A Data Mining-Based Study of the Impact of Changing Trends in the U.S. Political Economy on Global Foreign Policy

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States lost its global strategic rivals, and it utilized its own powerful strength to establish a hegemonic foundation that meets its own interests in the fields of economy, military, and system to safeguard its own strategic interests and international status. Although the United States through the hegemonic stability and other theories for its hegemony to provide the legitimacy of the defense, but the United States hegemony of the underbelly of the hegemony is still hierarchical and powerful hegemonic substance [1-2]. In addition, the U.S. hegemonic strategy is different from other hegemonies in history, and the construction of institutions and the dissemination of values have become an important feature of its hegemonic strategy [3-5]. At the same time, the U.S. hegemonic strategy is also based on many parts of today’s international society, such as globalization system construction, the integration of the world economy, and so on, thus forming a consistent U.S. hegemonic characteristics in the name of freedom in the name of hegemony [6-8].

When the tide of liberalism in the U.S. hegemonic strategy appears to decline, the return of realism and conservatism will increase the U.S. destruction of today’s open world order, which will also bring more uncertainty to the world situation, and also bring greater challenges to the new type of great power relations [9-12]. So the impact of the overall transformation of the U.S. hegemonic strategy is a more worthy of thinking about the reality of international political issues. At the same time, analyzing the political and economic trends in the context of the transformation of the U.S. hegemonic strategy can form a certain degree of prediction of the U.S. foreign policy trends in the future, which will help China to better adopt corresponding means of risk prevention of the transformation of the U.S. hegemonic strategy, so as to better deal with the U.S.-China relations in a prudent manner [13-17].

This paper argues for a relatively novel perspective, aiming to reveal the mechanisms and paths through which U.S. Political polarization and economic recession have an impact on U.S. foreign policymaking towards the globe. Based on quantitative and qualitative research methods, we study U.S. foreign policy from the perspective of U.S. political polarization and economic recession, so as to draw regular conclusions and predict U.S. foreign policy as much as possible by using the correlation analysis algorithm in data mining. The research argumentation has certain systematic and correlation, mainly through the K-Means algorithm in data mining, mining the change trend of the US politics and economy, as well as the important nodes of the US foreign policy strategy to the world. Analyzing U.S. foreign policy by taking the formation mechanism of U.S. foreign policy as an entry point can provide new perspectives for examining foreign policy.

2

Data mining techniques

Data mining techniques are the product of a combination of multiple disciplines and technologies, and a very young and active field of research.It combines traditional data analysis methods with sophisticated algorithms for processing large amounts of data, and is used to explore large databases to discover previously unknown and useful patterns.

2.1

Data Mining Algorithms

2.1.1

Principal Component Analysis Algorithm

Factor analysis, also known as principal component analysis or principle factor analysis, is used to determine the relationship between variables and to reduce the number of variables for subsequent analysis. The aim is to construct a small number of linear combinations of the input variables that explain as much of the variability in the data as possible. These linear combinations are referred to as principal components and they form reduced-dimensional data that can be used for further analysis.

The steps of principal component analysis are as follows:

1) Calculate the correlation coefficient of the sample correlation matrix: (1) $r (x, y) = \frac{k (x, y)}{σ_{x}^{*} \cdot σ_{y}^{*}} = \frac{\sum n_{x y} x y - x^{*} y^{*}}{n σ_{x}^{*} \cdot σ_{y}^{*}}$

2) Compute the eigenvalues of the correlation matrix, i.e., the roots of the characteristic equation. Equation A_x = λ_x is satisfied, where x ≠ 0, is called the eigenvector and λ is the eigenvalue of the linear transformation A.

3) Compute all the eigenvalues of the correlation matrix: (2) $\begin{matrix} \det (A - λ E) = 0 & λ_{1} \geq λ_{2} \geq \dots \dots λ_{m} \geq 0 \end{matrix}$

4) Seek principal component (i = 1,2,⋯p) and select coefficient vector a_i = (a_i1,⋯a_ip)^T makes: (3) $a_{i 1}^{2} + a_{i 2}^{2} \dots + a_{i p}^{2} = 1$

That is, a_i is of length 1, and the variance of the linear combination a_i1X₁+⋯a_ipX_p is maximized for any 1 ≤ j ≤ i, a_i1a_j1⋯+a_ipa_jp = 0 (i.e., a_i is orthogonal to a_p).

