Guest Post: Trump's shrunken stature on the world stage.

Trump looks inept to foreign leaders.

Trump alienated American allies, upset world trade, befriended an aggressor nation, pushed India toward China, and supported the insurrectionist former president of Brazil.

All that in eight months.

Jeffrey Laurenti sent me his take on President Trump's foreign policy moves and his reputation in foreign capitals. Laurenti is a college classmate, a political scientist, and a former senior analyst with a boutique foreign policy think tank. He travels internationally to places American tourists don't go. He has been active in Democratic politics. He served as a New Jersey elector in the 2012 election.

Laurenti in a Bassari village in Senegal

Guest Post by Jeffrey Laurenti

He should certainly revel in the pomp surrounding his state visit to the King of England this week, because when Donald Trump returns to New York next week for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, the evidence of his diminished status as the feckless leader of a friendless power will be impossible to conceal. 

 

The shock and awe of his muscular first months back in charge of the United States government have worn off. Trump’s blizzard of executive orders, declarations of imagined emergencies, kaleidoscopic tariffs, and bluster followed by retreat – “TACO” -- have become a running joke around the world.  

Laurenti contemplates the fall of empires outside the walls of Nineveh -- anciently Assyria, now Iraq.

In eight months, Trump’s most tangible achievements have been to alienate America’s long-time allies in Europe and Asia, impede the world’s brightest young minds from American higher education, and halt life-saving food and medical services across Africa. Events have made a mockery of his audacious claim he could end the grinding wars in Ukraine and Gaza in 24 hours.

 

Yes, the world has mocked him before. In Trump’s previous term his grandiose claims drew derisive laughter on the General Assembly floor and leaders of Western allies were caught on tape snickering at his shallowness. 

 

But the world was not then in crisis. Today, the cornerstone principle of international peace and security since 1945 is on the brink of collapse. Russia continues to wage a blatant war of aggression to seize its neighbor’s territory. Today, the postwar commitment never again to acquiesce in genocide is arguably under challenge in Gaza if not the West Bank.  

Trump himself airily decides the nation’s military is not intended just for “defense,” but for “war” – from whose “scourge” the U.N. was created to save succeeding generations. What’s in a name? It underscores that it’s the warmakers, men of iron, whom our 47^th chief executive most admires, and the peacemakers whom he disdains.  

 

Trump’s desperate courtship of Russian president Vladimir Putin spotlights the most dizzying reversal of America’s global position. For nearly three years, the United States had marshaled the overwhelming majority of the world community to condemn and oppose Putin’s war in Ukraine. In February 2025, Trump switched sides and voted at the U.N. with Russia against a European Union text deploring Russia’s “invasion.”   

 

Barack Obama had famously described Putin’s Russia as a “regional power,” infuriating the one-time KGB operative turned autocrat but accurately assessing the capabilities of a nuclear-armed state with a vast land mass but a declining population, limping economy, and shrinking life expectancy. Even its amply funded war machine has proved incapable of subduing Ukraine, thanks in part to the lifeline the West has provided. 

 

Mired in a war he started but cannot finish, Putin seemed on the ropes last December when his other international adventure, backing Syria’s loathed Assad regime to the hilt, suddenly imploded. Yet Trump has rescued the floundering Putin’s international standing, calling him frequently and even granting him a red-carpet welcome to Alaska, while perversely insisting that Ukrainians “started” the war and “don’t have the cards” to stay at the table.  

Sure, Trump has bleated that Putin’s ratcheting up attacks on civilian targets after each of their consultations is not nice. They embarrass him, who has been trying so hard to be helpful. At times the American president has gotten so upset that he has even threatened to add to the West’s array of economic sanctions on Russia – which just might prove a decisive blow to a faltering Russian war economy. But weeks and months pass; Russia sends a swarm of drones over Poland; he still quivers rather than pulls the sanctions trigger.

 

(It is not only Putin who can humiliate Trump and evince barely a whimper. Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu is for Trump another war-entangled dominatrix. The Israeli daily Haaretz holds out his attack on Qatar last week as just “the latest example of Netanyahu and his team making a mockery of the U.S. president – and not paying any price for it.")

 

In fairness, Trump did invoke the war in Ukraine in moving forcefully to use his economic weapon of choice, tariffs – not against Russia, however, but against India for buying Russian oil (on the cheap). India’s religious-right prime minister, Narendra Modi, had imagined Trump was a kindred spirit. No more.

 

Commentators have puzzled over Trump’s real reasons for punishing India rather than Russia, but no one can deny it’s been effective. It’s pushed Modi to fly to Beijing to embrace China’s Xi Jinping as well as Putin, and twenty years of painstaking U.S. diplomacy to coax India into an “Indo-Pacific” entente to insure against Chinese adventurism has gone up in smoke.

Laurenti outside Saigon's refurbished Caravelle Hotel that housed world media during the Vietnam war. 

Trump has likewise used his claimed power to unilaterally levy import taxes against another leading economy in the developing world, Brazil’s. Here he has been refreshingly frank in explaining his purposes, which are not economic but bracingly political. Trump wants to free a truly kindred spirit, former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro, convicted of plotting a military coup to overturn his election defeat three years ago and inciting right-wing mobs to storm the federal capital. Trump justifiably sees Bolsonaro’s plot as just like his own desperate maneuvering to cling to power after the November 2020 election.

 

But the legitimately elected president, Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva – who himself actually did jail time for trumped-up charges that courts finally dismissed – has stood his ground. If Americans want to pay 50% more for coffee to indulge presidential paranoia about prosecutions, Brazil has a ready and reliable alternative trade partner in China.

 

Ironically, by U.N. tradition, Brazil’s president leads off the General Assembly opening debate. The next speaker is the president of the United States. This year we may anticipate dueling addresses that spotlight the world’s fault lines today. 

 

One wonders how the U.N. chief of protocol will keep the two apart in the holding room behind the Assembly rostrum. Unlike the Renaissance-era pageantry in which King Charles is protectively enveloping his guest’s fragile ego today, next week his shrunken stature will be painfully clear.

 

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