City Research Online

Abstract

We contend that the Trump administration mainstreamed far-right politics through its foreign policy on China, the World Health Organization and its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Our Gramscian-Kautskyian theoretical perspective concentrates on elite power, class, and interconnections between advanced global capitalism and domestic inequality. We show that the administration amplified US far-right Sinophobia even as it deepened connections between US and Chinese corporate elites. Its foreign policy strategy attempted to appease transnational capitalist objectives through ‘ultra-imperialism' and draw on far-right ideas to shore up its domestic support base. But the administration, much like previous ones, attempted to make China a subordinate ‘responsible stakeholder’ through integrating and pressuring it in the Liberal International Order. The Gramscian-Kautskyian approach highlights that Sino–US relations are a mix of security and economic competition and interdependency. Over all, we argue that the Trump administration was not such a threat to the establishment as commonly contended.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Globalizations on 23 Nov 2021, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2021.1991660. © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The article has been published by Taylor & Francis in Globalizations on 23 Nov 2021, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2021.1991660.
Publisher Keywords:	United States, China, far-right, Trump administration, WHO
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform J Political Science > JA Political science (General)
Departments:	School of Policy & Global Affairs > International Politics
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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