Singapore plays its geopolitical cards carefully as a country that tries to maintain good relations with America in a region dominated by China. So it's worth paying attention when its defense minister says that the image of the United States has changed from liberator to great disrupt order to a landlord seeking rent. Its Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong summed up the challenge the world faces: "The US is no longer prepared to underwrite the global order.
This makes the international environment far less orderly and predictable. " In a few short weeks, the Trump administration has affected a revolution in foreign policy. It has largely abandoned a long standing democratic ally, Ukraine, whose security the US has pledged to uphold since signing the Budapest Memorandum 30 years ago.
In fact, it now asks for a big share of Ukraine's mineral wealth, which the administration describes as payback for American support. Meanwhile, Washington declared a tariff war on its neighbors and closest trading partners, Canada and Mexico, and demanded that Denmark sell it. Greenland and Panama hand over the Panama Canal.
It has moved to withdraw from the World Health Organization, which the US helped found. It has tried to shut most of its foreign aid programs to the world's poor, reversing a tradition of generosity that dates back to World War One. Its tariffs are clear violations of trade rules that Washington itself created and championed for decades.
These remarkable turnarounds are being noticed around the world and will result in a revolution in foreign policy everywhere. Friedrich Metz, the man who is likely to become Germany's next chancellor, said recently my absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that step by step we can really achieve independence from the USA. I never thought I would have to say something like this, but after Donald Trump's statements, it is clear that the Americans, at least this part of the Americans, this administration, are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.
Germany stood at the center of the security system, the US built after World War two for that country to start shaking is a seismic shift. Metz has even raised the idea of France and Britain extending their nuclear umbrella to Germany, because he is no longer convinced that the US would defend his country. That American promise was the essence of NATO, but no one in Europe knows if Trump would actually honor it.
People in Taiwan have watched nervously as the Trump administration has turned on Ukraine, and rather than offering support against the predatory intentions of Taiwan's bullying neighbor, Trump has berated Taiwan for not spending enough on its own defense. Many on the island now worry that Trump might make a deal with Beijing that leaves them abandoned, like Ukraine. All these American moves will have an effect.
They will begin to usher in a new multipolar world. Major countries like Germany and Japan will inevitably look out for their own security. That could mean for Japan as well as for South Korea.
Nuclear weapons become an attractive option, an insurance policy against aggression. Under the US security umbrella. The world has seen remarkably little nuclear proliferation.
That could change dramatically. Every country will consider how to wean itself off dependance on the US. As countries seek independence from the US, they might also seek alternatives to the dominance of the dollar.
Europeans, who are really the only ones who could mount an alternative, might start issuing EU bonds, which would be the most effective competitor to U. S. Treasury bonds.
America's exorbitant privilege of owning the world's reserve currency, which has allowed it to run up massive deficits at low cost, might erode faster than we could imagine. All these changes are gifts to Russia and China, whose goal has been to weaken America's power and presence in the world. As one rational guest said recently on GPS about Trump's Ukraine policy, it's indeed like Easter, Hanukkah, Christmas, birthday of Vladimir Putin and everything is happening on one day.
To those who think it's high time that we changed an international system that was so dependent on the US, have you weighed the costs and benefits? The United States has spent eight decades building an international system of rules, norms and values that has produced the longest period of great power, peace and global prosperity in human history. Its alliances are the greatest force multiplier for American influence around the world, and America has been the greatest beneficiary of this system.
Even now, decades later, setting the agenda and dominating the world economically, technologically, militarily, as this world unravels, America's privileged position will also decline, creating a more dangerous and impoverished world and more isolated, mistrusted, and insecure America. The post-American world is now in plain sight. Go to cnn.
com/fareed for a link to my Washington Post column this week.
