As an erratic president imposes his international doctrine, countries are forging more stable alliances. His US will be weaker, not stronger, says Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik

One of the ways in which Donald Trump’s regime obscures and distracts is by drawing our eyes constantly to the US – its raw power to intimidate and bully other nations, and its vast financial heft in wielding soft power through organisations such as USAid.

But at the same time as Trump projects his agenda on to the world stage, he is withdrawing the US from the world and reducing its role to its bare bones – an imperial power that blatantly picks and chooses how to engage based on its alliances and interests. American taxpayer money is ever so precious on the one hand, but on the other can be profligately spent on proposals to take over an entire territory in Gaza and send billions in aid to Israel. This is not isolationism, it is unilateralism.

In doing so, the US, despite its domination of the headlines, is withdrawing from a world from which it has been receding for a long time as a moral, military and economic force into selective engagement. The arc of that recession is wide. It was “the end of history” in the early 90s, when the end of the cold war was predicted to herald a new world in which liberal capitalist values dominated under globalisation and free trade, and democracy flourished as the Soviet Union and its autocracies across eastern Europe collapsed. But in the three decades since, the US expanded then caved in on itself.

  • Tasty Saganaki@reddthat.comEnglish
    15·
    12 hours ago

    For those of us who aren’t asleep, we know how bad things are. We know Trump and Musk and their goons are concerned only for amassing more of their own personal wealth and power at the obvious expense of everyone and everything else. News opinion pieces like this both give me a sense of sanity and not feeling alone, but also simultaneously depress/frustrate the hell out of me because it feels somewhat hopeless as the levers of power and information, from branches of government to news media, capitulate in various ways. Personally I think a general strike seems logical, but I have no idea how one would be organized in a country like the US with such an overall weak organized labor movement- though admittedly one that seems very active right now. However, I’ll always remain an optimist and believe a better world is possible.