(iPoster) Challenges and Opportunities of Trump 2.0 for US Leadership of the Liberal Order

• In Event: Poster Session: Various Interesting Foreign Policy

Abstract

As co-editors of "Polarization and Deep Contestation: The Liberal Script in the United States" (Oxford University Press, 2024), we worked with our co-editors (Tanja Borzel & Thomas Risse from the Free University of Berlin) and an interdisciplinary, international group of scholars to explore how affective partisanship and polarization have affected American politics generally and foreign policy more specifically. In our chapter, we explored the different foreign policy scripts or foreign policy orientations in the post–World War II context and how they manifested themselves in the 2016 presidential election. We compared President Donald Trump’s foreign policy script in his first administration to past presidential administrations and surveyed public opinion polls to illustrate the general stability in American attitudes across this period. Now that President Trump has been re-elected, we intend to reexamine and compare Trump’s current foreign policy and particularly the role of the public in supporting and constraining U.S. presidents as “persuaders-in-chief” and foreign policy, in general. We will explore the implications of the election of Trump 2.0 for the public’s commitment to an internationally-oriented foreign policy, including support for the liberal order. The paper addresses the link between heuristic and cognitive thinking, as well as the cultural roots of these habits of thought (e.g., the shared understanding of Americans’ beliefs about its special mission). Finally, we return to presidents as “persuaders-in-chief”, who must frame their specific foreign policies in language that resonates with the public as a way to garner popular support, especially in light of increasing, affective polarization. We particularly want to investigate the growing cracks in the public’s support for the liberal international order caused by internal contestations that may deepen over time.

Authors

• Jean Garrison, University of Wyoming

• Stephanie Anderson, University of Wyoming