It seems counterintuitive and contradictory to think of an intellectual foundation behind United States President-elect Donald J Trump when he is professedly unintellectual, even anti-intellectual. But make no mistake. Mr Trump is merely a phenomenon. Understanding it reveals his worldview and consequent policy prospects. But doing so requires seeing the Trump phenomenon as it is rather than why and how it is detested by countless millions of us. Indeed, the biggest difficulty when analysing Mr Trump and his second administration is the global disdain he elicits.
To be sure, Mr Trump represents a political movement that has been gestating in American politics for several decades. Tellingly, at the Republican Party primaries in 1992, candidate Patrick Buchanan advocated similar positions as compared to Mr Trump against immigration, multiculturalism, abortion, American imperialism, and an excessively regulated state. Proponents of this anti-establishment and insular line of thinking demanded a different socio-political order at home and an alternative paradigm abroad that must no longer be determined by the post-Second World War structure but a post-Cold War reality.
To them, after having successfully fought global conflicts on two continents in the 1940s and won the Cold War in the following four decades, an exhausted and overstretched America should come home to repair and recover the domestic front. Underpinning this strand of relative isolationism and abandonment of American imperialism, and disengagement from international obligations is nativism at home.
This nativist outlook was fundamentally supportive of social conservatism and opposed to illegal immigration, not xenophobia per se, but a cap on immigrant inflows consistent, for example, with the quota-driven Immigration Act of 1924, which was overturned in 1965, thereby opening the floodgates to non-American outsiders, especially from next-door Mexico and other Latin American countries to the south.
By 2004, the famous Harvard political scientist Samuel P Huntington conceptualised and codified this simmering nativism into a book entitled Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity. More famous for his Clash of Civilizations thesis, Huntington's last book before he passed is less mentioned due to its xenophobic undertones and cultural bias towards Americans who were White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) -- referred to as "Anglo-Protestant".
Yet it is the intellectual basis of sorts behind the movement that has enabled Mr Trump's rise. America was set up by English settlers and should, therefore, not become dominated by an immigrant majority from Mexico and other countries. From the fringe of the Republican Party, nativism has taken 30-odd years to move towards front and centre, spearheaded by an anti-intellectual president who is despised and deplored by establishment centrists and liberals but who sees it as a self-correcting catharsis for national renewal and rejuvenation.
Accordingly, Mr Trump's nativist leanings at home and rejection of the established rules-based liberal international order will likely lead to a policy projection abroad pivoting around trade protectionism and economic nationalism on the one hand and relative withdrawal with conditional engagement in foreign and security policy on the other. In practice, this means international trade on America's terms and a strong military that will no longer be the world's policeman.
Partners and allies will need to pull their weight as the US's priorities shift wholesale to reclaiming the greatness it lost since the end of the Cold War. By the same logic, rivals and competitors will be confronted and pushed back for having taken advantage of America's post-Cold War weakness when hyper-globalisation and international economic integration allowed them to ascend and challenge American supremacy in an effort to eclipse it.
Coming to grips with Trump II requires taking the Trump mantra of "Making America Great Again" seriously and literally. The questions that will frame US economic and security policy prospects will be based on the MAGA mindset: What was America's greatness like? Why, when and how it has been lost? And how to get it back?
Trump II's answers to these questions can already be anticipated. Clearly, such greatness existed in the past, perhaps around the 1950s and the end of the Cold War when American primacy was unchallenged. It was somehow eroded and lost in the post-Cold War period. Getting it back means bringing others down while America relatively goes up.
The international system, with its rules-based liberal order, has drained American resources. Allies are free-riders, as Trump II thinking goes, that are often geoeconomic competitors while they benefit geopolitically from US support and largess. Economic partners have gained substantially from access to the US's huge market to become major economies in their own right. To regain greatness, the international political and economic system needs to be revamped so that it is rebalanced in America's favour.
This is why China will be the top target of Trump II's wrath because the Trump movement views China as a challenger of the worst kind, which has stolen US technology and ripped off Americans by attracting factories and jobs that used to belong to them. China has done all that so shrewdly that it is on the cusp of surpassing the US in economic size and technological prowess.
We can, therefore, expect US industrial policies under the outgoing government of President Joe Biden to become outright mercantilism with direct export subsidies, import quotas, and wide-ranging tariffs. Trump II is likely to proceed with its pre-election tariff threats of 60% against Chinese imports and 20% on goods from other countries, not to mention the pledge to levy upwards of 200% duties on imported electric vehicles. Although it might not come up overnight and perhaps not as high as feared, the Trump II tariff wall will be erected to a height not seen in recent memory.
That Mr Trump is despised worldwide is natural because he is fundamentally anti-establishment, both at home and abroad. In US domestic politics, he is contesting American national identity that is being overwhelmed by continuous waves of immigration from Mexico and other Latin American countries. Internationally, Mr Trump is against the established institutional architecture of power, how authority has been exercised, and by whom.
He is the antithesis of our understanding of the international system and how it works because he wants to cleanse it in the US's favour. That he won the US presidential poll in 2016 and again eight years later with an even more decisive margin should behove outsiders to be aware that people in America want to change at home and abroad.