American retreat and decline

The "American Century" is ending. 

The United States is giving up global leadership.  Amid talk of confronting China, we are turning the world over to them.

After World War One the United States failed to join the League of Nations. After World War Two we changed our minds. The United Nations was headquartered in New York City, with specialized agencies and programs for common action in agriculture, education, refugee health, trade negotiations, and weapons control. We led in establishing NATO, the Organization of American States and other regional alliances. The operating theory--adopted by both parties and all presidents since 1945-- was that the world that cooperated with each other might avoid yet another world war. 

The US got many benefits out of this arrangement, but the economic globalism it facilitated (free trade and investment, plus open immigration policies) meant that manufacturing moved offshore, to the detriment of the non-college American worker.  Everyone noticed it; Trump took political advantage of it, with a populist, anti-globalist message in the campaign, and in actual governance.

Jeffrey Laurenti

We are experiencing what that means. Trump has been ineffective as a legislator, but very effective in changing the American role in the world in those areas where a President can act on his own.

Jeffrey Laurenti is a college classmate, did graduate work at Princeton, and then had a long career as a foreign policy expert, advising governments in his policy work with the United Nations Association of the United States, the United Nations Foundation, and the Century Foundation. I asked him to tell me what Trump's fight with China meant, expecting something about electoral politics. He answered with something about America's place in the world.

Guest Post by Jeffrey Laurenti

"China, public health, and the domino theory in 2020"

Protests and disorders across the United States this weekend have distracted Americans’ attention from the Covid-19 pandemic raging worldwide, much less the Trump administration’s latest salvo in its escalating conflict with China. 

For those who have put it out of their minds, the issue most insistently demanding Washington’s attention last week was China’s move to subject Hong Kong to the same repressive “national security” discipline that the Communist Party has imposed on China for seven decades. Late Friday President Trump announced steps he would take to penalize Hong Kong’s economy when China’s law takes effect. 

Puzzlingly, Trump simultaneously announced U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization. How this reinforces his punishment of China is not obvious, but what is clear is that derailing the only global health agency will not help the United States, Europe, Latin America, or the rest of the world end the coronavirus pandemic. 

In early May, when he first trained his sights on the W.H.O. as a target of his wrath, Trump announced he had formed a review panel to report back in 60 to 90 days on problems at the Geneva-based agency. In his declaration about cutting all U.S. ties to W.H.O. a few weeks later, there was no mention of this review panel or any “work” it may have done to justify U.S. withdrawal. Nor was there any hint of what is to become of the American health experts who work at the agency once Washington walks away.  

The W.H.O. has relied heavily on the medical and scientific expertise of America’s public health community in all its great campaigns, from eliminating smallpox to curtailing smoking to containing AIDS and Ebola virus. But after the abysmal failure of the United States in dealing with Covid-19 – despite months of public health warnings, it is now #1 in the world in infections, boasting over 30 percent of Covid deaths worldwide -- the rest of the world can only see the United States as a model to avoid.

Indeed, if the Trump administration’s concern is about contesting Chinese influence over the global health agenda, abandoning the U.N. agency that guides most nations' public health policies can only seal Beijing's dominance. But the president and his team seem oblivious to the role all the agencies of the United Nations play in forging common policies that nations seek to apply as best they can. Like flies trapped in amber, they seem frozen in the 1950s paranoia of the old John Birch Society that hallucinated about Soviet subjugation of America through the U.N. and international law. 

So on Trump's watch the United States has so far withdrawn from UNESCO, the U.N. Human Rights Council, and the W.H.O. It has abandoned the intermediate nuclear forces treaty, the Open Skies treaty, the Iran nuclear rollback pact, and (imminently) the New START nuclear arsenal caps. It has eliminated the World Trade Organization's dispute settlement machinery. And, of course, it has denounced the Paris climate accord. 

That's a quite stunning record of achievement in just one term. Imagine the dominoes yet to fall to achieve the dream of restoring the world order of 1914.