An international order free of the United States is inconceivable in the long-term, but a tentative limited multilateralism excluding the world’s sole superpower may develop and exist for some time.

U.S. secretary of state’s attempt to form an anti-China alliance is an anachronism. The world has changed fundamentally since the Soviet era, and there’s no going back.

Despite former US National Security Adviser John Bolton’s juicy revelations about Trump’s conduct of foreign policy, his book does little to answer the fundamental question facing the US: Is its current foreign-policy muddle Trump’s fault, or the result of something deeper and more structural?

Practice is the sole criterion for testing truth. China has confidence in its socialist path, theory, system and culture. China’s strengths are evident it its response to the coronavirus epidemic.

Trump’s approach, the Great American Comeback, has seen some success domestically but has been rocky in the international scene. Given persistent and emerging global threats, America First should not necessarily mean America alone.

Many Americans say they want a moral foreign policy, but disagree on what that means. Using a three-dimensional scorecard encourages us to avoid simplistic answers and to look at the motives, means, and consequences of a US president’s actions.

The hypocrisy of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in his hawkish criticism of China displays the fundamental undiplomatic character that has defined the Trump administration even in the face of the globe’s most recent crises.

What he didn’t say in the State of the Union address was more telling than what he did. One thing is clear: The president still has the ability to fire up his partisan base and compel the loyalty of Republicans in Congress. As a result, the politics of this election year will once again be profoundly divisive.

The recent tense, dangerous exchanges between the United States and Iran have revealed a great deal about US President Donald Trump’s management of his foreign policy. The main conclusion is that he doesn’t have one.

When I told a friend I had just written a book on morality and foreign policy, she quipped: “It must be a very short book.” Such skepticism is common. An Internet search shows surprisingly few books on how US presidents’ moral views affected their foreign policies. As the eminent political theorist Michael Walzer once described American graduate training in international relations after 1945, “Moral argument was against the rules of the discipline as it was commonly practiced.”