¹ There is no space here to review the literature about the international order concept in detail. For a short summary of the evolution of this order, see Lissner, Rebecca Friedman and Rapp-Hooper, Mira, ‘The day after Trump: American strategy for a new international order’, The Washington Quarterly, 4:1 (2018), pp. 7–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other summaries and critiques have been published by Moravcsik, Andrew, ‘Taking preferences seriously: A liberal theory of international politics’, International Organization, 51:4 (1997), pp. 513–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Deudney, Daniel and Ikenberry, G. John, ‘The nature and sources of liberal international order’, Review of International Studies, 25:2 (1999), pp. 179–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jørgensen, Knud Erik, ‘Liberal internationalism’, in Jørgensen, Knud Erik et al. (eds), SAGE Handbook of European Foreign Policy (London: Sage, 2013), pp. 501–15Google Scholar; Ikenberry, G. John, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Allison, Graham, ‘The myth of the liberal order: From historical accident to conventional wisdom’, Foreign Affairs, 97:4 (2018), pp. 124–33Google Scholar; Layne, Christopher, ‘The US foreign policy establishment and grand strategy: How American elites obstruct strategic adjustment’, International Politics, 54:3 (2017), pp. 260–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² In this study the use of the term ‘grand strategy’ is focused on foreign policy only and excludes, for analytical reasons, the domestic arena. Here grand strategy is defined as the ‘means and ends to produce national security … [and] a sense of national identity … about the nation's role and position in world politics’. Löfflmann, Georg, ‘From the Obama doctrine to America First: The erosion of the Washington consensus on grand strategy’, International Politics, 20:1 (2019), pp. 2–3Google Scholar. According to Posen, grand strategy is based on ‘a quiet consensus among the foreign and security policy elite’; see Posen, Barry, ‘Command of the commons: The military foundation of US hegemony’, International Security, 28:1 (2003), pp. 19–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ See, for example, Mearsheimer, John, ‘Bound to fail: The rise and fall of the liberal international order’, International Security, 43:4 (2019), pp. 7–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Glaser, Charles L., ‘A flawed framework: Why the liberal international order concept is misguided’, International Security, 43:4 (2019), pp. 51–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mearsheimer, John, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Daalder, Ivo H. and Lindsay, James M., The Empty Throne: America's Abdication of Global Leadership (New York: Public Affairs, 2018)Google Scholar; Ikenberry, G. John, ‘The end of liberal international order?’, International Affairs, 94:1 (2018), pp. 7–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nye, Joseph S., ‘The rise and fall of American hegemony from Wilson to Trump’, International Affairs, 95:1 (2019), pp. 63–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carpenter, Ted Galen, Gullible Superpower (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2019)Google Scholar; Walt, Stephen M., The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of US Primacy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018)Google Scholar; Haass, Richard, A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order (New York: Penguin Press, 2017)Google Scholar; Bacevich, Andrew J., The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (2^nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Schake, Kori, America vs the West: Can the Liberal World Order Be Preserved? (Melbourne, Australia: Penguin Random House, 2018)Google Scholar; Deudney, Daniel and Ikenberry, G. John, ‘Liberal world: The resilient order’, Foreign Affairs, 97:4 (2018), pp. 16–24Google Scholar; and Paul Staniland, ‘Misreading the “Liberal Order”: Why We Need New Thinking in American Foreign Policy’ (29 July 2018), available at: {https://www.lawfareblog.com/misreading-liberal-order-why-we-need-new-thinking-american-foreign-policy} accessed 9 March 2020.

