The Trump administration’s politics of time: The temporal dynamics that enable Trump’s interests to determine American foreign policy

Getting stuck in the past

The temporal imaginary that dominates within the study and practice of international politics largely treats the past as the ultimate arbiter of claims about politics. The imaginary I call into question here is the one that animates much—albeit not all—international relations scholarship along with foreign policy analysts and practitioners (Büthe, 2002; Elman and Elman, 2008: 357–358; Grzymala-Busse, 2011; Hom, 2018a). These understandings of time—the “timing mechanisms”—that orient this work have specific attributes and emphases, attributes and emphases that differ from other communities (Hom, 2018a). The media, for instance, has a vastly different temporal imaginary. Media outlets possess an imaginary that is much more fractured, and they employ a set of temporal approaches that scholars reject as simplistic and focused on the here and now. Instead, those with “expertise” on foreign policy and international affairs either turn to the lessons of the past or draw from timeless, “scientific” claims about the mechanisms that constitute the international system (Jackson, 2010; Walt, 1991). Whether more historically oriented or more scientific, what separates “expertise” in the field from media punditry stems from their ability to explain and interpret the past.

That said, within these fields there are certainly more nuanced understandings of the past than what I lay out above. ¹ Historical IR, for instance, includes work that specifically calls into question historiography in the context of international affairs (e.g. Lawson, 2012) and has robust debates about the role and use of history. Scientific IR—particularly given the reliance on regressions or mechanistic approaches (Montgomery, 2016)—has constant debates about how to incorporate time as a factor in its interpretation of data. Either way, when assessing the contemporary example of the Trump administration, analysts tend to either rely upon historical comparisons or statements built upon collected truths that are based on analysis of past events in the international system. A heading for Foreign Affairs—perhaps the most influential and historically prominent journal at the intersection of IR scholarship and practitioner analysis—puts it succinctly: “Learn about the past. Understand the present. Predict the future.”

Enabling this approach is a set of assumptions regarding the continuity of time and its directionality that are rarely made explicit. First, the past is understood as something that is, in an ontological sense, real. What has happened remains beyond dispute. It is undeniable that the current president won the election despite losing the popular vote, just as it is undeniable that the United States won World War II (Paine, 2012). Once in office, the President imposed a ban on transgender persons serving openly in the US military (Sonne and Marimow, 2019). While seemingly beyond dispute, each of these examples betray an aspect of the past—particularly for international politics—that is more liminal. The current president won millions fewer votes than his opponent and arguably violated election laws to achieve office. The campaign may have cheated in order to gain the majority of electoral votes, which raises the question of whether it really was a “win” in a democratic sense (Toles, 2016; Ziegler, 2018). Similarly, the transgender ban has been imposed and reimposed, but it is unclear how implementation has occurred, whether tweets constitute policy, ² and whom has left and/or been removed (BBC News, 2019). Even claiming that World War II ended in 1945 relies upon a colonial periodization that locates violence solely in the intentional acts of European state militaries, ignoring colonial structures that predate the war and continued well afterward (Barkawi, 2016; Paine, 2012). In other words, whenever one is dealing with a collective endeavor that incorporates as many entities, bodies, and institutions as global politics, the past is rarely as fixed and “real” as one likes to think (Bernstein et al., 2000). Much of the collective imaginary of the “real” past relies upon historical “facts” (Becker, 1955; Lustick, 1996) that are irreducibly interpretive and the function of narratives produced in the contemporary present (Edkins, 2003; Krebs, 2015; Subotic, 2016).

Second, there is a fixity attached to the past that is absent when compared to the fleeting present and indeterminate future. As “the great lab of history” scholars use in pursuit of a “coherent body of timeless propositions,” those who study and write about foreign policy seek to turn it into something set and indisputable (Kaplan, 1962: 3). If this process is successful, it enables us to create “timeless” laws that govern security politics, something seen as unquestionably desirable, if not always possible (McIntosh, 2015; Walt, 1991). Joined to this past-centric understanding of politics—partially derived through the intellectual history of thinking politics within and beyond the self-consciously historical discipline of history—there is an acceptance of linear clock-time as what time really is (Adam, 1995; Sjoberg, 2013; Vitalis, 2015). Linear clock-time possesses a number of attributes, but within IR two characteristics are critical—it is seen as natural and universal. Natural in that it is beyond the possibility of disruption or change by human and/or nonhuman entities and universal in that it is independent of spatial or temporal context. Its linearity also implies a directionality—past can impact present and present can impact future, but the future cannot change the present or the past (Price, 1997).

