Opinion The Poverty of Rational Trumpism

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Opinion The Poverty of Rational Trumpism

E-International Relations
01 Nov 2025, 18:17 GMT+

Richard W. Coughlin

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Nov 1 2025

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The foreign-policy establishment that mismanaged the postCold War order is now laying claim to the post-neoliberal one. Having learned nothing, it offers the same self-justifying bromidesonly this time dressed up as rational versions of Trumps economic nationalism. The Foreign Affairs essays by Emily Kilcrease and Geoffrey Gertz(Tell Me How This Trade War Ends) and by Wally Adeyemo and Jeffrey Zoffer(The World Economy Was Already Broken) are exemplary of this trend. They represent a bipartisan elite consensus whose purpose is not to rethink U.S. hegemony but to manage its decline while pretending to renew it.

Kilcrease and Gertz, both affiliated with the Center for a New American Securitythe Democratic Partys national-security talent farmwrite for a readership of policy professionals worried about the erosion of U.S. dominance and the rise of China. Their message is reassuring: the liberal order can be saved if only America acts like Trump but thinks like Harvard. They divide the world into good and bad states, scrubbing corporations and class relations from the picture entirely. In their scenario, virtuous states must defend themselves against Chinas abuses by sacrificing economic efficiency for security.

Most strikingly, they propose abandoning the Most-Favored-Nation principle, the cornerstone of GATT and the WTO, to allow preferential trade among trusted partners. Their CNAS war-game reaches a predictably self-serving conclusion: if Washington escalates tariffs, other countries will submit, terrified of losing access to the U.S. consumer market. Coercion becomes credibility. The implicit message to the Democratic establishment is simpleTrumps instincts were right; he just lacked discipline. Our job is to do protectionism better. This is the poverty of rational Trumpism: the fantasy that managerial competence can redeem imperial coercion. Compared to this, the Biden administrations watered-down industrial policy looks almost courageous.

Wally Adeyemo, Bidens Deputy Treasury Secretary, and Jeffrey Zoffer attempt a grand narrative of global economic change. They identify a second great transformation beginning when Nixon took the dollar off gold and George Shultz ended capital controls. But the true transformation was neoliberalism, not the U.S. retreat from the gold standard. The 1970s liberalization of capital flows and the 1980s Volcker shock did not modernize the world economy; they financialized it, reasserting dollar dominance through debt and austerity. Adeyemo and Zoffers nostalgia for rules-based globalization hides the simple fact that the rules were written by the United States and its G-7 partners to expand corporate power. Their complaint that the WTO failed good countries by letting China subsidize exports rings hollow next to Americas own agricultural subsidies and military-industrial protectionism. Their solutiona weighted-voting system that mirrors the IMF and World Bankwould formalize this hierarchy, turning weaker members into policy takers rather than policy makers. Gone are the mid-century liberal aspirations for labor rights, environmental standards, or development. What remains is a polite justification for excluding China and re-enshrining U.S. primacy.

Robert Keohane and Joseph NyesThe End of the Long American Centuryoffers the theoretical scaffolding for this managerial worldview. Having once celebrated complex interdependence as a path to cooperation, they now concede that interdependence has been weaponized. The United States uses its asymmetric positioncontrol of markets, technology, and security guaranteesto extract concessions rather than build institutions. This shift corrodes soft power, the consent that once masked coercion. Yet their conclusion is not to question American hegemony but to call for its rehabilitation. They want to restore responsible leadership, as if the system could be detoxified by better management. Politics becomes administration; ideology becomes crisis communications. As political scientists, Keohane and Nye dont do the vision thing. But politics without vision collapses into the management of the status quoand it was precisely that managerial complacency that produced Trump in the first place. Their critique of Trumpism is therefore politically impotent: it diagnoses change, but is unable (or unwilling) to imagine, much less consider transformation.

Paul KrugmansThe U.S. Economy Is in Worse Shape Than It Looksdrives the final nail. The supposed AI-driven boom is enriching the affluent while the working class falls behind. Wage growth is stalling; delinquencies on car loans and credit cards are rising; long-term unemployment is creeping up. Consumption is increasingly sustained by the top quintiles spending. Beneath the surface of innovation lies stagnation. If this is the market to which the worlds exporters are desperate to sell, the empires foundation is rotten. For the entire neoliberal era, U.S. capitalism has run on outsourcing abroad and indebtedness at homea system that extracts value from global supply chains and recycles cheap imports to pacify domestic consumers. The social wreckage that followseconomic precarity, debt, and the breakdown of communitiesfeeds directly into MAGAs revanchist politics.

Across these readings, one pattern stands out: the replacement of politics with technocracy. The foreign-policy establishments solution to every crisis is to rationalize it. Their nostalgia for the rules-based order is really nostalgia for a time when those rules disguised U.S. domination as global benevolence. Stephen WaltsThe Hell of Good Intentionsexposed how Americas self-styled realists and liberals alike turned foreign policy into an elite guild insulated from public accountability. The new generation is repeating the error. They broke the postCold War order and are now preparing to mismanage the post-neoliberal one. The tragedy is not that they lack expertise but that they lack imagination. They can describe decline but not transformation; they can preach responsibility but not justice. Their rational Trumpism is the intellectual face of a collapsing order that still believes it deserves to rule the world.