The end of America’s global leadership? June 1, 2017 10.24pm EDT

Author

1. Si mon Reich , Professor in The Division of Global Affairs and The Department of Political Science, Rutgers University Newark

Disclosure statement

American presidents in recent decades have spent a great deal of time proclaiming U.S. leadership of the global system. The decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement undermines much of what they have said. For any student of global politics, it represents a watershed moment when it comes to debating America’s role in the world.

Becoming a global leader

In practice, global leadership can take two forms.

The first version confers leadership because a country is the most powerful. It has the strongest military, the biggest economy, the most innovative technology. But beyond that, a global leader has to be willing to cast aside its own short-term interests in favor of a longer-term outlook. This isn’t altruism. It is seeing beyond the horizon, what psychologists define as “enlightened self-interest.”

Sometimes a dominant power must endure costs to achieve a collective benefit. American behavior since 1945 has often fitted that description, from supporting NATO to setting up international institutions like the World Bank or funding others like the United Nations. It is why Americans describe themselves, in the words of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, as “the world’s indispensable nation.”

The second version confers leadership as a result of a country’s glowing reputation. Ronald Reagan, for example, invoked the biblical notion that the United States was a model, a “shining light upon a hill.”

America is not an ordinary country. It is special. And presidents since Reagan have routinely made that claim, as if it is a statement of fact. Sometimes global public opinion disagrees. But many Americans still see the country as “one stand[ing] above all others.”

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Losing global leadership

It takes a long time and much effort to build a position as a global leader. But it can be lost in two ways.

The first is dramatic: through the heavy costs of war and with it the collapse of a leader’s economy. A country doesn’t even have to lose a war. Military victory in World War II cost Britain so much that it accelerated its decline as the preeminent power.

The second is a more incremental – and insidious. It involves a steady shift to a focus on short-term interests, and bullying – rather than cooperating with – other countries. This can take many forms. In economic terms, it may entail the leader imposing protectionist trade barriers against other countries. In security, the leader may require other countries to pay more for their collective defense. With that kind of behavior comes a loss of reputation. Sometimes leadership disappears with a whimper more than a bang. Individual decisions may seem so inconsequential that it is hard to spot their importance at the time.

Britain’s global leadership, for example, was built on free trade. But its first protectionist measures were introduced in the opening years of the 20th century. It took only another four decades for America to overtake it as the world’s economic leader. Interestingly, Ronald Reagan first employed protectionist trade barriers against Japan four decades ago.

Renouncing the Paris accord

Sometimes you can spot the moment that leadership was lost as clear as day. Withdrawal from the Paris climate accord looks like one of those moments.

Certainly, the Trump administration’s bickering over NATO’s budget has looked unseemly at times. But, despite Angela Merkel’s plaintive comment that it may be time for Europe to learn to be more self-reliant, that relationship is arguably reparable, contingent on some improvements in the defense expenditures of America’s NATO partners. It could simply be interpreted as tough American posturing.

The same is true of numerous trade deals. Indeed, senior Trump administration officials H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn suggested in a Wall Street Journal op-ed only this week that “America First” did not mean “America alone” when it comes to both trade and national security.

But pulling out of the world’s most far-reaching global climate compact, signed by nearly 200 countries in the last two years, is a completely different animal. Renouncing the agreement makes the United States members of very a select group – with Nicaragua and Syria. And, unlike the U.S., neither of them is particularly important when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions.

Donald Trump may come to discover, like with so many other things, that extricating the U.S. from the Paris Agreement and negotiating a new one is more complicated than he imagined. But despite the fact that it could take years to resolve, it is impossible for the U.S. to retain the claim

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of leadership when it played an instrumental role in setting up the agreement - and then immediately defected from it.

Clearly, the Obama administration sold the climate deal to the American people as being in America’s self-interest. And numerous public interest groups eagerly reinforced that view. But it also served a much broader collective interest – to all of humanity.

That has been widely understood. In the last few days, even some of America’s foremost corporations lobbied in favor of continued American adherence to the agreement. This included Exxon Mobil, the world’s largest oil company.

So why withdraw? Well, adhering to the agreement, argued some pro-business think tanks, entailed domestic costs, particularly to workers employed in America’s fossil fuel industry. They are among Trump’s core supporters. The president’s rhetoric about the unfair nature of the deal aside, it is concerns about his core political constituency that has apparently proved paramount, at a cost to America’s global reputation.

The costs and benefits of withdrawal

There are likely few benefits to the United States. American coal is not in demand and the growth of the renewable power suggests that the demand for fossil fuels will gradually decline anyway

Certainly, the Trump administration can claim the reassertion of American sovereignty. And the decision may further consolidate Trump’s political support among his true die-hard supporters. As Trump said in his announcement, withdrawal is further evidence of his keeping his campaign promises. His promise of renegotiation, in contrast, isn’t feasible, and looks disingenuous.

But despite Trump’s claim to the contrary, the diplomatic and economic costs will likely be significant. And the greatest cost will likely be to America’s global leadership. It is hard to retain the pretense that a country leads when America First entails ignoring the pleas of its closest allies and the United Nations’ leadership.

Just as with the Trump administration’s withdrawal from global and regional trade agreements, China has expressed a willingness to step in and fill the void, and become “a leader on climate change.”

Historians decades from now will no doubt debate the issue of if and when America abdicated from its role as “the indispensable nation.” But, looking back, many may well claim that June 1, 2017 was the day that America’s global leadership ended.

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FROM OBAMA’s archives

President Obama on 8 Years of American Leadership in the World

Leadership in the World When President Obama took office in 2009, America was engaged in two costly wars, faced a global economic crisis, and had a diminished standing with our allies and around the world. The President has refocused and reaffirmed American leadership in the world, recognizing that American strength derives not only from our military power but also our economic vitality, the depth and breadth of our global partnerships, and our values. In doing so, the President has remained relentless in taking action against terrorist networks, while also focusing on key emerging regions and policies that will shape the 21st century

Historic Diplomacy and Collective ActionThese are various deeds that spell out leadership to Obama

Secured a landmark multilateral deal to roll back the Iranian nuclear program and verify that Iran cannot obtain a nuclear weapon

Built a historic opening to Cuba, ending a failed policy of over 50 years by re-establishing diplomatic relations and facilitating greater travel, commerce, and people-to-people ties .

Secured bilateral agreements with China, India, Brazil, South Africa, and Mexico to reduce carbon emissions and combat climate change

AND DOZENS MORE.

American Leadership in a Global CenturyCarlos Pascual Friday, June 12, 2009

Carlos Pascual

Former U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Senior Vice President for Global Energy - IHS Markit, Former Brookings expert

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Carlos Pascual delivered the commencement address at Fort Leavenworth Command and General Staff College. Pascual challenged graduates to make operational the perspectives of American leadership in a globalized world.

Lieutenant General Caldwell, thank you for inviting me here today, for your leadership, and for your kind introduction. Let me extend my thanks as well to Lieutenant General Arter, Command Sergeant Major Johndrow, Brigadier General Cardon, and most importantly to the families and graduates of the Command and General Staff College.

Thank you for allowing me to join you today and to pay tribute to this graduating class – all 960 of you – from the United States and abroad.

I wanted to come here because I believe this is an institution dedicated to building peace. Of course your fundamental mission is to protect our nation: indeed to protect the more than 60 nations from which all of you hail, but we live in a world where protecting our national interests cannot be separated from engaging in our global community.

Seven decades ago, Winston Churchill exhorted the United States this way:

One cannot rise to be in many ways the leading community in the civilized world without being involved in its problems, without being convulsed by its agonies and inspired by its causes. If this has been proved in the past, as it has been, it will become indisputable in the future. The people of the United States cannot escape world responsibility.”

And if that was true seven decades ago, it is even truer today. Let me read to you from Barack Obama’s Audacity of Hope – written when his presidential aspirations were still a distant vision.

“When Truman , Acheson, Kennan, and Marshall sat down to design the architecture of the post-World War II order, their frame of reference was the competition between the great powers that had dominated the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries….America’s greatest threats came from expansionist states like Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia….That world no longer exists.

“[Today] the growing threat…comes primarily from those parts of the world on the margins of the global economy where the international “rules of the road” have not taken hold ….lands in which an overwhelming majority of the population is poor, uneducated, and cut off from the global information grid; places where the rulers fear globalization will loosen their hold on power….The very interconnectivity that increasingly binds the world together has empowered those who would tear that world down.”

