I spent much of this week talking with foreign officials who are in the U.S. for United Nations meetings. I was curious to know how they’re strategizing about the United States in the future — assuming Democrats do well in the midterm elections and Trump becomes a lame-duck president.
(None of my nine sources were heads of state; my stature doesn’t reach that high. But they were high enough to give me some useful insights.)
Here’s what I learned:
1. Most are thinking past Trump. They believe his influence is already waning, and his bellicose rantings show that he knows it. He’s still dangerous, they say, but not nearly as dangerous as he was, and he’s no longer capable of plunging the world into war. Every one of them told me he’s deeply unpopular in their countries.
2. They’re thinking in a timeframe of five to 10 years. They see Trump as a temporary phenomenon and assume the United States will “return to its senses.”
3. But — and here’s the part that concerned me — they’re unsure they can ever again rely on the United States for world leadership. Several pointed out that the fact Americans elected Trump for a second time reveals, in the words of one of them, “there’s something troublesome about your nation that transcends Trump.”
4. Even post-Trump, they see the United States as unstable and unpredictable. They don’t believe the country will fall into civil war, but they worry that policymaking will cycle between extremes because, in the words of another, “your extreme inequality will make it difficult to achieve any longer-term consensus.”
5. As a result, they’re looking ahead to a world where another nation, or group of nations, will take leadership on global issues that need to be addressed, such as climate change, AI, migration, widening inequalities, Putin’s aggression, and disease prevention.
6. Which nation or group? Another official put it to me this way: “We don’t trust China, the U.N. doesn’t work because of its security council, but the EU isn’t strong enough yet. Several of us are hoping that over the next decade the EU will be joined by Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, and that this new EU — really, a World Union — will devise a structure that enables it to work collaboratively and forcefully for the good of the world.”
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.