Evil Empire 97informed U.S. economic, development, energy, and foreign policies since
the late nineteenth century. Trump’s Muslim ban is simply the War on
Terror on steroids. In short, Trump’s foreign policy is unprecedented
not because of what it does, but because Trump will openly say what it
does—and because of what that then says about us as a nation.
The discomfort Trump provokes ought to prompt international
relations experts to reflect on the failings of their discipline to reckon
with the relationship between U.S. imperialism, U.S. foreign policy, and
the constellation of xenophobia, militarism, racism, and nationalism
that haunts our days. The fields of intellectual and legal history and
political theory are far ahead of international relations in their critical
interrogation of the ideologies that sustain empire at home and abroad. In
addition, Trump’s election has emboldened activists to make increasingly
explicit the connections they see between a racialized, anti-immigrant
politics of domestic dispossession and violence and the history of U.S.
imperialism in the world. Unfortunately the same does not appear to
be true for the majority of intellectual middlemen who set the public
tone for U.S. foreign policy.
Trump is, finally, both the emperor with no clothes and the point-
ing child, begging to hold a big military parade so we can collectively
acknowledge the naked imperialist power at the heart of U.S. foreign
policy. Trump practically screams at the United States to look at itself.
And yet, the more he screams, the more the intellectual enablers avert
their eyes. They are busy looking elsewhere—anywhere really—except
at that nakedness.