Political Reckoning
America’s global standing is at a low point. The pandemic made it worse.
Under Trump, the United States retreats from collaborative leadership at a
time of global crisis
President Trump walks to Marine One for a departure
from the South Lawn of the White House on July 15, 2020. (Jabin
Botsford/The Washington Post)
By
July 26, 2020 / Washington Post
America’s standing in the world is at a
low ebb. Once described as the indispensable nation, the United States is now
seen as withdrawn and inward-looking, a reluctant and unreliable partner at a
dangerous moment for the world. The coronavirus pandemic has only made things
worse.
President Trump shattered a 70-year
consensus among U.S. presidents of both political parties that was grounded in
the principle of robust American leadership in the world through alliances and
multilateral institutions. For decades, this approach was seen at home and
abroad as good for the world and good for the United States.
In its place, Trump has substituted his
America First doctrine and what his critics say is a zero-sum-game sensibility
about international relationships. America First has been described variously
as nationalistic, populistic, isolationist and unilateralist. The president has
demeaned allies and emboldened adversaries such as China and Russia.
At home, Trump’s handling of the pandemic
has created division and confusion rather than an effective national strategy.
The rest of the world sees the United States not as a leader in dealing with
the coronavirus but as the country with the highest number of coronavirus
infections and covid-19 deaths, and with the disease far from under control.
European nations have responded with the unprecedented step of blocking
Americans from entering their countries.
From abroad, the United States is seen as
having lost confidence in itself as it grapples not only with the pandemic but
also with long-standing political divisions and a racial reckoning over the
treatment of black Americans. The perceived loss of confidence among Americans
in turn has led others to question the United States’ appetite or capacity for
a collaborative leadership role at a time when the health and economic crises
call out for committed global cooperation.
Before the pandemic, the president took a
number of steps that signaled a retreat from collective involvement abroad,
pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, the Iran nuclear deal and the
Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact. He raised doubts about the U.S.
commitment to NATO. After a long-running quarrel with German Chancellor Angela
Merkel, he has called for the withdrawal of more than a quarter of the 34,500
U.S. troops stationed in Germany.
Trump delivers remarks on “Operation
Legend: Combating Violent Crime in American Cities” at the White House on July
22. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Since the pandemic struck, Trump has
continued to pull back. When other nations’ leaders gathered by video to rally
behind and provide funding for the development of a coronavirus vaccine, the
United States skipped the meeting. When many world leaders participated in a
World Health Organization assembly on the pandemic, the president was absent.
Trump’s anger with China over the virus ultimately prompted him to withdraw the
United States from the WHO.
“People are stunned about the effect of
incapable leadership, or of polarizing leadership, of not being able to unify
and get the forces aligned so you can address the problem [of the
coronavirus],” said Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, a vice president of the German
Marshall Fund and director of its Berlin office. “And that, of course, results
in a nosedive in how you view [the United States]. What you’re seeing is a
collapse of soft power of America.”
“I think the U.S. is seen from my
perspective as being involved in its own internal reckoning — like the rest of
the world doesn’t really exist,” said Robin Niblett, director and chief
executive of Chatham House, a think tank in London. “It’s America trying to
battle with historical and contemporary demons that as much as anything are a
result of its own internal contradictions and tensions and strengths and
weaknesses. And it’s not all bad. I’m just saying it is like really seeing
somebody’s psychological flaws exposed at a moment of stress.”
Political Reckoning
A series exploring the
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pace
Trump gets credit, even if sometimes
grudgingly, for asking uncomfortable questions and challenging old assumptions.
He has forced other nations to take a tougher approach to China and to
reappraise the costs of globalization. His badgering of NATO allies to spend
more on defense, however irritating to the allies, produced results that had
eluded previous presidents.
“If you look at the world, it is an
alliance of liberty coming around to face the existential threat of our time,
which is the totalitarian dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party,” said
Stephen K. Bannon, who served as chief strategist in the White House early in
the Trump administration and has long been a proponent of a nationalistic
foreign policy. “The axis and the allies here are very well defined.”
But despite acknowledgments that Trump has
at times raised legitimate questions, overall assessments of the effect of his
approach to the world are harsh — with fears that the pandemic will do further
damage over time.
