The Self-Inflicted Demise of American Power
NATO leaders have a lot to worry about. The U.K. government is a Brexit hot mess. Germany’s Angela Merkel, who has been holding a unified Europe together on her shoulders like Atlas, may not be able to last much longer. Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been channeling his inner authoritarian, and he’s not the only one. And then there’s President Donald Trump. Never one for subtlety, Europe’s most important ally called NATO obsolete, threatened to ignore America’s treaty defense commitments to NATO members that don’t pay up, slapped tariffs on European aluminum and steel, and treated NATO as an irritating layover on the way to his real destination: Helsinki, where he’ll be meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. And that was before Trump actually touched down in Brussels and started berating European leaders face-to-face.
Many experts believe the chief challenge of managing President Trump’s foreign policy is keeping Trump on message. They’re wrong. Trump isn’t misspeaking when he ignores his talking points, , or on winning a sham election. He’s not veering off script when he declares that just because Kim Jong Un posed for