When read in combination, this understanding of time and the past/present/future creates an interpretation of the past that portrays itself as natural and inevitable, but is actually the product of societal discourses and politics. While there has been a significant move to recognize time’s role in international politics, there has been less focus on utilizing the present as a frame for harnessing these insights into a distinct approach that foregrounds temporality’s sociopolitical constitution. This is at least partially because, as Hom (2018z) argues, there appears to be a problem when “timing” contemporary events given their apparent indeterminacy as they are unfolding and an inherent conservatism that prizes generalizable, rigorous findings.

How can we use a presentist approach to better understand, engage, and challenge contemporary politics?

I use the term “presentist” to capture a specific way of approaching politics that decenters the past, resists casting time as unitary and natural, and affirms the ways in which temporality is a product of politics, rather than merely operating as a background condition. Hoy’s work (2012) on temporality (as well as time) argues that it can be employed as an area of inquiry and a “method of analysis” (Hoy, 2012: xv). Adopting this perspective dislodges commonly held understandings of time and temporality derived from the dominance of Western clock-time—like the universality of the past, linear clock-time, and the idea that the relationships between past, present, and future are neutral, rather than sociopolitical constructs. If the present is a product of sociopolitical relations, along with the past and future, then those relations—its temporality—become a contextual question, rather than something to be assumed into existence. Temporal dynamics and the relationships between past, present, and future all will vary and provide a starting point for incorporating temporality into our political analysis.

Here I outline four areas of emphasis for a present-based perspective that together provide a toolkit for better understanding the temporal politics of the Trump administration—emergence; change as an intrinsic feature of the present; temporal borders between past, present, and future; and heterotemporality. When we focus on each of these in looking at the temporal politics surrounding the Trump administration, it reveals a politics of time that allows violence, extremism, and the politics of personal gain to (continue to) flourish in American foreign policy.

First, the present is constituted by the emergent and the new. For the present to exist as a meaningful concept, there must be something distinct and different about it from the past and/or future that enables it to become intelligible. Mead (2002) argues that this intrinsic newness is related to the ontology of sociality. Sociality—which for him includes one’s relationship with the non-human—is constituted by the interaction of two or more perspectives. So even when “alone,” one is always interacting and constituting a present (Joas, 1997: 182–185). Given the inevitable disjunctures that exist in this interaction of perspectives due to representation and positionality, the process is generative, producing something above and beyond that which has come before, creating a change from the past. It must be emphasized that this idea of change is as thin a conception of change as literally can be imagined. Positing that political continuity is produced through negotiating change merely emphasizes—just as is the case with performativity—that what appears to be inevitable, ongoing, and unyielding is produced that way (Butler, 1993). These continuities always and inevitably negotiate some difference. Here I focus on the difference located in the production of unavoidable temporal concepts like past, present, and future. The political present is defined by its difference—some change—with the past. Otherwise, it would still be past.

This idea of change and newness is bare and minimal. It is not the case that social and political life is always and everywhere experiencing significant change in the way we mean when we use the term colloquially; e.g. the end of the Cold War or the Arab Spring(s). The claim is merely that even for those things seen as politically enduring or continuous, e.g. the UN, or even the state, there is change intrinsic to the production of the present that constitutes that continuity. Even the seemingly permanent and ontologically prior entities for international politics like the state and war are products of relational processes (Barkawi, 2016; Campbell, 1992; Holmqvist, 2013; McIntosh, 2019). The point is not that all politics is all change all the time, but that even those things we see as politically continuous are never truly unmoving or inevitable. Continuity is not permanence.

The continuity of political structures and/or agents, then, possesses no ontological status due to the passage of time—it is a product of politics. When the past is seen as constructed in the present, rather than a universal precursor to that which occurs in the now, we are better able to see that this linkage can take upon any number of valences—continuity, discontinuity, divergence, and/or anything in between. Temporal dimensions in politics are something to be discovered, rather than asserted.

