Nearly two years into the Trump administration, over two dozen ambassador posts remain unfilled and without a nominee—including the ambassador positions in both Turkey and Saudi Arabia. That staffing gap issue resurfaced in the past week when Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi—who is also a U.S. resident—went missing in Turkey amid reports that he was murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
When U.S. President Donald Trump spoke to the United Nations General Assembly, he deliberately signalled a definitive break with the internationalist consensus that has guided U.S. grand strategy since World War II… But Trump’s brand of statecraft is not in fact out of step with much of U.S. history. Rather, he is discarding the key tenets of U.S. foreign policy since World War II in favour of an older strain of thinking about the United States’ role in the world.
Trump has overcome internal resistance and external pressure to deliver an as yet uninterrupted string of foreign-policy successes : North Korea’s “Rocket Man” Kim Jong-un hasn’t launched a rocket in ten months; America’s NATO allies are finally starting to deliver on pledges to increase defense spending toward the 2 percent of GDP target agreed in 2006 ; Mexico has seemingly come to terms on long-overdue NAFTA reforms; the United States has stayed out of the Arab world’s interminable wars in Syria, Libya and Yemen; and the U.S. embassy in Israel moved to Jerusalem in May without sparking the Third Intifada predicted by Trump’s opponents.
“We reject the ideology of globalism” in favor of the “ideology of patriotism.” So spoke the American president from the pulpit, in the high church of the first ideology, before a congregation nominally convened in a spirit of global cooperation. Ahead of his address at the annual gathering of the United Nations General Assembly, the buzz around the building was not about whether the world would witness a confrontational Donald Trump, but rather about who specifically the president would single out for attack.
Also Read: The World Just Laughed at Donald Trump
Next week Donald J. Trump returns to the United Nations for the annual opening of the UN General Assembly. While Trump exceeded expectations during his first UN appearance last year, he will face more pushback this time around. The president will encounter a more skeptical global audience, woke to the reality that his administration’s diplomacy is all take and no give.
For the past two years, the secretary-general of the United Nations, António Guterres, has watched as President Donald Trump upends American foreign policy, engaging in trade wars while simultaneously disengaging from international agreements and alliances. And now Guterres has reached a verdict: The United States, once the guarantor of global stability, is losing its ability to influence world events.
One of the more striking features of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign was the bipartisan opposition to Donald Trump from inside the foreign-policy establishment. Democrats opposed him for obvious partisan reasons, but hostility to Trump was even more vehement on the Republican side.
Westerners make much of China’s obsession with “winning without fighting.” As though any sane statesman, Eastern or Western, relishes losing or longs to take up arms with all the dangers, hardships and perverse turnabouts of fortune that come with combat. Winning without fighting is what we call “diplomacy,” and it is a mode of interaction that spans all countries, civilisations and times.