I raise these perspectives not to engender a fear of globalization, but to instill a respect for its power, an understanding of how to engage it, and a sense of humility about the limits of our capacity to act alone in shaping it.

We live in a world where capital, technology, ideas and people know no boundaries. It is this very capacity to transcend borders, to tap world capabilities, and to have access to world markets that has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty in China and India. It has created

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unprecedented wealth here in the United States. It has even contributed to a global capacity to advance peace. Forgotten by many is this reality: that cooperation through bodies like the United Nations has cut in half the number of conflicts within states since the end of the Cold War.

But globalization has its dark side when we fail to govern it, and here we have yet to succeed – as a nation, or as a global community. Hence, we have:

A world where a housing crisis in the U.S. turned into a financial crisis and then a global recession with unemployment over 9 percent in the U.S., with 20 million displaced in China, with the poorest of the poor pushed to the margins of survival in places like Mali, Chad, or the mountains of Peru.

A world where the industrial revolution has brought cars, televisions and refrigerators to billions, but it has entrenched a pattern of fossil fuel use that is causing carbon concentrations in our atmosphere that threatens life as we know it.

A world where nuclear technology has created capacity for a carbon-free future in producing electricity, but the uncontrolled proliferation of this technology has made countries, such as North Korea and Iran a menace to world peace and stability.

In this world that transcends borders, no one nation can succeed along, yet no nation can isolate itself from global problems.

This is why President Obama says American security is inseparable from global security. Our futures are intertwined.

But our challenge, your challenge, is to understand how to make operational these perspectives on our global environment. Let me leave you with a few observations:

First, the scale of international challenges is greater than any we have ever known:

We face today crises. You know them well – in some cases too well: Afghanistan/Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, the Middle East;

Geopolitical challenges to global stability: managing productively the rise of China and India; an aggressively assertive Russia; and throughout Latin America, a dynamic of change where the United States has become at times a secondary player; and

Existential or global challenges: the financial crisis, climate change, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and conflict within and between states.

What on this agenda can we put off? What can we place aside? Very little. Thus, an important lesson for our country and for everyone one of us: leadership in this world means to build partnerships with other nations to share this burden for the sake of a peaceful and prosperous world. It requires building respect for our nation – and that means setting a shining example in our adherence to the rule of law – so that we can leverage these partnerships and relationships to succeed in advancing our national interests. If this is true for the United States, it is equally true for every nation represented here today.

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These are not idealistic fantasies. Today, the ability to develop and sustain effective partnerships and the respect of the world has become the new American realism.

I leave you with this observation as well. The problems that we face are interconnected – their interaction defines our future – but at the same time we cannot find solutions unless we understand the interlinked forces that are defining our reality.

The economic crisis is not only shedding jobs, it affects the capacity of every nation to put a price on carbon, a measure seen as critical to encouraging conservation and innovation, and thus deterring the environmental changes that even now are a cause of floods, draughts, disease and migration.

Climate change is exacerbating competition for scarce resources – especially land and water – that could drive future conflicts. One thing we know for sure is that without addressing the underlying scarcities of land and water there are no permanent solutions to conflict in places like Darfur.

And for those who wonder why we should care about distant conflict, let us not forget that the most significant strife we have ever had on American territory was orchestrated from one of the poorest countries in the world – Afghanistan.

What do we learn from this?

Let’s not assess the world based on the static realities before us – but seek instead to gauge the interactive effects of global forces if we are to understand where future threats may emerge.

As we prepare for the future and search for solutions to today’s problems, we must understand how the military dimensions of today’s threats intersect with the other social, economic, cultural and religious factors driving the security environment. But I also caution this: it is not for our militaries to solve all of these problems, but to be a conscience and driver to our civilian authorities to invest and build these capabilities.

As a basic test of whether we are headed in the right direction – to test whether we are honest with ourselves – focus on local realities. Ask what it will take to deliver security and prosperity in a community in Southern Afghanistan, for example, and then ask what will make it sustainable – and here I suspect you’ll find these realities:

We can’t sustain success without building the capacity of local counterparts – whether they be military, police, government officials, entrepreneurs.

Building that capacity means an investment of our people in their people – that is why we are sending 4,000 troops to train and mentor Afghan police and military

But I know you will be sorely disappointed, and perhaps have already been, in our nation’s capacity to invest from the civilian side of our government – not because the will is not there, but because we don’t have the people. Look at this stark contrast: the 4,000 military trainers we are sending to Afghanistan constitute two-thirds of 6,500 foreign service officers across the world.

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As a nation, we have begun to make some critical changes. President Obama requested an 11 percent increase in his FY 2010 Foreign Affairs budget. It is a modest beginning. It will take the support of those of you with a stake in the nation’s security, and from America’s heartland, to achieve this and to continue to grow this capacity.

In our hearts, I believe we must be humble, but not bleak. We have a unique moment.

I have traveled the world – nowhere have I seen a rejection of American leadership. Instead, there is a thirst for a change in the style of leadership based on partnerships and shared investments. That is in our interest.

In the United States, poll after poll shows that the American people want international partnerships and cooperation. Intuitively, we as a nation understand the wisdom of working with others and sharing the burden of extraordinary times.

A core means to achieving sustainable partnerships is adherence to the rule of law. That plays to our strength – not our weakness – it is what makes us strong at home and we should welcome this internationally as well.

Yes, we will encounter problems – a global environment also means global competition. There are those who mean to hurt us and good people throughout the world. We have seen tragic acts of terror in London, Madrid, Mumbai and many cities in Pakistan and throughout the Middle East.

But we cannot be deterred in transforming our perspectives on this transnational world, modernizing our capabilities, and building our capacity to act together. Our strength is in our people – our creativity, honesty, decency, commitment to hard work, and a moral belief that we are in these global endeavors together – for the sake of our families and the generations that come behind us. Our hope is in people like you, and that is a source of confidence.

Command and Staff College Class of 09-1, congratulations. Good speed to you, and to your families. You have the gratitude of our nation, and every nation represented here today.

Gallup poll, 2013: Question asked: “Which country do you think is the greatest threat to peace in the world today?”

Replies:

United States 24%

Pakistan 8%

China 6%

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Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, North Korea, each 5%

India, Iraq, Japan, each 4%

Syria 3%

Russia 2%

Australia, Germany, Palestinian territories, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Korea, UK, each 1%

What our politicians call “leadership”, others call “a threat.”

American Leadership in a World in FluxBruce Jones Monday, March 10, 2014

There’s never been a more important time to understand American power, and leadership. We need only look to Russian special forces in Crimea, Chinese warships in the East China Sea, and an ever-deeper crisis in Syria to see the stakes. In every region, and at home, critics decry the lack of American leadership, and American withdrawal from the world stage. The narrative of American decline and withdrawal is becoming the conventional wisdom. But is it right?

What we’re really seeing is a mounting gap between the fundamentals, on the one hand, and perceptions and policy on the other. The fundamentals of American power are still strong. We spend more on our military than the next 15 countries combined, 10 of whom are close allies, and we have a huge advantage in high-tech weaponry, training, a global network of bases, a dominant intelligence capacity. (That doesn’t necessarily translate into easy military answers to crises, of course.) We dominate the league tables in higher education. The shale and tight oil revolution give us an increasingly strong position in global energy markets, and demonstrate the technological dynamism of our economy. Our population is young, and growing. And no leading power in modern history has had anything like the suite of alliances that America enjoys.

Now, at some point in the next decade or two, China’s economy will match that of the U.S. in size. But comparing the two on the basis of size is like comparing the Lakers to a middle-school basketball team – yes, both have 11 players, but the comparison ends there. Even when China’s economy overtakes that of the U.S., Americans will be far richer per capita, the American economy will occupy a far more influential segment of the market, and the American dollar will still play a vastly larger role in global finance. America’s GDP may have declined to roughly 22% of the world total (from a high of around 25%) but American firms still account for almost 50% of global profits, and American business still dominate sectors like finance and high technology. Oh and there’s this: the more China’s economy grows, the more ours grows, since China is an increasingly large trade partner.

But there’s no question that the big three emerging powers, China, India and Brazil, play an increasingly important role in international affairs. (Let’s stop lumping Russia in with these

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countries–one of the biggest problems with the concept of the ‘BRICs’ is the way it conflates these dynamic, market-oriented economies of the big three with Russia’s resource economy’s recovery from its 1990s collapse.) Are they trying to challenge the U.S.?

