Tag Archives: liberal internationalism

Backgrounder on neoconservatism and its marriage of convenience with liberal internationalism (Wilsonianism). Does the permanent warfare of today's neocons differ in any real way from the Trotsky idea of permanent world revolution? Socialism has been replaced by democracy-promotion but that difference is small, particularly as the consequences continue to play out on the world stage. This prompts the question as to why Donald Trump has appointed neoconservatives like John Bolton when he is a...

‘Make America Great Again’: Trump’s slogan seems both to yearn for a time when the United States had more influence, and to call for its pre-eminence to be restored. In its own way, it asserts that the US is – or should be – different. In fact it was only Trump’s predecessor, Obama, who was the first president to talk regularly about American exceptionalism, yet to Trump it is something that is long lost and it is his job to recover it. Yet belief in the US’s exceptional nature has been a...

We are now in the dubious position of “celebrating” – if that is the word – the 100th anniversary of US President Woodrow Wilson’s departure on December 4, 1918 on the liner SS George Washington for the Versailles Peace Conference where he was confident he would dictate his brilliant solutions that would end war in the world for all time. Historians and psychiatrists – including Dr. Sigmund Freud himself who co-authored a book on Wilson – have endlessly debated whether Wilson was sane and...

US President Donald Trump has managed to attract support for his "America First" isolationism not by dint of his own arguments, but because the US foreign-policy establishment abandoned its own values. After decades of thoughtless military interventionism, it is little wonder that Americans would seek an alternative.… A grownup speaks on semi-official channel. The voices of the grownups have been suppressed in the corporate media and only found expression in alternative media.One can be for...

Useful backgrounder on international relations and the different schools of thought in the US, particuarly liberal internationalism, neoconservatism and realism.  QuilletteThe World According to RealismRyan Zielonka is an independent consultant and incoming PhD student at the University of Washington

Krugman believes that Trump is threatening to destroy America’s great “empire” and that this is bad, because our country’s “empire” is good and noble. Trump, Krugman suggests, is an aberrant departure from the lofty values and ideals that have guided our foreign policy for most of the past century. Unfortunately, Robinson doesn't cite the warning of the founding fathers about avoiding entangling alliances, and that failure to do so would insert the fledging US into the same politics as...

In summary, Putin advocates national sovereignty and opposes liberal internationalism and liberal interventionism based on as another form of imperialism. The West, the reverse. More broadly, Russia is traditional while the West is liberal. This basis of the broader conflict between the East and West, Global North and Global South.  This conflict is dialectical. The economic basis is capitalism versus socialism. Both capitalism and socialism are internationalist. This...

One could argue that the US has always been an empire. Thomas Jefferson called the US an empire, but an “empire of liberty” dedicated to spreading freedom around the globe. Tell that to the Native Americans killed and dispossessed by White Settlers. Tell that to the Mexicans. The US seized a third of their country through war. Still, it wasn’t until 1898 that the US acquired its first overseas colony. Hawaii had been an independent nation. In 1887, American planters in the islands had...

Thomas Palley has a new paper: The Case for Concerted Action Thomas Palley – Re-theorizing The Welfare State And The Political Economy Of Neoliberalism’s War Against It V. Ramanan