Description
How has the Trump presidency affected the status of the United States as the leader of the liberal international order? This paper argues that Trump’s brash and chaotic diplomatic style and choices have affected the standing of the United States in the world and served to undermine the liberal international order it leads by making America unrecognizable to its close allies and friends. International orders are, first and foremost, a kind of recognition order: a social order that arranges states’ relationships with each other and guides their behavior through routinized relations of recognition. At the center of this recognition order is the leading power, or hegemon, who by virtue of its recognized status is able to define the rules, values, and norms that constitute the system. Central to the leading power’s status, however, is the recognition it receives from its friends and closest allies, who share a common vision of the international order and make a commitment to maintain it into the future. Even more, friends identify with each other on the basis of shared history and experience, a common set of values and priorities, and faithfulness to “a shared project of world-building” that reproduces the international order. In this context, the relationships a leading power has with its friends—and the relations of recognition that sustain those relationships—are the principal means by which the international order is created and reproduced. The paper shows how both Trump’s rhetoric and foreign policy decisions undermined these routinized relations of recognition—calling into question America’s commitment to the values at the center of the liberal international order—and limits American leadership going forward.
