U.S. President Donald Trump “has been called a realist, a nationalist, an old-fashioned mercantilist, an imperialist, and an isolationist,” but his grand strategy is “perhaps best described as ‘predatory hegemony,’” writes the scholar Stephen Walt in the forthcoming issue of Foreign Affairs. Trump sees the world as zero-sum, and under his leadership, the United States, unlike other great powers, is trying “to extract concessions and asymmetric benefits from its allies and adversaries alike.”
The Trump administration “appears to believe it can prey on other states forever, and that doing so will make the United States even stronger and further increase its leverage,” Walt writes. And its strategy “may work for a time” because of the United States’ “considerable assets and geographic advantages.” But the calculation behind it will ultimately prove wrong, he warns. “Predatory hegemony contains the seeds of its own destruction.”
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