Donald Trump presents himself as the man uniquely qualified to “remasculate” U.S. foreign policy, to sweep aside those who believe leadership depends as much on patience, discipline, generosity and imagination as on military muscle and an iron will. He wants to reassert American power without a mature understanding of the basis for that power. He lives in a zero-sum world, one divided between winners and losers, good and evil, doers and freeloaders, us and them.
But America First won’t strengthen America. It will alienate friends and embolden rivals. In the process, it will badly damage U.S. commercial interests. It will undermine the institutions that the U.S. and its allies created from the ashes of World War II and which continue to extend U.S. international influence into the future. It will cast grave doubt on what America stands for.
A Trump foreign policy will undermine U.S. exceptionalism, the consensus-based conviction that America will fight for more than its self-interest and is therefore worthy of emulation. That idea has sustained plenty of damage in recent years. It will sustain more. But the biggest risk posed by a Donald Trump foreign policy is that he will destroy this worthy aspiration once and for all.
From: Trump and the World: What Could Actually Go Wrong – POLITICO Magazine
