The destruction of the soft power of the United States
I haven't seen anything about this topic online yet, but to be fair I have been avoiding the news a bit for my own sanity.
One of the disasters of the recent presidential election is the damage to the "soft power" of the United States. By this I mean, the ability of the country to affect the behavior of other countries through cooperation and attraction. You can't have soft power if you don't have reliability, trustworthiness, and honor. Soft power takes years and decades to build. During the first Trump presidency, he did tremendous damage by siding with dictators, criticizing his own advisors, complaining about NATO countries not paying their share.. Like all of his ideas, it is based on the claim that he understands everything, I'll just do this simple thing and it fixes everything. So let's cut the deficit by cutting spending everywhere. When Biden was elected, some of this damage was undone, but the trust needs more than four years to recover. Well, now Trump is back before the trust was really regained. There is no ally in the world that can fully trust the United States. If we all survive the next four years, and there is a fair election, and then the best president of all time is elected, it will hardly help. The whole world knows that we are a country that is stupid and selfish enough to elect another trump in the near future. There is no way to unring this horrible bell.
Yes, I know that the US has done terrible things with it's power in the past, including invasions of other countries. But there has never been a leader in charge that openly antagonizes allies and embraces adversaries, and is so obviously corrupt and easily manipulated through bribery and favors. That so clearly works to weaken the United States in every possible way, including sowing division internally, flaunting ethics, and all the other "unamerican" things we have seen him do.
About Trump's complaints in his first term that we have bases all over the world and we are paying for it: Yes, we are. And it pays back in dividends. Besides the projection of power that serves our interests, it also gives us a reason to build equipment (in the US) using labor in the US and technology studied and implemented in the US. Complaining to NATO that they aren't paying their fair share makes them think "oh shit, the US won't protect us anymore. We better make more nukes". Now we are drastically increasing nuclear and military proliferation problems that are way more likely to have conflicts.
About Trump simplistic solutions such as cutting spending on programs: Remember how trump cut the staff by two-thirds of a key US health agency operating in China? Right before the coronavirus outbreak. For all we know, the global pandemic could have been almost averted.
Most voters apparently don't understand this type of thing of course. This is a problem of education, especially in civic responsibility. But I am sure that there are people in the Republican party, and working for Fox News, and on talk radio, that understand the things I said, and to a much better extent than some random guy on the internet. But for some reason they don't seem to give a shit. Something is more important to them so they allowed Trump to continue and they constantly help spread lies to give him more power. I find this very curious and suspicious.
Wow, you really read my mind. I was already wondering if that would be a viable platform to make European integration more popular. If EU was actually a federation, it would inherit the right to nuclear arms from France and we could happily get to building some more!
Only half joking. Putin is no joke, though. Better nukes than Russians, honestly.
"It is hard for a man to understand an issue, when his livelihood depends upon him not understanding it."
Obama and bush both said NATO needed to spend more, this isn't anything new. Europe needs to spend on more military regardless, there's no good reason they should depend solely on a foreign country to defend them.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/11/obama-and-bush-also-pressed-nato-allies-to-spend-more-on-defense.html
Yes, it’s bad, but forever is a long time. I think this is underestimating people’s ability to forget when things change. It takes a while, though.
I think this is especially true for memories related to foreign affairs. Firsthand, lived experiences tend to feel longer and have larger personal impacts. Whereas most folks don't remember other countries' bad events from 5 or 10 years prior, probably due in part to the attention economy. The exception would be major geopolitical events like Brexit
It isn’t the first nor will it be the last time the US becomes more isolationist. Remember that the US failed to join the League of Nations, which a US president spearheaded to begin with.
I read most of the way through the Trump biography Plaintiff in Chief by Zirin.
Trump is an extreme case of a transactional and short term oriented, impulsive person who is willing to burn bridges and break partnerships for small short term benefits. He has always been this way.
I'm not sure what conclusion to draw except to say that the problem is real. Allies should be wary
I think much worse than the reputational damage is his replacement of ambassadors and others in the diplomatic corp with people who just seem wholly incapable of real diplomacy and working behind the scenes to avoid crises. Biden had worked to restore some of that, but it would have taken much more time to build that base up again.
Empires die, and I think this is just a rapid accelerator on the demise of the American empire which was already well underway (unfortunately, because I think they have been a net positive for us in the West), and hastening the Chinese empire's ascendancy. I also think half-assed sanctions on China have also accelerated that, since as a result China need to become independent of US/Allied supply chains as a matter of survival, and they are able to do that during peacetime.
The world learned a harsh lesson about being allies with a democracy: voters are fickle and do not care for the commitments of their grandfathers. That and almost no one actually cares about foreign policy.