Does American foreign policy under U.S. President Donald Trump represent continuity or rupture when considering the centuries-long history of the United States? 

It’s easy to criticize President Trump for his extreme rhetoric, and there has been fear that his “America First” principle would translate into an abrupt disengagement from America’s overseas commitments. After all, the conservative “Project 2025” (whose general scheme guided Trump’s policy priorities in that year) viewed foreign development aid in particular as a waste of U.S. resources. The disastrous evisceration of the U.S. Aid for International Development (USAID) by Elon Musk in the first months of 2025 was a clear example of an ideologically motivated assault on people and programs that were accused of not only waste, but also criminality and corruption.

And there is certainly no doubt that the worldview constraining Trump’s policymaking is zero-sum and consistently adversarial, especially in his second presidential term. Trump’s view, and that of his “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) base, can be summarized as such: for America to reassert its greatness, other countries must accept economic and political subordination. 

This means other countries must pay substantially higher, if not punitive, tariffs to access U.S. markets. It also means that foreign powers should acknowledge their material and/or military dependence on the United States, which includes taking a larger share of security-related expenses in many cases. 

Trump’s relationship with America’s NATO allies in Europe is the case in point here. The Europeans have had to endure Trump’s sweeping pronouncements on their “decadence”, as well as their alleged exploitation of the United States. See, for example, Trump’s assertion that the European Union was established in order to “screw the United States.” Trump’s criticism of America’s traditional allies in Europe is perhaps the foremost example of his reckless alienation of America’s friends, and his complacent trashing of the image of the United States in the wider world. 

Trump’s diplomacy is indisputably crude, erratic, and egocentric, and an obvious departure in certain respects from the liberal internationalism in which the American foreign policy establishment has traditionally taken pride. Yet, there are also troubling continuities between his policies and those of his presidential predecessors. I will argue that these similarities point to an underlying sense of Exceptionalism, a hubris, that informs them all. 

In brief, I seek herein to confirm and elaborate the judgment of Nesrine Malik, who commented incisively in the Guardian in February 2025 that Trump’s return to the White House was “exposing American exceptionalism for what it is—and always has been”.

“Exceptionalism” here is essentially equivalent to what I have termed self-idolization above; in other words, the notion that the United States is central to modern world history, is an inherently positive moral force in international affairs, and therefore cannot be judged by any external reference point or held to the legal and ethical criteria applied to other states and statesmen. Trump’s version of Exceptionalism is epitomized in his declaration: “I don’t need international law. I’m not looking to hurt people.”

The Trump Brand

Let’s begin by outlining what I see as the core elements of the Trump “brand” in politics. The three intertwined ideological strands most salient in explaining Trump’s electoral successes are: (1) white supremacism, coupled with an anti-immigrant hysteria; (2) Christian Nationalism, with its nostalgia for a mythic past; and (3) American Exceptionalism, also strongly marked by its ahistoricism. 

After reflecting on the significance of these strands for Trump’s popularity within the United States, I will relate Trump’s more notorious ventures in external policymaking over the last year to antecedents in U.S. history. I don’t claim that Trump’s external policies are determined by his internal constituencies, though their acceptance of American unilateralism and distrust of all international institutions that constrain U.S. behavior are entirely congruent with Trump’s attitude. In any case, the same hubris, the same self-righteousness and bigotry, as well as brash ignorance, that undergird Trump’s popularity among Americans at home, also shape his policies toward the wider world.

Racism

This isn’t well known, but the exclusionary superiority of the white race was embedded in American law from its very beginning. In 1790, Congress enacted a law making race the primary criterion for naturalization as an American. An alien wishing to become a citizen had to be a “free white person. . . of good character”. Shockingly, this requirement for naturalization was not changed until 1952. And even at that point, Congress reaffirmed immigration quotas favoring persons hailing from northern and western Europe.

Reaching back to the 2016 presidential contest, it’s important to remember that Trump distinguished himself from other Republican candidates by his sweeping accusations against immigrants, especially non-white and non-Protestant immigrants, and by his demagogic exploitation of the complex questions of immigration and naturalization. Political commentators were at first incredulous that a man of Trump’s egregious coarseness and political inexperience could be taken seriously as a candidate for president. However, they quickly identified this aspect of his rhetoric as not only setting him apart from the rest of the field, but also attracting the attention and support of millions of Americans who obviously believed that immigration was out of control, and that the United States was under threat because of a tsunami of “illegal immigrants” from Latin America. 