⁴ On the reactions of the US foreign policy community, see Porter, Patrick, ‘Why US grand strategy has not changed: Power, habit and the foreign policy establishment’, International Security, 42:4 (2018), pp. 9–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Porter, Patrick, ‘A world imagined: Nostalgia and liberal order’, Policy Analysis, 843 (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, June 2018)Google Scholar; Dina Smeltz, Karl Friedhoff, Craig Kafura, Joshua Busby et al., ‘The Foreign Policy Establishment or Donald Trump: Which Better Reflects American Opinion?’, Chicago Council on Global Affairs (April 2018), pp. 1–21; Dina Smeltz, Ivo Daalder, Karl Friedhoff, Craig Kafura, and Lily Wojtowicz, ‘America Engaged, American Public Opinion and US Foreign Policy’, Chicago Council on Global Affairs (2018), pp. 2–35; Chaudoin, Stephen, Milner, Helen V., and Tingley, Dustin, ‘Down but not out: A liberal international American foreign policy’, in Jervis, Robert, Robert, , Gavin, Francis J., Rovner, Joshua, and Labrosse, Diane N. (eds), Chaos in the Liberal Order: The Trump Presidency and International Politics in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), pp. 61–98Google Scholar; Friedman, Benjamin H. and Sapolsky, Harvey M., ‘Unrestrained: The politics of America's primacist foreign policy’, in Thrall, A. Trevor and Friedman, Benjamin H. (eds), US Grand Strategy in the 21st Century (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 220–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar explain some of the reasons for the strong support for the maintenance of the postwar order.

⁵ Mearsheimer, ‘Bound to fail’, p. 7. The overwhelming rejection of Trump's foreign policy is also visible in expert polls; see Eric Parajon, Susan Peterson, Ryan Powers, and Michael J. Tierney, ‘Snap Poll: What Experts Make of Trump's Foreign Policy’ (7 December 2018), available at: {https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/07/snap-poll-experts-trump-foreign-policy/}.

⁶ 'Present at the destruction’ is a play on US Secretary of State Dean Acheson's 1969 memoir Present at the Creation (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969) describing his role as chief architect of the post-Second World War world order.

⁷ See David Samuels, ‘The aspiring novelist who became Obama's foreign-policy guru’, New Yorker (5 May 2016), available at: {https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magazine/the-aspiring-novelist-who-became-obamas-foreign%policy-guru.html} accessed 9 March 2020; Jeffrey Goldberg, ‘The Obama doctrine’, The Atlantic (April 2016), pp. 70–90, available at: {https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine} accessed 9 March 2020. See also Rhodes, Ben, The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House (New York: Random House, 2018)Google Scholar.

⁸ Some of the critics like Walt and Porter have extensively used this term to criticise the US foreign policy establishment. See Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions, pp. 112–13 and Porter, ‘Why US grand strategy has not changed’, pp. 9–46.

⁹ See Colin Dueck, ‘GOP Foreign Policy Opinion in the Trump Era’, Foreign Policy Research Institute (23 April 2018), available at: {https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2018/04/23/gop_foreign_policy_opinion_in_the_trump_era_113355.html} accessed 9 March 2020.

¹⁰ See Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions, pp. 95, 103. For Walt, blob members typically are represented by (transnational) progressives, libertarians affiliated with the Cato Institute, and academic realists. But he treats them less polemical compared to Walter Russell Mead who uses the term ‘Davoisie’ ('In it to win’, American Interest (27 January 2015)), or John Bolton, who called foreign policy elites ‘high minded’ in Surrender is not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations (New York: Threshold, 2007), pp. 441–55. The Alt-right uses comparable labels like ‘commentariat’, ‘expertocracy’, ‘establishment’, ‘elites’, and ‘globalists’, though for derogatory purposes.

¹¹ Similarly, Mills, C. Wright, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956)Google Scholar.

¹² Putnam, Robert D., The Comparative Study of Political Elites (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1976), p. 11Google Scholar.

¹³ Porter, ‘Why US grand strategy has not changed’, p. 11.

¹⁴ Porter, Patrick, ‘How the US foreign policy establishment constrains American grand strategy’, Policy Brief, International Security (8 June 2018), pp. 4, 13–14Google Scholar. See also Center for International Security and Governance, International Security Forum, Full Report (Bonn: University of Bonn, 2018), pp. 46–7; and Löfflmann, ‘From the Obama doctrine to America First’, pp. 7, 13.

