India, Feb. 20 -- In the past decade or less, since Donald Trump first became the US president in 2017, academicians have tried to make sense of his policy world, and coined several terms to describe it. In 2018, one of them suggested the phrase, "illiberal hegemony," and an analyst called it "reciprocity" in 2025. In between, "Trump has been called a realist, a nationalist, an old-fashioned mercantilist, an imperialist, and an isolationist," writes Stephen Walt, a professor at Harvard Kennedy School, in a recent article in Foreign Affairs (March-April 2026). He coins a new term, predatory hegemony, to describe Trump's antics.

Another article in the same issue, by Alexander Cooley, professor, Barnard College, and Daniel Nexon, professor,...