From Internalization to Externalization: The Impact of Changing State-Societal Relations on US Foreign Policy

Whether or not the United States provides the specific leadership goods required to maintain a liberal international order depends, among other factors, on social relationships in American domestic politics. This chapter argues that domestic structures largely determine if and what kind of hegemony the United States provides to international relations. Most importantly, domestic factors shape the American response to the challenge of international interdependence.

A hegemonic power can either internalize and absorb costs of sensibility and vulnerability interdependence or it can deflect, or at least delay, cost internalization and thereby externalize interdependence costs. The Trump administration pursues an externalization type of hegemony that cuts out several of the key elements of international liberalism and burdens other states with the costs of public good provisions in international affairs.

How can one explain this change of hegemony from previous US administrations? The chapter argues that the Trump administration is both, a response to changing social relationships in domestic politics and its driver. It identifies the following sources of changing state-society relationships: first, increasing fragmentation and polarization intensify social cleavages. Second, a state increasingly weakened by separation of power arrangements is exposed to a strong society that effectively pursues private interests by claiming them to be public ones. And, third, a new dominating coalition in the Republican Party replaced the old foreign policy establishment and drives an agenda of cost externalization. The chapter concludes that, taken together, these domestic factors transform American hegemony, where the previous practice of internalizing interdependence costs has changed to one of externalizing them.

in: Florian Böller, Welf Werner (eds) (2021): Hegemonic Transition. Global Economic and Security Orders in the Age of Trump, Wiesbaden: Springer, pp. 21-42. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-74505-9_2