¹⁵ Wittkopf, Eugene R., Faces of Internationalism: Public Opinion and Foreign Policy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Holsti, Ole R. and Rosenau, James N., ‘The post-Cold War foreign policy beliefs of American leaders: Persistence or abatement of partisan cleavages?’, in Wittkopf, Eugene R. (ed.), The Future of American Foreign Policy (2^nd edn, New York: St Martin's Press, 1994), pp. 127–47Google Scholar; Holsti, Ole R., Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Stimson, James A., Tides of Consent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Holsti, Ole R. and Rosenau, James N., ‘The structure of foreign policy attitudes among American leaders’, Journal of Politics, 52 (1990), pp. 94–125CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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¹⁷ See the summary of elite and pluralist theory by Schubert, Louis, Dye, Thomas R., and Zeigler, Harmon, The Irony of Democracy: An Uncommon Introduction to American Politics (17^th edn, Boston, MA: Cengage, 2009), pp. 10–12, 15–17, and 69Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Shapiro, Robert Y. and Bloch-Elkon, Yaeli, ‘Do the facts speak for themselves? Partisan disagreement as a challenge to democratic competence’, Critical Review, 20:1–2 (2008), pp. 115–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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²⁰ Pragmatic liberals mix realists and liberal positions. The adjective ‘pragmatic’ refers to someone who looks for practical solutions, making the best of a specific political situation rather than following ideological or value-driven goals. The term is not related to philosophical or methodological pragmatism. Also, the labels ‘independent’ and ‘centrist’ were avoided because they are associated with voting patterns or a partisan Left-Right continuum.

²¹ On the anti-Trump consensus, see Joshua W. Busby and Jonathan Monten, ‘Has liberal internationalism been trumped?’, in Jervis, Gavin, Rovner, and Labrosse (eds), Chaos in the Liberal Order, pp. 49–60.

²² Dalgaard-Nielsen, Anja, Germany, Pacifism and Peace Enforcement (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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²⁶ Originally, it was planned to conduct about 75 interviews but a shortage of funds and research time limited the sample. A larger sample probably would have allowed mapping of further nuances within each typology – as between libertarian realists, neo-conservatives, and so forth.

²⁷ From a quantitative perspective, the study's sample size might appear small. However, compared with other qualitative interview studies, it is still slightly above average; see Small, Mario Luis, ‘How many cases do I need?’, Ethnography, 10:1 (2009), pp. 5–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mason, Mark, ‘Sample size and saturation in PhD studies using qualitative interviews’, Forum Qualitative Social Research, 11:3 (2010)Google Scholar, available at: {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs100387}.

²⁸ For comparative reasons, the sample included seven non-US or dual citizens (Cases 4, 6, 8, 11, 15, 17, and 19) whose perceptions overlapped with that of the other experts, adding confidence about the consistency of the findings.

²⁹ Morse, Janice M., ‘Designing funded qualitative research’, in Denzin, Norman K. and Lincoln, Yvonna S. (eds), Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1994), pp. 220–35Google Scholar; and Miles, Matthew B., Huberman, A. Michael, and Saldaña, Johnny, Qualitative Data Analysis (3^rd edn, London: Sage, 2013)Google Scholar.

³⁰ This compares with a ‘recent study by the progressive media watchdog FAIR of the most cited think tanks [which] found [that] 48% are centrist, 31 percent are conservative, and 21 percent are left-center or progressive’; see Schubert, Dye, and Zeigler, The Irony of Democracy, p. 72.

³¹ Busby, Joshua W. and Monten, Jonathan, ‘Without heirs? Assessing the decline of establishment internationalism in US foreign policy’, Perspectives on Politics, 6:3 (2008), pp. 451–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar found that between 42 per cent and 46 per cent of top executive branch officials and the heads of foreign policy committees in Congress during and after the Cold War came from Ivy League backgrounds.

³² Silove, Nina, ‘Beyond the buzzword: The three meanings of “grand strategy”’, Security Studies, 27:1 (2018), pp. 39–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³³ The reconstructivist IR approach attempts to understand ‘the fundamental script of the role and identity of … foreign policy’ from the views of its actors; see Roos, Ulrich, ‘Beliefs and loyalties in world politics: A pragmatic liberal framework for analysis’, in Hellmann, Gunther and Jørgensen, Knud E. (eds), Theorizing Foreign Policy in a Globalized World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 180Google Scholar. See also Franke, Ulrich and Roos, Ulrich, ‘Actor, structure, process: Transcending the state personhood debate by means of a pragmatic liberal ontological model for International Relations theory’, Review of International Studies, 36:2 (2010), pp. 1057–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Franke, Ulrich and Hellmann, Gunter, ‘American pragmatism in foreign policy analysis’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics (2017), pp. 1–16Google Scholar, available at: {doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.356}.

