Trump’s erratic behavior threatens America’s domestic economy. The damage to America’s global credibility could prove to be even more dangerous.
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The last few weeks have convinced much of the world that the United States has abandoned its role as world leader, no longer cares about education, science, or modern medicine, and would just as soon let the global poor drown in their own desperation.
After witnessing all the manic executive decrees issued by Donald Trump over the last 100 days, it’s easy to see why the rest of the world might have come to the conclusion that the United States has gone off the rails, but the fact is that the increasingly traumatic changes in American policy are a function of the whims of one man, Donald Trump. They do not necessarily reflect the thinking of the American public, a growing majority of which now disapproves of just about everything that Trump is doing.
Just as the term “Biden moment” refers to former President Joe Biden’s loss of focus during a critical debate, we are now experiencing a rush of “Trump moments” — manic savagings of just about every aspect of the American tradition, often followed by urgent backtracking to avoid immediate disaster. All of this is taking place with no coherent policy objectives in view.
What They Saw and What They Got
Trump’s hardcore MAGA cult fell way short of the numbers needed to elect him. What put him narrowly across the line with less than a majority of the nationwide vote were the millions of voters who thought they were electing a president. What they got instead was an unrestrained would-be dictator given to binges of delusional paranoia and a determination to use the power of the White House to wreak vengeance for perceived past grievances.
In place of the expertise that usually helps steer the ship of state in a positive direction, Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants too afraid of retaliation to voice an honest opinion and destined to be sacrificed the moment he no longer finds them useful.
Trump’s theory holds that the United States should forget about the rest of the world, and that we should avoid engaging in any action unless a maximum payment in cold cash can be exacted in exchange.
Add to that a group of more sinister figures ready to use Trump as a cover for their own ambitions. They range from Silicon Valley technofascists angered by democratic norms that inhibit their freedom to move fast and break things, to an equally wealthy group that sees democracy as a threat to the inherited wealth they have no idea of what to do with.
Mix that with an unelected band of anti-government fringe actors like Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, and Elon Musk, and you have a recipe for perpetual chaos that threatens to become even more malevolent and malignant.
Clowning Around on the World Stage
As the titular leader of this group of MAGA misfits, Trump projects a “transactional” approach to international diplomacy, which he wants to use to replace the American strategy for building global peace that the US adopted after World War II and that has succeeded remarkably since then in avoiding major conflict in a nuclear armed world.
Trump’s theory holds that the United States should forget about the rest of the world, and that we should avoid engaging in any action unless a maximum payment in cold cash can be exacted in exchange. Trump sees America’s traditional efforts to secure and guarantee world peace and eliminate global poverty as nothing less than an invitation to be taken for a sucker.
Previous administrations, Trump believes, were weak fools enabling the rest of the world to take advantage of American generosity. It makes no difference to Trump that the US profited enormously by its investments in Europe, or that helping emerging Third World nations opened access for American products to global markets and increased American influence in practically every corner of the planet. Sure, the US gained unprecedented stature as the world’s most powerful economy, but Trump thinks we should have asked for more.
While turning the US from a promoter of human rights and abandoning America’s role as a committed supporter of global free-market capitalism, Trump wants to go back to a world in which “might makes right,” and in which the powerful do as they want, while the less fortunate are left to do as they must.
It’s an approach that led to unprincipled exploitation and violence in the 19th century and resulted in two world wars in the 20th century. In Trump’s eyes, we still face a dog-eat-dog world in which the rule of law reverts to the law of the jungle, which demands an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. As Mahatma Gandhi pointed out some time ago, that philosophy leaves us with a world that is blind. Trump obviously doesn’t agree.
Be that as it may, Trump is the elected president, even if only by the slimmest popular vote margin since Richard Nixon’s run in 1968. (Although Trump did gain more popular votes than Kamala Harris, he failed to get a majority, falling short at 49.9 percent of the cast ballots. George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016 gained the presidency in spite of being popular vote losers.)
For the moment, even if his policies might be anathema to many Americans, we are stuck with him as commander in chief.
Domestically, Trump’s slash-and-burn approach to government and the lack of anything resembling a coherent policy will almost certainly lead to increased economic hardship for most Americans. For the rest of the world, especially the so-called global South, it could well be catastrophic.
In the Eyes of the World, America = Trump
Unfortunately, the way much of the world sees it, Trump is the United States, whether Americans agree with him or not.
If Trump wants to make an enemy of Canada, shocked Canadians will surprise no one if they start to look at Americans as their enemy, even if the majority of Americans harbor no grudge against Canada.
When Trump decides to threaten Greenland, or insult Mexico, it makes no difference if a majority of Americans think that what Trump is doing is absurd. For better or worse, Trump is the face of America — at least for the time being.
With Trump as president, any expectation that the US is likely to ensure world order has pretty much gone out the window. How can the United States convince potential belligerents to show self-control when the president acts irrationally and is increasingly unpredictable?