Trump says that halting and even reversing this tide of immigration, especially through the U.S. border with Mexico, is the key to confronting crime, drugs, unemployment, and other social ills. There were also accusations that “illegals” were voting, receiving welfare, and taking jobs away from Americans. The anti-immigrant hysteria was reinforced by a barely concealed racism; more than one critic interpreted Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” to mean “Make America White Again”.

Racial issues were at the forefront of voters’ minds, not only because of Trump’s rhetoric, but also on account of the eight-year presidency of Barack Obama. In fact, one can make a good case that in 2016 Trump was running not so much against Hilary Clinton, the Democratic candidate for president, but against Obama and his legacy. Hence Trump’s questioning of Obama’s American nationality, and later the risible accusation that Obama had committed “treason” in his administration’s discussion of possible Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Indeed, the repudiation of Obama figures as a priority in Trump’s war against “woke”, and he can’t seem to let it rest. He removed Obama’s portrait from the area of the White House frequented by guests, and most recently has refused to apologize for a disgusting video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes that appeared on his social media platform, “Truth Social”.

Both white supremacism and a more generalized xenophobia (or what is often termed “nativism”), are nothing new to American society. The naturalization law of 1790 is one compelling item of evidence. Further proof is found in in so-called Jim Crow laws in the American South, informal discrimination against nonwhites in other areas of the country, and in vigilante terrorism against African Americans and Hispanics, which took the form of lynchings, bombings, and assassinations until the 1960s. This violence has continued in the form of police brutality and harassment until the present day. 

Yet, in line with the thinking of white supremacists, Trump denies that systemic racism against nonwhites still exists in the United States, and views the real problem facing the country as reverse racism. He has argued that, while the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had some positive aspects, efforts to dismantle institutionalized racism have produced anti-white discrimination.

White supremacism and the theory of reverse racism also explain the special allowance for Afrikaners who wish to immigrate to the United States because of the alleged “genocide” against them. As for nativism, it arises periodically among American citizens from immigrant families of previous generations, as a response to real or perceived crests in new immigration. This is especially prevalent when the immigrants in question appeared to threaten the racial or religious dominance of the established white Protestant majority. For example, the influx of Irish Catholics into the Northeast in the 1840s due to the potato famine; the wave of Chinese immigrant labor into California in the 1870s; and the high tide of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, especially Jews from the Russian Empire from 1881-1914. These were all followed by state and federal legislation aimed at curtailing further immigration on account of the perceived economic and cultural threat the immigrants posed.

Christian Nationalism

A second element in the Trump brand is so-called Christian Nationalism. It is common knowledge that most white evangelical Christians voted for Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024; the commonly cited statistic, based on exit polls, is that about 80% of white evangelical Christians voted for Trump in all three elections. The significance of this fact cannot be overstated: this one category of voters comprises 20-25% of the total electorate. Since all three of these elections were close, the dependability of the white evangelical vote for Trump was vital for his victories in 2016 and 2024.

There is a paradox in the loyalty of most evangelical Christians to Trump. It has been convincingly argued that Trump’s political success signals the decline rather than the triumph of evangelical Christianity in the United States, with regard to the traditional canons of Christian morality and spirituality. It is true that Trump’s appointees to the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which had made abortion legal throughout the United States. But, as researcher Aaron Renn writes in “How the Decline in Evangelicalism Helped Elect Donald Trump”, evangelical influence within the Republican Party was insufficient to keep a proposed federal ban on abortion in the Party’s platform in 2024.

Furthermore, the Republican Party is not formally committed to reversing legal advances for gays, or outlawing gambling, pornography, or marijuana (though individual Republicans may feel differently toward these issues). Renn writes:

Donald Trump is precisely the kind of person whose path to the presidency would have been barred in the previous era in which America was still a Christian-dominated society. . . Today, every standard that could have been used to disqualify Trump has been removed or even inverted. Affairs are seen as no big deal. Gambling is now legal and socially approved of. . . Relentless self-promotion is what we all do on social media every day. Our culture celebrates crudeness, in both word and deed. How can Trump’s language be held against him in an era of Cardi B’s?

Renn argues white evangelicals have remained loyal to the Republican Party even though the latter has effectively capitulated to, if not embraced, the cultural changes against which evangelicals have fought. But it appears that evangelicals still hoped to achieve certain goals in terms of changing government policies, perhaps with respect to school curricula and school prayer, defining family and gender, and combatting alleged reverse racism. 

