Morefield
responded to the inconsistencies of Trump’s world vision by empha-
sizing its departure from everything that came before and demanding
a return to more familiar times. International relations experts thus
express nostalgia for either the “U.S.-led liberal order” or the Cold War
while, in outlets such as Foreign Affairs and the New York Times, they
offer selective retellings of the country’s past foreign policies that make
them look both shinier and clearer than they were. These responses do
not offer much insight into Trump himself, but they do have much to
tell us about the discourse of international relations in the United States
today and the way its mainstream public analysts—liberals and realists
alike—continue to disavow U.S. imperialism.
For example, liberal internationalists such as John Ikenberry argue
that Trump is guilty of endangering the U.S.-led global order. That sys-
tem, according to Ikenberry and Daniel Deudney, emerged after World
War II, when the liberal democracies of the world “ joined together to
create an international order that reflected their shared interests,” while
simultaneously agreeing, as Ikenberry once put it, to transfer “the reins
of power to Washington, just as Hobbes’s individuals... voluntarily
construct and hand over power to the Leviathan.” The vision of cooper-
ating nation-states may have originated in values that first “emerged in
the West,” they argue, but these values have since “become universal.” In
this accounting, Trump threatens the stability of U.S. liberal hegemony
in two ways: by retreating from multilateral agreements such as the Iran
nuclear deal, and by refusing to participate in the narrative of enlightened
U.S. leadership. Future great threats to global stability, Ikenberry grum-
bled, were supposed to come from “hostile revisionist powers seeking to
overturn the postwar order.” Now a hostile revisionist power “sits in the
Oval Office.”
By contrast, when realists such as Stephen Walt or John Mear-
sheimer criticize Trump, they start from the position that the liberal