A year into Trump’s election, the world looks expectedly different. The US seems to be losing its soft power to the likes of China. While the Chinese seem to have strategies in place, Trump is driven by impulses, which blind him to the perils of promoting regional strongmen like the Saudi Crown Prince. Back home, he’s unleashing a conservative legal movement that could continue to have his stamp on American judiciary way beyond his tenure.
Hard blows to American soft power
When Donald Trump was elected president a year ago, it was widely predicted that the US foreign policy would take a “disastrous turn”. That’s been truest in the area of American soft power, argues The Economist.
“For all its flaws, America has long been the greatest force for good in the world, upholding the liberal order and offering an example of how democracy works. All that is imperilled by a president who believes that strong nations look out only for themselves. By putting ‘America First’, he makes it weaker, and the world worse off.”
“He openly scorns the notion that America should stand up for universal values such as democracy and human rights. Not only does he admire dictators; he explicitly praises thuggishness, such as the mass murder of criminal suspects in the Philippines. He does so not out of diplomatic tact, but apparently out of conviction. This is new. Previous American presidents supported despots for reasons of cold-war realpolitik. (‘He’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard,’ as Harry Truman is reputed to have said of an anti-communist tyrant in Nicaragua.) Mr Trump’s attitude seems more like: ‘He’s a bastard. Great!'”
“This repels America’s liberal allies, in Europe, East Asia and beyond. It emboldens autocrats to behave worse, as in Saudi Arabia this week, where the crown prince’s dramatic political purges met with Mr Trump’s blessing.
It makes it easier for China to declare American-style democracy passé, and more tempting for other countries to copy China’s autocratic model.”
China has plans, Trump has impulses
This is exactly what Roger Cohen argues in the New York Times. Couple Chinese strength, steady Chinese purpose aimed at midcentury dominance with America’s erratic outbursts suggestive of a petulant great power’s retreat, and you know this is a US that even a year ago, China could have only prayed in vain for.
“China is busy. It has the reserves, the surpluses and the growth to shape the world. More important, it has the pride and the confidence to think long term. America First, Trump’s ugly slogan, reeks of retrenchment. By contrast, Xi’s One Belt, One Road initiative is an enormous infrastructure project designed to use Chinese money and technology to reconnect the old Silk Road and tie nations to China. In scope and value it dwarfs the Marshall Plan, the postwar reconstruction program for Europe that was a farsighted expression of American confidence almost 70 years ago.”
The Chinese are winning the game for now. “The Chinese gambit — in the past, China has been reticent about offering itself as a global paradigm — comes at a moment of American democratic fracture. It’s a good moment for Beijing to talk of arriving “center stage.” Trump does not really have ideas. He has impulses (like his dangerous infatuation with Saudi Arabia).”
A pedophilic bromance
With the boy wonder crown prince Mohammad bin Salman accelerating his ascent to the throne through a series of wide-scale purges last weekend and reckless foreign-policy moves abroad, it seems Donald Trump Has Unleashed the Saudi Arabia the US always wanted — and feared, write Aaron David Miller and Richard Sokolsky in The Foreign Policy.
“During decades of service at the State Department, we longed for the day when risk-averse Saudi leaders would take greater ownership in solving their domestic and regional security problems and reduce their dependence on the United States.”
“But now the dog has finally caught up with the mail truck. The Saudis have become everything we wanted them to be — and by the looks of things, maybe a lot more than we bargained for.”
“This sits Donald Trump, apparently oblivious to the choices he’s making. He’s banked U.S. credibility, image, and policy on a young kid (MBS) whose ambitions and drive seem to have outstripped his wisdom, experience, and judgment. Mohammed bin Salman is up on a tight wire, and to paraphrase the late, great songwriter Leon Russell, putting on a show for Trump to see. The president, without thinking any of this through, has got America and the future of the region up there with him. Let’s hope he’s not too blind to see and doesn’t fall.”
Why no outrage?
Describing Saudi Arabia’s “special powers” over the US, the New York Times editorialises “If all this were happening in Iran, it’s a fair guess that President Trump, Congress and a host of other voices would react with outrage.”
“But there is a problem: Mr. Trump’s uncritical support of the prince’s behavior is stirring fears of a war with Iran and undermining American interests.”
“Secretary of State Rex Tillerson knows this, even if his boss doesn’t. On Friday Mr. Tillerson reaffirmed Lebanon’s independence, hailed Mr. Hariri and cautioned against using Lebanon for proxy conflicts. His words were a stern, if indirect, admonishment to Saudi Arabia. And to his boss in the Oval Office. Though why should a headstrong Saudi prince pay any attention to an American underling who has been repeatedly undermined by that same boss?”
Trump’s conservative legal movement
Away from his diplomatic and domestic policy exhibits, Trump is quietly transforming American judiciary faster than anyone had anticipated. No president in nearly half a century has gotten as many appeals judges confirmed this early as Trump, writes Charlie Savage.
Nearly a year after being elected, “Mr. Trump has already appointed eight appellate judges, the most this early in a presidency since Richard M. Nixon, and on Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted along party lines to send a ninth appellate nominee — Mr. Trump’s deputy White House counsel, Gregory Katsas — to the floor.”
“While the two parties have been engaged in a tit-for-tat escalation of hardball politics over judicial nominations since the Reagan years, the Trump administration is completing a fundamental transformation of the enterprise. And the consequences may go beyond his chance to leave an outsize stamp on the judiciary. When Democrats regain power, if they follow the same playbook and systematically appoint outspoken liberal judges, the appeals courts will end up as ideologically split as Congress is today.”
“As a result, Mr. Trump is poised to bring the conservative legal movement, which took shape in the 1980s in reaction to decades of liberal rulings on issues like the rights of criminal suspects and of women who want abortions, to a new peak of influence over American law and society.”