Slow-motion imperial decline

Richard Stengel is a former under secretary of state for "public diplomacy" in the Obama administration and once the editor of Time. "Public diplomacy" is a euphemism for image promotion by a country for its benefit -- by as much as possible making friends through soft, cultural power. 

Yes, just the sort of thing that the felonious Orange Toddler despises. Stengel has a harsh assessment of what the current president is doing to the USofA around the world.

... today’s unprecedented disengagement with diplomacy and our allies diminishes Brand USA. To call it a suicide pact is too strong, but it is a deliberate, conscious unraveling of the things that truly made America great.

What Trump is doing to America is a deliberate, slow-motion version of how Great Britain, one of the world’s great powers in the 20th century, became little England after the second world war. Within 15 years, an imperial hegemon became a medium-sized, more inward-focused European country concerned more with domestic economic recovery than foreign influence.

That is essentially what Trump is doing to America. Post-Trump, America will be a more domestic, inwardly focused nation, a country with fewer international connections and allies, but with an outsized, muscle-bound military, and always willing to do anything to make a buck. That is the fortress America of the 19th century, protected by two oceans and happily self-absorbed and insular.

No, we were never quite the shining city on the hill we thought we were. But, post-Trump, the United States will become little America. Smaller, meaner, less shiny. 

I found informative Stengel's evocation of a US analogy to the shriveling of Great Britain as a world power after 1945. A US imperial denouement is even happening in the same part of the world; the Suez Crisis of 1956 marked the end of Britain's far flung order. In that military flare up, the US Eisenhower administration prevented the Anglo-French-Israeli alliance from humiliating a nationalist Egyptian government; by fiat, the US preserved Egyptian sovereignty over the vital Suez Canal and signaled the end of Britain's worldwide reach.

Might we now see China play some similar role in our current Strait of Hormuz adventure? A flailing TACO Trump could use an intervention to get him out of the crisis he has made for himself and us all. An anxious world wishes there were an adult to step in ...