As regular readers of this blog know, I rarely address foreign policy issues. Mostly, my reluctance to do comes from prudence; I’m painfully aware that my lack of familiarity with the vagaries of international relations makes it likely that any such observations will be flawed. (Most of my experience and virtually all of my scholarship has focused on domestic policy.)
That said, anyone who reads or listens to the news cannot avoid recognizing the immense damage our idiot President has done to America’s stature in the world. As Simon Rosenberg recently wrote, “Our adversaries have been emboldened by Trump’s idiocy, buffoonery, cowardice, greed and self-sabotage – as they should be. For America is already a shadow of what it was even a year ago, far weaker, isolated, despised, clearly led by a confederacy of dunces and now hurdling towards rapid decline as a global power. Fox News viewers may see a viral strongman when they look at the Trump but the rest of the world sees an imbecilic fool.”
There has long been speculation that Putin “has something” on Trump. Whether or not that’s the case, Trump has long been dependent upon Russian money. Well before our would-be King entered politics, Eric Trump was quoted as saying that the unwillingness of U.S. banks to continue lending to the Trump organization wasn’t a problem, because their funding came primarily from Russia. (Most American banks had been burned by Trump’s multiple financial failures by that time, and had declined further funding.) Trump’s embarrassing, slavish fawning over Putin and other autocrats might simply be another facet of his desperate desire to align himself with “strong” leaders, or it may reflect something more sinister, but the end result is the same–our precipitous decline as a world power.
Trump’s animosity toward Ukraine and his shabby treatment of Zelenskyy has been unforgivable. He has done significant damage to NATO, imperilling not just the United States, but the Western alliance. His “friendship” and support for Israel’s Netanyahu (aka Israel’s Trump, albeit with brains) has allowed that country to commit war crimes with impunity. Destroying USAID and withholding international relief funds has been both inhumane and wildly contrary to American interests. Failing to keep the nation’s promises to battle climate change has added to the conviction that America simply cannot be trusted. And Trump’s frequent praise of autocrats and dictators–coupled with his disparagements of leaders of our democratic allies– has badly damaged the country’s relationships with our traditional partners.
Withdrawing the U.S. from the UN Human Rights Council and from the Open Skies Treaty underlined both America’s diminished concern for human rights and our further lack of reliability.
And of course, firing hundreds of respected experts in foreign affairs and replacing them with clowns and dunces has undermined American effectiveness across the board. His misnamed “America First” policies and actions have actually damaged alliances, alienated partners, and disregarded human rights–consequences that have hardly advanced American interests.
It is unlikely that the MAGA base either knows or cares. Trump’s voters are fixated on culture war issues and the recovery of White male privilege. I doubt that many of them will “connect the dots” between Trump’s insane tariffs and the rising cost of groceries, or recognize the other domestic economic effects of America’s lost international stature.
What struck me about the quote I shared from Simon Rosenberg was his description of America’s current government as “a confederacy of dunces.” There’s a book with that title, but it was funny.
There’s nothing funny about the dunces who are tanking the economy, undermining civic equality, and making America internationally irrelevant.
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