Third, when thinking politics with this perspective, the borders of the present—as well as past and future—must be situated in their respective context. A present never exists in isolation; it is a temporal frame by which one orders events into past, present, and future. When discussing a collective political context such as the United States, these borders are never given, but produced and reproduced via collective political action. Just as is the case with territorial borders—an area IR and foreign policy scholarship have theorized extensively—these borders are relationally defined and constituted by the power relations that make them intelligible (Ashley and Walker, 1990; Campbell, 1992; Weber, 1998). Equally so, past, present, and future bleed into each other, enabling each other’s existence even as this denies the clear boundaries from which their meaning emerges. Dolphijn and Tuin (2012: 66) argue that “there is a certain way in which what we take to be the ‘past’ and the ‘present’ and the ‘future’ are entangled with one another.” This is something Lacanians (Solomon, 2014), those writing in dialogue with Deleuze (Lundborg, 2012), and assemblage approaches (Stevens, 2016) all emphasize and share.

Finally, this lens emphasizes the political import of heterotemporality. Heterotemporality and a heterotemporal orientation, following Hutchings (2008, 2011), emphasizes that “the political present” is never unitary or universal, but produced as such by powerful political actors. This has multiple implications for an administration committed to a narrative strategy that articulates politics as operating on a single timeline dominated by itself, its actions, and those who react to it. It makes visible those presents occupied and produced by marginalized groups and individuals. Chakrabarty’s work (2008)—from which Hutchings draws—emphasizes this in the postcolonial/decolonial context via his ideas of “History 1” and “History 2,” showing how each corresponds to the differentiated pasts and futures of the center and periphery. In the case of American politics, the political present is currently dominated by the “palace intrigue” (Noah, 2018) of the Trump administration. Meanwhile, and largely left out of this present, are migrants subjected to the torture of indefinite solitary confinement for being disabled or LGBTQ—to cite only one example (Cohen, 2018; Rappleye et al., 2019). Similarly, the past and future that links the violent policing of black and brown bodies in America’s present to systemic and historic forms of racism is largely (attempted to be) made invisible by the dominant political present. Once these heterogeneous trajectories of past, present, and future are recognized as equally real, their very existence contradicts the depiction of these acts of violence as merely episodic events by bad actors, as is commonly articulated by the dominant political present (Sexton, 2016).

Simultaneity and rapid tempo

The Trump administration reproduces a temporal politics that emphasizes two characteristics over others—simultaneity and a rapid tempo for political events. This administration will constantly and deliberately engage in major initiatives in multiple different areas as a means to obfuscate and confuse public actors. Currently, the United States is supposedly conducting a pullout of troops in Syria, but is actually offering a series of conflicting announcements and contradictory actions, upending regional expectations and leaving Kurdish allies subject to violence and acts of genocide by the Turkish government (Barnes and Schmitt, 2019). The pullout was ordered via tweet while the House of Representatives was conducting impeachment investigations over the withholding of foreign assistance. This withholding of assistance to Ukraine was in exchange for their government providing evidence of corruption by the son of Joe Biden—who is a frontrunner in the Democratic primary set to decide the President’s challenger in the 2020 election.

Another example is the response to Hurricane Maria which was by all accounts worse than the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina (Lloréns, 2018). After the hurricane hit Puerto Rico in 2017, it took nearly a year for power to be restored to parts of the island. There were constant fights between the mayor of San Juan and the administration and the explicit racism justifying the non-response was just as direct (if not more so) than that which took place in New Orleans (Garcia-Lopez, 2018). Even so, this Katrina-sized disaster largely disappeared from federal concern as focus quickly turned to other matters. Every time there has been bad news, the administration almost always precipitates another crisis or escalates its actions in another area to overwhelm and divert coverage (Gabbatt, 2017).

There are long-term impacts to this process. First and foremost, it makes it difficult to maintain one’s temporal orientation. The relationship between past and future becomes less clear when events are occurring so rapidly. Second, if we emphasize the emergent in politics along with the heterotemporality of the political present, it reveals that no matter what appears to dominate the political present at any given moment, the Trump administration will always have the opportunity to obscure it via the next new or emergent issue. Whether they seize upon a series of new events (change in the conventional sense) or by elevating presents that are not seen as relevant at the time—e.g. the ongoing Syria conflict during impeachment, trade relations with China during Puerto Rico—the president and his administration possess an ongoing series of opportunities for accelerating political time in their political present. The administration can do this by drawing from pasts, presents, and futures that are not already positioned as universal and then using the bully pulpit and other political instruments of the American presidency to elevate them into the ongoing national narrative of politics (Krebs, 2015). This is particularly true in the context of American foreign policy which has allowed the contemporary executive branch an enormous amount of power to conduct policy and enact change (Hendrickson, 2017). All of this is only amplified by the current media landscape with its focus on providing 24 hours of programming, rapidly producing content, and creating profit through maximizing readership/viewership in order to acquire advertising revenue.