“It hurts our brand. It hurts the status
of our institutions. It’s going to weaken our economy and our economic power
and soft power as a consequence,” said Stephen J. Hadley, who was a national
security adviser to President George W. Bush. “It’s potentially a real
setback.”
Protesters rally in London’s Parliament Square
on Feb. 20, 2017, against Trump’s proposed state visit to Britain. (Jack
Taylor/Getty Images)
By the numbers,
a loss of confidence in U.S. leadership
This is not the first time the world has
held America in low esteem. The U.S. invasion of Iraq cost the country dearly,
in lives and in prestige. George W. Bush left office highly unpopular,
especially in Europe. Earlier, America’s image was tarnished by the red-baiting
of then-Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) in the 1950s, the bloody civil rights
clashes of the 1960s, the Watergate scandal that led to Nixon’s resignation in
the 1970s and the Iran hostage crisis later that decade.
Still, by the numbers, Trump had an
immediate and negative impact. A Gallup survey of impressions of world
leadership after the first year of Trump’s presidency saw the rating of U.S.
leadership plummet by 20 points — lower than Bush’s worst rating.
The following year, approval of U.S.
leadership remained similarly low, and disapproval was higher than for the
leadership in Germany, China and Russia. “In this climate, China’s leadership
has gained a larger advantage in the ‘great power competition,’ and the other
player, Russia, is now on a more even level with the U.S.,” the Gallup report
said.
The Pew Research Center issued a report in
January on international attitudes toward the United States and found 64
percent of people across 32 countries saying they had no confidence in Trump as
the U.S. leader, though impressions of the U.S. as a whole remained positive.
Trump’s ratings were slightly better than the previous year. Pew analysts said
that was because of increased support from those on the right in other nations,
including those who support right-wing populist parties in their countries.
The same phenomenon showed up in an annual
Gallup survey of satisfaction among Americans with the U.S. position in the
world. The 2020 survey found that category of satisfaction at 53 percent, up
from 32 percent in early 2017. The difference was attributable in large part to
a big shift among Republicans. Coming out of the Obama years in 2017,
47 percent of Republicans said they were satisfied with the U.S. position
in the world. After three years under Trump, that had risen to 85 percent.
A report issued last month by the
Bertelsmann Foundation, the German Marshall Fund of the United States and
Institut Montaigne found that, in Germany, France and the United States,
America was seen as the world’s most influential country both before and during
the pandemic, but the report noted that “China’s influence has risen
significantly.”
A recent poll asked Germans how their
perceptions of other countries have changed as a result of the pandemic. More
than 7 in 10 said their impressions of the United States have deteriorated.
Only 5 percent said their impressions had improved. China, which Trump has
criticized sharply for its handling of the pandemic, did not come off well,
either, but in comparison, far less badly than the United States.
When Pew asked Americans in May to rate
the performance of various countries with respect to the coronavirus, the
United States was rated lower than three other countries—South Korea, Germany
and Britain.
U.N. Secretary General António Guterres,
second from left, and Trump, center, at a meeting on reform of the United
Nations at U.N. headquarters in New York on Sept. 18, 2017. (Brendan
Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)
The
discontinuity of Trump’s foreign policy
On Sept. 2, 1987, Trump, at the time a New
York real estate developer toying with a run for president, bought a full-page
ad in three major newspapers to publish an open letter to the American people
outlining his views on foreign and defense policy. It was a view of the world
and America’s place in it that he would carry largely unchanged into the White
House almost 30 years later.
He did not use the words “America First”
but that was the essence of his message. For decades, he argued, “other nations
have been taking advantage of the United States.” He said the world “is
laughing at America’s politicians” for doing work beneficial to others at the
expense of those at home. He said the United States was absorbing the costs of
protecting other nations that could and should pay more.
At the time, Japan and Saudi Arabia were
among his principal targets. In office, it has become China and the nations of
NATO, which together make up the United States’ most important military
alliance. But if the targets are different, the philosophy has changed little.
America has been played for a sucker, and it’s time to call a halt.
