America's Absence in Istanbul: A Sign of Decline, Not Surrender
November 13, 2018
Team Trump missed the summit on Syria. In that, Patrick Lawrence sees
another sign of Washington's failure to accept its loss of diplomatic
primacy.
Lost in the Memory Palace:
US Leads, But No One Follows
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
You would hardly know it from reading the U.S. press, but a summit of
considerable significance took place late last month. German, French,
Russian, and Turkish leaders convened in Istanbul Oct. 27 to create a
comprehensive plan to end the seven-year war in Syria. On the agenda:
increase humanitarian aid, rebuild ruined towns and cities, assist returning
refugees, draft a new constitution and arrange internationally supervised
elections. All this will take time, but the Syria story is evolving from one
of conflict to one of reconciliation and reconstruction.
Two features of the summit deserve special note.
The four nations are not all fast friends, to put it mildly. But they drew
together to find common interests in resolving what may count as the worst
crisis since the Cold War's end. Second, there was a conspicuous absence at
the Istanbul gathering: the United States. Despite its prominent role in the
Syrian conflict for at least the past six years, if not longer, the United
States wanted no part of a many-sided summit dedicated to resolving it via
negotiation.
A matter of days later came the Trump administration's sweeping new
sanctions against Iran, planned for many months and put into force at
midnight on Nov. 4.
Never mind Washington's adversaries: Even its traditional allies in Europe
are resisting the United States. This new round of sanctions rank among the
stupidest foreign policy moves of Trump's two years in office. Two others
were withdrawing from the climate pact in June 2017 and unilaterally
recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital six months later.
Trump: No one follows. (Photo by Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
Three Things Now Clear
At this point, three things are clear about the Trump administration's
approach to global affairs.
No. 1: Team Trump's foreign policies are easily the most incoherent of any
administration in recent memory. The United States does or does not want to
settle the Korean question. It does or does not have an even-handed plan for
peace in the Mideast. It has or has not abandoned its campaign to depose the
Assad government in Damascus. What appears so on Monday appears otherwise by
midweek.
No 2: Time and again, this administration overplays its hand. In case after
case it acts on its own, expecting other nations to follow, only to discover
that few or none do. Since Trump took office, misjudging U.S. prerogatives
may be among the only consistent feature of his foreign policy.
No. 3: "America First" begins to shape up as "America Last" on the foreign
policy side. We are a long way from "the indispensable nation," the phrase
that Madeleine Albright used for the United States during her time as
secretary of state in the Clinton administration. Two years into Trump's
presidency, Albright's assertion-which was never more than U.S. hubris at
its purest-looks like it might be headed to a museum.
This is not solely due to incompetence in the Trump White House, although
this is considerable. The United States has been unable to find its place in
a swiftly changing world order at least since the George W. Bush
administration. It has consistently mishandled relations with China and
Russia from one administration to the next, to take two prominent examples:
trans-Atlantic ties with longtime allies (who too often behave like vassals)
have deteriorated steadily for years due to Washington's misjudgments.
The Trump administration's confusion merely makes the gravity of our moment
more difficult to deny: Absent last century's simplicities-chief among them
the binary East-West division-the United States is losing its grip on
leading.
Talk of Withdrawal
There is much talk in Washington these days of a U.S. withdrawal from global
affairs. Ivo Daalder, a former ambassador to NATO and now president of the
Chicago Council on Global Affairs, recently co-authored a book, with James
Lindsay, called "The Empty Throne: America's Abdication of Global
Leadership." It is a long lament about what its title suggests: the United
States is surrendering-supposedly-its position as No. 1 among nations.
This is a misreading, perfectly upside down from reality. The United States
is not surrendering anything. That is precisely the problem. It refuses to
give up its long-asserted right to act unilaterally on the assumption other
nations will either fall in line or silently acquiesce.
At the same time, Washington declines to participate in multilateral efforts
to resolve wars, competing political or territorial claims, and other such
problems via diplomatic negotiation, often with adversaries. This helps
explain why the Trump administration repudiated the Paris climate pact and
then the accord governing Iran's nuclear programs: Both implicitly
demonstrate that multipolarity is an inevitable 21st Century reality.
Daalder acknowledged this during a recent talk at the Council on Foreign
Relations, even if he seemed not to have grasped his own lesson. "As the
U.S. withdraws," he said, "it's not involved in building coalitions bringing
people together to deal with global challenges, people are going to turn to
others."
The Istanbul summit on Syria is an excellent case in point. The United
States should have been there. South Korea is another. While President Moon
Jae-in has to manage Seoul's traditional ties to Washington delicately, he
has unmistakably seized the lead in Northeast Asia and repeatedly signals
that he remains committed to a settlement with the North-ultimately with or
without U.S. cooperation.
Nostalgia is part of the problem. The world turns, and Washington is lost in
a kind of memory palace, where it nurses the desire to prolong those decades
of unchallenged primacy that it enjoyed after World War II. It refuses to
accept there is no turning back the clock. While it wants to play "follow
the leader" other nations drop out of the game.
Vigorous, nearly universal opposition to the new sanctions against Iran,
Seoul's determination to press on toward peace on the Korean Peninsula, the
summit on Syria in Istanbul: They all make the same point. Washington must
abandon its Wilsonian ambition to shape the world in its own image if it is
to remain an effective power-as it can and should-in the new global order.
The new Iran sanctions already appear to be a turning point in this respect:
Donald Trump's Washington thought it could lead, but virtually no one is
following.
There is no "abdication" and no new isolationist era in the offing. But
until the U.S. accepts the new norms of statecraft in a world of rising
powers, we will watch as other nations withdraw from America-a very
different thing.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the
International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author, and
lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the
American Century (Yale). Follow