Let Y_i = a_i1X₁ +⋯a_ipX_p, which is called the ith principal component.

5) Define the principal component contribution ratio: (4) $w_{k} = \sum_{j = 1}^{k} λ_{i} / \sum_{i = 1}^{n} λ_{i}$

2.1.2

Cluster analysis algorithms

Cluster analysis is an unsupervised data mining method that groups data based solely on information about objects and their relationships. The goal is that objects within a group have maximum similarity to each other and objects between groups have minimum similarity, and the greater the similarity within a group and the greater the difference between groups, the better the clustering effect. Usually similarity can be converted into distance for operation, such as Euclidean distance, Manhattan distance, and so on.

Broadly speaking, the main clustering methods can be divided into the following categories:

1) Based on the division method, K-means.

2) Hierarchical based methods, Chameleon.

3) Density-based methods, DBSCAN.

4) Grid-based methods, STING.

5) Model-based methods, etc.

2.1.3

Correlation analysis algorithms

Association rule is a simple but practical rule in the data, which belongs to the descriptive pattern. The purpose of mining it is to discover interesting associations or interrelationships between item sets in the database. Association analysis is based on the probability of occurrence of events that meet certain statistical significance and conditional probability of statistics and mining, in order to facilitate the rapid discovery of those events that have a practical value of the occurrence of the association.

The basic idea of the algorithm is:

1) Find all the frequent sets of itemsets that occur at least as frequently as the predefined minimum support.

2) Generate strong association rules from the frequency sets, which must satisfy minimum support and minimum confidence.

3) Generate the desired rules using the frequency sets found in step 1, generating all rules that contain only the items of the set, where each rule has only one item in its right-hand part. Once these rules are generated, then only those rules that are greater than the minimum confidence level given by the user are left. In order to generate all the frequency sets, a recursive approach is used.

2.2

Data Mining in the U.S. Political Economy

In this paper, we use K-Means, a data mining algorithm, to explore the changing trends in US politics and economy, as well as the significant nodes of US diplomatic strategy throughout the globe. K-Means is a prototype-based, divisive clustering technique. It attempts to discover clusters (represented by centers of mass) of user-specified number (K), defining the prototype in terms of centers of mass, where the center of mass is the mean value of a set of points, typically used for objects in n-dimensional continuous space [18].

Let N denote the number of observations, x_i denote the ird observation (i = 1⋯N). Let K denote the number of categories, C_i(l = 1,⋯K) denote the set of ordinal numbers of observations belonging to the lth category, and C(i)(i = 1⋯N) denote the ordinal number of the category to which observation i belongs.

k The distance measure commonly used in the mean clustering method is the Minowski distance: (5) $d (x, y) = {[\sum_{r = 1}^{p} {| x_{r} - y_{r} |}^{m}]}^{\frac{1}{m}}$

Default m=2 (i.e., Euclidean distance is used by default).

k The specific steps of the mean clustering method are as follows:

1) Initialize the centers of the K categories v₁⋯v_k.

2) In each cycle:

Reassign each observation to the class whose category center has the smallest distance from it: (6) $C_{i} = \arg \min_{i \leq j \leq k} d (x_{i}, v_{j}), i = 1 \dots, N$

where argmin denotes the search for the value of argument (l) that minimizes function d(x_i,v_j).

Recalculate the category center: (7) $v_{i} = \arg \min \sum_{i \in c_{i}} d (x_{i}, v), l = 1, \dots, K$

Continue cycling until the change in all category centers is minimal or the pre-specified maximum number of cycles is reached.

3

Characterization of the transmission mechanism of United States economic policy

After the financial crisis of 2008, the United States economy fell into recession. The banking industry was hit by a major blow, self-care, resulting in a sharp decline in credit activity, the real economy to obtain financial support greatly reduced, the CPI index remains high, the Dow Jones index plummeted more than even the third quarter of that year, there was a negative growth in GDP. In response to this bad situation, the Federal Reserve has implemented a series of monetary policies, in various ways to increase market liquidity, in order to achieve the purpose of stimulating economic recovery, stabilize the market and repair the banking system.