The elements of his America First
worldview include a focus on trade, with tariffs as a weapon; a more
restrictive immigration policy; pressing others to pay more of the cost of
mutual defense; and a reliance on bilateral rather than multilateral
negotiations. His style is transactional and highly personal, and while he has
been critical of the leaders of democratic countries such as Germany and
France, and Britain earlier, he has been reluctant to criticize authoritarian
leaders including Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping (the latter at
least until recently).
In a speech to the United Nations General
Assembly in September 2019, Trump said: “If you want freedom, take pride in
your country. If you want democracy, hold on to your sovereignty. And if you
want peace, love your nation. Wise leaders always put the good of their own
people and their own country first. The future does not belong to globalists.
The future belongs to patriots. The future belongs to sovereign and independent
nations.”
Trump addresses the United Nations General
Assembly in New York on Sept. 24, 2019. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in a
speech to the Heritage Foundation’s President’s Club last October, said the
administration was approaching the world realistically. “We’ve recognized that
we can’t be all things to everywhere, all the time,” he said. “No nation has
the capacity to deliver that. And that means not that you abandon the field but
that you calibrate your resources to effectively address the relative risks. . . . I am confident that the next
administrations will come into office and they’ll see these issues the same way because they’re right.”
On their face, those words are not
particularly discordant. But analysts who have served presidents of both
parties come to a different conclusion. They say Trump’s presidency has marked
the greatest discontinuity in American foreign policy since World War II.
“President Trump is acting as no
administration acted since the 1920s,” said Nicholas Burns, a career Foreign
Service officer and former U.S. ambassador to NATO now teaching at Harvard’s
Kennedy School. “Those presidents were engaged in the world. President Trump
isn’t. He’s almost at war with the world.”
Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago
Council on Global Affairs and U.S. ambassador to NATO during the administration
of President Barack Obama, said of Trump, “He doesn’t believe in alliances,
open markets, promotion of freedom and human rights — the three pillars of
[American] foreign policy. On the essential concept of the United States as the
global leader of the international order, Donald Trump has thrown that all out
the window.”
“What Donald Trump is doing is badly
damaging the belief by people outside the United States that we still
understand that that system [of alliances] is in our best interests, as well as
the interest of other countries,” said Kori Schake, director of foreign and
defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute, who served in the
administration of George W. Bush. “We act like treaties and participation in
international organizations is some kind of big favor we are doing everyone
else.”
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said Trump’s
benign treatment of authoritarian leaders such as Putin, Xi and North Korea’s
Kim Jong Un has produced no obvious positive results or benefits for the United
States. “He would argue this is part of his grand strategy to get them to be
better neighbors,” Romney said. “The disproof of that is the lack of pudding.”
Romney pointed to Trump’s decision to
withdraw from the WHO to argue that going it alone is the wrong strategy. “It’s
a very symbolic decision to say the WHO is too influenced by China and we’re
going to get out of it so it can be completely dominated by China, instead of
saying we’re going to flex our muscle and make sure the WHO gets in line,” he
said.
Across the political spectrum of national
security analysts, including some who give the president credit in specific
areas of foreign policy, there is agreement that the pandemic underscores the
damage caused by the president.
Tom Donilon, who was a national security
adviser to Obama, said: “By almost every measure, America’s standing and
influence in the world has been damaged over the last three-and-a-half years. . . . You see it during a crisis. This is the
first global crisis probably since World War II where the United States has not
been in the lead. It’s kind of a
stunning thing to see a transnational challenge like this without U.S.
leadership.”
Through a smashed wall, a view of a
devastated street in the Salaheddine district of the Syrian city of Aleppo on
Aug. 22, 2013. (Louai Abo Al-Jod/AFP/Getty Images)
Trump disrupts,
but is there an effective strategy?
In the years after the end of the Cold War,
the United States was the world’s lone superpower. But it never was quite the
indispensable nation as those words began to be used in the late 1990s.
Defenders say the description was employed
by officials in President Bill Clinton’s administration in part to encourage
Americans to resist isolationist impulses and to remain involved in the world
after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
As the world changed, the role of the
United States changed, too. Other nations rose to power. China’s economic
prowess gave it standing it had lacked, and then Xi turned his country in a
sharply anti-democratic direction. Russia under Putin became a global nemesis.
