The Rise of China and the America First Trade Policy: Structural Response to Geopolitics or Far-Right Ideology?

Is the America First trade policy a structurally driven response to the rise of China, or an ideologically motivated framework? The paper addresses this question by bringing the theory of uneven and combined development into dialogue with Stuart Hall’s method of articulation. It develops the argument that the America First trade agenda is an internally contradictory form of ideological articulation that reflects the political heterogeneity of the Trump administration and its patrimonial form of decision-making. Exploring the material dimensions of the United States’ uneven and combined development with China, the paper questions whether the formal goals of the America First agenda can be achieved by identifying the structural obstacles to it in the global economy which the Trump administration seems unlikely to challenge radically. Rather than a geopolitically driven return of “great power politics” what we may instead be observing is how far right nationalist and neo-imperialist discourses form part of a complex pattern of geopolitical fragmentation and oligarchisation. This analysis leads to the conclusion that the incoherence of the America First trade agenda may be illustrative of how unstated kleptocratic interests and perceived domestic political advantages are more important than a far-right actors’ reading of geopolitics in shaping their foreign and trade policy choices.