It’s complicated. All three have grievances, and they’re jockeying for space and leverage. They do want to challenge the West’s dominance in key global regimes like trade and finance–to reshape them, but not to break them. And China is looking to challenge American naval dominance off its coastlines in the East and South China Seas–vital trading routes for the Chinese economy. In all this, they have common or at least overlapping interests–and Russia is aligned with these goals.

But this is not a unified bloc seeking to challenge the West. India and China have fought three wars against each other, and while they’re now huge trading partners they still eye each other with suspicion and nervousness, while their armies test each other in the Himalayas. China and Russia have some common interests, and occasionally collaborate to stymie Western initiatives–but these are rival powers too, and each is actively exploring relations with other powers like India and Japan to balance their relationship with each other. What divides these powers is far more important than what unites them.

And in the case of the big three, their growth is dependent on a stable global financial system, and on global trade. For China and India, they’re also embarked in a far-flung search for the energy resources they need to grow–and they’re finding them in places they have no power to stabilize on their own. They are both increasingly dependent on oil from the Persian Gulf, and thus on America’s military presence there. The fact is that their growth, now and for the next decades, is still dependent on American power.

Not so with Russia. Russia looks more set to challenge Western influence in its neighborhood, and is less dependent on international trade. But even Russia is vulnerable to global markets, and to energy sales to Europe. As I write the threat of sanctions on Russia, in response to its military moves in the Crimea, is being felt in the Russian business community, and in the Russian stock market.

In short, there are a lot of sources of tension and rivalry in contemporary international politics, but also important sources of restraint–and of cooperation, against terrorism in particular, but also proliferation and threats to trade.

Navigating this tense balance between rivalry and restraint is going to be the dominant challenge for American leadership in the years to come. It’s going to take patient management of our allies (and a certain patience by our allies), and it’s going to take an ability to work with countries like India and Brazil that are neither friend nor foe.

And it’s going to take sound policy. An example of the opposite: taking out Qaddafi’s regime, but failing to put a stabilization presence into Libya afterwards, to secure the peace. Syria is more complicated but little doubt that the Administration’s confused stance over chemical weapons and airstrikes in August 2013 did little to project confidence in American power.

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Critics argue that if the United States withdraws from international leadership we’re going to see chaos and confusion. They’re right. This hasn’t happened yet, though, despite some perceptions to the contrary. We have the underlying capacity, a powerful alliance structure, and a favorable international landscape.

But there’s no time to waste. The longer the perception of American hesitation endures, the more ingrained it will be. The more uncertain our allies become, the more they’ll act in ways that will create complications for the United States, in Asia, in Europe, and the Middle East. We’ve got global interests, and a global presence. Time to recall that we’re still the top global power, will be for some time to come, and to project the confidence of our position.

Now Is Not The Time To Shirk American Leadership In The WorldGuest post written by

By Senator Richard G. Lugar (Ret.) and Congressman Jim Kolbe (Ret.)

Lugar and Kolbe are former members of Congress and honorary co-chairs of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network, MFAN.

US President Donald Trump delivers a statement on Syria from the Mar-a-Lago estate in West Palm Beach, Florida, on April 6, 2017

Since the end of World War II, U.S. foreign policy has relied on the three distinct policy tools: defense, diplomacy and development. These three Ds have worked together to develop mutually reinforcing strategies that have enjoyed strong bipartisan support for over 70 years. Continued U.S. leadership across the globe is not only a moral imperative that supports our nation’s long established values; it is the right policy for promoting our national security and creating a safe, stable and prosperous world.

Unfortunately, President Trump’s 2018 budget proposes an arbitrary cut of 31% to diplomacy and development programs operated by the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development. These cuts are based on campaign rhetoric, rather than a cost-benefit analysis of what tools actually lead to safety for Americans in a volatile world or more favorable global circumstances for the growth of U.S. jobs and our economy. Nor do the cuts consider the moral imperatives of assisting people in desperate circumstances such as those currently suffering from famines in Somalia, Yemen, South Sudan and northeast Nigeria. But perhaps more disturbingly, the budget communicates a disdain for America’s leadership role in the world.

Presidential budgets always are re-written by Congress, and this budget will not be the exception. There is broad understanding within the legislative branch about how damaging these proposed cuts would be to U.S. leverage around the world. Such a U.S. retreat from global influence will

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create a void that will undoubtedly be exploited and filled by those whose interests are contrary to our own.

Effective U.S. foreign policy can only be achieved when our nation’s diplomats and development professionals have the resources to work effectively alongside our men and women in uniform. President Trump’s own cabinet leaders recognize the value of each of these distinct 3Ds. At his confirmation hearing for Secretary of Defense, General James Mattis reminded Congress that the military “lets you provide the strongest support for our diplomats to try to find a non-military option. It’s the ‘peace through strength’ idea.” Further, at his confirmation hearing, Secretary of State Tillerson underscored America’s unique history as the only super power “with the means and the moral compass capable of shaping the world for good,” and he endorsed foreign assistance agencies and programs as an important “projection of America’s values around the world.”

Secretary Mattis’ views on the importance of diplomacy and development are reflected across the leadership of our armed forces as evidenced in a recent letter to Congressional leadership signed by more than 120 retired generals. In it they wrote, “development agencies are critical to preventing conflict and reducing the need to put our men and women in uniform in harm’s way.”

……..

As our country faces a complex world of conflicts, diplomatic challenges, and humanitarian crises during tight budget times, the partnership among Defense, State and USAID, is both essential and cost-effective. At just 1% of the federal budget, the International Affairs Budget provides impressive returns on investment. For example, when the Ebola epidemic struck West Africa, a coordinated response from USAID, the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the Centers for Disease Control halted the spread of the disease and kept the American people safe.

Our nation’s charitable spirit underscores how moral values remain American values. When the President’s Malaria Initiative saves 6 million lives in 10 years that is America expressing a moral choice. When 11.5 million HIV-positive people are living productive lives thanks to access to antiretroviral drugs through PEPFAR, and nearly 2 million babies are born to HIV-positive mothers, HIV-free – that is America making a moral choice.

We recognize that development is challenging work that may take time to demonstrate results. Beginning with President Bush, U.S. development programs have undergone a series of reforms, many of which have been recommended and supported by the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN), which we co-chair. With a results oriented focus of development programs including PEPFAR and the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the Trump White House is inheriting a set of modernized development agencies that continue to improve. Through Power Africa, a multi-agency initiative, supported by Congress through recently enacted legislation, USAID is mobilizing more than $40 billion from private-sector partners and already delivering power to 6 million people.

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Since 2011 USAID has conducted more than 1,500 program evaluations which are used to shape policies, modify existing projects, and inform future project design. Among eight bipartisan pieces of foreign assistance legislation enacted by the last Congress is the Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act which requires that common evaluation standards be applied across U.S. agencies that administer foreign assistance and that development programs be transparent to U.S. taxpayers.

We should continue to build on an effectiveness agenda that supports ending global hunger and extreme poverty and creating educational and economic opportunity so that developing countries may become safe and stable partners of the United States in the global economy. We urge Congress to uphold its powerful bipartisan foreign policy legacy with a robust diplomatic and development budget. Such action is not only right and moral; it is good for America.

Lugar served in the Senate from 1977 to 2013 and as Chairman or Ranking Minority Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for more than a decade. He is currently president of The Lugar Center.

Kolbe served in the United States House of Representatives for 22 years, including six as chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations.  He is currently a Senior Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Gallup, January 18, 2018

World's Approval of U.S. Leadership Drops to New Lowby Julie Ray

Story Highlights

Median approval of U.S. leadership is 30%, down from 48% in 2016 U.S. approval dropped substantially in 65 countries and areas Germany's leadership now tops that of U.S., China and Russia

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- One year into Donald Trump's presidency, the image of U.S. leadership is weaker worldwide than it was under his two predecessors. Median approval of U.S. leadership across 134 countries and areas stands at a new low of 30%, according to a new Gallup report.

The most recent approval rating, based on Gallup World Poll surveys conducted between March and November last year, is down 18 percentage points from the 48% approval rating in the last year of President Barack Obama's administration, and is four points lower than the previous low of 34% in the last year of President George W. Bush's administration.

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The recent drop in approval ratings is unrelated to the world's being less familiar with the new U.S. administration. The global median who do not have an opinion about U.S. leadership in 2017 (23%) is similar to the 25% in the last year of the Obama presidency.

Instead, disapproval of U.S. leadership increased almost as much as approval declined. The 43% median disapproval, up 15 points from the previous year, set a new record as well, not only for the U.S. but for any other major global power that Gallup has asked about in the past decade.