Equally important, taking the present seriously as a set of temporal dynamics shows that nothing—not even devastatingly bad news for the Trump administration—ever constitutes the totality of politics. This ongoing set of opportunities acts as a crucial resource for an administration committed to providing narratives for like-minded media outlets like Fox News to trumpet (Grossman and Hopkins, 2019). Future presidents will likely be able to do the same thing provided they are so inclined, which appears likely, barring a significant technological shift, reorientation of the American media landscape, or reassertion of Congressional control over foreign policy instruments.

Ultimately, the opportunities provided by the political configuration of the present moment enable the administration to conduct a strategy of attrition, weakening those who oppose its policies, particularly when it comes to public interest and attention. NGOs have seen spikes in financial support and donations—e.g. immigration NGOs during the child separation crisis and for Puerto Rico post-Maria—but that support oftentimes only follows major events and disasters, prompting what one study refers to as “rage giving” and eventually recedes (Hall, 2018). Anecdotally, many citizens claim that they have been turned off by politics, which if it spreads widely, could remove whatever ability the public has to act as a deterrent against governmental abuses (Khalid et al., 2019).

There is a separate advantage to these actions for a president. This politics of simultaneous action demonstrates that the government can engage in equal and opposite actions at the same time, reproducing a form of authoritarian power. Wedeen (2015) argues that legitimacy is actually not particularly relevant for power consolidation by non-democratic governments. What matters is public acceptance that this is how politics operates, regardless of whether the public and opposition is able to politically articulate just how absurd it has become. Claiming that something false is, in fact, indisputably true, and that anyone who disagrees is producing propaganda is intellectually indefensible. But when backed by the irresistible force of government power—when it is indeed indisputable—it reinforces the message that the government is in charge more effectively than if the initial claim was actually true. For an administration whose very first act was to insist large numbers of people were at the inauguration, despite photographic, video, and eyewitness evidence showing otherwise, it is unsurprising that this has been a consistent mark of its assertion of power throughout its time in office.

There is also an accelerated tempo in the rate of political action. The Trump administration has largely ignored the typical governmental processes of study, consultation, engagement, and internal debate, prior to announcing and enacting major policy initiatives. Major actions in the foreign policy space occur without internal government input (e.g. the National Security Council, State Department, and Ambassadors), let alone international consultation. Announcements on withdrawing US military forces from Syria, banning transgender troops from serving openly, and publicly discussing measures to dismantle NATO all occurred with little to no preparation (Bergengruen, 2018; Borger and Chulov, 2018). One need only look at the constant surprise among members of the administration themselves to see how disruptive these moves have been. The officials who were central to the implementation of the Syria pullout only found out it was occurring when the tweet went public. Combined with the rapid turnover of officials and deliberate reliance on acting heads of departments, there has been a rejection of institutional and bureaucratic memory that amplifies the appearance of rapidity and chaos in political decision making—even for those who approve of the decisions themselves. ³

At the moment of writing, the United States has announced that they are sending troops to the Middle East to confront Iran, there is an ongoing trade war with China, executive action is rolling back health care rights for transgender and non-binary persons, and there are proposed regulations allowing adoption agencies to discriminate against same sex couples. All of these are occurring while the administration is actively refusing subpoenas as part of constitutionally mandated Congressional oversight. Such refusals have previously constituted a constitutional crisis sufficient to threaten a President’s ability to remain in office. What is most notable about these occurrences is precisely that they are not notable—nothing about this moment appears vastly different than the week before or the week before that.

Temporal othering

Typically, past, present, and future are seen as facets of a universal temporality. Barring disruption, the past extends into and shapes the present and future. Politics operates with an underlying continuity that mirrors time’s flow. Alternatively, if we adopt the temporal framework laid out earlier and treat temporal borders between past, present, and future as products of a political present, we can better see the ways in which that continuity and bordering can be altered in ways that benefit some actors over others. In this case, the Trump administration engages in a politics of temporal othering. While other temporal dynamics and constructs may or may not be fully intentional, the temporal frames adopted by the Trump administration deliberately position the politics of the moment as alien and a threat to the past—i.e. the way things “should” be. Typically, temporal othering at the level of state politics is a process of othering a past self in order to promote a new identity that actively resists returning to that past (Gustafsson, 2019). The past self exists as an existential threat that the present must be constructed to guard against. Germany and Japan both evidence this in their relationship to the political past (Hagström and Karl, 2019). Each has an imperial past linked to early 20th century aggression and World Wars that these countries see as something to be avoided by securing a new self. Specific politics and policies follow; e.g. debates over rituals and cultural memory, education (e.g. history textbooks), constitutional prohibitions on militarism, and popular resistance to nationalist appeals (Hagström and Isaksson, 2019). In cases like these, the past operates as the temporal other that the political present seeks to secure itself against (Prozorov, 2011).

