Anatomy of the Trump presidency

[kpete]

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/anatomy-of-the-trump-presidency/article19391770.ece

In an earlier article in this newspaper (“Understanding the Trump phenomenon,” August 5, 2016), I suggested that it was necessary to take Donald Trump’s candidacy and its implications more seriously than many were doing then. Six months into the Trump presidency, the American media remains fascinated with the new “reality show” that has entered the White House.

As every small skirmish, move and tweet is given inordinate scrutiny and attention, it is easy however to lose sight of the big picture.

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The fourth point is more crucial still, and concerns the projection of American power abroad. Since the end of the Cold War, and the emergence of the unipolar American-dominated system around 1990, speculation has gone on regarding the nature of potential challenges to it. These could come from other state-systems, such as China, or the European Union, or from unclassifiable systems and forms, such as al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. But few could have predicted that the real challenge would come from within the U.S. itself. Yet, this is what has happened. The Trump administration appears singularly unconcerned with, and inept in dealing with, foreign policy, and after all its core internal constituency is firmly ‘isolationist’ in its inclinations. The State Department is today in utter disarray. The Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, is from the petroleum industry and seems out of his depth; so that rumours even surface regularly of his imminent resignation.

Based on the past six months, it seems likely that by 2020, the systematic projection of American power on a global scale would have shrunk considerably.


http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/anatomy-of-the-trump-presidency/article19391770.ece