\n<\/p>\n
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\u2019s avowed posture of anti-intellectualism. But it also stands in tension with what has become increasingly obvious several months into President Donald Trump\u2019s second term: that this U.S. government is consciously setting out to make history.<\/p>\n
This is evident in part in Trump\u2019s personal pursuit of glory\u2014universal adulation for superlative achievements\u2014of 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.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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\u2019s avowed posture of anti-intellectualism. But it also stands in tension with what has become increasingly obvious several months into President Donald Trump\u2019s second term: that this U.S. government is consciously setting out to make history.<\/p>\n
This is evident in part in Trump\u2019s personal pursuit of glory\u2014universal adulation for superlative achievements\u2014of 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.<\/p>\n
But the administration\u2019s 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\u2019s Present at the Creation<\/em>\u2014and 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\u2014and forced the rest of us to attempt to make sense of it.<\/p>\n Of course, trying to figure out the final shape of an order that has not yet coalesced\u2014trying to figure out history before it has happened\u2014is necessarily a speculative enterprise. That\u2019s especially so when you\u2019re trying to presage not only future events but also their future effects and any retrospective meaning they\u2019ll be given by posterity. It\u2019s 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\u2019s impact, allegedly said that \u201cit is too early to tell.\u201d<\/p>\n And yet, there\u2019s still an undeniable impulse to try making sense of all that\u2019s happening in our world by placing it in some historical context. That\u2019s part of what Foreign Policy<\/em> has been up to this year\u2014including in these five standout pieces.<\/p>\n By Christopher Clark, June 30<\/em><\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThis narrative of development\u2014world history as a bildungsroman\u2014no longer comforts us as it once did,\u201d Clark writes. \u201cEconomic 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.\u201d<\/p>\n By Ivan Krastev and Leonard Benardo, June 30<\/em><\/p>\n 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\u2014and when are they actually useful?<\/p>\n Historical analogies, Krastev and Benardo write, \u201chave 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.\u201d<\/p>\n By Stephen M. Walt, June 30<\/em><\/p>\n
\n1. The End of Modernity<\/strong><\/a><\/h3>\n
\n2. Why Compare the Present to the Past?<\/strong><\/a><\/h3>\n
\n3. <\/strong>How Trump Will Be Remembered<\/strong><\/a><\/h3>\n