Trump and the Liberal International Order

According to leading cosmopolitan liberals, the post-WWII order has been a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity. The main threat to this Golden Age, they maintain, is right-wing populist nationalism in general and Donald Trump in particular. I argue that their position is a Eurocentric ideolog...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inInternational critical thought Vol. 10; no. 2; pp. 182 - 199
Main Author Noonan, Jeff
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Routledge 02.04.2020
Subjects
capitalism
cosmopolitanism
Global South
liberalism
Trump
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Summary:According to leading cosmopolitan liberals, the post-WWII order has been a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity. The main threat to this Golden Age, they maintain, is right-wing populist nationalism in general and Donald Trump in particular. I argue that their position is a Eurocentric ideological inversion of reality. In truth, Trump is not a threat to the liberal-capitalist order, but a pure expression of its life-destructive competitive dynamics. His "America First" foreign policy is a response to the contradictions of global political economic forces. The paper begins with an examination of the real drivers of the liberal-capitalist system, confronts the ideological illusions of liberal cosmopolitanism with these darker realities, argues that an empirical examination of Trump's record reveals that he is more consistent with than an opponent of post-war political economic dynamics, and concludes with a review of the manifold life-destructive effects that order has had on the peoples of the Global South and workers everywhere.
ISSN:2159-8282
2159-8312
DOI:10.1080/21598282.2020.1779601