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The subtext of this extended commentary for the 2024 Policy Studies Yearbook in Politics & Policy is the crucial role that liberalism and civil rights must play in U.S. foreign policy if America is to be on the right side of history. Our explicit subject is the conflux of elite and populist forces that constantly work against such liberal‐democratic engagement. It is no secret that today's MAGAism ("Make America Great Again") wears many of the same antiliberal stripes as did postwar McCarthyism, which was its direct progenitor. Thanks largely to the center‐right resistance of President Eisenhower, McCarthyism was ultimately held in check domestically. Unfortunately, that was not the case on the side of U.S. foreign policy, where tenacious strains of antiliberalism had a very long shelf life. Thus, McCarthyism ended up having its most durable impact in the developing world, where cozy relations with highly reactionary regimes were considered necessary in the face of communist inroads. At a time when liberalism was hitting its full stride on American soil, U.S. foreign policy was exporting a very different America abroad, and especially in Asia. Even domestically, the waspish virulence of McCarthyism was never eradicated. It simply hibernated, and in 2016, it came back with a vengeance in the even more truculent form of Trumpism. Once again, xenophobic populism is laying claim to U.S. foreign policy and savaging liberal internationalism. The entrenched progressivism that stood its ground against McCarthyism has long since eroded. MAGAism faces no obstacle comparable to the dynamic liberalism of the 1950s or the counterculture of the 1960s. Seen from the perspective of January 6, 2021, the old McCarthyism looks tame by comparison. Related Articles: Craig, Stephen C., and Jason Gainous. 2024. "To Vote or Not to Vote? Fake News, Voter Fraud, and Support for Postponing the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election." Politics & Policy 52(1): 33–50. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12577. Haar, Roberta N., and Lutz F. Krebs. 2021. "The Failure of Foreign Policy Entrepreneurs in the Trump Administration." Politics & Policy 49(2): 446–78. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12399. Skidmore, Max J. 2023. "Abortion—Reactionary Theocracy Rises in America, While Declining Elsewhere." Politics & Policy 51(3): 437–57. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12534. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often charged that the will to represent the past, whether in fiction or nonfiction, is a cloak for the will to power. This caveat, however, should be balanced [...]

China's return to hard-power strategies in Asia represents more than a geopolitical sea change. It is not just Xi Jinping rejecting Deng Xiaoping's soft-power foreign policy, but the whole ethos of Dengism as the West has sorely misunderstood it. A generation of Western observers has taken this putative Dengism as the abiding essence of the China model. Its 'win/win' blueprint for China's rise became a central pillar of 'Washington Consensus' globalism, which is now giving way to the Sino-globalism ofXi's 'China Dream'. There is still talk of the peaceful rise', but Xi conditions his vision of Asian 'harmony' on the acceptance ofChina's regional supremacy. To comprehend the full implications of this hard-power shift is to recognise that the era of irenic globalism has ended and a new age of power politics has dawned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]