dckingsfan wrote:DCKingsFan wrote:DCZards wrote:I agree...for the most part. The Liar-in-Chief's tweets are certainly hurting his credibility and therefore the stature and credibility of our country, particularly on the international stage.
I think our credibility on the world's stage has been rocked for quite some time. I think most countries have lost faith in the US as a worldwide leader quite some time ago.
I think (within the US) we haven't caught up to that. I think that Trump just pushes us past that. He is just increasing the momentum for us to pull out of the roll as the world's leader and police.
What is puzzling is that he is duplicitous in that way. Instead of reducing Military spending, withdrawing troops from abroad, reducing funding for the UN - he kind of picks and chooses.
I think that confuses our partners abroad and Trump supporters as well.
The world is no longer either a bipolar or uni-polar world, where massive super powers run the order of events. This trend toward a diverse and chaotic multi-polar world is not the fault of US Presidents. That said, I agree with the drop in credibility. Bush hurt it significantly in basic diplomatic relations, which Obama had largely repaired. But Obama (and I blame the congress on this as well) lost significant stature of his red line thing. This has led to more aggressive acts by really bad international players like Trump's favorite country, Russia.
In a real positive in my opinion, the Obama administration worked really hard toward developing large international multilateral coalitions toward global issues. He was successful at this - more to the point US leadership set the table to support more collaborations like this.
Trump has changed that. He is interested in bilateral relationships. He is interested in personal, one on one connections. We will see whether or not he can in effect turn back the clock to the 1980s where bilateral relationships drove international policy. This will also be dependent on Trump's personal relationship skills.
But again, the world has changed. There was a time that the President of Kenya, Kazahkstan, Indonesia and other countries of that stature would defer to their economic betters. This doesn't happen any more. Its not just the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). More than ever their voice matters at the international stage - hence the direction toward multilateral relationships.
Bilateral relationships, if you add up the one-to-one negotiations for each country involved,
take lots more time to construct. And Trump wants to cut the State department by 30%, while not filling the Assistant Secretary and other political appointee positions. This approach is not connected to reality. Its pure fantasy.
