The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 83, January 2026 Page 12 From the series Chronicles of the new American nationalism The American establishment faces a truly difficult conundrum. On the one hand, it is confronted with Donald Trump, who has been gripped by show politics to the point of delirium: a recent tragic example was the president’s comments on social media about the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife, which he blamed on the director’s anti-Trump hatred. On the other hand, there is the attempt to uncover a rationale behind the policies of the Trump presidency, insofar as the measures aimed at countering American decline partially represent continuity with the lines of previous administrations, or with certain currents within them. In recent months, this second approach has been taken by Michael Froman, president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and several Biden administration officials, including Kurt Campbell. In their view, there ar...

From the series News from the Silk Road The international tensions which China will face on the seas in the next fifteen years could find a buffer in the expansion of China’s influence on land in Central, Southern and Western Asia. Wang Jisi is the dean of the School of International Studies at the University of Beijing and a major figure of the American party in China. His unexpected foray into ‘geopolitics’ has reignited the old clash between different American currents — a phenomenon we analysed more than twenty years ago. At the time, Robert Manning, the author of The Asian Energy Factor and adviser to the State Department in 1991, viewed Asia’s growing dependence on the Persian Gulf for its energy requirements in the light of geoeconomics and geostrategy and foresaw a possible convergence between the USA and China. From a geoeconomic standpoint, both trade and the funding and development of the infrastructure necessary for Asia’s energy needs were more important than terri...