We’re all feeling what happened in Charlottesville. I wrote about the rise of racism and many forms of discrimination a couple weeks ago so I won’t recap the horrors we’ve seen dozens of times since Saturday. You can probably guess how I feel about it. Trump’s response is yet another reason the international community is more and more reticent to align themselves to the United States. In the case of countries less committed to an alliance with the United States, there are both economic and security considerations that have discouraged them from working with us, but now they have a reason to feel emotionally hesitant regardless of any of the more tangible reasons to remain independent of any binding international agreements forged in America’s image.
Trump’s behavior, his tweets, his ignorance, and hatred for anyone but himself hasn’t yet shown itself to be intellectualized in that it all seems unclear. He doesn’t seem to philosophize about a world in which only white Christians have power. He seems more angry and unbalanced than someone who would present heinous arguments about genetics and superior races and religions that worship the devil. There may be hope that he just doesn’t know what he’s talking about and isn’t actually directing all white supremacists to commit acts of violence. His arguments don’t seem nuanced or lucid or organized, which is good. It’s much better than having an organized group that is harder to contain and disperse.
Regardless, Trump seems also unaware that, like it or not, his role is to speak! His role is to be clear in what he says, and if he’s not supporting nationalist tendencies and exclusionary policies, then I don’t think the international community has gotten the message. I don’t think anyone believes that. This is going to hurt Trump, but it’s going to hurt the United States much more if all of us can’t outdo his behavior by being ten times more mature. We need to show the international community that he’s not one of us, or we could lose them.
America’s greatest foreign policy strengths are its ability to create strong and lasting alliances economically, militarily, politically, and democratically. We’ve a critical part of such organizations as NATO, NORAD, the UN, numerous free trade agreements, and treaties that we believe are just and fair and moral.
However, countries from Venezuela to Vietnam and South Africa to Greece are questioning whether it’s worth it to form economic ties with us, to work with us militarily, to trust our expertise in how to continue providing the world with greater and greater prosperity, and indeed to trust us to do right by them.
With that, there are six key areas we all need to work on to be sure America can continue to dominate the world stage so that we can continue to do what we know is right.
International Organizations
As mentioned, the United States is a member of numerous international organizations, as are many countries, but the United States seems to have a very disproportionate influence on the direction of these organizations. Some of these positions won’t likely change anytime soon, like our permanent position on the UN Security Council. However, Trump has angered many NATO countries, and we need to maintain strong ties with NATO countries. An attack on one is an attack on all, but the way you feel about someone is always going to dictate your actions more than the terms of a contract ever could.
The United States is also a member of organizations you’d never think it’d be a part of. They are a “nonregional” member of APEC in Asia, a “dialogue” partner in ASEAN, and an “observer” in many more. It doesn’t take much to understand why we’re able to stay so involved: we have the power to broker agreements between member nations and additional countries around the world, we have the money to invest, and we have the unbelievable military strength to assure the member countries that they can accomplish their goals without interference from nations that wish to harm them.
Democracy
Several countries around the world are questioning whether democracy is the best system of government. Venezuela is now a dictatorship. Several years ago, Greece elected Alexis Tspiras, whose has shown an interest in a cordial relationship with Russia. The government of Pakistan is technically democratic but seems not operate as such. Despite our ability to form symbiotic relationships with many countries, 75% of Pakistani citizens in 2012 responded to a poll by saying that they wouldn’t vote for either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney for President of the United States. The Pakistani government dislikes us even more and believes that the Chinese government offers substantial benefits for them. Their citizens are now required to learn Mandarin, and China is claiming to offer numerous economic benefits.
Our ability to encourage countries to let democracy flourish and let their people decide their own fate has often been tied to our influence over certain countries more than our influence in certain countries. At least that’s how some of those countries see it, and more and more, they are questioning whether they could break away from conditional agreements they have with the United States. We offer relief packages, loans, military assets, and infrastructure in exchange for allowing their people to have more freedom. However, the balance between encouragement and over implementation has sometimes left them to manage their young democracies without much control from the United States. That was seen as a good approach because we shouldn’t be controlling them, but they’ve come to believe that we tore their countries into pieces and left without helping them implement democratic rule. While I certainly disagree in most cases, what matters most is they are seeking other systems of government and are often finding that a reversion to dictatorship is more palatable and more realistic for them, claiming they aren’t ready for democracy because it would be too chaotic.