But while these issues had some mobilizing potential, Trump also clearly drew on a reservoir of visceral fear and ferocious anger at the ways in which American society was changing—changes that had allowed someone like Obama to be elected in the first place. For Trump, the polarization of American society was a political asset on account of the undercurrent of Christian Nationalism. 

It must be understood that this discussion is not about patriotic Americans who happen to be devout Christians. The qualifier “Christian” here is really an ethno-ideological descriptor: “real Americans” are white Christians, who made America what it is, and who are engaged in defending it against “socialists” and “communists.” For many of Trump’s supporters, those who oppose him don’t represent a legitimate political alternative, but a treasonous ideological faction. As one recent treatment of this religio-political formation defined it, Christian Nationalism is an “ethno-traditionalism among many white Americans that conflates racial, religious, and national identity (the deep story) and pines for cultural and political power that demographic and cultural shifts have increasingly threatened (the vision).”

It is not generally recognized that most of the thousands of rioters at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 were driven by a fanatical species of Christian Nationalism. A sign carried by one of the protestors made clear his motivation: “Jesus is my Savior and Trump is my President.” A study devoted to exposing the leadership of these types of movements explained: 

On January 6, 2021, Christian flags, wooden crosses, and “Jesus saves” signs mingled with pro-Trump banners as insurrectionists, inspired by a buzzing undercurrent of religion and outrage, reacted with violence and stormed the U.S. Capitol. . . . Although Oath Keepers’ armed militiamen and white supremacist Proud Boys drew headlines, the deadly Capitol assault was largely incited by Christian nationalist leaders who wove a narrative of divine mission, rallying thousands to Washington with calls to spiritual and political warfare.

A separate study of online fundraising for the legal defense of individual rioters concluded that, not only were the rioters innocent of all criminal activity, but

. . . they are elevated to the status of “patriot,” someone who is righteously self-sacrificing in the name of a shared, greater good. January 6th is thus viewed not as an example of political violence, but rather as an aspirational allegory of what it means to righteously defend one’s country against a real threat. . . . [W]hite Christian nationalism is used. . . to suggest that the defendant’s intent and means were positive and divinely sanctioned. . . .

The notion that an act of insurrection of Christian Nationalists was “divinely sanctioned”, even if it was against the law, leads naturally to a discussion of the sense of moral immunity and self-idolization integral to American Exceptionalism.

American Exceptionalism

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that white racism and Christianity have been formative to American identity, since white racism has influenced lawmaking since the country’s founding, and Christianity has been the religion of the majority of Americans since the nation’s beginning as well. 

But the particular history of Christianity in the United States has also contributed to the third strand of the Trump brand, American Exceptionalism. The Christian Nationalists who took part in the January 6th events were, as indicated above, “pining” for their fading influence and nostalgic for “American greatness.” Their mythic narrative tells of a country founded by devout Christians on Christian principles, morally superior to other nations, blessed by God with unprecedented prosperity and power, and, finally, sanctioned by God to act unilaterally as a virtuous and liberating force in the wider world. 

And while they invoke this myth to justify revolution against demographic and cultural changes they reject, it is not only the theocratic fanatics that believe this story. It is accepted across most of the political spectrum. The noted Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr ascribed it to the Puritans, who held to a doctrine of “special providence” which taught that God was ever present to reward or punish them according to their merits or deserts.

While this doctrine is perhaps an inevitable component of a lively religious consciousness, its unfortunate effect, according to Niebuhr, was to induce Americans to interpret their riches, success, and power, as signs of God’s special providence toward their country. Niebuhr argued further that proof of God’s favor far outweighed the proof of God’s wrath, given the vast material resources of the North American continent; he also suggested that this was an important factor in the notorious self-righteousness of Americans, as well as their spiritual immaturity. Niebuhr’s reflections cast light on one plausible religious source for the widely held belief in American Exceptionalism.

But there is another secular sociohistorical source that has been offered as an explanation for America’s unique position in the world, i.e., the frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner. According to Turner, who (by the way) showed little interest in religions’ impact on the American character, the history of the United States differed from that of any European country on account of the American frontier, which Turner located at “the hither edge of free land”. 

Whereas European societies were defined by competition and conflict over lands already settled and subdivided, American society expanded westward into new lands open to exploitation by the individual pioneer: the “frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier.” 

