Great power competition - change and continuity in US foreign policy under Trump

'Great power competition': change and continuity in US foreign policy under Trump

The first Trump presidency accelerated the turn in American strategic thinking towards ‘great power competition’, producing a bipartisan consensus that confounded the wider trend to political polarisation in US domestic politics. This briefing session will kick-off the LSE CCRG/IDEAS webinar series on the implications of Trump 2.0 for the rest of the world. 

Our experts will provide an overview of:

- The Trump administration’s foreign policy priorities and frameworks  

- How seriously we should take the hyper-aggressive trade proposals 

- The impacts on climate change and the environment 

This event is part of a series of webinars on Trump 2.0 and the age of polycrisis organised by the LSE Conflict and Civicness Research Groups based at LSE IDEAS, the in-house foreign policy think tank of the London School of Economics and Political Science. These sessions from our research community provide a series of 60 minute briefings on the impacts of Trump’s second term for some of the issues and contexts that we research.

Meet the Speakers and Chair 

Dr Luke Cooper (@lukecooper100) is Associate Professorial Research Fellow in International Relations and the Director of PeaceRep's Ukraine programme, based at the Conflict and Civicness Research Group in LSE IDEAS, the LSE's in-house foreign policy think tank. He has written extensively on nationalism, authoritarianism and the theory of uneven and combined development, and is the author of Authoritarian Contagion; the Global Threat to Democracy (Bristol University Press, 2021).

John Feffer (@johnfeffer) is director of Foreign Policy In Focus and Global Just Transition at the Institute for Policy Studies. He is the author, most recently, of Right Across the World: The Global Networking of the Far Right and the Left Response (Pluto Books), The Pandemic Pivot (Seven Stories), and Aftershock: A Journey into Eastern Europe’s Broken Dreams (Zed Books). He has also published a trilogy of dystopian novels (Splinterlands, Frostlands, and Songlands (Dispatch Books).

Dr Nancy Okail is President and CEO of the Center for International Policy. Dr. Okail is a leading scholar, policy analyst, and advocate with more than 20 years of experience working on issues of human rights, democracy, and security in the Middle East and North Africa region. In 2020, Okail was appointed as a visiting scholar at the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University, focusing on accountability and the intersection of human rights and technology. Prior to joining Stanford, she served as Executive Director of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (TIMEP), which under her leadership became an internationally renowned policy research organization.

Dr Marika Theros is a policy fellow at the Conflict and Civicness Research Group at LSE IDEAS and the PI and co-director of PeaceRep’s Afghanistan Research Network. Her research focuses on political mobilization, global-local dynamics of violence and change,  peacebuilding and multi-stakeholder dialogues, the politics of knowledge production, and the securitization of climate change. She is also the co-founder of the Civic Ecosystems Initiative, a platform to explore the phenomenon of ‘civic ecosystems’ and social innovation and the director of the Civic Engagement Project (CEP) which works at the intersection of action-oriented research, policy and civic engagement in difficult environments.