The State Department's learned director of policy planning caused quite a stir at the Future Security Forum with the New America Foundation on 29 April, 2019. (She appears from time counter 9:12:36 on the final panel before the end of the Forum). At one point, she characterised the US contest with China as the first with a "non-Caucasian" power. This racist gloss is as embarrassingly inaccurate as it is disingenuous, as rebutted by The Washington Post. Click here and here.
Nothing illustrates better where Skinner is coming from than her attempt to rationalize President Trump's unpredictability into a "Trump Doctrine" supported by respectable, and apparently consistent, "Four Pillars" - (a) National Sovereignty (b) Reciprocity, (c) Shared Responsibility, and (d) Regional Partnership.
However, as every party at the receiving end, US allies included, now knows, National Sovereignty means the sovereignty and primacy of the United States, not so much that of another nation if at odds with "America First". Reciprocity means other countries, however different, need to reciprocate what the US does if somehow they manage to benefit. Shared Responsibility means US allies can no longer be free-riders on American security protection. They need to pay or to varying degrees, fend for themselves. As for Regional Partnership, absent global peers, a regional approach is adopted to rally allies to serve America First priorities, which may not always coincide with theirs.
American hegemony is characteristic of US exceptionalism underpinned by American ideals of "City on a Hill". It is driven by the "military-industrial complex" (including Wall Street) dating back to the times of Eisenhower. This powerful complex sits at the heart of American economy and politics. Its oxygen is fixation on an overarching national enemy or rival. It was the USSR during the Cold War. It's China now.
With the rise of China, a resurgent Russia, and global economic gravitas shifting towards the developing world, a resurgence of American hegemonism appears symptomatic of a foreboding sense of relative decline.
By inventing fancy covers for Trumpian hegemonic behaviour, Ms Skinner risks making people see that the emperor has no clothes, or think that he doesn't need them after all.
