\u201cT he United States has become a rogue state.\u201d That\u2019s the title of a recent column in the Foreign Policy magazine. I generally agree with the author, but would dispute the title. The US has always been a rogue state. And yet, something does seem to have changed fundamentally under Donald Trump, especially with his second term in office. So what gives?<\/p>\n
\u201cThe United States is now acting like a predatory hegemon, exploiting positions of leverage built up over decades to exploit allies and adversaries alike,\u201d the author wrote.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis zero-sum approach to nearly all relations with others includes a deep hostility towards most international institutions and norms, deliberately erratic behaviour, and a tendency to treat other foreign leaders with ill-disguised contempt while expecting demeaning acts of submission and fealty from most of them. As the fallout from the war in Iran spreads throughout the region and around the world, it underscores that the administration either didn\u2019t understand how its actions would affect other states or simply didn\u2019t care.\u201d<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t mean to nitpick but I would use the analogy of the Chinese triads or the Italian mafia. There is the big boss or the Godfather who keeps the peace among the rival gangs, so he earns everyone\u2019s respect or at least inspires fear. Still, he is really the biggest criminal of all. For a long time, the US was, and to a great extent, still is, the Godfather or the biggest triad boss. Now though, as his power and authority decline, he is acting more like a regular criminal. That makes him far more dangerous.<\/p>\n
At least that\u2019s my own understanding or misunderstanding of the realist or neorealist school of international relations. Stripped of their sophisticated mathematical game theory and academic jargon, it essentially sees the relationships between states in terms of gangsterism.<\/p>\n
As prominent economist Jeffrey Sachs recently told The Guardian newspaper: \u201cTrump is saying out loud what used to be said only in private. In that sense, it is an advantage. The US foreign policy is gangsterism and now is more widely understood to be gangsterism. Only the rest of the world, acting on UN principles and in a united way, can push back against US militarism.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cT he United States has become a rogue state.\u201d That\u2019s the title of a recent column in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":567988,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[10908,23,90296,12,1922,203837,801,14945,250831,3,18231,16236,1207,19598,21,19,22,20,25,24,18232,28489],"class_list":{"0":"post-567987","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-afghanistan","9":"tag-america","10":"tag-brown-university","11":"tag-donald-trump","12":"tag-foreign-policy","13":"tag-guardian","14":"tag-iran","15":"tag-iraq","16":"tag-jeffrey-sachs","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-nicolas-maduro","19":"tag-pakistan","20":"tag-syria","21":"tag-un","22":"tag-united-states","23":"tag-united-states-of-america","24":"tag-unitedstates","25":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","26":"tag-us","27":"tag-usa","28":"tag-venezuela","29":"tag-yemen"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=567987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567987\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/567988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=567987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=567987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=567987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}