Is Trump destroying the international position of the USA?
“It takes a lifetime to build a good reputation, but you can lose it in a minute.”
― Will Rogers
-The real dangers aren’t obvious. Once Trump made it clear to our allies that they couldn’t trust us or trust agreements we’ve made with them—including treaties even, as far as they could tell—it’s not like they were going to revile Trump in public. America is too powerful for that.
Instead they’re quietly talking with each other and forging agreements that sidestep us without openly opposing us.
So the danger is them getting locked into long-term agreements/treaties that aren’t advantageous to us. So even if the voters manage to—in effect—fumigate the White House in 2020, many trains will have already left the station.
For example, absent TPP, China is trotting out its own deal. I like to call it the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Hemisphere.” China’s neighbors would rather be in an agreement with us, but now they’re thinking that even if Democrats retake the White House in 2020, they’ll never know when a Republican bull will get in the china shop and trash existing agreements again.
Bad as Bush II was, he wasn’t remotely as appalling to our allies as Trump is. And now that they know another Republican President could be this bad, it has forced them to recalculate how much they can depend on us in the long run.
So even if we get a grown-up for a President in 2021, a lot of arrangements may have been already made that sidestep us, to our long-term detriment.
I get the impression that there are few people left in the Republican Party who hold passports, have traveled abroad, and who have any sense of how interdependent America is in 2018. Many of them appear to long for Jefferson’s rural America with almost no international dependencies/trade ties—and believe we can somehow roll back the last two+ centuries to that day.
Their willful ignorance and susceptibility to simplistic authoritarian appeals has harmed us greatly. But it won’t become obvious for a while.
