Chapter Six looks at the role of international law in the Trump administration State Department. Former policymakers gave their opinion on the extent of the effect of the Trump administration on State Department policymaking and discussed potential long-term effects. The Trump administration generally displayed a negative view toward international law, institutions, and agreements, as evidenced by its words and in its actions, a view at odds with the prevailing State Department culture. More significantly, the Trump administration took unusual steps to stifle dissent within the State Department. Former officials expressed a range of perceptions regarding the Trump administration’s effect on the State Department. A minority believed that the administration’s views and actions significantly affected attitudes and practices within the Department regarding international law and institutions. The majority believed that effects on attitudes were more likely to be felt at the policy-decision level, rather than at the lower, policy development level. That is, attitudes among rank-and-file and career State Department officials probably remained unchanged and were likely to “bounce back” after the 2020 election. Nevertheless, a reprise of the Trump administration, or a similar administration, could ultimately affect not only practices at the State Department but attitudes among officials as well.

This chapter examines major events in US–China–North Korea triangular relations before and during the Trump years and considers Trump’s legacy and the outlook for the Biden administration. It concludes that the US under Trump failed to decouple US–China relations from US–North Korea relations in its policymaking and considers US–China relations on its own terms.

This chapter examines the US approach to North Korean human rights issues since the 1980s and argues that while the situation was afforded greater rhetorical attention during the Trump administration, his approach did not in fact substantively differ from that of previous presidents. In his North Korea policy, Trump sought the headlines and did what he could to appear to be shaking things up. In practice, however, not much changed. He was subject to the same concerns and values and external forces as his predecessors. As a result, US policy toward North Korean human rights continued to follow a familiar pattern: Human rights issues are raised only when relations between the US and DPRK deteriorate.

Making America Great Again, Again and Again focuses on a recent example of state behavior—US foreign policy during the Trump administration—to illustrate how these tools and concepts can enrich our understanding of the present moment. The Trump administration was viewed by many as historically novel and one whose actions might radically reorder the world, while others saw it as merely an extension of deep historical processes. How one positioned this present largely turned on their conception of past and future. By placing emergence and change as ontological constants, and centering this heterotemporality and discontinuity, we can better identify the temporal dynamics that characterized the Trump administration’s—and thus American—foreign policy. This chapter identifies four temporal dynamics that characterized the Trump administration—temporal othering, the production of simultaneity in a heterotemporal political environment, the accelerated pace and tempo of political action, and the (re)production of an indefinite present.

This chapter outlines the degree of change and continuity that the Obama administration brought to foreign policy and compares it to the Trump administration and its America First foreign policy.

Asian Americans play a prominent role in the state surveillance story, because Asian Americans play an ambiguous role in both international relations and domestic race relations.4 Although people of Asian descent have been arriving in the Americas since before the Civil War – Asian soldiers fighting on both sides of the internecine conflict – Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants, whatever their formal status and however assimilated, have been portrayed as “sojourners” only temporarily resident in the United States and likely to return to a homeland to which they have remained stealthily loyal.5 The persistent theme has been that Asians are inassimilable into American society, whether by biology, culture, or their own collective choices. The assumption that it is contradictory to be both Asian and American has been used, explicitly and implicitly, to justify discrimination against Asian Americans.

Chapter 7 tracks Trump’s anti-science bias, and its effect on the administration’s management/mismanagement of the pandemic. The chapter begins by putting science in America in an historical perspective. It swiftly proceeds to put the discussion in a contemporaneous context, with a special focus on the antipathy between the president and the scientific community – that part of the scientific community that was outside as opposed to inside the administration. What is made clear nearly throughout the book is that experts – scientists and doctors – who were inside the administration were caught in a vise. A vise that obliged them to choose – between their profession and the president. Almost without exception they opted to support the latter at the expense of the former. The White House Coronavirus Task Force was, for example, not much more than a sham, even though members of the Task Force included the likes of Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx.

This concluding chapter is intended to accomplish two goals. First, I will summarize and compare the findings of the three case studies. Second, I will consider what effect policies of the current Trump administration may have on US compliance with its IHL obligations going forward.