3.1

United States economic policy adjustments

3.1.1

U.S. quantitative easing monetary policy

As a result of the financial crisis caused by the subprime mortgage crisis, a large number of American small and medium-sized enterprises have gone bankrupt or are on the verge of collapse, which has had a huge impact on the real economy of the United States. However, the re-use of traditional monetary policies has not been enough to quench thirst and cannot cause changes in the real economy.In order to prevent the erosion of the crisis on the real economy, and to help enterprises save money from liquidity difficulties, the Federal Reserve is bold in its monetary policy. The new monetary policy tools from financial institutions directly to the Federal Reserve to expand the object of the rescue to enterprises, the results make the enterprise can be directly from the Federal Reserve to obtain funds, shorten the time lag of monetary policy, improve efficiency, to avoid greater losses, and rebuild the market confidence at the same time play an important role.

Since 2008, the U.S. government has launched a series of rescue initiatives, including increased spending, tax cuts, increased transfer payments, and strengthening the social safety net. The United States Federal Reserve Board has continued to introduce various forms of accommodative monetary policy, including lowering the federal funds rate to 0-0.25 per cent, expanding the scale of asset purchases (the QE series), and adjusting the monetary policy target.

3.1.2

Characteristics of the political transmission mechanism

The spillover effects of the exit of quantitative easing (QE) in the United States, which is the transmission mechanism, are shown in Figure 1. It focuses on the real economy and politics. [19]

Real economy level:

1) U.S. exit from QE is conditional on a solid recovery of the U.S. economy, and the rise in U.S. demand is favorable to the growth of foreign trade in other countries.

2) As the U.S. exits QE, the supply of U.S. dollars will decline, or trigger a decline in international commodity prices denominated in U.S. dollars, and global imported inflationary pressures will ease.

Political level:

1) Withdrawal of QE, the supply of U.S. dollars will decrease, and countries other than the U.S. will face certain depreciation pressure and international capital outflow pressure, leading to the decline of trade globalization and the formation of a unilateral protection mechanism.

2) From the current situation, with the steady recovery of the U.S. economy, the Federal Reserve interest rate hike in 2025 is a probable event, the narrowing of the interest rate differential between the U.S. and other countries will exacerbate the depreciation pressure of non-dollar currencies and international capital outflow pressure. This will increase liquidity pressure in the global financial market, and will increase the difficulty of policy regulation by the monetary authorities of various countries during the process of economic restructuring.

3.2

The emergence of a small multilateral foreign policy

After the financial crisis in 2008, the United States withdrew from the quantitative easing policy (QE), is the United States to the global foreign policy of the era of a major shift in the strategic contraction and the transfer of strategic resources is the United States of America’s diplomacy in a new stage, the formation of a small multilateral foreign policy of the underlying logic as shown in Figure 2. At this time, the United States in the process of advancing the Asia-Pacific strategy is faced with two dilemmas.

The first is the multilateral diplomatic dimension. With the relative decline of its international reputation and national strength, the institutional power and legitimacy power enjoyed by the U.S. are declining, and its leadership of multilateralism is not as good as it once was, so the difficulty of constructing a multilateral mechanism in the Asia-Pacific region has steeply increased.

The second level is the management level of the Asia-Pacific hub-and-spoke alliance system. In the context of strategic contraction, United States’ "Asia-Pacific rebalancing" strategy does not want to increase the total amount of resources invested in its global strategy, according to this underlying logic, the new Asia-Pacific strategy should encourage Asia-Pacific allies to share more costs and make more contributions, and avoid them choosing a "free-riding" strategy.

Thus, small multilateral diplomacy meets both the theoretical and political rationale that has emerged in the United States’ development strategy.

4

Impact of changes in the political economy of the United States on its foreign policy

This paper uses quantitative and qualitative research methods to study U.S. foreign policy from the perspectives of U.S. political polarization and economic recession from the perspective of influencing mechanisms and paths, so as to draw regular conclusions and predict U.S. foreign policy as much as possible using correlation analysis algorithms.

