American foreign policy over the last eight decades might be best termed liberal internationalism. It was born in the wake of Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which turned public opinion overnight from isolationism to global engagement. Following the defeat of Germany and Japan, the thrust of liberal internationalism was to contain the Soviet Union, defeat revolutionary movements, and make the world safe for the expansion of American capital by projecting the military and political power of the American state globally.

The crisis of liberal internationalism

This ambitious project, however, became mired in its own ambitions, its first major setback occurring in Southeast Asia, with the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. Toward the end of the twentieth century, globalization, the economic component of liberal internationalism, led to the unmooring of U.S. capital from its geographical location in the United States as American transnationals went out in search of cheap labor, resulting in the massive loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States and the building up of a rival economic power, China. Power projection, the military prong of the project, led to overextension or overreach, with the ambitious effort of President George W. Bush to remake the world in America’s image by carrying out the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq during Washington’s so-called “unipolar moment” in the early 2000s. The result was a debacle from which the United States has never recovered. Both the crisis of globalization and the crisis of overextension paved the way for the rebirth of the isolationist impulse that broke to the surface under Trump’s presidency in 2017-2021.

Only in retrospect can one appreciate how radically the isolationist, anti-globalist, and protectionist foreign policy of the first Trump administration broke with liberal internationalism. Trump, among other things, tore up the neoliberal Trans-Pacific Partnership that both Democrats and Republicans championed, considered NATO commitments a burden and threatened to leave the alliance, demanded that Japan and Korea pay more for keeping U.S. troops and bases in their countries, trampled on the rules of the World Trade Organization, ignored the IMF and World Bank, negotiated the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan with the Taliban, and broke the West’s united front against North Korea by stepping across the DMZ to pat Kim Jong Un on the back on June 30, 2019.

Some have said that his foreign policy was erratic or chaotic, but there was an underlying logic to his supposed madness, and this was his felt need to play opportunistically to an important part of his white, working-class and middle-class base that felt they had had enough of bearing the burdens of empire for the sake of the American political and economic elites.

But like Roosevelt in his efforts to break with isolationism in the early 1940s, Trump’s drive to break with liberal internationalism was plagued with obstacles, foremost of which were some of his appointees, who were open or covert adherents of liberal internationalism and proponents of globalization, and the entrenched national security bureaucracy known as the “deep state.” With Trump’s defeat in the November 2020 elections, these elements of the old foreign policy regime bounced back with a vengeance during the Biden administration, which proceeded to give full backing to Ukraine in its fight with Russia, expand the remit of NATO to the Pacific, and plunge the United States into full-scale military containment of China. Open-ended in its commitment to confront perceived threats to US interests literally everywhere, this perspective has led to Biden’s provocative decision to order the Zelensky government to fire long-range missiles he has provided into Russia even as a regime change in the center of the empire is about to take place.

Trump’s second chance

For Trump, there is a second chance to remake U.S. foreign policy beginning on January 20, 2025, and it’s unlikely he’ll allow partisans of the old regime to spoil his efforts a second time. In this regard, one must not be fooled by the pro-expansionist or interventionist rhetoric or record of some of his cabinet picks, like Marco Rubio. These folks have no fixed political compass but political self-interest, and they will adjust to Trump’s instincts, outlook, and agenda.

Trump is not interested in expanding a liberal empire via free trade and the free flow of capital--an order defended by a political canopy of multilateralism, and promoted via an economic ideology of globalization and a political ideology of liberal democracy. What he is interested in is in building a Fortress America that is much, much less engaged with the world, where the multilateral institutions through which the US has exercised its economic power, NATO and the Bretton Woods institutions, would be much less relevant as instruments of US power, and unilateral strikes in the Israeli-style in militarily disciplining those perceived as enemies outside the fortress will be the order of the day.

Trump’s ''Make America Great Again'' (MAGA) perspective considers the empire overextended and proposes an “aggressive defensive” posture appropriate to a superpower in decline. The MAGA approach would focus on walling off the core of the empire, North America, from the outside world by radically restricting migration and trade, bringing prodigal American capital back, dispensing with what Trump considers the hypocritical exercise of extending foreign aid and exporting democracy, and abandoning with a vengeance all efforts to address the accelerating global climate crisis (preoccupation with which he considers a fetish of effete liberalism).

Selective engagement

Rather than isolationism, probably a better term for Trump’s grand strategy is “selective engagement,” to contrast it to the open-ended global engagement of liberal internationalism.

