After the Era of American Embarrassment

The recent performance of the U.S. government has made the United States, in a biblical phrase, the scorn of its neighbors.

In a massive Pew survey of 42,000 respondents in 36 countries, 76% of them expressed no confidence in the current U.S. leader’s handling of international affairs. Even Vladimir Putin received more positive views.

An administration that came to office due to a desire to cure domestic political grievance is increasingly turning out to be toxic globally.

Grievance’s long arc

Meanwhile, the sense of domestic grievance not only persists, but is mushrooming. It is indeed quite likely to remain a factor in U.S. politics for the indefinite future.

Large sectors of the U.S. population have soured on government, resenting its intrusions into their lives and its failure to improve them.

A decade ago, those attitudes set the stage for a political outsider to mobilize millions on the claim that he would be their vengeance.

That this outsider has broken many of his own key promises has disappointed quite a few of his followers, though many remain committed to him.

A United States celebrating victimhood?

These negative tendencies at home have spilled over into the U.S.’s foreign relations. Driven by a profound self-pity — the very opposite of the traditionally confident American mindset — it was asserted from the Oval Office that the world was in effect cheating the United States and taking advantage of the U.S.’s generous impulses.

Soon enough, a tone of hostility, sometimes bordering on contempt, began to flavor U.S. declarations regarding other countries.

The egotist-in-chief, surrounded by a near-endless supply of Cabinet-level sycophants, seems incapable of showing or feeling any sense of embarrassment. For distraction, another round of dubious applied tariffs is always at hand.

Thankfully, many Americans are not so detached from showing proper human emotions.

As a consequence, a creeping degree of disappointment and shame is reinforcing the massive levels of disapproval of the current administration’s flawed policies and incompetence.

Even while the present incumbent’s base of support remains substantial, opinion polls reveal that most Americans, feeling the pain of surging energy prices and severe disruption to social programs, oppose the war of choice waged on Iran and other aspects of current policy.

Shock therapy for the U.S.?

More damaging than the preening self-regard shown by the U.S. leadership in recent years has been the shock to the institutions, structures and processes that were often delivered or corroborated by the U.S. Supreme Court. It has evidently abandoned the finely balanced political equilibrium on which the country had depended for at least several generations.

In addition, the ever-expanding fractures undermining the trust in the United States among its international allies are generating a fluidity in international politics that has not been seen for decades.

Laudable objectives and objectional means

This state of affairs is not helped by the great tension that exists even in cases aiming at the realization of laudable objectives – for example, preventing proliferation of nuclear weapons and stemming the flow of drugs into the United States.

All too often, these are being pursued on the back of objectional means, such as the extrajudicial attacks on presumed drug-running boats in the Caribbean or the capture of the head of the Venezuelan government.

In addition, this is an administration that counterfactually claims to have settled numerous wars while, in reality, it has failed to resolve any of the three most violent conflicts – Ukraine, Gaza and now Iran.

Breaking it, but also owning (up to) it?

Perverse results are beginning to appear in the inter-state relationships of the United States. Attempts by the administration to strike a balanced approach to China as both a competitor and a co-dependent trading associate have only partially succeeded.

This lack of clarity and strategic direction on the part of the United States itself has also prompted other countries to hedge their relationships with China, often including the assumption of more accommodationist stances toward Beijing.

For their part, Canada and the European Union are now pursuing multiple objectives independently of the United States. This includes bolstering assistance to Ukraine against Russia, while still seeking to steady the consistently uneven U.S. engagement in that mission.

From a global standpoint, a growing role for Europe may be welcome, but the European nations are also full of their own inabilities and shortcomings.

To the extent that there is more of a determination to act on the part of Europe, the United States cannot reasonably claim credit for that development in any constructive sense since it is, at least in part, the reaction to ill-considered actions by Washington.

Advantage China

As a byproduct of wavering American leadership, China, in particular, has gained leverage and status in the international system. It is ironic that all the talk of refocusing U.S. strategy on the Pacific and the rise of China has given way to policies that in fact strengthen Beijing’s global influence.

Russia has also benefited by openings created by U.S. preoccupation in the Persian Gulf and relative inattention to the aggression in Europe.

These movements may not be revolutionary, but they represent worrisome tendencies that are likely to persist and grow if the United States does not regain its geopolitical footing.

The nuclear issue

On one specific ambition – halting the spread of nuclear weapons – the counterproductive effect of the administration’s actions should be clear to all.

Whatever the short-term impact of brute force assaults on the Iranian nuclear program, the long-term incentives both in Tehran and elsewhere have almost certainly shifted in the opposite direction.

North Korea, for example, has responded vocally to the war on Iran by adamantly pronouncing that there will be no reversal of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons capability.

Similarly, the most fervent advocates of regime change in Tehran perceive that the U.S. administration has fallen well short of its objectives. A plausible result has been to whet the appetite for nuclear weapons, not only in Iran, but in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, rather than destroy it.

From alliance destroying to alliance rebuilding?

More than one path toward international realignment is possible, and which path develops will depend on the objectives and behavior of many states.

It behooves Americans to assess those prospects clinically. Self-scrutiny is an anguishing move at this stage, but it is imperative to recognize that it is their own government that has diminished the nation’s international status and jeopardized the constructive role it had played for decades.

An era of American embarrassment need not become an age. A critical fact is that the current American government never won a popular majority, though it succeeded in the electoral college.

The sense of democracy imperiled?

What is far more concerning is that the complex structure of the U.S. Constitution, presumably a solid safeguard to ward off the tyranny of a majority, has in fact morphed into the tyranny of a minority.

This move is buttressed by an overly eager and highly partisan U.S. Supreme Court that is shredding the traditional separation of powers via its decisions.

Even more troublingly in a purely democratic context, in neither the U.S. House nor the U.S. Senate do the narrow majorities represent the majority of American voters.

A very un-American sense of self-flattery

The extraordinary obsession now on display calls to mind the 19th century Romantic poet Shelley’s famous portrayal of Ozymandias, the prime literary example of transient self-flattery.

Indulgent narcissism is a poor substitute for the dignity that earns one esteem. And the fawning applause of one’s chosen lackeys becomes neither the fawnee nor all the fawners.

Whether or not the United States is able to regain a more constructive stance internationally depends largely on the outcome of future elections.

A Supreme Court consistently playing with fire

The ever more expansive gerrymandering of legislative districts, actively supported by the U.S. Supreme Court, further reinforces the deep polarization of the U.S. electorate.

Nevertheless, the political trend toward disapproval of the current administration may soon be able to produce a U.S. Congress willing to impose at least a certain measure of discipline on an executive branch acting as if there are ever fewer limits to its exertion of power.

Of course, a small tilt in the legislature’s partisan balance will not cure the nation’s debilities but it could still bring meaningful changes in the country’s capacity for rational self-criticism.

Until that capacity is restored, any form of constructive American policymaking, foreign as well as domestic, is bound to languish.

Meanwhile, Americans are learning what many others have come to know:  it is hard to be proud of your country when you are ashamed of its leader.