The Shattering of US Leadership

During the Cold War, the US was the pre-eminent Western power. It forged an inter-connected set of formal and informal alliances to confront and eventually defeat the totalitarian Soviet Empire. An essential element of the US-led West’s victory was that, in the main, most of the US’s friends and allies wanted to be our friends and allies. Contrariwise, though the leadership of many of the countries in the Soviet Union’s imperial network may have cooperated with their Soviet overlords, most of the people of those nations did not want to be part of a Soviet Union-dominated, freedom-denying network. Ultimately the West’s Cold War victory was founded on its imperfect and imperfectly expressed commitment to liberty over the Soviet Empire’s constant, though too often lately recognized, commitment to domination and control.

Now the US is on the threshold of squandering that hard-fought victory by alienating our friends and Allies. Worst of all, we stand poised to become the most useless of allies – an unreliable one.

President Trump sprinkles many of his discourses on US relations with other powers in terms of victimhood. He complains that the US has been taken advantage of by others, that we have been played for suckers, that we have rescued nations from oppression, restored prosperity to Europe and other regions, and gotten no thanks for our many great and decent deeds. This ahistorical litany of mistreatment is disconnected from reality in at least two ways: 1. no other nations were in a position after World War II to take advantage of the United States – we set the rules, 2. while some voices in some lands lamented the rise of American power, most countries and their leaders showed genuine thanks and appreciation for the US efforts at creating a stable world-order in which all nations and their people could thrive. As a Swedish diplomat remarked to me years ago, “We maintain neutrality for domestic political reasons, but between the US and the Soviet Union, we are on the US side.”

Trump tends to calculate things as a zero-sum equation – if we have a trade deficit with a particular country, they are winning, we are losing, and they are ripping us off. While some countries (China in particular) try to suppress labour force wages, exchange rates, and interests on sovereign debt to gain an unfair advantage for their exports, most nations, especially those in OECD member states, try to get advantage for politically influential groups in their country (rice farmers in Japan for one example) in order to stay in office, while engaging in give-and-take with trading partners. Truly free trade between relative peer Liberal Democracies would be better, as it would contribute to economic prosperity in all the Liberal Democracies, but political realities influence national trade policies (for example US agricultural exports). Blinded by his zero-sum lenses, Trump instead prattles on about eliminating trade imbalances with those nations that “have been ripping us off for years.”

In a recent interview on Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson (highly recommended), Thomas Sowell commented that if the Trump tariffs were a negotiating tool of limited duration to reduce tariffs between the US and its trading partners, then they might not do too much harm. But if they were long-lasting, he added, they would do real harm to Americans, especially those in the lower economic quintiles.

More worrisome for US national security is the corrosive effect Trump’s tariff actions are having on political alliances. While economists rightly lament the negative financial impact of the continuing unpredictability of US trade policy, knowledgeable national security experts, political scientists, and diplomats rightly fear that Trump’s trade policy will undermine our friends and Allies’ confidence in the US fulfilling its treaty obligations or less formal agreements. The question arises that if Trump will so cavalierly set aside the USMCA (US, Mexico, Canada) free trade agreement, he might do likewise with the NATO Treaty or other agreements that, though not a Senate approved Treaty, have been treated as a binding agreement.

Running parallel with Trump’s zero-sum thinking is his affection for an ‘us-versus them’ worldview. Usually that ‘us’ is citizens of the US, though at times it seems to be only those who support Donald Trump and are loyal to him. In this way he is much like his second immediate predecessor who famously spoke of the Senate having only 51 members, that is, the number of Democratic Party members; and, disparaged all MAGA Republicans as insurrectionists. “Whoever is not with me is against me…” seems to define loyalty not to principles, ideals, the US and its Constitution, but to the person of the President.

On such a foundation of shifting sand, a single personality who is the temporary leader of the Executive Branch of the US Government, foreign national leaders will find it impossible to build a lasting relationship. Worse, the stable international security structure may collapse or at least become unsteady as Trump moves the structure from its current solid foundation of shared principles and values set by the US decades ago to rest upon perceived loyalty to an individual personality.

President Trump has a choice to make: be the (temporary) leader of the Free World and accomplish as much good as possible in his time in office, or be the (again temporary) leader of a movement founded on a personality, doomed to fade as did that of his first immediate predecessor.

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This article has been reprinted with the author’s permission. The original version can be found here: Edward G. Stafford Substack.