a critique of the current US president's time in office. In truth, the anti-Trump messaging of the pre-show neither fitted the production nor felt necessary. Cimolino's Learwas distinctly traditional in its aesthetic: the cast wore costumes inspired by the early modern period, whilst the candlelit wood-paneled staging felt evocative of Jacobean indoor playhouses. Even before considering that it was staged and filmed in a pre-COVID-19 world, this is a production that was always firmly [End Page 516] Click for larger view...

Política Comercial de Estados Unidos: Una Revisión de los Alcances de la Administración Trump

Los parámetros de la política comercial de los Estados Unidos han experimentado una serie de cambios drásticos con la llegada del Presidente Donald Trump a la Casa Blanca. Sus posturas proteccionistas, así como sus ataques en contra de los sistemas multilaterales que regulan el comercio internacional, han terminado por provocar un cambio sistemático en las relaciones comerciales de la nación norteamericana. El siguiente trabajo de investigación recopila las posturas que antecedieron a la administración actual, así como las prioridades y promesas realizadas por el actual presidente norteamericano en razón de proteger los intereses nacionales de los Estados Unidos. De la misma forma, el presente artículo hace una revisión sobre los efectos y alcances de la política comercial llevada a cabo por Donald Trump en el inicio de su administración.

Similar Politicians, Different Media

The article analyzes the media treatment of two sex scandals: the “Stormy Daniels scandal”, which involved the current US President Donald Trump in 2018 and the “Ruby scandal”, which involved Silvio Berlusconi in 2010, while he was Italy’s Prime Minister. By combining both quantitative and qualitative methodologies the aim is to discover whether the media treatment is different, as we can expect since the two countries belong to two different media systems, or if, following the theory of Americanization of political communication, the Italian media will tend to emulate the American model. Furthermore, another aim of this study is to detect whether a shift towards a more Polarized Pluralist model can be identified in the USA, as some authors have started foreseeing. The results will show that both countries’ media behave coherently with the traditional feature of their media system, the Polarized Pluralist and the Liberal.

ПЕРСУАЗИВНИЙ КОМПОНЕНТ ЦИФРОВОЇ ПУБЛІЧНОЇ ДИПЛОМАТІЇ

The objective of the article is to study persuasion in the digital public diplomatic discourse. Discursive, semantic, syntactic, and stylistic analyses have been employed to carry out the research of the persuasive component. The methods of pragmalinguistics have been used to establish implicit meanings in diplomatic communication. As a result of the study, the definition of digital public diplomacy as a communicative phenomenon implemented by using web as well as information and communication technologies has been given. The pragmatic intentions of digital public discourse have been established, including the presentation of the official position and the state image making in the Internet. Digital public diplomacy or twiplomacy helps to make international activities open and accessible to the public, as well as to persuade them. In particular, the explicit and implicit language means of persuasive influence used by the current US President Donald Trump on his Twitter page to form the country’s foreign policy while taking into account the interests of American voters are analyzed in detail. Among lexical persuasive means loaded vocabulary and clichés, phrasal verbs and colloquialisms should be mentioned. They give special tone to presidential tweets reproducing Trump’s emotional and straightforward style. The use of grammatical means of persuasion (the superlative degree of comparison of adjectives and adverbs, intensifiers, exclamatory sentences) helps to express Donald Trump’s hyperbolic and categorical evaluation of events. At the same time, the American president practically does not use stylistic means, except for some epithets, dead metaphors, repetitions and assonance. The obtained results contribute to further scientific development of the problem of persuasive communication, in particular, in digital diplomacy.

President Trump’s African Policy, first results

The article is devoted to the analysis of the African policy of the current US president Donald Trump. Summing up his activity in this direction over the two-year period of his stay in the White House, the author notes that despite a number of statements of shocking, if not frankly racist, character to the countries of the Black Continent during his election campaign, the new American president no changes made to it. Most of the important legislations for Africans, which was adopted by the U.S. Congress under presidents of Clinton, Bush-junior and Obama, remain in force, although the financing of some of them, in view of the principle installation of the current American administration on protectionism and budget savings, in order to “make America grate again”, was somewhat reduced. The intention declared by Tramp to “wipe out Islamic terrorism” and also actively oppose China’s trade and economic expansion and political influence on the continent will continue to be implemented by the sixth regional military command of the USA, formed in 2007, AFRICOM. This policy of further militarizing U.S. policy in Africa was reaffirmed by the Trump administration’s new Africa strategy announced in December 2018.

Televisual diplomacy:I am the Ambassadorand Danish nation branding at home and abroad

In a time when the current US president came to office via a career in reality television, it seems unnecessary to argue that popular culture and International Relations intersect in meaningful and dramatic ways. Operating from this premise, mass-mediating the act of diplomacy via a television series presents a fecund object of analysis that questions many of the myths surrounding what we call the ‘diplomatic community’. Consequently, this article is interested in the geopolitical interposition of Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) via the popular culture form of reality television. We achieve this through a close reading of the DR series I am the Ambassador/Jeg er ambassadøren fra Amerika (2014–2016), ‘starring’ the real US ambassador to Denmark. We situate Ambassador within the evolving space of ‘new diplomacy’ through an evaluation of how it imagines, popularises, and expands ‘everyday’ sites of diplomacy via mass-mediation. However, as we argue, the series – when viewed holistically – says more about the Danish state and its people than it does about the role of the US ambassador, thus functioning as a tool of nation branding as much at home as abroad.

