Every president thinks they can change the world \u2013 and Donald Trump has an even greater sense of personal omnipotence than his recent predecessors. <\/p>\n
But it\u2019s not working out too well for the 47th president. Trump might intimidate tech titans to toe the line and use government power to try to bend institutions like Harvard University and judges, but some world leaders are harder to bully. <\/p>\n
He keeps being ignored and humiliated by Russian President Vladimir Putin who is defying the US effort to end the war in Ukraine. Russian media is now portraying Trump as the tough talker who always blinks and never imposes consequences. <\/p>\n
The president also thought that he could shape China to his will by facing down leader Xi Jinping in a trade war. But he misunderstood Chinese politics. The one thing an authoritarian in Beijing can never do is bow down to a US president. US officials say now they\u2019re frustrated <\/strong>that China hasn\u2019t followed through on commitments meant to deescalate the trade conflict. <\/p>\n As with China, Trump backed down in his tariff war with the European Union. Then Financial Times commentator Robert Armstrong enraged the president by coining the term TACO trade \u2014 \u201cTrump Always Chickens Out.\u201d <\/p>\n Everyone thought that Trump would be on the same page as Benjamin Netanyahu. After all, in his first term he offered the Israeli prime minister pretty much everything he wanted. But now that he\u2019s trying to broker peace in the Middle East, Trump is finding that prolonging the Gaza conflict is existential for Netanyahu\u2019s political career, much like Ukraine for Putin. And Trump\u2019s ambition for an Iranian nuclear deal is frustrating Israeli plans to use a moment of strategic weakness for the Islamic Republic to try to take out its reactors militarily. <\/p>\n Powerful leaders are pursuing their own versions of the national interest that exist in a parallel reality and on different historical and actual timelines to shorter, more transactional, aspirations of American presidents. Most aren\u2019t susceptible to personal appeals with no payback. And after Trump\u2019s attempts to humiliate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office, the lure of the White House is waning. <\/p>\n Trump spent months on the campaign trail last year boasting that his \u201cvery good relationship\u201d with Putin or Xi would magically solve deep geopolitical and economic problems between global powers that might be unsolvable. <\/p>\n He\u2019s far from the first US leader to suffer from such delusions. President George W. Bush famously looked into the Kremlin tyrant\u2019s eyes and \u201cgot a sense of his soul.\u201d President Barack Obama disdained Russia as a decaying regional power and once dismissed Putin as the \u201cbored kid in the back of the classroom.\u201d That didn\u2019t work out so well when the bored kid annexed Crimea. <\/p>\n More broadly, the 21st century presidents have all acted as though they\u2019re men of destiny. Bush came to office determined not to act as the global policeman. But the September 11 attacks in 2001 made him exactly that. He started wars in Afghanistan and Iraq \u2014 which the US won, then lost the peace. And his failed second term goal to democratize the Arab world never went anywhere. <\/p>\n Obama tried to make amends for the global war on terror and travelled to Egypt to tell Muslims it was time for \u201ca new beginning.\u201d His early presidency pulsated with a sense that his charisma and unique background would in itself be a global elixir. <\/p>\n Joe Biden traveled the globe telling everyone that \u201cAmerica is back\u201d after ejecting Trump from the White House. But four years later, partly due to his own disastrous decision to run for a second term, America \u2014 or at least the internationalist post-World War II version \u2013 was gone again. And Trump was back. <\/p>\n Trump\u2019s \u201cAmerica First\u201d populism relies on the premise that the US has been ripped off for decades, never mind that its alliances and shaping of global capitalism made it the most powerful nation in the planet\u2019s history. Now playing at being a strongman who everyone must obey, he is busily squandering this legacy and shattering US soft power \u2014 ie. the power to persuade \u2014 with his belligerence. <\/p>\n The first four months of the Trump presidency, with its tariff threats, warnings of US territorial expansion in Canada and Greenland and evisceration of global humanitarian aid programs show that the rest of the world gets a say in what happens too. So far, leaders in China, Russia, Israel, Europe and Canada appear to have calculated that Trump is not as powerful as he thinks he is, that there\u2019s no price for defying him or that their own internal politics make resistance mandatory. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every president thinks they can change the world \u2013 and Donald Trump has an even greater sense of personal omnipotence than his recent predecessors. But it\u2019s not working out too well for the 47th president. Trump might intimidate tech titans to toe the line and use government power to try to bend institutions like Harvard…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7163,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7162\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}