ABSTRACT
The election of Donald Trump on November 9, 2016 was viewed by much of the U.S. foreign policy establishment as a threat to the liberal international world order and to U.S. “leadership” within that order. In his first year in office, officials within the U.S. State Department have resigned in increasing numbers and former members of previous foreign policy teams have openly condemned Trump for harming U.S. foreign policy. For much of this establishment Trump’s “America First” commitment was viewed as promoting isolationism and a transactional world view that subordinated international cooperation and the promotion of American values to the raw geopolitical interests of the U.S. state. Are these fears borne out after approximately a year of the Trump administration in power? Does President Trump represent a threat to the global objectives pursued by the U.S. foreign policy establishment for generations? Through an analysis of U.S. global drug policies, I argue that fears of a radical departure from the past are overblown and that the Trump administration has maintained a prohibitionist, militarized drug control policy that has been fundamental to U.S. drug control policies since the first part of the 20th century. The nexus between the Trump administration drug policy officials and transnational corporations as well as the ongoing maintenance of a neoliberal, globalized social structure of accumulation has been central to this continuity.
