We’re only 100+ days in and Trump has been a wrecking ball to American alliances, power, economy, society, etc. I’ll leave out the democracy part for now; we’ve had countless threads talking about how Trump is a threat to U.S. democracy. This thread isn’t about that.
Rather, the overall status of the United States in the global community is already in sharp decline, and it’s set to plummet further yet. Having a 79-year old president who behaves like a 7.9 year old is not only ruining American alliances and relationships with partners like Canada, Australia, NATO-Europe, etc. but also handing even more power, indirectly, to China, which, while authoritarian, is at least a mature, predictable, and stable regime led by grown-ups.
To list all the ways Trump is wrecking American power, status, economy and influence would be too long to explore in a thread like this - but, basically - how much can be recovered? After Trump’s term, Biden’s presidency still, for the most part, saw America return to being kind of its original role in the international community, but Trump’s reelection in 2024 indicated that this wasn’t a fluke and his second term is going to be far more calamitous than the first. So, by the year 2029, when President Ocasio-Cortez or whomever takes office, can the new president/administration still return America back to where it originally was in the global community, or has the ship now permanently sailed on that?
Considering the amount of time and effort required, not simply because of the extent of the damage but the snail’s pace of the political process as well, probably never reaching what it has been. The relative status in comparison to other countries may not change but any way to quantify it can’t be predicted in the long time frame ahead. 10 years would be extremely optimistic given that rest of the world also has their own ideas about this.
Some things can never be undone, others take a very long time.
In the category of “can never be undone” are the facts that the ignorant dumbass was actually elected, and the corollary to that, which is that the US can never again be fully trusted, either as a trading partner or a military partner.
I don’t think it would take very long for cordial relations with other nations to once again prevail under the leadership of a sane US president. So nice state dinners and so forth among national leaders. But the idea of the USA as a stable power that can be relied on for anything is gone for the foreseeable future, not because of Trump, but because of the more basic underlying fact that uninformed dumbass voters are not conducive to stability and rationality.
Span of time… some people used to believe or claim that the US had ‘solved’ the ‘problem of government’.
There are college courses in things called ‘political science’. An oxymoron if ever there was one.
It’s only been 200 years or so. Who knows what political system will prevail in the next 100 years?
Even if some sane person is elected to the presidency with the backing of pragmatic and astute majorities in both houses of Congress, the “international order” that facilitated 80 years of global trade and cooperation is done. However they might ‘feel’ about the United States and its radical abandonment of this order and support for democratic institutions and movements, there will no longer be a default trust in the United States as a partner in regional and global security partnerships or as a reliable trading partner, and that is even not considering what happens Trump manages crash the US dollar as a global currency standard or what happens if China invades Taiwan and threatens Japan and the United States does nothing, or if nationalistic and ethnic conflicts break out in Central and Eastern Europe as nations there start individually rearming. (There has been shockingly little discussion about the now-reunified Germany becoming the dominant military force in Europe despite how poorly that worked out the last couple of times, but hey, that’s all ancient history, amirite?)
To be fair, this order was going to go through a transformation anyway, as developed nations with aging populations and material scarcity struggled to maintain export economies and the multipolar world of a post-hydrocarbon pulse economy faced enforced degrowth, not even counting for what is going to happen when the Chinese economy that is built upon a house of bad credit that will make the 2007-8 mortgage crisis look like a flash-in-the-pan news story, but at least this had the potential to be managed (at least until extreme weather events from climate change created economic and social disruptions). But this kind of trade war ‘shock therapy’ has basically eliminated all trust in American good will and a general suspicion of nations to trust anyone outside of very close allies.
The extent to which American influence can be recovered is debatable, but it isn’t just about what the US does post-Trump; the entire face of international diplomacy and cooperation is going to change, and likely not for the better.
I really hate to be the one to say this, but there may not be an “after Trump”. Although the man himself may not be in office forever, but his cult may well entrench themselves indefinitely. He’s quite stupid, but he’s not the only source of stupid policy.
It is not at all clear to me that there will be an “after this” phase. He may rule as a bronze bust forever.
You talk about, “By the time Trump leaves office”, but it’s worse than that. Trump has already done nearly irreparable harm to the US and its standing in the world. Even were he to drop dead today, it would make no difference, because we can’t trust that the conditions that produced Trump won’t produce someone else very similar to him.
We all breathed a sigh of relief when Biden won in 2020, thinking that meant the US had returned to some semblance of sanity, but that was short-lived. Trump winning again showed that the US as it is is fundamentally broken. Even if someone sensible wins in 2028, there’s no way we can trust that you won’t go crazy again in 2032. We’ll work with the sensible President for as long as they’re there, but we won’t be putting any long-term trust into that relationship.
And even if you elected Sensible Candidates for the next decade or more, it won’t be enough, if the Crazy Candidate is still running and winning a significant portion of the vote, because we know it just takes a small shift to suddenly have president Crazy again. There can’t be any chance of a Crazy Candidate getting anywhere close to office, which means the current GOP must be either replaced outright, or reformed so heavily that a Trump-like candidate is near-impossible. That will take years to accomplish, and more years to convince the rest of us that the changes will stick.
Besides what others have said, the same socioeconomic inertia that that helped the US maintain its semi-hegemony over much of the world will work to make it nigh-impossible to recreate that hegemony. Once everyone has rebuilt their international economic, political and military relations along non-US-centric lines, they’ll have no incentive to go to the effort to change everything back. This isn’t the post-WWII era anymore, we aren’t going to be able to expand into a vacuum to impose our order on a world where every other industrial power is near flattened by war.