³⁴ Oevermann, Ulrich, ‘Die Methode der Fallrekonstruktion in der Grundlagenforschung sowie der klinischen und pädagogischen praxis’, in Kraimer, Klaus (ed.), Die Fallrekonstruktion: Sinnverstehen in der sozialwissenschaftlichen Forschung (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), pp. 138–56Google Scholar.

³⁵ Strauss, Anselm S., Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Glaser, Barney G., Basics of Grounded Theory Analysis (Mill Valley, CA: Sociology Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

³⁶ Peirce, Charles Sanders, ‘How to make our ideas clear’, in Houser, Nathan and Kloesel, Christian J. W. (eds), The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Vol. I: 1867–1893 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992 [orig. pub. 1878]), p. 130Google Scholar. This premise does not imply that beliefs are identical with action but points out how beliefs are operationalised into imperatives that can be achieved by specific actions. Imperatives are collectively shared but the pathways, means, and intentions towards achieving them allows for variants of action.

³⁷ Mathias Albert and Stephan Stetter, ‘Actorhood in world politics: The dialectics of agency/structure within the world polity’, in Hellmann and Jørgensen (eds), Theorizing Foreign Policy in a Globalized World, pp. 81–100.

³⁸ Goldstein, Judith and Keohane, Robert O. (eds), Ideas and Foreign Policy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁹ Friedman, Benjamin H. and Logan, Justin, ‘Why Washington doesn't debate grand strategy’, Strategic Studies Quarterly, 10:4 (2016), p. 15Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Roos, ‘Beliefs and loyalties in world politics’, p. 180.

⁴¹ The causes and processes that lead to the long-term formation and change of rules for action are not a topic of this study. They have been addressed in other contexts; see fns 33 and 45.

⁴² Similar Converse, Philipp E., ‘The nature of belief systems in mass publics’, in Apter, David E. (ed.), Ideology and Discontent (New York: The Free Press, 1964), pp. 206–61Google Scholar; and Holsti, Ole R., The ‘Operation Code’ as an Approach to the Analysis of Belief Systems: Final Report to the National Science Foundation (Durham, NC: Duke University, 1977)Google Scholar.

⁴³ George, Alexander L. and Bennett, Andrew, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), p. 7Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Katzenstein, Peter and Sil, Rudra, ‘Eclectic theorizing in the study and practice of International Relations’, in Reus-Smit, Christian and Snidal, Duncan (eds), The Oxford Handbook of International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 109–30Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ For examples of the application of reconstructive foreign policy analysis, see Roos, Ulrich and Rungius, Charlotte, ‘Neue Macht, neue Mächte – gute Gründe? Rekonstruktion einer außenpolitischen Diskursoffensive in Deutschland’, Zeitschrift für Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik, 9 (2016), pp. 39–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roos, Ulrich, Deutsche Außenpolitik: Eine Rekonstruktion der grundlegenden Handlungsregeln (Wiesbaden: Springer VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Franke, Ulrich and Roos, Ulrich, ‘Einleitung: Zu den Begriffen “Weltpolitik” und “Rekonstruktion”’, in Franke, Ulrich and Roos, Ulrich (eds), Rekonstruktive Methoden der Weltpolitikforschung (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2013), pp. 7–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kurthen, Hermann and Schöne, Helmar, ‘Außenpolitische Handlungsregeln in Deutschland: Ergebnisse aus Experteninterviews während der Libyenkrise 2011’, Zeitschrift für Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik, 11:1 (2018), pp. 39–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hermann Kurthen, ‘German foreign policy rules for action during the 2011 Libya Crisis’, German Politics and Society (forthcoming).

⁴⁶ Deterding, Nicole and Waters, Mary C., ‘Flexible coding of in-depth interviews: A twenty-first-century approach’, Sociological Method and Research (2018), pp. 1–32Google Scholar, available at: {https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124118799377} accessed 9 March 2020.