India’s power expanded. The United States became bogged down in two wars in the
Middle East that cost thousands of lives, stretched its military thin and
sapped the appetite among the public for foreign adventures.
Anecdotally, a shift in perceptions about
America’s desire for global leadership began before Trump was elected. One
moment that many abroad cite is when Obama failed to follow through on his
threat to retaliate militarily after Syria crossed his “red line” by using
chemical weapons against its own people. Obama’s decision sent a damaging
signal to allies.
Before Trump, opposition to globalism was
growing. The most conspicuous example of how the politics were changing came
when Hillary Clinton, who as secretary of state had advocated for the
negotiation of a Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact, refused to endorse the
agreement as a candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2016.
Others cited the financial crisis in 2008
and 2009 as another moment when others, particularly China, fed perceptions of
U.S. decline. Efforts to extract the country’s military from Iraq and
Afghanistan added to the idea of the United States pulling back.
Both Obama and Trump campaigned against
endless wars in the Middle East, and analysts argue that both presidents
thought the United States needed to right-size itself globally — though the two
leaders approached that mission in radically different ways. Obama still sought
engagement in the world through allied institutions. Trump has preferred that
America go it alone.
“I think this has been coming,” Chatham
House’s Niblett said. “Trump is a rude awakening, maybe a necessarily rude
awakening, to a shift that’s been happening for at least the last 15 or 20
years, since the end of the Cold War.”
If Trump’s style draws near-universal
criticism, not every policy of his does, whether it is helping to arm Ukraine
and moving an armored brigade into Poland as a counter to Russian aggression,
or pushing back on China’s moves in the South China Sea. In this
interpretation, Trump’s policies recall an old line about the composer Richard
Wagner, of whom it was said that his music was better than it sounded.
Bannon said that Trump has been far ahead
of the American foreign policy elites on China and has “boxed in the
globalists” and the campaign of former vice president Joe Biden with his
hawkish approach. He pointed to statements by senior administration officials
this summer that have laid out the case against the Chinese in aggressive
terms.
Bannon called it “nonsense” to suggest
that Trump is not leading the world on what he described as the major issue of
the day. He argued that the president has spoken with the same kind of force
and clarity on China that marked President Ronald Reagan’s posture and rhetoric
toward the Soviet Union in the 1980s. “The world is coming together [on
China],” he said. “Those are the facts.”
Chinese and U.S. flags are positioned for
a meeting between Chinese Transport Minister Li Xiaopeng and U.S.
Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao at the Chinese Ministry of Transport in
Beijing on April 27, 2018. (Jason Lee/AFP/Getty Images)
Others see Trump as a problem identifier
without policies to solve the problems he identifies. They see his China policy
as one-dimensional, focused principally on trade, and ask what is the
relationship with China that he is seeking and how would he try to make it
happen. “The Trump administration can’t say what’s the point we’re aiming for,”
said Schake, the AEI policy director. “What’s the China we want? That makes it
harder to get everybody organized.”
Romney argued that Trump would have been
“far better served to have collaborated with our allies around the world and
have confronted China not just as the United States but as an entire world
community.”
Kiron Skinner served as the State
Department’s director of policy planning from 2018 to 2019 and now is a
professor at Carnegie Mellon University. She described Trump’s foreign policy
strategy as based on four pillars:
First, that nation states, rather than
international institutions, are the principal players and that nation states
“should put their nation state first.” Second, that there should be greater
reciprocity in international agreements. Third, that there should be increased
burden-sharing by America’s allies. Fourth, that America should extricate
itself from endless wars.
Skinner said the president operates on
instincts and hunches that add up to a theory of the world. “It’s
counterintuitive because he’s not a foreign policy expert. But he’s really
trying to do grand strategy,” she said.
She argued that Trump is recognizing a new
reality internationally faster than some of the foreign policy elites. “They’re
not theorizing fast enough,” she added. “They’re reacting to what is being said
by one person, namely Donald Trump, instead of saying, ‘Is there something
here?’ I think there’s a way that they’re discounting that there could be an
argument underneath the rhetoric.”
