One of the most important stories of the year has been Amercia’s declining status on the world stage. We begin today’s roundup with Ryan Cooper at The Week and his take on the situation:
America's power and global influence have plummeted like a stone during the Trump presidency. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson recently claimed otherwise in a New York Times op-ed, but he is obviously wrong.
The American empire is crumbling.
What President Trump is destroying is a product of the postwar years. In the years after the Second World War, America constructed what amounted to a globe-spanning empire, with the active assistance of Western Europe. The immediate justification was to build a military coalition capable of countering and containing the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc — and an important secondary objective was setting up a solid economic system to ensure prosperity, manage trade, and avoid depression.
Bill Neely at NBC News:
President Donald Trump hasn’t started a war. But he’s spent his first year in the White House at war, and his military has dropped a record number of bombs on the Middle East.
Unlike many of his predecessors, Trump's vision for U.S. foreign policy is crystal clear and summed up in two words: "America First."
Acting on this, he abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and pulled out of a global climate agreement. But this has led to "America Isolated."