Keylor Publishes OpEd on Trump’s Foreign Policy
William Keylor, Professor of International Relations and History at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, published a recent Op-Ed discussing how presidential candidate Donald Trump might manage foreign relations for the United States if elected.
Keylor wrote the July 18, 2016 article for POV, an opinion page published by BU Today that provides timely commentaries from students, faculty and staff on a variety of issues: on-campus, local, state, national, or international. Keylor’s article is entitled “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in Trump’s Foreign Policy.”
From the text of the article:
During the entire campaign for this year’s Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump has delivered a grand total of one speech devoted to foreign policy, on April 27 at the Center for the National Interest. To fill in the gaps of his foreign-policy program by sorting through his occasional remarks on the subject in numerous rallies and press conferences, one is hard put to find a consistent set of themes. So what can be gleaned from his single foreign-policy speech and his occasional off-the-cuff (I almost wrote “off-the-teleprompter) comments about how Trump might conduct the foreign relations of the United States if elected president?
I’ll give Trump the benefit of the doubt by acknowledging that some of his foreign policy pronouncements are fully compatible with the thinking of respectable schools of thought on the question of America’s role in the world. I will highlight three strands of his thinking about foreign policy as reflected in his recent public statements to demonstrate how they do not depart appreciably from the mainstream in the current American political scene: opposition to democracy promotion in the non-Western world, the need to exert pressure on US allies in Europe to increase spending for their own defense, and more generally, the adoption of an unapologetically realist approach to international relations.
You can read the entire Op-Ed here.
Keylor served four consecutive terms as Chairman of the Department of History at Boston University (1988-2000) and has been Director of the International History Institute since 1999. At Boston University, he has received the Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Methodist Scholar-Teacher Award. Learn more about him here.