In London last week, I met a Nigerian man who
succinctly expressed the reaction of much of the world to the United
States these days. “Your country has gone crazy,” he said, with a
mixture of outrage and amusement. “I’m from Africa. I know crazy, but I
didn’t ever think I would see this in America.”
A
sadder sentiment came from a young Irish woman I met in Dublin who went
to Columbia University, founded a social enterprise and has lived in
New York for nine years. “I’ve come to recognize that, as a European, I
have very different values than America these days,” she said. “I
realized that I have to come back to Europe, somewhere in Europe, to
live and raise a family.”
The world has
gone through bouts of anti-Americanism before. But this one feels very
different. First, there is the sheer shock at what is going on, the
bizarre candidacy of Donald Trump, which has been followed by an utterly
chaotic presidency. The chaos is at such a fever pitch that one
stalwart Republican, Karl Rove, described the president
this week as “vindictive, impulsive and shortsighted” and his public
shaming of Attorney General Jeff Sessions as “unfair, unjustified,
unseemly and stupid.” Kenneth Starr, the onetime grand inquisitor of
President Bill Clinton, went further, calling Trump’s recent treatment of Sessions
“one of the most outrageous — and profoundly misguided — courses of
presidential conduct I have witnessed in five decades in and around the
nation’s capital.”
But there is another aspect to the decline in America’s reputation. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey
of 37 countries, people around the world increasingly believe that they
can make do without America. Trump’s presidency is making the United
States something worse than just feared or derided. It is becoming
irrelevant.
The most fascinating finding of the Pew survey was not that Trump is
deeply unpopular (22 percent have confidence in him, compared with 64
percent who had confidence in Barack Obama at the end of his
presidency). That was to be expected — but there are now alternatives.
On the question of confidence in various leaders to do the right thing
regarding world affairs, China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin
got slightly higher marks than Trump. But German Chancellor Angela
Merkel got almost twice as much support as Trump. (Even in the United States,
more respondents expressed confidence in Merkel than in Trump.) This
says a lot about Trump, but it says as much about Merkel’s reputation
and how far Germany has come since 1945.
Trump has managed to do something that Putin
could not. He has unified Europe. As the continent faces the challenges
of Trump, Brexit and populism, a funny thing has happened. Support for Europe
among its residents has risen, and plans for deeper European
integration are underway. If the Trump administration proceeds as it has
promised and initiates protectionist measures against Europe, the
continent’s resolve will only strengthen. Under the combined leadership
of Merkel and new French President Emmanuel Macron, Europe will adopt a
more activist global agenda. Its economy has rebounded and is now growing as fast as that of the United States.
To America’s north, Canada’s foreign minister recently spoke out,
in a friendly and measured way, noting that the United States has
clearly signaled that it is no longer willing to bear the burdens of
global leadership, leaving it to countries such as Canada to stand up
for a rules-based international system, free trade and human rights. To
America’s south, Mexico has abandoned any plans for cooperation with the
Trump administration. Trump’s approval rating in Mexico is 5 percent, his lowest of all the countries Pew surveyed.
China’s leadership began taking advantage of
Trump’s rhetoric and foreign policy right from the start, announcing
that it was happy to play the role of chief promoter of trade and
investment around the world, cutting deals with countries from Latin America to Africa to Central Asia. According to the Pew survey, seven of 10 European countries now believe that China is the world’s leading economic power, not the United States.
The
most dismaying of Pew’s findings is that the drop in regard for America
goes well beyond Trump. Sixty-four percent of the people surveyed
expressed a favorable view of the United States at the end of the Obama
presidency. That has fallen to 49 percent now. Even when U.S. foreign
policy was unpopular, people around the world still believed in America —
the place, the idea. This is less true today.
In 2008, I wrote a book about the emerging “Post-American World,”
which, I noted at the start, was not about the decline of America but
rather the rise of the rest. Amid the parochialism, ineptitude and sheer
disarray of the Trump presidency, the post-American world is coming to
fruition much faster than I ever expected.
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