Turner ascribed the dominant and distinctive elements of the American personality to the dynamism of the frontier: “coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy. . .” and, above all, individualism and democracy.

We may pause here to observe that the indigenous peoples of North America are marginal to the heroic tale of the white pioneers; while Turner posited that state expansion in a European context required conquest, he pretended, in complete disregard of the historical record, that America’s territorial expansion was accomplished at no one’s expense, that “free land” was really free for the taking. 

In spite of his blindness to the violence inherent to America’s westward growth, he did see that there were temptations in the American brand of democracy: “But the democracy born of free land, strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant of administrative experience and education, and pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds, has its dangers as well as its benefits.” 

In fact, the values of frontier society helped to produce the kind of democracy that catapulted a political parvenu like Donald Trump to the presidency: an unabashed egotist, boastful and proud of his business acumen, without any experience in public administration, possessing only the most superficial understanding of American history and of the world beyond America, scornful of the knowledge of experts, certainly impatient of restraint, and, in his behavior and speech, the very soul of coarseness.

If Puritanism and “Turnerism” supply a conceptual framework for understanding the plausibility of American Exceptionalism to vast numbers of white Americans in particular, the president before Trump whose thought was most powerfully shaped by their convergence was Woodrow Wilson. Wilson’s father was a Presbyterian minister, whence his familiarity with the Puritan/Protestant moral universe and belief in America’s divine mission; he was also familiar with the Turner thesis, and saw both America’s territorial expansion and its liberal democratic institutions as elements in a “Providential system”. 

Granted, Wilson appears to have been sincere in his propagation of American Christian values, and particularly democracy, whereas Trump’s commitment to constitutional liberty and electoral democracy is tenuous at best. But Wilson, like Trump, trampled on constitutionally guaranteed freedoms in order to suppress dissent against the government’s mobilization for war; and his views on race relations were, like Trump’s, deplorably regressive, inasmuch as his administration reimposed racial segregation and turned a blind eye to an epidemic of lynchings across the American South.

We have noted above the ahistoricism of both Christian Nationalism and American Exceptionalism. The discourse of Christian nationalism and American Exceptionalism is permeated with claims to America’s moral superiority vis-a-vis the rest of the world, but such a notion requires a self-serving amnesia with regard to the realities of American history. 

Thus, Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State in the first Trump Administration, speaking at the American University in Cairo in 2019, could declare without reservation that “America is a force for good in the Middle East” (though his partisan loyalty dictated an admission that the Obama years were an exception to this general rule). He went on to chronicle America’s liberating interventions in the history of region, ignoring the CIA’s role in overthrowing Mosaddiq and an emerging democracy in Iran, America’s longstanding and massive aid to Israel while it was engaged in oppressing or slaughtering Palestinians, and America’s catastrophic and chaos-sowing invasion of Iraq, to name only the most egregious examples.

However, as Nesrine Malik reminds us, American self-righteousness, and belief in its right to defy internationally accepted norms, has ample precedent in previous presidencies, especially in the second Bush Administration. As she puts it, the global war on terror (GWOT) was “one long, disastrous norm-busting campaign”. 

She cites other times and places in recent history when the U.S. government or other U.S. institutions flagrantly violated the rights of both citizens and noncitizens and snubbed the authority of international organizations: the detention of Haitian refugees in Guantanamo under Bush Sr. before the more infamous use of the same military base to hold captives from the GWOT by Bush Jr.; disregard for decisions of the International Criminal Court and Congress actually authorizing the use of force to free American or allied agents detained by the ICC; and U.S. universities’ violation of first-amendment rights to free speech and assembly in the general crackdown on student protests on behalf of Palestine during the genocide in Gaza, 2023-2025

Trump’s Foreign Policy as Historical Continuity

Returning to Nesrine Malik’s thesis regarding U.S. Exceptionalism, I want to argue that many, if not all, of Trump’s seemingly outrageous foreign policy ventures conform to pre-existing patterns in American history. Let us take for example his proposals to annex Canada and Greenland. 

As shocking as it seems, Trump is not the first president to indulge these fantasies. With respect to Canada, James Polk entertained the idea of war with Britain to seize parts of what became British Columbia in 1844. Even more bizarre in retrospect was a contingency plan to invade and annex Canada in 1930, so-called War Plan Red, drafted when the U.S. anticipated a conflict with Britain for global hegemony.

