ALLIANCES AND ACCORDS
SIMON BARBER: Donald Trump’s ruthless foreign policy might win out after all
Donald Trump’s boastful ramblings and glaring deficiencies as a human being should not blind us to the possibility that he has a coherent, if ruthless, foreign policy doctrine, knows what he wants and may succeed in getting it. What he’s doing is not normal, but that’s the point. He sees the US as Gulliver tied down by ideologically hidebound Lilliputians wedded to an outdated global order, whose creation Washington drove after the Second World War and has long needed serious reimagining. In Trump’s view, leaders both Democratic and Republican have sold out ordinary Americans by ceding sovereignty to international organisations such as the World Trade Organisation, alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) and multilateral agreements such as the Paris climate accord. However, Trump is no isolationist. Rather, as the Hudson Institute’s Walter Mead wrote in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Trump is "a revisionist who wants to alter the terms of the world system in A...
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