⁴⁷ Saldaña, Johnny, The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers (London: Sage, 2009), p. 7Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ See similar recommendations by Gläser, Jochen and Laudel, Grit, Experteninterviews und qualitative Inhaltsanalyse als Instrumente rekonstruierender Untersuchungen (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2004)Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Beamer, Glenn, ‘Elite interviews and state politics research’, State Politics & Policy Quarterly, 2:1 (2002), p. 87CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Tavory, Iddo and Timmermans, Stefan, Abductive Analysis: Theorizing Qualitative Research (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

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⁵¹ Large quantitative, survey-based typologies discussed in the US literature typically range from left liberal internationalists to conservative realists and isolationists or unilateral nationalist positions, although the political science literature has never come to a conclusive agreement about how many and which labels to use for describing the full spectrum of empirical beliefs among foreign policy actors in the US at a given moment. See Holsti and Rosenau, The Structure of Foreign Policy Attitudes among American Leaders; Murray, Shoon K., Anchors Against Change: American Opinion Leaders’ Beliefs after the Cold War (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rathbun, Brian C., ‘Does one right make a realist? Conservatism, neoconservatism, and isolationism in the foreign policy ideology of American elites’, Political Science Quarterly, 123:2 (2008), pp. 271–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Drezner, Daniel W., ‘The realist tradition in American public opinion’, Perspectives on Politics, 6:1 (2008), pp. 51–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rourke, John T. and Boyer, Mark A., International Politics on the World Stage (8^th edn, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010)Google Scholar.

⁵² The prevention of the spread of WMDs was not mentioned in the interviews as a separate imperative but subsumed under leadership/primacy/security, a finding that differs from Porter's definition of US grand strategy; see Patrick Porter, ‘Why US grand strategy has not changed’, p. 9.

⁵³ Friedman and Logan claim that ‘the vast majority of US foreign policymakers are devotees of primacy, a grand strategy that sees global US military exertions – alliances, foreign bases, patrols, military training, regular wars, and continual airstrikes – as the only guarantee of national security, global stability, and free trade’. See Friedman and Logan, ‘Why Washington doesn't debate grand strategy’, p. 14.

⁵⁴ In the cited transcripts the symbol ‘…’ denotes that parts of a transcript have been omitted for the sake of brevity, while [text] indicates an addition by the author to make the citation grammatically correct or its contextual reference more understandable for the reader.

⁵⁵ See, for example, Brooks, Stephen G. and Wohlforth, William C., ‘American primacy in perspective’, Foreign Affairs, 81:4 (2002), pp. 20–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thrall and Friedman (eds), US Grand Strategy in the 21st Century; and Friedman and Sapolsky, ‘Unrestrained’.

⁵⁶ In the literature, this instrumental interpretation of alliances and multilateralism is often associated with liberal institutionalism, see Mearsheimer, ‘Bound to fail’, p. 23.

⁵⁷ What is called here the ‘prosperity' rule for action is, in the literature, often associated with the economic interdependence theory. Ibid., p. 23.

⁵⁸ See Schneider, Gerald, ‘Capitalist Peace theory: A critical appraisal’, in Thompson, William R. (ed.), The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)Google Scholar, available at: {https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.314}.

⁵⁹ See Mello, Patrick A., ‘Democratic Peace theory’, in Joseph, Paul (ed.), The SAGE Encyclopedia of War: Social Science Perspectives (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2016), pp. 472–6Google Scholar; and Maoz, Zeev and Russett, Bruce, ‘Normative and structural causes of democratic peace, 1946–1986’, American Political Science Review, 87:3 (1993), pp. 624–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁰ Seven respondents – representing different globalist expert types – self-critically remarked that the actual implementation of values in the United States itself was far from consistent (Cases 10, 14, 18, 26, 28, 33, and 37).

⁶¹ Nymalm, Nicola and Plagemann, Johannes, ‘Comparative exceptionalism: Universality and particularity in foreign policy discourses’, International Studies Review, 21 (2019), p. 22CrossRefGoogle Scholar, argue that the America First slogan is an example of Trump's nationalist exemptionalism.