In the case of the Trump administration, the situation is flipped. America’s “past” is precisely what is under threat. The present state of contemporary politics and society challenges and threatens the realization of this past in the present. “Make America Great Again” has become an orienting frame of the Trump administration, having gone well beyond a campaign slogan to inform and infuse messaging and policy for the administration. It neatly summarizes the temporal directionality of its politics. America is currently failing, but can be restored to glory if the Trump vision manifests in US politics. Because it is portrayed as an expression of the people’s will, it appears populist and inclusive, rather than chauvinist and exclusionary. This provides a cover for the white nationalism, racial resentment, and hegemonic masculinity that the administration projects and cultivates among its followers (Bonikowski, 2017; Oliver and Rahn, 2016).

What this creates is a situation where the material outcome of Trump administration policies is ultimately irrelevant. What matters is that Trump maintains and consolidates power and that the overall directionality of his efforts is to preserve America’s past “greatness.” If the present is the threat, then political initiatives enacted in that present are always enacted under duress. If the measures succeed, then the Trump administration can simply claim credit and use them for political gain. If they fail, the Trump administration can raise the tempo to divert attention and weaken the public perception that the administration is failing. More importantly, it can characterize these objective failures as further proof that the present is the threat, thus reinforcing the framing of American politics that his supporters find appealing. This is why the President can release back-to-back tweets that are literally contradictory: “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” and “KEEP AMERICA GREAT!” (@realDonaldTrump 2019).

One question this framing raises regards whose past this frame claims was “great.” Because a presentist approach emphasizes heterotemporality and the ontological non-universality of the political present, it allows us to focus on the heterogeneity of political, and therefore temporal, experience. At the same time, it is also true that the United States possesses a narrative that politically coheres across time. The United States could not exist as an institution without it (Campbell, 1992; Steele, 2008; Subotic, 2016 ). What the Trumpist formulation of the present as temporal other does is produce a cipher for a singular past that can be filled in as each individual sees fit, even while affirming that each individual’s vision is a reflection of the way the past actually was—implicitly affirming the idea that there is one past for America and those who do not agree with your individual vision of it are wrong about America itself. This allows the Trump administration to reproduce a nationalist politics centered on white racial resentments without explicitly endorsing these ideologies—they are simply “returning America to greatness” (Bonikowski, 2017). There is a sort of nostalgia at work here, but instead of only a nostalgia for the past, it is a nostalgia for a hopeful view of the future that is no longer present. In this way, the administration has—perhaps unintentionally—collapsed visions of the past and future into a present dominated by the administration.

Much of the president’s efforts to impose this past, then, are really about framing the past (and the future realization of that past) as currently under threat, as opposed to something like a series of steps that will result in the material realization of a white ethno-state. The Muslim ban, abuses of migrants, bullying of politicians of color, explicit identification with law enforcement during episodes of violent policing against persons of color, and a constant resistance to “political correctness,” e.g. NFL players protesting the national anthem, all reinforce this narrative. In the process they also center the debate on what “the” past actually was, rather than acknowledging that there are many pasts—e.g. the constructed past of white Trump supporters is vastly different than that of many persons of color. While these actions have material effects, these material effects are ultimately less important for the Administration’s purposes than the racial cues it taps into (Luttig et al., 2017). So long as the frame governs US actions, this source of political power remains intact.

Creating and maintaining an indefinite present

The Trump administration’s politics collapse the past and future, leaving only an indefinite present where they can use Donald Trump’s attributes—e.g. his decades-long relationship with American media and the public consciousness—along with the tools of the office to dominate political discourse. Whether we focus on the areas laid out prior such as the heterogeneity of temporal experience, temporal borders, or the reproduction of continuity, this is one of the central ways that the Trump administration’s politics of time impact their agenda. It is also one of the many reasons so much is made of elections—they serve as the only real recurring and reliable feature of political temporality. Yet, even recurring elections are under threat as the President himself “jokes” about a third, fourth, and fifth term and actively undermines the validity of elections that do not turn out in his favor (Sonmez, 2019). Former administration insiders as well as the sitting Speaker of the House have all publicly expressed concern that the president will not peacefully leave power should he lose.

