Diogenes is on his way back. Here's another repost from his greatest hits.
There was a time when "America" was synonymous with strength, justice,
freedom, opportunity, enlightenment, peace, cooperation, fairness, and
understanding.
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
Two trends are clear: (1) The Divider-in-Chief is taking the U.S. out of
organizations and treaties that involve helping or dealing with
ethnicities or races he doesn't like; (2) He is trying to control
foreign nuclear weapon expansion while removing hindrances on American
weapons development.
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 (Reposted 10/11/2020)
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¹ Robert Longley, "The Evolution of American Isolationism," https://www.thoughtco.com/the-evolution-of-american-isolationism-4123832