Donald Trump and “America First,” 2017–

Abstract

The election of Donald Trump brought to the White House a billionaire businessman who never held a political office and had virtually no experience with, or knowledge about, international relations not related to his business activities. In the first seventeen months of his presidency, he struck a significant blow at the liberal international order that was created and maintained by the United States since the Second World War.

For Further Reading

Prior to his 2016 campaign for the presidency, the books that appeared about Trump dealt primarily with his life as a businessman. Trump wrote, or hired ghostwriters to write, autobiographies, self-help books, personal finance books, and political policy treatises. They include Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987), Time to Get Tough (2011), and Crippled America (2015).

On January 17, 2018, a British newspaper, The Guardian, reported that more than 4500 English-language books were published during Trump’s first year in office compared to just over 800 works about Barack Obama. A bibliography of some of these books by and about Trump is provided by Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliography_of_Donald_Trump.

Not surprisingly, as of this writing, very few scholarly books have appeared dealing with Trump’s early foreign policy. One is Charlie Laderman’s and Brendan Simms’s Donald Trump, The Making of A World View (2017). For the most part, it is a collection of excerpts from over 30 years of Trump interviews that trace the origin of his America First philosophy to the early 1980s and into the first 100 days of his presidency. An excellent overview of Trump’s first year in office, with a chapter on his foreign policy, can be found in Michael Nelson’s Trump’s First Year (2018).

The scholarly journals that proved to be major sources for this chapter, as well as the others, are The National Interest, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, World Affairs, Arms Control Today, and The American Interest. Also important were the reports of the Brookings Institution, at https://www.brookings.edu/topic/international-affairs/, and those by Geopolitical Futures, at https://geopoliticalfutures.com/.