Even the facts of the past largely operate as a non-entity for the Trump administration—everything now is “absolutely unprecedented” or the “best ever”—his visit to Japan was supposedly their “biggest event … in over 200 years” (Crowley, 2019). When confronted with facts that dispute his characterization, they are discarded and denied. The cycle is self-reinforcing and produces a future that increasingly appears consonant with the past. The longer the Trump administration can prevent the actions of the past from acting as a constraint on the political present, the less relevant the present and any future repercussions appear. This is because if the present we are fighting over, e.g. what other “big” events have occurred in Japan in the last century, is already destined to become a future past whose meaning—and very existence—is going to be determined by the Trump administration, then it begins to look as if any resistance and/or opposition that actually happens, never actually did. In the case of foreign policy, this means widely held assumptions about American foreign policy that can serve as resources for those seeking to restrain American aggression like the value of alliances, international law, or norms against violent conflict resolution are eroded. Reasonable people can disagree about the value of these elements of the international system, particularly in terms of restraining American violence. Yet, if they disappear or lose all meaning, it allows an administration like Trump’s—either now or in the future—to normalize behavior previously considered unimaginable by the American foreign policy establishment.

North Korea is one example of these dynamics. The administration ratcheted up tensions, declared all previous efforts and their underlying frameworks as failures, risked an actual shooting war on the peninsula, then proceeded to negotiate a “deal.” It then declared it a success and continued to make this claim even as North Korea returned to its pre-deal status quo of weapons testing (Ward, 2018). All these despite the “deal” containing basic misunderstandings regarding central terms like “denuclearization” and it lacking concrete commitments to future benchmarks or any type of enforcement mechanisms (Gladstone, 2018). What it did do, however, is construct a future that rapidly became a self-serving past. This is not to say that moves like these were intentional or the product of significant planning, but when the ultimate result of political contestation is the (re)production of an indefinite present, it denies the ability of opponents to martial the lessons of the past, point out hypocrisies (actions contradictory with the past), or imagine an alternative future, each of which is a critical element of opposition in times of political contestation (Petrova, 2016). The first step to building toward future political change is imagining a future that is different. Successfully maintaining an indefinite present crowds out the space necessary for a narrative to emerge that the public and/or political elites can point to and draw from as a guide for future action.

Unrestrained foreign policy

To this point, the administration has largely avoided the significant crises that most presidencies eventually face—the economy has remained buoyant, unemployment is at historic lows, and there have been few direct threats and/or attacks on the American homeland that would constitute a national security crisis (Blinken, 2019). As the administration falls on harder times, however, one can expect the politics of distraction to accelerate even beyond the already rapid rate of action.

The refusal to abide by previously held norms and frames of conceivable action has also contributed to the disruptive tenor of administration actions (Graham, 2018). One key area where we can expect a continuation and expansion of this type of behavior is in terms of long-term commitments to allies and institutions (Patrick, 2017). NATO has already come under vocal challenge (Sperling and Webber, 2019). The US–China economic relationship has been historically upended in ways previously seen as highly unlikely (Guo et al., 2018). Ties with Central American countries like Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador have radically shifted as continuing foreign assistance is called into question because of a supposed caravan of migrants approaching the US southern border (Sheridan and Sieff, 2019). South Korean interests were barely considered in preparing for the US–NK summits, and key administration positions have been filled only sporadically (Bennett and Berenson, 2018).

The disruption is not just to formal commitments to allies, but also include the very idea of international agreements themselves. The United States has pulled out of the multilateral deal that froze the Iranian nuclear program, the Paris accord on Climate change, and the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty (INF). Each of these moves was enacted without plans to implement an alternative, underlining this Administration’s goal to reverse American commitments to international law (Koh, 2017). Given the willingness of this administration’s leadership to enact policy via tweet—creating a direct link between the President’s will and any US commitment—any action left to the executive branch is subject to dissolution at any moment. On top of this, the President has declared an open hostility to deals he has not personally negotiated and he publicly prides himself on his ability to act in opposition to expert opinion. As the administration has hollowed out bureaucratic institutions—refusing to appoint key leaders, cutting budgets, and ignoring their recommendations—they have created a spiral effect where a handful of individuals increasingly determine US foreign policy (Hudson et al., 2019; Ioffe, 2017). Regardless of whether countries and institutions find these individuals’ views beneficial, it makes American policy unreliable, subject to radical change, and most worryingly, unrestrained by past agreements that seek to limit aggression and violence.

