AT THE UNITED NATIONS, TRUMP ABDICATES U.S. LEADERSHIP
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump continued a long-standing presidential tradition by giving a speech at the United Nations General Assembly. Unlike most of his predecessors, however, Trump found himself isolated in front of the international community.
That isolation is, at least in part, self-imposed. In his speech, Trump said that the “U.S. will always choose independence and cooperation over global governance.” Compare those words to President Harry S. Truman’s at the opening session in 1946: “This meeting of the Assembly symbolizes the abandonment by the United States of a policy of isolation.” Under Trump, that long-standing vision — embraced by both Democrats and Republicans — has been not only abandoned, but denigrated.
This is an unforced error, a step toward isolation that harms U.S. interests and weakens its leadership on the world stage. It comes as the U.S.-led world order is under assault from the re-emergence of a powerful and ambitious China and the meddlesome and aggressive behavior of smaller nations such as Russia. With so many potential international problems, it is more important than ever that the United States not go it alone or retreat from international engagement.
To confront the current crises requires a strong and committed executive. U.S. presidents have been central to sustaining a world order for generations. They understood it was a responsibility that required allies. And that sometimes they would have to put the interests of those allies ahead of America’s to maintain America’s larger interest in a stable world order.
President Bill Clinton demonstrated this when he intervened in Kosovo’s ethnic genocide in the 1990s at the request of the European nations. Even President George W. Bush, who had his fair share of conflict with the international community, asked U.N. member countries in 2002 to “stand” with the United States and bring democracy to the Middle East. He claimed it would “show that the promise of the United Nations can be fulfilled in our time.”
Conflicts between powerful nations seeking to be the dominant expanding civilization have been known in every era of recorded human history. What is different about what is happening now, however, is that this type of conflict has not been seen since 1945, when the U.S. devised a world order in its own democratic and enlightened image. Even during the Cold War, an era of heightened tensions fed by nuclear proliferation, the Soviet Union and the United States never met face to face on any battlefield.
This spared the world from a clash of the two superpowers. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. had no viable challengers — leading conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer to observe in 1990 that we had reached an unprecedented “unipolar moment” in world history.
That moment is over. That’s largely due to the re-emergence of an outward-looking and economically proficient China under the leadership of President Xi Jinping. China’s version of a world order will mirror its own domestic values — where security trumps privacy and the expectation of civil obedience regularly displaces individual liberties.
To be sure, decades of unsuccessful foreign interventions, such as the Vietnam War and the second Iraq War, have made Americans and the rest of the world wary. But there’s no denying that the world has become safer under U.S. leadership. People are richer, happier and healthier today than in any other period in recorded history.
The purpose of these norms has been to stabilize the world by making all nations prosperous. This is known as the “democratic peace thesis.” According to this theory, nations that share the same values, in this case, democracy, do not go to war with one another. Moreover, the economic prosperity of democratic nations keeps them from turning to violence as an alternative means to thrive.
Without America’s continued involvement in global affairs, the world will be at the mercy of the vicissitudes of powerful, illiberal nations, and history demonstrates that, unlike the United States, most hegemonic states seek to dominate smaller nations.
And there should be little doubt that this would be bad for the U.S. and its interests. After the collapse of the British world order in World War I, there was a rise of despotic states that engaged in a new form of imperialism that was justified through hypernationalism. There was also global economic uncertainty, culminating in the Great Depression. Moreover, if the current world order collapses or, for that matter, even fractures, democracies will more than likely become outnumbered, leading to fewer partners for the U.S.
There is no other nation with a similar set of values that is capable of taking over for the United States as the guarantor of the most successful world order in history. So the U.S. better hang on, for its own interests and for those of its allies. And there’s no better way to do so than by remaining a good-faith partner to the international community — and not a loner state.
Gabriel Glickman, an adjunct professor of history, is writing a world history book provisionally titled, “The Rise and Fall of World History: Avoiding Historical Amnesia in 21st Century Classrooms.”
The Washington Post