After America

Trump’s retreat crafts a global order without the U.S. at a familiar spot — the center.

What does the world look like without United States leadership? We’re about to find out.

The nations that signed the Trans-Pacific Partnership met in Chile earlier this month — the first major meeting since Donald Trump rejected the multilateral trade deal. But instead of U.S. leading the talks, as had been the norm during the eight years of negotiations, China has stepped in to fill the void.

That ascendant nation is seizing the mantle of leadership once reserved for the United States — on trade, global warming and even development.

Chinese companies are building, financing and operating ports across the globe, from Greece and the Middle East to East Africa and Sri Lanka. The Chinese military has also built its first overseas outpost in Djibouti, which sits along major trade routes.

Closer to home, China continues to invest in South and Central America, including $60 billion in Venezuela. AntiAmerican governments in the Western hemisphere receive a convenient boost, but allies like Mexico only get a browbeating from Washington. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers wrote this week in the Financial Times that “there was no greater strategic gift the U.S. could give China than to abrogate Nafta and rupture the North American community.”

But that’s exactly what Trump has threatened to do.

Things aren’t much better across the Atlantic, where Vladimir Putin’s Russia is working to roll back the United States’ gains since the Cold War. Troops in Ukraine, cyberattacks in the Baltics and rigged polls and fake news in Bulgarian elections have all worked to undermine European stability and punish politicians who look toward the West instead of toward Moscow. Putin broke bread with French politician Marine Le Pen last week, a candidate for president who wants to shatter the entire EU.

Not since the depths of the Cold War has Europe needed her Atlantic ally more than today. But where an ally once stood, the European Union now finds an adversary. Trump has insulted European leaders, abandoned a key trade treaty and even attempted to craft deals with individual nations in the European Union — which is the equivalent of a foreign leader trying to negotiate with individual states against Washington.

European Union President Donald Tusk wrote an open letter earlier this year outlining the greatest threats to the EU marks the 60th anniversary of the foundational Treaty of Rome. Trump is on the list.

The United States landed at Normandy in 1944, funded the Marshall Plan, executed the Berlin Airlift, defended Europe from Soviets, supported democracy and contained communism. But in three months, Trump has turned us into Europe’s enemy. Ronald Reagan’s tough talk scared our adversaries. Donald Trump’s scares our allies.

At home, the public servants in charge of our nation’s foreign policy have found themselves abandoned by the White House. Hundreds of key positions in the State Department have gone unfilled. No one is being given work. Experts are ignored while the president’s daughter and son-in-law get seats at the table.

“This is probably what it felt like to be a British foreign service officer after World War II, when you realize, no, the sun actually does set on your empire,” Julia Ioffe cited a mid-level State Department officer in The Atlantic. “America is over. And being part of that, when it’s happening for no reason, is traumatic.”

In our darkest days, an American president once told the nation that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself.

For anyone looking at the global picture, that fear is very real.

We’re deeply afraid of what Trump is doing to the post-war order. We’re afraid he’s abandoning everything our nation won after World War II and the Cold War. We’re afraid he’s throwing away the sacrifices made on the beaches of Normandy and Guadalcanal. We’re afraid of the world he’s trying to create — a world without the United States at the center.

We’re even more afraid of whether we’ll be able to retake that mantle of leadership once he’s finally left office.