Other nations looked to us for leadership, for assistance, for intervention, for friendship, for alliances.
Now we are shunned by many other countries. We have become an outlier, indeed a pariah of the community of nations where we were once a major player.
Once when we spoke, nations listened; now they snicker.
This downfall of America's reputation has been brought about single-handedly by the ill-begotten president, Donald Trump. Tyrannis Trump has spent his term trying to change America into what he thinks it should be.
The unpresident's psychopathy dictates that the world has to be Trumpcentric. Whether he'll manage to make the world in his own image is doubtful, but he's been working hard to transform this nation into something he may have seen in a dream.
Trump's ultimate delusional goal is an America for Americans only, by which he means white English-speaking non-Catholic Christians. There is no place in his philosophy for people of any color or ethnicity, including the indigenous nations who were here long before Europeans arrived.
He was elected on a platform of racism, xenophobia, and paranoia. His only clearly stated plan was to build a wall to keep Mexicans out. By May 2020, only 3 miles out of 194 miles of wall constructed or replaced under the Trump administration was new fencing. The border is 1,954 miles long.
After almost 4 years of boasting about the wall and its progress the Bricklayer-in-Chief has only managed to add one-tenth of one percent to what already stood before he was elected. And everything that stands is only 10 percent of the length of the border.
He has steadily worked to isolate the United States from the rest of the world. He has used flimsy and nonsensical reasons to remove the U.S. from several organizations and agreements, including:
- The Paris Climate Agreement
- The Trans-Pacific Partnership trade bloc
- UNESCO, the UN's culture and education body
- The UN Human Rights Council, responsible for the promotion and protection of all human rights around the globe
- The UN Relief and Works Agency, which provides aid to Palestinian refugees in the Near East
- The Iran nuclear accord
- The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty required the U. S. and the Soviet Union to eliminate all nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers
- The Open Skies Treaty allows member nations to overfly other members' territory to collect data on military forces and activities
- and others, including a possible withdrawal from the World Health Organization; he has threatened to withdraw but not carried through
The Bumbler-in-Chief has never set out any coherent plan or policy, but the actions above reveal a sort of stream-of-consciousness approach to distancing the United States from the general community of nations.
Isolationism has never worked for the United States. Had Trump ever looked at the history of his own country, he might have come across Thomas Jefferson's 1801 inaugural address, in which he described his vision of American isolationism: "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none…”¹
American presidents have never been able to avoid those entangling alliances. Whether coming to the defense of fellow republics or defending America's own interests, presidents and Congresses have become entangled, usually because it was the right thing to do.
That is a foreign concept to Trump. Everything he does is for his own personal gain and interest, and if anyone else can decipher what that is, they're not talking.
Isolationism is impossible when every citizen has access to worldwide communication. Citizens of the isolationist countries North Korea, China, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, among others, don't have this access.
Don't let the Isolator-in-Chief add the United States of America to that list.
--- Diogenes, 8/23/2020
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¹ Robert Longley, "The Evolution of American Isolationism," https://www.thoughtco.com/the-evolution-of-american-isolationism-4123832