As a result, these countries are eschewing influence from the United States as much as possible, and they have found a great alternative in Asia. The Chinese Communist Party is claiming to offer money with no strings attached. This is a cruel lie with all its burdensome loans that bankrupt taxpayers for generations, but China focuses on smaller countries that the United States has abandoned due to questionable human rights records and violent dictatorships.
Donald Trump is promising to ignore these countries even more, and they are leaving us left and right. Many are saying that our influence on the international community will not hold throughout his entire administration, and we’ve seen already that countries in Western Europe have signed economic agreements with China, hedged their bets by joining organizations with both the United States and China, and openly denounced the United States as a result of Trump’s actions and behavior.
The problem here is that dictatorship centralizes power and allows a foreign country to have immense influence quickly and painlessly because there are no elections to stop them. As a result, China can quickly convert Venezuela into a country that does whatever China wants it to do, which will be a major national security concern for the United States, but we’ll get to that in a minute. Without the power of the people, a foreign power can quickly influence an entire nation.
Relief Efforts
Donald Trump has said he’s only going to allow 50,000 refugees to come into the United States each year. However, he’s also made it so incredibly obvious that he doesn’t want to help any country for any reason. He has said he wants to defund USAID, which guarantees loans to help numerous economies. He has said he doesn’t want to help countries suffering from civil war, famine, health pandemics, and other major issues.
This has been a major focus of the United States since its rise to power. We often had the ability to form meaningful relationships with other countries because we’ve been able to show how much we care. Of course, we didn’t do this to get more advantages to invest in those countries or get their vote in the UN, but on the other hand, we’re at risk of losing their support in various organizations because they’re seeing us leave one by one.
If Donald Trump continues to ignore other countries, then other major players will come in and exceed our influence. I do think we’ll be able to get that influence back simply by supporting these countries again once Trump is out of office. However, it’s likely China will attempt to form agreements that explicitly prevent them from going back to the United States, leaving them with the risk of having no one until 2020.
Military Partnerships
Since World War II, the United States has been seen as unbeatable. Between NATO, NORAD, US Central Command, US-ROK, and numerous mutual agreements with countries in every region of the world, you can’t beat the United States in a conventional war. There’s no debate on that.
However, there are many asymmetrical war tactics that have already emerged and that countries have been employing for years now. We’ve seen influence campaigns on numerous elections around the world, and that would seem bad enough. However, hacking has become the most reliable way to stop the United States. Our cyberdefense capabilities are not even in the same neighborhood as our dominance in conventional warfare.
China has been outsourcing these cyber capabilities and utilizing much of it themselves. The OPM hack stole information from millions of people, including myself, and all I got in response was a letter from the government saying that my information was stolen and there’s nothing they could do about it. We’ve also seen countries lose actual hard currency. North Korea stole millions from Bangladesh. China claims a rogue organization stole money from Japan. However, Putin claims a rogue organization hacked the 2016 election, and given their strong similarities, I’m not buying that China didn’t have control over that organization.
The point is countries around the world can’t turn to the United States for a quick fix to all their cybersecurity issues. We can’t send in a destroyer or missile defenses or fire warning shots, and our allies know this. More importantly, however, countries not tightly aligned with anyone know this, and our inability to guarantee protection against hacking from China and its allies is encouraging them to actually align with China instead because they’d smaller countries with little chance of control over their own destiny need to make sure they’re on the right side or end up losing everything.
Given that Trump almost lost his ability to have any say on the future of Syria and that he’s having a hard time ending the guestworker program that sends North Koreans to dozens of countries and revenues back to its nuclear program, it’s clear Trump is doing a good job swaying countries worldwide to work with us to squash even the most dangerous aggressors.
Economics
Trump has said he wants to pull out of NAFTA and has officially started renegotiating the terms a couple days ago. He wants the United States to become an export country. While he’s encouraging foreign companies like FoxConn to invest in the United States, which I find particularly at odds with his “America First” motto, he’s missing the point that you can’t be an island in a global society.
He backed out of TPP, which would have been a strategic initiative that benefits us militarily as much as it would’ve benefited us economically. We could’ve moved jobs from China to Vietnam and elsewhere rather than moving them all the way back to the United States, but now we’ve abandoned countries that have to now partner with China in the RCEP and get burdensome loans from the AIIF. We still exercise Freedom of Navigation in the South China Sea, but we’re merely showing a presence but not actually gaining ground like we could have. I understand Trump’s motivation, but totally abandoning a region dominated by China when many allies are extremely at risk is a great way to erase any trust they’ve slowly begun to have in us.