One of the most significant areas this will impact is American restraint and its commitments to non-aggression—such as they are. Since the end of World War II, there is a dominant narrative within US foreign policy that US actions are part of a long tradition responsible for a more peaceful and liberal world (Nye, 2017). Emphasizing the rule of law, democratization, and human rights, as well as the expansion of economic trade and financial markets, the preservation and expansion of this order has been seen as critical to preventing a renewal of the global conflicts of the early 20th century. Whether that narrative has any validity is an open question, but it is the case that if this narrative were to disappear, one can imagine an even more unrestrained American foreign policy. If the Trump administration continues—or worse, another administration comes to power that intentionally employs and amplifies these dynamics—the United States is likely to deviate from its own (supposed) script in increasingly violent ways. The United States has privileged relationships with autocrats—e.g. Russia, Turkey, the Philippines—over commitments to democratic allies (Kagan, 2019). Human rights have been completely discarded at the level of policy and strategy (Koh, 2017). US strategic and economic interests with Saudi Arabia, for example, have been privileged over holding their government accountable for serious human rights violations, something Trump himself admitted explicitly (Fernandez-Campbell, 2018). The lack of interest in the near genocide in Yemen and the refusal to confront the government over the torture and murder of Jamal Khashoggi for fear of jeopardizing economic gains from arms sales provide clear and gruesome evidence of this. Even at the local level, shootings like the one in El Paso show that this violence is not limited only to areas outside the United States, but traverse the borders and boundaries which seek to keep it outside.

To be clear, the argument here is not meant to assert that the current narrative of order is on balance beneficial, nor is it to make a claim about the benevolence of American power. Instead, the claim is that whatever violence already exists as a result of the United States’ actions in the world has the potential to get worse, when compared to the initial stages of the Trump administration, the previous administration, and the past few decades. The US government has always violated and circumvented its commitments to international law, human rights, and the use of force, but since their development, it has been loathe to reject these principles entirely and declare them meaningless (Steele, 2019). At a minimum, they have existed as rhetorical tropes actors can use as resources for opposition, and this politics of time calls their existence into question. If the past is ultimately irrelevant, then past restraints are as well.

Second, we can expect the US willingness to follow international norms to radically shift. After consideration, the administration pardoned members of the military already convicted of war crimes. One individual was so clearly a threat that his own troops sabotaged his weaponry to prevent the perpetrator from continuing to murder civilians (Bebernes, 2019). Support for “unleashing” the military has been both rhetoric and reality in the first few years of this administration, something that has resulted in heighted civilian deaths and drone strikes (compared to previous administrations), as well as a refusal to disclose official estimates of civilians killed by US operations (McKelvey, 2019). Military personnel have been repurposed for domestic political reasons. Thousands of troops were deployed to the Southern border to address a supposed military threat of migrant “invasion” that never materialized (Cooper and Edmondson, 2019). As things get more complicated at home, resisting the temptation of military action in situations like Venezuela where the United States can claim to oppose political bogeymen like socialism or historic enemies like Cuba will prove attractive. Finally, the president has explicitly inquired into nuclear weapons as a military option and prior to becoming president spoke often of their importance as a foreign policy tool, emphasizing his unique expertise on the topic and his resistance to past American restraint regarding their use (Zurcher, 2017). Each of these things has no doubt happened in the past—e.g. the United States is the only country to use nuclear weapons in wartime—but the danger here is that whatever American proclivity for policies like these will be amplified and unrestrained. Norms that have restrained the United States in the past are now less likely to hold—this is part of the reason the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the Doomsday Clock as close to midnight as it ever has been (Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 2018).

