During the Cold War, it was a type of folk wisdom, if not a fairy tale, that in America, “politics stopped at the water’s edge.” This meant that Democrats and Republicans put partisanship aside, presenting a unified front in service to the country’s “national interests” abroad.
In the Age of Trump, that wisdom has been largely — if not entirely — discarded.
Donald Trump believes in himself, in Trumpism and MAGA. He does not believe in American exceptionalism, the international rules-based order and America’s traditional alliances and friends. Trump is the state, and America’s national interests are the same as his own.
With the power he has managed to grab from a compliant Supreme Court and a Republican Congress, against an ineffective Democratic opposition and cowed media, Trump now has nearly all the tools to impose personalist rule over all areas of American life. But internationally, he has to face other leaders who, with strong wills, personalities and national interests of their own, will not capitulate so easily.
His personalist rule is a defining feature of autocratic and authoritarian regimes. It is antithetical to democracy and good governance. With the power he has managed to grab from a compliant Supreme Court and a Republican Congress, against an ineffective Democratic opposition and cowed media, Trump now has nearly all the tools to impose personalist rule over all areas of American life. But internationally, he has to face other leaders who, with strong wills, personalities and national interests of their own, will not capitulate so easily.
Historian Matthew Dallek, author of “Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right,” explained how the president’s recent Alaskan summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin and subsequent meeting with European leaders, who were attempting a democratic intervention, illustrated Trump’s warmth toward autocrats — and failure to achieve results or respect.
“[T]he old post-World War II international order is crumbling,” Dallek said. “America has become mercurial and unreliable, perhaps even a force for global instability. Its oldest friends don’t know where Trump stands or what he will do from one moment to the next. The ties that once bound America to much of the world no longer hold.”
The limits of Trump’s power on the international stage were highlighted by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting in Tianjin, China, earlier this week. This alliance of 20 countries, most of which are authoritarian, was assembled in 2001 to counter the influence of the U.S. and NATO in shaping the future world order in Asia. Trump was not invited.
Given his personality, the president likely took this as a personal affront, especially since he admires strongmen like Chinese President Xi Jinping, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, North Korea’s supreme leader Kim Jong Un and, most famously, Putin.
On Wednesday, Trump praised China’s huge military parade and ceremony in Beijing marking the end of World War II. “I thought it was a beautiful ceremony,” he said. “I thought it was very, very impressive…But I understood the reason they were doing it. And they were hoping I was watching — and I was watching.”
Trump is correct: Washington was the main audience for China’s display of its growing military power to rival the U.S.
Earlier that day, Trump mockingly praised Xi, Putin and Kim Jong Un on Truth Social for their “successful” meeting in Beijing: “May President Xi and the wonderful people of China have a great and lasting day of celebration. Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States of America. PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”
In a post on Friday morning, Trump continued with his sarcasm, which contained an element of insecurity: “Looks like we’ve lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest, China. May they have a long and prosperous future together!”
I reached out to former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, who currently serves as director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, for his insights about the meeting. He compared this “new era,” as he called it, to the Cold War.
“[T]wo great powers again anchor international coalitions with opposing political systems – autocracies versus democracies,” McFaul said. “Polls show that most people around the world prefer democracy to dictatorship. [But] the democratic world is less united than the autocratic world. Xi showed last week his successful efforts to unite the autocrats and even attracted a few leaders from democratic leaders to attend [the] summit and celebration of the end of World War II for China. By contrast, President Trump has shown little desire to unite or lead the free world in the way that American presidents in the Cold War did.”
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McFaul warned that while Trump is weakening the democratic world, autocrats like Xi and Putin are forming stronger and more expansive alliances. “Trump is not doing the same to unite the democratic world. In fact, he is doing the exact opposite, weakening American military alliances, and gutting the international economic institutions, including most blatantly the World Trade Organization, that used to facilitate trade and investment between capitalist economies in the Cold War.”
He also noted Trump’s lack of “interest in promoting democracy at home or abroad.” McFaul pointed out the president’s destruction of “some of America’s most powerful soft power instruments for promoting democratic values.” This includes the Department of Government Efficiency’s assault on the U.S. Agency for International Development, Voice of America and Radio Free Asia.
“At home,” he said, “Trump’s assault on democratic institutions makes it much harder for the United States to inspire ‘small d’ democrats around the world. And at times, Trump seems to prefer embracing autocrats over democrats, as his royal treatment in Alaska of imperialist dictator Vladimir Putin demonstrated.”
Others are uncertain about whether the Tianjin summit represented a fundamental realignment in the global order. “[W]hile some are pointing to Modi’s meeting with Xi as indicating that Trump is pushing India towards China, I’m more cautious,” said Paul Poast, associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago and a nonresident fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “India is in many ways the epitome of the ‘realpolitik state’ in today’s world, meaning it has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests. From buying Russian oil at a discount and participating in BRICS, to being a core member of the Quad with the US, India is continuing to maintain its long-held position of being non-committal.”
Poast also observed that Trump could even be waking up to the limits of his international influence. “I don’t think Trump is going to swoon Putin. Moreover, as he indicated in a Truth Social post [Thursday], I think he recognizes as much. Trump wants to end the war in Ukraine and wants to divide Russia from China, but he’s starting to recognize that neither is really under his control.”
But Poast added an important qualifier. “None of this is to say that Trump has ‘bought into’ the idea of maintaining the ‘Liberal International Order’ or “Rules-based Order.” But Trump does see China as a competitor and is recognizing that Russia under Putin is not keen on aligning with the United States.”
On the world stage, America no longer exerts the influence it did even a year ago. Like many great empires, it is being brought down from within. Ryan Wiggins, chief of staff for the pro-democracy advocacy group The Lincoln Project, summarized this sad state of affairs: “Trump has a child’s understanding of the world and is driven by ego and whatever impulses come into his weak mind. It’s causing the U.S. economy to burn as he pursues trade and economic policies that are completely unworkable and destroys U.S. leadership on the global stage. And he’s doing a lot of it to distract from the Epstein files.”
Wiggins also highlighted the role the GOP has played in aiding and abetting the loss of American prestige and power on the world stage. “Equally as dangerous is the utter refusal of Congressional Republicans to do their jobs and provide a check on Trump’s destruction of the post-World War II order,” she said. “They do not care at all about America, only their own local power and ability to get on right-wing media.”
Polls consistently show that Americans are generally poorly informed about foreign policy and global affairs. Enabled by the myth of American exceptionalism, this lack of knowledge has left much of the public unprepared for an authoritarian alliance between global strongmen and the American right, aimed at dismantling the country’s multiracial, pluralistic democracy.
If the American people want a glimpse of our increasingly likely future, we only need to look abroad to Putin’s Russia and Orbán’s Hungary and their authoritarian models of government and society. These are the shining cities on a hill, to paraphrase President Ronald Reagan, that Trump and the right are now looking to as role models.
American exceptionalism will not save the country from this dark future — or from the betrayal of its historic role as leader of the free world.
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