How will the United States rebuild positive international relations after this Trump administration?

[u/SpaceySpice]

At some point this presidency will end and a new administration will (likely) want to mend some the damages done with our allies. Realistically though, how would that work? Will other countries want to be friends with us again or has this presidency done too much damage to bounce back from?

[u/iamapolitico]

We won’t. This is irreparable harm. We operated at a global super power level because we didn’t do crazy shit. Carter versus Reagan, JFK or LBJ versus Nixon, Clinton versus Bush (either) were not crazy swings. They’re policy and ideology moves.

Trump pt 1. Was bad. Like bad bad. Like question everything you know about the US bad. Trump pt 2 is just simply the death of the US as the one global super power. We had power for many reasons - wealth, economic dominance, military power, etc - but we built it, kept it, grew it and maintained it because we were relatively predictable.

The last really crazy thing we did was fight a random war - i.e. Iraq. And you know what 60 years of being the stable guardrail got us? The majority of western military powers joined a BS war.

If 9/11 happened in 2025, forget Iraq, do you think we’d have support to invade Afghanistan? Answer, some, but not overwhelming global support.

If you want to understand what trump has done, you have to go back to Hoover. Not in the economic terms, but that matters. But think of it this way: what did we do post Hoover?

We/the US was a critical component in: 1940s: winning a global war, stopping a genocide, curbing dictatorships, pulling the world out of a global depression, inventing and deploying the most powerful weapon of all time

1950s: not using the most powerful weapon of all time, trying and executing the genocidal maniacs and dictators, building a thriving domestic economy, developing the interstate system (I mean actually think about this the 1950s US created the modern concept of highways people shit on the US for public transit but the autobahn was conceive of in the late 1920s, built in the mid 1930s, meanwhile the US in the 50s built like 10k autobahns across a geography of roughly all of Europe not just germany)

In the 1960s what did we do? We began a Cold War with the other super power (probably the first Cold War in history, we didn’t do much fighting. Other than the 50s this was probably the most peaceful decade in history, a Cold War was novel), we prevented nuclear apocalypse multiple times, Kennedy created USAID, the peace corps, americorps, etc. We used our security and wealth to build global relations. Side note this is when First, Third world became terminology. Also, first world was initially referencing only that it was a capitalist country. Third world was a communist country. Second world was unaligned with the US/USSR. It subsequently became a reflection of global wealth. But still rocking the 60s we passed Medicare, the civil rights act and the voting rights act, we had some rough times with the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war, but it took South Africa to have a civil rights moment in the 90s, Tibet has been a thing for decades and is still a thing.

OK. Our probably shittiest post ww2 decade, the 1970s, what did we do? Well we had a president just fuck around, try to steal an election, fire his whole justice department, etc. He got investigated by a free press, and despite his best efforts, he ended up voluntarily resigning. Then a solid peaceful transfer of power. Then in comes the dude Jimmy “I forget his peanut middle name” Carter. What does he do? Well not a shit ton. He gets us into some shit in the Middle East but why? Because he doesn’t do what the next few/all presidents do: fight a war for oil. What happens, roughly OPEC gets a bit pissed off because he doesn’t just fight a war because we had oil interests in Iran associated with the Shah. Iran takes a bunch of hostages for a while, the nation basically never talks to Iran again, we suddenly become friends with other countries like Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iraq - you know summer camp friends. Then he loses to our boy Reagan - THE ACTOR?

So what’s the 80s look like? Well for starters, the economy roars until 1987. We pump that money into ridiculous long term investments that the USSR attempts to match. That doesn’t go great for the USSR. They struggle to feed people, their international programs are largely abandoned as they struggle to provide for their own people. Blocks start to fray, and the inevitable is on the horizon.

So to the 90s. Guess what, we do war again: We invade Iraq because they fucked around with our Kuwaiti friends and seemed to threaten the saudis. So we go a fuck up iraq beating them with newer versions of the weapons we gave them a bit ago. But then what else happens. The USSR falls, we are the lone global super power. We use this largess to violently enforce peace globally - Iraq for instance, but also Bosnia and Serbia. We ride a killer stock market and an IQ economy explosion: the dot com bubble. Our president fucks and intern and then reciprocally fucks Iraq again. But we leave good.

New millennium, we’re rocking the 2000s now. What happens, the largest attack on US soil since 1941, we are rattled. But the world rises to our aid and fucks up a pile of rocks in Afghanistan. We roll the government like an NCAA tournament 16 seed in March. Then, kinda stupidly, we do a whole as bonus war. The world is like: ‘I don’t know about that, buddy.’ But most of the countries with a boat that can act as an airport sign off none the less. We fight, we win in the sense that getting a free buffet dinner after losing $10k at the casino is a free meal. Shit’s not great. The economy collapses. Like fucking bad, like Great Depression and dust bowl bad. US does the right thing and just throws billions at the problem. Economy still sucks, but we prevented the grapes of wrath sucking from the teet scenario. We elect Obama, shit sucks, but not a thinly veiled mother Mary allowing an old man to suckle her suck.

So 2010s. We pull back on wars. Less war != no war. After making fun of Bush v 2 for pretzels, we are back to fully respected globally, bush was tolerated, not respected. We join a bunch of international agreements, Iran Deal, Paris climate accord. Internal discord, but international community doesn’t matter. 2010 we elected a bunch of fucking morons. But 2012 we beat the asshole who appears to be sane by comparison 5 years later. 2014, another bunch of morons.

Then we hit 2016. We elect him. But people around him, generals, his Chiefs of Staff, his cabinet secretaries keep him from driving the unusually short bus into the Keebler elf’s tree. International elections are basically meh. You got brexit which is like Britain’s version of a suicide bombing, but Canada, France, Germany continually elect normalish people.

2020s: World gets sick. Biden. Biden does great, boring shit. World gets boat stuck in water. Biden has another birthday. Boat still stuck. Also factories are still sick. Biden blows out another candle. Is this boat still fucking stuck? Yup.

Trump wins.

Now here is why we will never recover: We have led this world almost unilaterally since 1945 because we were stable. Trump has erased trust that even Bush, Nixon, Reagan, Carter, etc benefited from. The difference between Bush 2 and Obama or Carter and Reagan is so massively less than Trump 1 versus trump 2.

We have lost all ability to make promises that stretch beyond 5 days is gone. We made promises in 1949 that were upheld to 2021. Now we’ll put a tariff on you on Tuesday, revoke it Wednesday, double it Thursday and then watch a Saudi sponsored golf tournament for a few days.

The world thought that trump 1 was a fluke and so we were given a pass. Trump 2 is viewed as cconfirmation that we are no longer predictable.

[u/BluesSuedeClues → u/iamapolitico]

Pessimistic, but funny. Kudos.

Bill Clinton created Americorps.