JokersUpdates.com: Current Affairs - Foreign Affairs: “. Trump’s foreign policy strategy will leave the United States “poorer, less secure, and less influential than it has been for most living Americans’ lifetimes,” writes Stephen Walt.

Ever since Donald Trump first became U.S. president, in 2017, commentators have searched for an adequate label to describe his approach to U.S. foreign relations. Writing in these pages, the political scientist Barry Posen suggested in 2018 that Trump’s grand strategy was “illiberal hegemony,” and the analyst Oren Cass argued last fall that its defining essence was a demand for “reciprocity.” Trump has been called a realist, a nationalist, an old-fashioned mercantilist, an imperialist, and an isolationist. Each of these terms captures some aspects of his approach, but the grand strategy of his second presidential term is perhaps best described as “predatory hegemony.” Its central aim is to use Washington’s privileged position to extract concessions, tribute, and displays of deference from both allies and adversaries, pursuing short-term gains in what it sees as a purely zero-sum world.

Given the United States’ still considerable assets and geographic advantages, predatory hegemony may work for a time. In the long run, however, it is doomed to fail. It is ill suited for a world of several competing great powers—especially one in which China is an economic and military peer—because multipolarity gives other states ways to reduce their dependence on the United States. If it continues to define American strategy in the coming years, predatory hegemony will weaken the United States and its allies alike, generate growing global resentment, create tempting opportunities for Washington’s main rivals, and leave Americans less secure, less prosperous, and less influential.
APEX PREDATOR

Over the past 80 years, the broad structure of world power has gone from bipolarity to unipolarity to today’s lopsided multipolarity, and U.S. grand strategy has shifted along with those changes. In the bipolar world of the Cold War, the United States acted as a benevolent hegemon toward its close allies in Europe and Asia because American leaders believed their allies’ well-being was essential to containing the Soviet Union. They used American economic and military supremacy freely and sometimes played hardball with key partners, as President Dwight Eisenhower did when Britain, France, and Israel attacked Egypt in 1956 or as President Richard Nixon did when he took the United States off the gold standard in 1971. But Washington also helped its allies recover economically after World War II; created and, for the most part, followed rules intended to foster mutual prosperity; collaborated with others to manage currency crises and other economic disruptions; and gave weaker states a seat at the table and a voice in collective decisions. U.S. officials led, but they also listened, and they rarely tried to weaken or exploit their partners.

During the unipolar era, the United States succumbed to hubris and became a rather careless and willful hegemon. Facing no powerful opponents and convinced that most states were eager to accept American leadership and embrace its liberal values, U.S. officials paid little attention to other states’ concerns; embarked on costly and misguided crusades in Afghanistan, Iraq, and several other countries; adopted confrontational policies that drove China and Russia together; and pushed to open global markets in ways that accelerated China’s rise, increased global financial instability, and eventually provoked a domestic backlash that helped propel Trump to the White House. To be sure, Washington sought to isolate, punish, and undermine several hostile regimes during this period and sometimes paid scant attention to other states’ security fears. But both Democratic and Republican officials believed that using American power to create a global liberal order would be good for the United States and for the world and that serious opposition would be confined to a handful of minor rogue states. They were not averse to using the power at their disposal to compel, co-opt, or even overthrow other governments, but their malevolence was directed at acknowledged adversaries and not toward U.S. partners.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/predatory-hegemon-walt