Why American grand strategy has changed: international constraint, generational shift, and the return of realism

Kitchen, Nicholas

doi:10.1080/23340460.2020.1734957

Cited by 10 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 44 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Neither is fully defined despite considerable discussion (see Jervis, 2003;Coll, 2008;Goldberg, 2016). Accordingly, while it would be asking too much to definitively define what constitutes the "Trump Doctrine" at this stage, we see it as important to further the academic debate and establish any role unpredictability has played (see Hill and Hurst 2020;Kitchen 2020).…”

Section: Conceptual Complexitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Trump’s low conceptual complexity leadership and the vanishing ‘unpredictability doctrine’

Hassan

Featherstone

2020

Cambridge Review of International Affairs

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Section: Conceptual Complexitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Trump’s low conceptual complexity leadership and the vanishing ‘unpredictability doctrine’

Hassan

Featherstone

2020

Cambridge Review of International Affairs

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Conversely, if structural realism prescribed a fundamentally different economic response to China, realists might be able to claim that the United States is now confronting the consequences of ignoring their prescriptions for appropriate behaviors in great power politics. Although today's academic IR tends to dismiss "paradigmatic" approaches, many in broader foreign policy communities around the world observe the return of realism in international politics (Kitchen 2020;Tunsjø 2018;Zhang 2022). If an influential variant of realism offers a convincing account of a critical economic drive that can be associated with a formidable rival's rise, then realism might deserve more currency in understanding great power relations of our time.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Twenty Years’ Crisis? Rethinking the Cases for U.S. Economic Engagement with China

Kim¹

2023

Perspect. polit.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Structural realists accuse U.S. economic engagement with China as a mistake driven by liberal idealism and lack of realism. I suggest that this increasingly popular narrative reflecting the traditional idealism-realism distinction is misplaced. First, liberal approaches to international relations can clash with each other when a democratic state engages with an authoritarian state, and engagement is justified by one strand of liberalism—economic interdependence liberalism—whereas a different liberal perspective—democratic peace liberalism—opposes economic engagement with an oppressive regime. Second, realism—in particular, structural realism—posits that important state behaviors reflect the need to attain more relative power than others. Then, if economic engagement better serves a state’s relative capacity vis-à-vis other states, economic exchanges with a potential strategic contender would be an unavoidable choice. The liberal case for economic engagement is much more restrictive than it is often articulated, while a structural realist case for engagement can be convincingly made. For about two decades since the mid-1990s, U.S. administrations defended economic engagement with China not only with economic interdependence liberalism but also by utilizing an argument in line with the structural realist case for engagement. Blaming one foreign policy idea as responsible for today’s strategic difficulties is misleading.

show abstract

“…Notwithstanding this assertion about the inevitability of grand strategic decision-making, Brands claims that Trump did not build a coherent Grand Strategy. A similar argument is forwarded by Kitchen (2020), who argues that Trump's decisions were mostly driven by chaotic and incoherent impulses and, as such, cannot be deemed as a strategy.…”

Section: The National Security Strategy Issued By the Trump Administr...mentioning

confidence: 70%

Understanding Donald Trumps inconsistent foreign policy through psychological assessments: the case of North Korea

Boas

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This thesis is dedicated to an analysis of the Trump administration's foreign policy, which is widely understood as inconsistent and incoherent. In order to understand these characteristics, I hypothesize that the Trump administration's foreign policy was inconsistent and incoherent because it was deeply influenced by the president's personality. To build this analysis, I first outline the absence of a Trump Grand Strategy or a Trump Doctrine, or any type of guiding principle that could comprehensively explain the Trump administration's foreign policy. Out of the few distinguishable patterns in Trump's international behavior, this thesis explores his populist approach and his centralization of decision-making processes, strengthening the argument that Trump's personal traits might have played an important role in his foreign policy. To test the outlined hypothesis, I draw on Leadership Trait Analysis' assumptions and methods, assessing Trump's personality through at-a-distance content analysis. Drawing on the literature on leadership styles, I draw hypotheses about Trump's foreign policy decisionmaking behavior from his personal traits and compare these with his actual behavior regarding North Korea, which was the selected case for analysis. Results show that the hypotheses drawn from Trump's personality are consistent with his actual foreign policy behavior in U.S diplomacy towards North Korea, which allows us to understand Trump's personal characteristics as causal mechanisms in his decision-making process in this case. In that sense, the inconsistency and incoherence of his foreign policy could be understood as the result of a sum of foreign policy issues that were not strongly defined by ideology or strategy, but were highly influenced by the president's personal characteristics.

show abstract

Why American grand strategy has changed: international constraint, generational shift, and the return of realism

Cited by 10 publications

References 44 publications

Trump’s low conceptual complexity leadership and the vanishing ‘unpredictability doctrine’

Trump’s low conceptual complexity leadership and the vanishing ‘unpredictability doctrine’

A Twenty Years’ Crisis? Rethinking the Cases for U.S. Economic Engagement with China

Understanding Donald Trumps inconsistent foreign policy through psychological assessments: the case of North Korea

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About