The exact foreign policies that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump will pursue when he returns to the White House after a four-year interval are not yet clear. What is, at least for some notable observers, is that his reelection sounds the death knell of American exceptionalism. Of course, this isn’t the first time that claim has been made about the U.S. generally or the U.S. with Trump as president specifically. The concern now is with how the U.S. will relate to the world under his second-term stewardship.
In a recent op-ed for the Financial Times, Francis Fukuyama wrote that Trump’s reelection “represents a decisive rejection by American voters” of the liberal and democratic ideals that have motivated U.S. foreign policy over the past several decades. Similarly, Dan Drezner, writing for Foreign Affairs, notes that while “U.S. policy blunders, as well as Russian ‘whataboutism’ … have eroded the power of American exceptionalism,” the second Trump administration “will bury it.” And the Chicago Council’s Ivo Daalder asserts that Trump’s return to the Oval Office marks “the end of the Pax Americana,” because Trump only cares about the U.S. “winning,” not “leading.”
According to the argument behind these sentiments, there is a direct connection between U.S. global engagement and the values that have long underpinned that engagement. And in turning his back on the former, as Trump is widely expected to do, he will be disavowing the latter. Since ascending to superpower status in the mid-20th century, the U.S. has been the leading power of the liberal international order. That order has fostered peace and prosperity because it bases interactions between nations on open economic exchange, democratic principles and global institutions that embody international law. The U.S. is uniquely positioned to lead such an order, this argument continues, because it is itself uniquely virtuous in its embrace of free market principles, democratic norms and the rule of law. While far from perfect, it has, as the saying often attributed to Winston Churchill aptly put it, always ended up doing the right thing—after exhausting all other alternatives.