As long as Trump is president, the US is no longer qualified or available to act as the world’s policeman. Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, have made it abundantly clear that they no longer consider what happens in the rest of the world to be an American problem (unless, of course, it promises an opportunity for some form of “deal,” plunder, or other species of self-enrichment).
Given that the US is no longer there, it is becoming apparent that no one else is really equipped to reestablish order when the system begins to break down. To be sure, Russia and China are ready to volunteer, but do we really want Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping setting standards for the future of humanity? Ask the Ukrainians or the Uyghurs about that.
Will a Perennial Regional Boxing Match Become a Nuclear Cage Fight?
The first test case in which this dilemma is likely to become apparent is the ruckus developing over the Pahalgam terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir on April 22. The attack by five terrorists killed 25 tourists and an additional bystander.
Both India and Pakistan lay claim to Kashmir. India administers the part where the attack took place and suspects that the attacks had the support of Pakistan’s army. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has given India’s military a blank check to respond by attacking Pakistan.
As long as the US was acknowledged as the world’s lone superpower, potential belligerents like India and Pakistan felt free to make dire threats against each other. That served, in each nation, to fend off domestic calls for violent revenge. The potential belligerents could then sit back and wait for the United States to pressure them not to do anything rash. The tactic involved a bit of theater, but it effectively averted violent confrontation.
Trump and Vance changed that.
When Pakistan and India pleaded with the US to intervene, the most Trump could say was that he really was “deeply concerned.” Both Pakistan and India obviously wanted more than that.
Americans could ask why anyone should care. They might find the answer when nuclear fallout from the confrontation begins settling over Los Angeles.
A single terrorist attack might appear trivial, but the roots of World War I trace back to a lone anarchist, Gavrilo Princip, who shot and killed Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo (in what is now the Balkan country of Bosnia and Herzegovina). No one cared that much about the archduke, but the perceived slights that followed the assassination accumulated until global war became inevitable.
From Global Dominance to Global Irrelevance?
After all the chaos that Trump has caused, it is questionable whether anyone still believes that the US is capable of intervening in, much less averting, an international crisis.
With Elon Musk’s evisceration of the US Agency for International Development and Trump’s insane comments about invading Greenland and possibly forcing Canada to become the 51st state, not to mention his absurd campaign to rename the Gulf of Mexico, the US has not only lost anything resembling “soft power,” it has also become a laughingstock in diplomatic circles.
The US still has an overwhelming military force, but it has so far failed even to control Yemen’s ragged band of Houthi mountain guerrillas who regularly threaten shipping through the Suez Canal. The US was never really a “paper tiger” before, but under Trump’s chaotic mismanagement, it is beginning to look like one.
Trump’s choice for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News weekend TV anchor known to have a drinking problem, hasn’t helped matters. The hapless former TV host not only broadcast US attack plans by texting classified information over an insecure mobile phone, but has spread Trump’s chaos and unpredictability to the Pentagon. No one knows who is really in charge. They also don’t know how long Hegseth is likely to stay in a job that he is manifestly unqualified to handle.
Henry Kissinger, who served as both national security advisor and secretary of state, observed that the number of crises any administration had to cope with was multiplying out of control. Trump survived his first term by presenting himself as the crisis. He was rarely out of the news. He may not be that lucky during his second term.
There is no question that the US’s role as a superpower had to be temporary at best. The United States became the dominant power because the European powers had mutually ruined each other in World War II, and the US was the only power left. Russia looked as though it might compete, but it quickly fell back because its political system, kept in power by Stalin’s demagoguery, rendered it economically unsustainable.
Putin’s authoritarian approach, based on a feudalistic system of semi-criminal oligarchs, is not doing much better. Who would have expected Moscow to be forced to turn to North Korea to support the failing Red Army in Ukraine?
American acceptance of its reduced role as the world’s policeman is probably a good thing, but America’s withdrawal from that role needs to be graduaI — and carefully thought out — not chaotic, opaque, and unpredictable.
In the present moment, it’s not just that the US is no longer as great as it was in the years following World War II. It’s that Western Europe has, to a large extent, recovered from the destruction of World War II and is ready to move into the future. Likewise, the Third World, long exploited by competing colonial empires, is beginning to find its footing and emerge as a potent economic force.
In this new context, the US could play a positive role of first among equals. American acceptance of its reduced role as the world’s policeman is probably a good thing, but America’s withdrawal from that role needs to be graduaI — and carefully thought out — not chaotic, opaque, and unpredictable.
Instead of a reasoned approach, Donald Trump has moved America mindlessly toward isolation, while offering no understandable explanation of where he hopes to end up (the absence of which has helped fuel speculation on the part of some that Trump is actively serving a foreign master). His attitude is that if the world doesn’t want to play ball his way, he’ll take his ball and go home.
What Trump doesn’t realize is that the world doesn’t need or want his ball. For the majority of Americans who no longer support Trump, the existential question is what can be done over the next three-and-a-half years with an increasingly unhinged 78-year-old man who refuses to listen.
