Helen Thompson (University of Cambridge, UK) | Forcing the disruption: Trump and the world disorder
16. Dec
6:15 pm, C40.704
For all the contingencies created by Donald Trump’s personality, his second presidency constitutes a serious US attempt to reset the world order both to deal with the United States’ rising debt and the new challenge China poses to the US’ long-standing supremacy in the Western Hemisphere. While the administration has sought to create fractures that render the status quo untenable, such are the strategic difficulties the United States faces they have largely been unsuccessful except in relation to Europe and even there most European states’ fiscal position does not allow for the military change demanded. The administration’s attempts to force disruption onto the United States’ economic relationship with China have proved particularly hard to execute because of China’s control of rare earths and have driven China towards greater energy dependency on Russia. The failures are pushing the United States closer towards a debt crisis that threatens the basis of the domestic American monetary order and that of the international financial system.
Helen Thompson is Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge University. Her most recent book Disorder: Hard Times in the 21stCentury was published by Oxford University Press on 24 February 2022 and was shortlisted for the 2022 Financial Times Business Book of the Year. She has written for, among other outlets, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Sunday Times, the Guardian, Foreign Affairs, Project Syndicate, the London Review of Books, New Statesman, UnHerd, Nature, and Prospect. She was a major contributor to the podcast Talking Politics and co-presented the politics podcast These Times.
Language: English
The event is a cooperation between the Institute of Political Science (IPW) and the research initiative on the Disruptive Condition.