America’s influence waning under Trump
Trump campaigned on an “America First” foreign policy and says a strong United States will mean a stronger world.
It’s whispered in NATO meeting rooms and celebrated in China’s halls of power. It’s lamented in the capital cities of key U.S. allies and welcomed in the Kremlin.
Three years into Donald Trump’s presidency, America’s global influence is waning. In interviews with The Associated Press, diplomats, foreign officials and scholars from numerous countries describe a changing world order in which the United States has less of a central role.
And in many ways, that’s just fine with the White House. Trump campaigned on an “America First” foreign policy and says a strong United States will mean a stronger world.
“The future doesn’t belong to globalists,” Trump told the U.N. General Assembly in September. “The future belongs to patriots.”
Trump insists he’s abandoning globalism for bilateral ties more beneficial to the U.S..
But there’s little sign of that.
Instead, once-close allies — France, Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Mexico, Turkey, Germany and more — have quietly edged away from Washington over the past three years.
Sometimes it’s not so quiet.
In a Buckingham Palace reception room during the recent NATO summit, a TV camera caught a cluster of European leaders grinning as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appeared to mock Trump.
“You just watched his team’s jaws drop to the floor,” Trudeau said, apparently speaking about his meeting with Trump, talking to a group that included the leaders of France, Britain and the Netherlands.
Trudeau quickly tried to walk back his words, telling reporters that he and Trump have a “good and constructive relationship.” But the footage brought into the open the increasing divide between the United States and its allies.
This is a major change. For generations, America saw itself as the center of the world. For better or worse, most of the rest of the world has regarded the U.S. as its colossus — respecting it, fearing it, turning to it for answers.
“We are America,” said Madeleine Albright, secretary of state in the Clinton administration. “We are the indispensable nation.”
To be sure, America is still a global superpower. But now, the country’s waning influence is profoundly redrawing the geopolitical map, opening the way for Washington’s two most powerful foes — Russia and China — to extend their reach into many countries where they had long been seen with suspicion.
Because those longtime friends of Washington? Many are now looking elsewhere for alliances. Very often, they look to China or Russia.
In Islamabad, for example, where the U.S. was once seen as the only game in town, Pakistan’s government now gets military aid and training from Russia and billions of dollars in investment and loans from China. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte is nurturing closer ties to Beijing despite his nervousness over its expansionism in the South China Sea. In Egypt, long one of America’s closest Middle Eastern allies, Cairo now lets Russian military planes use its bases and the two countries recently held joint air force exercises. In Ukraine, which has looked to U.S. military aid for years to try to keep an expansionist Russia in check, Trump’s questionable loyalty is seen as creating a dangerous vacuum.
“Once the U.S. role in Europe weakens, Russia’s influence inevitably grows,” Vadim Karasev, head of the Kyiv-based Institute of Global Strategies said.
Or there’s France, whose friendship with America goes back to the days of George Washington. Perhaps more than any other Western leader, French President Emmanuel Macron has made clear that Europe should look to Beijing, not Washington, when it comes to addressing global issues from trade wars to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Macron’s recent trip to China was choreographed in part to convey that the European Union has little faith in Washington anymore.
Europe is on “the edge of a precipice,” Macron told The Economist magazine in a recent interview. “What we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO,” he said, a reference to the announced U.S. withdrawal from northern Syria.
Perhaps no U.S. ally is more worried than the Kurds, America’s longtime battlefield allies. They bore the brunt of the combat as the Islamic State group was driven from the territory it held across a swath of Iraq and Syria.
“Betrayal process is officially complete,” a Kurdish official said in a WhatsApp message sent to journalists after Trump’s defense secretary announced U.S. troops would fully withdraw from northeastern Syria. That pullout paved the way for a Turkish offensive against Kurdish fighters and signaled to the world that U.S. may no longer be as reliable as it once was.
The Kurds weren’t taken completely by surprise. Kurdish officials had been holding back -channel talks with Syria and Russia for more than a year before the announcement. The Kurds feared they would be abandoned by Washington.
China has been delighted by what it sees as the voluntary abdication of U.S. leadership, particularly on free trade and climate change.
Trump’s pullout from the planned Trans-Pacific Partnership, for example, opened the way for Beijing to push ahead with its own alternative free-trade agreement.
Meanwhile, China has gone from being a climate change curmudgeon to sometimes reaping praise as a global leader on the issue.