⁶² On exemptionalism, see Ruggie, John Gerard, ‘American exceptionalism, exemptionalism and global governance’, in Ignatieff, Michael (ed.), American Exceptionalism and Human Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 304–38Google Scholar.

⁶³ American exceptionalism assumes a unique role and character in US history, policy making, and identity. The trope of exceptionalism and America's benevolent mission shines uncritically through in various descriptions and analyses of US foreign policy strategy and in the public discourse. See, for example, Cheney, Dick and Cheney, Liz, Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015)Google Scholar; Restad, Hilde Eliassen, American Exceptionalism: An Idea that Made a Nation and Remade the World (London: Routledge, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hilde Eliassen Restad, ‘Are we coming to the end of “American exceptionalism”?’, Newsweek (6 March 2016).

⁶⁴ Exceptionalist actions and beliefs have been used as cause or effect in describing, explaining, or legitimising the particularities of US history, society, foreign policy, and national identity; see Lipset, Seymour M., American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997)Google Scholar. The concept is based on assumptions about qualitative and quantitative differences of the United States as being universal, unique, exempt, or superior. For a critique, see, for example, Hodgson, Godfrey, ‘Anti-Americanism and American exceptionalism’, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 2 (2004), pp. 27–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Exceptionalism often is linked to beliefs about a specific US responsibility, mission, burden, or model function, referring to specific features of US history, practices, values, institutions, and conditions, such as geography, resources, power, opportunities, options, and sacrifices. See, for example, Harold H. Koh, ‘America's Jekyll-and Hyde exceptionalism’, in Ignatieff (ed.), American Exceptionalism and Human Rights, pp. 111–44. Ideological convictions, historical mythologies, cultural stereotypes, and topoi related to exceptionalism are ‘manifest destiny’, ‘the Shining City upon a Hill’, ‘the beacon of the West’, ‘mankind's last best hope’, ‘God's own country’, ‘the indispensable nation’, ‘benign leader of the free world’, and the like; see Hodgson, Godfrey, The Myth of American Exceptionalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; and Walt, Stephen M., ‘The myth of American exceptionalism’, Foreign Policy, 189 (2011), pp. 72–5Google Scholar. Exceptionalism has been used to justify unilateral military intervention as well as principled multilateralism to encourage altruistic cooperation and peace; see Patrick, Stewart, ‘Multilateralism and its discontents: The causes and consequences of US ambivalence’, in Patrick, Stewart and Forman, Shepard (eds), Multilateralism and US Foreign Policy: Ambivalent Engagement (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002), pp. 1–46Google Scholar; Pillar, Paul, Why America Misunderstands the World (New York: Columbia Press, 2016)Google Scholar; and Vezirgianniodu, Sevasti-Eleni, ‘The United States and rising powers in a post-hegemonic global order’, International Affairs, 89:3 (2013), pp. 635–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁵ Brands, Hal W., What America Owes the World: The Struggle for the Soul of Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁶ The belief in the US as a benign superpower whose hegemony – unlike that of previous empires – is resting not only on self-interest and military-economic domination but also on liberal norms and universal values is confirmed in the literature; see Diez, Thomas and Manners, Ian, ‘Reflections on normative power Europe’, in Berenskoetter, Felix and William, M. J. (eds), Power in World Politics (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 173–88Google Scholar.

⁶⁷ Mead, Walter Russell, Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America's Grand Strategy in a World at Risk (New York: Vintage, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ According to PEW polls the US public, in comparison to its elites, shows little appetite for empire or moral proselytising abroad; see Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stoker, ‘The Problem of American Exceptionalism’, PEW Research Center (9 May 2006).

⁶⁹ For a similar observation about how the public evaluates foreign policy through a domestic lens, see James Curran, ‘Americanism, not Globalism’: President Trump and the American Mission (Sydney, Australia: Lowy Institute, July 2018), p. p. 17; and Mark Hannah, ‘Worlds Apart: U.S. Foreign Policy and American Public Opinion’ (Eurasia Group Foundation, 2019).

