Get ready for America the Small.
.....in Trump’s view of the world, nations share nothing, really, except a thirst for power and wealth. Shared values are meaningless, and the idea of shared fate (as presented by global threats like disease or climate change or even nuclear proliferation) is so foolish as not to be worth mentioning. What matters, all that matters, is the daily competition of all against all for security and resources.
As my colleague Dan Drezner pointed out, this might sound a lot like simple foreign-policy realism—that all states seek security and prosperity, and that amassing national power and wealth is the road to security and prosperity for citizens. The problem, of course, is that the world doesn’t work that way any longer—if it ever did. An entire generation of scholars and practitioners have laid out the ways in which globalized flows of information and capital, globally-linked corporations and NGOs, and globally-connected citizens make it difficult to treat “national power” as something that governments can amass and control.
Moreover, problems of the commons have always shown the limits of individual nations’ ability to protect their citizens through a competitive, go-it-alone approach to world affairs. Climate change and infectious disease aren’t stopped by walls and pay no mind to “America First.” Neither, of course, do the purveyors of jihadi ideology, not in the age of the internet. The Trump administration’s worldview seems to ignore these real dangers, and that puts Americans at risk.
Finally, this impoverished understanding of global affairs as a zero-sum competition for power and resources claims to reassert American leadership in the world even as it rejects that leadership’s basic foundation: that collective purpose and collective action can reduce costs and increase security and opportunity for like-minded nations. As David Frum notes in the The Atlantic, successive American presidents built America’s global influence (or power, for you vulgar realists) on the notion that collective advancement of open markets and open societies would produce a rising tide of wealth and security that would benefit the United States along with many others. It is hard to see how a strategy rooted instead in cutthroat competition and arms’-length suspicion will somehow do better than that postwar liberal order at extending American influence, security, or prosperity.
And here, it appears, is the danger of having serious and dedicated national security professionals staffing Donald Trump’s White House: By finding viable ways to implement his expressed will, and by elevating his impulses into grand strategy, they are magnifying the impact of their impulsive, but largely incompetent, commander-in-chief. Rather than merely seeing President Trump as a capricious leader, European leaders have begun to express their conclusion that the United States is no longer trustworthy. Thus, American influence will decline, and America’s security and prosperity along with it. Get ready for America the Small.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2017/06/02/trumps-america-first-is-america-the-small/