Four ways in which recent shifts in US policies affect the whole world

            After a hundred days of the most chaotic, bizarre and cruel administration in the history of the American Presidency, it is understandable that most people in the US would focus on the harm done to this country. The massive random firings of essential government workers, elimination of government agencies, a reign of fear accompanying savage immigration raids, flaunting of both courts and Congress, and economic disaster induced by tariffs are breathtaking.

            But the global implications are equally severe, and perhaps worse. Unlike many of the domestic policies enacted by executive order that can easily be reversed if an opposition party is allowed to stand for elections and win, the global damages may be longer lasting. And in some cases be irreversible. These are the worst:

Isolationism

            Tariffs will hit the US consumer as a sales tax on most of the things one might buy in Walmart, Target, or even the local supermarket. But it can also have an isolating effect. It is this administration’s US attempt to withdraw from the transnational manufacturing and marketing system that is the hallmark of the age of globalization. Ridiculously low prices for everything from t-shirts to toaster-ovens are the result.

            A few tariffs can be useful. Virtually every President has adopted some to protect fledgling US industries. President Joe Biden’s attempt to revive the computer chip industry in the US is an example of a case where tariffs might play a strategic role.

            But when nothing is being produced in the US and there is no government assistance in the massive task of rebuilding a manufacturing infrastructure in the US, tariffs simply isolate the US from the global world and cripple the domestic economy.

            It is not just economic isolationism, however. Trump distrusts NATO and the alliances that kept the world stable and safe. He wants to withdraw from the huge support that the US has given for Ukraine’s attempts to hold on to their democracy. This is their problem, he seems to say, and we don’t need to go around the world looking for trouble. He seems unaware that this trouble will eventually come back to hurt all of us.

Stinginess

            One of Trump’s first acts was to dismantle the Agency for International Development (AID). This was the government’s premier instrument for assisting countries around world and promoting democratic institutions. It administered the delivery of surplus US food—primarily wheat, soy, and milk powder – to people in need in desperate situations.

            I was directly involved in distributing AID foodstuffs in a famine in India years ago when I first lived in the country. Working with CARE and a local Gandhian movement we were able to provide food to eight million people a day, one of the largest hot food programs in history. It was credited for saving the lives of thousands if not millions affected by years of drought.

            This was food that otherwise would be wasted. The US produces more food that it can consume within the United States, so to stabilize prices the government buys up surplus grain and powdered milk. Rather than just pouring it down the sewer, it packages it and ships it to distraught food-insufficient regions of the world. My famine in India was an example.

            Today there are boatloads of desperately needed food from AID stalled and headed back to harbor since the sudden termination of the food program. In Sudan, where a major famine is endangering millions and US aid was the major lifeline to survival, killing the food delivery will be a tragedy of enormous proportions.

            AID programs relating to food, health services, environmental security, and democratic education are not just charity. They are the major ways that the US interacts with the world on a human person-to-person level and builds a network of alliances and potential support. It is a further act of extreme and selfish isolationism to say that we do not need this, nor do we care what happens to other people.

            China is waiting to move into development assistance in the absence of the US, especially in regions it finds useful for minerals and other raw resources. When America discovers it is deprived of these resources it may find that its stinginess may end up costing a lot.

Authoritarianism

            Trump’s isolationism has turned old allies into enemies. Paradoxically it has also turned old enemies into friends. The eerie camaraderie with Vladimir Putin is a wretched example. When tariffs were announced that would affect most of the world, including islands in the Pacific where only penguins reside, Russia was exempted. When Trump attempted to work out a deal to end the war in Ukraine, he went first to Russia then came to Ukraine with the Russian talking points, including the absurd suggestion that Ukraine had started the war.

            It’s not just Putin. Trump’s Christmas list of dictatorial pals include Viktor Orban of Hungary, Abdel Fateh al-Sisi of Egypt, Kim Jong Un of South Korea, and Racep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. He admires China’s Xi Jinping, even when he declares China to be his foe. Clearly he would like to be more like them and not like what he regards as the weak and soft democratically elected leaders. 

            This has global implications. Since the time of the European Enlightenment the assumption was that the world was steadily becoming more democratic. The occasional deviation from this norm was considered a temporary and specific set of setbacks that would eventually be rectified. Many observers of international politics hope that this will still be the case. But for the US to shift its weight behind the autocratic trends of China, Russia, Egypt, Turkey, and to a lesser extent India and Israel is a sobering indication of a direction of global politics that those who believed in the inevitability of democracy thought scarcely possible even a few years ago.

Rebuking democracy

            This leads us to the fourth and perhaps most profound aspect of the current US approach to global politics: the dimming of the lamp of liberty.  To millions of people who live in repressive regimes around the world from Russia to El Salvador, America has stood as a beacon of democracy and freedom. Some have fled their cruel homelands seeking refuge in the arms of liberty, as the inscription on the Statue of Liberty promises. Others have struggled on, defying the odds of a chaotic and tyrannical state, with the image of American democracy as the light that gives them hope. The educational material of the U.S. Agency for International Development has reinforced that image with programs supporting democracy.

            The current administration’s immigration policy resists the idea of the US as a refuge. But more than that, its undemocratic domestic policies shatter the image of the US as a beacon of freedom. For those of us who used to be proud to travel abroad and identify ourselves as Americans we now hesitate. I sometimes say I’m from California or Hawai’i, hoping people will think that these entities are not in the US, which in some ways they’re not.

            But we can’t escape the fact that those of us who are American are tied to the destiny charted by the changes in the country’s direction. It may be the case that currently those of us who live in the U.S. may not care about the significance of these changes in America’s image and impact around the world. After all, we have to wrestle with the new limitations on freedom and the rising prices of toaster-ovens. But sooner or later we will have to deal with the larger reality that the US image and impact in the world has shrunk to miniscule proportions. This diminishes us all, and we may never fully recover.