Big Losses Are Among Close Allies, Few Gains

The relatively fragile image of U.S. leadership in 2017 reflects large and widespread losses in approval and relatively few gains. Out of 134 countries, U.S. leadership approval ratings declined substantially -- by 10 percentage points or more -- in 65 countries that include many longtime U.S. allies and partners.

Portugal, Belgium, Norway and Canada led the declines worldwide, with approval ratings of U.S. leadership dropping 40 points or more in each country. While majorities in each of these countries approved of U.S. leadership in 2016, majorities disapproved in 2017.

In contrast, U.S. leadership approval increased 10 points or more in just four countries: Liberia (+17), Macedonia (+15), Israel (+14), and Belarus (+11). The 67% of Israelis who approve of U.S. leadership is on par with the ratings Israelis gave the U.S. during the Bush administration. Notably, interviewing in Israel took place before Trump officially recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital, but he had repeatedly promised to do so during his campaign for president.

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U.S. Approval Drops to New Lows in Americas

Regionally, the image of U.S. leadership suffered most in the Americas, where approval ratings dropped to a new low. The median of 24% who approve of U.S. leadership in the region now stands at about half of what it was in the last year of the Obama administration (49%).

Approval of U.S. leadership plunged in every country in the region in 2017. In fact, there were double-digit decreases in all countries except Venezuela, where approval dropped nine points.

Find out what the world thinks of U.S. leadership.See how the U.S. competes with Germany, China and Russia.

U.S. leadership approval ratings suffered nearly as much in Europe as they did in the Americas; however, the current 25% approval rating there is not the lowest on record -- the ratings during the last two years of George W. Bush's administration still hold that distinction. In Asia, approval dropped to 30%, tying the previous low that Gallup measured during the Bush administration.

Africa as a whole remained the bright spot for U.S. leadership approval, as it has been for the past decade. Nonetheless, the approval rating for the region is at its lowest level yet, clinging to a bare majority (51%) that may be at risk after the president's alleged remarks about the continent last week.

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Trump's First Year: Hard Times for U.S. Soft Power

The losses in U.S. leadership approval may have implications on U.S. influence abroad. With its stable approval rating of 41%, Germany has replaced the U.S. as the top-rated global power in the world. The U.S. is now on nearly even footing with China (31%) and barely more popular than Russia (27%) -- two countries that Trump sees as rivals seeking to "challenge American influence, values and wealth."

The present situation represents a marked change in the status quo since Obama's presidency, when the image of U.S. leadership remained relatively strong worldwide. In Obama's last year in office, for example, the U.S. led Germany by seven points, China by 17 points and Russia by 22 points.

The current rankings instead look more like a return to the status quo during the last year of the Bush administration -- with Germany on top, followed by China, the U.S. and then Russia -- except now, the U.S. has even more ground to make up.

Implications

It is too early in Trump's presidency to deem his "America First" foreign policy a success or failure. However, it is clear that based on the trajectory of what the world thinks of the U.S., many of the U.S. alliances and partnerships that the Trump administration considers a "great strength" are potentially at risk.

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The World Without American LeadershipThe Daily Angle

If America has abdicated its global leadership role, are we now left with a free-for-all?

Gary Grappo • Aug 14, 2019 Gary Grappo is CEO of Equilibrium International Consulting, LLC, having founded the company following a distinguished career in public and foreign policy and in the private sector. Ambassador Grappo is a career American diplomat (retired).

People around the world, including Americans, have argued that the world can get along without US leadership. Today, they may want to scan the global landscape. While acute crises and violent conflict may not seem imminent at the moment, the view isn’t a hopeful one. For Americans, naively content in their island bubble between the two great oceans, the view may not be so worrisome yet. For those outside its shores, it may be less comforting.

Japan and South Korea, two of America’s most important allies in Asia, are at the point of a diplomatic breakup. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe recently imposed what amounts to trade sanctions on a variety of products made by its Asian ally in retaliation for a decision by South Korean President Moon Jae-in.

The two countries’ dispute stems from a decades-long inability to resolve outstanding issues related to Japan’s colonization of Korea from 1910 to 1945 and effective enslavement of Koreans as laborers and sex workers. Since 1965, various attempts have been made to resolve these disputes, the most recent in 2015. It was President Moon’s decision last November to step back from one of the provisions of that most recent attempt that has led to the current standoff.

Mutual trade tariffs — the apparent go-to response in international disputes nowadays following the precedent of the US president’s preferred response — export and import quotas, visa restrictions and now threats of withdrawal from critical intelligence-sharing agreements have made this a potential crisis. Japan and South Korea are the second and fourth biggest economies in Asia and the continent’s most stalwart democracies. This isn’t supposed to happen between democracies. The dispute could threaten the global supply chain and even undermine efforts to bring North Korea’s nuclear weapons program to heel. The stakes are high.

Meanwhile, Washington, for whom the two nations represent pillars of its Indo-Pacific policy, seems to respond with a shrug of the shoulders. President Donald Trump, demurring from US involvement, asserted such a diplomatic undertaking was “like a full-time job.” Statements from the State Department have amounted to little more than parental “Play nice, you two!” admonitions.

Old Wounds, New Battles

Elsewhere in Asia, India and Pakistan have renewed their recurrent hostilities. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi revoked Article 370 of the constitution, which dated back to 1949 and

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gave Jammu and Kashmir its special status; now it will be treated as a nominal political and administrative entity of India. Pakistan responded with trade sanctions — again we see it — and the expulsion of India’s ambassador to Islamabad. India has deployed troops to the region to maintain order.

The two South Asian behemoths have been in almost perpetual feuding mode since their independence in 1947, including wars in 1948, 1965, 1971, 1985 and 1999. Lesser skirmishes between Pakistani and Indian forces have occurred more frequently. While war appears unlikely at this juncture — the risk of escalation between the two nuclear-armed nations makes open conflict always a dangerous proposition — the unsettled nature of the Kashmir region and heightened nature of tensions render crystal ball reading hardly more than a coin toss.

The presence of Islamic militant organizations in the Pakistan-controlled areas further complicates the standoff. Though influenced by Islamabad, these groups operate according to their own ideological playbook, and attacking Indians or Indian forces in the area has been a pattern. How India might respond in today’s stressed circumstances is uncertain.

Washington may have oafishly and ineptly exacerbated this latest round of tensions. During a visit last month by Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, to Washington and a meeting with President Trump, the latter maladroitly offered to serve as mediator in the two countries’ dispute. While such mediation might be welcome in Islamabad, that is most definitely not, nor has ever been, the case in New Delhi.

Trump’s ill-considered intervention is unlikely to be the cause of this latest fall-out. But it shouldn’t be discounted. Aside from anodyne press statements from the State Department about respecting the rights of the residents of the region and peaceful settlement of differences, there’s little sign that the White House has any intention of acting on the president’s offer to Prime Minister Kahn or taking any other action to calm hostilities.

The US maintains a delicate relationship with both nations. Pakistan is critical to Washington’s efforts to negotiate a successful understanding with the Taliban on Afghanistan’s future and end America’s 18-year long war there, something desperately wanted by Trump and most Americans. India, over the last two decades, has emerged from behind the self-imposed isolation of strict neutrality, largely a result of its close ties with the former Soviet Union, and established itself as a rising global power, though not yet on par with China.

It is the world’s largest democracy, and Washington has been working patiently to strengthen its ties with the region’s dominant power as an Asian counterbalance to China. Renewed tensions between these two countries are patently not in Washington’s or anyone’s interest. No good whatsoever can come of it.

Fracture Zone

This brings us even closer to American interests, the pending UK exit from the EU, aka Brexit. The UK’s new prime minister, Boris Johnston, has all but promised his nation’s departure from the world’s largest trading bloc by the EU-mandated date of October 31, with or without an

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agreement. The so-called hard or no-deal Brexit would likely lead to considerable economic disruption in Britain and potentially exhume haunting animosities in Northern Ireland. Beyond that, predictions are hard to come by, though largely pessimistic.

Dating back to his stump speeches as a candidate, Donald Trump has all but abetted Brexit. More recently, in voicing his support for Johnson, Trump has doubled down on Britain leaving the EU. While he’s also promised to quickly negotiate a bilateral trade agreement with Britain once it does leave, such a deal would do little for the US and would hardly replace the enormity of trade and other business Britain currently does with the EU. Furthermore, little assessment has been made of the impact of the British departure from the EU, currently America’s largest trading partner in the world. A weakened EU, most of whose members are also members of America’s most important strategic alliance, NATO, is patently not in US interests.