One aspect of selective engagement will be disengagement from what Trump denigrates as “shithole countries,” meaning, most of us in the global South, in terms of trying to shape their political and economic regimes via the IMF and the World Bank and providing bilateral economic and military aid. Tough, militarized border controls will be the stance towards people from these countries. Definitely, there will be no more talk of “exporting freedom and democracy” that was a staple of both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Another aspect of selective engagement will be a “spheres of influence” approach. North America and South America will be regarded as being Washington’s natural sphere of influence. So, Trump will uphold the original isolationist creed, the Monroe Doctrine, and maybe his choice of Marco Rubio to be secretary of state might reflect this, since Rubio, a child of Cuban refugees, has been very hostile to left-leaning governments in Latin America. Cuba and Venezuela, in particular, will be squeezed more than they are right now.

Eastern Europe will likely be seen as belonging to Moscow’s sphere of influence, with Trump reversing the post-Cold War U.S. policy of extending NATO eastward, which was a key factor that triggered Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The European Union will be left to fend for itself, with Trump unlikely to invest any effort to prop up NATO, much less expand its remit to the Asia Pacific, as Biden has done. It would be a mistake to underestimate Trump’s resentment of the western allies of the United States, which, in his view, have prospered at the expense of America.

The downgrading of the United States as a central player in the Middle East will continue, with Washington confining itself to providing weapons for Israel and encouraging a diplomatic rapprochement between Israel and the reactionary Arab states like Saudi Arabia to stabilize the area against Iran and the wave of radical Islamism that direct U.S. intervention failed to contain. Needless to say, Trump will gladly turn a blind eye to Tel Aviv’s carrying out its genocidal campaign against the Palestinians.

Africa will be further marginalized from Washington’s consciousness and there will be little effort to compete with China’s influence there. Though Modi is Trump’s ideological ally, disengagement is also likely to be the trend in South Asia, with an informal acknowledgement of the region as being in China’s sphere of influence.

Finally, in the Asia Pacific, there is a strong likelihood that while Trump will pursue the trade and technology war with China that he initiated during his first term, he will dial down the military confrontation with Beijing, mindful that his base is not going to like military adventures that take away the focus from building Fortress America. Concretely, he’ll raise the price for keeping U.S. troops and bases in Japan and South Korea. He’ll reengage Kim Jong Un in the dialogue he was carrying out when he crossed the DMZ in 2019—a dialogue that could have unpredictable consequences for the U.S. military presence in South Korea and Japan. He already gave an indication of this during his acceptance speech during the Republican National Convention when he said he had to initiate a dialogue with Kim owing to the fact that he “is someone with a lot of nuclear weapons.” Could a change in Washington’s commitment of a military umbrella for South Korea and Japan be the price of a grand deal between Kim and Trump? This is the specter that haunts Seoul and Tokyo.

Trump is likely to cease sending ships through the Taiwan Straits to provoke China, as Biden did, and one can expect him to tell Taiwan that there’ll be a dollar price for being defended by the United States and that Taipei should not expect the same assurance that Biden gave it that Washington will come to Taiwan’s rescue in the event of a Chinese invasion. Trump probably knows that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan was never in the cards anyway and that Beijing’s strategy was always cross-straits economic integration as the means to eventually absorb Taiwan.

As for the Philippines and the South China Sea, a Trump administration is likely to tell Manila that there will be none of that “iron clad” guarantee promised by Biden of an automatic U.S. military response under the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty in support of Manila in the event of a major confrontation with China in the South China Sea, like the sinking of Philippine vessel. Trump, it must be remembered, has gone on record saying that he would not waste one American life for what he called “rocks” in the South China Sea. The Pentagon’s push to build up the Philippines as a forward base for the military confrontation with China that Biden fully supported is likely to be reviewed, if not put on hold.

In short, Trump is likely to acknowledge in practice that the Asia Pacific is China’s sphere of influence, though this message will be delivered informally and covered up by rhetoric of continued American engagement with the region.

To summarize, there are few certainties when it comes to an unpredictable figure like Trump. These few certainties are that Trump will be bad for the climate, for American democracy, for women, and for minorities. As for the rest, one can speculate based on past behavior, statements, and events, but one would be wise to always remind oneself that while his instincts are isolationist, unpredictability in policy and action has been and will continue to be the hallmark of Donald Trump.

But whatever happens, whether the Trump administration will be less bellicose than Biden’s or less, the Global South must be prepared to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the continuing decline, crisis, and retreat of the United States as a hegemonic power to accelerate that downspin and carve out more space for the pursuit of its interests.