The Trump administration and US national security: taking stock

This event will take place a year after the US public voted to return Donald Trump to the Oval Office. In what ways have President Trump, his administration’s top officials, and other notable surrogates broken with his predecessor’s national security narrative and offered their own coherent narrative in its stead? What implications has this alternative narrative had for US national security policy? Are we witnessing simply a repeat performance of the first Trump administration’s greatest hits, or has the second Trump administration introduced new narrative elements?

Author of the award-winning Narrative and the Making of US National Security, and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Grand Strategy, Ron Krebs will take stock of the Trump administration and US national security a year after the election. Following Krebs' talk, a panel of LSE experts will join the discussion to share their views.

Meet our speakers and chair

Boram Lee is Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations at LSE. Boram's research interests lie in how value-based issues affect economic globalisation and how industrialised democracies negotiate human rights or environmental side agreements during trade negotiations to export their values to trading partners. Her book project examines how the US and the EU adopt different strategies to make those side agreements look credible in the eyes of their domestic constituencies and how those side agreements affect their relationships with partner countries.

Ronald Krebs is Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. His primary focus is international conflict and security. He has written extensively, for both scholarly and general interest publications, on US foreign policy; grand strategy; military recruitment and service; civil-military relations; and rhetoric, narrative, and politics. From 2020-2023, he was editor-in-chief of the journal Security Studies.

Katharine Millar is Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of International Relations at LSE. Her broad research interests lie in examining the gendered cultural narratives underlying political violence and the modern collective use of force. Her on-going research examines gender, race, sexuality and the transnational politics of death; gender and cybersecurity; and liberal notions of political belonging.

Luca Tardelli (@luca_tardelli) is Associate Professor (Education) in International Relations. His research focuses on international security, military intervention, and US foreign policy. His research draws primarily on both realism and political sociology to study the practice of military intervention, particularly how elite politics and elite relations shape US decisions to intervene in civil wars and revolutions.

Rohan Mukherjee (@rohan_mukh) is Assistant Professor and Deputy Director of LSE IDEAS in the Department of International Relations at LSE. His research focuses on rising powers and how they navigate the power and status hierarchies of international order. His regional focus is on the Asia-Pacific, particularly how major powers such as India, China, the United States, and Japan, and smaller states in south and southeast Asia, manage the regional effects of global transitions.

More about this event

The Department of International Relations (@LSEIRDept) at LSE is now in it's 98th year - one of the oldest as well as largest IR departments in the world, with a truly international reputation. We are ranked 2nd in the UK and 5th in the world in the QS World University Ranking by Subject 2025 tables for Politics and International Studies.

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