Problems elsewhere in the world garner less attention but still present concerns to the regions in which they occur and to America’s wide-ranging interests. In Hong Kong, Algeria, Sudan and Russia citizens are rising up to challenge the established ruling order, i.e., dictatorships. In Algeria and Sudan, outsiders — unsurprisingly authoritarian regimes themselves — are supporting the entrenched ruling class, usually the armed forces leaderships and compromised political and business elites. These include Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Russia.

Though still lacking in effective political organization, this rise of the people to challenge the status quo and demand rule of law, accountability, respect for human rights and fair elections is another demonstration of the universal yearning for democracy and freedom.

The US, a champion of democracy throughout most of the postwar period under successive Democratic and Republican administrations, has been largely quiet. Neither the White House nor the State Department has seen fit to lend even a modest word of encouragement to those risking lives to call some of the world’s most autocratic regimes to account.

A Loss of Moral Leadership

Taken alone or even collectively, these challenges to global stability might have been taken in stride by a pre-Trump US foreign policy leadership. Presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and even Barack Obama would have made phone calls to counterparts of friends and allies and dispatched able secretaries of state such as George Schultz, Jim Baker, Warren Christopher, Condoleezza Rice or John Kerry and their teams of seasoned experts to help mend such difficulties. 

But America under Trump, no longer the steward of global stability, is busy stirring its own pot of poisonous potions. An escalating trade dispute with the world’s second largest economy, China, threatens the global economy. Neither side seems prepared to search for serious options as both drive furiously toward a head-on collision. President Trump, when not upping tariffs, pours rhetorical gasoline on the simmering feud, foolishly believing that trade wars are “winnable.”

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In Iran, the US administration appears to be succeeding in bringing the economy of that nation to its knees but with no apparent plan to actually bring the Islamic Republic around to a new agreement that would fix the shortcomings of the earlier nuclear accord negotiated under Obama and broken by Trump.

Even at home, stability and predictability are two words never used to describe this president’s domestic programs. His overwrought policies on immigration and the border with Mexico, strained relations with both Mexico and Canada on trade, and venomous and inflammatory rhetoric on race have left many Americans with knots in their stomachs. Donald Trump’s leadership “philosophy” is a tragic departure from that of previous occupants of the office. Franklin Roosevelt once described it as “not merely an administrative office… [but] pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.” Under Trump, it’s become an office to divide, debase, degrade, distract and disgorge bilious bombast.

The US Senate, once known as the world’s “greatest deliberative body” and historically the legislative body more engaged in US foreign policy, has passively submitted to heretofore unthinkable positions and pronouncements of the president. In today’s Republican-controlled Senate, deliberation has degenerated into scandalous deference. The Republican majority has thwarted rational legislation on guns, passively ignored the brutal treatment of Central Americans fleeing their countries for the US through Mexico, refused to take up legislation to tighten America’s electoral process against foreign intervention before the 2020 election, and discounted serious and potentially impeachable actions by the president, to name but a few of the many serious issues unaddressed.

Is There an Adult in the House?

Since World War II, Americans and most people around the world took solace in the fact that US leadership, though far from immune from problem-making, could walk the always tough course of its own domestic policy and still chew the sticky and often distasteful gum of international diplomacy. It would work with its many allies and friends around the world to diffuse crises, head off conflicts and sooth edgy nerves of nations and their leaders.

Donald Trump asserted during his many campaign speeches and in subsequent statements as president that the world had taken advantage of the US and that it had become a global chump. It was settling fights while having its own lunch money taken away. Many around the world, while not necessarily agreeing with this warped assessment, nevertheless concluded similarly. American leadership has become an anachronism, its clumsy and ineffective military forays contributing to rather than alleviating the world’s instability. It has become irrelevant in a multipolar world where America’s is just another voice.

What President Trump and like-minded Americans, as well as others around the world, have forgotten, however, is the unique ability of the United States to convene. That is, its capacity to bring nations together to address global and even regional problems and ultimately to head off conflict. To be sure, the American record is less than perfect, as history confirms. But the role of convener was ably, if not perfectly, filled.

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Over the course of the last 10-15 years, that distinctive ability has been squandered by a needless war in Iraq, an extended and seemingly never-ending war in Afghanistan, an all-consuming global war on terror, and an often vacillating and unfocused foreign policy. Despite his contributions to this development, President Obama deserves credit for ushering forward the Paris Climate Agreement, the Trans Pacific Partnership and the Iran nuclear deal, all of which followed in the tradition of his predecessors of leveraging America’s power and influence for the good not only of the US but also of nations everywhere. Having abrogated his predecessor’s achievements, President Trump now appears bent on full-scale abandonment of America’s historic role as the world’s convener-in-chief.

The present state of affairs may have indeed been inevitable. Nations like China, among others, have risen in power and influence. The global economy has grown so massive and dynamic that no nation, not even one with the dominance of the US, could truly lead or manage it. But in the absence of America — the mediator, conciliator, convener — are we left with a free-for-all?

As one surveys the global landscape, there are disturbing signs that affairs in the world are not what we — whether in America, Japan, South Korea, India, Pakistan or Europe — should wish them to be. The devolution of power and action to regional powers with little control ought to be cause for alarm. It leaves the problems and the countries involved therein vulnerable to bad actors, such as terrorists, or the stronger seeking to gain advantage at the weaker one’s expense.

Governments lacking the guard rails of genuine participatory democracy and rule of law ignore, if not abuse, their citizens. Without such brakes, any one of the tensions we now see could escalate in an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world.

Would the world prefer to see active, principled diplomacy by the US to address such problems? Perhaps not. There is always the possibility of making things worse. But if not the United States, then who?

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

Our America

Kamala [Harris] believes we are at a turning point in history. By alienating our allies and ignoring the emerging threats we face, President Trump has left America less safe and weaker in the world.

American Leadership At Home and AbroadWe are on a dangerous path and we need to change course. Kamala believes that requires American leadership and a president who holds true to our values at home and abroad.

That means America must fight alongside friends and allies – not alone. During his time in the White House, President Trump has undermined the partnerships and institutions we’ve spent

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decades building in every corner of the world. Kamala believes America is stronger when we invest in our critical relationships and alliances – from NATO, to key partners like Japan, India, Mexico, and Korea. Whether it’s the nuclear threat of North Korea and Iran, chaos and oppression in Venezuela, or confronting China’s unfair trade practices, the U.S. is most effective at confronting global challenges when we work in lockstep with our partners.

Turning our back on the world is not an option: the U.S. and our allies face real threats to our security – from Russian aggression to international terrorism – and we need to be clear-eyed, determined, and proactive in confronting them.

American leadership and values also means preparing for a range of new and emerging threats, including cyber-security, climate change, and the white supremacist terror threat at home. President Trump has ignored all three, and it has put America’s security at risk. As president, Kamala will invest in new technology to fortify America’s critical infrastructure, including by passing her Secure Elections Act to protect against foreign interference in our democracy. She’ll immediately re-enter the Paris Agreement and make climate cooperation a key diplomatic priority for the United States. And she’ll confront white supremacy by re-establishing the Domestic Terror Intelligence Unit and reversing President Trump’s cuts to programs designed to combat white nationalism.

Finally, American leadership and values means remembering who we are. Part of what makes America strong are the very values the Trump Administration jeopardizes: thoughtfulness and measured leadership, a commitment to human rights and pursuing peace, and respect for our veterans and service members.

Kamala believes these values belong at the center of our foreign policy. As president, she’ll end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and protracted military engagements in places like Syria. But she’ll do so responsibly – by consulting our Generals and Ambassadors, not via tweet. She’ll reinvigorate our diplomatic corps and State Department. She’ll continue her unshakable support for Israel and work towards a two-State solution so that Palestinians and Israelis can govern themselves in security, dignity, and peace. She’ll stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, but without isolating the United States diplomatically and risking an unnecessary war.

Most importantly, unlike President Trump, Kamala will prioritize the needs of America’s service members, military families, and veterans, just as they’ve prioritized the needs of our nation. That means defending the Department of Veterans Affairs against corporate privatization attempts, expanding our investment in veterans’ health care, and reversing President Trump’s illegal and immoral ban on transgender service member

Does the World Actually Want American Leadership? National Review June 11, 2018 By J. J. McCullough J. J. McCullough is a columnist for National Review Online and the Global Opinions section of the Washington Post.

