The recent tense, dangerous exchanges between the United States and Iran have revealed a great deal about US President Donald Trump’s management of his foreign policy. The main conclusion is that he doesn’t have one.

When I told a friend I had just written a book on morality and foreign policy, she quipped: “It must be a very short book.” Such skepticism is common. An Internet search shows surprisingly few books on how US presidents’ moral views affected their foreign policies. As the eminent political theorist Michael Walzer once described American graduate training in international relations after 1945, “Moral argument was against the rules of the discipline as it was commonly practiced.”

Trump has succeeded at browbeating in a few cases, but his tactics have resulted in a global consensus that resistance is anything but futile.

Unlike the Cold War, when the national strategies of the United States and Soviet Union shaped the course of world development, changes in the international pol

A tragic sensibility after the experience of two world wars compelled the United States to establish a new international order backed by American power. After decades of relative peace and prosperity, however, this sensibility is waning – as the United States demonstrates a lack of collective will to maintain its position on the global stage. As China increasingly assumes the position of a world power, it must maintain its tragic sensibility and awareness of crisis.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s address to the 74th session of the United Nations General Assembly expressed to the world that the United States is pushing an increasingly nationalist agenda, much to the concern of many other nations. What are the implications of Trump’s message for the rest of the world?

US President Donald Trump has been accused of weaponizing economic globalization. Sanctions, tariffs, and the restriction of access to dollars have been major instruments of his foreign policy, and he has been unconstrained by allies, institutions, or rules in using them.

US President Donald Trump’s administration has shown little interest in public diplomacy. And yet public diplomacy – a government’s efforts to communicate directly with other countries’ publics – is one of the key instruments policymakers use to generate soft power, and the current information revolution makes such instruments more important than ever.

Washington’s sudden hostility to its former role as a guardian of global stability has raised questions about how the international order will evolve. At the UN this week, Trump slammed multilateral diplomacy and global cooperation. President Xi Jinping of China (who was absent from the UN meetings) has continued to embrace these ideals.

The soft power of inspiration is not the only ethical tradition in American foreign policy. There is also an interventionist and crusading tradition.