Unlike other recent U.S. presidencies, the Trump administration does not seem to be regularly inviting renowned historians to advise White House officials on policy or chronicle its decisions for posterity. (Think Jon Meacham under President Joe Biden, or Taylor Branch during the Clinton administration.) That absence is generally consistent with the Trump administration’s avowed posture of anti-intellectualism. But it also stands in tension with what has become increasingly obvious several months into President Donald Trump’s second term: that this U.S. government is consciously setting out to make history.
This is evident in part in Trump’s personal pursuit of glory—universal adulation for superlative achievements—of which his desire to win a Nobel Peace Prize is the most obvious expression. He wants figures or institutions of authority to recognize that he has made America great again, and thus himself qualifies as great.
Unlike other recent U.S. presidencies, the Trump administration does not seem to be regularly inviting renowned historians to advise White House officials on policy or chronicle its decisions for posterity. (Think Jon Meacham under President Joe Biden, or Taylor Branch during the Clinton administration.) That absence is generally consistent with the Trump administration’s avowed posture of anti-intellectualism. But it also stands in tension with what has become increasingly obvious several months into President Donald Trump’s second term: that this U.S. government is consciously setting out to make history.
This is evident in part in Trump’s personal pursuit of glory—universal adulation for superlative achievements—of which his desire to win a Nobel Peace Prize is the most obvious expression. He wants figures or institutions of authority to recognize that he has made America great again, and thus himself qualifies as great.
But the administration’s interest in history making is expressed not via appeals to existing institutions but rather in bids to remake the landscape of institutions and thus enter a new era of history entirely. This is the sort of history making captured in the ambitious world ordering of former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s Present at the Creation—and the destructive iconoclastic impulses unleashed during revolutionary moments such as the Protestant Reformation. By rejecting so many of its political inheritances, the Trump administration has thrust geopolitical actors around the world into an entirely new era—and forced the rest of us to attempt to make sense of it.
Of course, trying to figure out the final shape of an order that has not yet coalesced—trying to figure out history before it has happened—is necessarily a speculative enterprise. That’s especially so when you’re trying to presage not only future events but also their future effects and any retrospective meaning they’ll be given by posterity. It’s basic prudence to heed the proverbial (and probably apocryphal) caution expressed by Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, who, when asked in the 1970s about the French Revolution’s impact, allegedly said that “it is too early to tell.”
And yet, there’s still an undeniable impulse to try making sense of all that’s happening in our world by placing it in some historical context. That’s part of what Foreign Policy has been up to this year—including in these five standout pieces.
1. The End of Modernity
By Christopher Clark, June 30
Trump is the cause of wide-reaching political changes, both in the United States and abroad. But Cambridge University historian Christopher Clark suggests that it’s also important to understand Trump as a symptom of a much larger historical process that was well underway before he took office: the growing obsolescence of modernity. This bygone era was defined fundamentally by a belief in growth, peace, and, above all, progress.
“This narrative of development—world history as a bildungsroman—no longer comforts us as it once did,” Clark writes. “Economic growth in its modern form has proved to be ecologically disastrous. Capitalism has lost much of its charisma; today, it is even considered (if we follow economist Thomas Piketty and other critics) a threat to social cohesion. And then there is climate change, looming over everything like a threatening storm cloud: a threat that not only calls into question the nature of the future but also suggests the possibility that there may be no future at all. The multifaceted nature of contemporary politics, the present of turmoil and change without a clear sense of direction, is causing enormous uncertainty.”
2. Why Compare the Present to the Past?
By Ivan Krastev and Leonard Benardo, June 30
It has become ubiquitous to attempt to explain the Trump administration and its policies by evoking historical analogies. The fact that these analogies tend to contradict one another is usually left unstated. In a recent essay, Ivan Krastev and Leonard Benardo address an even more fundamental question: Under what conditions are we compelled to search for historical parallels to make sense of our present circumstances in the first place—and when are they actually useful?
Historical analogies, Krastev and Benardo write, “have several distinct advantages when it comes to the current moment. Unlike post-Cold War prophecies, historical analogies tend to be less Eurocentric and more rooted in a diverse set of national histories. In the aftermath of the Cold War, Western liberal democracies were considered the model of the world to come; how people outside Europe or the United States were trying to make sense of the radical political rupture they themselves were experiencing was of regrettably modest interest. Now, there is a growing recognition that we cannot make sense of world in flux if we are unaware of the historical analogies used in different corners of the world.”
3. How Trump Will Be Remembered
By Stephen M. Walt, June 30
Tourists take photos of the spot where a portrait of U.S. President Donald Trump once hung at the Colorado State Capitol in Denver on March 25. The state removed the portrait after Trump complained that it was deliberately unflattering. Jason Connolly/AFP via Getty Images
It may be tempting to think that it’s a good thing for a U.S. leader to be motivated by a desire to enter history books as a great president. Why shouldn’t we want our presidents to be maximally ambitious? FP columnist Stephen M. Walt argues, however, that historical ambition can be a destructive force all its own.
“When leaders are driven primarily by the desire for personal glory, rather than by a genuine commitment to the public interest, they are more likely to pursue meaningless ‘achievements’ that bring few benefits (e.g., renaming the Gulf of Mexico) and to ignore more challenging problems whose solution would help millions of people (such as improving infrastructure or reducing economic inequality),” Walt writes. “They are more inclined to take big risks, conjure up imaginary emergencies to justify extreme measures, and pursue lofty but ill-conceived projects that ordinary citizens will end up paying for. And if appearances are all that matter, an ambitious leader will spend more time building up cults of personality and suppressing criticism than on actually governing. Sound familiar?”
4. The End of Development
By Adam Tooze, Sept. 8
Among the Trump administration’s most decisive changes to U.S. foreign policy has been a frontal assault on foreign aid—one aimed not only at the domestic institutions that organized and distributed that assistance, but also at the international development ideology that justified similar efforts around the world for at least the past decade. Yet FP columnist Adam Tooze argues that abandoning the world’s sustainable development goals (SDGs) was long overdue.
“The broader vision of the SDGs was always a gamble at long odds, and in practice, it has delivered so little that it raises the question of whether it was ever anything more than a self-serving exercise on the part of global elites,” Tooze writes. “With hindsight, the SDGs, for all their capaciousness and generosity of spirit, seem like an effort to craft a world organized around a spreadsheet of universal values rather than politics and around a happy blend of public and private economic interests.”
5. What Happened to the War Powers Act?
By Julian E. Zelizer, June 25
A sizable consensus of legal scholars in the United States, and a growing number of policymakers, now argue that the Trump administration’s ongoing use of the military against alleged Venezuelan drug smugglers amounts to a violation of domestic and international laws—including the 1973 War Powers Act, which sets limits on the president’s authority to use the military. FP columnist Julian Zelizer investigates the origins of the War Powers Act—and shows why it was never as effective as its authors intended.
“The War Powers Act failed to achieve its goals,” Zelizer writes. “The president has retained massive authority to conduct military operations abroad, and Congress rarely challenges the president once operations are underway. Rather than a measure to protect institutional prerogatives, both sides of the aisle have used the reform as a cudgel to attack the other party’s president while usually remaining silent about their side.”
