No matter how hard White House officials try, they cannot construct a coherent ‘Trump doctrine’ that would make sense amid the chaos that has afflicted US foreign policy in recent months.
However, this chaos is not entirely the making of President Donald Trump alone.
Since 1945, the United States has vied for total global leadership. The 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent disintegration of the Eastern Bloc, gave it complete global hegemony.
The US became the force that stabilized and destabilized any region in the world, as it saw fit – which always served the interests of the US and its allies.
Political opinions and ideological strands in the US, but also globally, were formulated around this reality. Often unwittingly, we are all pushed into one of two categories: pro- or anti-American.
For decades, many critical voices warned of an uncontested unipolar world. Conformists fought back against the ‘un-American’, and ‘unpatriotic’ few, who dared break rank.
In the late 1980’s, Francis Fukuyama declared ‘the end of history’, now that the US and its western allies managed to defeat communism. He prophesized the end of ‘sociocultural evolution’, where a new form of a single human government can be formed.
It appeared, however fleetingly, that all the obstacles before the American vision of total domination have been subdued. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times imagined such a world in his bestselling book, The World is…