The Pros And Cons Of US President Donald Trump

Liberal internationalism is dead. Or at the very least on death row awaiting execution should US President Donald Trump push forward with his campaign promises. Why? Simply put, his declared priorities as president are at complete odds with the fundamental feature undergirding the post-1945 world order sired and steered by the US. Once the continents emerged from the ashes of World War II, Washington as the only standing superpower promised a benevolent model of international relations that shunned the petty realpolitik of old Europe and its exploitative colonialism. Positive social virtues like human rights and self-government would thenceforth be the guiding lights to lead humanity into an era of global peace and stability. To sustain such highbrow idealism, the US contoured a foreign policy that gave equal berth to strategic and moral imperatives. They were yin and yang, two sides of the same coin, impossible to separate. The earliest manifest example of this doctrine was the Marshall Plan to rebuild a devastated postwar Europe and Japan. That thousands of American soldiers had perished only a few years earlier while fighting its prime beneficiaries Germany and Japan did not muddle the calculus. Erecting a stable system of rules required sacrifices and for that the US forgave

That US presidents who paid lip-service to a moral dimension in international relations did so to camouflage militarism behind the facade of consensus. And that US national interests always positioned the global moral goalpost and not the other way around. Put another way, Washington after 1945 reprogrammed the free world’s superego to mirror its priorities with scant accommodation for competing voices. Hence its 2003 military misadventure in Iraq that should have been roundly condemned by the highest international forum of the UN was instead given legal