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An expert on global politics details the dangers of Trump's nationalist agenda and its destabilizing effects on the world.How will Donald Trump's "America First" policy impact international stability? This sobering book argues that it will put the country on a path toward war. International relations expert Hall Gardner analyzes the twists and turns of our president's foreign policy pronouncements from the beginning of his campaign to the present. He argues that Trump's proposed economic nationalism and military buildup--if implemented--will alienate America's friends and rivals alike. The unintended and perilous consequence could well be to press Russia, Iran, Turkey, and China into a closer counter-alliance versus the United States, Europe, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.Gardner has long warned that the uncoordinated NATO and European Union enlargement into former Soviet spheres of influence and security would not only provoke a Russian revanchist backlash, but could also encourage Moscow to forge a Sino-Russian alliance. That Russian backlash has already taken place since the annexation of Crimea in 2014 during the Obama administration. Now Trump's seeming contempt of trade pacts and multilateral relations, plus his confrontation with both Iran and North Korea, could push Russia to construct closer ties with a more assertive China to form a polarizing alliance. At the same time, "America First" trade and monetary disputes with allies could tempt some of those states to move into neutrality or else drift into the Russia-China orbit.Against this dangerous and destabilizing unilateralism, Gardner makes a convincing case that the only workable means of maintaining a peaceful world order is through patient and thoroughly engaged diplomacy and a realist rapprochement with both Russia and China.
About the Author
What do my books have in common?
My latest book, Crimea, Global Rivalry, and the Vengeance of History, published by Palgrave Macmillan in August 2015, analyses the long term causes and consequences of Moscow's annexation of Crimea and its political-military interference in eastern Ukraine. The books picks up on points of my first book, Surviving the Millennium, which first warned in 1994 of a possible pessimistic scenario in which Moscow might eventually opt for the annexation of Crimea. Crimea, Global Rivalry, and the Vengeance of History also responds to Francis Fukuyama's 1995 Foreign Affairs review of my first book---while additionally critiquing Fukuyama's more recent arguments in reference to Ukraine and other issues---by arguing that the post-Cold War world was never at the "end of history." Rather, homo geopoliticus is presently experiencing the "vengeance of history"---a dangerous period that must be surmounted by reaching a difficult accommodation with Russia and China, among other states. The book then reviews a number of geostrategic options, based on a mix of historical analogies to World War I, World War II, plus contemporary analysis. The intent of such a global strategy is to minimize the possibility of wider regional wars---as well as the real possibility of major power war. It is argued that the present crisis represents a mix of the pre-World War I analogy (based on my interpretation of the origins of WWI, as argued in The Failure to Prevent World War I: The Unexpected Armageddon) and pre-World War II analogy---but that Russian actions against Ukraine are more like those of Lenin during the interwar period, than the much later actions of Hitler in annexing the Sudetenland.
Published in February 2015, The Failure to Prevent World War I: The Unexpected Armageddon originated in my PhD dissertation (1987) at the Johns Hopkins Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, which had compared and contrasted the geopolitical, political-economic, military technological and diplomatic dynamics between Great Britain and Germany that led to World War I in the period from 1870 to 1914 to the US-Soviet rivalry during the Cold War. Following Soviet collapse, my first book, Surviving the Millennium (1994) then updated the multiple dimensions of US-Soviet rivalry during the Cold War. Despite Soviet collapse, my study of the World War I period was not, however, entirely left in limbo. I began to engage in deeper research on the subject, particularly as I realized that most studies on the origins of WWI written in English tended to focus primarily on Anglo-German relations, but of course with a number of important studies on Austrian and Russian perspectives. And yet there seemed to be relatively fewer studies written on the French perspective.
My first step was consequently to update my previous research for one of the chapters of the Ashgate Research C
