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Trump’s tariffs and Bush’s Project for the New American Century [1]
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Date: 2025-05
With the world continuing to reel from Donald Trump’s global tariffs – and the markets still in turmoil from the shock of their announcement – it makes sense to look for parallels in US political history to try and better understand the plan.
The law-breaking of the Nixon administration and his eventual resignation may be comparable, as may Eisenhower’s bitter anti-left attacks of McCarthyism in the early 1950s. You could perhaps also compare Trump’s actions to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidential directive to intern 120,000 Japanese Americans, many of whom were held for years in grim conditions, after Pearl Harbour in 1941.
But the most relevant and most recent comparison is that of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) barely 25 years ago.
PNAC was a neo-conservative think tank established in 1997 amid right-wing dissatisfaction over Bill Clinton’s failure to capitalise on the US’s post-Cold War status as the world’s only superpower. It would go on to play a key role in shaping US foreign policy after Republican George W Bush won the 2000 presidential election.
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The organisation’s founding statement said it was crucial for the US to “shape a new century favourable to American principles and interests” and “accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity and our principles”.
Ten of the 25 people who signed that statement went on to serve in Bush’s administration, where they quickly set to work on enacting its principles. With the plan already mapped out, they were able to enact foreign and security policy decisions in their first six months in office that were comparable in scope and pace to those undertaken by Trump in recent months.
One such decision was withdrawing the US from the Kyoto climate change protocols, along with opposition to the idea of climate change even being a problem. Others include Bush’s antagonism to the planned International Criminal Court and his suspicion of arms control agreements including the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention.
Five months into Bush’s administration, the New American Century was beginning to take shape, ably summarised by a leading neoconservative commentator, Charles Krauthammer, in The Washington Standard on 4 June 2001:
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