4.1

Political polarization in the United States

4.1.1

Timing of political polarization

Political polarization can be understood as “partisan polarization”, i.e., a decrease in moderates and a decrease in influence in Congress. Conversely, partisan ideology has increased, as evidenced by the increasing polarization of partisan ideology among party members, activists, and leaders. There is a tendency towards either the conservative or liberal end of the spectrum, with a high degree of ideological homogenization and increased cohesion within parties. This situation may lead to a situation where members of both parties’ positions on common policy issues are completely drawn along partisan lines, and where partisan competition is so intense that it is difficult, if not outright refusal, to compromise. Using the K-Means algorithm, this paper speaks to the changing trends of political polarization pairs in the U.S. A cluster analysis finds that political polarization under the Trump administration is the peak of political polarization in the U.S. after the Cold War

1) The overall trend of clustering indicates that political polarization peaked during the Trump administration after the Cold War

Political polarization has peaked under Trump, and in a way, Trump is the result of that polarization.In 2017, the Pew Research Center released a report that investigated the polarization trends in American politics from 1994 to 2017 as shown in Figure 3. A survey of the political values of the American public over the past 20 years found that the median support of the Democratic Party for freedom was 0.61, and the median support of the Republican Party for conservatism was 0.32, and the two parties in the United States had a serious trend of polarization, with the median gradually moving to both sides. There has been an increase in the possession of ideologically aligned values among the U.S. public and an increasing correlation of these political values with party affiliation, with these shifts particularly evident among the politically concerned American public.

2) Concrete manifestations of political polarization at its peak during the Trump administration

In addition to the abstract illustrations of partisan polarization, the greatest bipartisan variation, and thus polarization, has been seen on specific issues such as “percentage of both parties approving of the president’s job performance,” “percentage believing that immigrant efforts and talents have strengthened the United States,” and “percentage believing that the nation’s economy is in excellent or good shape,” among others. The bipartisan difference, or polarization, has also been greatest under the Trump administration in areas such as “percentage who think the president’s job performance is excellent or good,” and “percentage who think the country’s economy is in excellent or good shape.

As shown in Figure 4, the percentage of both parties approving of the president’s job performance is only 8.7% for the Democratic Party (DEM) during the Trump administration. The Republican Party (REP) is at 83%, although this is not an all-time high. But the 8.7% presidential job approval rate for the rival party, the Democrats, gives Trump the worst title, and since President Eisenhower in 1952, Trump is the only president to receive a single-digit approval rate from his rival party.

Using the above chart as a blueprint, the results of the four presidential administrations in terms of Democratic and Republican approval of their work are listed as shown in Table 1. The percentage difference between the two parties was also calculated and can be seen to rise from a 34% difference during the Reagan administration all the way up to a 76% difference during the Trump administration.

Table 1.

Comparison of two party approval rates by administration after the Cold War

Government period	Democratic approval rate	Republican approval rate	Percentage difference
Trump	83%	7%	76%
Obama	17%	80%	63%
G.W. Bush	82%	25%	57%
Clinton	32%	77%	45%
G.H.W. Bush	71%	27%	44%
Reagan	72%	38%	34%

The statistics on the percentages of both parties who think the country’s economy is in excellent or good shape are shown in Figure 5, where both parties’ ratings of the country’s economy were essentially similar under the Clinton administration, increased under the Bush administration, and then this variability narrowed relatively under the Obama administration. But after the Trump administration, the difference changed abruptly, creating a 34% difference to a maximum. This suggests a difference in how the two parties feel about the state of the nation’s economy, with Republicans in particular reflecting a clear ideological bent, jumping rapidly from about 10% satisfaction in 2017 to about 40% in 2020, and then cascading to 72% satisfaction in 2021, late in the Trump administration.

4.1.2

Impact of political polarization on global foreign policy

The impact of U.S. political polarization on its global foreign policy, this paper mainly through the U.S. political polarization affects the president and congressional two levels to explain the impact of political polarization on foreign policy, the following figure clearly and simply presents the path of influence of political polarization on U.S. foreign policy as shown in Figure 6. Its simple representation of the relationship between political polarization and U.S. foreign policymaking, that is, the path of influence.