And it has been observed that several U.S. presidents sought to purchase Greenland from Denmark in the past, though Trump has hinted at his willingness to use force to obtain control of this immense island. But this proposed acquisition also conforms to American expansionism in the 19th and 20th centuries, either through the purchase of lands claimed by European states (in the case of Greenland, Denmark) or by direct aggression. In this context we should remember three biggest land grabs in U.S. history. 

First, the Louisiana Purchase in 1803: a “purchase” effected by President Thomas Jefferson, whereby the United States asserted sovereignty over vast lands in the Mississippi Valley by paying off the former claimant, France, without regard for the rights of indigenous peoples inhabiting these areas. Second, the Mexican War, 1846-48, whereby the rich resources and lands of the American Southwest were acquired by conquest. And third, the American purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867; as with the Louisiana Purchase, the rights of indigenous peoples were ignored. A few decades later, after the conclusion of a series of “wars” against the American Indians, imperialism regained momentum when, in the 1890s, the United States acquired a sovereign Hawaii by overthrowing the native queen, and seized Caribbean islands including Cuba and Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, by means of a war with Spain, in 1898. As we have seen, F.J. Turner saw the march of territorial expansion as the key to understanding American society. Will Trump preside over a new wave of conquests and annexations in North America?

Trump has also ordered the use of military force against Venezuela, attacking ships in international waters that are accused of carrying narcotics, and abducting Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, who are now in New York awaiting trial on charges of drug trafficking. Again, to most people in Latin America this is just a continuation of the sordid narrative of Yankee imperialism. 

The latter story was chartered by the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which prohibited future European interventions in Latin America, in order to secure American hegemony in the Western hemisphere. The litany of American interventions in Latin America is long: America’s self-serving diplomacy in recognizing the new state of Panama in 1903, in order to obtain the land rights needed to build and operate the Panama Canal; the U.S. ambassador’s complicity in the overthrow of Mexican president Francisco Madero in 1913; the American overthrow of democratically elected presidents in Guatemala, 1954, and in Chile, 1973; U.S.-funded opposition to the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua under Reagan in the 1980s; and, in an act that directly foreshadows the abduction of Venezuelan president, George H.W. Bush ordered a U.S. intervention in Panama, in order to arrest General Manuel Noriega of Panama, in 1989. 

This history, of which the foregoing is only a brief selection, is the main reason why Latin American critics of the U.S. action—though it must be noted that several Latin American leaders approved of Trump’s intervention—saw it as a continuation of American violation of not only Venezuelan but also of Latin American sovereignty more generally.

Another theme of external relations in the Trump administrations has been his willingness to enter into trade wars, particularly with China. Trump’s preferred weapon, especially in his current administration, has been tariffs. Although this tactic is a reversal of longstanding American support for free trade, dating back to the period after 1945, it is not an innovation if we take into account the longer history of America’s economic relations, which featured the use of tariffs as a way of protecting U.S. industries and jobs. In fact, the visionary advocate of American continental expansion, Alexander Hamilton, who served as the first Secretary of the Treasury, thought tariffs were an excellent way of developing the U.S. economy and increasing federal revenue, since federal income tax was not inaugurated until the twentieth century. 

The imposition of tariffs was controversial in the period before the Civil War, since it raised the prices paid by Southern planters for goods imported from Europe. But the Republican Party, which for a long time determined federal policy, maintained tariffs, again, to protect U.S. industry from European competition. In the face of the stock market collapse in 1929, the Republicans instituted an extremely punitive tariff, the so-called Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, hoping that it would help American farmers and businessmen (the consensus among economic historians is that it deepened the Depression). 

After World War II, the promotion of free trade was one of the few things that Republicans and Democrats could agree on, and since the United States emerged from the war as the leading capitalist economy, it made sense to seek open markets for American products. Trump’s attachment to tariffs can be seen as a reversion to an earlier period in U.S. history, and the logic behind it is found in the threat to American economic hegemony posed by China.

In the Middle East, Trump has followed a well-worn path, even if he has gone much further than previous presidents in pursuing a confrontation with Iran at the behest of Israel. Netanyahu denies that the U.S. intervention in Iran was a result of the longstanding alliance with Israel, but the denial is somewhat doubtful. In the first year of Trump’s second presidency, January 2025 to February 2026, Israel’s Prime Minister has visited the White House seven times, more than any other foreign political leader, and more than any other Israeli prime minister; and this was in addition to Netanyahu’s visit to Trump in December 2025, prior to his inauguration. In March 2026, Reuters reported on a phone call Netanyahu made just prior to the beginning of joint military operations, in which he argued for the killing of Khamenei. While it’s impossible to know if this was the deciding factor for the United States to enter into war with Iran, it is significant circumstantial evidence.

