The Trump Doctrine: A Conversation with Aslı Ü. Bâli and Aziz Rana
This webinar is co-sponsored by Boston Review.
In their recent Boston Review essay, Quincy Institute non-resident fellows Aslı Ü. Bâli and Aziz Rana argue that the emerging “Trump doctrine” replaces multilateralism and international law with open-ended coercion, economic punishment, and the normalization of dominance over weaker states. They trace this framework back to the Biden Administration’s policy on Gaza, and how it treats sovereignty as conditional and wields sanctions, blockades, and force not as last resorts but as primary tools of policy.
Today, this doctrine reverberates from the Middle East to the Caribbean. As Israel was permitted to impose a siege on Gaza and prevent food and medicine from reaching civilians, critics warn that similar coercive logics are resurfacing elsewhere. In Cuba, the Trump administration is deepening shortages of food, fuel, and medicine through a naval blockade of the island, prompting accusations of collective punishment. What came permissible in Gaza is now being employed elsewhere, eroding decades of international norms designed to protect civilians.
Join us for a timely conversation with Bâli and Rana on what it means when great powers prioritize economic strangulation over diplomacy. How do such strategies reshape global norms—and who pays the human cost? And what will it ultimately mean for America if we march toward a world without these norms?
The conversation will be conducted by Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, on Monday, March 2 from 12:00 – 1:00 PM Eastern Time.
Program
Panelists
Aslı Ü. Bâli
Aslı Bâli is a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute and Professor at Yale Law School. Previously, she taught law at the UCLA School of Law, where she served as the founding Faculty Director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights and the Director of the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies. Bâli’s research focuses on two broad areas: public international law—including human rights law and the law of the international security order—and comparative constitutional law, with a focus on the Middle East. Her scholarship has appeared in the American Journal of International Law Unbound, Cornell International Law Journal, International Journal of Constitutional Law, University of Chicago Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Yale Journal of International Law, and Virginia Journal of International Law, among others.
Aziz Rana
Aziz Rana is a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute and professor of law at Cornell University. His research and teaching center on American constitutional law and political development. In particular, his work focuses on how shifting notions of race, citizenship, and empire have shaped legal and political identity since the founding. He is the author of "The Two Faces of American Freedom' (2010), a book that situates the American experience within the global history of colonialism, examining the intertwined relationship in American constitutional practice between internal accounts of freedom and external projects of power and expansion. His current book manuscript, Rise of the Constitution, explores the modern rise of constitutional veneration in the twentieth century.
Trita Parsi
Trita Parsi is co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute. He is an award-winning author and the 2010 recipient of the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. He is an expert on US-Iranian relations, Iranian foreign policy, and the geopolitics of the Middle East. He has authored four books on US foreign policy in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Iran and Israel. He has been named by the Washingtonian Magazine as one of the 25 most influential voices on foreign policy in Washington DC for five years in a row since 2021, and preeminent public intellectual Noam Chomsky calls Parsi “one of the most distinguished scholars on Iran.”