President Donald Trump wields American power like few leaders in U.S. history ever have. By imposing tariffs, threatening territorial conquest, and ordering military intervention, he deploys the United States’ strength to assert dominance over friends and foes alike.
Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard, describes this uniquely Trumpian grand strategy as “predatory hegemony” in a new essay in Foreign Affairs. The central aim of predatory hegemony, Walt writes, “is to use Washington’s privileged position to extract concessions, tribute, and displays of deference from both allies and adversaries, pursuing short-term gains in what it sees as a purely zero-sum world.” Walt argues that this approach may appear to yield immediate wins, but that over time it will erode the real sources of American power, leaving the United States “poorer, less secure, and less influential.”
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