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Only when it follows European priorities.

As we wade through long essays of weepy analysis of America’s declining global standing in the age of President Donald Trump, a question worth pondering is whether the rhetoric would be much different in the age of President Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or Jeb Bush.

One does not have to be a supporter of Trump’s trade war to observe that a great deal of the shock and horror with which his administration is received in foreign lands — most recently at last week’s G7 summit in Quebec — is brazenly disingenuous. Though Trump is framed as presenting a depressing, existential threat to the credibility of U.S. leadership of the western alliance, such framing fails if it does not first concede the degree to which “world opinion” always flops back and forth depending on whether a Republican or Democrat is in the White House. Overseas allies are giving a terrible score to U.S. leadership at the moment, says Gallup. To find comparably bad numbers you have to go all the way back to . . . the last Republican administration.

President George W. Bush attempted to mobilize the world in favor of war with Iraq, a rallying cry that relied heavily on deference to American intelligence and geopolitical strategy. The initiative was a flop. The leaders of France, Germany, Canada, and others opposed the war loudly, and protesters filled the streets of Europe. Close allies fought elections over who possessed the greatest courage to “stand up” to the United States, and even pro-war governments made great show of how they reached the decision entirely on their own terms, and had no intention of being an American poodle.

Then, as now, America was mocked for having true friends only in Israel and the former Warsaw Pact, leading to Donald Rumsfeld’s defensive assertion that we should stop paying so much attention to “Old Europe.” Then, as now, the U.S. administration was said to have preemptively discredited itself by embodying everything the civilized West rightly despised about America: unilateralism, arrogance, simplistic black-and-white morality, over-the-top rhetoric. The Economist ran covers depicting the president of the United States as a Strangelovian caricature riding a bomb, and John Kerry made “respected in the world” one of the slogans of his 2004 presidential run.

I raise this not to relitigate the Iraq War, or any other part of Bush’s foreign policy, but rather to remind us of the simple fact that the West’s impression of American leadership is always extremely contextual, based on what that leadership is doing, as opposed to being broadly supportive unless given extreme provocation to be otherwise.

It would be absurd, after all, to believe that the foreign policy of Barack Obama was uncontroversial with western allies simply because he carried himself in some dignified, agreeable matter. To the extent that Obama’s lead-from-behind approach to foreign affairs ever exerted itself aggressively, it was largely in the service of things Europeans either already had (diplomatic relations with Cuba), wanted (the Iran deal, the Paris climate accord), or mostly ran themselves (the intervention in Libya). His line on Israel (belligerent, unhelpful) was basically the European one, while bombing ISIS targets in Iraq and Syria was a mission the Europeans couldn’t jump into fast enough. Obama’s was not a presidency that drew allies into the unknown

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by tapping into some vast reserve of goodwill for the United States; it was one that earned easy praise for marching under someone else’s banner.

Obama’s was not a presidency that drew allies into the unknown by tapping into some vast reserve of goodwill for the United States; it was one that earned easy praise for marching under someone else’s banner.

In the Canadian magazine Maclean’s the other day, Scott Gilmore wrote a much-shared, righteous screed about how Trump has proven the need to “America-proof the west.” Yet such sloganeering flows easily from a certain sort of foreigner who has never liked America much to begin with and clearly sees fantasizing about a post-American world order as an opportunity Trump’s rise has provided, rather than a burden he’s imposed. Far from being perfectly at peace with American global leadership until a few weeks ago, lesser powers have been pursuing a project to offset American “hegemony” for years, and the goal has been either explicitly or implicitly cited as justification for everything from tightening up the European Union to forging closer ties to China.

To be sure, although anti-Americanism can often be a petty, jealous, and hypocritical thing, it can also be rooted in genuine divergences in the philosophy of foreign policy. The perspective of the American Right on matters of international law, institutions of global governance, supra-constitutional treaties, and the justifiable use of armed force, among other things, will always differ noticeably from that of the majority of European leaders, rooted, as it is, in uniquely American traditions. Any era of Republican control of U.S. foreign policy thus seems destined to herald some degree of ideological disharmony within the broader western alliance, and a western alliance worth anything will surely learn to incorporate this consistency of American democracy into its strategic planning.

Unless, that is, the point was never about integrating the United States as it actually exists into a position of leadership and deference, but rather merely tolerating American leaders to the degree they do not contest the settled consensus of the rest, propose disruptive ideas, or exert any independent prerogative without unanimous assent.5

President Trump’s tariffs seem like broadly bad policy poorly imposed, though it’s still early, and I have faith they may yet lead to productive outcomes, including an end to some of the trade deformities Peter Navarro recently outlined. Yet as far as existential crises to the western alliance go, Trump will be only as bad as America’s allies let him be — which, unfortunately, some seem quite eager to do.

War Stories

This Is What a World Without American Leadership Looks Like

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The escalating feud between U.S. allies Japan and South Korea is what happens when the president ignores his responsibilities.

By Fred Kaplan

Aug 23, 201911:19 AM

A little over a month ago, White House officials suddenly realized that tensions between South Korea and Japan—the two top U.S. allies in North Asia—were spiraling out of control. Like most Americans who don’t follow Asian politics, they seemed unaware, or unfazed, that these tensions had erupted periodically for the past 70 years—and that the eruptions have usually been quelled by American mediation.

The issues between the two countries have been the same all along. What’s different, this time around, is that President Donald Trump—unlike all previous presidents—has had, until very recently, no interest in stepping in.

“How many things do I have to get involved in?” he asked last month, in a tone of exasperation, when he first heard requests to help quell the tensions. The implication was that he didn’t much want to get involved in this one. And so the tensions spiraled.

Those issues between the two countries amount to a toxic brew of nationalist resentments dating back more than a century. They ought to be a cautionary tale in this era when our own country is repackaging old tribal disputes into seething partisan politics.

The background is this: In 1910, Japan colonized South Korea, recruited laborers at abysmally low wages, and, during World War II, forced South Korean women to serve as “comfort women”—essentially sex slaves—to Japanese servicemen. The memory of this history—still potent, though few of its victims are still alive—is the source of the tensions today.

For a while, it seemed that this tawdry chapter had been closed. A treaty signed in 1965 obligated the Japanese government to reimburse the underpaid workers (many of whom were still alive at the time). Another treaty, signed in 2015, compensated the surviving comfort women and many families of those who were deceased.

“How many things do I have to get involved in?” — Donald Trump

Top-tier U.S. officials—including, in the more recent treaty, President Barack Obama—were deeply involved in the negotiations of both treaties.

Gradually, over the past two years, both treaties have fallen apart—and no U.S. official, certainly not Donald Trump, has intervened to hold them together.

Many South Korean citizens protested the limited terms of the “comfort women” agreement upon its signing, and when President Moon Jae-in took office in 2017, he shut down the foundation that had been distributing the Japanese funds.

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Then, last year, a lawsuit was filed in South Korean court on behalf of the underpaid laborers, seeking reimbursement from Japanese companies that had participated in the occupation. The 1965 treaty—which also established diplomatic relations between South Korea and Japan—had explicitly placed liability strictly on the Japanese government. It also set up an arbitration board—consisting of one person each from Japan, South Korea, and a third party—to hear and resolve any complaints. The lawyers for the laborers argued that individuals should have the right to sue for damages from the offending companies. (Under the treaty, Japan paid the South Korean government, which, rather than distributing the money to the underpaid laborers, poured it into industrial investment, which spurred enormous economic growth.) The judge sided with the laborers. In a split decision, which took everyone by surprise, the South Korean Supreme Court upheld that verdict.

That was the pivot. The Japanese companies, backed by the Tokyo government, refused to comply. The Seoul government then threatened to seize Japanese assets in South Korea. Last month, Japan restricted exports of materials critical to South Korea’s semiconductor and flat-panel industries, while also removing the country from its “whitelist” of trusted trading partners. South Korea removed Japan from its own similar list.

Finally, just this week, South Korea canceled a treaty with Japan that was signed in 2016 (again, under heavy prodding from the Obama administration), under which the two agreed to share top-secret intelligence information with each other.

“This is the most serious rupture,” says Daniel Sneider, lecturer at Stanford University, who was written extensively about these growing tensions and their roots. Not only did the 2016 treaty allow rapid transmission of intelligence about North Korea’s nuclear sites, missile tests, and other possible threats; it also led to extensive contacts between South Korean and Japanese military commands—contacts that were kept out of public view and that might now be terminated along with the treaty.

