In search of enemies: Donald Trump’s populist foreign policy rhetoric

Date01 February 2021
Published date01 February 2021
DOI10.1177/0263395720935377
Subject MatterSpecial Issue Articles
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395720935377
Politics
2021, Vol. 41(1) 48 –63
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0263395720935377
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In search of enemies: Donald
Trump’s populist foreign
policy rhetoric
Jonny Hall
London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Abstract
This article asks how Donald Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric during his presidential campaign and
presidency has affected US foreign policy in the area of overseas counterterrorism campaigns.
Looking at two case studies – the May 2017 Arab Islamic American Summit and the US role in
the counter Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) campaign, it is argued that Trump’s foreign policy
rhetoric has failed to accurately describe or legitimate his administration’s counterterrorism
strategy, as per the conventional wisdom. Instead, Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric has largely been
aimed at creating a sense of crisis (as populism requires) to mobilise his domestic base. In making
this argument about the purpose of Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric, not only does the article
contribute a new perspective to the extant literature on elections, rhetoric, and US foreign policy,
but also to the burgeoning scholarship on governing populists and their foreign policies. Although
these findings could be unique to Trump, the article’s novel framework – combining International
Relations and populism scholarship to elaborate on how the foreign arena can be used to generate
a state of perpetual crisis – can hopefully be applied in other contexts.
Keywords
crisis, Donald Trump, foreign policy, populism, rhetoric
Received: 24th September 2019; Revised version received: 29th January 2020; Accepted: 8th March 2020
Introduction
In line with the focus of this special issue (Lacatus and Meibauer, 2021), this article asks
how Donald Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric1 on the campaign trail and in the White
House has affected US foreign policy. More specifically, this article focuses on the area
of overseas counterterrorism campaigns, or what was originally known as the ‘War on
Terror’. This area of foreign policy was chosen because of the prominence of the issues
of terrorism and counterterrorism during the 2016 election campaign, with 80% of
American voters answering that ‘terrorism’ would be ‘very important’ to their vote in said
Corresponding author:
Jonny Hall, Department of International Relations, London School of Economics and Political Science,
Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK.
Email: J.Hall5@lse.ac.uk
935377POL0010.1177/0263395720935377PoliticsHall
research-article2020
Special Issue Article
Hall 49
election (Pew Research Center, 2016). Consequently, Trump emphasised the threat of
terrorism during his first presidential campaign, but also repeatedly focused on defeating
the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as a central part of his foreign policy. In this
sense, if we ought to see a link between Trump’s rhetoric and government policy (as has
been found in the case of other presidents; see Bentley, 2017; Jackson, 2005; Payne,
2021), counterterrorism seems a likely case. This is especially relevant given that coun-
terterrorism represents a particularly costly area of foreign policy which (theoretically at
least) has to be justified to the American people: American troops are involved in combat
in 14 different countries (Grant and Goldsmith, 2018) and these campaigns cost approxi-
mately US$60 billion a year (Crawford, 2018). Finally, there has been little written on the
Trump administration’s counterterrorism strategy thus far (Neumann, 2019: 5), so this
article attempts to contribute to this lacuna.
The article is structured as follows. The first section reviews how the Trump adminis-
tration runs contrary to the extant scholarship on foreign policy rhetoric: not only has
Trump’s foreign rhetoric failed to legitimate counterterrorism policy, but he has also gone
against the notion that an incumbent president should run a positive re-election campaign.
To explain this, the second section of the article engages with scholarship on populism,
which argues that populists rely on a sense of crisis, even while governing. This scholar-
ship is combined with the International Relations work of Campbell, which provides a
relevant framework for how a state of perpetual crisis might be rhetorically generated.
Using primary sources from Trump’s campaign and during his presidency,2 the third sec-
tion of the article looks at Trump’s crisis rhetoric regarding terrorism and counterterror-
ism. On both the campaign and in the White House, Trump has identified Muslim
immigrants and the Washington establishment as the drivers of this crisis, while on the
campaign trail he promised strategic revolutions to solve the issue of terrorism. The
fourth section of the article assesses how Trump’s campaign rhetoric has matched up to
his government’s policies. Looking at the May 2017 Arab Islamic American Summit in
Saudi Arabia and the US role in the counter-ISIS campaign, it is argued that there has
been a significant disconnect between rhetoric and reality, which can be explained by
considering the purpose of Trump’s populist foreign policy rhetoric. Fifth, the article
looks at how the targets of Trump’s exclusionary populist rhetoric have moved away from
terrorists and towards immigrants, which provides further evidence of how Trump’s rhet-
oric primary relies on the notion of crisis to mobilise political support.
Foreign policy rhetoric on the campaign trail and in
government
Working chronologically, it is conventionally assumed that foreign policy rhetoric for
challenger candidates aims to criticise the record of the incumbent government (Armacost,
2015: 119). These criticisms are normally coupled with proposed alternative foreign poli-
cies which would resolve the failures of the previous administration (Armacost, 2015:
119). In this way, candidates can use their foreign policy rhetoric to establish their credi-
bility as a future commander-in-chief (Boys, 2021), highlight particular issues that they
care about, or contrast themselves to other candidates (Johnstone and Priest, 2017: 4).
While realists would deemphasise the importance of foreign policy rhetoric altogether,
for critical constructivists and liberals, foreign policy rhetoric in government is largely
assumed to follow an instrumental logic: to generate necessary political and material sup-
port for foreign policies. As critical constructivist Jackson (2005: 1) puts it, ‘the enactment

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