What? Putin Wasn't the Only One Who Noticed?

The damage is done. This presidential election campaign has left America's reputation in tatters around the world. At this point it doesn't even matter who wins.

Harvard professor, Stephen Walt, writes in Foreign Policy that the damage Trump has inflicted on America isn't going away.

That sense of relief [should Clinton win] may be short-lived, however, because Trump’s candidacy and the broader condition of American politics have already done considerable damage to America’s image overseas. If you talk to foreigners a lot (it’s part of my job), you mostly hear repeated expressions of bewilderment: they find the Trump phenomenon as hard to understand as America’s fondness for guns. The French newspaper Liberation called him the “American Nightmare,” and a diverse array of foreign media outlets offer similar appraisals. Or as the New York Daily News headlined in March: “As [Trump] sinks lower, he does lasting harm to America’s image in the world.”

"To make matters worse, the Trump campaign has revealed that a fair number of Americans seem to like the Donald’s disdainful and bigoted views of Muslims, Mexicans, and most U.S. allies. It can’t be encouraging for the citizens of other countries to discover that a non-trivial chunk of the American body politic is xenophobic, racist, protectionist, and ill-informed. That may always have been true, but it took the Trump campaign to put it up in bright lights."

"Alas, the problem isn’t just the campaign. The recurring dysfunctions at both federal and state levels reinforce the growing sense that something has gone badly awry with America’s other political institutions. Congress can’t pass budgets or ratify trade agreements, won’t even bother to hold hearings on Supreme Court nominees, won’t vote either to authorize the use of force or to withhold authorization, won’t conduct genuine oversight of the intelligence community, and won’t perform any of the other key functions the Founding Fathers designated for them. Instead, representatives and senators spend more time “dialing for (campaign) dollars” than they do legislating, while the rascals most responsible for all this obstructionism keep getting reelected. Several U.S. states are flirting with bankruptcy; gerrymandering is endemic; media outlets spew fact-free bile on a daily basis; and the country’s existing institutions seem incapable of undertaking clear, obvious, and farsighted initiatives and then bringing them to fruition."

For nearly 70 years America has reaped great prestige, wealth and power from being the country that most other countries respected, even admired. There's been no other nation where appearances counted for so much. That's the sort of goodwill that pays huge dividends but hard as it is to achieve, losing it is almost effortless.

A word of caution for those tempted to dive headfirst into the pool of Schadenfreude. What Trump has done to America's standing in the world is merely the icing on a multi-layer cake. It's just one more element in the destabilization and decline of the United States. You can add to that the repeated demonstration, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere, that all the King's Horses and all the King's Men have utterly failed to deliver military victory. Then there's America's debt-fueled economy dependent on the confidence of foreign lenders willing to keep buying the country's debt, a.k.a. the national deficit, and buying it in American dollars. Not one of these corrosive forces is being turned around. America is coming to be revealed as the main street facade of a cowboy movie set.