The US South Caucasian Policy under Donald Trump

After providing a brief overview of the US policy in the South Caucasus from the beginning of the 90s of the 20th century as there have emerged three new countries in the region after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the article mainly focuses on relatively less active engagement from the side of the United States into the affairs of the South Caucasus since the presidency of Barack Obama maintained if not untypically deepened even more under Donald Trump currently as well. These trends are explained through the prism of the general standpoints of the latest American administrations promoting the idea of less or non-interference of the superpower in other countries’, regions’ or continents’ notably domestic matters. There are discussed major implications of such, i.e. the less active US foreign policy observed among others, also in the South Caucasus lately, although in the case of this region clearly primarily with less desirable effects as it appears in fact, taking into account on the other hand however quite diverse needs and interests of Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. The article critically analyses the consequences the US recent withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, as well as its re-imposition of economic sanctions against Iran might have for the South Caucasian countries, addresses the factor of latest uncertainty over the NATO member Turkey, covers the Russian problem, and raises one of the crucial issues whether the current US President Donald Trump has more actual decisive power than the Congress, also in terms of foreign policy implementation, or not.

OBAMA AND LIBERAL AFRO-PESSIMISM

This article disputes academic accounts of Afro-pessimism, which see it as a product of ideological or discursive bias in the viewer, or as a crude generalisation across very different countries and cultures by examining the context for and major themes of Afro-pessimism after 1994. In particular, it shows that modern Afro-pessimism is largely a product of liberal concerns and liberal media. It demonstrates the salience of these themes by showing how they permeate and influence former US President Barack Obama’s African outlook by a close reference to his speech to the Ghanaian parliament in 2009 and suggests that they may provide the context for the views of current US President Donald Trump.

Battlefield praxis: The alliance of realism and constructivism and the “fall” of liberal internationalism

The Great Debates are an important stage in the development of International Relations (IR) as a science. However, the ?exactness? of its chronology and content, as well as the precise determination of the actors and results, is questionable on several grounds. Therefore, relying on this, often contradictory, interpretations of the outcome of the Great Debates, little can be said about the current state of the mentioned theoretical dialogue. Today, IR scholars mostly discuss abandoning the idea of macro theory and the pluralistic silence in which medium-scale theories resonate in peace. However, this "diagnosis" still does not give us an answer to the question of who really won the fight of so-called big theories, or which theoretical paradigm today has the greatest influence within the disciplinary field? Applying the idea of reflexivity between the theory of international relations and the practice of foreign policy, the author of this paper rejects the restrictions of the mythos of the discipline (at the center of which is the myth of the Great Debates) and turns to the analysis of international political praxis as an instrument for the identification of the mentioned theoretical impact. At the center of the analysis are the foreign policy principles of the United States, which the author reviews in a hundred-year time interval, in particular emphasizing the doctrine of Wilsonianism and the principles of foreign policy advocated by the current US President Donald Tramp. Facing Wilsonianism and Trampism (determining, in turn, the latter as a realistic-constructivist Anti-Wilsonian coalition), the author offers his view of the current state of paradigmatic ?clashes? in the theory and practice of international relations.

Is There an Obama Doctrine?

Seven years after Obama assumed office, experts still differ over what the ‘Obama doctrine’ is. Viewing the world through a mix of scepticism over what US power can achieve and a sense of optimism over long-term trends that favour the liberal order, the current US president has advocated a policy of prudence and disengagement. This vision, according to some analysts, has underestimated the revisionist threat to the liberal global order and a more robust American policy will be required from the next administration as a result.

The influence of valence and decision difficulty on self-referential processing

Self-referential processing is defined as the process by which a person becomes aware that specific contents are related to his or her own self. Cortical midline structures (CMS), such as dorsal and medial prefrontal cortex, and regions such as inferior frontal cortex, insula, and temporal pole have been implicated in self-referential processing. However, the specific contribution of each of these areas is still largely unknown. More particularly, not many studies have examined the influence of valence and decision making difficulty on regions involved in self-referential processing. In this study, participants evaluated how well personality traits, differing in valence and decision difficulty, described themselves or the current US President. In line with predictions, ventral, rostral, and dorsal parts of medial prefrontal cortex showed greater activity when participants judged traits about themselves relative to judging traits about the current US President. However, none of these regions showed significant modulation by trait valence. Increasing trait decision difficulty was associated with increased activity within dorsal medial prefrontal cortex and bilateral anterior insula. However, there was very minimal overlap (6/119 voxels, i.e., 5%) of the regions of dorsal medial prefrontal cortex implicated in self-referential processing and those implicated in trait decision difficulty. The results are interpreted within current accounts of self-referential processing.