Morefield
Institute of International Affairs—to link the problems of empire with
the violence and disruption of imperialism.
Similarly, deflection within international relations today obscures
the U.S. role in maintaining the profoundly hierarchical, racist, insecure,
deeply unjust reality of the current global order. It also makes it impossible
to address how U.S. foreign policy (covert and overt) has contributed to the
destabilization of that order by creating the circumstances that give rise
to “failed states,” “rogue regimes,” and “sponsors of terrorism.” Moreover,
it impedes any theorizing about how the widespread appeal of Trump’s
xenophobia at home might, in part, be the product of U.S. foreign policy
abroad, the bitter fruit of the War on Terror and its equally violent pre-
decessors. In other words, in the grand tradition of liberal empire, U.S.
foreign policy deflection actively disrupts the link between cause and effect
that an entire science of international relations was created to explain.
what makes trump’s attitude toward foreign policy so uniquely
unhinging for international relations experts, then, is the fact that it is
essentially undeflectable. When he explains to Theresa May that ref-
ugees threaten European culture or calls Mexican immigrants killers,
he lays bare the meant-to-be unutterable fear of nonwhite migration
that has haunted British, U.S., and European imperialists and foreign
policy experts for over a century. When he summons the fires of na-
tionalism to demand an unprecedented increase in the military budget,
and then gets it with the overwhelming support of House and Senate
Democrats, he reveals that constitutional checks on the commander in
chief are only as good as the willingness of Congress to resist jingoism.
When he calls nations populated by brown and black people shitholes,
he openly advertises the unspoken white supremacist edge that has