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Civitas Outlook
Topic
Politics
Published on
Mar 28, 2025
Contributors
Joel Kotkin
Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

Ignore the Bluster – Donald Trump Is Not an Imperialist

Contributors
Joel Kotkin
Joel Kotkin
Senior Research Fellow
Joel Kotkin
Summary
MAGA foreign policy is driven by a haunting sense of America’s vulnerability and decline.
Summary
MAGA foreign policy is driven by a haunting sense of America’s vulnerability and decline.
Listen to this article

US president Donald Trump’s MAGA brand of foreign policy has been treated with contempt and consternation by much of the world. He has incited the ire of neoliberal theorists like Francis Fukuyama, as well as many European intellectuals, who rarely have much positive to say about America anyway. To them, Trump epitomises a destructive American arrogance and imperial delusions.

Whatever he may think of himself, Donald Trump is no Augustan figure, no colossus ready to conquer the known world. He is a phenomenon borne of concern about American decline, ranging from failing education levels and massive debt to frayed national coherence and fading industrial, even military, supremacy. He is driven not by imperial ambitions (despite his absurd claims about acquiring Greenland and Canada), but rather in response to the consequences of recent imperial overreach.

The old US foreign policy, argues secretary of state Marco Rubio, is ‘obsolete’. Attempts to reshape the world through unrestrained globalisation and foreign interventions have not only failed, he says, but are now also a ‘weapon being used against us’.

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