In a speech this week in Brussels, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gamely tried to place a coherent gloss on the jumble of fictions, fantasies, hatreds, and seemingly unquenchable impulses towards self-dealing that comprise President Trump’s worldview.
But right on cue, this week has produced a string of new events that underscore once again that this worldview, as a basis for major policy decisions, is failing spectacularly.
In
his speech, Pompeo declared that Trump “sees the world as it is, not as we wish it to be,” adding: “He knows that nothing can replace the nation-state as the guarantor of democratic freedoms and national interests.” Pompeo defended Trump’s efforts to revamp the international order on terms supposedly more friendly to U.S. interests, articulating the nationalist trope that international institutions and multilateral cooperation, in their current form, are failing globally and, more important, eroding U.S. sovereignty -- its right and ability to act in its own interests.
To whatever degree Trump’s version of this worldview is really the basis for his decisions, there is fresh evidence that it is producing terrible outcomes: ...
There’s no question that the
liberal international order that Pompeo decried is in need of repair. But as https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/12/06/europe-is-quite-aware-what-theyre-going-through-is-mike-pompeo/?utm_term=.3bc3d42564d1 (Dan Drezner) and
Stewart Patrick explain, Trump’s guiding vision is often little more than the notion that unraveling multilateral cooperation wherever possible is inherently good for America, because multilateral cooperation is inherently bad for us -- when in fact it does hold the key to solving problems in a complex, interconnected world, even if its outcomes must be dramatically improved.
Pompeo says that Trump “sees the world as it is, not what we wish it to be.” But as we’re seeing on one front after another, precisely the opposite is true. And the results this is producing are likely to get worse.