The impact of U.S. political polarization on Congress’s formulation of global foreign policy can be discussed on two levels:

1) On the one hand, the mass and elite polarization of political polarization can be manifested in the election of members of Congress, where different members of Congress are elected because of different degrees of political polarization. Therefore, from this point of view, members of the National Assembly are in fact the products of political polarization, and the veto power and the power to make laws exercised by them are inevitably affected by political polarization.

2) On the other hand, in the decision-making process of members of Congress, mass and elite polarization can also have a constant impact on the global foreign policy of the United States.

Overall, congressional influence on foreign policymaking is long-term, pervasive, and somewhat decisive. Long-term means that it takes a long time for a bill to be introduced and become law, and in the short term, it does not appear to have a substantial impact. However, the process from introduction to law is pervasive, and once it becomes law, it is strongly binding and decisive.

4.2

Recession in the United States

4.2.1

Timing of the recession

By digging into the economic data of the United States, it was found that the great recession of the United States economy began in 2008 with the global financial crisis. During this period, the “China Threat Theory” within the U.S. was again hot, as the main creator and leader of the post-war international system, the U.S. began to worry more and more about the rise of China will become an important challenger to the international system, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, the U.S. believes that it has already felt the impact on its hegemonic status of China’s economic cooperation and regional security order, and the sense of insecurity of the U.S. due to the rise of China has increased. The United States believes that it has effectively felt the impact of China’s hegemonic position in economic cooperation and regional security order, and the sense of insecurity generated by China’s rise has increased. Therefore, the U.S. formulated the “Asia-Pacific rebalancing” strategy in order to slow down the process of power transfer between the hegemonic powers and the rising powers.

After the Great Recession, the real need to restore economic development prompted the United States to shift its strategic center of gravity to the Asia-Pacific region. The Asia-Pacific region not only has a large population and a huge market, but also brings together the world’s most rapidly developing emerging economies, the world’s second-largest economy, China, and the world’s third-largest economy, Japan, are both located in the Asia-Pacific region. 2008 after the outbreak of the global financial crisis, the Asian region has been less affected by the impact of the economic development of the momentum is still strong, and the economic growth rate of the Asian countries, except for Japan, was generally more than 7% in 2010, and the contribution of Asia to the world economy is more than that of Japan. In 2010, the economic growth rate of Asian countries, excepting Japan, exceeded 7%, and Asia’s contribution to the global economy exceeded that of North America and the European Union (EU) by as much as 28.5%.

After the global financial crisis, the Asia-Pacific countries represented by China contain a huge potential to change the global economic pattern, and Asia is beginning to be regarded as the engine of global economic recovery and economic growth. The U.S., on the other hand, has been slow to recover from the “Great Recession,” with high unemployment and low consumer sentiment. The statistics released by the U.S. Census Bureau are shown in Figure 7. The report shows that in 2009, the U.S. population below the poverty line rose from 36.52 million in 2008 to 45.36 million, reaching 15.04% of the total U.S. population, which set a record for the highest number of poor people in the U.S. over the past 51 years, and in 2010, this number reached 54.22 million people. To date, the last “Great Recession” was a period of epidemics, and the number and proportion of people living in poverty has risen significantly, with no clear downward trend to date.

4.2.2

Impact of the recession on global foreign policy

After the global financial crisis in 2008, the U.S. economy entered a recession, and the Trump administration has stepped out of the traditional diplomatic model of “bilateral alliance system + multilateral diplomacy”, and is now empowering its allies and partners in the region with more vitality through a small multilateral foreign policy.

The Biden administration has also made no real effort to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), and in July 2021, the U.S. Trade Promotion Authority Act (TPA) will expire.However, as of 2024, the Biden administration has made no real progress in renewing TPA. This bill is an important tool for the U.S. To secure new trade agreements, the White House can submit a trade agreement to Congress. The U.S. government has given more jurisprudential support to small-multilateral diplomacy at the legislative level and more policy tools at the executive level, and developments at both levels have led to a strengthened position for small-multilateral foreign policy in U.S. foreign strategy.

