Donald Trump
'Insightful' Financial Times
'Instant and powerful illumination' Adam Tooze
On November 8 2016, Donald Trump won the American presidential election, to the surprise of many across the globe. With Trump as Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful country on earth, Americans and non-Americans alike were left wondering what this would mean for the world. It has been claimed that Trump's foreign policy views are impulsive, inconsistent and that they were improvised on the campaign trail. However, drawing on interviews from as far back as 1980, leading historians Charlie Laderman and Brendan Simms show that this assumption is dangerously false. Revealing that Trump has had a consistent position on international trade and America's alliances since he first considered running for president in the late 1980s, his foreign policy views have deep roots in American history. For this President, almost every international problem that has confronted the United States can be explained by the mistakes of its leaders. Yet, after decades of dismissing America's leaders as fools and denouncing their diplomacy, Trump now has to prove that he can do better.
This insightful and compelling book reveals the world view that Trump brings to the Oval Office, illuminating how that world view was formed, what might result if it is applied to foreign policy and the potential consequences for the rest of the world. An essential read.
Charlie Laderman is Senior Lecturer in International History at King's College London and a Harrington Faculty Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security, University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of Sharing the Burden: Armenia, Humanitarian Intervention (2019) and co-author of Hitler’s American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany’s March to Global War (2021) with Brendan Simms.
Brendan Simms is Professor of the History of International Relations at the University of Cambridge. An expert on European geopolitics, past and present, he is a frequent contributor to print and broadsheet media, has advised governments and parliaments, and spoken at Westminster, in the European parliament and at think-tanks in the United Kingdom, the United States and in many Eurozone countries. He is the author of Donald Trump: The Making of a Worldview (2017), Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia (2001) (shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize), Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present (2013) and Hitler: A Global Biography (2019).