Politics, Primacy, and the Crisis of US Foreign Policy

American politics has fractured even as its system of government remains winner-take-all. The presidential campaign pitting Kamala Harris and TIm Walz against Donald Trump and JD Vance represents competing claims to America's political character that have clear implications for how America relates to the world.  In this talk, Van Jackson will argue that, while there are stark differences in how Democrats and Republicans think about foreign policy, both political parties in the United States have proven committed to a strategy of primacy that is militarist, exceptionalist, and premised on the ability to dominate others. The unappreciated danger that Washington poses to the rest of the world is that its strategy--regardless of which party prevails--is fundamentally mismatched to a rapidly multipolarizing world. For smaller nations, the urgent issue is not primarily about understanding the possible trajectories of American behavior in the world, but rather the forces driving US trajectories and the pathologies that its national security officials cling to regardless of who is president.