Stephen M. Walt
Sensible people around the world are reeling from the Trump administration’s first three months in office. It’s not just the chaotic dismantling of key U.S. government institutions, the assault on higher education, the shakedowns directed at prominent law firms, the blatant disregard for due process and defiance of court orders, the personal vendettas directed against individuals the president dislikes, and the on-again, off-again imposition of tariffs against adversaries, allies, and those evil, anti-American penguins. It is also the increasingly evident incompetence of the loyalists Donald Trump appointed to advance his autocratic ambitions.
The impacts on America’s reputation for stability and trustworthiness were immediate. Tremors in the once rock-solid market for U.S. Treasury bonds led Mark Blyth of Brown University to tell the New York Times, correctly: “The whole world has decided that the U.S. government has no idea what it’s doing.” Or as my colleague Jason Furman told CNN: “The U.S. right now is an incredibly unreliable partner to anyone in the world, and I don’t know how we are going to get back to being reliable.”
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