Trump Has Unleashed Chaos by Distraction Upon the International Community. That's No Accident
LONDON — The Saudis are furious. The Danes are scrambling. Colombia has backed down. Mexico and Canada stand in a purgatory between tariff wars with the US and … not. China has retaliated, launching a trade war between the economic superpowers. The Brits, long proud of their “special relationship” with the United States, are leaning into their tradition of quiet diplomacy.
It’s as if President Donald Trump has flung a bag of marbles across the global stage, under the feet of foreign leaders who have often stepped together through eight decades of postwar global order.
Everyone, it seems, is responding to Trump — even Australia’s leader, when asked last week for his thoughts only a few hours after Trump announced the US would “take over” the decimated Gaza Strip and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
“I’m not going to, as Australia’s prime minister, give a daily commentary on statements by the U.S. president,” Anthony Albanese told reporters.
Acknowledged publicly or not, world leaders are watching Trump’s wood-chipper approach to some American government institutions and wondering about those of the post-Cold War order: What of the U.S. roles in NATO, the United Nations, the World Bank and other pillars of the international order? On U.S.-controlled NATO, Trump has long questioned the value of the pact and threatened not to defend members of the alliance that fail to meet defense-spending goals. On his first day back in the Oval Office, Trump began to pull the United States out of the World Health Organization for the second time, an act that would leave the U.N. agency without its biggest donor. WHO’s leaders huddled over a response and asked diplomats to lean on Washington to reverse Trump’s decision. A German envoy worried: “The roof is on fire.”
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2025/02/10/trump-has-unleashed-chaos-distraction-upon-international-community-thats-no-accident.html
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