Conclusions

This chapter explores over the exercise of US power through its economic statecraft in the different countries and regions covered in the analytical narratives, in each of the three sub-periods established in the introduction, and presents the discussion on the nature of power, regional orders and economic statecraft. It describes the argument to the fate of US hegemony since Donald Trump’s arrival into the White House. In the age of Trump, Washington has privileged the military over the foreign service, pursuing spending increases in the former and cuts in the latter. The Trump administration’s foreign policy has been largely reduced to coercion and rudimentary strategic bargaining—not exactly what US diplomacy in the golden age of US hegemony was about. Council on Foreign Relation’s president Richard Haass has noted that since the arrival of Trump to the White House “the United States has changed from the principal preserver of order to a principal disrupter.”