Trump’s Way of Losing Friends and Alienating People  

Since Donald Trump, became United States President in 2016 everything that catches his eye at home and abroad has been up for renegotiation. Perhaps that is too weak a word to describe the attempt to dismantle the way the world has governed itself since 1945.  

In the last four years many have come to fear the worst Mr. Trump can do, not just for the US (most people on the planet don’t live there) but for what he can do to the world order that has been visibly falling about our ears.
At the end of World War Two, the US along with the victorious allies decided they never, ever wanted to see a repeat of the destruction of the Second World War.

People had this sense in 1918 that they never wanted a rematch, simply because of the scale of what they had been through.  But the conflict that ended in 1945 was worse than anyone could have imagined.  Tens of millions dead, Europe and large swathes of Asia, north Africa and the Middle East a smoldering wreck.

To stop this, the US created a host of international institutions.  The United Nations, The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were just some of the organisations that kept human society relatively peaceful.  Ok, if not peaceful, then they existed to prevent the next global conflagration.

The creation of this international institutional architecture had as much to do with furthering US power as it had with ensuring world peace and prosperity.

As the dominant power since 1945, and particularly since 1991, the United States has been very hard to resist when it wants to do something.  Many of the institutions that have sprung out of the 1945 settlement have done enormous good, such as UNICEF, UNWRA and the World Health Organisation.  On the other hand, the IMF’s structural readjustment programs have been destructive. Where the US has been unable to bend an organisation to its will, it has been thoroughly disruptive, such as during the 1980s when the US withdrew from UNESCO.  Or when the Nixon administration abandoned fixed exchange rates at the end of the 1960s, pulled by the economic cost of the Vietnam War.

None of this is to say the country was doing anything Great Powers don’t normally do.  States will try to create an environment in which they can extend and stabilize their influence and power.  China’s ‘Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’, Russia’s ‘Eurasian Economic Union’ are both designed to do this. The difference between these and the institutions built by the US is scale.

Now, we are living in a world where the US itself wants to tear down the infrastructure that has helped enforce its power.  From breaking the JCPOA deal negotiated by Barack Obama with Iran, to the Paris Climate Accords to the WHO, the US has run a snow plough through any attempt to order human affairs.

Predictably, the result is mayhem.  With governments uncertain as to what US President Donald Trump will do next, the ending of the old certainties is anxiety inducing.

One example would be NATO.  Founded in 1948, the alliance has survived the Cold War, the post-Cold War search for a purpose and the post-9/11 world.

Now, its greatest challenge is not terrorism, or Russia’s renewed provocations, but Donald Trump himself.  In leveraging the frequent US complaint that Europeans won’t pay to defend themselves, Trump has been name calling, deriding figures such as Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron while being (some would say suspiciously) friendly with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.  NATO’s European members have found themselves questioning US commitments to its allies.

Trump has criticized allies as diverse as South Korea and New Zealand, whilst abandoning a long standing relationship with Kurds in the Middle East.  As he has done this, he has heaped praise and cooperation on the adversaries of his erstwhile friends: Kim Jong-un in North Korea and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey.

None of this has been done with much of a strategy in mind; other than to pander to the prejudices of Trump and his supporters.  It isn’t as though Trump achieves anything substantive.  The negotiations with North Korea are a classic.

He has rubbished South Korea’s leaders while attempting to force greater contributions from Seoul toward US troop deployments in the country; all the while praising North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.  Who responded to Washington’s peace overtures by developing a new ballistic missile.

The international system, reliant as it is on mutual trust and a degree of predictability, may never be the same again.  The way the US has undermined international institutions will make any state think twice before trusting the ‘World’s Policeman’ again.