System-Level Crises and Coping Strategies: Dealing with the Trump Presidency

Crises come in many shapes and forms. Recently much has been made of the impending crisis of the liberal international order, and the election of Donald Trump is shaping up to be a defining event, spelling a turn to a transactionalist brand of muscular isolationism in Washington. The US is exhibiting signs of a declining hegemon, whose foreign policy approach is in flux in the face of a system-level power shift and domestic forces calling for disengagement. This sea change in America’s global role forces other international actors to reconsider the options available to them in order to mitigate its effects on the international system and the global normative universe. After laying out the key parameters of the “Trumpian” foreign policy approach and introducing its key points of contention, the paper will revisit the soft versus hard balancing debate in International Relations. This will produce an analytical tool consisting of military, economic, diplomatic and legal/normative coping strategies, which are available to America’s allies to deal with the impending crisis. These strategies will then be analysed in terms of both their normative desirability and strategic feasibility as crisis mitigation tools.