I With war raging in Ukraine indefinitely and instability flourishing in the Middle East and trade wars overwhelming our relations around the globe — and more generally with American leadership in the world deafeningly absent — the world appears to have been so completely transformed by Donald Trump’s foreign policy that precedents may seem irrelevant to our understanding of our current situation. If we lead anything now, it is to make it worse. It may seem useless to look back even a few years, to the neolithic age when the Democratic Party was in charge of American foreign policy. But look back we must. For the obligations and the challenges of managing America’s international relations will outlast any American government, and one day a Democrat will sit in the Oval Office again. When that happens, a return to what we used to think of as normalcy will be progress enough, though the magnitude of Trump’s destruction of our position beyond our borders will take a long time to correct. But real success — the restoration of a rational and moral calculus of interests and values — will require that the right lessons, including the cautionary lessons, be learned from the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations. The Trump administration’s international orientation will be a partial guide in this new thinking: it will show us what not to do, unless we seek an isolated and insulated America. Even though there are isolationist currents in the Democratic Party, it is not a party with a tradition of America First. We are for enlightened world leadership. (A phrase that needs unpacking, of course.) We are against denying Vladimir Putin’s responsibility for the invasion of Ukraine. We are for providing Ukraine the military support it needs to defend itself. We are against economic warfare with our friends and allies in Europe and Asia. We are for a strong NATO alliance and a strengthened security architecture with Asian allies, especially Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the Philippines. We still believe — I hope — that American power can be used for good in faraway places, and — I hope again — that the United States must act in the face of various kinds of emergencies and atrocities. And of course we emphasize the set of global issues that includes climate change, global health, and food security. When the happy day comes and Trump is back home golfing and hustling, the immediate challenge will be to restore America’s role as a leader, a friend, and an ally. The second Trump administration has in a matter of months squandered the soft power that took seventy-five years for America to create. With its economic warfare against friend and foe alike, as well as its disdainful attitude towards longstanding allies, trust and confidence in Washington’s leadership has been shattered and it may never return to its previous heights. His capricious demolition of America’s universally admired programs of foreign assistance amounts to a colossal blow to America’s position in the world, not to mention the immensity of the suffering that is causing. It is so much easier to destroy than to build. But there will be no third Trump administration, and if the pendulum of American politics swings back towards the Democratic Party, it will be imperative to understand the foreign policies of the post-Cold War Democratic administrations with lucidity. Today America cannot lead because America is alone. Unsplendid isolation, we might call it. Isolationism always fulfills its own dream. When the Trump administration looks behind, it will find few followers. And yet it will at the same time insist upon American supremacy! (I am ignoring, of course, the dizzying inconstancy of Trump’s foreign policy, the daily and even hourly inconsistencies, which makes any generalization about it provisional and may prove to be the administration’s worst failing in foreign affairs. For the next three years, the better part of diplomatic wisdom for the nations of the world will be to try and catch a wave.) The international reputation that the founding fathers of the post-World War II generation created for the United States, Democratic and Republican presidents alike, had a powerful result: the United States was a rare combination of feared, admired, and respected. To be sure, it was also hated, but anti-Americanism did not suffice to overthrow the America-led world order, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The erosion of the America-led world order was in fact begun by the United States. The Iraq war accomplished that, and in many ways it remains the gift that keeps on giving. (“Vietnam Syndrome” was nothing compared to this. Ronald Reagan was elected a mere five years after our retreat from Saigon.) Our reputation was damaged for at least a generation, as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld became the ugly Americans of a new era and the incompetence of the occupation of Iraq undermined America’s reputation for getting the job done. Later, the post-Iraq reluctance to act under the Obama administration further weakened the deterrent effect of America’s military might and taught the nations of the world to call America’s bluff. Any honest assessment of America’s role in the world must start with the recognition that America’s power has been grievously diminished in recent decades — notwithstanding the successful air attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities and, a decade earlier, the unforgettable Special Forces operation that killed Osama Bin Laden. For it is not just our economic, military, and political system that determines power, but also our alliances and friendships around the world: they are what has differentiated America’s role from that of previous hegemons. (We were a hegemon, but we were never an empire; whatever that abused terms means, it does not denote a system of alliances.) By rejecting the daily diplomacy of alliance building and management, what former Secretary of State George Schultz nicely called “diplomacy as gardening,” the two Trump administrations have done grievous and utterly self-inflicted harm to the force multiplier effect of America’s alliances. What is the
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