GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES
Lessons From the Past for Trump's Transactional Foreign Policy
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Nov 13, 2019 | 16:40 GMT
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Highlights
- President Donald Trump's administration is anything but the first to pursue a transactional foreign policy. An important comparison case: 18th-century Britain.
- The British experience suggests there are huge benefits to reap from a transactional foreign policy but huge costs to avoid. Doing transactionalism correctly is difficult.
- While 18th-century Britain resembles our own world in many ways, there are differences. It's in those differences that the United States possesses few of the advantages Britain enjoyed three centuries ago.