Abstract

Evaluating international political strategy includes critiquing the desired future implied in the strategy. Political strategy focuses on trend alteration regarding prevailing polity perceptions, elite composition, polity attitudes, and polity values to actualize a desired political future regarding the nature of the target of the strategy. Critical evaluation of a strategy focuses on the assumptions and capabilities underpinning this effort by the initiator state at trend alteration. US security challenges in Eurasia are legacy issues from the Cold War. The Cold War containment strategy instruments and interests originally targeting the Soviet threat that the US created and developed continue to shape the political discourse regarding security challenges in the region. Comprehension of the political values institutionalized in these bureaucratic, military, and economic vested interests is useful for understanding the political communication topography today. These vested interests embody the international political trends that set the global political framework for what is today, called globalization. The US Trump administration’s conservative populism politically compels it to maintain and intensify the post-Cold War general thrust of US foreign policy in Eurasia and the world: defense and expansion of unilateral US global hegemonic political predominance. It is manifested in the intensification of pressure against perceived challengers to US global influence. Trump’s populist rhetoric of radical change serves essentially a legitimation function to reinforce the primacy of these vested interests in the US foreign policy making process, thus intensifying this general thrust.