🇺🇸 The United States Has Become a Rogue State — Foreign Policy Magazine
The United States is now acting like a predatory hegemon, exploiting positions of leverage built up over decades to exploit allies and adversaries alike. This zero-sum approach to nearly all relations with others includes a deep hostility toward most international institutions and norms, deliberately erratic behavior, and a tendency to treat other foreign leaders with ill-disguised contempt while expecting demeaning acts of submission and fealty from most of them.
The second Trump administration has been far more disruptive, damaging, and dangerous than most observers expected, and the tragically inept war with Iran is driving that point home in spades. The fallout from the war in Iran spreads throughout the region and around the world, it underscores that the administration either didn’t understand how its actions would affect other states or simply didn’t care. Every country in the world is having to figure out how to deal with an increasingly rogue United States.
U.S. foreign policy is now in the hands of a remarkably incompetent set of officials, from the president on down. International influence depends on many things, but one of the key ingredients is other states’ belief that the people they have to deal with are smart, well-informed, and generally know what they are doing.
At this point, does anyone in the higher echelons of the Trump administration merit that description? Not that I can see. Conducting foreign policy is a difficult business, and no government gets everything right, but this administration commits own goals on a weekly basis while insisting that it is infallible.
To make matters worse, some of these features are not going to be easy to correct after Trump leaves office, even if he is replaced by someone with very different views. The institutional capacity of the U.S. foreign-policy machinery is being hollowed out as experienced civil servants retire or are dismissed (include some senior military officers) and are either not replaced or superseded by Trumpian loyalists.
And because the U.S. body politic remains deeply polarized, other states must also worry that the pendulum will simply swing back and forth between extremes. Americans elected Trump not once but twice and could elect someone similar again. Given that reality, how can any country trust any commitment that Washington might make today, or under a Democratic president?
Throughout history, the classic way to deal with powerful and dangerous states is to balance against them, either through one’s own efforts or in partnership with others (or both). A classic illustration was the coordinated French, German, and Russian decision to oppose the 2002 U.N. Security Council resolution that would have authorized the U.S. attack on Iraq; although it failed to convince the Bush administration not to go to war, it exposed U.S. (and British) isolation. A similar thing happened over the U.S' threats to take Greenland.
Although most realist scholars maintain that “bandwagoning” with a powerful predatory state is risky and therefore rare, some states will see this as their best option. Especially weak and vulnerable states may conclude that they have no choice but to align with the United States and hope for the best, and countries that want to use U.S. support to advance their own revisionist aims will be happy to jump on the bandwagon. Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the smaller Persian Gulf states are obvious examples of this sort of opportunistic behavior.
🔗 https://archive.ph/sn4dm
