The False Promise of Liberal Order: Nostalgia, Delusion and the Rise of Trump: Patrick Porter, Polity Press, Cambridge and Medford

The coming of Donald Trump to power as the 45th President of the United States amounted to a moment of reckoning for the American foreign policy establishment. With his unconventional posturing and populist moorings, the Trump presidency seemed antithetical to Washington DC’s ‘Blob’ worldview that guided American foreign policy in the post-Cold War years. The Blob members, by and large, were animated by a liberal internationalist vision.1 In response, the defenders of the liberal international order (hereafter, LIO) voiced their concerns, with nostalgia for a bygone order and expression of alarm at the unfolding of the ‘America First’ agenda.