The widening gulf between the two allies will also make it harder to devise a common position on negotiating with North Korea, assuming that, at some point, a U.S. president is interested in negotiating, rather than letting Kim Jong-un do whatever he wants as long as he stops short of test-launching long-range missiles.

Ever since its creation, just after World War II, North Korea—always a small, impoverished nation—has followed a strategy of playing off the divisions among its larger neighbors. The widening gulf between South Korea and Japan gives Kim much more room to play.

The Trump administration woke up to the dangers just last month, after the mutual export bans and South Korea’s subsequent threat to seize Japanese assets. Matt Pottinger, the senior Asia specialist on the National Security Council, arranged a trip to the two countries. But John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser (and Pottinger’s boss), headlined the visit—and, while he mentioned the tensions between the two countries, he spent much more time trying to get their leaders to join the U.S.-led coalition against Iran. (He failed.)

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Trump had already said he didn’t want to get involved in a trade dispute between South Korea and Japan. So both of them felt free to ratchet up the tensions—which are driven by domestic politics much more than any national security considerations.

“Obviously, Trump didn’t create this situation,” Sneider told me. “But what’s happening is a consequence of the vacuum of leadership in Washington—and that is created by the Trump administration.”

Scott Snyder, director of the Program on U.S.-Korea Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, agrees. “The Obama administration was pretty deep behind the scenes in facilitating improvement of Japan–South Korea relations in 2015–16,” he says. As part of his effort to “pivot” toward Asia, Obama created a quarterly summit among the deputy foreign secretaries of the United States, South Korea, and Japan. As in most previous administrations, U.S. ambassadors and assistant secretaries in charge of Asian affairs at the Defense and State departments spoke to their counterparts almost daily, putting out small fires before they erupted into four-alarm blazes. All of this ended under Trump. Ambassadors and assistant secretaries for the region weren’t even appointed until very recently.

Some U.S. officials have tried to put out the flames since this summer’s spurt of tensions. Snyder notes that U.S. emissaries proposed a “standstill” agreement between the two governments, but Moon and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe “shrugged it off” and paid no consequence for doing so: a clear signal that the United States would no longer use its leverage to exert compromises. Earlier this month, Trump finally said he was “concerned” that the two allies were “not getting along with each other.” But he proposed no agenda or demands, so nothing is likely to happen.

Trump’s main misperception, even now, is seeing the rising tensions as a mere trade dispute. “It’s not a trade dispute,” Daniel Sneider says. “Trade is the main arena in which these larger issues”—issues of nationalism, bitterness, honor, and history—“play out.”

Obama didn’t fully grasp the larger dimensions, either. Sneider recalls him telling the Japanese and South Korean leaders, “You have to look forward,” as if history was something that merely happened long ago rather than a force that pervades daily life and shapes streams of consciousness several decades after the slights and furies began to accumulate.

This is a common failing of Americans, especially when we gaze at disputes agitated not merely by decades but by centuries of animus—sectarian wars in the Middle East, border wars in South Asia, tribal wars in Africa, civil wars everywhere—and wonder why the combatants can’t just move on.

It’s a strange blindness, since we Americans still very much carry the wounds of our past, notably the sin of slavery, which continues to animate our politics, culture, economics, and society. The myth of the melting pot exerts such a strong force that, in many corners of life, it’s come true—and where it hasn’t, it has allowed many of us to pretend that it has. (Look at the preposterous backlash to the New York Times’ recent 1619 Project, revealing that many conservatives deny that slavery has exerted any legacy on modern life whatsoever.) Maybe that’s

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why we have avoided a resurgence of civil wars. Maybe that avoidance, brought on by evasion, lies at the heart of “American exceptionalism”—though now we too are wondering how long that can sustain itself.

Many other countries face the force of history all the time. South Korea and Japan are unusual in that they’re divided by this force yet at the same time are both our allies. The challenge, which previous presidents have taken up to some degree, is to recognize this fact, to confront its complexities, to help the countries contain the natural tendency for conflict: in short, to act like the leader of an alliance, not just for their benefit but for our own.

War Stories

This Is What a World Without American Leadership Looks LikeThe escalating feud between U.S. allies Japan and South Korea is what happens when the president ignores his responsibilities.

By Fred Kaplan

Aug 23, 201911:19 AM

A little over a month ago, White House officials suddenly realized that tensions between South Korea and Japan—the two top U.S. allies in North Asia—were spiraling out of control. Like most Americans who don’t follow Asian politics, they seemed unaware, or unfazed, that these tensions had erupted periodically for the past 70 years—and that the eruptions have usually been quelled by American mediation.

The issues between the two countries have been the same all along. What’s different, this time around, is that President Donald Trump—unlike all previous presidents—has had, until very recently, no interest in stepping in.

“How many things do I have to get involved in?” he asked last month, in a tone of exasperation, when he first heard requests to help quell the tensions. The implication was that he didn’t much want to get involved in this one. And so the tensions spiraled.

Those issues between the two countries amount to a toxic brew of nationalist resentments dating back more than a century. They ought to be a cautionary tale in this era when our own country is repackaging old tribal disputes into seething partisan politics.

The background is this: In 1910, Japan colonized South Korea, recruited laborers at abysmally low wages, and, during World War II, forced South Korean women to serve as “comfort women”—essentially sex slaves—to Japanese servicemen. The memory of this history—still potent, though few of its victims are still alive—is the source of the tensions today.

28

For a while, it seemed that this tawdry chapter had been closed. A treaty signed in 1965 obligated the Japanese government to reimburse the underpaid workers (many of whom were still alive at the time). Another treaty, signed in 2015, compensated the surviving comfort

Top-tier U.S. officials—including, in the more recent treaty, President Barack Obama—were deeply involved in the negotiations of both treaties.

Gradually, over the past two years, both treaties have fallen apart—and no U.S. official, certainly not Donald Trump, has intervened to hold them together.

Many South Korean citizens protested the limited terms of the “comfort women” agreement upon its signing, and when President Moon Jae-in took office in 2017, he shut down the foundation that had been distributing the Japanese funds.

Then, last year, a lawsuit was filed in South Korean court on behalf of the underpaid laborers, seeking reimbursement from Japanese companies that had participated in the occupation. The 1965 treaty—which also established diplomatic relations between South Korea and Japan—had explicitly placed liability strictly on the Japanese government. It also set up an arbitration board—consisting of one person each from Japan, South Korea, and a third party—to hear and resolve any complaints. The lawyers for the laborers argued that individuals should have the right to sue for damages from the offending companies. (Under the treaty, Japan paid the South Korean government, which, rather than distributing the money to the underpaid laborers, poured it into industrial investment, which spurred enormous economic growth.) The judge sided with the laborers. In a split decision, which took everyone by surprise, the South Korean Supreme Court upheld that verdict.

That was the pivot. The Japanese companies, backed by the Tokyo government, refused to comply. The Seoul government then threatened to seize Japanese assets in South Korea. Last month, Japan restricted exports of materials critical to South Korea’s semiconductor and flat-panel industries, while also removing the country from its “whitelist” of trusted trading partners. South Korea removed Japan from its own similar list.

Finally, just this week, South Korea canceled a treaty with Japan that was signed in 2016 (again, under heavy prodding from the Obama administration), under which the two agreed to share top-secret intelligence information with each other.

“This is the most serious rupture,” says Daniel Sneider, lecturer at Stanford University, who was written extensively about these growing tensions and their roots. Not only did the 2016 treaty allow rapid transmission of intelligence about North Korea’s nuclear sites, missile tests, and other possible threats; it also led to extensive contacts between South Korean and Japanese military commands—contacts that were kept out of public view and that might now be terminated along with the treaty.

The widening gulf between the two allies will also make it harder to devise a common position on negotiating with North Korea, assuming that, at some point, a U.S. president is interested in

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negotiating, rather than letting Kim Jong-un do whatever he wants as long as he stops short of test-launching long-range missiles.

Ever since its creation, just after World War II, North Korea—always a small, impoverished nation—has followed a strategy of playing off the divisions among its larger neighbors. The widening gulf between South Korea and Japan gives Kim much more room to play.

The Trump administration woke up to the dangers just last month, after the mutual export bans and South Korea’s subsequent threat to seize Japanese assets. Matt Pottinger, the senior Asia specialist on the National Security Council, arranged a trip to the two countries. But John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser (and Pottinger’s boss), headlined the visit—and, while he mentioned the tensions between the two countries, he spent much more time trying to get their leaders to join the U.S.-led coalition against Iran. (He failed.)

