A new chapter in history: America stands alone on the world stage

“Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” Thus did atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer recall the Bhagavad Gita upon witnessing the Trinity nuclear test in 1944. We must appreciate that we, too, are witnessing the destruction of a world at the hands of another: Donald Trump. Whatever the president says to rationalize what he is doing on the world stage, we must prepare ourselves for a global order that is going to be decidedly less shaped by American interests and values.

The president’s first overseas trip was little short of a disaster for the American-led post-World War II order that Trinity ushered into existence. That world was of course marked by the Cold War rivalry and division of spheres, but there was little doubt that the United States headed up what came to be a Western alliance created to defend liberal capitalist values.

{mosads}Before the trip, former NATO ambassador Nicholas Burns noted witheringly that, “for any other president this would be a first trip to assume leadership of the West — but Trump is the first U.S. president whom Europeans don’t see that way.”

By the time it was over, German Chancellor Angela Merkel insisted that it is time for Europeans to take their future into their own hands, and her electoral opponent Martin Schulz of the center-left Social Democrats described Trump as “the destroyer of all Western values.” Notwithstanding Trump’s German heritage, the Germans can’t stand him.

Instead of representing Western values — by which Schulz was referring to democracy, human rights, and civil liberties — Trump shares most clearly the values of the strongmen for whom he has expressed admiration around the globe: Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Vladimir Putin of Russia, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, and Xi Jinping of China. It is perhaps the latter whom Trump resembles the most at this stage in the sense that he views foreign relations in purely transactional terms.

The Chinese have been winning friends around the world by bolstering their economies and developing infrastructure — typically with an eye toward access to raw materials the Chinese need — without insisting on any annoying human rights standards. U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson made this stance crystal clear by distinguishing in a State Department speech between American “values” and American “policies.” Our values are ever-present, he opined, but our policies would be aligned with our interests, and if values got in the way, they would take a back seat. This is precisely the Chinese approach to international affairs, and it is working very well for them.

One of the strangest things President Trump has done since he took office is the cancellation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). By most accounts, the trade agreement linking Pacific countries was intended by President Obama, who negotiated the deal, to serve American interests and to impose common labor and environmental standards on the participating countries. With the United States out of the deal, China moved in to fill the vacuum. Trade accords in the region will now be based on bilateral accords rather than the regional approach underlying the TPP.

Along with China’s creation of the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank, which has only added members since it was first announced in 2015, the abandonment of the TPP has increasingly ceded the Pacific sphere to China. And Trump’s proposed budget cuts to the “soft power” side of American influence will further exacerbate this tendency.

Meanwhile, the Russians are surely enjoying the American withdrawal of attention from the European continent and the failure to endorse the mutual defense agreements at the heart of NATO. The Baltic countries that the Soviets overwhelmed in the early post-World War II period are undoubtedly rather nervous. Far-right politicians in France, Hungary, and Poland are sympathetic to Trump’s blustering nationalism, even if recent elections have slowed the rush toward populism.

Turkey, which fears its Kurds growing too powerful in the face of the battle against ISIS, is cozying up to the Russians after being spurned by the Germans in the run-up to the recent referendum solidifying Erdogan’s power. Erdogan and Putin are birds of a feather, and both have enjoyed favorable treatment from President Trump.

American self-isolation has reached its pinnacle, however, with the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord of 2015, to which practically all countries are signatories. Corporate leaders argued that the Paris agreement opens the door to innovative, clean-energy business opportunities from which their companies will be excluded if the United States pulls out.

The nationalist wing of the White House won the battle over American support for the agreement, presumably because staying in would have alienated Trump’s base. Now the nationalists in the regime are free to take apart Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which they see as an economic straitjacket hamstringing the country’s extractive industries.

As these varied examples make clear, Trump cares about one thing, and one thing only, and that is power for himself, if not for his country. As we saw when he pushed aside the Montenegrin prime minister at a photo op in Brussels, Trump is the big rich kid in school who takes for granted that he’s got to be in the front row for the class picture.

In that unattractive moment, and in his choices about whom and what to support on the world stage, Trump has clarified for the defenders of liberal and environmental values in the European Union and other multilateral institutions that they really are on their own. For the first time perhaps since George Washington warned us to avoid “entangling alliances,” America stands alone, and the Pax Americana of the post-World War II period is giving way to a world of authoritarian dealmakers.

John Torpey is a professor of sociology and history and director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center of City University of New York.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.