Over the course of the year, as Donald Trump took steps to alienate and offend the United States’ longtime allies, many of those countries have forged stronger partnerships with each other. The more the president shredded our alliances, the more countries such as Britain, France, Canada and Japan found it easy to leave us behind with new economic and security agreements.
But the White House isn’t just pushing away our traditional friends, the Republican administration is also alienating our would-be allies — leading them into the arms of some of the United States’ most important rivals and adversaries.
Take India, for example. The New York Times reported over the holiday weekend on the souring relationship between Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and what happened after the American president repeatedly and falsely claimed credit for ending a conflict between India and Pakistan.
During a phone call on June 17, Mr. Trump brought it up again, saying how proud he was of ending the military escalation. He mentioned that Pakistan was going to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize, an honor for which he had been openly campaigning. The not-so-subtle implication, according to people familiar with the call, was that Mr. Modi should do the same. The Indian leader bristled. He told Mr. Trump that U.S. involvement had nothing to do with the recent cease-fire. It had been settled directly between India and Pakistan.
According to the Times’ report, which hasn’t been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, Trump “largely brushed off” Modi’s correction, “but the disagreement — and Mr. Modi’s refusal to engage on the Nobel — has played an outsize role in the souring relationship between the two leaders.”
In the days and weeks that followed that June call, Trump surprised India with the imposition of harsh trade tariffs and scrapped plans to travel to India later this year for a diplomatic gathering.
Soon after, as NBC News reported, Modi found some new friends.
A private car ride with Vladimir Putin may not be as special as President Donald Trump thought. With a backseat bromance of their own, as well as hand-holding and hugs, the Russian leader, his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi, and their host, Chinese leader Xi Jinping, put on a display Monday that seemed designed to turn heads in Washington.
None of this is subtle: For all of Trump’s preoccupation with “respect” on the international stage, the footage out of Tianjin showed the leaders of China, Russia and India, all smiles and literally hand-in-hand, sending a clear message to the White House: “We’ve decided we don’t need you after all.”
It’s not easy for an American president to get friends, foes and partners to leave the U.S. behind simultaneously, but Trump is failing so spectacularly that he’s managing to pull it off.
For much of the post-Cold War era, the bipartisan consensus was that it is in the United States’ interest to strengthen ties with India. The reasoning was obvious: It’s the world’s largest democracy, with a massive population, a growing economy, a border with China and, just as importantly, a long-standing relationship with Russia. As Kapil Komireddi explained in an op-ed for the Times: Bill Clinton, who laid the foundation of the modern U.S.-India partnership, called the two democracies ‘natural allies.’ George W. Bush described them as ‘brothers in the cause of human liberty.’ Barack Obama and Joe Biden cast the relationship as one of the defining global compacts of this century. To Washington, India was a vast emerging market, a potential counterweight to China, a key partner in maintaining Indo-Pacific security and a rising power whose democratic identity would bolster a rules-based international order. India, Komireddi added, had shed its Cold War suspicions of Washington “and moved steadily closer to the United States.” And then Trump set the relationship on fire, to the delight of China. The result is a generational fiasco that’s still unfolding before our eyes.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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