The U.S. government’s financial capacity for development was boosted by the Making Good Use of Investment for Development Act, signed into law by Trump during his presidency, which was able to promote U.S. investment in developing countries and was seen as a direct policy tool for the U.S. government to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative. In conjunction with the Act, the U.S. expansion of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue to include infrastructure financing will be smoother. However, after the Biden administration took office, it also actively used domestic legislation to complement small multilateral diplomacy. In the case of science and technology security, for example, the Biden administration has attempted to form a small multilateral science and technology alliance in order to restrict China’s technological exchanges with the United States or other countries and to normalize the technological embargo against China.

4.3

Future Directions for U.S. Global Foreign Policy

Political polarization and economic recession in the dual context of data mining this paper research that the United States of America’s global foreign policymaking in the future direction of the following three points:

1)

The role of the president in foreign policymaking is becoming more and more important

As the phenomenon of domestic political polarization in the United States continues to intensify, the degree of polarization of political parties will continue to deepen, the two parties on a certain topic to reach agreement on the difficulty is also increasingly large, in the case of two-party stalemate, the president’s “executive order” has become more and more important.

On the one hand, in the case of bipartisan stalemate, the president can sign an “executive order” directly on an international event to take direct measures to respond to this time the president’s personal political awareness of the preference is particularly important, determining the United States foreign policy decisions in what direction.

On the other hand, the president signed the “executive agreement” can also improve the efficiency of diplomatic decision-making, an effective solution to the two parties on the decision-making of an international event deadlocked diplomatic decision-making efficiency decline in the situation.

2)

Increased Swing in Diplomatic Decision-Making

Political polarization and economic recession have led to the possibility of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party in power adjusting to the foreign policy decisions of the previous party.As political polarization and economic recession continue to intensify, this adjustment in foreign policymaking has become increasingly obvious.

3)

Longer cycle of foreign policy making

On the one hand, by the impact of political polarization, the rigidity of bipartisan relations, so that the two parties on an international event in the foreign policy decision-making has not been able to reach agreement, which will make the foreign policy decision-making time compared to the previous than a substantial increase in the president, if necessary, but also need to sign the “executive order” to break the deadlock, reduce the time of decision-making.

On the other hand, due to the economic recession, the House of Representatives holds important financial power and is unable to maintain the huge financial welfare expenditures, foreign aid, etc., while the Senate is mainly responsible for foreign policy agreements and other aspects. However, due to political polarization, the Senate and the House of Representatives have mutual checks and balances on each other, which makes the process of hearing and implementing foreign policy decisions longer.

5

Conclusion

The United States, as one of the most influential countries in the world today, has politics and an economy that produce great influence that can be extended from within to the global. Attention to the changing trend of the U.S. political economy is of great significance to analyze the U.S. foreign policy towards the world and predict the direction of its foreign policy. Under a specific political environment, when the U.S. political polarization is at a low ebb, but the U.S. foreign policy is becoming more extreme and aggressive. On the contrary, when political polarization is at its peak, U.S. foreign policy tends to be more rational, calm, and defensive. Second, from the perspective of the House and Senate majority party, the different state ratio and the post-Cold War average comparison show that the United States Congress in the majority party has different congressional political polarization that is higher, but the overall foreign policy through the rate is not necessarily lagging behind the average and is, in general, higher than the average, so the impact on foreign policy presents complexity. Under economic pressure, the United States is changing from the “bilateral alliance system as the main + multilateral diplomacy as a complement” to the traditional foreign policy model and is changing to a small multilateral foreign policy. It is attempting to establish a small multilateral science and technology alliance to restrict China’s technological exchanges with the United States or other countries, and the technological embargo against China will become normalized.

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A Data Mining-Based Study of the Impact of Changing Trends in the U.S. Political Economy on Global Foreign Policy

Yihao Chen

Publicado en línea: 17 mar 2025

Recibido: 28 oct 2024

Aceptado: 02 feb 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/amns-2025-0278

Palabras claveData mining, K-Means algorithm, Small multilateral diplomacy, Political polarization, Economic recession

© 2025 Yihao Chen, published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Palabras clave
Data mining, K-Means algorithm, Small multilateral diplomacy, Political polarization, Economic recession