Here's the key to Trump's foreign policy: What would McKinley do?

[marmar]

Here's the key to Trump's foreign policy: What would McKinley do?
William McKinley's combination of high tariffs and overseas imperialism was disastrous — but not to Donald Trump

By Mark Lawrence Schrad
Professor of political science, Villanova University
Published March 23, 2025 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) The magnitude of the global geopolitical earthquake unleashed by the second Donald Trump administration has been stunning, both to the dismay of the foreign policy establishment, and the cheers of Trump’s anti-establishment acolytes. Until recently, the U.S. boasted the most robust economic recovery from the COVID pandemic, anchoring global economic growth and stability. In two months under Trump, this nation has become the largest source of economic uncertainty and geopolitical instability. He has trashed America’s long-standing alliances with Canada and Europe to curry favor with indicted war criminal Vladimir Putin.

The whiplash of self-defeating, on-again, off-again trade wars, abandoning allies for foes and undermining the entire architecture of international politics and economics has left politicians, pundits and laypeople alike scrambling for a framework to make sense of it all. Some suggest that the return of Trumpism is merely a reversion to international-relations realism, in which states flex their own power even ahead of alliances, legal constraints or morality. Yet even realist apologists such as Andrew Byers and Randall Schweller expected that a multipolar world would constrain Trump’s “America First” policies, producing an “inclination for restraint” and a propensity for “avoiding military entanglements,” and reserving bombast, bluster and threats to extract concessions from countries “that the United States does not share many values with,” like Russia, China and Iran. Wrong.

While laying bare the hollowness of realism, Trump is loudly and unabashedly proclaiming a new era of American imperialism: rather than being constrained by relative power considerations, the U.S. will use all levers of power at its disposal to expand its dominance globally. Smashing the institutions of the post-World War II economic and political order are necessary to permit a return to an earlier — and far more dangerous — multipolar international order of the 19th century, in which great powers battled economically and militarily for geopolitical supremacy. If we want to better understand Trump’s neo-imperial foreign policy, we’d be best to place it in the context of the history of American overseas imperialism.

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I am not the first to point out Trump’s unusual obsession with Gilded-Age aristocracy. New York Times columnist David Brooks recently plumbed the depths of Trumpian psychology through his “11th grade history textbook.” Brooks describes Trump’s Gilded Age fixation as reflecting the growth of “a boisterous, arriviste nation … bursting with energy, bombast and new money.” We were “materialistic, mechanical and voracious for growth,” and the Wild West “braggadocio,” money seeking, jingoist ultra-nationalism and anti-establishment populism fits MAGA like a glove. ...............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/03/23/heres-the-key-to-foreign-policy-what-would-mckinley-do/