The ‘liberal international order’…

Fascinating to see that the US administration has downgraded the status of the EU embassy in Washington.

The European Union’s delegation in Washington – led by Irishman David O’ Sullivan – had enjoyed the same status as a national embassy. But the State Department last year classified the embassy as an international organization, alongside the African Union.

This is of a piece with the following:

[Trump] made no secret of his view of the European Union during the presidential campaign, voicing support for Brexit on several occasions. The EU is just one of several multilateral institutions such as Nato and the UN that the Trump administration has dismissed. Last month US secretary of state Mike Pompeo delivered a speech in Brussels that was highly critical of the European Union, calling for the restoration of the role of the nation-state in the liberal international order.

Of course Washington would like that. In such an ‘order’ the larger states would find it easier to apply the pressure their size gives them to smaller states. You can find the text of the Pompeo speech online – and it’s well worth a read if only for its incoherence. He makes a good fist of attempting to square the circle of an isolationist President who is uninterested and unmoved by international affairs with the traditional approach of the US, but he can’t quite paper over the cracks.

This is what President Trump is doing. He is returning the United States to its traditional, central leadership role in the world. He sees the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. He knows that nothing can replace the nation-state as the guarantor of democratic freedoms and national interests. He knows, as George H.W. Bush knew, that a safer world has consistently demanded American courage on the world stage. And when we – and when we all of us ignore our responsibilities to the institutions we’ve formed, others will abuse them.
Critics in places like Iran and China – who really are undermining the international order – are saying the Trump administration is the reason this system is breaking down. They claim America is acting unilaterally instead of multilaterally, as if every kind of multilateral action is by definition desirable. Even our European friends sometimes say we’re not acting in the world’s interest. This is just plain wrong.
Our mission is to reassert our sovereignty, reform the liberal international order, and we want our friends to help us and to exert their sovereignty as well. We aspire to make the international order serve our citizens – not to control them. America intends to lead – now and always.
Under President Trump, we are not abandoning international leadership or our friends in the international system. Indeed, quite the contrary. Just look, as one example, at the historic number of countries which have gotten on board our pressure campaign against North Korea. No other nation in the world could have rallied dozens of nations, from every corner of the world, to impose sanctions on the regime in Pyongyang.

And there’s this:

We changed course from the Iran deal, because of, among other things, Tehran’s violent and destabilizing activities, which undermined the spirit of the deal and put the safety of American people and our allies at risk. In its place, we are leading our allies to constrain Iran’s revolutionary ambitions and end Iran’s campaigns of global terrorism. And we needn’t a new bureaucracy to do it. We need to continue to develop a coalition which will achieve that outcome which will keep people in the Middle East, in Europe, and the entire world safe from the threat from Iran.
America renegotiated our treaty, NAFTA, to advance the interests of the American worker. President Trump proudly signed the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement at the G20 this past weekend in Buenos Aires, and on Friday will submit it to the Congress, a body accountable to the American people.

All this is so transparently contestable that I’ll leave it to others. Foreign Policy notes:

In the end, Pompeo’s speech was little more than a sea of contradictions. It claimed that the United States was “rallying the noble nations of the world to build a new liberal order that prevents war and achieves greater prosperity for all.” But he also announced that the United States was reasserting its sovereignty and that, going forward, it would support institutions that serve U.S. interests. Europeans didn’t hear that as a rallying cry to save the liberal order. They read it as a thinly veiled attempt for the United States to gain “more freedom of action,” Masala said.

But entirely telling was the fact he embraced NATO fervently when his own President has been antagonistic to the point of hostility about it.

The reality is there is no Trump doctrine whatsoever. It’s an absence of doctrine. How far that takes the US is interesting to consider.