⁷⁰ In the sample, only two respondents suppressed any open criticism of Trump, although they were in favour of upholding the rules-based international order (Case 30/Realist; Case 31/Pragmatic Liberal). They possibly silenced their criticism because of an expectation of being hired by the Trump administration and, therefore, not wanting to expose themselves or leave traces of disloyalty in the interviews. Other Trump supporters that were contacted unfortunately did not respond or chose not to participate in the study.

⁷¹ See also Berenskoetter, Felix, ‘Mapping the mind gap: A comparison of US and European security strategies’, Security Dialogue, 36 (2005), p. 75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷² The small size of the sample did not allow the author to distinguish further nuanced patterns within this group, but it appeared that they represented positions across non-party and party lines including, for example, centrist Democrats and moderate Republicans who were willing to reach across the aisle in favour of situational pragmatic and bipartisan rather than ideological and value-driven solutions or power-maximisation.

⁷³ A pragmatic liberal (Case 7/Think tank) intimated that even Republicans ‘holdovers’ from the Reagan and G. W. Bush administration among President Trump's inner circle felt alienated. Another think tank member pointed out that many senior level administrators in the DoD and the State Department continue to believe in the liberal international order (Case 32/Pragmatic Liberal). In fact, ten experts said that several of Trump's (at the time mostly military) advisors tried to curb the worst instincts of the President. Also, a nationalist commented on the irony that traditional mainstream and liberal Conservatives – only a little more hawkish than Obama – who ‘would never have dreamed of supporting Trump in the [Republican] Primary’ elections (Case 36/Nationalist), now work in the Trump administration to restrain the president. Similar observations are reported by Woodward, Bob, Fear: Trump in the White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018)Google Scholar.

⁷⁴ The distance between the US foreign policy elite and Donald Trump and his supporters also has been observed in the literature; see Hamilton, Daniel S. and Tiilikainen, Teija, Domestic Determinants of Foreign Policy in the European Union and the United States (Washington, DC: Center for Transatlantic Relations and Finnish Institute of International Affairs, 2018), pp. 7–8, 76, 103Google Scholar; Thrall, A. Trevor, ‘Beyond hawks and doves: Identifying the restraint constituency’, in Thrall, A. Trevor and Friedman, Benjamin H. (eds), The Case for Restraint: US Grand Strategy for the 21st Century (New York: Routledge, 2017)Google Scholar; Dina Smeltz, Ivo Daalder, Karl Friedhoff, and Craig Kafura, ‘What Americans Think about America First’, Results of the 2017 Chicago Council Survey of American Public Opinion and US Foreign Policy, Chicago Council on Global Affairs (2017), pp. 13–14; Schultz, ‘Perils of polarization for US foreign policy’; Busby and Monten, ‘Has liberal internationalism been trumped?'; and John Halpin et al., America Adrift (Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, 2019); Joshua D. Kertzer et al., ‘Elite Misperceptions and the Domestic Politics of Conflict’ (8 January 2020), available at: {http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~jkertzer/} accessed 9 March 2020.

⁷⁵ A realist expert also makes this point, arguing that ‘there has been always a struggle between those different priorities in each administration […] the balance of hard power with human rights concerns, the nature of the regimes we are dealing with’ (Case 37/Realist).

⁷⁶ See Schubert, Dye, and Zeigler, The Irony of Democracy, p. 12. Gries further specifies that realists emphasise the implementation of policy means whereas liberal idealists focus on how the implementation of means serves intended policy goals; see Gries, Peter H., The Politics of American Foreign Policy: How Ideology divides Liberals and Conservatives over Foreign Affairs (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), p. 109CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁷ Thompson, Similar Jack, ‘Understanding Trumpism: The new president's foreign policy’, Sirius, 1:2 (2017), pp. 1–6Google Scholar.

⁷⁸ According to Porter, these hopes among the foreign policy elite faded quickly because Trump undauntedly enacted his campaign promises against the elite's opposition and advice; see Porter, ‘Why US grand strategy has not changed’, pp. 38–45.

⁷⁹ See Stokes, Doug, ‘Trump, American hegemony and the future of the liberal international order’, International Affairs, 94:1 (2018), p. 134CrossRefGoogle Scholar. However, shortly after Trump's term started, already some conservative Democrats hinted that a ‘snap back’ option was unlikely; see Madeleine Albright and Stephen Hadley, ‘Submitted Statement’, Committee on Armed Services, United States House of Representatives (21 March 2017).

