American leadership, once essential to world peace, is now mocked and ridiculed. We find ourselves increasingly isolated within institutions that we led the world in creating, such as the G-20, NATO and the United Nations, and are treated by allies and adversaries alike as an non-entity that can safely be ignored, as an obstacle to be worked around or as a dupe to be manipulated.
Nobody did this to us. We have done it to ourselves. A man elected on the promise to make America great again is turning the country into a laughingstock in the eyes of the world. They have taken his measure, both as a person and as a leader, and have concluded that he is a blowhard, a man for whom spectacle substitutes for substance. It is an extraordinary abdication of national influence and power, unprecedented in its haste and scale.
I know the excuses, the explanations. Our new leadership claims to take pride in its lack of predictability and its willingness to break the rules. That explanation might be more convincing if its unpredictability had a purpose, or if they were capable of anything different. Neither is the case. It is unpredictable because it cannot be anything else, because from the top on down it is handicapped by a lack of discipline, an incoherence and incompetence that allows it to toss out bizarre ideas without benefit of study or forethought, to make promises or policy statements with no later attempt at implementation.
On Sunday morning, for example, President Trump was touting the creation of a joint cyber-security effort with Russia as a major accomplishment of the G-20 summit. It would be impenetrable! It would make our elections safe!
Other administration figures echoed the argument. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the joint effort would allow the two countries “to work together to better understand how to deal with these cyber threats.” Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, an increasingly comic sycophant, called the arrangement a “strategic alliance” with Russia that “I think is a very significant accomplishment for President Trump.”
A few hours later, after widespread mocking, Trump published another tweet: “The fact that President Putin and I discussed a Cyber Security unit doesn’t mean I think it can happen. It can’t.”
Behavior like that makes it implausible to describe Trump as the leader of the free world, because a leader by definition has others willing to follow and he has almost none. On issues from Iran to the status of Jerusalem to Russian intervention, the president, the secretary of state, the ambassador to the United Nations, the defense secretary and the national security adviser all express opinions and policy statements at variance with each other. And an administration that can’t perform the basic task of getting themselves on the same page has no capacity to try to do the same internationally.
The president’s defenders also laud him as a master negotiator, yet there is zero evidence that such skills exist. We have no new trade deals; we have no process by which new trade deals can be cut. On North Korea, President Trump had claimed the cooperation of China in helping to restrain its client state, yet North Korea seems singularly unimpressed.
Our alleged master negotiator has negotiated nothing. He has destroyed but not built. The same pattern of grandiose talk undercut by incompetence and incoherence that has rendered him ineffective in Washington has done the same on the international scene, and I hate to think what another 41 months of this will bring.
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