Maybe you think it’s a good thing that the United States is no longer considered the leader of the free world. Perhaps it’s for the best if we withdraw behind our borders and build a big wall and stay out of other people’s business. Maybe our economic well being doesn’t depend on global trade and we can solely rely on ourselves from here on it.
But even if all those things are true, since the planet is shared with a bunch of foreigners whether we like it or no, we should probably at least wonder what comes next. They certainly are.
Why in the world would we need this huge military? Will we only use it to form a blockade on the oceans and station soldiers atop walls on the northern and southern borders? Will we build a force field over our land mass to protect from flying missiles and climate change? Will we keep people in as well as keep others out? Because if all we are doing is “protecting our borders” this massive military seems a bit superfluous. Indeed, it might just give other countries the idea that we aren’t really isolationist after all.
Maybe all that is just fine and we can stop caring about anyone but ourselves and let the world go on without us. Lord knows we haven’t done a perfect job at keeping the peace although we did manage to avoid another world war or a nuclear exchange so there’s that.
China has now assumed the mantle of fighting climate change, a global crusade that the United States once led. Russia has taken over Syrian peace talks, also once the purview of the American administration, whose officials Moscow recently deigned to invite to negotiations only as observers.
France and Germany are often now the countries that fellow members of NATO look to, after President Trump wavered on how supportive his administration would be toward the North Atlantic alliance.
And in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the U.S., once the only mediator all sides would accept, has found itself isolated after Trump’s decision to declare that the U.S. recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
In his wide-ranging speech on national security last week, Trump highlighted what he called the broadening of U.S. influence throughout the world.
But one year into his presidency, many international leaders, diplomats and foreign policy experts argue that he has reduced U.S. influence or altered it in ways that are less constructive. On a range of policy issues, Trump has taken positions that disqualified the United States from the debate or rendered it irrelevant, these critics say.
Even in countries that have earned Trump’s praise, such as India, there is concern about Trump’s unpredictability — will he be a reliable partner? — and what many overseas view as his isolationism.
“The president can and does turn things inside out,” said Manoj Joshi, a scholar at a New Delhi think tank, the Observer Research Foundation. “So the chances that the U.S. works along a coherent and credible national security strategy are not very high.”
As the U.S. recedes, other powers including China, Russia and Iran are eagerly stepping into the void.
One significant issue is the visible gap between the president and many of his top national security advisors.
Trump’s national security speech was intended to explain to the public a 70-page strategy document that the administration developed. But on key issues, Trump’s speech and the document diverged. The speech, for example, included generally favorable rhetoric about Russia and China. The strategy document listed the two governments as competitors, accused the Russians of using “subversion” as a tactic and said that countering both rival powers was necessary.
Russia reacted angrily: America continues to evince “its aversion to a multipolar world,” President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, said.
At the same time, Trump’s refusal to overtly criticize Russia, some diplomats say, has emboldened Putin in his military actions in Ukraine, where Russian-backed rebels are battling a pro-West government in Kiev. Kurt Volker, the administration’s special envoy for Ukraine, said that some of the worst fighting since February took place over the past two weeks, with numerous civilian casualties. Volker accused Russia of “massive” cease-fire violations.
Nicholas Burns, who served as a senior American diplomat under Republican and Democratic administrations, said the administration’s strategy was riddled with contradictions that have left the U.S. ineffective.
Trump “needs a strong State Department to implement” its strategy, he said. “Instead, State and the Foreign Service are being weakened and often sidelined.”
Trump’s “policy of the last 12 months is a radical departure from every president since WWII,” Burns said in an interview. “Trump is weak on NATO, Russia, trade, climate, diplomacy. The U.S. is declining as a global leader.”
The most recent example of U.S. isolation came with Trump’s decision to formally recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, delighting many Israelis, but angering Palestinians and reversing decades of international consensus.
On Thursday, an overwhelming majority of the U.N. General Assembly, including many U.S. allies, voted to demand the U.S. rescind the decision.
For the last quarter-century, successive U.S. governments have held themselves up as an “honest broker” in mediating peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. Trump insisted he is not giving up on a peace deal, but most parties involved interpreted his announcement as clearly siding with Israel.
“From now on, it is out of the question for a biased United States to be a mediator between Israel and Palestine,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at a summit of more than 50 Muslim countries that he hosted in Istanbul. “That period is over.”
Daniel Kurtzer, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, said that if a peace deal is to be made now, “it won’t be from American policy.”
“Trump took himself and the administration out of the peace process for the foreseeable future,” he said.
Trump had boasted of his ability to convene Muslim leaders during his trip to Saudi Arabia in May, but that would seem far less possible today. In Jordan, arguably Washington’s closest Arab ally in the Middle East, government-controlled television has started 24-hour broadcasts of invitations to follow a Twitter account whose hashtag roughly translates as “Jerusalem is ours … our Arabness.”
Regional leaders and analysts also say that for all of Trump’s tough rhetoric, they see few concrete steps by the U.S. to counter Iran’s steady expansion of its military, economic and political influence, a perception that Iranian leaders are happy to exploit.
“Trump is ranting and making empty threats,” said Hamid Reza Taraghi, a conservative Iranian politician with close ties to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “Russia, China and Iran are gaining ground in the Middle East, and America is losing ground and influence.”
That view is also shared by Iranian moderates, with whom the Obama administration thought it could work.
“The reality on the ground in the Middle East is that the American administration has failed to form an efficient coalition against its self-proclaimed enemies,” said Nader Karimi Juni, an independent Iranian analyst who writes for reformist dailies and magazines.
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China has also benefited from Trump’s refusal to join other nations to work against climate change. Even as Trump removed climate change from the list of threats menacing the United States, China announced it would begin phasing in an ambitious program to curb carbon emissions by establishing the world’s largest market for trading emissions permits.
Trump was not invited to an international climate summit hosted earlier this month by French President Emmanuel Macron because of his decision to pull the United States out of 2015 international climate deal.
“You cannot pretend to be the guarantor of international order and get out of [an accord] as soon as it suits you,” Macron told France 2 TV.
Here’s the thing. Trump isn’t actually an isolationist. He has no coherent ideology. He is driven by a psychological desire to have everyone bow down to him and pay tribute, period. He is not building up the military in order to make America irrelevant in the world. He’s building it up because he believes the US should be able to run the world at the point of a gun,on its own terms. His vision, such as it is, is a world that pays the United States for favors and responds with gratitude and obeisance to US demands. He doesn’t want to withdraw he wants to dominate.
And in a way, regardless of what he actually does, merely electing him already did the damage. Any powerful country that could put such an unqualified cretin in charge is unfit for global leadership. The problem is that we have all these bombs and planes and ships and guns. What are they going to do about that? I wish I knew.
If you feel like dropping a little something into the Hullabaloo kitty over this holiday period, I would be most appreciative.
Happy New Year, everybody. Together we can get through this.
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Donald J. Trump