Blessing America First

Religion, Populism, and Foreign Policy in the Trump Administration

Häftad, Engelska, 2024

Av David Buckley

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How did the Trump administration change the place of religion in U.S. foreign policy? How did the guardrails of America’s foreign policy bureaucracy respond to a populist president? Drawing on firsthand experience in the State Department’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs during the Obama-Trump transition, David T. Buckley traces how the Trump administration’s populism affected the foreign policy bureaucracy, with significant implications for U.S. domestic and international politics.Blessing America First argues that under Trump, religion in U.S. foreign policy shifted from an implement of statecraft to a tool of populist political strategy. Populism constructs ideological bounds between “the people” and threatening outsiders, and embraces personalist governance while rejecting bureaucratic constraint. This domestic political logic, Buckley demonstrates, influenced foreign policy decisions and reshaped bureaucratic offices in the State Department and USAID. Populism also promoted international religious ties in a surprising range of settings, from Poland to India, Brazil to Russia. Buckley shows that the possibility of curbing these changes was limited by conditions in American democracy that predated the 2016 election, including norms of nonpartisanship among career officials, malleable legal institutions, and polarization in public opinion. A groundbreaking examination of Trump’s State Department, blending insider experience with original quantitative and qualitative data analysis, Blessing America First draws broader lessons for understanding the relationship between religion and democracy under populist rule.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2024-09-10
Mått152 x 229 x 26 mm
Vikt468 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor320
FörlagColumbia University Press
ISBN9780231207553

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AcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart I. Religion and Foreign Policy: Statecraft and Populist Governance1. What Does Populism Have to Do with Religion and Foreign Policy?2. The Blob Gets Religion: RGA and the Prepopulist EquilibriumPart II. The Populist Difference3. “The Faith of the Administration”: Populist Ideology, Religion, and Foreign Policy4. Who Needs an Office? Populist Personalism and Religion in the BureaucracyPart III. Preexisting Conditions and Populist Constraint5. Faith in a Deep State? Bureaucratic Preservation in a Populist Transition6. Salvation in Institutions? American Secularism, Executive Power, and Populist Change7. A Faithful Audience? Public Opinion and Trump’s Religious Foreign PolicyPart IV. Effects Beyond the Populist8. Faithful Partners: Religious Populism and International TiesConclusion: Religion and Foreign Policy After PopulismAppendixNotesBibliographyIndex

David T. Buckley's Blessing America First is a hugely important book. It sheds so much light on areas that have received little academic and journalistic attention: the growing role of religion in American diplomacy over a long period and the radical substantive and bureaucratic transformations around these issues during the Trump years. This is also an extraordinary participant-observer study, since Buckley was able to see the transition between the Obama and Trump administrations firsthand as an academic fellow in the State Department. Buckley’s account—smart, eye-opening, and constructive—deserves a very wide audience. And here’s hoping that future policymakers pay attention to his guidance.