Foreign policy by exception: Personal interests and crisis mentality

As the Trump administration expands the temporal boundaries of the present and obscures the political potential of past and future, there will likely be a continuation and expansion of foreign policy by exception. It will likely be characterized by a crisis mentality where only the immediate effects and impacts will be considered. In the American context, times that are articulated as exceptional enable centralized decision-making authority to enhance the speed and rapidity of response. ⁴ Whether the issue is nuclear use, indefinite detention, extrajudicial executions, or the rapid deployment of troops, each of these foreign policy actions has two defining characteristics. One is the concentration of decision-making authority within the executive branch and the other is a belief that the immediacy of the problem warrants a response that democratic contestation precludes. We can already see the manipulation of these ideas with increased regularity within the administration; e.g. when the administration wanted to deploy military troops to the border, a migrant crisis was manufactured and securitized through baselessly claiming that Middle Eastern terrorists were using it to cross the border (Vazquez, 2018). More prosaically, when Congress opposed a substantial arms sale to Saudi Arabia, the executive declared an “emergency” in order to avoid oversight (Spindel, 2019). Most glaringly, the administration has used the conflict in Syria to deflect from its troubles at home—first, in the bombing of suspected chemical weapons sites and then by announcing a complete withdrawal of troops in response to the House impeachment investigation. In the foreign policy realm, this type of behavior should continue and only get worse. If there is no willingness to even consider the lessons of the past and little concern about future costs, then foreign policy will be a transactional, episodic, and opportunistic endeavor (Ikenberry, 2017: 4). For the foreseeable future—and for any future administration that follows this politics of time—national interest is likely to largely drop out as it requires an ongoing narrative of past and future in order to be made intelligible (Krebs, 2015).

Three implications follow from this. One, this transactional attitude toward foreign policy will make personal and/or financial interest more central in US decision making. We can expect to see a deepening of personalist motivations—both political and financial—when it comes to deciding US foreign policy. There are already broad outlines of this in terms of the US focus on maintaining strong ties with Russia, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, each of which has economic and financial interests in Trump-owned businesses (Bryan, 2018; Hjelmgaard, 2018). At a more micro level, China has made trademark concessions that would directly benefit Trump family interests immediately prior to American concessions on Chinese businesses and Saudi Arabia has purchased substantial amounts of services at Trump’s DC hotel which appears to confirm quid pro quo relationships (Bryan, 2018; Helmore, 2018). Finally, the withholding of Ukrainian military assistance in exchange for investigating the son of former Vice President Joe Biden is perfect evidence of such a personally motivated quid pro quo. There is little evidence that these type of interactions are limited to these countries. More importantly, the administration’s politics of time have created a blueprint where such public acts of corruption are now possible, thinkable, and road tested, providing opportunity for others to follow suit.

Another temptation for altering the rate and focus of politics is via deliberate military action. The “rally around the flag effect” may be somewhat overstated in reality, but as a political trope it carries weight and there is empirical evidence that it “personally” benefitted President George W. Bush in 2001, something that could influence his former staffers in the executive branch (Hetherington and Nelson, 2003). Trump himself has stated his belief in the effect, tweeting in 2011 that President Obama would likely start a war with Iran in order to win reelection—a scenario he would continue to return to over the years (Breuninger, 2018). Given these assumptions, there is likely to be an increased possibility of small-scale military actions and shows of force that have little material impact and pose no real danger to American citizens if they fail. So while intentional military conflict with states like North Korea, Iran, or China may be less likely, action in places like Venezuela, Syria, and Yemen will be much more appealing (Hom et al., 2017).

Second, there is likely to be a form of mirror imaging in the guise of US policymakers presuming that other countries will behave similarly. If the United States continues to enact policy without consideration of past and/or future, then it becomes easy to misread other actors’ decisions as similarly driven, rather than as part of a pattern or long-term strategy. We can already see this through the delegation of strike authority to theater-level military commanders in the war on terrorism (Tankel, 2018). As a consequence, the number of drone strikes and military attacks are up significantly—even over the Obama administration—and civilian casualties have expanded greatly, with decisions regarding who and when to strike made by those more concerned with tactical success than strategic success (McKelvey, 2019). The upshot of this is that the United States is likely to lurch from operation to operation, killing even more of those it chooses to deem dangerous without much concern for ending the war.

Third, long-term challenges to United States and global politics are unlikely to be addressed, most notably climate change. Climate change poses a unique problem from a temporal perspective as it operates both as a cataclysmic future that haunts our present, and a process responsible for disastrous changes in the contemporary environment (Neimanis and Walker, 2014). This duality ultimately works against action as the contemporary manifestations of climate change appear insufficient to warrant appropriate action while the not-yet of future scenarios is twisted into evidence that climate change is not even occurring. Any American administration will have difficulty addressing climate change due to these temporal dynamics, but an administration committed to the present and a politics of time that is constantly changing the subject of that present renders effective action impossible—even were it not already so heavily invested in climate denialism (Waldman, 2019).