There will almost certainly be an “after Trump”; as much as others have tried to ape his particular form of unapologetic, self-aggrandizing, authoritarian bombast nobody has really been able to replicate it; the only other person in who has even gotten close to commanding the same level of cult-like reverence is Elon Musk and he did that outside of the political arena (and in fact has been sucking air out of the room ever since he got into politics). Which is not to say that potential successors and kingmakers aren’t following Trump and taking notes about what works.
Whether or not the US is able to return to some semblance of democratic norms or whether it will further descent into the kind of anarcho-corporate capture oligarchy is another question entirely. Personally, I suspect that democracy of the type we’ve (mostly) enjoyed for the last two and a quarter centuries is probably on its last breath because neither major party really supports it.
Exactly. At least half of American voters want what they see trump as selling. At least half of American voters don’t want the USA to be a refuge for other people to come to to flee persecution, or to find opportunity impossible in their countries of origin. Those voters don’t want women, minorities, disabled people, gays and other gender-questioning people to have the same rights as white men. These voters are okay with shipping people off to prison camps in remote areas within and outside the USA without ever seeing a lawyer or a judge. They don’t want to spend public money on education or the arts. Hillary made a huge blunder when she called them “deplorables,” but that’s what they are. They’re not going away.
Even if “somone sensible” wins and “sensible people” pack both houses of Congress, these voters are still there, simmering away. I don’t know how Democrats, or any “liberals,” can appeal to them.
I do think the pompous, narcissistic, bombastic trump is a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon. No one in the Republican party has the (I hate to use this word in reference to him) charisma, presence and sheer audacity to rally people around the way he does. Thank goodness.
But to address the subject of this thread: no one in the world (and few of us here) can trust that good will toward all will surely prevail again. I hope I’m wrong.
Firstly, irrespective that most of the 45/47 inflicted hurt via the primary schoolyard bully routine will be experienced by Americans, the possible timeframe for the “return to normality” from an American’s perspective will be a lot less than for the rest of the globe. Which is going to be most of a generation. Minimum. The bluff was called. You blinked. The bond market passed adjudication.
And if you lose the USD’s reserve currency status, you’ll never get it back.
Moreover, if it was possible to restore the hegemony relatively painlessly for the US then the MAGA movement will persist, consider itself vindicated and ready to roll the dice again with the next right wing populist. So let all the poisons that lie in the mud hatch out.
It will only be when MAGA accepts, whether in the privacy of confessional or in public, that the downward spiral with profuse bleeding from their ears, draining from their own hip pockets and the end of empire is the direct and incontrovertible consequences of their own making that a light will appear on the hill.
And it’s not just that. They believed the lies, no matter how outrageous (eating cats? Seriously?). Even if they stop believing those particular lies, we can’t trust them not to believe the next set of outrageous lies. Their ability to parse truth from lies is fundamentally broken.
From a practical, realpolitik perspective, I think the US will be welcomed into the fold almost as soon as Trump is gone. The US is too large and (for the moment) wealthy to ignore, and a repentant US will probably get a version of what it has before as soon as it is feasible.
But the trust is gone, the brand is toxic, and the reputation is in tatters. No one will put the US in a position where they have to be relied upon, and the machinery is being put into place now to mitigate the hegemony of the US dollar, the UN veto, and other post-WWII certainties. It will be treated as, say, Greece or Italy is treated: important but not capable of running things.
Yes I think some op-eds have gone too far in suggesting that other countries will not trust any US president, or that the US will remain a pariah. It’s too important a country, and the next president and admin can do a lot to give a positive impression to other world leaders.
But in terms of signing deals, other countries now know that deals may only be good for one presidential term. And, for the next couple of decades at least, the US is going to be perceived as a risky place to invest, and partner with, and the currency has lost a lot of its reliability.
In terms of the loss of global hegemony, a lot of it was inevitable, so impossible to roll back. Trump just sped up the process.
US dominance was largely an accident of history and geography anyway, as its explosion in wealth, industrial capacity, and influence was fueled by its positioning during and immediately after World War 2, compared to the extensive damage elsewhere. In retrospect, it’s hilarious that anyone with any historical awareness would mistakenly assume that any current status quo should have any kind of permanence, but it does seem to be a common error in human thinking over the millennia.
Well the saying all roads lead to Rome come to mind. The US has maintained a central part of international trade. Due to current event ‘stuff’, Canada and to a lesser extent Mexico has given a golden opportunity to break trade ties with the US (which were highly favorable to the US), and sell international at fair market prices. Those favorable rates to the US are gone forever, to Canada’s benefit going forward. Trump was the excuse they needed to do this, and I don’t see it coming back.
The spell is broken and America will never enjoy the status and influence it once had. “European security cannot be left in the hands of ignorant voters from Wisconsin every four years,”
Jean-Yves Le Drian, the French Minister of Europe and Foreign Affairs
In fairness, people have been predicting the end of US dominance for at least the last 20 years, and yet the gap even increased by several measures in that time.
It turns out, when you have the biggest market, and the world’s reserve currency, you can do a lot wrong and yet economic winds still blow towards you.
(In fairness, US tech startups have been a big part of the success in the last 20 years. The extent to which that comes from being the biggest market, with lots of investment capital swashing around, versus good policy on university research and R&D is complex, so I’ll stick a pin in it. But I acknowledge it’s a potential counter argument to US success being mostly based on being the biggest fish)
But now, trump is quickly tearing apart the advantages the US had, and the best bang to buck investments. Other cars were starting to catch the US up, and then trump said “how come we’ve never tried reverse gear?”