Daalder countered by saying that even if
some of Trump’s instincts were correct, he has not shown he has a strategy to
get things done. “Constructive disruption might well have been useful,” he
said. “It clearly is the case that the system has been stultified, that some of
the verities that the foreign policy elite in Washington have taken as acts of
faith need to be questioned. But disruption for its own sake becomes
destruction. The absence of a strategy and a clear goal of getting from point A
to point B undermines the values of disruption and left us all worse off.”
Schake said the administration treats
diplomacy as something performative, arguing that the administration “appears
to be operating under the belief that strident reiteration of our maximal
demands counts as diplomacy. . . . They keep
saying over and over what we expect of North Korea, what we expect of Iran,
what we expect of the Europeans, and it doesn’t appear to move anybody, and so
it’s a failing diplomatic strategy.”
A voter wearing a protective mask carries
a ballot at a polling site in Brooklyn on June 23. (Victor J.
Blue/Bloomberg News)
A challenging
future, no matter the outcome in November
What the next four years hold obviously
depends considerably on the outcome of the November election, but few who study
or practice in the areas of foreign policy and national security see an easy
path ahead, whatever the result.
“Over the long term, I still have
confidence in our institutions, our entrepreneurial traditions, our
universities, our values, our young people and all the rest,” said Hadley, the
former national security adviser. “But our margin for error is small. The
challenges are great and we’re not doing what we need to do to avoid the
doomsday scenario.”
“I think this is the most dangerous moment
the United States has faced in decades,” said the former Obama adviser Donilon.
“We obviously are in the midst of multiple crises. Economic. Health. A serious
societal upheaval. We have an election system that is vulnerable to outside
interference. . . . We have the
lowest point in our relationships with Russia and China in decades. I think
democracy is under the most pressure in the world since the ’30s.”
Burns, a foreign policy adviser to the
Biden campaign, said he thinks the former vice president, as president, would
“quickly return the United States to a position of leadership” and that other
governments would respond positively to that. “But I worry that it will take
longer with the publics of these countries,” he added. “The memory of Donald
Trump will not fade easily.”
But for those for whom electing Biden
solves everything, Daalder offered a cautionary note. “It’s not enough to just
change tone,” he said. “People will say it’s great that Joe Biden loves us, but
what are we going to do? It will take an extraordinary effort to reengage and
rebuild a set of relationships and a set of tools that have been ignored for
far too long.”
Few believe a new president can flip a
switch and return the situation to that of a previous era. “There is no status
quo ante,” said the German Marshall Fund’s Kleine-Brockhoff.
Presumptive Democratic presidential
nominee Joe Biden, center, arrives at a campaign event in Wilmington, Del., on
July 14. (Patrick Semansky/AP)
Nor will the choices be easy for allies of
the United States, particularly in Europe, even if Biden becomes the next
president. “Europeans can dismiss a lot of what the Trump administration tells
Europe because it’s Trump telling us,” Niblett said, “because we don’t trust
him personally, because as Europeans, we think he’s making it up as he goes
along. But if Biden were to come, there’d be no hiding. Europeans would have to
make choices” — starting with their relationship with China.
Whoever is the next president will face
what some analysts see as the most daunting national security inheritance of
any president in living memory — and the mere change of administrations might
not be enough to reassure other nations, which now fear that a significant
portion of the U.S. population embraces Trump’s approach to the world and will
continue to do so, even if he is no longer president.
“Now that they’ve seen Trump, they fear a
whipsawing back and forth between something they recognize in the historical
tradition and something that’s a throwback to neo-isolationism,” said Michèle
Flournoy, who served as undersecretary of defense for policy in the Obama
administration. “Until they see a second election that validates an engaged
United States that is willing to lead in concert with allies and partners, they
won’t be assured.”
The prestige of the United States ebbs and
flows with events, but the country remains the one to which others still look
in times of crisis. Expectations of this country are always higher than for
other powers that do not have its long track record of leadership. But the last
time this country’s standing was in decline, it was because of fears that the
United States would exercise its vast powers excessively and unilaterally. That
is not the issue today. Instead, it is a worry that the United States is no
longer prepared or willing to use the powers it still has for the good of the
world.
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