Trump’s struggle to clarify objectives in the current war is itself evidence that the United States may be serving Israel’s quest for absolute regional hegemony by decapitating the Iranian leadership and degrading its military capabilities. It is worth noting that this is the first time that the United States and Israel have carried on a joint military operation, though of course they have military-supply and intelligence connections that go back to the 1970s. 

It must be remembered that Joe Biden, for all his differences with Trump, enabled the Israeli genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Although Trump himself does not appear to subscribe to the apocalyptic scenarios conjured by his spiritual advisor, Paula White-Cain, his Christian nationalist constituency, including some military officers taking part in Operation Epic Fury, use end-times rhetoric to justify America’s massive commitment to Israel in this war, and the unprecedented bombing of Iran.

As of this writing, Trump’s entire gambit has yet to play itself out, but the recent history of U.S. relations with Iran is not reassuring; the Iranian regime has already proved to be more resilient than expected, and its launching of homemade drones and missiles against Israel and the Gulf states would appear to be a surprisingly effective riposte to American-Israeli aggression.

On the other hand, since this essay is focused on continuity rather than change in U.S. policy, let us emphasize the fact that this latest conflict is broadly connected with patterns of alliance and alienation dating back to the 1970s. It was at that time that America formed a strategic alliance with Israel; the 1973 war was the first Arab-Israeli war to take on the character of a proxy war between the United States and the U.S.S.R. Moreover, in the 1970s, American financial aid to Israel increased enormously: a 2023 report by the Congressional Research Service highlighted the fact that Israel, as the leading recipient of foreign aid, has received, cumulatively, a staggering $158bn since its founding in 1948.

On the other side of the current conflict in the Gulf, Iran has been a bête noire (Black Beast) since the Islamic revolution in 1979. The United States never re-established diplomatic relations with Iran since that date; and George W. Bush named it as one of three countries that constituted his “Axis of Evil,” since it was (and still is) allegedly a major sponsor of terrorism. And although previous presidents have avoided direct intervention in Iran, there has been discussion about the possibility of a war with Iran for decades, especially in the years after the 9/11 attacks, even though no evidence linked Iran to that atrocity. America’s invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11 positioned substantial numbers of American troops in Iran’s neighbors; and fears of Iran’s nuclear ambitions fueled open discussion in 2006 about invading the country.

As with so many other domestic and foreign initiatives undertaken by the Trump administration, the current assault on Iran has not a shred of legitimacy from the standpoint of international law. As stated above, Trump dismisses the relevance of international law in formulating his foreign policy, since he’s “not looking to hurt people”. His deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, is more blunt: “We’re a superpower, and under President Trump, we’re going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.”

This is precisely the position one expects from Trump, his henchmen, and his white Christian Nationalist constituency, rooted in the hubris of American Exceptionalism. To quote Nesrine Malik once again:

This is not to suggest that there is no difference between Trump and his predecessors, or that anyone is under any illusion that the U.S. was a perfect democracy before his arrival on the scene. . . . But the American dream of prosperity at home and supremacy abroad has long masked a much more cynical and transactional order—one that Trump is both exposing and entrenching.

The United States celebrated 250 years of independent statehood this year. Any categorical commendation or condemnation of its internal history, or its external relations, would be inherently ahistorical. Its history, like the history of other states, is too variegated to be subsumed under a single comprehensive assessment. But for the Americans and non-Americans who recoil at the grandstanding and impulsiveness of President Trump, putting his rhetoric and policies into a longer historical context is necessary. He does not represent all of what America’s history has meant to its citizens or the world, but neither can he be extruded from its history. His election was the result of his appeal to values and beliefs embraced by many millions of Americans, at a moment when those ideals appeared to be in jeopardy, and even his seemingly foolish and self-destructive ventures in diplomacy and war, build on or refer us back to precedents established decades, or in some cases centuries, before his accession to the presidency for the second time.

Author’s note: I acknowledge inspiration I derived from Peter Beinart’s fine book, The Icarus Syndrome: The History of American Hubris (New York: HarperCollins/Council on Foreign Relations, 2010). I also thank Mr. Scott Nelson, with whom I correspond and who alerted me to many of the details cited herein, and who read and commented on a draft of this article.