⁸⁰ See Lesser, Ian O., ‘What to expect from the United States: A look ahead at US foreign policy’, IAI Papers, 2 (2020), pp. 1–10Google Scholar.

⁸¹ See fn. 3. A RAND study also has laid out some options for a postliberal new world order 2.0; see Mazarr, Michael J., Priebe, Miranda, Radin, Andrew, and Cevallos, Astrid Stuth, Alternative Options for US Policy toward the International Order (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; similarly a recent Atlantic Council study wants to breathe new life into a reformed liberal order. See Jain, Ash and Kroenig, Matthew, Present at the Re-Creation (New York: Atlantic Council, 2019)Google Scholar.

⁸² Progressive voices are Jentleson, Kizer, vandenHeuvel, Sachs, Sanders, and Warren. Libertarians are represented mostly by the Cato Institute, such as Ashford, Carpenter, Glaser, and Preble. Supporters of (neo)realist policies of restraint, retrenchment, and offshore balancing are Bacevich, Haass, Handle, Ikenberry, Layne, Mearsheimer, Posen, Rugar, and Walt. Many moderate Democrats in favour of competitive geopolitics like Rapp-Hooper, Rhodes, and Sullivans have gathered in the so-called National Security Action. Conservative defenders of the status quo ante can be found among American Affairs, such as Brands, Brooks, Lind, Stokes, and Wohlforth. Conservative nationalists, not all of them Trump admirers, can be found in the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, and Breitbart. They are represented by academics like Dueck and Schweller. For a review of the debates and positions, see, for example, Ashford, Emma and Thrall, A. Trevor, The Battle Inside the Political Parties for the Future of US Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: CATO Institute, 2018)Google Scholar; A. Trevor Thrall and Jordan Cohen, ‘The Democrats’ Search for a New Foreign Policy’, Cato at Liberty blog (16 January 2020), available at: {https://www.cato.org/blog/democrats-search-new-foreign-policy} accessed 9 March 2020; and Colin Dueck et al., ‘Policy roundtable: The future of Conservative foreign policy’, Texas National Security Review (2018), available at: {https://tnsr.org/roundtable/policy-roundtable-the-future-of-conservative-foreign-policy/} accessed 9 March 2020.

⁸³ See, for example, R. David Harden, ‘America adrift: Trump has ended the “post-World War II era”’, The Hill (16 October 2019); Restad, Hilde Eliassen, ‘Whither the “city upon a hill”? Donald Trump, America First, and American exceptionalism’, Texas National Security Review, 3:1 (2019)Google Scholar, available at: {https://tnsr.org/2019/12/whither-the-city-upon-a-hill-donald-trump-america-first-and-american-exceptionalism}.

⁸⁴ Some critics of US foreign policy are pessimistic about a fundamental reform of US grand strategy and the willingness of the US American public and elite to accept that a multicentric world of equals is incompatible with the belief that being number one is the only option. For example, the Australian James Curran claims that ‘America will not become a “normal nation”. It will not lose entirely that sense of special mission, simply because that part of its national creed runs so deep and because those in the foreign policy elite are creatures of their culture: the America in which they came to maturity and in which their world view was formed was the America of Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan, and Clinton. The Washington elite will not easily lose their taste for being a superpower. They will cling tightly to the vision and vigor inherent in the description of the United States as the “indispensable nation”’; see James Curran, ‘Americanism, not Globalism’, p. 16. A promoter of American exceptionalism 3.0 is Charles A. Kupchan, ‘The clash of exceptionalisms: A new fight over an old idea’, Foreign Affairs, March/April (2018), pp. 139–48. Others warn against the fallacy ‘that the US is largely immune to “the laws of history”’; see Lundestad, Geir, The Rise and Decline of the American ‘Empire’: Power and the Limits in Comparative Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁵ As mentioned, the placement of individual expert's beliefs by type and rule for action is approximate. Also, the investigator would have preferred more nationalists represented in this study.

⁸⁶ The case for a better integration of humanities, social sciences, and mixed methods in policy analysis is eloquently made by Desch, Michael, Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019)Google Scholar.