The Trump Era

Historians and politicians will mine the astonishing 2016 U.S. election for years to come, drawing countless lessons about voter dissatisfaction, political acrimony and resistance to social change, among many other mostly domestic problems brought to the surface by the tumultuous campaign. But one of the unexpected mileposts marked by America’s electoral exercise this year lies in the use of a new weapon in global power politics: weaponized social media as an aggressive tool of foreign policy. If war is politics by other means, as the 19th-century military strategist Carl Von Clausewitz famously said, the U.S. election demonstrated that in the [...]

Donald Trump’s surprise presidential election victory was a result, in part, of his success tapping into growing populist sentiment across much of the United States. That follows a global trend that has seen populist leaders come to power in Latin America, Europe and Asia. For all the attention on populism, though, what is it? Jan-Werner Müller explained it this way in a December 2014 article for WPR on the threat populism poses to liberal democracy: Contrary to conventional wisdom, populism is not simply a matter of irresponsible policies or appeals to the downtrodden. Populism is an anti-elitist but, crucially, also [...]

Does Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States signal an existential crisis for the liberal internationalist global order? Will it usher in a period of heightened barriers to trade and dialogue, with one-sided ultimatums replacing diplomatic negotiations and compromise? Will the U.S.-backed security architectures in Europe and Asia crumble into the kind of epochal chaos currently on display in the Middle East? It is easy at times like these to fall prey to panic and despair—to believe, in essence, one’s own campaign rhetoric. But while all of the above scenarios remain possible, for now they are off in [...]