Othering with the American Establishment in Trump's populist foreign policy

پژوهش نامه ایرانی سیاست بین الملل

Volume 13, Issue 1 - Serial Number 25, January 2025, Pages 174-149   

Document Type: Original Article

DOI: 10.22067/irlip.2024.85084.1455

Authors

Seyyed Mohsen Hosseini¹; Arash Reisinezhad^{* 2}; Mohsen Abbaszadeh Marzbali³

¹International Relations , faculty of law and political science , university of tehran

²University of Tehran

³Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Mazandaran, Iran

Abstract

Today, liberal democracy has faced challenges including populism. As a populist person or party comes to power, a populist foreign policy with special characteristics in any country, including the United States, emerges. Within this context, Trump had deep impact on the country's foreign policy with his populist slogan, like "America First", his nationalist populism approach, and a conflict between the structure and the agent arose. From this perspective, the main question of this research is how Trump made the American establishment as the Other for its populist foreign policy. The hypothesis of this research is that Trump made the establishment as a major Other to his populist foreign policy through the creation of a bipolar atmosphere and confrontation between the structure and the agent, and the unfavorable conditions of the structure and the existing status of the liberal international order. The paper explains how Trump made the establishment as a sublime Other of his foreign policy by using the paradigm of neoclassical realism, the process tracing method, and by referring to sources and written documents about populism and American foreign policy in the Trump era.

Keywords

Populism; Trump; America; Establishment; Foreign Policy

References

 

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