Description
Donald Trump’s first White House meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky resonated around the world, breaking diplomatic norms and being labelled as “great television” by Trump himself. I take Trump’s comment seriously, analysing several foreign policy stunts by the second Trump administration as part of a larger shift away from rationalist logics of international relations and towards a “hyperreal” mode instead. Jean Baudrillard’s “hyperreality” describes a state of discourse where the imaginary is no longer an abstraction of the real but rather entirely independent of it, the metaphor of a metaphor. I argue that hyperreal logic already dominates popular culture and social media discourse, making its extension into international politics the continuation of an ongoing ontological shift in Western societies. With his reality television background, Trump is a native of hyperreality who embraces spectacle and outrage in his politics. This article shows how seemingly outlandish proposals like the annexation of Canada are entirely logical in hyperreality, where the creation of spectacle and attraction of undivided attention are key modes of exercising power. Studying International Relations in an age of hyperreal politics then requires openness to methods and ideas already established in cultural studies and directing serious attention to the unserious but spectacular.
