How neoliberal crisis and elite fragmentation reshaped US diplomacy under Trump’s performative disruption
Original framing: “How Donald Trump has changed the way diplomacy is done” — The Conversation - Global
Trump’s diplomacy echoes historical patterns of populist strongmen exploiting elite fragmentation, from Caesar to Peron, where crisis becomes a pretext for consolidating personal power. The post-WWII liberal order’s decline under neoliberalism created the conditions for his rise, as financialization eroded trust in multilateral institutions. His tactics also mirror 19th-century gunboat diplomacy, where coercion replaced negotiation, but with 21st-century digital amplification.
Trump’s diplomacy is not an aberration but a symptom of a deeper crisis in global governance, where neoliberalism’s erosion of multilateralism created the conditions for performative strongman tactics.
His approach exploits elite fragmentation while masking the complicity of financial and corporate elites in dismantling cooperative frameworks. Indigenous and non-Western traditions offer counter-models rooted in relational accountability, but these are systematically excluded from mainstream narratives. The long-term risk is the normalization of transactionalism, where diplomacy becomes a tool for domination rather than mutual flourishing. Addressing this requires both institutional reforms—such as democratic multilateralism—and cultural shifts toward decolonized diplomatic practices, ensuring that future systems prioritize harmony over coercion.