Friday, July 28, 2017

Our "Post-America World"



Fareed Zakaria writes that the world is "over" America. The world has moved on.


In London last week, I met a Nigerian man who succinctly expressed the reaction of much of the world to the United States these days. “Your country has gone crazy,” he said, with a mixture of outrage and amusement. “I’m from Africa. I know crazy, but I didn’t ever think I would see this in America.”

A sadder sentiment came from a young Irish woman I met in Dublin who went to Columbia University, founded a social enterprise and has lived in New York for nine years. “I’ve come to recognize that, as a European, I have very different values than America these days,” she said. “I realized that I have to come back to Europe, somewhere in Europe, to live and raise a family.”

The world has gone through bouts of anti-Americanism before. But this one feels very different.
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According to a recent Pew Research Center survey of 37 countries, people around the world increasingly believe that they can make do without America. Trump’s presidency is making the United States something worse than just feared or derided. It is becoming irrelevant.

The most fascinating finding of the Pew survey was not that Trump is deeply unpopular (22 percent have confidence in him, compared with 64 percent who had confidence in Barack Obama at the end of his presidency). That was to be expected — but there are now alternatives. On the question of confidence in various leaders to do the right thing regarding world affairs, China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin got slightly higher marks than Trump. But German Chancellor Angela Merkel got almost twice as much support as Trump. (Even in the United States, more respondents expressed confidence in Merkel than in Trump.) This says a lot about Trump, but it says as much about Merkel’s reputation and how far Germany has come since 1945.
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China’s leadership began taking advantage of Trump’s rhetoric and foreign policy right from the start, announcing that it was happy to play the role of chief promoter of trade and investment around the world, cutting deals with countries from Latin America to Africa to Central Asia. According to the Pew survey, seven of 10 European countries now believe that China is the world’s leading economic power, not the United States.

The most dismaying of Pew’s findings is that the drop in regard for America goes well beyond Trump. Sixty-four percent of the people surveyed expressed a favorable view of the United States at the end of the Obama presidency. That has fallen to 49 percent now. Even when U.S. foreign policy was unpopular, people around the world still believed in America — the place, the idea. This is less true today.






11 comments:

Tal Hartsfeld said...

Just remember: People like me are stuck here for the rest of their lives.

rumleyfips said...

It's not just the rest of the world; a third of America had rejected the America of the past hundred and fifty years. There are lots of American qualities they reject, the rule of law and equality of opportunity being two big ones.

The Mound of Sound said...


Tal, I understand completely. My best friend, going back more than 40-years, is a life-long Michigander. I've got relatives down there too and some great friends in Seattle and the Olympic peninsula. They're feeling "stuck" too. I did my undergrad in the States and sure, it had its problems back then, but it was a country that kept moving forward and went through an era of great advances in human and civil rights. It grew the world's most dynamic and broad-based middle class in history. There are times I have trouble believing that was all thrown away - for the benefit of a privileged few.

Dana said...

Tal Hartsfeld, you're not stuck. You're choosing the easiest option.

The Mound of Sound said...


I think staying is hardly the easiest option, Dana. If Tal and the majority of Americans like him can you imagine what would befall his homeland, our only immediate neighbour? From a purely selfish perspective I wouldn't want that.

Gyor said...

Merkel doing right by the world? Try telling that to Greece. Merkel crushed the innocent people of Greece on behalf of the banksters.

I'm praying Guy Caron wins the NDP leadership race and then becomes Prime Minister because the world deseperately needs real leadership, leadership its not getting.

Gyor said...

Merkel doing right by the world? Try telling that to Greece. Merkel crushed the innocent people of Greece on behalf of the banksters.

I'm praying Guy Caron wins the NDP leadership race and then becomes Prime Minister because the world deseperately needs real leadership, leadership its not getting.

Dana said...

You don't find moving a few dozen kms easy or comfortable do you? How easy or comfortable would you find emigrating? If hundreds of thousands or even millions of well to do Americans were to pick up and leave the country that would have an impact.

But either way they've by gawd's sacred turds got to "do* something.

Whining and fussing and cringing and apologizing is really starting to become as irritating as Trump himself.

Lorne said...

It would seem that the world, by and large, has taken the full measure of Trump and found him vacuous and morally and mentally diseased, defects that are very obvious to those of us who reside north of the failing empire. The problem is, his base is hooked on his version of reality programming, and the problem for Trump is that he will have to keep upping their outrage to retain their attention and loyalty. Now that the gay, the transgendered, the Mulim and Mexican have been isolated and scapegoated, who will next fall victim to the Mad Hatter?

Dana said...

Gyor, you do understand what a poll is don't you? You do understand that quoting a poll is not the same as endorsing it's findings. If you've got a beef with the results go talk to all the people who answered the questions.

What exactly does Guy Caron have to do with the subject of Mound's post?

For that matter what does your opinion of Merkel have to do with it?

Don't you have something pressing to do?

Tal Hartsfeld said...

The ability to leave one's country of origin is only as viable as the level of one's social, economic, educational and legal status.
Any country one would anticipate moving to will still be a country of laws and customs.
And will also have their own customs and immigration departments---the ones who determine which outsiders are worthy of allowing in or which ones are to be turned away.
Hence, in the event of extreme political and social turmoil a lot of us will find ourselves in a most precarious dilemma.