National Security
Finally, I’ve already mentioned some issues with national security like hacking, our military influence around the world, and crucial alliances that Trump doesn’t seem to even know about. However, we have physical assets in countries around the world. We have bases, surveillance and communications equipment, and agreements to land at various bases that our allies operate around the world. If you want the short version, just know our fighter jets can’t fly around the world without stopping to refuel and expect to engage an opponent and guarantee they can make it back home safely.
You may remember that Trump shared classified intelligence obtained by communications with the UK, and as a result, the UK said they didn’t think it was safe to share information with us anymore. That ban was lifted in less than a day, but we can’t survive on our own. We created a globalized world, and now we have to live in it. I am immensely in favor of globalization, but we can’t our own stake in it get taken away from us. Just compare it to how we almost lost control over our own Internet sovereignty. Now imagine we don’t just lose control of information but lose our ability defend ourselves in the physical space.
The country of Djibouti recently evicted the United States from one military base and allowed the Chinese Navy to move in. The horn of Africa is so incredibly important to international trade, and you could describe one of China’s major international strategies as economilitaristic. Yes, I made up that work, but they use loans, infrastructure promises, unfair trade practices, and currency manipulation for the purpose of beating other nations into submission and eventual subjugation to the Party. Therefore, I think it’s not a stretch to we need to limit them economically if we’re going to limit them militarily.
If you live in the United States, you’ve probably seen the commercials that claim that Qatar is funding terrorism. Yes, yes they are. However, it is incredibly dangerous to run these commercial, TWEET about it, and call them out in front of the entire world when Qatar is allowing the United States to have its largest military base in the entire Middle East in one of the region’s tiniest countries. Trump needs to be much more diplomatic and sensitive to our own military concerns there even if he doesn’t want to care about the Qatari people. However, he’s gone even farther by supporting the Saudi-led blockade of Qatar that has even prevent Qatar Airways from flying over several countries in the Middle East. To get to Doha, you now have to follow the weirdest flight pattern, and the Qatari government is not happy about it and not happy with Trump.
Guess what? One of most important allies in the South China Sea is being treated the exact same way. While Japan and Korea far outweigh other countries in Asia in terms of their military alliances with the United States and Northeast Asia is the most underrated location in Asia in terms of potential for utter chaos, Singapore hosts the United States and is doing so more and more in response to China’s rising aggression. However, Trump is not going easier on their North Korean guestworker program but actually harder on them. If you ever had to compromise, you’d at least schedule your phone calls to call and yell at Singapore last. There are plenty of countries around the world hosting North Korean guestworker programs that send billions back to the Kim Regime’s nuclear program, but Trump wants to bully the one that we can’t afford to lose.
So what can we do about all this?
As an individual, you can actually do quite a lot. While not every country important in this discussion is a democracy, you can still form relationships with individuals such as yourselves who can have influence in their own countries. You can befriend people from Pakistan simply by talking to them online, or you can join a volunteer program or religious mission to many citizens in Pakistan. In doing so, you start building relationships with people who will eventually have influence in small ways but when each person makes a small decisions, that can start a big wave of change that could start with their small businesses and might eventually change the way their government thinks. You can do this in many countries. I’ve formed ties with many people in China while I lived there and still communicate with people through the social media sites that aren’t blocked there.
If you’re going to start a business or already run a business, please source your products from democracies. I don’t know why we initiated a major globalization project throughout the world and decided to give all our jobs to China. I’m in favor of international trade, but they’ve used it as a weapon. Work with India. They’re a democracy, and they are right next to China. They have ties with the United States, and most of them even speak English, if that would’ve been a sticking point for you.
Finally, we need to elect people who want greater ties with the international community. Nationalism will give us exactly that…a nation. It won’t give us any acceptance by the international community. Therefore, we need to elect people in 2018 and 2020 that understand that. We need to elect people who are in favor of international trade and who know how to use it in a way that benefits both the United States and the world. We need to elect people who will reach out to our allies and countries who are wondering whether to move East or West and show them that we care and show them that we understand their culture and want to work with them and let them be who they are without conforming to someone to American ultra-nationalist identity that only benefits us.
The most importantly you can do is show the world that you’re not Trump. When I lived abroad because the loved Obama. I was surrounded by people in 2012 on election night when Obama won, and I can’t tell you how I was that those people weren’t upset about the results. Now that Trump has won, my recent trip to China included people probing whether I agreed with Trump or not. While things don’t get out of hand, it’s clear that there’s an association between a country’s leaders and how other countries view its citizens. Anything you can do to reach out to even one citizen of another nation to tell them what you stand for will help.