Now that president-elect Donald Trump has selected his national security team, what course will he set? In a recent interview Henry Kissinger, the US secretary of state in the 1970s, cautions that “America has conceived of foreign policy as a series of discrete challenges to be addressed as they arise on their merits rather than as part of an overall design”. Mr Trump, the deal-by-deal negotiator, may prefer to run a case-by-case foreign policy.
For 70 years, US international problem-solving has taken place within the framework that the US created after the second world war and then adapted. That framework is now at risk. States created in the Middle East in 1916 have broken down into a life-and-death struggle among sects and tribes, manipulated by local would-be hegemons. The new battleground supplies a cause and base from which radical Islamic terrorists reach around the world. The chaos has triggered a destabilising migration to the EU. Furthermore, countries in the region — Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran — have struggled unsuccessfully to transition to modern market economies, raising the risk of an even larger upheaval.
The European integration project that has been the foundation of transatlantic strategy since the Marshall Plan is fragmenting. Neither Britain nor the EU has a constructive plan for Brexit. Fearful populist-nationalists in eastern Europe recall destructive movements of the 1920s and 1930s. The eurozone is struggling. Even stalwarts of the European project, such as the Netherlands and Italy, are losing faith.