In the two weeks since my last column, the Trump administration has continued cannibalizing domestic government functions—putting in place plans to lay off tens of thousands of Veterans’ Administration workers; slashing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; announcing huge proposed cuts to the social security administration and to the civilian workforce at the Pentagon.
But I’m not going to write about domestic issues. Today’s focus is on America’s place in the world.
Rachel Mills
For nearly a century, Americans have taken it for granted that we operate at the center of the universe—that an American passport is good anywhere; that American cultural products, from Bourbon to cinema, from Harley Davidsons to music to sports, are sought after everywhere; that the dollar is the global currency; that when investors are looking to fund a nation’s national debt they will, it goes without saying, turn to Treasury Bills; and that a particularly American version of English is the global language of diplomacy and of casual conversation. So used are we to this comfortable state of affairs, which allows a country with five percent of the world’s population to control a vastly greater part of the world’s attention and economic resources, and to effortlessly live far beyond its means, that we no longer ask why that is the case.
A few reasons stand out: coming out of World War II, the US had more hard power— sheer military might, from nuclear weapons to aircraft carriers—than any other country. It had ready allies eager to link their fortunes to an America that was seen as the indispensable defender of liberal democracy in an age of totalitarian extremes. It invested wisely, too, in soft power, helping people in poorer countries access vaccinations and antibiotics; intervening to mitigate famines; cleaning up detritus of war such as landmines; welcoming into the United States refugees from war-blighted countries; sending students abroad and bringing students from abroad into the United States; seeding small business development in impoverished countries; opening consulates in far-off regions; cleaning up polluted ecosystems, waterways, and air; investing in local democracy initiatives to help nations blighted by corruption, military rule, or colonialism develop political systems in which differences could be worked out at the ballot box rather than at the barrel of a gun. All of that generated vast reserves of goodwill.
In recent weeks, pretty much every one of these tools has been weakened by an administration that preaches America First but seems to be doing everything in its power to punch holes in the very things that have provided the US with such privilege since 1945.
One could write a book on these follies, but, since space is at a premium, here are a few choice highlights: Trump and Vance publicly eviscerated Ukrainian leader Volenskyy while sweet-talking Russia’s Putin; they followed up by cutting off military aid to Ukraine; and then stopped the sharing of all intelligence information. When Russia responded by unleashing a deadly aerial bombardment, Trump simply said that that was “what anybody would do,” and that “Russia holds all the cards.” This week, as the grotesque US squeeze on Ukraine accelerates, Russia seems on the verge of surrounding thousands of Ukrainian troops, recapturing lands taken by Ukraine, and pressing further west into the Ukrainian heartland.
They have fractured, probably beyond repair, the NATO alliance of which the US is the keystone, leaving a vulnerable Europe scrambling to rearm, and invoking the specter of mass nuclear proliferation as countries such as Germany and Poland seek to protect themselves from imperialist Russian landgrabs. So profound has the shift been that Germany’s incoming Chancellor says the US can no longer be relied upon, and only one in seven Germans has a positive view of Trump; France’s president, Macron, has detailed the need to extend his country’s nuclear umbrella over Europe; and four former UK ambassadors to the US have said the two countries seem to be on irreconcilably different political and moral courses.
Trump’s mob-like team have ripped up hard-negotiated trade agreements with Canada and Mexico, and have treated these neighbors as vassal states to be humiliated and brutalized on Trump’s whim. According to reports, Trump spent a large part of his recent phone call about tariffs with Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau—whom he continually insults by calling “governor”— swearing at him. Trudeau himself has said that Trump’s ultimate goal seems to be to tank the Canadian economy so as to soften the country up for annexation. And American officials have done nothing to dial down these fears, informing Canadian officials that Trump believes he can rip up the treaties establishing the international border between the two countries.
They have taken a Musk-inspired DOGE chainsaw to development projects around the world. Last week, there was an extraordinary standoff between employees at the US African Development Foundation—which provides millions of dollars in vital development funding to some of the poorest countries and people on earth—and DOGE staffers brought in with a mandate to dismantle USADF and halt all its overseas activities. Ultimately, the DOGE crew was escorted in by US Marshalls, as if they were part of an occupying army.
The confrontation was emblematic of the Trump administration’s approach to the rest of the world. It took barely a month to destroy USAID, arguably the most successful soft-power program in American history, leaving maternity programs in poor nations on hold, ending international polio vaccination efforts, halting anti-TB and malaria campaigns, removing medication access from hundreds of thousands of HIV/AIDS patients, stranding thousands of enrollees in medical experiments without access to either medications or doctors, and increasing the risk that people in famine zones will die of starvation.
Trump’s State Department has announced plans to scale back the country’s diplomatic footprint through shuttering consulates. (China will now have a larger diplomatic presence globally than will the United States.) It has also ordered embassy staff to cancel subscriptions to news services, something that will save a pittance at the cost of leaving diplomatic staff flying blind.
They have pretty much stopped admitting refugees into the US and are reputedly on the verge of releasing a much-expanded version of Trump 1.0’s Muslim travel ban.
The assaults on America’s international involvement and relationships even stretch to university students. The Administration has put an indefinite “pause” on the funding of scholarships, both for students coming into the country to study and also for Americans studying abroad. Thousands of students have gone overseas only to find the money promised them by Feds has vanished.
The end result is not America First but America isolated and resented. The beneficiaries are Russia, rising like an authoritarian phoenix from the ashes, and China, which seems likely to fill many of the international voids left by a retreating America. The clear losers—in addition to the millions of people around the world cruelly suffering as the US retrenches—are the American people. We have bestrode the globe for nearly a century. Now, as Trump-Vance-Musk strip American government for parts, the country is withdrawing from the world beyond our shores.
These are, indeed, the days the music died.