Trump had already said he didn’t want to get involved in a trade dispute between South Korea and Japan. So both of them felt free to ratchet up the tensions—which are driven by domestic politics much more than any national security considerations.

“Obviously, Trump didn’t create this situation,” Sneider told me. “But what’s happening is a consequence of the vacuum of leadership in Washington—and that is created by the Trump administration.”

Scott Snyder, director of the Program on U.S.-Korea Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, agrees. “The Obama administration was pretty deep behind the scenes in facilitating improvement of Japan–South Korea relations in 2015–16,” he says. As part of his effort to “pivot” toward Asia, Obama created a quarterly summit among the deputy foreign secretaries of the United States, South Korea, and Japan. As in most previous administrations, U.S. ambassadors and assistant secretaries in charge of Asian affairs at the Defense and State departments spoke to their counterparts almost daily, putting out small fires before they erupted into four-alarm blazes. All of this ended under Trump. Ambassadors and assistant secretaries for the region weren’t even appointed until very recently.

Some U.S. officials have tried to put out the flames since this summer’s spurt of tensions. Snyder notes that U.S. emissaries proposed a “standstill” agreement between the two governments, but Moon and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe “shrugged it off” and paid no consequence for doing so: a clear signal that the United States would no longer use its leverage to exert compromises. Earlier this month, Trump finally said he was “concerned” that the two allies were “not getting along with each other.” But he proposed no agenda or demands, so nothing is likely to happen.

Trump’s main misperception, even now, is seeing the rising tensions as a mere trade dispute. “It’s not a trade dispute,” Daniel Sneider says. “Trade is the main arena in which these larger issues”—issues of nationalism, bitterness, honor, and history—“play out.”

Obama didn’t fully grasp the larger dimensions, either. Sneider recalls him telling the Japanese and South Korean leaders, “You have to look forward,” as if history was something that merely

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happened long ago rather than a force that pervades daily life and shapes streams of consciousness several decades after the slights and furies began to accumulate.

This is a common failing of Americans, especially when we gaze at disputes agitated not merely by decades but by centuries of animus—sectarian wars in the Middle East, border wars in South Asia, tribal wars in Africa, civil wars everywhere—and wonder why the combatants can’t just move on.

It’s a strange blindness, since we Americans still very much carry the wounds of our past, notably the sin of slavery, which continues to animate our politics, culture, economics, and society. The myth of the melting pot exerts such a strong force that, in many corners of life, it’s come true—and where it hasn’t, it has allowed many of us to pretend that it has. (Look at the preposterous backlash to the New York Times’ recent 1619 Project, revealing that many conservatives deny that slavery has exerted any legacy on modern life whatsoever.) Maybe that’s why we have avoided a resurgence of civil wars. Maybe that avoidance, brought on by evasion, lies at the heart of “American exceptionalism”—though now we too are wondering how long that can sustain itself.

Many other countries face the force of history all the time. South Korea and Japan are unusual in that they’re divided by this force yet at the same time are both our allies. The challenge, which previous presidents have taken up to some degree, is to recognize this fact, to confront its complexities, to help the countries contain the natural tendency for conflict: in short, to act like the leader of an alliance, not just for their benefit but for our own.

'The World Needs American Leadership.' Mitt Romney Says President Trump's Character Falls ShortSuyin Haynes

Time•January 1, 2019

Incoming Republican Senator Mitt Romney has said that President Donald Trump’s character “falls short” of what is required for leadership of the U.S., in an op-ed published by the Washington Post Tuesday evening.

Romney, a vocal critic of Trump, wrote that the president’s “conduct over the past two years, particularly his actions this month” indicate that he has “not risen to the mantle of the office.” In December, Trump announced the withdrawal of troops from Syria and Afghanistan, a decision triggering the resignation of Secretary of Defense James Mattis. Mattis’ departure from the administration followed a string of high-profile exits over the past year, including former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster.

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“A presidency shapes the public character of the nation,” Romney wrote, referencing American leaders of the past. “A president should demonstrate the essential qualities of honesty and integrity, and elevate the national discourse with comity and mutual respect.”

Romney and President Trump have publicly sparred several times in the past. “With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable,” wrote Romney, who was the Republican party’s 2012 presidential nominee. “And it is in this province where the incumbent’s shortfall has been most glaring.” Romney had previously passionately called on Trump to apologize for his response to the violent white nationalist rallies in Charlottesville in August 2017.

“The world needs American leadership, and it is in America’s interest to provide it,” Romney continued, pointing to the actions of autocratic regimes in Russia and China as a threat to international stability. “Trump’s words and actions have caused dismay around the world.”

Economist Nov 9th 201

Endangered America’s global influence has dwindled under Donald TrumpA presidential tour of Asia cannot hide the fact that America has turned inward, hurting itself and the world

Incoming Republican Senator Mitt Romney has said that President Donald Trump’s character “falls short” of what is required for leadership of the U.S., in an op-ed published by the Washington Post Tuesday evening.

Romney, a vocal critic of Trump, wrote that the president’s “conduct over the past two years, particularly his actions this month” indicate that he has “not risen to the mantle of the office.” In December, Trump announced the withdrawal of troops from Syria and Afghanistan, a decision triggering the resignation of Secretary of Defense James Mattis. Mattis’ departure from the administration followed a string of high-profile exits over the past year, including former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster.

“A presidency shapes the public character of the nation,” Romney wrote, referencing American leaders of the past. “A president should demonstrate the essential qualities of honesty and integrity, and elevate the national discourse with comity and mutual respect.”

Romney and President Trump have publicly sparred several times in the past. “With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable,” wrote Romney, who was the Republican party’s 2012 presidential nominee. “And it is in this province where the incumbent’s shortfall has been most glaring.” Romney had previously

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passionately called on Trump to apologize for his response to the violent white nationalist rallies in Charlottesville in August 2017.

“The world needs American leadership, and it is in America’s interest to provide it,” Romney continued, pointing to the actions of autocratic regimes in Russia and China as a threat to international stability. “Trump’s words and actions have caused dismay around the world.”

NATO at Seventy: An Alliance in CrisisReport - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

Authors: Nicholas Burns, Douglas Lute

February 2019

Reviving American Leadership of the Alliance

NATO’s single greatest challenge is the absence of strong, principled American presidential leadership for the first time in its history. President Donald Trump is regarded widely in NATO capitals as the Alliance’s most urgent, and often most difficult, problem. NATO leaders, for example, considered not holding a 2019 summit to mark the seventieth anniversary this spring as they did in decades past. They feared President Trump would blow up a meeting in controversy as he has done each time he has met with NATO leaders during the past two years. Wary of his past behavior, NATO plans a scaled down leaders meeting for December 2019.

President Trump’s open ambivalence about NATO’s value to the U.S., his public questioning of America’s Article 5 commitment to its allies, persistent criticism of Europe’s democratic leaders and embrace of its anti-democratic members and continued weakness in failing to confront NATO’s primary adversary President Vladimir Putin of Russia, have hurtled the Alliance into its most worrisome crisis in memory.3

There is no reason to believe President Trump’s attitude will change for the better during the next two years. He believes NATO allies are taking advantage of the U.S.4 These are the same allies and partners who came to America’s defense on 9/11, suffered more than 1,000 battlefield deaths alongside American soldiers in Afghanistan,5 are fighting with the U.S. now against the Islamic State and shoulder the main burden sustaining a fragile peace in the Balkans, in both Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

President Trump is the first U.S. president to view the European Union as an economic competitor rather than a vital partner of both the U.S. and NATO. His troubling anti-NATO and anti-Europe bias has caused European governments to question the credibility of the U.S. as the leader of the West for the first time since the Second World War.6 The European public confidence in American leadership is also at historically low depths.7 Every American president before Trump has encouraged the strength and unity of Europe as a core interest of the U.S. Trump may well cause even greater damage to the Alliance while he remains in office.

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With American leadership, anything is possible within the Alliance; absent American leadership, progress will be slow at best. At the most basic level the next American president must reaffirm U.S. commitment to the Alliance, especially the Article 5 collective defense pledge, in both words and deeds. Given the opportunity to do so within months of his inauguration in May 2017, President Trump refused to honor the U.S. commitment to Article 5, even while unveiling a memorial at the new NATO headquarters commemorating its historic invocation after 9/11.1 His persistent disrespect toward some key democratic leaders and warmth toward some autocrats, denigration of NATO and the EU and penchant for unpredictable statements and decisions combine to erode European governmental and public confidence in American leadership.

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